From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 1 11:12:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 06:12:11 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: A Brief History of Time Balls Message-ID: Op-Ed Contributor: A Brief History of Time Balls NYT December 30, 2004 By SCOTT HULER RALEIGH, N.C. [Happy Gregorian calendar new year, everyone! As opposed to fiscal new year, pay new year, Julian new year, Islamic new year. This is a general interest article for all my lists. Though I am only half-way through my fourth book since abandoning reality on my sixtieth birthday, there are too many topical articles, like this one, for me to keep holding them until I finish the book, which is Revelation: Four Views and is not a good book, since neither it nor any other treatment of the last book of the Bible ever notices the blatant contradiction in the pre-tribulationist pre-millenarian views that maintain that signs, such as the return of the Jews to the Holy Land, are proof of the coming of the end, when such events take place AFTER the Rapture. What I am learning is just how far those with a particular view will stuff and twist a sacred text into it and yet still disagree among themselves. I am eager to learn whether this stuffing and twisting takes place on any such scale outside the Occident. [I will be sending five to ten articles a day until Lent, which begins early this Gregorian year, namely February 9, and which I commemorate by suspending my forwardings for forty days and forty nights. You'll be interested to know that I fulfilled my desire ever since 1965 when I got a copy of Wolfgang Schmieder's monumental Bach Werke Verzeichnis and desired to get recordings of all of Bach's music. Two editions came out, on Telefunken (old instruments, Haroncourt and Leonhart chief conductors) and H?nnsler (new instruments, which I prefer, Rilling, chief conductor). The latter set came in a huge box of 171 individually-wrapped compact discs for $1800. I got an e-message from Berkshire Record Outlet informing me of new additions to their catalog, including H?nnsler recordings. Suspecting that these may include Bach recordings, I, along with several hundred other people, logged onto the site. After half an hour of retrying, I was able to order the set, for $200! They were quickly sold out. The set I got was repackaged into four-in-one albums, which fitted into two boxes 11 inches (28 cm.) long. No booklets, but rather two CD-ROMs which had them as PDFs. Naturally, I am glad not to have to find room for the original set. [I'll send messages to everyone on my personal lists and, where I think it of interests, to lists I subscribe to, at least for a few days. Let me know your preferences. You will not be flooded with messages, as sometimes in the past. I will not have read most of them in detail, since I want to continue to abandon reality by reading fiction.] [Next up is a very long file about my favorite Jewish intellectual, Susan Sontag. I read all of these obituaries, appreciations, reviews, and her own writings, as well as the essay that launched her career, "Notes on 'Camp,'" a brilliant essay, though camp is not my sensibility. Then the best article about the Bush election and redemption. Something on Basque separatism, of which I approve, while at the same time wanting international institutions to be strenghtened for facilitation purposes and which do not have to be governmental. And a fifth item on the progress of women's wages.] WHEN the time ball drops above Times Square in New York just before midnight on New Year's Eve, Americans will, together, do something that has otherwise become an almost entirely independent and private activity: they will tell the time. New York City's annual ball drop is probably the greatest single moment of public timekeeping in the world. Yet the Times Square ball is not the world's most important time ball - nor was it the first. It wasn't even the first time ball in New York. Oh, and it isn't even dropped right. A little history first. Public time-telling began in church. In 1335, the bells of the church of San Gottardo (then Beata Vergine) began tolling the hours in Milan, ringing once at 1 a.m. and culminating in 24 chimes at midnight. It was the first time church bells had been used to announce time regularly. The idea spread rapidly through Europe, and for the first time in history, large groups of people knew the time. The Milan clock could be off by as much as 1,000 seconds a day, but that wasn't really a problem, because if nobody knew exactly what time it was, how could anyone really be late? Measurement of time improved as the centuries passed, but even into the early 18th century most people had no need for precise time. (The minute hand shows up on watches, for example, around 1700). The bells tolled hourly and that was plenty. Accuracy improved vastly during the industrial revolution and was honed at sea: ship captains needed extremely precise clocks to coordinate their celestial readings with the time those readings would occur at a known point - usually Greenwich, England (the city that later lent its name to Greenwich Mean Time, the world's standard time). John Harrison, the famous clockmaker, developed a chronometer accurate and portable enough to do the job in 1761, and ultimately changed the world. But once clocks were capable of precision time-telling, the question was, what to set them against? In the early 19th century, enter the time ball. Robert Wauchope, a Royal Navy captain, had an idea: a large signal in a harbor would, at a specific moment, indicate the exact time - sailors could view it through a telescope and set their chronometers precisely. In 1829 the Admiralty gave it a shot, setting up the world's first time ball in the harbor at Portsmouth, England. It worked so well that in 1833 they set one up at the Royal Observatory in Flamsteed House, on a Greenwich hilltop. The ball, which was visible to ships at anchor, would be dropped every day at 1 p.m. At 12:55 p.m., the red, wood-and-leather ball was raised halfway up a 15-foot mast atop the building; at 12:58 it went to the top; and on the hour the ball began to drop, the start of its downward motion signaling exactly 1 p.m. The ball idea caught on. The United States Naval Observatory began dropping a noon time ball in Foggy Bottom in 1845 and kept it up until 1885, when the ball drop moved to the State, War and Navy Building (now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) next to the White House, where it kept dropping until 1936. Starting in 1877, the Navy telegraphed a daily signal to the Western Union Building in New York, atop which an automatic time ball then dropped. (Twelve minutes early, to account for the difference in longitude; we didn't get time zones until the telegraph and railroads made them necessary, in the 1880s.) And as for New York, in December of 1904, this newspaper celebrated the move to its new Times Square building with a New Year's Eve party, which thereafter grew year by year. When, in 1907, a ban on fireworks prompted The Times to find a new celebration finale, a time ball was brought in, and the tradition began. The Times Square ball isn't quite a true time ball. The eye can easily pick up motion, so precise time balls mark time by starting to move, not by stopping. The Times Square ball marks time with the end of its motion - hard to perceive and inexact, but presumably more fun for counting backward. As timekeepers became increasingly cheap, accurate, automatic and interconnected, these public time signals - not just time balls but noontime guns as well - began to disappear. Today the Greenwich time ball still drops daily, but for tourists, not navigators; time balls drop in a few other world harbors, like Christchurch, New Zealand, and Edinburgh, but most time balls are reserved for special occasions, which makes it even more comforting when, once a year, a time ball drops in New York, and we all watch. Who cares that they do it wrong? At least they do it. It's the end of a year. It's a way to mark a moment. It's a moment Americans across the country can spend together. In these fractious times, it's at least one thing we can all agree on. Scott Huler is the author of "Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale, and How a 19th-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/30/opinion/30huler.html?ex=1105449877&ei=1&en=f24f429b8caf3875 --------------------------------- Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like! Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. Enjoy now for 50% off Home Delivery! Click here: http://homedelivery.nytimes.com/HDS/SubscriptionT1.do?mode=SubscriptionT1&ExternalMediaCode=W24AF HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact onlinesales at nytimes.com or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 1 11:12:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 06:12:52 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Susan Sontag Package Message-ID: Susan Sontag Package Here comes a whole bunch of obituaries, appreciations, reviews, and her own writings. Susan Sontag, Social Critic With Verve, Dies at 71 New York Times (unless specified otherwise) December 28, 2004 By MARGALIT FOX Susan Sontag, the novelist, essayist and critic whose impassioned advocacy of the avant-garde and equally impassioned political pronouncements made her one of the most lionized presences - and one of the most polarizing - in 20th-century letters, died yesterday morning in Manhattan. She was 71 and lived in Manhattan. The cause was complications of acute myelogenous leukemia, her son, David Rieff, said. Ms. Sontag, who died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, had been ill with cancer intermittently for the last 30 years, a struggle that informed one of her most famous books, the critical study "Illness as Metaphor" (1978). A highly visible public figure since the mid-1960's, Ms. Sontag wrote four novels, dozens of essays and a volume of short stories and was also an occasional filmmaker, playwright and theater director. For four decades her work was part of the contemporary canon, discussed everywhere from graduate seminars to the pages of popular magazines to the Hollywood movie "Bull Durham." Ms. Sontag's work made a radical break with traditional postwar criticism in America, gleefully blurring the boundaries between high and popular culture. She advocated an aesthetic approach to the study of culture, championing style over content. She was concerned, in short, with sensation, in both meanings of the term. "The theme that runs through Susan's writing is this lifelong struggle to arrive at the proper balance between the moral and the aesthetic," Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic and an old friend of Ms. Sontag's, said in a telephone interview yesterday. "There was something unusually vivid about her writing. That's why even if one disagrees with it - as I did frequently - it was unusually stimulating. She showed you things you hadn't seen before; she had a way of reopening questions." Through four decades, public response to Ms. Sontag remained irreconcilably divided. She was described, variously, as explosive, anticlimactic, original, derivative, na ve, sophisticated, approachable, aloof, condescending, populist, puritanical, sybaritic, sincere, posturing, ascetic, voluptuary, right-wing, left-wing, profound, superficial, ardent, bloodless, dogmatic, ambivalent, lucid, inscrutable, visceral, reasoned, chilly, effusive, relevant, pass?, ambivalent, tenacious, ecstatic, melancholic, humorous, humorless, deadpan, rhapsodic, cantankerous and clever. No one ever called her dull. Ms. Sontag's best-known books, all published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, include the novels "Death Kit" (1967), "The Volcano Lover" (1992) and "In America" (2000); the essay collections "Against Interpretation" (1966), "Styles of Radical Will" (1969) and "Under the Sign of Saturn" (1980); the critical studies "On Photography" (1977) and "AIDS and Its Metaphors" (1989); and the short-story collection "I, Etcetera" (1978). One of her most famous works, however, was not a book, but an essay, "Notes on Camp," published in 1964 and still widely read. Her most recent book, published last year, was "Regarding the Pain of Others," a long essay on the imagery of war and disaster. One of her last published essays, "Regarding the Torture of Others," written in response to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Americans at Abu Ghraib, appeared in the May 23, 2004, issue of The New York Times Magazine. An Intellectual With Style Unlike most serious intellectuals, Ms. Sontag was also a celebrity, partly because of her telegenic appearance, partly because of her outspoken statements. She was undoubtedly the only writer of her generation to win major literary prizes (among them a National Book Critics Circle Award, a National Book Award and a MacArthur Foundation genius grant) and to appear in films by Woody Allen and Andy Warhol; to be the subject of rapturous profiles in Rolling Stone and People magazines; and to be photographed by Annie Leibovitz for an Absolut Vodka ad. Through the decades her image - strong features, wide mouth, intense gaze and dark mane crowned in her middle years by a sweeping streak of white - became an instantly recognizable artifact of 20th-century popular culture. Ms. Sontag was a master synthesist who tackled broad, difficult and elusive subjects: the nature of art, the nature of consciousness and, above all, the nature of the modern condition. Where many American critics before her had mined the past, Ms. Sontag became an evangelist of the new, training her eye on the culture unfolding around her. For Ms. Sontag, culture encompassed a vast landscape. She wrote serious studies of popular art forms, like cinema and science fiction, that earlier critics disdained. She produced impassioned essays on the European writers and filmmakers she admired, like Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Jean-Luc Godard. She wrote experimental novels on dreams and the nature of consciousness. She published painstaking critical dissections of photography and dance; illness, politics and pornography; and, most famously, camp. Her work, with its emphasis on the outr?, the jagged and the here and now, helped make the study of popular culture a respectable academic pursuit. What united Ms. Sontag's output was a propulsive desire to define the forces that shape the modernist sensibility. And in so doing, she sought to explain what it meant to be human in the waning years of the 20th century. To many critics, her work was bold and thrilling. Interviewed in The Times Magazine in 1992, the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes compared Ms. Sontag to the Renaissance humanist Erasmus. "Erasmus traveled with 32 volumes, which contained all the knowledge worth knowing," he said. "Susan Sontag carries it in her brain! I know of no other intellectual who is so clear-minded, with a capacity to link, to connect, to relate." A Bevy of Detractors Others were less enthralled. Some branded Ms. Sontag an unoriginal thinker, a popularizer with a gift for aphorism who could boil down difficult writers for mass consumption. (Irving Howe called her "a publicist able to make brilliant quilts from grandmother's patches.") Some regarded her tendency to revisit her earlier, often controversial positions as ambivalent. Some saw her scholarly approach to popular art forms as pretentious. (Ms. Sontag once remarked that she could appreciate Patti Smith because she had read Nietzsche.) In person Ms. Sontag could be astringent, particularly if she felt she had been misunderstood. She grew irritated when reporters asked how many books she had in her apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan (15,000; no television set). But she could also be warm and girlish, speaking confidingly in her rich, low voice, her feet propped casually on the nearest coffee table. She laughed readily, and when she discussed something that engaged her passionately (and there were many things), her dark eyes often filled with tears. Ms. Sontag had a knack - or perhaps a penchant - for getting into trouble. She could be provocative to the point of being inflammatory, as when she championed the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl in a 1965 essay; she would revise her position some years later. She celebrated the communist societies of Cuba and North Vietnam; just as provocatively, she later denounced communism as a form of fascism. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, she wrote in The New Yorker, "Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." And in 2000, the publication of Ms. Sontag's final novel, "In America," raised accusations of plagiarism, charges she vehemently denied. Ms. Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in Manhattan on Jan. 16, 1933, the daughter of Jack and Mildred Rosenblatt. Her father was a fur trader in China, and her mother joined him there for long periods, leaving Susan and her younger sister in the care of relatives. When Susan was 5, her father died in China of tuberculosis. Seeking relief for Susan's asthma, her mother moved the family to Tucson, spending the next several years there. In Arizona, Susan's mother met Capt. Nathan Sontag, a World War II veteran sent there to recuperate. The couple were married - Susan took her stepfather's name - and the family moved to Los Angeles. For Susan, who graduated from high school before her 16th birthday, the philistinism of American culture was a torment she vowed early to escape. "My greatest dream," she later wrote, "was to grow up and come to New York and write for Partisan Review and be read by 5,000 people." She would get her wish - Ms. Sontag burst onto the scene with "Notes on Camp," which was published in Partisan Review - but not before she earned a bachelor's and two master's degrees from prestigious American universities; studied at Oxford on a fellowship; and married, became a mother and divorced eight years later, all by the time she turned 26. After graduating from high school, Ms. Sontag spent a semester at the University of California, Berkeley, before transferring to the University of Chicago, from which she received a bachelor's degree in 1951. At Chicago she wandered into a class taught by the sociologist Philip Rieff, then a 28-year-old instructor, who would write the celebrated study "Freud: The Mind of the Moralist" (Viking, 1959). He was, she would say, the first person with whom she could really talk; they were married 10 days later. Ms. Sontag was 17 and looked even younger, clad habitually in blue jeans, her black hair spilling down her back. Word swept around campus that Dr. Rieff had married a 14-year-old American Indian. Moving with her husband to Boston, Ms. Sontag earned her master's degrees from Harvard, the first in English, in 1954, the second in philosophy the next year. She began work on a Ph.D., but did not complete her dissertation. In 1952 she and Dr. Rieff became the parents of a son. Ms. Sontag is survived by her son, David Rieff, who lives in Manhattan and was for many years her editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. (A journalist, he wrote "Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West," published by Simon & Schuster in 1995.) Also surviving is her younger sister, Judith Cohen of Maui. After further study at Oxford and in Paris, Ms. Sontag was divorced from Dr. Rieff in 1958. In early 1959 she arrived in New York with, as she later described it, "$70, two suitcases and a 7 year old." She worked as an editor at Commentary and juggled teaching jobs at City College, Sarah Lawrence and Columbia. She published her first essays, critical celebrations of modernists she admired, as well as her first novel, "The Benefactor" (1963), an exploration of consciousness and dreams. Shaking Up the Establishment With "Notes on Camp" Ms. Sontag fired a shot across the bow of the New York critical establishment, which included eminences like Lionel and Diana Trilling, Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe. Interlaced with epigrams from Oscar Wilde, that essay illuminated a particular modern sensibility - one that had been largely the province of gay culture - which centered deliciously on artifice, exaggeration and the veneration of style. "The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly on refinement," Ms. Sontag wrote. "The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion." If that essay has today lost its capacity to shock, it is a reflection of how thoroughly Ms. Sontag did her job, serving as a guide to an underground aesthetic that was not then widely known. "She found in camp an aesthetic that was very different from what the straight world had acknowledged up to that point, and she managed to make camp 'straight' in a way," Arthur C. Danto, the Johnsonian professor emeritus of philosophy at Columbia and the art critic for The Nation, said yesterday in a telephone interview. "I think she prepared the ground for the pop revolution, which was in many ways essentially a gay revolution, through Warhol and others. She didn't make that art, but she brought it to consciousness. She gave people a vocabulary for talking about it and thinking about it." The article made Ms. Sontag an international celebrity, showered with lavish, if unintentionally ridiculous, titles ("a literary pinup," "the dark lady of American letters," "the Natalie Wood of the U.S. avant-garde"). Championing Style Over Content In 1966 Ms. Sontag published her first essay collection, "Against Interpretation." That book's title essay, in which she argued that art should be experienced viscerally rather than cerebrally, helped cement her reputation as a champion of style over content. It was a position she could take to extremes. In the essay "On Style," published in the same volume, Ms. Sontag offended many readers by upholding the films of Leni Riefenstahl as masterworks of aesthetic form, with little regard for their content. Ms. Sontag would eventually reconsider her position in the 1974 essay "Fascinating Fascism." Though she thought of herself as a novelist, it was through her essays that Ms. Sontag became known. As a result she was fated to write little else for the next quarter-century. She found the form an agony: a long essay took from nine months to a year to complete, often requiring 20 or more drafts. "I've had thousands of pages for a 30-page essay," she said in a 1992 interview. " 'On Photography,' which is six essays, took five years. And I mean working every single day." That book, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1978, explored the role of the photographic image, and the act of picture-taking in contemporary culture. The crush of photographs, Ms. Sontag argued, has shaped our perceptions of the world, numbing us to depictions of suffering. She would soften that position when she revisited the issue in "Regarding the Pain of Others." The Washington Post Book World called "On Photography" "a brilliant analysis," adding that it " merely describes a phenomenon we take as much for granted as water from the tap, and how that phenomenon has changed us - a remarkable enough achievement, when you think about it." In the mid-1970's Ms. Sontag learned she had breast cancer. Doctors gave her a 10 percent chance of surviving for two years. She scoured the literature for a treatment that might save her, underwent a mastectomy and persuaded her doctors to give her a two-and-a-half-year course of radiation. Out of her experience came "Illness as Metaphor," which examined the cultural mythologizing of disease (tuberculosis as the illness of 19th-century romantics, cancer a modern-day scourge). Although it did not discuss her illness explicitly, it condemned the often militaristic language around illness ("battling" disease, the "war" on cancer) that Ms. Sontag felt simultaneously marginalized the sick and held them responsible for their condition.. In "AIDS and Its Metaphors" Ms. Sontag discussed the social implications of the disease, which she viewed as a "cultural plague" that had replaced cancer as the modern bearer of stigma. She would return to the subject of AIDS in her acclaimed short story "The Way We Live Now," originally published in The New Yorker and included in "The Best American Short Stories of the Century" (Houghton Mifflin, 1999). Although Ms. Sontag was strongly identified with the American left during the Vietnam era, in later years her politics were harder to classify. In the essay "Trip to Hanoi," which appears in "Styles of Radical Will," she wrote glowingly of a visit to North Vietnam. But in 1982 she delivered a stinging blow to progressives in a speech at Town Hall in Manhattan. There, at a rally in support of the Solidarity movement in Poland, she denounced European communism as "fascism with a human face." In 1992, weary of essays, Ms. Sontag published "The Volcano Lover," her first novel in 25 years. Though very much a novel of ideas - it explored, among other things, notions of aesthetics and the psychology of obsessive collecting - the book was also a big, old-fashioned historical romance. It told the story of Sir William Hamilton, the 18th-century British envoy to the court of Naples; his wife, Emma ("that Hamilton woman"); and her lover, Lord Nelson, the naval hero. The book spent two months on The New York Times best-seller list. Reviewing the novel in The Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote: "One thing that makes 'The Volcano Lover' such a delight to read is the way it throws off ideas and intellectual sparks, like a Roman candle or Catherine wheel blazing in the night. Miniature versions of 'Don Giovanni' and 'Tosca' lie embedded, like jewels, in the main narrative; and we are given as well some charmingly acute cameos of such historical figures as Goethe and the King and Queen of Naples." Ms. Sontag's final novel, "In America," was loosely based on the life of the 19th-century Polish actress Helena Modjeska, who immigrated to California to start a utopian community. Though "In America" received a National Book Award, critical reception was mixed. Then accusations of plagiarism surfaced. As The Times reported in May 2000, a reader identified at least a dozen passages as being similar to those in four other books about the real Modjeska, including Modjeska's memoirs. Except for a brief preface expressing a general debt to "books and articles by and on Modjeska," Ms. Sontag did not specifically acknowledge her sources. Interviewed for The Times article, Ms. Sontag defended her method. "All of us who deal with real characters in history transcribe and adopt original sources in the original domain," she said. "I've used these sources and I've completely transformed them. I have these books. I've looked at these books. There's a larger argument to be made that all of literature is a series of references and allusions." Ms. Sontag's other work includes the play "Alice in Bed" (1993); "A Susan Sontag Reader" (1982), with an introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick; and four films, including "Duet for Cannibals" (1969) and "Brother Carl" (1971). She also edited works by Barthes, Antonin Artaud, Danilo Kis and other writers. Ms. Sontag was the subject of an unauthorized biography by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, "Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon" (Norton, 2000), and of several critical studies, including "Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me," by Craig Seligman (Counterpoint/Perseus, 2004). She was the president of the PEN American Center from 1987 to 1989. In a 1992 interview with The Times Magazine, Ms. Sontag described the creative force that animated "The Volcano Lover," putting her finger on the sensibility that would inform all her work: "I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says, be serious, be passionate, wake up." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/books/28cnd-sont.html An Appreciation | Susan Sontag: A Rigorous Intellectual Dressed in Glamour December 29, 2004 By CHARLES McGRATH Susan Sontag, who died yesterday at 71, was one of the few intellectuals with whom Americans have ever been on a first-name basis. It wasn't intimacy that gave her this status; it was that like Marilyn and like Judy, she was so much a star that she didn't need a surname. In certain circles, at least, she was just Susan, even to people who had never met her but who would nevertheless talk knowledgeably and intimately about her latest piece in The New York Review of Books, her position on Sarajevo, her verdict on the new W. G. Sebald book. She brought to the world of ideas not just an Olympian rigor but a glamour and sexiness it had seldom seen before. Part of the appeal was her own glamour - the black outfits, the sultry voice, the trademark white stripe parting her long dark hair. The other part was the dazzle of her intelligence and the range of her knowledge; she had read everyone, especially all those forbidding Europeans - Artaud, Benjamin, Canetti, Barthes, Baudrillard, Gombrowicz, Walser and the rest - who loomed off on what was for many of us the far and unapproachable horizon. Nor was she shy about letting you know how much she had read (and, by implication, how much you hadn't), or about decreeing the correct opinion to be held on each of the many subjects she turned her mind to. That was part of the appeal, too: her seriousness and her conviction, even if it was sometimes a little crazy-making. Consistency was not something Ms. Sontag worried about overly much because she believed that the proper life of the mind was one of re-examination and re-invention. Ms. Sontag could be a divisive figure, and she was far from infallible, as when she embraced revolutionary communism after traveling to Hanoi in 1968 and later declared the United States to be a "doomed country ... founded on a genocide." But what her opponents sometimes failed to credit was her willingness to change her mind; by the 80's she was denouncing communism for its human-rights abuses, and by the 90's she had extended her critique to include the left in general, for its failure to encourage intervention in Bosnia and Rwanda. She had found herself "moved to support things which I did not think would be necessary to support at all in the past," she said in a rueful interview, adding, "Like seriousness, for instance." Not that she was ever unserious for very long. There was about most of her work a European sobriety and high-mindedness and an emphasis on the moral, rather than sensual, pleasures of art and the imagination. Her reputation rests on her nonfiction - especially the essays in "Against Interpretation" and "Styles of Radical Will" and the critical studies "On Photography" and "Illness as Metaphor" - while the 1967 novel "Death Kit," written to a highbrow formula of dissociation, now seems all but unreadable. For a while Ms. Sontag took the French position that in the right hands criticism was an even higher art form than imaginative literature, but in the 80's she announced that she was devoting herself to fiction. She wrote the indelible short story "The Way We Live Now," one of the most affecting fictional evocations of the AIDS era, and in 1992 she published a novel, "The Volcano Lover," that had all the earmarks of the kind of novel she had once made fun of. It was historical and it was a romance, about the love affair of Lord Nelson and Emma Hamilton. Being a Sontag production, it was of course brainy and stuffed with fact-laden research, but as many critics pointed out, there was also a lightness and even - who would have guessed? - an old-fashioned wish to entertain. Much the same was true of her last novel, "In America," which came out in 2000, about a Polish actress who comes to the United States at the end of the 19th century. Ms. Sontag was too much a critic and essayist to stick to her resolve; her last book, "Regarding the Pain of Others" (2003), was nonfiction, an outspoken tract on how we picture suffering. Last May she expanded on those ideas for an article in The New York Times Magazine about the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. This piece was classic, provocative Sontag. But those late novels, playful and theatrical, are a reminder that behind that formidable, opinionated and immensely learned persona there was another Sontag, warmer and more vulnerable, whom we got to see only in glimpses. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/29/books/29appr.html 'Regarding the Pain of Others' March 23, 2003 Reviwed by JOHN LEONARD Toward the end of ''Regarding the Pain of Others,'' her coruscating sermon on how we picture suffering, Susan Sontag loses her temper. As usual she's been playing a solitary hand, shuffling contradictions, dealing provocations, turning over anguished faces, numbing numerals, even a jumping jack (''we have lids on our eyes, we do not have doors on our ears''). But she seems personally offended by those ''citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk'' who ''will do anything to keep themselves from being moved.'' And she is all of a sudden ferocious: ''To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment. . . . It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people's pain . . . consumers of news, who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror. There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality.'' So much, then, for Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard and their French-fried American fellows in the media studies programs, looking down on staged events as if from zeppelins, or like the kings of Burma on the backs of elephants, remote and twitchy among the pixels, with multiple views in slo-mo, intimate focus or broad scan, and an IV-feed of chitchat. When we think about the pictures we have seen from Bosnia, Rwanda and Chechnya, about the videotapes available to us of Rodney King being beaten and Daniel Pearl being murdered, media theory seems merely impudent. Yet Sontag has no more use for the pure of heart and perpetually incredulous who are always shocked by the wounds of the world, by evidence of ''hands-on'' cruelty and proof ''that depravity exists.'' Where have they been? After a century and a half of photojournalistic witness, ''a vast repository'' of ''atrocious images'' already exists to remind us of what people can do to each other. At this late date, to be surprised is to be morally defective: ''No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.'' So there is suffering, and there are cameras, and it is possible to worry about the motives of the men and women behind the cameras, whether one may be too arty, another a bit mercenary, a third a violence junkie, as it is possible to worry about whether our looking at the pictures they bring back from the wound is voyeuristic or pornographic; whether such witness, competing for notice among so many other clamors, seems more authentic the more it's amateurish (accidental, like satellite surveillance); whether excess exposure to atrocity glossies dulls Jack and jades Jill; or whether. . . . But then again, maybe these worries are self-indulgent and beside the point, which should be to think our way past what happened to why. ''It is not a defect,'' Sontag says, ''that we do not suffer enough'' when we see these images: ''Neither is the photograph supposed to repair our ignorance about the history and causes of the suffering it picks out and frames. Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged?'' Photographs ''haunt'' us; ''narratives can make us understand.'' As thinking people used to do, before what Sontag calls ''the era of shopping,'' we are invited to make distinctions and connections, and then maybe fix something. Or have all of us already sold, leased or leveraged our skepticism, our intellectual property rights and our firstborn child for a seat at the table and a shot at the trough? Sontag of course has done our homework for us, her usual archaeology. She follows the trail of photojournalism from Roger Fenton in the Valley of Death after the charge of the Light Brigade, to Mathew Brady's illustrating of America's Civil War, to Robert Capa among Spanish Republicans, to the horrors of Buchenwald and Hiroshima, to famine in India and carnage in Biafra and napalm in Vietnam and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. After consulting Goya on what a victorious army does to a civilian population, she takes us to Tuol Sleng, near Phnom Penh, to look at the photographs the Khmer Rouge took of thousands of suspected ''intellectuals'' and ''counterrevolutionaries'' (meaning Cambodians who had gone to school, spoke a foreign language or wore glasses) after they were tortured but before they were murdered. She reminds us of how hard it is for the image makers to keep up with improvements in the technology of torture and execution, from the stake, the wheel, the gallows tree and the strappado to smart bombs dreamed up on bitmaps in virtual realities. (Long-distance mayhem gets longer by the minute. The British who bombed Iraq in the 1920's and the Germans who bombed Spain in the 1930's could actually see their civilian targets, whereas the recent American bombings of Afghanistan were orchestrated at computer screens in Tampa, Fla.) She has shrewd things to say about colonial wars, memory museums, Christian iconography, lynching postcards, Virginia Woolf, Andy Warhol, Georges Bataille and St. Sebastian; about ''sentimentality,'' ''indecency'' and the ''overstimulation'' Wordsworth warned us would lead to to (lovely phrase!) ''savage torpor.'' And, as usual, she provokes. It probably isn't true that ''not even pacifists'' any longer believe war can be abolished, that photos have a ''deeper bite'' in the memory bank than movies or television, that ''the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked,'' and that ''most depictions of tormented, mutilated bodies do arouse a prurient interest.'' I don't know, and neither does she. On the other hand, when she revises her own conclusions from ''On Photography'' to say she's no longer so sure that shock has ''term limits,'' or that ''repeated exposure'' in ''our culture of spectatorship neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities,'' I agree with her for no other reason than I want to. Her job is not to win a verdict from a jury, but to make us think. And so she has for 40 years. Never mind that Cyndi Lauper reputation from those essays in ''Against Interpretation'' on happenings, camp and science fiction. Maybe in the early 60's girls just wanted to have fun. By the time of ''Styles of Radical Will,'' she was already Emma Goldman, if not Rosa Luxemburg, reviewing Vietnam as if it were a Godard film. But there was nothing playful about ''On Photography,'' which deserved all those prizes, or ''Illness as Metaphor,'' which actually saved lives, or ''Under the Sign of Saturn,'' where essays so admiring of Walter Benjamin and Elias Canetti reminded us that she had always been the best student Kenneth Burke ever had, and could be relied upon to value Simone Weil over Jack Smith. ''If I had to choose between the Doors and Dostoyevsky,'' she would write years later, ''then -- of course -- I'd choose Dostoyevsky. But do I have to choose?'' Yes, she had to, with the culture she cared about going down the tubes. Against that gurgle and flush, she sent up kites and caught the lightning bottled in ''Where the Stress Falls,'' asking us to think the prose of poets and the ''excruciations'' of everybody else, from Machado de Assis to Jorge Luis Borges to Adam Zagajewski to Robert Walser to Danilo Kis to Roland Barthes, before he was struck down by a laundry truck on his way to his mother's, not to mention side excursions to the dance of Lucinda Childs, the photography of Annie Leibovitz and the 15-hour version of Alfred Doblin's ''Berlin Alexanderplatz'' that Rainer Werner Fassbinder managed to make for German television. All this, plus what she found out about herself under the influence of morphine and chemotherapy, and an essay, hilarious in its very conception, on ''Wagner's Fluids.'' Then there were the novels. If the early ones, ''The Benefactor'' and ''Death Kit,'' smelled of the lab, the recent ones, ''The Volcano Lover'' and ''In America,'' are full of ocean and desert airs. It is an amazing, buoyant transformation, by a writer with as much staying power as intellectual wherewithal -- a writer, moreover, who went a dozen times to Sarajevo while the rest of us were watching the Weather Channel -- and still she's niggled at even by people she hasn't sued. Late in the first act of ''Radiant Baby,'' the new musical about Keith Haring, they bring on a highfalutin critic. She is trousered and turtlenecked in black, with a white streak in her dark mane. She is, of course, a Susan Sontag doll, maybe even a bunraku puppet. You almost expect her to quote Kleist. How remarkable, when even the best-known critics in the history of Western culture pass among us as anonymously as serial killers, that this one should end up emblematic, a kind of avant-garde biker chick, and also be so envied and resented for it. From the political right, you'd expect vituperation, a punishment for her want of piety or bloodthirstiness about 9/11, as if all over hate radio, Fox News and the blogosphere, according to some mystical upgrade of the Domino Theory, every pip was caused to squeak. But in our aggrieved bohemias? Who cares that her picture has been taken by Harry Hess, Peter Hujar, Irving Penn, Thomas Victor, Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe and Annie Leibovitz, not even counting Woody Allen for purposes of ''Zelig''? That she's shown up as a character in unkind novels by Judith Grossman, Alfred Chester, Edmund White, Philippe Sollers, Francis King and Sarah Schulman? The only Sontag who matters is the one who keeps on publishing her own books. ''One result of lavishing a good part of your one and only life on your books,'' she wrote in 1995, ''is that you come to feel that, as a person, you are faking it.'' I hope not, but I don't have time to find out because I have to look up, at her recommendation, another writer I've never read, Multatuli, who's written another novel I never heard of, ''Max Havelaar.'' Anyway, in the course of admiring so many serious thinkers, she became one. If, however, we must plight some troth to the cult of Gaia, this is how I imagine her, as the poet Paul Claudel saw the ornamental sandstone dancing maiden in the jungles of Cambodia, one of those apsaras that Andre Malraux tried to steal -- smiling, writes Claudel, her ''Ethiopian smile, dancing a kind of sinister cancan over the ruins.'' She knows lots of things the rest of us only wish we did. Think of Susan Sontag as the Rose of Angkor Wat. John Leonard reviews books for Harper's Magazine and The Nation, movies for ''CBS News Sunday Morning'' and television for New York magazine. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/books/review/023LEONAT.html 'In America' March 12, 2000 Reviewed by SARAH KERR The narrator of ''In America'' is unidentified save for a cool, cerebral voice and some quickly dropped biographical details, like youth in Arizona and California and early marriage to a formidable intellectual many years her senior, that self-consciously call to mind the novel's famous author, Susan Sontag. When we first meet the narrator, she is out walking in a winter storm. Shivering from the cold, she passes by a hotel, notices a party on the ground floor and decides to slip inside and warm up. And then something strange happens. She speaks an up-to-date lingo (she ''crashed'' the party, she talks of ''upgrading'' information). But inside the hotel, the guests chatter away in a language she doesn't know. Odder still, the ladies are wearing floor-length gowns, while the gentlemen have on waistcoats; the room is lighted by stinking gas lanterns, and the cabs everyone arrives in are powered not by engine but by horse. Is this some kind of gimmicky costume affair? Has the narrator unwittingly boarded a time machine? Not quite. Although she can't speak to the revelers, with a little effort she is able to suss out who they are and what era they belong to. The time and place are Russian-occupied Warsaw, 1876. The guest of honor is the leading Polish actress of the day, the lovely and charismatic Maryna Zalezowska. But here is the weird part: our guide knows all this because, it turns out, she herself has made the whole scene up. Such an actress really existed, and lived out adventures roughly resembling those the book is about to chronicle. But everything else about this party, from the small talk to the church bells echoing across the city, the red-faced servant huffing beneath a load of firewood and the baked black grouse with partridges, comes courtesy of the narrator's mind. She had, she confesses, been struggling to work up a story about a different gathering (another self-reference: the hotel party she first set out to describe would have taken place in the same era but in Sarajevo, a city Sontag is widely known to have visited, bravely, at the height of the bombing in the early 1990's). Instead, her imagination flew to this party in Warsaw, and here she has decided to stay. ''I thought if I listened and watched and ruminated,'' she reasons, ''taking as much time as I needed, I could understand the people in this room, that theirs would be a story that would speak to me, though how I knew this I can't explain.'' Settling into a story -- choosing a setting and characters, working out the particulars -- is an awkward process for the novelist, part whim, part a matter of waiting for the authentic detail to suggest itself; in dramatizing that process Sontag has hit on a neat metafictional truth. I dwell on this opening scene because she moves readers through it with sure-footed and wonderfully daring technique. At the same time (prelude to a battle that will rage throughout this book), the ideas about fiction that Sontag proposes seem the opposite of daring. ''Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled,'' the narrator announces, sounding a little passive and complacent. Imagination, she seems to say, is not much more than a survey of the contents of your own brain. But back to the story, which improves tenfold once the narrator gets out of the way and lets the characters do their thing. Our heroine, Maryna, is heavy-jawed and sturdily built, too old, at 35, to be strictly beautiful, but with a diva's ''skillful gestures'' and ''commanding gaze,'' which make her seem like the most gorgeous creature anyone has ever seen. Still weak from a recent battle with typhoid and fed up with the indignities of Russian occupation, she worries that she is losing her passion for acting. So she decides to give up her career and sail to America, and she persuades a full entourage -- including her decent but sexually absent husband and a young journalist who longs above all else in life to be her lover -- to accompany her. Maryna's plan, rather vague, is for everyone to pitch in toward a humble communal life somewhere, a more authentic existence; the group is inspired in part by Fourier's then fashionable ideas but most of all by the weary actress's desire to be done with the tired part of Maryna Zalezowska and take on a meaty new role. The arrival of these Polish idealists in kitschy America sets the scene for some charming historical set pieces: they nibble on that bizarre native delicacy, ''dry airy lumps made by exploding kernels of white corn,'' and at the Philadelphia Exposition Maryna marvels at a huge sculpture of Iolanthe made entirely of butter. Two members of the party who travel ahead to scout locations pick the unlikely setting of Anaheim, Calif. (today home to Disneyland, but back then, apparently, a magnet for Europeans attempting to learn farming). Living off their savings, the Poles rent a farm, read agricultural pamphlets, lay out a garden and na vely attempt to become vintners. And then, after some stark but rather beautiful months, the idyll falls apart. The failure is gradual -- drift more than rupture -- and most of the people involved seem to get over it quickly. Very quickly, in fact. The novel offers little in the way of conflict. To support her family, Maryna moves to San Francisco and returns to the stage under the easier-to-swallow name Madame Marina Zalenska. At this point in the story, some novelists might choose to focus on her insecurities about reviving her abandoned career. But this heroine is too steely to admit such doubt. ''You feel strong,'' the narrator says, saluting her willpower. ''You want to feel strong. The important thing is to go forward.'' Maryna kicks down barriers as if they were Styrofoam props. Auditions are a cinch, and famously tight-fisted impresarios stand in line to put her up in lavish penthouse suites. As in her essays, Sontag has a terrific feel for the way theatrical styles evolve, seeming vital and true when they burst on the scene, and embarrassing and bizarre the minute audiences decide they are dated. Maryna appears to stand on a threshold. Besides Shakespeare, she specializes in the corny but undeniably moving plays that dominated the 19th-century stage: weepies in the tradition of ''Camille,'' starring a heroine whose love violates social mores, leading inexorably to her gorgeous, swooning death. The poignant implication is that in a few decades Maryna may be regarded as a high priestess of dreck. But for her time she is an artist of the highest caliber: night after night, crowd and critics alike get out their handkerchiefs for her performances. That Maryna never phones in a sluggish performance, never even flubs a line, is hard to believe, but then belief may not be the point. Sontag's fiction, always ripe with ideas, has often flirted with fantasy. Early on, in the avant-garde ''Death Kit'' (1967), she probed an average man's dissociative dreams. Later, she abandoned novel writing for some 25 years, and when she returned, with ''The Volcano Lover'' (1992), her virtuosic retelling of the Lord Nelson-Lady Emma Hamilton affair, she seemed drawn to fantasy of the more traditional variety. That book, with its famous lovers and Neapolitan background, had the romantic glamour of an old Saturday matinee. ''In America'' has glamour, too, but it's all funneled into the character of Maryna, who never goofs, never seems graceless or cowardly, never does anything to contradict a worshipful saloonkeeper who declares: ''You're a star. Everyone loves you. You can do anythin' you want.'' Even Sontag, one suspects, would admit that Maryna is part fantasy -- a pure distillation of diva-ness. Almost but not quite as lively as in ''The Volcano Lover,'' Sontag's prose here is lithe, playful: in spite of the listless plot, this book has flow. Indeed, ''In America'' reads so smoothly that one could almost accuse Sontag of placing too few demands on her readers. Stimulating ideas, as usual, lurk around every corner. But they tend to arrive pre-interpreted. So marked out are the themes in this book that within minutes of finishing I felt ready to conduct a seminar. There is the problem of impermanent utopias. (Brook Farm is referred to, and Maryna's favorite role is plucky Rosalind from ''As You Like It,'' the saddest of comic heroines, who escapes to the forest of Arden and feels both free and banished from freedom.) There is the unexpected kinship between Poland and the United States, countries that have little in common except the fantasy that they have been singled out for a remarkable destiny -- America chosen to liberate the rest of the world, and Poland, after centuries of attacks and occupations, assigned a noble martyrdom. There is the paradox that Americans then as now were suspicious of art, preferring loud capitalist spectacles with junk food, and yet Shakespeare was so popular in the 19th century that even a rowdy town like Virginia City had a company of actors who knew his plays by heart. There is the way Maryna's abrupt change of roles stands for the changes ordinary 19th-century women may have wanted to make but couldn't. ''It is harder for a woman to want a life different from the one decreed for her,'' Maryna writes a friend back home, spelling out her predicament a little too explicitly. ''A woman has so many inner voices telling her to behave prudently, amiably, timorously.'' And of course there is the classic Henry James problem turned inside out, with refined intellectuals set loose in vast, bumpkin America. Of all Sontag's themes, this is both the most lighthearted and the most labored. The observations she makes about America (it's a place that wants ''endlessly to be remade, to shuck off the expectations of the past, to start anew with a lighter burden'') have been made for centuries, rather forcefully, by many of our greatest writers, not to mention by Madonna. Nor is this the only instance where Sontag plays with imagery that is startlingly familiar. When the journalist first crosses the Atlantic, his boat trip matches to a T what you expect from the movies. Ditto the comic-relief character of Miss Collingridge, a sexless spinster diction coach who beseeches Maryna to say ''Idiot. Not eediot. And kill, not keel''; she could have been invented by James or Trollope, and played on film by a young Eve Arden. As for Maryna, with her aristocratic ennui, eroticized yet asexual glamour, cement-thick but enchanting accent and stardom lived as a kind of exile, it's hard not to be reminded of Garbo in ''Grand Hotel,'' tearfully pleading, ''I vant to be alone!'' Much of this d?j? vu may well be on purpose. Sontag was the great champion of camp, after all. Throughout her career she has been ravenously curious about all categories of aesthetic experience, and the stereotype is a perfectly legitimate, even fascinating category to explore. But if American culture can claim any particular virtue right now, surely it's a highly evolved, ironic awareness of many of the clich?s Sontag is describing as if for the first time. We have VH1 to tell us all about divas, and talk shows to remind us that we like to change identities at the drop of a hat. And didn't Sontag raise the stakes slightly higher in that opening chapter, when she said, essentially, Here is what my imagination is capable of; here is what I have been able to see? The irony is that Sontag's mind has such a rigorous, dauntingly original reputation; her thoughts, it is generally assumed, run on ahead of her sometimes dry prose. Maybe elsewhere but not here. Sentence by sentence, scene to scene, the writing in ''In America'' is utterly nimble. It's the ideas, somehow, that lag behind. Sarah Kerr is a writer on culture and politics. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/12/books/booksspecial/sontag-america.html 'Illness as Metaphor' July 16, 1978 Reviewed by DENIS DONOGHUE Illness as Metaphor" first appeared as three long essays in the New York Review of Books last January and February. The essays have been revised in a spirit of discretion. Wilhelm Reich's language is no longer described as having "its own inimitable looniness"; now it has "its own inimitable coherence." Laetrile is a "dangerous nostrum" rather than a "quack cure." John Dean is not reported as calling Watergate "the cancer on the Presidency." The revised version has him explaining Watergate to Nixon: "We have a cancer within -- close to the Presidency -- that's growing." Far-right groups no longer have "a paranoid view of the world"; now they have a "politics of paranoia." All the textual changes I have come across serve the cause of moderation. But Susan Sontag is still angry. Her book is not about illness, but about the use of illness as a figure or metaphor. She is particularly concerned with the metaphorical sue of tuberculosis in the 19th century and cancer in the 20th. Most of these metaphors are lurid, and they turn each disease into a mythology. Until 1882, when tuberculosis was discovered to be a bacterial infection, the symptoms were regarded as constituting not merely a disease but a stage of being, a mystery of nature. Those who suffered from the disease were thought to embody a special type of humanity. The corresponding typology featured not bodily symptoms but spiritual and moral attributes: nobility of soul, creative fire, the melancholy of Romanticism, desire and its excess. Today, if Miss Sontag's account is accurate, there is a corresponding stereotype of the cancer victim: someone emotionally inert, a loser, slow, bourgeois, someone who has steadily repressed his natural feelings, especially of rage. Such a person is thought to be cancer-prone. Most of Miss Sontag's evidence for attitudes about tuberculosis is taken from 19th-century novels and operas. Evidence for attitudes about cancer is rarely cited at all, except from wild men like Reich and George Groddeck. At one point Miss Sontag says that "there is peculiarly modern predilection for psychological explanations of disease, as of everything else" and that these explanations are popular because psychology is "a sublimated spiritualism," "a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of 'spirit' over matter." But she does not produce any respectable evidence for these assertions. If a doctor gave me a psychological stereotype instead of a cure or an alleviation, I'd demand my money back. If doctors have nothing better to say than that you have cancer because you are the type of person to get cancer, then indeed they should keep quiet. But because they don't know what causes cancer, their offense is venial if they hazard a guess. Miss Sontag says that the most truthful way for regarding illness is the one most purified of metaphoric thinking. A disease should be regarded as a disease, not as a sign of some terrible law of nature or an otherwise unnamable evil. I agree with her. But anger drives her to the point of asserting that "our views about cancer, and the metaphors we have imposed on it, are so much a vehicle for the large insufficiencies of this culture, for our reckless improvident responses to our real 'problems of growth,' for our inability to construct an advanced industrial society which properly regulates consumption, and for our justified fears of the increasingly violent course of history." Very little evidence is produced that would sustain this list of charges. The gross mythology of tuberculosis did not persist after the discovery of streptomycin in 1944 and the introduction isoniazid in 1952. I cannot believe that the sinister mythology of cancer will persist after the causes of the disease are known and a successful treatment is produces. It is appalling that the disease retains its secret. So long as it dies, the secret is likely to turn itself into a mystery and to stand for nameless evils of every kind. In the meantime we should be alert to our attitudes and to our words. Miss Sontag's book is bound to help in this respect, even though it is short of evidence. "As long as a particular disease is treated as an evil, invincible predator, not just a disease, most people with cancer will indeed be demoralized by learning what disease they have." I'm sure that's true, though I'm not convinced that many cancer patients are encouraged or forced to think of their disease in that way. What they fear is not an evil, invincible predator, but the terrible probability that their disease will result in death. If the metaphorical use of cancer discouraged doctors from trying to discover its cause and its cure, the situation would indeed be obscene, but there is no evidence that this is the case. Still, we are careless in our language. Miss Sontag is right in that charge. But she is not innocent in her practice. She confesses that once, in despair over America's war on Vietnam, she wrote that "the white race is the cancer of human history." That is the kind of statement she would now repudiate, not for its political sentiment but for its recourse to the metaphor of cancer. In the last chapter of her book she comments on the fact that the same vocabulary is used in reference to cancer, aerial warfare and science fiction. Cancer cells invade the body, patients are bombarded with toxic rays, chemotherapy is chemical warfare: the enemy is a nameless Other to be conquered and destroyed. Tumors are malignant or benign. And so on. "The use of cancer in political discourse," Miss Sontag maintains, "encourages fatalism and justifies 'severe' measures -- as well as strongly reinforcing the widespread notion that the disease is necessarily fatal." Miss Sontag is sensitive to this issue partly, I think, because she knows that her own rhetoric has often been guilty. Her victims have mostly been literary critic, so they have not deserved better treatment, but the habit of mind in her sentences has regularly been punitive. In the first pages of "Against Interpretation," for instance, she wrote that "like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities." The works of Beckett, she went on, have "attracted interpreters like leeches." A few pages later she wrote of "the infestation of art by interpretations." "Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us," she continued, "superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses." And the first sentence of her review of Sartre's "Saint Genet" reports that it is "a cancer of a book, grotesquely verbose, its cargo of brilliant ideas borne aloft by a tone of vicious solemnity and by ghastly repetitiveness." If any other critic were to write that sentence, Miss Sontag would italicize "cancer," "grotesquely" and "ghastly" and accuse him of having an obscene mind. None of these sentences represents Miss Sontag at her best. At her best she is tough but fair. I have found "Illness as Metaphor" a disturbing book. I have read it three times, and I still find her accusations unproved. But the book has some extraordinarily perceptive things about our attitudes: how we view insanity, for instance, of heart disease. Nearly everything she writes demands to be qualified, but that demand is rarely met: she silences it before it has a chance to utter itself. I think her mind is powerful rather than subtle; it is impatient with nuances that ask to be heard, with minute discriminations that, if entertained, would impede the march of her argument. She is happiest when attacking a prejudice or a superstition or whatever she deems to be such, some force at large in the world that doesn't deserve the qualification that a more scrupulous mind would feel obliged to propose. She had the mind of a person who wants results and wants them now. So the elective affinity between her mind and its object is explained by the fact that each is present in the world as a form of power. To Miss Sontag, writing is combat. If I wanted to see a fine discrimination made, with precisely the right degree of allowance for and against, I wouldn't ask Miss Sontag to supply it. She would be bored by the request. But if I badly wanted to win, at nearly any cost, I would do anything to have Miss Sontag on my side. As in "Against Interpretation," "Styles of Radical Will," "Trip to Hanoi" and now "Illness as Metaphor," she would use lurid metaphors to fight lurid metaphors, believing that a good end justifies any means, any language, any style. It is my impression that "Illness as Metaphor" is a deeply personal book pretending for the sake of decency to be a thesis. As an argument, it seems to me strident, unconvincing as it stands, a prosecutor's brief that admits nothing in defense or mitigation. The brief is too brief to be just. So the reader is left with a case not fully made but points acutely established; enough, at any rate, to make him feel not only that he must in future watch his language but, with the same vigilance, watch his attitudes, prejudices, spontaneities. Denis Donoghue is professor of Modern English and American Literature at University College, Dublin. His most recent book is "The Sovereign Ghost." He will teach at the Graduate Center in the City University of New York next fall. http://www.nytimes.com/1978/07/16/books/booksspecial/sontag-illness.html 'On Photography' December 18, 1977 Reviewed by WILLIAM H. GASS Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable, the anonymous narrator of one of Borges's apocalyptic tales tells us, because they multiply and disseminate an already illusory universe; and if this opinion is, as seems likely, surely true, then what of the most promiscuous and sensually primitive of all our gadgets -- the camera -- which copulates with the world merely by widening its eye, and thus so simply fertilized, divided itself as quietly as amoebas do, and with a gentle buzz slides its newborn image into view on a coated tongue? No simple summary of the views contained in Susan Sontag's brief but brilliant work on photography is possible, first because there are too many, and second because the book is a thoughtful meditation, not a treatise, and its ideas are grouped more nearly like a gang of keys upon a ring than a run of onions on a sting. I can only try, here, to provide kid of dissolute echo of her words. The hollow sounds are all my own. Susan Sontag not only has made films -- and written critical essays ("Notes on Camp," "Against Interpretation") and fiction -- she also has a passionate interest in the Nikon's resonant echo or the Brownie's little print, as this beautiful book attests. Every page of "On Photography" raises important and exciting questions about its subject and raises them in the best way. In a context of clarity, skepticism and passionate concern, with an energy that never weakens but never blusters, and with an admirable pungency of thought and directness of expression that sacrifices nothing of sublety or refinement, Sontag encourages the reader's cooperation in her enterprise. Though disagreement at some point is certain, and every notion naturally needs refinement, every hypothesis support, every alleged connection further oil, the book understands exactly the locale and the level of its argument. Each issue is severed at precisely the right point, nothing left too short or let go on too long. So her book has, as we say, a good head: well cut, perfectly coiffed, uniform or complete in tone of color, with touches of intelligence so numerous they create a picture of photography the way those grains of gray compose the print. Sontag's comments on the work of Diane Arbus are particularly apt and beautifully orchestrated, as she raises the level of our appreciation and understanding of these strange photographs each time, in the course of her exposition, she has occasion to remark upon them. But these six elegant and carefully connected essays are not really about individual photographers, nor solely about the art, but rather about the act of photography at large, the plethora of the product, the puzzles of its nature. Principal among these problems is the fact that "the line between 'amateur' and 'professional,' 'primitive' and 'sophisticated' is not just harder to draw with photography than it is with painting -- it has little meaning. Naive or commercial or merely utilitarian photography is no different in kind from photography as practiced by the most gifted professionals: there are pictures taken by anonymous amateurs which are just as interesting, as complex formally, as representative of photography's characteristic powers as Stieglitz or a Walker Evans." Technical finish is not a measure. Intention scarcely maters. The subject alone signs no guarantee. I once took a terribly overexposed photograph of a Spanish olive grove, but if you thought I had intended the result, you could admire the interplay of the trees' washed-out form, the heat that seems to sweep through the grove like the wind. The fact is that, although there are many calculations which can be made before any photograph is taken, and of course tricks can be played during the developing afterward the real work is executed in a single click. A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once. The decisions a photographer must make, compared to those of the flower-arranger or salad chef, are few and simple indeed. The effects of his actions are dominated by accident: the ambiance of an instant in the camera's apprehension of the world. The formal properties of photographs, even the most formal ones, are too often exhausted in a glance, and we return to the subject, again and again, with other than esthetic interest. So far, certainly, the artistic importance of the camera has been secondary to its effect on society, on our knowledge of processes like aging, of things and beings (like the body of the opposite sex), on our standards of illustration an documentation, our ability to influence others with its powerful rhetoric, its untiring surveillance. It has changed the composition of our amusements and pastimes beyond return, altered our attitudes toward seeing itself. One realizes, reading Susan Sontag's book, that the image has done more than smother or mask or multiply its object. My face is only photography, and people inspect me to see if I resemble it. The family album demonstrates to me what I don't yet feel: not that I was young once, but that I'm old now. Time, so long as it lingers in the look, is visible to us in this photographic age in a way it was never visible before, among familiar things, we fail to measure change with any accuracy; but the camera records one step upon the stone, and then another, until the foot has worn a hollow like a hand cupped to catch rain. Process has become perceptible in the still. And that is strange. For the still photograph is rarely of a still subject, although in slower days one was cautioned not to move; and the image the camera caught, and was made to cough up, was an image already stopped, seized, like the victims of Pompeii's lava, in the slow flow of the subject's will. We can easily see the difference now, because, out of the continuities of experience, the sitter (that was the word) selected the slice that was to stand for his or her life, the prettiest or most imposing self (although this itself took skill that few possess); whereas it is normally the camera that makes the choice these days, and we are encouraged to relax, to guard against being on our guard, as if the pose were merely that, and the candid camera, more likely to serve up a fairer, fuller share of us that our own decision would supply. Besides, ceremonies are another thing of the past, and a visit to the photographer is itself something to be photographed before it disappears like the Aborigines. What was once a black box with a backwards beard, a menacing presence, a merciless eye, has become as discreet as a quick peek, friendly as an old chum, ubiquitous as bees at a picnic or Japanese school children at a shrine. But camera enthusiasts are nor always fans of the photograph. There are too many benefits in the point and click itself. The business of taking a picture is, first of all, a flattering and righteous one, as Sontag points out, so the shooter is accorded considerable respect: If the subject, we are pleased to have been found "pictorial," worthy of homage or memorial; if a bystander, we do not wish so come between the lens and its love, so we stop or turn aside or otherwise absent our image. It is bad manners to block the view or be insensitive to the claims of the camera. We have learned to read resemblance as easily as English. A photograph is flat, reduced, rigidly rectangular like the view-finder, cropped out of space like a piece of grass, sliced from time like cheese or salami, fixed on a piece of transportable paper, soft or glossy as no perception is, often taken at artificial speeds, positions, distances, so we can "see" both shatters and implosions, the pale denizens of caves or the deep sea, the insides of minerals, as she says, crystals, sky, the speed of bees; and almost invariably, in the case of the serious camera, the photograph is composed wholly of shadow, its shades going from gray to gray like night or our moods in a state of depression; yet we breathe in its illusions like a heavy scent. Sontag omits none of these matters, touching on them frequently, each time in a more complex and complete way, though her method (exactly appropriate to the vastness of her subject, the untechnical level of her language, the literary nature of her form) allows only the brush, the mention, the intriguing suggestion. Given my own philosophical biases, I should have been pleased to see her weigh more heavily the highly conventional character of the simplest Polaroid. However, the belief in the realism of its image is fundamental to the cultural impact of the camera, and since that is an important part of her theme, she is right to stress it. Even if the camera were more like the eye than it is, and Sontag is both put off and beguiled by the parallels, it sits steady as the spider for the fly, sees only in a blink, and is sightless 99 percent of the time -- while we see between blinks as between Venetian blinds, and our sight is thus relatively uninterrupted, in a sense continuing even through our sleep. When we see, there is always the "I" as well as the eye. There is the frame of the eye socket, the fringe of hair, the feel of the face, our hungers, hopes and hates - that full and exuberant life in which objects seen are seen because they're sought, complained of, or encountered -- though no photograph contains them. And when we carry away from any experience a visual memory (remote, conventional, schematic in its own way, too ... no souvenir), that recollection is private, not public; it cannot be handed round for sniggers, smiles or admiration; it cannot lie a lifetime in a box to be discovered by distant cousins who will giggle at the quaintness of its clothing. No. I think that I would want to say that the camera only pretends to be an eye. It creates another object to be seen, yet one that exists quite differently than a perception; not merely differing as people differ who come from different climates and geography, but as entities differ which have their homes in different realms of Being. It is not sight the camera satisfies so thoroughly, but the mind; for it creates in a click a visual concept of its object, a sign whose substance seems seductively the same as its sense, yet whose artificiality is no less than the S's that line the sentence like nervous sparrows on a swaying wire. Sontag discusses, it seems to me, a number of separate, though not necessarily equal or even exclusive views of what the serious purpose of photography might be, apart from the immediate needs of sentiment and utility it so obviously serves. The camera certainly confers an identity on whatever it isolates, however arbitrary the framing. It permits its subject to speak to the world, in a way it would otherwise never be able to do, by multiplying its presence, taking it from its natural environment and placing it within the reach of many, as though it could live well anywhere, like the starling. The lens removes reality from reality better than a surgeon, and allows us to witness killing with impunity, nakedness without shame, weddings without weeping, miracles without astonishment, poverty without pain, death without anxiety. It discovers a desirable titillation in overlooked, humble, ugly, out-of-the-way or unlikely objects, often reflecting the interest of a social class in what the camera considers exotic. It can create an image that will interpret its object , so that the shot will not be a cartoon balloon fixed to something real, but a caption of commentary, like an epitaph, beneath. In addition, the camera finds forms in nature that are the same as those which establish beauty in the other arts, an thus proves that photography is itself an art -- an art of structural epiphany, if God has had a hand in the laws of Nature. The camera is a leveler. It makes everything photogenic. Every angle of an object has an interest, as has every object from any angle, every entrance, every exit, however odd or quick or small or previously proscribed. A scullery maid may make a better picture than a queen. And the eye is omnivorous as an army of army ants. The perfect cook, the camera can make anything, in a photograph as on a platter, look good. Of course, the camera may be registering exactly that relation of eye and apprehension which give the machine is particular epistemology. The image is magically superior to the word because, though a gray ghost, the photo is believed to possess actual properties of its object. Furthermore, the relation between image and object has been made by machine -- a device that lifts off a look with less wear than a rubbing -- yet what in the image is the same as its source? In a sense, what one catches in a photograph is reflected light, and film is like river sand that receives the imprint of the drinking deer, or mud that preserves the tire tread of a robber's car; but the causal connection is loose, and can be faked. Suppose, for instance, we contrived to dimple up an image, by artificial means, created the picture of a person who never existed (doctored photographs do that for events). The photo would still "look like" a man, but it would not be the image of anybody, and so (without its of) would not be an image. Would it any longer be a photograph? The great equalizer, the camera has brought democracy to the visual levels of the world. Now images accompany us everywhere, even attesting to our quite fragile and always dubious identity (to paraphrase Gertrude Stein: I am I because my shrunken photo shows me). Though only a hundred years old as an art, photography seems already ageless as a skill, its product without limit, even if its images are not immortal and do decay, and even if some species are endangered. Perhaps they move us too easily, as though we stood on skates. Perhaps, at the same time, we have grown too familiar with the way the camera makes our common clay seem strange. Now, not even strangeness is unfamiliar. Instead of text accompanied by photographs, Susan Sontag has appended to her book a collection of quotes, framed by punctuational space and the attribution of source. These are clipped from their context to create, through collage, another context -- yet more words. And for a book on photography that shall surely stand near the beginning of all our thoughts upon the subject, maybe there is a message, a moral, a lesson, in that. William H. Gass is the author of "Omensetter's Luck," "Fiction and the Figures of Life," "On Being Blue" and other books. He is professor of philosophy at Washington University, St. Louis. http://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/18/books/booksspecial/sontag-photo.html 'Against Interpretation' January 23, 1966 Reviewed by BENJAMIN DEMOTT The lady swings. She digs the Supremes and is savvy about Camp. She catches the major Happenings and the best of the kinky flicks. She likes her hair wild and her sentences intense ("I couldn't bear what I had written," etc.; "I could not stand the omnipotent author," etc.). She mocks Establishment biggies (Charles Snow, Arthur Miller) and worships little mag kings (Genet, Resnais, Artaud, that whole unruddy gang). And time and time over she flaunts intellectual pieties, as with her hint that critical problems are like Kleenex and the mind is a runny nose. ("I have the impression not so much of having, for myself, solved ... problems as of having used them up.") Yet despite all this, despite coterie ties, clever girlisms, a not completely touching softness toward the cant of the Edie & Andy world the author of the collection of essays and reviews at hand stands forth as a genuine discovery. Her book, which includes 26 pieces published between 1961 and 1965 in periodicals ranging from Partisan Review to Film Quarterly, is a vivid bit of living history here and now, and at the end of the sixties it may well rank among the invaluable cultural chronicles of these years. That this is so owes much to the alertness and integrity with which Susan Sontag details her own responses to the more startling and symptomatic esthetic inventions of recent days. These inventions don't figure, to be sure, in every piece assembled here. A substantial portion of this book is about other books -- plain, ordinary, print-and-paper works of Pavese, Sartre, Simone Weil, Leiris, Lukacs, Levi-Strauss. What is more, the critical argument patched on as a unifying line, in introductory and concluding essays, appears to derive less directly from experience with new-wave films, pop art and the like, than from overexposure to certain fringe movements of literary criticism. And, as has to be added, that argument isn't especially fresh or well-informed. Miss Sontag's announced cause is that of design, the surface art in the Jamesian sense in fine, the cause of style. She invokes a (predictable) string of sages from Ortega y Gasset to Marshall McLuhan in support of the claim that "interpreters" -- people who "translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else" -- are philistines. And, impatient with theorists who continue to treat novels and movies as means of "depicting and commenting on secular reality," she insists that art now is "a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility." One weakness of the case, in the present version, is it rather beamish dependence on crude distinctions between form and content. Another is that it lacks urgency. The author believes her sort of thinking is out of favor and that lit-crit generally in the last few decades has avoided matters of structure and style. She is wrong by a country mile on this point, and the embattled sections of her book seem, in consequence, more like tomboy fantasies than reactions to critical things as they are. Competent chatterers about critical things as they are, though, aren't in short supply these days. What is rare is the writer who has moved beyond the Gee Whiz or See Here response to the new art the observer who breathes naturally in encounters with a Godard film or a nouveau roman and takes as his critical purpose the re-creation of these encounters as known an experienced by the feelings and the imagination. Miss Sontag at her best is such a writer. She doesn't simply view a Happening, for instance; she inhabits the moment of its "performance" and gives it back to her reader as an inward disturbance as well as a set of odd outward events. We, the audience, feel "teased" and "abused," she reports. Nobody caters to our desire to see everything, events occur in semidarkness or simultaneously in different rooms, we are "deliberately frustrated," "enveloped," mocked, turned into scapegoats: "I, and other people in the audience, often laugh during Happenings. I don't think this is simply because we are embarrassed or made nervous by violent and absurd actions. I think we laugh because what goes on in the Happenings is, in the deepest sense, funny. This does not make it any less terrifying. There is something that moves one to laughter ... in the most terrible of modern catastrophes and atrocities. There is something comic in modern experience as such, a demonic, not a divine comedy." As every schoolboy knows, no critic can recover and re-create an esthetic experience in its wholeness. Formulas and summarizing ploys inevitably turn up in "Against Interpretation" -- the key words and phrases are: "mixtures of attitude," "contradiction" and "radical juxtaposition." And in a few sections there is laziness and fudging. Miss Sontag notes that "Pop art lets in wonderful and new mixtures of attitude which would before have seemed contradictions" but analyzes the mixtures too sketchily and doesn't specify the quality of the relevant feelings. Her patience now and again fails her: she calls up the weird images in Jack Smith's film "Flaming Creatures," claims the film is "a brilliant spoof on sex" that is also "full of the lyricism of the erotic impulse" -- but races away with too few words about how this simultaneity of lyric and satiric modes feels on the pulses. And, since a good deal of the book consists of reviews, the best work of the artist under consideration is sometimes scanted. (A piece about Nathalie Sarraute focuses for most of its length on this writer's fictional manifesto and deals only dryly, in a paragraph, with her novels.) But the final impression, to repeat, is by no means that of perfunctory writing. Miss Sontag drives herself hard, more often than not, in the interest of adequacy of response. Her passing remarks on figures as dissimilar as Taylor Mead, Tammy Grimes, the Beatles and Harpo Marx are alive with a sense of what it is like to watch these performers. Her descriptions of the sensations and feelings engaged or disengaged during Brecht plays, good and bad Ionesco, Peter Weiss's "Marat-Sade," and the films of Bresson and Godard are at once subtle and exact. And there are moments at which, pressing toward a perception of the kinds of feeling articulated in a particular esthetic taste, she rises to analysis that is nothing less than exhilaratingly shrewd -- witness the swift, unpretentious, deliciously comprehending remarks on "sweet cynicism" and "tenderness" in her famous "Notes on Camp." More piquant than any of this, there is at every moment the achieved character of the observer herself. He "I" of "Against Interpretation" isn't a mere pallid, neutral register; it is a self clear enough in outline to provide answers to many of the cultural historian's bald questions -- as, for example, the question who needs the new art and why? Spiky, jealous of her preferences, seemingly exacerbate by the very notion that others may share them, Miss Sontag obliquely confirms that enthusiasts of the new art tend to be people who need badge of difference from the herd. Impatient, restless, her nerve ends visible in sentence after sentence (can't bear it, can't stand it), she further testifies that one pleasure offered by the new art is a release from that prison of patience and ploddingness into which traditional art locks its audience. Finally: suspicious of order, certain beyond doubt that sanity itself is but a cozy lie, she reveals that the new art is, most profoundly, a mode of self-torment -- a means by which guilty men who know the real truth of existence (life is meaningless) can punish themselves for finkishly ignoring it and dallying day by day with the comfortable old deceits of good sense. To make this last point, is, of course, to say that a thoroughly American figure stands at the center of "Against Interpretation." The dress is new, true enough, and the images strange. The haunting image is that of a lady of intelligence and apparent beauty hastening along city streets at the violet hour, nervous, knowing, strained, excruciated (as she says) by self-consciousness, bound for the incomprehensible cinema, or for the concert hall where non-music is non-played, or for the loft where cherry bombs explode in her face and flour sacks are flapped close to her, where her ears are filled with mumbling, senseless sound and she is teased, abused, enveloped, deliberately frustrated until -- Until we, her audience, make out suddenly that this scene is, simply, hell, and that the figure in it (but naturally) is old-shoe-American: a pilgrim come again, a flagellant, one more Self-lacerating Puritan. A few readers, mainly swingers, will be vexed by the discovery of this "radical juxtaposition," for it does rather mock the gospel of "liberation." But most readers will acknowledge, at the least, that to have brought such a complex figure to life in a collection of essays is a feat. Miss Sontag has written a ponderable, vivacious, beautifully living and quite astonishingly American book. Mr. DeMott, the author of "Hells and Benefits," is professor of English at Amherst. Some art aims directly at arousing the feelings; some art appeals to the feeling through the route of the intelligence. There is art that involves, that creates empathy. There is art that detaches, that provokes reflection. Great reflective art is not frigid. It can exalt the spectator, it can present images that appall, it can make him weep. but its emotional power is mediated. The pull toward emotional involvement is counterbalanced by elements in the work that promote distance, disinterestedness, impartiality. Emotional involvement is always, to a greater or lesser degree, postponed. -- From "Against Interpretation." http://www.nytimes.com/1966/01/23/books/booksspecial/sontag-interpretati on.html? 'The Volcano Lover: A Romance' August 9, 1992 Reviewed by JOHN BANVILLE At a literary festival some years ago, the critic George Steiner expressed his impatience at the arrogance of poets and novelists, most of whom, it seemed to him, believe that theirs are the only areas of literature in which a writer can be truly creative. For his part, he declared, he would happily swap any number of second-rate sonnets for one page of Claude Levi-Strauss's "Tristes Tropiques," and whole shelves full of indifferent novels for a single chapter of Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams." His remarks aroused anger and vituperation, of course, yet many in the audience thought he had a point. That point, however, loses some of its acuity when one recalls that Mr. Steiner has committed fiction of his own -- three books of it, in fact. Would he exchange his first volume of tales, "Anno Domini," for a page of his "Language and Silence"? Perhaps he would; yet it seems that even the profoundest critics are not content merely to criticize fiction, but itch also to produce the stuff. "The Volcano Lover" is a surprise. A historical novel by Susan Sontag? And a historical novel that declares itself (shamelessly, one almost wants to say) to be a romance, at that? Who would have thought it? Although she has written fiction in the past, Ms. Sontag is best known as a critic who for the last 30 years has been one of the leaders of the avant-garde in the United States, the American champion and interpreter of such quintessentially European figures as Roland Barthes and E. M. Cioran. Surely the author of that seminal essay "Against Interpretation" would look with nothing but scorn upon a modern-day attempt to produce something worthwhile in such a tired old genre as the historical novel? Well, not a bit of it. "The Volcano Lover," despite a few nods of acknowledgment toward post-modernist self-awareness, is a big, old-fashioned broth of a book. Sir Walter Scott would surely have approved of it; in fact, he would probably have enjoyed it immensely. THE "volcano lover" of the title is Sir William Hamilton, the British diplomat and antiquary who is best remembered as the complaisant husband of Emma Hamilton, notorious mistress of Admiral Nelson. The book is set for the most part in Naples, where, from 1764 until his recall under a cloud in 1800, Sir William was the British envoy to the court of the egregious Bourbon monarch Ferdinand IV, later to become Ferdinand I, King of the Two Sicilies, and his formidable Austrian wife, Maria Carolina, sister of Marie Antoinette. The novel is a kind of triptych, divided among Hamilton, his wife and Lord Nelson. Ms. Sontag presents her characters in a way that is at once stylized and intimate; they might be figures from an old ballad, or even from the tarot pack. Thus Sir William is referred to throughout by his Italian sobriquet of "Cavaliere," Emma is "the Cavaliere's wife" and Nelson, of course, is "the hero." This is an effective means of escaping the difficulty all writers of historical novels face in presenting famous, often legendary, people from the past as plausible characters in a work of fiction. ("I say, Brahms, isn't that old Beethoven over there?") The novel opens with a prologue that invites us to accompany the author on a visit to the flea market of history: "Why enter? What do you expect to see? I'm seeing. I'm checking on what's in the world. What's left." Some readers may quail at this self-conscious and rather ponderous opening; Ms. Sontag, however, has set her aim on a broad audience, and very rapidly -- indeed, at the turn of a page -- we find ourselves set down squarely in a solid and recognizable world: "It is the end of a picture auction. London, autumn of 1772." Here we meet the Cavaliere, and at once some of the main themes of the book are subtly sketched. He has tried and failed to sell a thing he loves dearly, a "Venus Disarming Cupid" by Correggio. "Having stopped loving it in order to sell it," he tells his nephew, "I can't enjoy it in the same way, but if I am unable to sell it I do want to love it again." Throughout her novel, the author will return repeatedly to the dichotomies of love and money, art and value, possession and renunciation. The Cavaliere is a cold fish, but he has two grand passions. The first is his collection of art and artifacts, the second is volcanoes, and in particular Mount Vesuvius, which, thanks to his posting to Naples, he has ample opportunity to study. It is a measure of Ms. Sontag's skill and artistic tact that she does not labor the contrasts between the calmness and frailty of man-made treasures and the unpredictability and chaotic forcefulness of nature, while yet managing to keep this theme firmly in view throughout. In the love that erupts between Emma and Lord Nelson, the Cavaliere encounters another of those natural phenomena that he can only observe, never experience. The first hundred pages or so constitute a portrait of the Cavaliere and his world, and although in her central character it might seem the author is working with poor material, this is, I think, the richest and most convincingly detailed section of the book. When Emma, and then Nelson, come on the scene, the perspective broadens, with a consequent loss of depth. Particularly good is the portrayal of the Cavaliere's first wife, Catherine, a Welsh heiress, refined, delicate, unhappy and hopelessly and unrequitedly in love with her husband. After Catherine, who has always been frail, dies from what the doctor diagnoses as "a paralysis," the Cavaliere's nephew, Charles Greville, sends his mistress to Naples. She presents herself as a widow, Mrs. Hart, but she is really the impossibly beautiful daughter of a village blacksmith "who had come to London at 14 as an underhousemaid, was seduced by the son of the house" and "soon found more dubious employment." Although Emma does not know it, the cynical Charles has "sold" her to his uncle in return for an indefinite loan to pay his debts. "So the old man collected the young woman," becoming "a kind of Pygmalion in reverse, turning his Fair One into a statue." EMMA HAMILTON is a splendid character, and Ms. Sontag does her proud. She catches Emma's gaiety, her cheerful vulgarity, her selfishness, her love of life, her cruelty. Nelson, too, is portrayed with vividness and subtle skill. The author brings a skeptical sensibility to bear on their grand passion, yet shows us too how lovers delude and sustain themselves with fictions that are not only necessary but also plausible. Emma was a rose, though somewhat overblown by the time Nelson met her. And he was a hero, though also a martinet, a muddler and a merciless tyrant, as Ms. Sontag shows when Ferdinand and his vengeful consort send the British admiral to deal with the rebellious nobility of Naples after the fall of its short-lived republic in 1799. The novel closes with the posthumous testament of Eleonora Pimentel, one of the leaders of the republican movement, an enlightened thinker and minor poet who was one of the many important figures of Neapolitan society whom Nelson summarily executed for their part in the rebellion. On a visit to Naples, Goethe (referred to, of course, as "the poet") tells Emma: "The great end of art is to strike the imagination. . . . And, in pursuing the true grandeur of design, it may sometimes be necessary for the artist to deviate from vulgar and strict historical truth." In this is detectable, I suspect, the voice of Ms. Sontag herself. And yet, another of the perils of this kind of fiction is the tendency of the author to become hypnotized by facts, to let them weigh down the narrative. In places, "The Volcano Lover" does become somewhat dropsical, swollen with the accumulation of historical evidence (no sources are cited, however), but for the most part it proceeds with an admirable lightness of step. There is an operatic quality to the tale (Baron Scarpia makes frequent, villainous appearances), and a grand, at times majestic, sweep to the telling. The style is confident, vigorous, witty. ("Ah, these English," reflects Goethe. "So refined and so coarse. If they did not exist, nobody would have ever invented them.") And, for the most part, the narrative is irresistible in its forward thrust. Some of the set pieces are worthy of a Marguerite Yourcenar or a Simon Schama, and there are wonderful touches of grotesque comedy. When, for example, the ship carrying the Cavaliere's precious collection of antique vases begins to sink, the sailors save what they believe is one of his treasure chests, which turns out to contain the corpse of a British naval officer -- an admiral, as playful fate would have it -- pickled in alcohol, being brought home for burial. I find "The Volcano Lover" impressive, at times enchanting, always interesting, always entertaining; yet it also seems to me curiously hollow. I wish I could like it less and admire it more. What is missing is the obsessiveness of art, that leporine, glazed gaze that confronts us from out of the pages of many a less densely textured but altogether more concentrated work. Will it seem cantankerous in the extreme if I say that Ms. Sontag cares too much? Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at the heart. For all the author's evenhandedness, we sense clearly behind her studied fiction a passionate moral intelligence hard at work; this is to Ms. Sontag's great personal credit, of course, but peculiarly damaging to her art. But then perhaps she did not set out to write a work of pure fictional art. In its almost encyclopedic discursiveness, "The Volcano Lover" displays -- intentionally, I am sure -- the influence of the 18th-century French philosophe , in particular Denis Diderot. It operates in that broad but nebulous area between fiction and essay, in which Hermann Broch's "Death of Virgil" is the supreme exemplar, and which in our time is occupied by writers such as Milan Kundera and V. S. Naipaul. However, what will stay with me from "The Volcano Lover" are those moments when the author forgets about the broad facts of history and homes in on this or that detail of her grand pageant, letting her imagination have full and formidable play. When the doings of heroine, hero, king and poet have faded from my memory, I shall still have a clear and precise picture of the Cavaliere's pet monkey, Jack: "The monkey put his paw on the Cavaliere's wig and uttered a small cry. He patted the wig, then inspected his black palm, tensing and unfurling it." It is in such seemingly unconsidered corners of the novel that art resides. SEE NAPLES AND GAPE He lives in a place that for sheer volume of curiosities -- historical, natural, social -- could hardly be surpassed. It was bigger than Rome, it was the wealthiest as well as the most populous city on the Italian peninsula and, after Paris, the second largest city on the European continent, it was the capital of natural disaster and it had the most indecorous, plebeian monarch, the best ices, the merriest loafers, the most vapid torpor, and, among the younger aristocrats, the largest number of future Jacobins. Its incomparable bay was home to freakish fish as well as the usual bounty. It had streets paved with blocks of lava and, some miles away, the gruesomely intact remains, recently rediscovered, of two dead cities. . . . Its handsome, highly sexed aristocracy gathered in one another's mansions at nightly card parties, misleadingly called conversazioni , which often did not break up until dawn. On the streets life piled up, extruded, overflowed. Certain court celebrations included the building in front of the royal palace of an artificial mountain festooned with meat, game, cakes and fruit, whose dismantling by the ravenous mob . . . was applauded by the overfed from balconies. During the great famine of the spring of 1764, people went off to the baker's with long knives inside their shirts for the killing and maiming needed to get a small ration of bread. The Cavaliere arrived to take up his post in November of that year. The expiatory processions of women with crowns of thorns and crosses on their backs had passed and the pillaging mobs disbanded. The grandees and foreign diplomats had retrieved the silver that they had hidden in convents. . . . The air intoxicated with smells of the sea and coffee and honeysuckle . . . instead of corpses. . . . Living abroad facilitates treating life as a spectacle. . . . Where those stunned by the horror of the famine and the brutality and incompetence of the government's response saw unending inertia, lethargy, a hardened lava of ignorance, the Cavaliere saw a flow. The expatriate's dancing city is often the local reformer's or revolutionary's immobilized one, ill-governed, committed to injustice. Different distance, different cities. The Cavaliere had never been as active, as stimulated, as alive mentally. >From "The Volcano Lover." http://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/09/books/booksspecial/sontag-volcano.html 'AIDS and Its Metaphors' January 22, 1989 Reviewed by PAUL ROBINSON Susan Sontag's purpose in ''AIDS and Its Metaphors'' is to show how the way we talk and think about AIDS makes the disease even worse than it actually is. The metaphorical packaging of AIDS, she argues, increases the suffering of the afflicted while creating unneeded anxiety among the population at large. Readers familiar with Ms. Sontag's ''Illness as Metaphor'' (1978) will recognize a familiar intellectual tactic. In that work she directed her critical skills at the metaphorical uses of tuberculosis in the 19th century and cancer in the 20th, revealing how language distorted the reality of both diseases and, in the case of cancer at least, kept patients from pursuing the most rational course of treatment. With AIDS, she sees the metaphorical process at work even in the way the disease is defined. Acquired immune deficiency syndrome, she points out, is above all a disease of stages. ''Full-fledged'' or ''full-blown'' AIDS, said to be invariably fatal, is preceded by infection by HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, and AIDS-related complex (ARC). The metaphor at work is a botanical or zoological one. It insinuates that the evolution from the original infection to AIDS is a biological inevitability; the stages stand in relation to one another as acorn to oak tree. The effects of this linguistic sleight of hand is to create the impression that not only AIDS but HIV infection leads inexorably to death. It is an invitation to despair, causing much misery in its own right and also diverting victims from a sensible medical attitude toward their condition. Virtually alone, Ms. Sontag hopes to combat the fatalism associated with AIDS. She will not allow that the disease, even in its mature form, invariably results in death: ''It is simply too early to conclude, of a disease identified only seven years ago, that infection will always produce something to die from, or even that everybody who has what is defined as AIDS will die of it.'' The high mortality rate, she speculates, could simply reflect the early, generally quick deaths of those most vulnerable to the virus. Above all, however, she resists the illicit deduction that HIV infection, as the metaphor implies, is just as lethal as the final manifestations of the disease. Currently the authorities estimate that between 30 and 35 percent of those testing HIV positive will develop AIDS within five years, and they further hedge their bets by suggesting that over a longer stretch of time most or probably all of those infected will fall ill. For Ms. Sontag this is metaphorical double talk, an insidious apology for medical failure. One wonders whether Ms. Sontag hasn't allowed her experience with cancer to color her interpretation of the present epidemic. She was herself a cancer patient in the 1970's, and she triumphed over not only the disease but her doctors' ''gloomy prognosis'' as well. AIDS, however, differs from cancer in one striking respect: there has not been a single known case of recovery. Given this awesome fact, the bleak view of AIDS implied in its conceptualization as a disease of stages seems less a metaphorical trick than a sober assessment of reality. Likewise, the suspicion that HIV infection may in the long run prove 100 percent fatal reflects the sober fact that we have seen that figure rise from well under 10 percent to over 30 percent in the period the disease has been under observation. A measure of fatalism seems altogether in order. A second metaphor Ms. Sontag wishes to exorcise is the notion of AIDS as a ''plague'' (in contrast to an ''epidemic,'' the neutral term she prefers). Her principal objection to the plague metaphor is that it represents the disease as a punishment, a ''visitation'' inflicted not only on the ill but on society at large. The punishment, of course, is for moral laxity - a view supported by the disease's association with homosexual license and illegal drugs, although contradicted by the absence of either of these connections with the disease in Africa. The plague image is also regrettable, in her view, because, like the botanical or zoological metaphor of stages, it contributes to the aura of inevitability: ''The plague metaphor is an essential vehicle of the most pessimistic reading of the epidemiological prospects. From classic fiction to the latest journalism, the standard plague story is of inexorability, inescapability.'' Curiously, some of the epidemic's most sympathetic and profound chroniclers have self-consciously employed the language of plague to very different moral effect. Particularly striking in this regard is Andrew Holleran, some of whose columns in the magazine Christopher Street have recently been published in book form as ''Ground Zero.'' In Mr. Holleran's eloquent usage, ''the plague'' conveys not only the physical agony of the disease itself, but the reverberant sense of catastrophe and reasonable despair the epidemic has unleashed. The word also suggests something of its character as an ironic atavism. It remains a metaphor, to be sure, but an appropriate one. Ms. Sontag also objects to the idea that AIDS is somehow particularly dehumanizing or degrading. She observes that these characterizations are invariably applied to diseases that transform the body, especially the face. AIDS (notably when it results in Kaposi's sarcoma) is similar in this respect to syphilis or leprosy. The judgment is merely esthetic, in Ms. Sontag's view, and adds an illegitimate psychic burden to the patient's physical sufferings. She seems not overly impressed that, alone among epidemics, AIDS typically seeks out its victims in their prime, at the moment when physical attractiveness is most integral to one's sense of self. Indeed, for homosexuals this ''esthetic'' concern is far from arbitrary: not only is the disease hideously disfiguring, but it originates in a moment of erotic attraction, when physical beauty is very much to the point. The supremely ironic structure of the disease - one readily thinks of Blake's ''Sick Rose'' - makes its ''metaphorical'' association with dehumanization, once again, seem entirely appropriate. As Ms. Sontag admits, ''one cannot think without metaphors,'' so the correct question to ask regarding the way we think about AIDS is whether its metaphors are well or ill chosen. They would be ill chosen if they misrepresented the disease or contributed to its victims' pain. Despite her ingenuity and her manifest good will, Ms. Sontag doesn't convince me that either is the case. By comparison with earlier diseases, the metaphors associated with AIDS have tended to be both tame and apposite. The disease itself, and not the way we talk about it, is the true source of its horror. Paul Robinson, a professor of history at Stanford University, is the author of ''The Modernization of Sex.'' http://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/22/books/booksspecial/sontag-aids.html --------------------------------- 'Under the Sign of Saturn' November 23, 1980 Reviewed by DAVID BROMWICH Susan Sontag's third book of essays has meditations on Antonin Artaud, Elias Canetti, Leni Riefenstahl, Walter Benjamin and Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's film about Hitler, along with brief eulogies for Paul Goodman and Roland Barthes. Her subjects bear witness to Miss Sontag's range as well as her diligence. She keeps up - appears, at times, to do the keeping-up for a whole generation - and has long been an effective publicist for the more imposing European offshoots of high modernism. The theater of cruelty, the death of ''the author'': From ground to summit, from oblivion to oblivion, she covers the big movements and ideas and then sends out her report, not without qualms. For the art she most admires, an inward and recalcitrant art, exists in tension with her own role as its advocate. It stands outside the mainstream of culture, and sometimes at the very periphery of human experience: It refuses to belong. Nevertheless, Miss Sontag tries to help it belong, by explaining it to us in calm, reasonable, sympathetic tones. Her job is to spread the avant-garde word with evangelical warmth. But what if the word was a curse? To repeat it too complacently may lead to ''the domestication of agony.'' The phrase is Miss Sontag's, and she is troubled by it. Yet for her there seems to b e no way out of the predicament it describes. Her fondness for the extreme case inclines her to believe that the extreme case must somehow be ''exemplary'' (a favorite praise-word). To be exemplary it must first be widely known, and here Miss Sontag faces a dilemma. She can either do justice to the subtlety of the thinker in question and increase his following by a very few; or reduce him to manageable slogans and greatly increase the frequency with which his name occurs in the intellectual chatter of the age. She has chosen the latter course. Her message is always: ''Read these writers; but do not suppose that you can possess them.'' Yet one critic cannot argue both points with equal efficiency, and in reading Miss Sontag we are apt to forget the warning. Thus Benjamin's ferocity and Artaud's ''unassimilable voice'' are brought into line with our own readiness to benefit from what is fierce and unassimilable. By this route, dangerous ideas come to sound wonderfully acute or wonderfully daring and, of course, ahead of their time. Eventually they are domesticated. Miss Sontag's essay on Benjamin shows most plainly how this can happen, and it is worth a long look in any case. Benjamin - a German-Jewish essayist, celebrated as a commentator on Baudelaire and Kafka, who committed suicide in 1940 when his escape from Nazi Europe seemed impossible - is both the greatest and the most dangerous of her subjects; she gets her title from his ''Saturnine'' temperament and writes of him with a brave though slightly strained familiarity. Benjamin composed some unsettling aphorisms on ''The Destructive Character,'' in which the note of self-reference is unmistakable. He sketched an attitude roughly comparable to that of Nietzsche's ''Critical Historian.'' For both writers, the cultural achievements of the past have become overwhelming and therefore oppressive; in the present, we are condemned merely to preserve or repeat them. Both writers go on to suggest an alternative: deliberate forgetfulness. Where the critical historian rewrites history to make room for himself, the destructive character adopts a wholly negative relation to the present. His life becomes one continuous act of destruction: ''What exists he reduces to rubble.'' But here is the way Miss Sontag interprets the same idea: ''The ethical task of the modern writer is to be not a creator but a destroyer - a destroyer of shallow inwardness, the consoling notion of the universally human, dilettantish creativity, and empty phrases.'' Who would not wish to see those things destroyed? Benjamin, however, when he said destruction meant destruction, without any dash followed by a limiting clause. It is an uncompromising credo, and has had consequences for those who stuck by it. One cannot be sure which of the available forms of intellectual terrorism Benjamin himself might have encouraged in the hope of clearing the air. But we have at least a clue in the admiration he professed for Brecht during the most intolerant Stalinist phase of Brecht's career. Even more temperate, assured and remote from Benjamin is her interpretation of his belief in a hidden self. For this, Miss Sontag is indebted to Gershom Scholem's essay ''Walt er Benjamin and His Angel,'' which she alludes to but never names . She thinks that for Benjamin, ''the process of building a self and its works is always too slow.'' But in the writings she has in mind, Benjamin seems to have denied that the self could be ''built'' at all. For the self, as Benjamin conceived it, does not belong to the world of ordinary experience; it does not learn from or even participate in our daily lives. The part of us that is engaged with the world grows up separate from the self, and we live in the unhappy awareness that this exile from the self makes our existence unintelligible. Benjamin spoke in apocalyptic language about the day when this hidden self would return to bless him: It would be the day of judgment. That is why he announced his intention not to build but to wait, and said of his attitude toward the self, ''nothing can overcome my patience.'' His distinction between two realms - a hidden realm of complete knowledge and a fallen realm of existence - and his argument for destruction as a weapon to break the tyranny of an existence that seems a kind of exile, both have points in common with Gnostic religious doctrine. Elsewhere, in her essay on Artaud, Miss Sontag describes Gnosticism as ''a sensibility,'' and by doing so goes some way toward domesticating it. About the dates and places of Benjamin's career, Miss Sontag is oddly precise. Oddly, because they are given in no special order; a beginner could not use them to reconstruct even the broad outlines of the life. Their real importance for Miss Sontag seems to be magical rather than expository. But her largest difficulty, and this holds for many of the essays, is a certain vagueness in her conception of her reader. She seems to be addressing a reader who knows Benjamin's writings so well that he can pick up glancing allusions to a dozen titles, but who needs to be told that Scholem and Theodor Adorno were his friends, that ''what the French call un triste'' is a person marked by ''a profound sadness.'' ''Approaching Artaud,'' the longest essay in the book, originally appeared as the introduction to a selection of Artaud's writings. Miss Sontag has a gift for sympathy but none at all for quotation, and with Artaud the balance works very much to her advantage. He took a passion for literature, and a resentment of literature, as far as it could go, and ended in the sort of madness that makes better reading in French than in English. Even here, for all her caution, Miss Sontag cannot help making the subject tamer than he sounds in his own words. But she offers a richly conscientious survey of Artaud's career, and adds a defense of madness in the familiar style of R.D. Laing and Michel Foucault. The result may not convince anyone to read beyond ''The Theater and Its Double,'' which remains Artaud's best-known work; but the next generation of students, when they decide to approach him, will be using Miss Sontag's notes to ease the first rigors of contact. ''Fascinating Fascism,'' on the art of Leni Riefenstahl - the German movie star and Nazi movie director and, more recently, photographer of primitive African tribes - is written in a less friendly spirit. Here Miss Sontag wants to establish the reality of ''fascist art,'' and to expand that category beyond works called fascist simply because of their sponsorship or avowed aim. She names ''Fantasia,'' ''2001'' and Busby Berkeley's ''The Gang's All Here'' as examples of ''fascist art'' - an intriguing list, and one only wishes she would say something about it. ''Triumph of the Will,'' Riefenstahl's 1935 propaganda film of a Nuremberg rally, doubtless belongs in this company. Its chief apologists have been those who affirm the total separation of art from the political vision that it serves. But Miss Sontag once counted herself among them, and her essay is curiously indifferent to her own earlier position. At the end Riefenstahl is linked to the sadomasochistic ''scenario'' now available to everyone, and it is this that Miss Sontag denounces. She calls it, in an awkward but true enough phrase, an experience ''both violent and indirect, very mental.'' Yet her peroration spoils the effect by rhetorical overreach: ''The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.'' That slips into bathos because the freight is too heavy; but in any case the details of costume, which become an absorbing concern in the second part of Miss Sontag's attack, are beside the point. Black leather is a symptom and not a cause of the brutal estheticism she deplores. A better conclusion would have looked beyond the costumes and more deeply at the specialized emotions that they satisfy. But to do so might have led to a reappraisal of the ''camp'' sensibility, of which Miss Sontag was once an excited interpreter. About camp she now says only, ''art that seemed eminently worth defending ten years ago, as a minority or adversary taste, no longer seems defensible today'' because ''taste is context, and the context has changed.'' And yet there were many who felt 10 years ago as she feels now. Is it possible that Miss Sontag has simply changed her mind and wishes at all costs to avoid saying so? After ''Fascinating Fascism'' many readers will supppose that she has indeed changed her mind. But in general, the extent of Miss Son tag's commitment to a language of sensibil ity, and of her willingness to revise it by stating a moral o bjection in moral terms,remains uncertain even to herself. Of Benjami n's experiments with hashish she observes, almost pertly: ''In fac t, melancholics make thebest addicts.'' So the moralist in her is fre e to depart without a trace. To make a strength of Miss Sontag's mixed qualities, it might be argued that her shifting point of view has fostered her catholicity of taste. There is probably no other writer who could feel attached to the ideas of Paul Goodman and Roland Barthes, and passionately inhabit both their worlds. For the rest of us, one would drive out the other: They are too different in tone, interest and specific density. Miss Sontag unites them, and seems all the luckier for it. Incidentally, the eulogy for Goodman also gives us our clearest picture of her: ''I am writing this in a tiny room in Paris, sitting on a wicker chair at a typing table in front of a window which looks onto a garden; at my back is a cot and a night table; on the floor and under the table are manuscripts, notebooks, and two or three paperbacks.'' She still cares then, in her own life, for the romantic ideal of the solitary artist. Having shown us her fidelity to this ideal, she can afford in the future to be more suspicious of her occasional desire to make a clean sweep of things: interpretation, the institution of authorship, even her apartment in Paris. The important work gets done in spite of the manifestoes. David Bromwich teaches English at Princeton and has contributed to The (London) Times Literary Supplement, Dissent and other jurnals. http://www.nytimes.com/1980/11/23/books/booksspecial/sontag-saturn.html --------------------------------- 'Styles of Radical Will' July 13, 1969 Reviewed by LAWRENCE M. BENSKY The subjects of the essays in this important book --- Susan Sontag's second collection of essays, containing pieces written since 1966 -- are major subjects of relevant intellectual concern in 1969: the avant-garde "esthetics of science," the pornographic classics of "The Story of O" and "The Image," French philosopher E.M. Cioran, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard. Is this to say she is fashionable? Readers can certainly find excuses for thinking so. The techniques she employs have something for everyone in the mind game: vast fields of reference, an easy use of traditional philosophical and literary analysis, ruthless self-criticism, a shifting focus of investigation. But since she uses such techniques better than almost any other writer today, Susan Sontag cannot be called fashionable, any more than a statue can be called statuesque. She's simply there, thoroughly herself. Where she is can best be seen in her own words. On esthetics: "As the activity of the mystic must end in a via negativa, a theology of God's absence, a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech, so art must tend toward anti-art, the elimination of the 'subject' ('the object,' the 'image'), the substitution of chance for intention, and the pursuit of silence.... Art is unmasked as gratuitous, and the every concreteness of the artist's tools ... appears as a trap. Practiced in a world furnished with secondhand perceptions, and specifically confounded by the treachery of words, the artist's activity is cursed.... Art becomes the enemy of the artist, for it denies him the realization -- the transcendence -- he desires. Therefore, art comes to be considered something to be overthrown." (And the "esthetics of silence" come to be written.) Or, on politics: "What the Mongol hordes threaten is far less frightening than the damage that Western, 'Faustian' man, with his idealism, his magnificent art, his sense of intellectual adventure, his world-devouring energies for conquest, has already done, and further threatens to do.... [In Vietnam] an unholy dialectic is at work, in which the big wasteful society dumps its garbage, its partly unemployable proletarian conscripts, its poisons and its bombs upon a small, virtually defenseless, frugal society whose citizens, those fortunate enough to survive, then go about picking up the debris, out of which they fashion materials for daily use and self-defense." Who she is can be glimpsed in the following passage from her essay "'Thinking Against Oneself': Reflections on Cioran," for it provides something of an auto-portrait of Susan Sontag: "More and more, the shrewdest thinkers and artists are precocious archeologists of ... ruins-in-the-making, indignant or stoical diagnosticians of defeat, enigmatic choreographers of the complex spiritual movements useful for individual survival in an era or permanent apocalypse." The key words are clear: "indignant," "stoical," "enigmatic," "complex," "useful." But one major adjective must be added: "moral" -- because the eight essays in "Styles of Radical Will" are mainly exercises in moral definition, as far as moral definition can be accomplished today on the two supremely and terrifyingly insecure areas of modern art and modern political brutality. Like all moralists, Miss Sontag hopes to inspire readers with the desire to act upon her principles. But there are insurmountable difficulties in acting upon them, and this is the final, most maddening element in the world she so brilliantly describes. For example: How is art -- even radical art -- "useful for individual survival in an era of permanent apocalypse?" As Miss Sontag has convincingly argued, good and bad have become useless concepts; the most valid forms -- in art, in philosophy -- are those which accommodate the greatest ambiguity; they are profoundly disturbing but are psychologically appropriate to our condition. Thus Bergman's "Persona" and the films of Godard are exemplary esthetic models. But art is not life; life drives one crazy and corrupts the language with which one could recognize one's condition, while art reinvents language and makes sure one recognizes just how badly off one is. Can such a vicious circle aid us in a moral definition? How "useful to individual survival" can it -- or similar intellectual structures -- be? This issue -- like so many -- reaches the point of crisis when Miss Sontag confronts the question of Vietnam in her essay "Trip to Hanoi," based on her visit there in the spring of 1968. It is her triumph that by being true to what she sees and feels -- her first concern -- she is able to transfer her artistic and philosophical values to politics without distorting them or losing herself, and find value and meaning where others have lapsed into political cliches or been struck dumb with horror. The placement of "Trip to Hanoi" as the concluding piece in the book is symbolic of the way in which Vietnam has wrenched many students, writers, teachers and intellectuals away from their guarded concerns into a field of experience where they must suddenly cope as never before. When "Trip to Hanoi" appeared last year in Esquire and later as a paperback, inmates of the liberal and radical wards in the cultural asylum roared in pain. How dare Susan Sontag use the Vietnamese as foils for her own personal psychological development? How dare she claim to be a radical and still spend time agonizing over agonizing at the typewriter? Aren't we getting gassed, clubbed, taxed, drafted, jailed while she is trying to decide what to say? Reading "Trip to Hanoi" now as a part of a collection, one sees how Miss Sontag's sensibility allowed her to risk these painful accusations. "What I'd been creating and enduring for the last few years was a Vietnam inside my head, under my skin, in the pit of my stomach," she writes, adding that she is "a stubbornly unspecialized writer who has so far been largely unable to incorporate into either novels or essays my evolving radical political convictions and sense of moral dilemma at being a citizen of the American empire." Hanoi changed that -- and "Trip to Hanoi" enables us to see how her attitude toward Vietnam does follow logically from the moral philosophy which she applies so successfully to esthetic questions. In art, she glories in the discovery of "tact" and "poise" amidst the roaring babble. On her trip, she delighted in the painful recognition of the virtues of the Vietnamese who were "fastidious" and "whole" in the unspeakable holocaust. To understand the nature of this achievement -- the clear-eyed translation of a vocabulary of art and philosophy into politics -- one must note again that Miss Sontag has been deeply influenced by the contemporary radical French intellectual tradition that concentrates on searching for the underlying structures -- often of an awesome complexity -- beneath the tangled and chaotic surface of individual acts. By creating a personal vocabulary that can permit her to define esthetic expression or political behavior as "tactful," "poised," "fastidious" and "whole," she is demonstrating an intellectual achievement both foreign to contemporary American usage and difficult to appropriate in times of artistic and political change. Even if one does not accept the annoying and sometimes difficult validity of intellectual accomplishment in a period of ferment and horror, one ignores the best of human creativity and personal honesty at one's peril. It should be remembered that Miss Sontag has now written four of the most valuable intellectual documents of the past 10 years: "Against Interpretation," "Notes on Camp," "The Aesthetics of Silence," and "Trip to Hanoi." In the world in which she's chosen to live, she continues to be the best there is. Mr. Bensky, a critic and former managing editor of Ramparts, lives in San Francisco. http://www.nytimes.com/1969/07/13/books/booksspecial/sontag-radical.html 'Trip to Hanoi' February 4, 1969 Reviewed by HERBERT MITGANG Susan Sontag, last season's literary pin-up, spent a couple of weeks in Hanoi in the spring as a reward for what the North Vietnamese regarded as a proper anti-American war attitude. Was this trip necessary? Not for the ordinary purposes of her "Trip to Hanoi," which is an interior journey with reportorial blinders. Although Miss Sontag proves herself still capable of ascending peaks of obscurity, her self-examination as a troubled American trying to balance the immorality of Vietnam and a sense of conscience makes her journey a thoughtful experience. A more dense discussion of the war and the future of American foreign policy is found in "No More Vietnams?," edited by Richard M. Pfeffer for the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. The book grew out of a conference of 26 certified "scholars with relevant expertise," former government officials and journalists. The intellectual varsity is all here but the book is difficult to digest because it has been arranged in dialectical form. The reason for mixing everybody together is explained in foundationese: "We judged," writes Stevenson Institute director William R. Polk, "that at this stage of our awakening understanding of the implications of Vietnam, conflicts in interpretation and opinion need to be emphasized rather than synthesized." The result is that "No More Vietnams?" has many voices talking at once. Nevertheless, the blackbirds in the pie do take wing when singled out: Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department consultant on pacification: "The lesson which can be drawn here is one that the rest of the world, I am sure, has drawn more quickly than Americans have -- that, to paraphrase H. Rap Brown, bombing is as American as cherry pie. If you invite us in to do your hard fighting for you, they you get bombing along with our troops." Stanley Hoffmann, professor of government at Harvard: "The ethics of foreign policy must be an ethics of self-restraint. The saddest aspect of the Vietnam tragedy is that it combines moral aberration and intellectual scandal." Sir Robert Thompson, former Secretary for Defense in Malaya: "The prospect of going in as a political reformer frightens me more than anything else. I would not touch political reform in these territories with a barge pole -- and I certainly would not touch it with an American political scientist." Edwin Reischauer, former Ambassador to Japan: "Vietnam has shown the limited ability of the United States to control at a reasonable cost the course of events in a nationally aroused, less developed nation.... I believe we are moving away from the application to Asia of the 'balance of power' and 'power vacuum' concepts of the cold war." It is unfortunate, though hardly to be anticipated, that this book's round table took place several months before McGeorge Bundy's speech at DePauw University last October calling for an end to bombing of North Vietnam. Since Mr. Bundy was more responsible than any Presidential adviser for the bombing and escalation of the war in Vietnam, his speech could have helped to focus the lessons set forth in "No More Vietnams?" For Mr. Bundy reversed himself not on grounds of the immorality of the war but of the lack of success ("its penalties upon us are much too great"). Most of the voices for sanity in this book, who seek to avoid future Vietnams, stress not success but morality. It is fortunate, on the other hand, that Miss Sontag arrived in Hanoi after the decision had been made in Washington to stop bombing the North Vietnam capital. For it gave her the opportunity to look inward. Being Susan Sontag, she quotes not Ho but Hegel after her interior journey to Hanoi: "As Hegel said, the problem of history is the problem of consciousness ... anything really serious I'd gotten from my trip would return me to my starting point: the dilemmas of being an American, an unaffiliated radical American, an American writer.... Radical Americans have profited from having a clear-cut moral issue on which to mobilize discontent and expose the camouflaged contradictions in the system." And that, if one may draw a conclusion from her conclusion, may bring the ultimate victory here of a lost war there: Cold-war concepts are being turned inside-out because the defeat, and convulsive social changes may result in a more humane America at home and abroad. Miss Sontag's "Trip to Hanoi" was indeed necessary and is well worth reading because it blows the mind's cobwebs. http://www.nytimes.com/1969/02/04/books/booksspecial/sontag-hanoi.html --------------------------------- 'Death Kit' August 18, 1967 Reviewed by ELIOT FREMONT-SMITH An old saw has it that the critical and creative imaginations are in some sly way antithetical, that their sensibilities are mutually subversive, that one cannot successfully do the job to the other. Like most old saws, this one is dull, bent and missing teeth; but beneath the flaking rust there is still an edge of truth. Lacking something better, one can use the instrument to hack away at least part of the mystery of how it happens that a critic of Susan Sontag's refined sensibilities can write fiction that is both tedious and demonstrably insensitive to the craft of fiction. As a critic, Miss Sontag has been original, provocative and intellectually rigorous. She is best known for her "Notes on Camp" (1964), but her essays on happenings, science-fiction movies, French writers and thinkers, etc. (collected in "Against Interpretation," 1966), have also had conspicuous and deserving impact on current critical thought, combining as they do, hawkish intellectuality with "gem-like flame" estheticism, and conventionally relativistic moral concerns with what virtually amounts to an ethic of pure style and relativity to sensation. If her critical writing has not always been entirely lucid, it has been fresh and fascinating, and idiomatically true to itself. Her novels are a different matter. In "The Benefactor" (1963), she explored, at tedious and wandering length, the dream- and waking-life of a fellow who wants to fashion actuality from his dreams -- a seemingly easy chore because his dreams are so undreamlike, and a chore because so dull. The novel was infused with ideas that had little dramatic relation to the narrative; voices where confused (the novel's and Miss Sontag's) or at any rate confusing, and the pacing was erratic. On the positive side, the novel was an attempt at innovation and -- one is grateful for surprises -- the tone throughout was not French and decadent, as one might expect, but resolute and even cheery. Much of the same may be said of "Death Kit," which skips, shuffles and snoozes over very similar territory. Its nonhero and occasional quasi-narrator is a 33-year-old, expensively educated, Pennsylvania businessman who is moderately thoughtful, entirely dependable in everyday matters, and nicknamed Diddy -- "the sort of man it's hard to dislike, and whom disaster avoids." But: "Diddy, not really alive, had a life. Hardly the same. Some people are their lives. Others, like Diddy, merely inhabit their lives." In fact, the life that Diddy inhabits is also unreal, as Miss Sontag evolves it. But this is as nothing compared with Diddy's immediate problem, which is: Did he bludgeon to death a railroad worker while his train was halted in a darkened tunnel -- as he himself believes -- or was he sitting all the time quietly in his seat, as Hester, the sensuous blind girl who hears all, testifies. The answer, or nonanswer, is suspected all along, though Miss Sontag seems not to care overmuch, and "all along" is a long, long way. During the lulls -- Diddy's dreams, who-knows-who's philosophical ruminations, Miss Sontag's epistemological riddles, the reader's daydreams, art vs. life, Gide, Camus, Freud vs. Jung vs. Wilhelm Reich, authenticity vs. reflection, action as indecisive evidence of no death quite yet, and so on and on and on -- one comes to think that Miss Sontag may have been taken in by Hester's post-tryst (in the train's bathroom) admonishment to Diddy: "There's no point in not doing what you want, is there? I mean, if nobody's stopping you." A novelist might have stopped before even this early point, and rethought character development, pacing, authenticity of tone and other antiquarian matters of craft. For instance, the small but nagging matter of the use of "now," in parentheses, presumably to heighten immediacy. What is its real effect? Or the much larger matter of Diddy's potentialities for thought. "Death, thought Diddy," Miss Sontag writes, "is like a lithographer's stone. One stone, cool and smooth to the touch, can print many deaths, virtually identical except to the expert eye. One lightly inscribed stone can be used, reused indefinitely." Well, no. Not the Diddy I know, anyway. He wouldn't have had a thought remotely like this, not in a million years. After a rousing beginning (except for those silly and reductive parenthetical "nows"), it heralds, I'm afraid, a rather meandering and fretful middle; the ending is a slight but well-done shocker, patterned perhaps on the classic thriller film, "Dead of Night." Did Diddy do it? Is Hester a loving liar? Is the railroad worker truly dead? Can Diddy prolong his tenancy in life? Are dreams more real that real? The persevering reader will earn what answers he can, with Miss Sontag's good-natured, earnest and (too) occasionally brilliant help, deduce. http://www.nytimes.com/1967/08/18/books/booksspecial/sontag-death.html --------------------------------- 'The Benefactor' September 8, 1963 Reviewed by DANIEL STERN For her first book Susan Sontag, a 30-year-old New Yorker, has chosen to write a carefully "modern" work, a picaresque anti-novel. The tone is detached, the action almost nonexistent, and the characters do not lead lives, they assume postures. We are not told the hero's surname or the name of his city, though this last is clearly Paris during the past 40 or 50 years. "The Benefactor" is the supposed memoir of an aging man named Hippolyte, who has dreamed his way through an ambiguous life. As a young man without any of the usual human ambitions, he abandons his university education and is supported by his wealthy, indulgent father. His primary purpose is solitary speculation, and to further this he lives only on the periphery of other lives. In line with this he frequents the salon of a foreign couple, the Anderses, a salon peopled by "virtuoso talkers." At about this time Hippolyte has the first of a series of disquieting dreams. Shortly afterward he makes his great decision: instead of using his dreams to interpret his life, he will use his life to interpret his dreams. Cued by a dream, he begins an affair with his hostess, Frau Anders. She is a plump, sensuous woman in her late thirties, and there is much talk about sensuality; yet it remains a curiously cerebral affair. >From this point on the novel alternates cinematic descriptions of dreams with what, for want of better words, must be called waking life. Both are cryptic, both devoid of identifiable drives and emotions. Along the way Hippolyte does some occasional acting in films, flirts with an experimental religion, has frequent conversations with a thief and sometime homosexual, takes a trip to an Arab country with Frau Anders, where he sells her into white slavery, marries and becomes a widower. None of these activities, however, has any dimensional life. Obviously meant to be emblematic, they are thin as experiences, undeveloped as ideas. Hippolyte also dreams numerous repetitious dreams, ponders them endlessly and keeps encountering Frau Anders, like a guilty conscience. The intent is to present waking life as if it were a dream. And, to present dreams as concrete as daily living. The result is that whatever Hippolyte does, participating in the making of a film, having an affair with a ludicrous leftist named Monique, visiting his dying father and mourning his young wife ... all are without motive or feeling. It has been said of the French that they develop an idea and then assume that it is the world. Hippolyte has decided that he is the world, and has proceeded to explore it. However, Miss Sontag has furnished her protagonist with an empty spirit. And, she uses irony as the chief instrument for her examination. The problem, here, is that genuine irony illuminates because it measures actions, or ideas, by implication, against an unspoken moral attitude or vision of life. Of these neither Hippolyte nor the author gives any indication. Part of the obligatory method of the roman nouveau is the use of the novel as a vehicle for the retelling of an ancient myth. Towards the end of "The Benefactor" what might have been suspected is revealed. Hippolyte is, of course, Hippolytus of the Greek myth, whose stepmother, Phaedra, attempts to seduce him; he refuses and she wreaks her revenge. We are told this, typically, in the form of a dream. "In the dream," Hippolyte recounts, "I am my famous namesake of myth and drama vowed to celibacy. Frau Anders is my lusty stepmother. But since this is a modern version of the story I do not spurn her. I accept her advances, enjoy her, and then cast her off. As the goddess in the opening of the ancient play declares, those who disregard the power of Eros will be chastised. Perhaps that is the meaning, or one of them, of all my dreams." The analogy, like the other themes in the book, remains an abstraction, unfleshed and, finally, unimportant. When, at the end, Hippolyte is relieved of his compulsion to dream, the significance is as cloudy as that of the dreams themselves. Miss Sontag is an intelligent writer who has, on her first flight, jettisoned the historical baggage of the novel. However, she has not replaced it with material or insights that carry equal, or superior, weight. Instead she has chosen the fashionable imports of neoexistentialist philosophy and tricky contemporary techniques. She has made an unfortunate exchange. Mr. Stern is the author of "Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die" and other books. http://www.nytimes.com/1963/09/08/books/booksspecial/sontag-benefactor.h tml --------------------------------- Susan Sontag Finds Romance August 2, 1992 By LESLIE GARIS As soon as Susan Sontag delivered the last section of her new novel, "The Volcano Lover," to the offices of her publisher, she felt bereft. "It was like taking a beloved person to the airport and returning to an empty house," she says softly, intensely, during a recent interview in her New York apartment. "I miss the people. I miss the world." The principal characters -- although there are many others -- are Sir William Hamilton, the 18th-century English minister to the Court of Naples; his wife, Emma, and Horatio Lord Nelson, England's most revered naval hero, whose love affair with Emma became as famous as his impressive victories over Napoleon. Under the title (which refers to Hamilton's obsession with Mount Vesuvius), Sontag has appended the words, "A Romance." A romance by the author of "Against Interpretation," "Styles of Radical Will," "Death Kit" and "AIDS and Its Metaphors"? A romance by the intellectual champion of modernism; the eloquent admirer of Roland Barthes, Elias Canetti, Antonin Artaud? "In order to find the courage to write this book, it helped me to find a label that allowed me to go over the top," she explains. "The word 'romance' was like a smile. Also, the novel becomes such a self-conscious enterprise for people who read a lot. You want to do something that takes into account all the options you have in fiction. Yet you don't want to be writing about fiction, but making fiction. So I sprang myself from fictional self-consciousness by saying, It's a novel -- it's more than a novel -- it's a romance!" She opens her arms and laughs un-self-consciously. "And I fell into the book like Alice in Wonderland. For three years, I worked 12 hours a day in a delirium of pleasure. This novel is really a turning point for me." At 59, she has already had a remarkable career. Although she has written fiction, two plays and four films, she is primarily known for her learned and startling essays. Dealing from a seemingly limitless store of knowledge, she has examined the 20th century from widely divergent points of reference, like literature, painting, illness, photography, philosophy, pornography, film, sociology, anthropology, communism and fascism. Having lived for long periods in France and Italy, conversant in three languages (translated into 23), she is a true polymath internationalist. Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist and man of letters, and another writer who straddles many cultures, compares her to Erasmus, the greatest humanist of the Renaissance: "This is one of the worst-informed eras in history, just like the beginning of the 15th century. Countries are ignorant about each other. And, like Erasmus, exactly when it is needed, Susan Sontag is a communicator in this broken-down world. Erasmus traveled with 32 volumes, which contained all the knowledge worth knowing. Susan Sontag carries it in her brain! I know of no other intellectual who is so clear-minded with a capacity to link, to connect, to relate. She is unique." As she sits in her kitchen, she does have the air of one who has wrestled prodigiously, and over a considerable lifetime, with essential questions. Wrinkles and creases run wild on her unadorned face. Her skin is as pale as a monk's. Her long, unruly, onyx-black hair is rent by a dramatic slash of pure white that runs like an ice flow over the crest of her head. But her candid expression, her round dark eyes that fill easily with tears, her frequent laughter and her deep, vibrant voice suggest the eagerness and avidity of a seeker; a curiously timeworn child who needs a bit more sleep. "I think I've always wanted to write this book," she is saying. "I'm glad to be free of the kind of one-note depressiveness that is so characteristic of contemporary fiction. I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up." "The Volcano Lover" anatomizes immense varieties of passionate engagement. Hamilton loves abjectly not only his art collection, which he continually augments, but Vesuvius, his beloved volcano, whose threats and displays of destructive energy hold him in permanent thrall. He loves Emma as a connoisseur loves a Leonardo, with cultivated, refined appreciation. Enter Nelson, the man of action, the genuine hero, and another sort of passion is ignited in Emma, which relegates Hamilton, the expert on nature's power, to the status of outsider in the drama of human forces unleashed under his own roof. And then there are the passions of revolution and an epic array of 18-century follies engendered by romantic dreams of reason. SONTAG, HERSELF, IS A hybrid of reason and romance. One need only peruse the vast library in her airy five-room apartment for confirmation. An intellectual who studies the history of ideas might have many books. But only a person intemperately in love with reading possesses 15,000. "I'm an addicted reader," she says, "a hedonist. I'm led by my passions. It's a kind of greed, in a way." She laughs happily. "I like to be surrounded by things that speak to me and uplift me." I ask how the books are arranged. "Ahhh. By subject or, in the case of literature, by language and chronologically. The 'Beowulf' to Virginia Woolf principle. I'll show you." "Nothing is alphabetical?" "I know people who have a lot of books. Richard Howard, for instance. He does his books alphabetically, and that sets my teeth on edge. I couldn't put Pynchon next to Plato! It doesn't make sense." We enter a room off the kitchen, where Karla Eoff, Sontag's assistant, sits at a desk answering what she describes as three years of correspondence -- all let go during the writing of "The Volcano Lover." "Here is English literature," says Sontag by a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. "You need a ladder. It starts here, and here are the Chaucerians." She sweeps her hand over several shelves, "and then comes Shakespeare, Elizabethan Stuart plays, Marlowe, Middleton, Webster, the poets," she gestures on through dozens and dozens of books. "It's very approximate. Here's Beckford, William Blake and then Wordsworth." "You don't have a separate poetry section?" "No. It's all here. It's where they come. There's Byron. I have all of English literature here. There's Oscar Wilde, and there's Meredith and Hardy. Of course, when I get into the modern stuff you can see who I read and who I don't. For instance, I adore V. S. Naipaul. "And here's French literature. Up there is Montaigne, then Rabelais, Pascal, Racine, but it's not just the main people. I have a lot of so-called minor writers who aren't minor to me." We move from shelf to shelf, room to room. Spanish, French, Italian literature, all untranslated. Japanese, Greek, Chinese and Russian literature, in English. In the living room -- almost empty except for one couch, the only rug in the apartment and one Mission chair -- is ancient history, Judaism, a huge library of early Christianity, followed by Byzantium and the Middle Ages. In Sontag's study is an oddly giant-size burgundy velvet chair, a desk with an I.B.M. Selectric II typewriter (she has resisted the computer) and, of course books: here are philosophy, psychiatry and the history of medicine. Discreetly recessed next to a rose-colored marble fireplace is a tiny room that contains books by Sontag. "I used to keep them in my closet." "Why?" "Oh," she sighs deeply, "I don't want to look at my own books. A library is something to dream over, a sort of dream machine." "Have you read everything here?" "Oh, yes. Over and over. You see, they're full of slips of paper." Indeed, narrow strips of white paper stick up from the books like shoots of wild vegetation. "Each book is marked and filleted. I underline. I used to write in the margins when I was a child. Comments like 'How true!' And 'I have felt this also!' " She roars with laughter. I ask what she wrote in Aristotle. " 'Aristotle means here that' -- Oh, please! It's so embarrassing now." We enter the long hallway that connects the rooms. "The art river starts here." What appears to be a complete library of the history of art, all oversize books, runs on low shelves from one end of the hallway to the other. On the wall above the shelves is a series of engravings of Vesuvius, the hand-colored originals from a book commissioned by Hamilton in 1776. Under the prints, on top of the bookcase, is the skull of a horse and a circle of wishbones -- rather like a pagan altar to nature and death. In the rest of the apartment is Sontag's collection of black-and-white prints by Piranesi and other 18th-century artists. The volcano prints -- almost the only color in the house -- radiate with the lurid red of flowing lava. As I walk down the hall, from Greece into the Renaissance and through the 19th century, I remark on the uncanny perspective one has just passing by the titles. "Yes," she says. "What I do sometimes is just walk up and down and think about what's in the books. Because they remind me of all there is. And the world is so much bigger than what people remember." SONTAG'S childhood world, although not materially impoverished, was intellectually and emotionally meager. Her early years were spent in Arizona, where she rarely saw her alcoholic mother or her father, who had a fur business in China, because they spent almost all their time in the Far East. Susan and her younger sister were cared for by a housekeeper. When Susan was 5, her father died in China of tuberculosis. Her mother remarried, and the family moved to Los Angeles. Again, the adults traveled while the children stayed home. Her enormous intelligence further ordained her solitude. She read at 3, wrote a four-page newspaper at 8 and had a chemistry laboratory in her garage at 9. Many ardent, fruitless hours were spent trying to convert neighborhood children to her interests. "I can remember my first bookcase when I was 8 or 9. This is really speaking out of my isolation. I would lie in bed and look at the bookcase against the wall. It was like looking at my 50 friends. A book was like stepping through a mirror. I could go somewhere else. Each one was a door to a whole kingdom." "Did you have a mentor?" "No, no, no. I discovered books. When I was about 10 years old, I discovered the Modern Library in a stationery store in Tucson. And I sort of understood these were the classics. I used to like to read encyclopedias, so I had lots of names in my head. And here they were! Homer, Virgil, Dante, George Eliot, Thackeray, Dickens. I decided I would read them all." "With absolutely no encouragement?" I'm incredulous. "I didn't allow myself to look for it. And these people couldn't encourage me, since they didn't understand what I cared about. I very quickly located the source of judgment completely outside my life -- from the great dead. If somebody said, 'Oh, you're very smart,' I would feel as if I had been told I had black hair. It was such a given. And compared to the standards I was setting myself, I didn't think I was so smart. I thought that I cared more than other people. If they cared as much, they could do what I was doing. I didn't think I was a genius." "Wasn't your mother proud of you?" "My mother was a very withholding woman. You have no idea. . . ." Her voice drifts off. We are back in the kitchen. Her hair, which has been gathered into the semblance of a ponytail, has been gradually escaping from its elastic band, which she now removes entirely and plays with in her fingers. Her nails are so short I think she must have bitten them. She continues. "I would put my report card by her bed at night and find it signed at the breakfast table in the morning. She never said a word." She sighs. "I have a vision of my mother lying on her bed, with the blinds drawn, and a glass next to her that I thought was water, but I now know was vodka. She always said she was tired. As a consequence, I am happy to sleep four hours a night." Sontag's sister, Judith, was only 12 when Sontag left home at 15, and they hardly saw each other until they were both in their 50's. Judith, who is also extremely intelligent and went to Berkeley, is married, has one daughter and lives on the island of Maui, where she owns a small business. The two sisters discovered to their surprise that they had many things in common -- among them a love of books. "I think a childhood like that," Sontag says, "breeds a great talent for stoicism. If you're going to survive, you say, I can take this; it's bearable. Otherwise you're lost. I refuse to see myself as a victim. I'm the most unparanoid person in the world. In fact, I envy paranoids; they actually think people are paying attention to them." She laughs. "I didn't feel persecuted, I felt abandoned." When she was 15, her principal told her she was wasting her time at North Hollywood High and graduated her. She was delighted. Now her life would really begin. After one term at Berkeley, she enrolled at the University of Chicago, which at that time had a set curriculum and no electives. She took exams when she entered and placed out of most of her courses. She had already done the reading. "I audited classes in the graduate schools, and that was wonderful. I would start at 9 in the morning and go all day. It was a feast." It was there she met Philip Rieff, a young instructor in a social theory course that Sontag had placed out of. It was 1950, December of her second year. On friends' recommendations she went to hear him lecture on Freud (his 1959 book, "Freud: The Mind of the Moralist," is essential reading for scholars). Ten days after the lecture, they were married. She was 17. It was an endless conversation. He was, she says today, the first person she could talk to. He seemed older than his 28 years, and Sontag looked extremely young. He was a dapper Anglophile, while she, a Westerner, lived in blue jeans and wore her hair long down her back. They were an odd-looking couple. Soon after they were married, she attended one of his lectures and behind her one student whispered to another, "Oh, have you heard? Rieff married a 14-year-old Indian!" For the next nine years, she and Rieff lived an academic life. Their son, David, was born in 1952. Sontag received master's degrees from Harvard in English literature and philosophy and finished her course work for a Ph.D. when she received a fellowship to Oxford. At the same time, Rieff was offered a fellowship at Stanford. They went separate ways for one academic year, but when Sontag returned to America the marriage unraveled. It was 1959, and Sontag at last realized one of her childhood dreams: she moved to New York. She had a child, a furnished mind and no income. "I had $70, two suitcases and a 7-year-old," Sontag recalls. (Her lawyer told her she was the first person in California history to refuse alimony.) David Rieff was another prodigy. He calls himself today "overeducated." His two books, "Going to Miami" and "Los Angeles, Capital of the Third World," were both critically acclaimed. I asked him about his childhood, if he felt under great intellectual pressure, and he said he was comfortable with scholarly activities -- athletics would have been a reach. He painted a picture of mother and son so close in age and interests that "separation -- even the ability to distinguish between who was who -- was difficult and took longer than it should have." During the first New York years, "I was very aware of how precarious our life was. We lived in very small, close quarters for a long time. Life was pretty tough. After that, things started to go much better. She was making a career." After a stint of teaching philosophy and the history of religion at various New York colleges, she wrote her first novel, "The Benefactor," and decided to stake her future on writing full time. In 1964, she emerged as a literary star with an audacious essay for Partisan Review, "Notes on Camp," which defined for the first time that esoteric, urban, cult sensibility, which exalted artifice and mocked seriousness. The essay is peppered with Oscar Wilde quotes, like "To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up." "On Style," an essay published the following year -- an exhortation to "encounter" art as "an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question" -- established her as the seer at the vanguard. She was dubbed the new "dark lady of American letters," the title previously assigned to Mary McCarthy. WHEN I ARRIVE AT HER Chelsea apartment for our second day of talks, she has been correcting the proofs of Emma's death scene and is awash with emotion. But it is clear that it is the whole project, the fact of this book -- which is so different from anything she has ever done -- that is overwhelming her this morning. I ask her again about her notion that "The Volcano Lover" is a turning point. "I think every ambitious writer looks for the right form, and I always felt whatever form I chose constricted me." Her two novels, "The Benefactor" and "Death Kit," both published in the 60's, received mixed reviews. Criticized for being too self-conscious, more concerned with modernist literary fashion than with the raw material of life, they were nevertheless praised for their powerful intelligence, original ideas and precise language. It has been 25 years since "Death Kit," during which time she has become internationally famous for her essays. Now she says the essay is a dead form for her. "The essays were a tremendous struggle. Each of the large ones took nine months to a year. I've had thousands of pages for a 30-page essay -- 30 or 40 drafts of every page. 'On Photography,' which is six essays, took five years. And I mean working every single day." "When you say working, are you looking things up, checking references?" "No, no, I don't look anything up until after I've finished and I'm checking. No, it's just writing. I'd get started, and then I'd run into a ditch, and then I would start again -- and again." Temperamentally, Sontag is an admirer. All her best essays celebrate creators, thinkers or the created work of art. This quality led her into essay writing -- and led her out of it. "The Canetti essay was the beginning of the end. I wanted to honor Canetti." Her essay probably helped win him the Nobel Prize. "Yet as I was writing, I thought, 'Why am I doing this so indirectly? I have all this feeling -- I'm in a storm of feeling all the time -- and instead of expressing it I'm writing about people with feeling.' " Twelve years ago in London, while poking around the print shops near the British Museum, Sontag first saw the volcano prints Hamilton had commissioned. She was immediately drawn to them and bought several. Years later, she read a biography of Hamilton and the story began to simmer. "When I started the novel, it seemed like climbing Mount Everest. And I said to my psychiatrist, 'I'm afraid I'm not adequate.' Of course, that was a normal anxiety. What worried me was that I would not be writing essays, because they have a powerful ethical impulse behind them, and I think they make a contribution. But my psychiatrist said, 'What makes you think it isn't a contribution to give people pleasure?' " She stops talking and bites her lip. She is clearly moved and is trying not to cry. She takes a deep breath. "And I thought, ohhhhhh. That sentence launched me." ILLNESS AS metaphor," "AIDS and Its Metaphors" and "On Photography" -- all book-length essays -- challenge us to consider a deeper view of the concept of illness and the effects of the visual image than we ordinarily attempt. Sontag's object is to liberate perception from the simple and reductive by offering a more layered analysis. Her essays equate complexity with clarity and obfuscation with oversimplification. "Ill people are haunted by dread, shame and humiliation," she says angrily. The two illness books are an attempt to rectify the human cost of these superstitious, medieval notions. Above all, she adds, "I am always struggling against stereotypes." Robert B. Silvers, the editor of The New York Review of Books, which has published much of her writing, describes her quest to reject lazy assumptions as the "cautionary element in her work." Sontag calls it the "Don Quixote in me." Because her prose is polemical and her philosophy avant-garde, she has, on occasion, angered many older and more conservative critics. Richard Poirier, for many years an editor of Partisan Review, remembers when she was an exotically beautiful young writer for his magazine and aroused the ire of Phillip Rahv and others of the New York intellectual establishment, who distrusted both her enthusiasm for popular culture (film, dance, music) and her dense academic knowledge. "She was one of those rare creatures," he told me, "who knew about what was going on in the universities and in European criticism, who had the courage and the force of will and character to challenge the men in the intellectual community to pay attention to these things." IF HER INTELLECT IS rigorous and pure, so is her apartment, for aside from books and papers, the environment is strikingly Spartan. She says she goes out seven nights a week with friends for dinner, concerts, plays. She has phenomenal energy and stays out late, always ready to do one more thing, go one more place. ("Suddenly it's 4 in the morning," she says, "and somebody suggests something else. You go on. You don't say you're tired or you've had enough. Because you can never have enough.") Considering her abundant social life, I am amazed at the absence of furniture -- there are so few places to sit. Doesn't she have friends over? "No. This apartment is the inside of my head. It's a map of my brain." "Have you always lived alone?" "No, no. Not only have I at different times lived with lovers, but I've had friends come and stay. I like the idea that there are other bodies in other rooms." She has never remarried, but she has many intense friendships, which constitute a kind of multifarious international bond. FROM THE LATE 1960's to the mid-70's, Sontag was an expatriot. David had dropped out of Amherst College, and joined her in Paris, living in separate apartments, entirely absorbed by French culture, rarely speaking English. She returned to New York in 1976 (by then David was at Princeton), when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. "I remember when I was thrown into the world of people with cancer, one of the things that most surprised me was people saying, 'Why me?' But I saw that for lots of people these dramatic illnesses became victim situations. Illness is like a lottery -- some people get ill and you happen to be one of them. I didn't feel a victim of my illness." The prognosis was grim. At that time, New York oncologists were more alarmist about chemotherapy than they are now, so she chose to follow the treatment of Lucien Israel, a renowned French oncologist, who recommended radically high doses of chemotherapy, which, in the end, were administered by a reluctant Sloane-Kettering in New York. "My New York doctors said, 'Don't you realize that this is very extreme treatment and you're going to suffer a lot?' And I said" -- her voice is barely audible -- "but you people don't give me any hope. He's not promising anything, but he's offering much more treatment." She underwent chemotherapy for two and a half years -- an unheard-of amount of time in the 70's. The final cost was near $150,000. Since she had no medical insurance, Robert Silvers raised the money for her by writing letters and calling a number of her friends in the intellectual community. Almost everyone gave something, and those who were able gave a great deal. "Did you always have hope?" There is a long silence. "You live with two feelings. I thought I was going to die. But. . . ." She fingers a small clock with a double face; one for America and one for Europe. "I really wanted to fight for my life. I was told I had a 10 percent chance to live two years. I thought, well, somebody's got to be in that 10 percent." "How did you react to dying?" "I was terrified. Absolutely terrified and horrified. Horrible grief. Above all to leave David. And I loved life so much. But, I thought, I must believe I will die, because that's the only way I can have dignity or use the time that's left. But I also thought, well. . . ." Her voice rises and disappears. "I was never tempted to say, that's it. I love it when people fight for their lives." She knew Ingrid Bergman during her last illness and tried to persuade her to see Dr. Israel, but Bergman refused, saying she'd had a good life and didn't mind dying. Sontag is incensed as she tells this story. "I said, 'Why not have more of your life?' But she said, 'No, no, it's all right.' It drove me crazy -- that anybody would say that! It's, again, my mother, of course. Resignation, resignation, it drives me wild." She is now, except for slight problems with a kidney, in good health. She says that at 59 she notices no difference in her energy from her early 20's. There is a great deal of death -- even gore -- in "The Volcano Lover," and I ask her if she drew on her cancer experiences for those sections. "If you think you are going to die, and you are spared, you can never completely disconnect from the knowledge. You always feel a little posthumous. But I think one's imaginative participation in the horrors that are part of history. . . ." She looks outside. Her apartment has sweeping views of the Hudson River. "I can never take my own unhappiness really seriously because I think so much of how badly off most people in the world are." She has always had a high political profile, from her early radical days to her work on behalf the victims of Soviet totalitarianism. During the Vietnam War, she made a famous, controversial trip to Hanoi. She remembers a woman she saw in a factory there, working under the most abject conditions. When Sontag expressed outrage, the woman told her she was so much better off than her parents, because, as rice farmers, they lived up to their hips in water. "I don't think a week goes by when I don't think of that woman. 'I'm dry,' she said. 'I have work in which I'm dry.' " I'm reluctant to believe that social morality can be so internalized, and ask her if it doesn't seem "artificially rational" to ameliorate her own grief by making make such historic comparisons. "No, you don't decide!" She is leaning forward passionately. "You either are in touch with that imaginatively or you're not. It's not deciding -- it's the other way around. I can't screen it out. I feel I'm receiving messages all the time. And sometimes I'm overwhelmed." "Overwhelmed by what?" "By suffering. A friend once said to me, 'You are lacking a skin that most people have.' I'm also incredibly squeamish. I cannot watch most American movies. I don't even have television." AS PRESIDENT OF PEN in 1987 and as an original member in 1974 (with the founder, Richard Sennett) of the New York Institute for the Humanities, she has been an effective advocate for imprisoned writers. When Sontag conceived of "The Volcano Lover," she acquired an agent (Andrew Wylie) for the first time in her life and won a lucrative four-book deal with her lifelong publisher, Farrar Straus Giroux. With that advance, she bought this apartment. Then, in 1990, she was awarded a MacArthur fellowship, which will pay $340,000 over five years, plus medical insurance. She is at last comfortably, even luxuriously, set up. I experience the monkish silence in her apartment and ask her an odd question. "Do you believe in an afterlife in which you'll meet your literary heroes?" "No." "Most people hope to meet their relatives. You don't anticipate Homer and Dante?" I'm only partly joking. "Not at all. What pleases me is just the idea that I'm doing what they did. That's already so astonishing to me. Because. . . ." She is speechless. "Literature needs lots of people. It's enough to honor the project." "What is the project?" "Oh . . . to . . ." she sighs deeply ". . . to produce food for the mind, for the senses, for the heart. To keep language alive. To keep alive the idea of seriousness. You have to be a member of a capitalist society in the late 20th century to understand that seriousness itself could be in question." Her leg is propped up childishly on the table. Each day, like a young graduate student, she has worn the same pair of sweatpants and sneakers, with different rumpled shirts. She is reluctant to talk about a next project, except to say she wants to write fiction. "To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one's feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one's self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same." Leslie Garis is a frequent contributer to this magazine on literary subjects. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/02/books/booksspecial/sontag-romance.html --------------------------------- Sontag Talking December 18, 1977 By CHARLES SIMMONS Q. Why is there more critical attention being paid to photography nowadays? Is photography getting better? A. In the time, the three years or so, that I was working on these essays, it seemed to become much more central. As late as 1973, photography books in bookstores tended to be in the back with gardening books and cookbooks. Now they have a section of their own, right up front near the cash register. The audience for photography books -- which is an important index to the interest in photography -- enormously enlarged just in that brief period. There have been many times more photography shows in museums in the past couple of years than there were, say, 10 years ago. There are many more photography galleries in large cities than there were 10 years ago. There's an interest everywhere. The New Yorker started an occasional photography column about two years ago. .But I can't believe it's because photography is better. In fact, I'm sure it isn't . There's no reason to think that there are more great photographers now than in the past. But now photography has respectability. The battle that has been going on since 1840 for photography to be acknowledged as an art form has finally been won. Indeed, photography as an art form interests a lot of people who were formerly interested mainly in painting and sculpture. Q. Could it be that painting and sculpture are simply less interesting? A. That's sometimes said. One hears that painting and sculpture are in a state of demoralization, that there are no exciting new figures conveying a sense that these are arts in which very important things are happening, such as people had in the 1950's and 60's. Another explanation that's often given is that the enormously inflated market for painting in the 60's priced many collectors out of the market and there was a need for a cheap object that people cold collect. And the third idea that you hear sometimes is that there's a reaction against difficulty in art. Not only is photography an art more easily practiced by large numbers of people, it's also easier to understand, easier to grasp. It makes fewer demands. For example, understanding serious contemporary photography doesn't involve knowing about the history of photography. But to understand serious contemporary painting one has to know something about the history of painting. Q. Did serious music complicate itself in recent years and lose its audience, so that popular music is now taken more seriously? A. If that is so, I think the fault is with the audience. In the past decade people have been less and less willing to take on difficult things. The very notion of professionalism came into disrepute as authoritarian, elitist. I don't think it's that the work got too complicated, I think it's that the audience got lazier. Seriousness has less prestige now. I don't mean to suggest that individual photographers aren't serious. But I think that the audience -- and we're still talking about a fairly small audience -- is less willing to be serious is that old-fashioned way that modernist art demands. It's very complicated, because part of modernism is the idea of antiart. So modernism itself, while being the breeding ground for all these great works of art starting from the end of the last century, contained the seeds of its own destruction. Too much emphasis was placed on outrage, and people got used to taking short cuts. Enough artists said we had to close the gap between art and life. Now people aren't willing to put in the work involved in entering these realms of discourse which distinguish art from life. Q. Modern art taught people how to be ironic about art, and that was a relief for a time. A. Enough artists said, "Down with art! No more masterpieces!" So it was inevitable that one day audiences would take this in a much simpler form and say, "Yes, down with art! No more masterpieces! We want an art that's comfortable, that's ironic, that's easy." I think we see the results everywhere. .More and more, audiences want quick results, they want punch lines from the beginning. Modernism always assumed that the recalcitrant bourgeois audience that could be shocked was going to hang onto its own standards. But when modernism became the established mode, it also became a contradiction in terms. And that, I think, is the situation in which photography has prospered. Q. There's a particularly intimate passage in your book in which you describe seeing in a bookstore in Santa Monica in 1945, when you were 12, photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, and you make the extraordinary statement that you divide you life in half -- before seeing these photographs and after. And you say that something in you died at that midpoint. Do you know what that was, and do you want to talk about it? A. I think that that experience was perhaps only possible at that time, or a few years after. Today that sort of material impinges on people very early -- through television, say -- so that it would not be possible for anyone growing up later than the 1940's to be a horror virgin and to see atrocious, appalling images for the first time at the age of 12. That was before television, and when newspapers would print only very discreet photographs. As far as what died -- right then I understood that there is evil in nature. If you haven't heard that news before and it comes to you is so vivid a form, it's tremendous shock. It made me sad in a way that I still feel sad. It wasn't really the end of childhood, but it was the end of a lot of things. It changed my consciousness. I can still remember where I was standing and where on the shelf I found that book. Q. While you were writing this book did your attitude toward photography change? I had a sense that you credited photography more by the end of the book than at the start. A. I don't think it changed. What I did come to appreciate as I was writing these essays is how big a subject photography really is. In fact, I came to realize that I wasn't writing about photography so much as I was writing about modernity, about the way we are now. The subject of photography is a form of access to contemporary ways of feeling and thinking. And writing about photography is like writing about the world. In fact, as I said in the preface, I never intended to write all those essays. I wrote one essay in late 1973 and discovered when I was finishing it that I had more material left over that I though would be enough for a second essay. And while writing the second essay, I realized that I had enough material left over to write a third. And it became a sorcerer's apprentice situation. By the fourth essay I was seriously worried whether I could ever end it. And I would have gone on. I don't think I could have gone on from the sixth essay -- because that was consciously written in the spring of this year to close it off and to state the most general themes. But I could have written another essay between the fifth and the sixth. I have a lot more material, and the subject became deeper as I was working on it. Q. I was very interested in everything you said about Diane Arbus. You raised the question of how she got her models to pose for her. That's something of a mystery, isn't it? A. As Arbus said, the camera is a tremendous license in this society. You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it. I was in a restaurant recently , and someone decided to take photographs at a neighboring table. It was a very expensive restaurant, the people who were there wanted it to be worth the money they were spending. The taking of photographs at this neighboring table involved flashbulbs, yet nobody seemed to mind that this monopolized everybody's attention for about 15 minutes. I stopped eating, stopped talking to the people who had invited me, and just watched -- as did practically everybody else. Everyone was fascinated; nobody minded the intrusion. The camera gives license to disturb people without offending them. It's a license to stop people on the street, ask to be admitted to their private space by saying, "I want to photograph you." Everybody's made nervous by it, but they're also flattered, as Arbus said, by the attention. Q. Are you put off by Richard Avedon's distorted photographs? Why do people sit for Avedon? A. It's difficult to refuse a photographer. This role, this activity, has a privileged place in our experience and in our lives. You have to be a professional recluse like Salinger or Pynchon to refuse being photographed. More generally, it's hard to resist the invitation to manifest oneself. I'm doing it with you now. If Richard Avedon asked to photograph me I would go and be photographed by him. He may not ask me, because we're friends, and he tends not to photograph people he knows. Q. The one he did of Renata Adler is awfully nice. A. Well, there are two photographs of Renata. There's the beautiful one with the hat, and there's another, which he told me he took the day they met; that was the way he wanted to photograph her. He has told me that he prefers to do that sort of photograph. Q. What sort? A. The kind you call distorted -- I say revealing. You could say that the way he photographs emphasized skin blemishes very much, because it's extremely accurate, sharp-focus photography. The image is unflattering in that way. But I don't agree that Avedon's photographs distort. I think, on the contrary, that we expect to be flattered by photography, we expect in fact that the photograph will show us to be better looking than we really are. Q. Photogenic. A. That notion of being "photogenic" actually means that you look better in a photograph than you do in real life. We all want to be photogenic; that is, we all want -- since the photograph is this thin slice of time -- to be photographed at that moment when we are looking better than usual. What Avedon has done is to take photographs which do not contain in any way the idea of the photogenic. Q. Which writers are you reading now? A. I don't know where to start. Since his death I've been reading all of Nabokov, I'm overwhelmed by how good he is. He gets better and better every time I reread him. I'm sad that he didn't get the Nobel Prize. So many second-rate writers have gotten it, one wants first-rate writers to get it too. And I've been reading and rereading Viktor Shklovsky, Sinyavsky, Joseph Brodsky. Q. What are you writing now? A. I'm finishing an essay called "Illness as Metaphor." And I'm writing a story, which will be called either "Act 1, Scene 2," or "The Letter." And then I've been at work on a novel for several years, off and on. I'll get back to that after the first of the year. Q. Is it a relief to get off one project and onto another? A. It's always a relief to do fiction; it's always a trial to do essays. They're much harder for me. An essay can go through 20 drafts, a work of fiction rarely goes through more than three or four drafts. With fiction, I'm almost there after the first draft. The second, third and fourth drafts are mostly cutting and fixing up. These photography essays took, each one of them, about six months. Some of the stories are done in a week. Q. On the other hand, the photography book is very ambitious, perhaps the first literary book on the subject. A. By "literary book," do you mean it's a book by a writer? Q. I mean you brought a literary sensibility to it. You don't agree with that? A. Well, many people seem to think that one should be a photography insider to write about photography as I've done. But no insider would do it. Only an outsider would write this kind of book. However, I'm not a literary, as opposed to visual, person. The distinction is trivial. It's because I do see "photographically" that I came to understand what a distinctive and momentous way of seeing that is. More generally, people don't like trespassers, and to people on the inside I'm a trespasser -- even though in fact I'm not. Also, I am not and don't want to be a photography critic. This isn't that kind of book. http://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/18/books/booksspecial/sontag-talking.html --------------------------------- The Decay of Cinema February 25, 1996 By SUSAN SONTAG Cinema's 100 years seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline. It's not that you can't look forward anymore to new films that you can admire. But such films not only have to be exceptions -- that's true of great achievements in any art. They have to be actual violations of the norms and practices that now govern movie making everywhere in the capitalist and would-be capitalist world -- which is to say, everywhere. And ordinary films, films made purely for entertainment (that is, commercial) purposes, are astonishingly witless; the vast majority fail resoundingly to appeal to their cynically targeted audiences. While the point of a great film is now, more than ever, to be a one-of-a-kind achievement, the commercial cinema has settled for a policy of bloated, derivative film-making, a brazen combinatory or recombinatory art, in the hope of reproducing past successes. Cinema, once heralded as the art of the 20th century, seems now, as the century closes numerically, to be a decadent art. Perhaps it is not cinema that has ended but only cinephilia -- the name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired. Each art breeds its fanatics. The love that cinema inspired, however, was special. It was born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other: quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral -- all at the same time. Cinema had apostles. (It was like religion.) Cinema was a crusade. For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything. Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life. As many people have noted, the start of movie making a hundred years ago was, conveniently, a double start. In roughly the year 1895, two kinds of films were made, two modes of what cinema could be seemed to emerge: cinema as the transcription of real unstaged life (the Lumiere brothers) and cinema as invention, artifice, illusion, fantasy (Melies). But this is not a true opposition. The whole point is that, for those first audiences, the very transcription of the most banal reality -- the Lumiere brothers filming "The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station" -- was a fantastic experience. Cinema began in wonder, the wonder that reality can be transcribed with such immediacy. All of cinema is an attempt to perpetuate and to reinvent that sense of wonder. Everything in cinema begins with that moment, 100 years ago, when the train pulled into the station. People took movies into themselves, just as the public cried out with excitement, actually ducked, as the train seemed to move toward them. Until the advent of television emptied the movie theaters, it was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to walk, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive. Example: It looks good to wear a raincoat even when it isn't raining. But whatever you took home was only a part of the larger experience of submerging yourself in lives that were not yours. The desire to lose yourself in other people's lives . . . faces. This is a larger, more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience. Even more than what you appropriated for yourself was the experience of surrender to, of being transported by, what was on the screen. You wanted to be kidnapped by the movie -- and to be kidnapped was to be overwhelmed by the physical presence of the image. The experience of "going to the movies" was part of it. To see a great film only on television isn't to have really seen that film. It's not only a question of the dimensions of the image: the disparity between a larger-than-you image in the theater and the little image on the box at home. The conditions of paying attention in a domestic space are radically disrespectful of film. Now that a film no longer has a standard size, home screens can be as big as living room or bedroom walls. But you are still in a living room or a bedroom. To be kidnapped, you have to be in a movie theater, seated in the dark among anonymous strangers. No amount of mourning will revive the vanished rituals -- erotic, ruminative -- of the darkened theater. The reduction of cinema to assaultive images, and the unprincipled manipulation of images (faster and faster cutting) to make them more attention-grabbing, has produced a disincarnated, lightweight cinema that doesn't demand anyone's full attention. Images now appear in any size and on a variety of surfaces: on a screen in a theater, on disco walls and on megascreens hanging above sports arenas. The sheer ubiquity of moving images has steadily undermined the standards people once had both for cinema as art and for cinema as popular entertainment. In the first years there was, essentially, no difference between these two forms. And all films of the silent era -- from the masterpieces of Feuillade, D. W. Griffith, Dziga Vertov, Pabst, Murnau and King Vidor to the most formula-ridden melodramas and comedies -- are on a very high artistic level, compared with most of what was to follow. With the coming of sound, the image making lost much of its brilliance and poetry, and commercial standards tightened. This way of making movies -- the Hollywood system -- dominated film making for about 25 years (roughly from 1930 to 1955). The most original directors, like Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles, were defeated by the system and eventually went into artistic exile in Europe -- where more or less the same quality-defeating system was now in place, with lower budgets; only in France were a large number of superb films produced throughout this period. Then, in the mid-1950's, vanguard ideas took hold again, rooted in the idea of cinema as a craft pioneered by the Italian films of the immediate postwar period. A dazzling number of original, passionate films of the highest seriousness got made. It was at this specific moment in the 100-year history of cinema that going to movies, thinking about movies, talking about movies became a passion among university students and other young people. You fell in love not just with actors but with cinema itself. Cinephilia had first become visible in the 1950's in France: its forum was the legendary film magazine Cahiers du Cinema (followed by similarly fervent magazines in Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Sweden, the United States and Canada). Its temples, as it spread throughout Europe and the Americas, were the many cinematheques and clubs specializing in films from the past and directors' retrospectives that sprang up. The 1960's and early 1970's was the feverish age of movie-going, with the full-time cinephile always hoping to find a seat as close as possible to the big screen, ideally the third row center. "One can't live without Rossellini," declares a character in Bertolucci's "Before the Revolution" (1964) -- and means it. For some 15 years there were new masterpieces every month. How far away that era seems now. To be sure, there was always a conflict between cinema as an industry and cinema as an art, cinema as routine and cinema as experiment. But the conflict was not such as to make impossible the making of wonderful films, sometimes within and sometimes outside of mainstream cinema. Now the balance has tipped decisively in favor of cinema as an industry. The great cinema of the 1960's and 1970's has been thoroughly repudiated. Already in the 1970's Hollywood was plagiarizing and rendering banal the innovations in narrative method and in the editing of successful new European and ever-marginal independent American films. Then came the catastrophic rise in production costs in the 1980's, which secured the worldwide reimposition of industry standards of making and distributing films on a far more coercive, this time truly global scale. Soaring producton costs meant that a film had to make a lot of money right away, in the first month of its release, if it was to be profitable at all -- a trend that favored the blockbuster over the low-budget film, although most blockbusters were flops and there were always a few "small" films that surprised everyone by their appeal. The theatrical release time of movies became shorter and shorter (like the shelf life of books in bookstores); many movies were designed to go directly into video. Movie theaters continued to close -- many towns no longer have even one -- as movies became, mainly, one of a variety of habit-forming home entertainments. In this country, the lowering of expectations for quality and the inflation of expectations for profit have made it virtually impossible for artistically ambitious American directors, like Francis Ford Coppola and Paul Schrader, to work at their best level. Abroad, the result can be seen in the melancholy fate of some of the greatest directors of the last decades. What place is there today for a maverick like Hans- Jurgen Syberberg, who has stopped making films altogether, or for the great Godard, who now makes films about the history of film, on video? Consider some other cases. The internationalizing of financing and therefore of casts were disastrous for Andrei Tarkovsky in the last two films of his stupendous (and tragically abbreviated) career. And how will Aleksandr Sokurov find the money to go on making his sublime films, under the rude conditions of Russian capitalism? Predictably, the love of cinema has waned. People still like going to the movies, and some people still care about and expect something special, necessary from a film. And wonderful films are still being made: Mike Leigh's "Naked," Gianni Amelio's "Lamerica," Fred Kelemen's "Fate." But you hardly find anymore, at least among the young, the distinctive cinephilic love of movies that is not simply love of but a certain taste in films (grounded in a vast appetite for seeing and reseeing as much as possible of cinema's glorious past). Cinephilia itself has come under attack, as something quaint, outmoded, snobbish. For cinephilia implies that films are unique, unrepeatable, magic experiences. Cinephilia tells us that the Hollywood remake of Godard's "Breathless" cannot be as good as the original. Cinephilia has no role in the era of hyperindustrial films. For cinephilia cannot help, by the very range and eclecticism of its passions, from sponsoring the idea of the film as, first of all, a poetic object; and cannot help from inciting those outside the movie industry, like painters and writers, to want to make films, too. It is precisely this notion that has been defeated. If cinephilia is dead, then movies are dead too . . . no matter how many movies, even very good ones, go on being made. If cinema can be resurrected, it will only be through the birth of a new kind of cine-love. Susan Sontag is the author, most recently, of "The Volcano Lover," a novel, and "Alice in Bed," a play. http://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/25/books/booksspecial/sontag-cinema.html --------------------------------- Regarding the Torture of Others May 23, 2004 By SUSAN SONTAG I. For a long time -- at least six decades -- photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one. Photographs have an insuperable power to determine what we recall of events, and it now seems probable that the defining association of people everywhere with the war that the United States launched pre-emptively in Iraq last year will be photographs of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans in the most infamous of Saddam Hussein's prisons, Abu Ghraib. The Bush administration and its defenders have chiefly sought to limit a public-relations disaster -- the dissemination of the photographs -- rather than deal with the complex crimes of leadership and of policy revealed by the pictures. There was, first of all, the displacement of the reality onto the photographs themselves. The administration's initial response was to say that the president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs -- as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict. There was also the avoidance of the word ''torture.'' The prisoners had possibly been the objects of ''abuse,'' eventually of ''humiliation'' -- that was the most to be admitted. ''My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture,'' Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said at a press conference. ''And therefore I'm not going to address the 'torture' word.'' Words alter, words add, words subtract. It was the strenuous avoidance of the word ''genocide'' while some 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda were being slaughtered, over a few weeks' time, by their Hutu neighbors 10 years ago that indicated the American government had no intention of doing anything. To refuse to call what took place in Abu Ghraib -- and what has taken place elsewhere in Iraq and in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay -- by its true name, torture, is as outrageous as the refusal to call the Rwandan genocide a genocide. Here is one of the definitions of torture contained in a convention to which the United States is a signatory: ''any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession.'' (The definition comes from the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Similar definitions have existed for some time in customary law and in treaties, starting with Article 3 -- common to the four Geneva conventions of 1949 -- and many recent human rights conventions.) The 1984 convention declares, ''No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.'' And all covenants on torture specify that it includes treatment intended to humiliate the victim, like leaving prisoners naked in cells and corridors. Whatever actions this administration undertakes to limit the damage of the widening revelations of the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere -- trials, courts-martial, dishonorable discharges, resignation of senior military figures and responsible administration officials and substantial compensation to the victims -- it is probable that the ''torture'' word will continue to be banned. To acknowledge that Americans torture their prisoners would contradict everything this administration has invited the public to believe about the virtue of American intentions and America's right, flowing from that virtue, to undertake unilateral action on the world stage. Even when the president was finally compelled, as the damage to America's reputation everywhere in the world widened and deepened, to use the ''sorry'' word, the focus of regret still seemed the damage to America's claim to moral superiority. Yes, President Bush said in Washington on May 6, standing alongside King Abdullah II of Jordan, he was ''sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families.'' But, he went on, he was ''equally sorry that people seeing these pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America.'' To have the American effort in Iraq summed up by these images must seem, to those who saw some justification in a war that did overthrow one of the monster tyrants of modern times, ''unfair.'' A war, an occupation, is inevitably a huge tapestry of actions. What makes some actions representative and others not? The issue is not whether the torture was done by individuals (i.e., ''not by everybody'') -- but whether it was systematic. Authorized. Condoned. All acts are done by individuals. The issue is not whether a majority or a minority of Americans performs such acts but whether the nature of the policies prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out makes such acts likely. II. Considered in this light, the photographs are us. That is, they are representative of the fundamental corruptions of any foreign occupation together with the Bush adminstration's distinctive policies. The Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria, practiced torture and sexual humiliation on despised recalcitrant natives. Add to this generic corruption the mystifying, near-total unpreparedness of the American rulers of Iraq to deal with the complex realities of the country after its ''liberation.'' And add to that the overarching, distinctive doctrines of the Bush administration, namely that the United States has embarked on an endless war and that those detained in this war are, if the president so decides, ''unlawful combatants'' -- a policy enunciated by Donald Rumsfeld for Taliban and Qaeda prisoners as early as January 2002 -- and thus, as Rumsfeld said, ''technically'' they ''do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention,'' and you have a perfect recipe for the cruelties and crimes committed against the thousands incarcerated without charges or access to lawyers in American-run prisons that have been set up since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. So, then, is the real issue not the photographs themselves but what the photographs reveal to have happened to ''suspects'' in American custody? No: the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken -- with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives. German soldiers in the Second World War took photographs of the atrocities they were committing in Poland and Russia, but snapshots in which the executioners placed themselves among their victims are exceedingly rare, as may be seen in a book just published, ''Photographing the Holocaust,'' by Janina Struk. If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880's and 1930's, which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib. The lynching pictures were in the nature of photographs as trophies -- taken by a photographer in order to be collected, stored in albums, displayed. The pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, however, reflect a shift in the use made of pictures -- less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated. A digital camera is a common possession among soldiers. Where once photographing war was the province of photojournalists, now the soldiers themselves are all photographers -- recording their war, their fun, their observations of what they find picturesque, their atrocities -- and swapping images among themselves and e-mailing them around the globe. There is more and more recording of what people do, by themselves. At least or especially in America, Andy Warhol's ideal of filming real events in real time -- life isn't edited, why should its record be edited? -- has become a norm for countless Webcasts, in which people record their day, each in his or her own reality show. Here I am -- waking and yawning and stretching, brushing my teeth, making breakfast, getting the kids off to school. People record all aspects of their lives, store them in computer files and send the files around. Family life goes with the recording of family life -- even when, or especially when, the family is in the throes of crisis and disgrace. Surely the dedicated, incessant home-videoing of one another, in conversation and monologue, over many years was the most astonishing material in ''Capturing the Friedmans,'' the recent documentary by Andrew Jarecki about a Long Island family embroiled in pedophilia charges. An erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured in digital photographs and on video. And perhaps the torture is more attractive, as something to record, when it has a sexual component. It is surely revealing, as more Abu Ghraib photographs enter public view, that torture photographs are interleaved with pornographic images of American soldiers having sex with one another. In fact, most of the torture photographs have a sexual theme, as in those showing the coercing of prisoners to perform, or simulate, sexual acts among themselves. One exception, already canonical, is the photograph of the man made to stand on a box, hooded and sprouting wires, reportedly told he would be electrocuted if he fell off. Yet pictures of prisoners bound in painful positions, or made to stand with outstretched arms, are infrequent. That they count as torture cannot be doubted. You have only to look at the terror on the victim's face, although such ''stress'' fell within the Pentagon's limits of the acceptable. But most of the pictures seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography: a young woman leading a naked man around on a leash is classic dominatrix imagery. And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet -- and which ordinary people, by sending out Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate. III. To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one's life, and therefore to go on with one's life oblivious, or claiming to be oblivious, to the camera's nonstop attentions. But to live is also to pose. To act is to share in the community of actions recorded as images. The expression of satisfaction at the acts of torture being inflicted on helpless, trussed, naked victims is only part of the story. There is the deep satisfaction of being photographed, to which one is now more inclined to respond not with a stiff, direct gaze (as in former times) but with glee. The events are in part designed to be photographed. The grin is a grin for the camera. There would be something missing if, after stacking the naked men, you couldn't take a picture of them. Looking at these photographs, you ask yourself, How can someone grin at the sufferings and humiliation of another human being? Set guard dogs at the genitals and legs of cowering naked prisoners? Force shackled, hooded prisoners to masturbate or simulate oral sex with one another? And you feel naive for asking, since the answer is, self-evidently, People do these things to other people. Rape and pain inflicted on the genitals are among the most common forms of torture. Not just in Nazi concentration camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was run by Saddam Hussein. Americans, too, have done and do them when they are told, or made to feel, that those over whom they have absolute power deserve to be humiliated, tormented. They do them when they are led to believe that the people they are torturing belong to an inferior race or religion. For the meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but that their perpetrators apparently had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures show. Even more appalling, since the pictures were meant to be circulated and seen by many people: it was all fun. And this idea of fun is, alas, more and more -- contrary to what President Bush is telling the world -- part of ''the true nature and heart of America.'' It is hard to measure the increasing acceptance of brutality in American life, but its evidence is everywhere, starting with the video games of killing that are a principal entertainment of boys -- can the video game ''Interrogating the Terrorists'' really be far behind? -- and on to the violence that has become endemic in the group rites of youth on an exuberant kick. Violent crime is down, yet the easy delight taken in violence seems to have grown. From the harsh torments inflicted on incoming students in many American suburban high schools -- depicted in Richard Linklater's 1993 film, ''Dazed and Confused'' -- to the hazing rituals of physical brutality and sexual humiliation in college fraternities and on sports teams, America has become a country in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen as good entertainment, fun. What formerly was segregated as pornography, as the exercise of extreme sadomasochistic longings -- as in Pier Paolo Pasolini's last, near-unwatchable film, ''Salo'' (1975), depicting orgies of torture in the Fascist redoubt in northern Italy at the end of the Mussolini era -- is now being normalized, by some, as high-spirited play or venting. To ''stack naked men'' is like a college fraternity prank, said a caller to Rush Limbaugh and the many millions of Americans who listen to his radio show. Had the caller, one wonders, seen the photographs? No matter. The observation -- or is it the fantasy? -- was on the mark. What may still be capable of shocking some Americans was Limbaugh's response: ''Exactly!'' he exclaimed. ''Exactly my point. This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we're going to ruin people's lives over it, and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time.'' ''They'' are the American soldiers, the torturers. And Limbaugh went on: ''You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people. You ever heard of emotional release?'' Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis. And shock and the awful are what these photographs announce to the world that the Americans have delivered: a pattern of criminal behavior in open contempt of international humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal. What is illustrated by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality. IV. The notion that apologies or professions of ''disgust'' by the president and the secretary of defense are a sufficient response is an insult to one's historical and moral sense. The torture of prisoners is not an aberration. It is a direct consequence of the with-us-or-against-us doctrines of world struggle with which the Bush administration has sought to change, change radically, the international stance of the United States and to recast many domestic institutions and prerogatives. The Bush administration has committed the country to a pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war -- for ''the war on terror'' is nothing less than that. Endless war is taken to justify endless incarcerations. Those held in the extralegal American penal empire are ''detainees''; ''prisoners,'' a newly obsolete word, might suggest that they have the rights accorded by international law and the laws of all civilized countries. This endless ''global war on terrorism'' -- into which both the quite justified invasion of Afghanistan and the unwinnable folly in Iraq have been folded by Pentagon decree -- inevitably leads to the demonizing and dehumanizing of anyone declared by the Bush administration to be a possible terrorist: a definition that is not up for debate and is, in fact, usually made in secret. The charges against most of the people detained in the prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan being nonexistent -- the Red Cross reports that 70 to 90 percent of those being held seem to have committed no crime other than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some sweep of ''suspects'' -- the principal justification for holding them is ''interrogation.'' Interrogation about what? About anything. Whatever the detainee might know. If interrogation is the point of detaining prisoners indefinitely, then physical coercion, humiliation and torture become inevitable. Remember: we are not talking about that rarest of cases, the ''ticking time bomb'' situation, which is sometimes used as a limiting case that justifies torture of prisoners who have knowledge of an imminent attack. This is general or nonspecific information-gathering, authorized by American military and civilian administrators to learn more of a shadowy empire of evildoers about whom Americans know virtually nothing, in countries about which they are singularly ignorant: in principle, any information at all might be useful. An interrogation that produced no information (whatever information might consist of) would count as a failure. All the more justification for preparing prisoners to talk. Softening them up, stressing them out -- these are the euphemisms for the bestial practices in American prisons where suspected terrorists are being held. Unfortunately, as Staff Sgt. Ivan (Chip) Frederick noted in his diary, a prisoner can get too stressed out and die. The picture of a man in a body bag with ice on his chest may well be of the man Frederick was describing. The pictures will not go away. That is the nature of the digital world in which we live. Indeed, it seems they were necessary to get our leaders to acknowledge that they had a problem on their hands. After all, the conclusions of reports compiled by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other reports by journalists and protests by humanitarian organizations about the atrocious punishments inflicted on ''detainees'' and ''suspected terrorists'' in prisons run by the American military, first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, have been circulating for more than a year. It seems doubtful that such reports were read by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice or Rumsfeld. Apparently it took the photographs to get their attention, when it became clear they could not be suppressed; it was the photographs that made all this ''real'' to Bush and his associates. Up to then, there had been only words, which are easier to cover up in our age of infinite digital self-reproduction and self-dissemination, and so much easier to forget. So now the pictures will continue to ''assault'' us -- as many Americans are bound to feel. Will people get used to them? Some Americans are already saying they have seen enough. Not, however, the rest of the world. Endless war: endless stream of photographs. Will editors now debate whether showing more of them, or showing them uncropped (which, with some of the best-known images, like that of a hooded man on a box, gives a different and in some instances more appalling view), would be in ''bad taste'' or too implicitly political? By ''political,'' read: critical of the Bush administration's imperial project. For there can be no doubt that the photographs damage, as Rumsfeld testified, ''the reputation of the honorable men and women of the armed forces who are courageously and responsibly and professionally defending our freedom across the globe.'' This damage -- to our reputation, our image, our success as the lone superpower -- is what the Bush administration principally deplores. How the protection of ''our freedom'' -- the freedom of 5 percent of humanity -- came to require having American soldiers ''across the globe'' is hardly debated by our elected officials. Already the backlash has begun. Americans are being warned against indulging in an orgy of self-condemnation. The continuing publication of the pictures is being taken by many Americans as suggesting that we do not have the right to defend ourselves: after all, they (the terrorists) started it. They -- Osama bin Laden? Saddam Hussein? what's the difference? -- attacked us first. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, before which Secretary Rumsfeld testified, avowed that he was sure he was not the only member of the committee ''more outraged by the outrage'' over the photographs than by what the photographs show. ''These prisoners,'' Senator Inhofe explained, ''you know they're not there for traffic violations. If they're in Cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands, and here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.'' It's the fault of ''the media'' which are provoking, and will continue to provoke, further violence against Americans around the world. More Americans will die. Because of these photos. There is an answer to this charge, of course. Americans are dying not because of the photographs but because of what the photographs reveal to be happening, happening with the complicity of a chain of command -- so Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba implied, and Pfc. Lynndie England said, and (among others) Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican, suggested, after he saw the Pentagon's full range of images on May 12. ''Some of it has an elaborate nature to it that makes me very suspicious of whether or not others were directing or encouraging,'' Senator Graham said. Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, said that viewing an uncropped version of one photo showing a stack of naked men in a hallway -- a version that revealed how many other soldiers were at the scene, some not even paying attention -- contradicted the Pentagon's assertion that only rogue soldiers were involved. ''Somewhere along the line,'' Senator Nelson said of the torturers, ''they were either told or winked at.'' An attorney for Specialist Charles Graner Jr., who is in the picture, has had his client identify the men in the uncropped version; according to The Wall Street Journal, Graner said that four of the men were military intelligence and one a civilian contractor working with military intelligence. V. But the distinction between photograph and reality -- as between spin and policy -- can easily evaporate. And that is what the administration wishes to happen. ''There are a lot more photographs and videos that exist,'' Rumsfeld acknowledged in his testimony. ''If these are released to the public, obviously, it's going to make matters worse.'' Worse for the administration and its programs, presumably, not for those who are the actual -- and potential? -- victims of torture. The media may self-censor but, as Rumsfeld acknowledged, it's hard to censor soldiers overseas, who don't write letters home, as in the old days, that can be opened by military censors who ink out unacceptable lines. Today's soldiers instead function like tourists, as Rumsfeld put it, ''running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise.'' The administration's effort to withhold pictures is proceeding along several fronts. Currently, the argument is taking a legalistic turn: now the photographs are classified as evidence in future criminal cases, whose outcome may be prejudiced if they are made public. The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner of Virginia, after the May 12 slide show of image after image of sexual humiliation and violence against Iraqi prisoners, said he felt ''very strongly'' that the newer photos ''should not be made public. I feel that it could possibly endanger the men and women of the armed forces as they are serving and at great risk.'' But the real push to limit the accessibility of the photographs will come from the continuing effort to protect the administration and cover up our misrule in Iraq -- to identify ''outrage'' over the photographs with a campaign to undermine American military might and the purposes it currently serves. Just as it was regarded by many as an implicit criticism of the war to show on television photographs of American soldiers who have been killed in the course of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it will increasingly be thought unpatriotic to disseminate the new photographs and further tarnish the image of America. After all, we're at war. Endless war. And war is hell, more so than any of the people who got us into this rotten war seem to have expected. In our digital hall of mirrors, the pictures aren't going to go away. Yes, it seems that one picture is worth a thousand words. And even if our leaders choose not to look at them, there will be thousands more snapshots and videos. Unstoppable. Susan Sontag is the author, most recently, of ''Regarding the Pain of Others.'' http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/23PRISONS.html --------------------------------- Why Are We in Kosovo? May 2, 1999 By SUSAN SONTAG The other day a friend from home, New York, called me in Bari -- where I am living for a couple of months -- to ask whether I am all right and inquired in passing whether I can hear sounds of the bombing. I reassured her that not only could I not hear the bombs dropping on Belgrade and Novi Sad and Pristina from downtown Bari, but even the planes taking off from the nearby NATO base of Gioia del Colle are quite inaudible. Though it is easy to mock my geographyless American friend's vision of European countries being only slightly larger than postage stamps, her Tiny Europe seems a nice complement to the widely held vision of Helpless Europe being dragged into a bellicose folly by Big Bad America. Perhaps I exaggerate. I am writing this from Italy -- weakest link in the NATO chain. Italy (unlike France and Germany) continues to maintain an embassy in Belgrade. Milosevic has received the Italian Communists' party leader, Armando Cossutta. The estimable mayor of Venice has sent an envoy to Belgrade with letters addressed to Milosevic and to the ethnic Albanian leader with whom he has met, Ibrahim Rugova, proposing Venice as a site for peace negotiations. (The letters were accepted, thank you very much, by the Orthodox primate following the Easter Sunday service.) But then it is understandable that Italy has panicked: Italians see not just scenes of excruciating misery on their TV news but images of masses on the move. In Italy, Albanians are first of all future immigrants. But opposition to the war is hardly confined to Italy, and to one strand of the political spectrum. On the contrary: mobilized against this war are remnants of the left and the likes of Le Pen and Bossi and Heider on the right. The right is against immigrants. The left is against America. (Against the idea of America, that is. The hegemony of American popular culture in Europe could hardly be more total.) On both the so-called left and the so-called right, identity-talk is on the rise. The anti-Americanism that is fueling the protest against the war has been growing in recent years in many of the nations of the New Europe, and is perhaps best understood as a displacement of the anxiety about this New Europe, which everyone has been told is a Good Thing and few dare question. Nations are communities that are always being imagined, reconceived, reasserted, against the pressure of a defining Other. The specter of a nation without borders, an infinitely porous nation, is bound to create anxiety. Europe needs its overbearing America. Weak Europe? Impotent Europe? The words are everywhere. The truth is that the made-for-business Europe being brought into existence with the enthusiastic assent of the ''responsible'' business and professional elites is a Europe precisely designed to be incapable of responding to the threat posed by a dictator like Milosevic. This is not a question of ''weakness,'' though that is how it is being experienced. It is a question of ideology. It is not that Europe is weak. Far from it. It is that Europe, the Europe under construction since the Final Victory of Capitalism in 1989, is up to something else. Something which indeed renders obsolete most of the questions of justice -- indeed, all the moral questions. (What prevails, in their place, are questions of health, which may be conjoined with ecological concerns; but that is another matter.) A Europe designed for spectacle, consumerism and hand wringing . . . but haunted by the fear of national identities being swamped either by faceless multinational commercialism or by tides of alien immigrants from poor countries. In one part of the continent, former Communists play the nationalist card and foment lethal nationalisms -- Milosevic being the most egregious example. In the other part, nationalism, and with it war, are presumed to be superseded, outmoded. How helpless ''our'' Europe feels in the face of all this irrational slaughter and suffering taking place in the other Europe. And meanwhile the war goes on. A war that started in 1991. Not in 1999. And not, as the Serbs would have it, six centuries ago, either. Theirs is a country whose nationalist myth has as its founding event a defeat -- the Battle of Kosovo, lost to the Turks in 1389. We are fighting the Turks, Serb officers commanding the mortar emplacements on the heights of Sarajevo would assure visiting journalists. Would we not think it odd if France still rallied around the memory of the Battle of Agincourt -- 1415 -- in its eternal enmity with Great Britain? But who could imagine such a thing? For France is Europe. And ''they'' are not. Yes, this is Europe. The Europe that did not respond to the Serb shelling of Dubrovnik. Or the three-year siege of Sarajevo. The Europe that let Bosnia die. A new definition of Europe: the place where tragedies don't take place. Wars, genocides -- that happened here once, but no longer. It's something that happens in Africa. (Or places in Europe that are not ''really'' Europe. That is, the Balkans.) Again, perhaps I exaggerate. But having spent a good part of three years, from 1993 to 1996, in Sarajevo, it does not seem to me like an exaggeration at all. Living on the edge of NATO Europe, only a few hundred kilometers from the refugee camps in Durres and Kukes and Blace, from the greatest mass of suffering in Europe since the Second World War, it is true that I can't hear the NATO planes leaving the base here in Puglia. But I can walk to Bari's waterfront and watch Albanian and Kosovar families pouring off the daily ferries from Durres -- legal immigrants, presumably -- or drive south a hundred kilometers at night and see the Italian coast guard searching for the rubber dinghies crammed with refugees that leave Vlore nightly for the perilous Adriatic crossing. But if I leave my apartment in Bari only to visit friends and have a pizza and see a movie and hang out in a bar, I am no closer to the war than the television news or the newspapers that arrive every morning at my doorstep. I could as well be back in New York. Of course, it is easy to turn your eyes from what is happening if it is not happening to you. Or if you have not put yourself where it is happening. I remember in Sarajevo in the summer of 1993 a Bosnian friend telling me ruefully that in 1991, when she saw on her TV set the footage of Vukovar utterly leveled by the Serbs, she thought to herself, How terrible, but that's in Croatia, that can never happen here in Bosnia . . . and switched the channel. The following year, when the war started in Bosnia, she learned differently. Then she became part of a story on television that other people saw and said, How terrible . . . and switched the channel. How helpless ''our'' pacified, comfortable Europe feels in the face of all this irrational slaughter and suffering taking place in the other Europe. But the images cannot be conjured away -- of refugees, people who have been pushed out of their homes, their torched villages, by the hundreds of thousands and who look like us. Generations of Europeans fearful of any idealism, incapable of indignation except in the old anti-imperialist cold-war grooves. (Yet, of course, the key point about this war is that it is the direct result of the end of the cold war and the breakup of old empires and imperial rivalries.) Stop the War and Stop the Genocide, read the banners being waved in the demonstrations in Rome and here in Bari. For Peace. Against War. Who is not? But how can you stop those bent on genocide without making war? We have been here before. The horrors, the horrors. Our attempt to forge a ''humanitarian'' response. Our inability (yes, after Auschwitz!) to comprehend how such horrors can take place. And as the horrors multiply, it becomes even more incomprehensible why we should respond to any one of them (since we have not responded to the others). Why this horror and not another? Why Bosnia or Kosovo and not Kurdistan or Rwanda or Tibet? Are we not saying that European lives, European suffering are more valuable, more worth acting on to protect, than the lives of people in the Middle East, Africa and Asia? One answer to this commonly voiced objection to NATO's war is to say boldly, Yes, to care about the fate of the people in Kosovo is Eurocentric, and what's wrong with that? But is not the accusation of Eurocentrism itself just one more vestige of European presumption, the presumption of Europe's universalist mission: that every part of the globe has a claim on Europe's attention? If several African states had cared enough about the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda (nearly a million people!) to intervene militarily, say, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, would we have criticized this initiative as being Afrocentric? Would we have asked what right these states have to intervene in Rwanda when they have done nothing on behalf of the Kurds or the Tibetans? Another argument against intervening in Kosovo is that the war is -- wonderful word -- illegal,'' because NATO is violating the borders of a sovereign state. Kosovo is, after all, part of the new Greater Serbia called Yugoslavia. Tough luck for the Kosovars that Milosevic revoked their autonomous status in 1989. Inconvenient that 90 percent of Kosovars are Albanians -- ethnic Albanians'' as they are called, to distinguish them from the citizens of Albania. Empires reconfigure. But are national borders, which have been altered so many times in the last hundred years, really to be the ultimate criterion? You can murder your wife in your own house, but not outdoors on the street. Imagine that Nazi Germany had had no expansionist ambitions but had simply made it a policy in the late 1930's and early 1940's to slaughter all the German Jews. Do we think a government has the right to do whatever it wants on its own territory? Maybe the governments of Europe would have said that 60 years ago. But would we approve now of their decision? Push the supposition into the present. What if the French Government began slaughtering large numbers of Corsicans and driving the rest out of Corsica . . . or the Italian Government began emptying out Sicily or Sardinia, creating a million refugees . . . or Spain decided to apply a final solution to its rebellious Basque population. Wouldn't we agree that a consortium of powers on the continent had the right to use military force to make the French (or Italian, or Spanish) Government reverse its actions, which would probably mean overthrowing that Government? But of course this couldn't happen, could it? Not in Europe. My friends in Sarajevo used to say during the siege: How can ''the West'' be letting this happen to us? This is Europe, too. We're Europeans. Surely ''they'' won't allow it to go on. But they -- Europe -- did. For something truly terrible happened in Bosnia. From the Serb death camps in the north of Bosnia in 1992, the first death camps on European soil since the 1940's, to the mass executions of many thousands of civilians at Srebrenica and elsewhere in the summer of 1995 -- Europe tolerated that. So, obviously, Bosnia wasn't Europe. Those of us who spent time in Sarajevo used to say that, as the 20th century began at Sarajevo, so will the 21st century begin at Sarajevo. If the options before NATO all seem either improbable or unpalatable, it is because NATO's actions come eight years too late. Milosevic should have been stopped when he was shelling Dubrovnik in 1991. Back in 1993 and 1994, American policy makers were saying that even if there were no United States intervention in Bosnia, rest assured, this would be the last thing that Milosevic would be allowed to get away with. A line in the sand had been drawn: he would never be allowed to make war on Kosovo. But who believed the Americans then? Not the Bosnians. Not Milosevic. Not the Europeans. Not even the Americans themselves. After Dayton, after the destruction of independent Bosnia, it was time to go back to sleep, as if the series of events set in motion in 1989 with the accession to power of Milosevic and the revocation of autonomous status for the province of Kosovo, would not play out to its obvious logical end. If Europe is having a hard time thinking that it matters what happens in the southeastern corner of Europe, imagine how hard it is for Americans to think it is in their interest. It is not in America's interest to push this war on Europe. It is very much not in Europe's interest to reward Milosevic for the destruction of Yugoslavia and the creation of so much human suffering. Why not just let the brush fire burn out? is the argument of some. And the expulsion of a million or more refugees into the neighboring countries of Albania and Macedonia? This will certainly bring on the destruction of the fragile new state of Macedonia and the redrawing of the map of the Balkans -- certain to be disputed by, at the very least, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece. Do we imagine this will happen peacefully? Not surprisingly, the Serbs are presenting themselves as the victims. (Clinton equals Hitler, etc.) But it is grotesque to equate the casualties inflicted by the NATO bombing with the mayhem inflicted on hundreds of thousands of people in the last eight years by the Serb programs of ethnic cleansing. Not all violence is equally reprehensible; not all wars are equally unjust. No forceful response to the violence of a state against peoples who are nominally its own citizens? (Which is what most ''wars'' are today. Not wars between states.) The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders. Can we really say there is no response to this? Is it acceptable that such slaughters be dismissed as civil wars, also known as ''age-old ethnic hatreds.'' (After all, anti-Semitism was an old tradition in Europe; indeed, a good deal older than ancient Balkan hatreds. Would this have justified letting Hitler kill all the Jews on German territory?) Is it true that war never solved anything? (Ask a black American if he or she thinks our Civil War didn't solve anything.) War is not simply a mistake, a failure to communicate. There is radical evil in the world, which is why there are just wars. And this is a just war. Even if it has been bungled. Stop the genocide. Return all refugees to their homes. Worthy goals. But how is any of this conceivably going to happen unless the Milosevic regime is overthrown? (And the truth is, it's not going to happen.) Impossible to see how this war will play out. All the options seem improbable, as well as undesirable. Unthinkable to keep bombing indefinitely, if Milosevic is indeed willing to accept the destruction of the Serbian economy; unthinkable for NATO to stop bombing, if Milosevic remains intransigent. The Milosevic Government has finally brought on Serbia a small portion of the suffering it has inflicted on neighboring peoples. War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as intoxicating as victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize that the Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for Serbia, the net result of Milosevic's policies being the economic and cultural ruin of the entire region, including Serbia, for several generations? Alas, one thing we can be sure of, that will not happen soon. Susan Sontag is the author, most recently, of ''The Volcano Lover: A Romance.'' She is completing a new novel. http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/books/booksspecial/sontag-kosovo.html --------------------------------- First Chapter: 'In America' March 12, 2000 By SUSAN SONTAG PERHAPS IT WAS the slap she received from Gabriela Ebert a few minutes past five o'clock in the afternoon (I'd not witnessed that) which made something, no, everything (I couldn't have known this either) a little clearer. Arriving at the theatre, inflexibly punctual, two hours before curtain, Maryna had gone directly to her star's lair, been stripped to her chemise and corset and helped into a fur-lined robe and slippers by her dresser, Zofia, whom she dispatched to iron her costume in an adjoining room, had pushed the candles nearer both sides of the mirror, had leaned forward over the jumbled palette of already uncapped jars and vials of makeup for a closer scrutiny of that all too familiar mask, her real face, the actress's under-face, when behind her the door seemed to break open and in front of her, sharing the mirror, hurtling toward her, she saw her august rival's reddened, baleful face shouting the absurd insult, threw herself back in her chair, turned, glimpsed the arm descending just before an involuntary grimace of her own brought down her eyelids at the same instant it bared her upper teeth and shortened her nose, and felt the shove and sting of a large beringed hand against her face. It all happened so rapidly and noisily her eyes stayed closed, the door banged shut and the shadow-flecked room with its hissing gas jets had gone so silent now, it might have been a bad dream: she'd been having bad dreams. Maryna clapped her palm to her offended face. "Zofia? Zofia!" Sound of the door being opened softly. And some anxious babble from Bogdan. "What the devil did she want? If I hadn't been down the corridor with Jan, I would have stopped her, how dare she burst in on you like that!" "It's nothing," Maryna said, opening her eyes, dropping her hand. "Nothing." Meaning: the buzz of pain in her cheek. And the migraine now looming on the other side of her head, which she intended to keep at bay by a much-practiced exercise of will until the end of the evening. She bent forward to tie her hair in a towel, then stood and moved to the washstand, where she vigorously soaped and scrubbed her face and neck, and patted the skin dry with a soft cloth. "I knew all along she wouldn't " "It's all right," said Maryna. Not to him. To Zofia, hesitating at the half-open door, holding the costume aloft in her outstretched arms. Waving her in, Bogdan shut the door a bit harder than he intended. Maryna stepped out of her robe and into the burgundy gown with gold braiding ("No, no, leave the back unbuttoned!"), rotated slowly once, twice, before the cheval glass, nodded to herself, sent Zofia away to repair the loose buckle on her shoe and heat the curling iron, then sat at the dressing table again. "What did Gabriela want?" "Nothing." "Maryna!" She took a tuft of down and spread a thick layer of Pearl Powder on her face and throat. "She came by to wish me the best for tonight." "Really?" "Quite generous of her, wouldn't you agree, since she'd thought the role was to be hers." "Very generous," he said. And, he thought, very unlike Gabriela. He watched as three times she redid the powder, applied the rouge with a hare's foot well up on her cheekbones and under her eyes and on her chin, and blackened her eyelids, and three times took it all off with a sponge. "Maryna?" "Sometimes I think there's no point to any of this," she said tonelessly, starting again on her eyelids with the charcoal stick. "This?" She dipped a fine camel's-hair brush into the dish of burnt umber and traced a line under her lower eyelashes. It seemed to Bogdan she was using too much kohl, which made her beautiful eyes look sorrowful, or merely old. "Maryna, look at me!" "Dear Bogdan, I'm not going to look at you." She was dabbing more kohl on her brows. "And you're not going to listen to me. You should be inured by now to my attacks of nerves. Actor's nerves. A little worse than usual, but this is a first night. Don't pay any attention to me." As if that were possible! He bent over and touched his lips to the nape of her neck. "Maryna ..." "What?" "You remember that I've taken the room at the Saski for a few of us afterward to celebrate " "Call Zofia for me, will you?" She had started to mix the henna. "Forgive me for bringing up a dinner while you're preparing for a performance. But it should be called off if you're feeling too ... "Don't," she murmured. She was blending a little Dutch pink and powdered antimony with the Prepared Whiting to powder her hands and arms. "Bogdan?" He didn't answer. "I'm looking forward to the party," she said and reached behind for a gloved hand to lay on her shoulder. "You're upset about something." "I'm upset about everything," she said dryly. "And you'll be so kind as to let me wallow in it. The old stager has need of a little stimulation to go on doing her best!" MARYNA DID NOT RELISH lying to Bogdan, the only person among all those who loved her, or claimed to love her, whom she did in fact trust. But she had no place for his indignation or his eagerness to console. She thought it might do her good to keep this astonishing incident to herself. Sometimes one needs a real slap in the face to make what one is feeling real. When life cuffs you about, you say, That's life. You feel strong. You want to feel strong. The important thing is to go forward. As she had, single-mindedly, or almost: there had been much to ignore. But if you are of a stoical temperament, and have a talent for self-respect, and have worked hard with another talent God gave you, and have been rewarded exactly as you had dared to hope for your diligence and persistence, indeed, your success arrived more promptly than you expected (or perhaps, you secretly think, merited), you might then consider it petty to remember the slights and nurture the grievances. To be offended was to be weak like worrying about whether one was happy or not. Now you have an unexpected pain, around which the muffled feelings can crystallize. You have to float your ideals a little off the ground, to keep them from being profaned. And cut loose the misfortunes and insults, too, lest they take root and strangle your soul. Take the slap for what it was, a jealous rival's frantic comment on her impregnable success that would have been something to share with Bogdan, and soon put out of mind. Take it as an emblem, a summons to respond to the whispery needs she'd been harboring for months this would be worth keeping to herself, even cherishing. Yes, she would cherish poor Gabriela's slap. If that slap were a baby's smile, she would smile at the recollection of it, if it were a picture, she would have it framed and kept on her dressing table, if it were hair, she would order a wig made from it ... Oh I see, she thought, I'm going mad. Could it be as simple as that? She'd laughed to herself then, but saw with distaste that the hand applying henna to her lips was trembling. Misery is wrong, she said to herself, mine no less than Gabriela's, and she only wants what I have. Misery is always wrong. Crisis in the life of an actress. Acting was emulating other actors and then, to one's surprise (actually, not at all to one's surprise), finding oneself better than any of them were including the pathetic bestower of that slap. Wasn't that enough? No. Not anymore. She had loved being an actress because the theatre seemed to her nothing less than the truth. A higher truth. Acting in a play, one of the great plays, you became better than you really were. You said only words that were sculpted, necessary, exalting. You always looked as beautiful as you could be, artifice assisting, at your age. Each of your movements had a large, generous meaning. You could feel yourself being improved by what was given to you, on the stage, to express. Now it would happen that, mid-course in a noble tirade by her beloved Shakespeare or Schiller or Slowacki, pivoting in her unwieldy costume, gesturing, declaiming, sensing the audience bend to her art, she felt no more than herself. The old self-transfiguring thrill was gone. Even stage fright that jolt necessary to the true professional had deserted her. Gabriela's slap woke her up. An hour later Maryna put on her wig and papier-m?ch? crown, gave one last look in the mirror, and went out to give a performance that even she could have admitted was, by her real standards for herself, not too bad. BOGDAN WAS so captivated by Maryna's majesty as she went to be executed that at the start of the ovation he was still rooted in the plush-covered chair at the front of his box, hands clenching the rail. Galvanized now, he slipped between his sister, the impresario from Vienna, Ryszard, and the other guests, and by the second curtain call had made his way backstage. "Mag-ni-fi-cent," he mouthed as she came off from the third curtain call to wait beside him in the wings for the volume of sound to warrant another return to the flower-strewn stage. "If you think so, I'm glad." "Listen to them!" "Them! What do they know if they've never seen anything better than me?" After she'd conceded four more curtain calls, Bogdan escorted her to the dressing-room door. She supposed she was starting to allow herself to feel pleased with her performance. But once inside, she let out a wordless wail and burst into tears. "Oh, Madame!" Zofia seemed about to weep, too. Stricken by the anguish on the girl's face and intending to comfort her, Maryna flung herself into Zofia's arms. "There, there," she murmured as Zofia held her tightly, then let go with one arm and delicately patted Maryna's crimped, stiffened mass of hair. Maryna released herself reluctantly from the girl's unwavering grip and met her stare fondly. "You have a good heart, Zofia." "I can't stand to see you sad, Madame." "I'm not sad, I'm ... Don't be sad for me." "Madame, I was in the wings almost the whole last act, and when you went to die, I never saw you die as good as that, you were so wonderful I just couldn't stop crying." "Then that's enough crying for both of us, isn't it?" Maryna started to laugh. "To work, you silly girl, to work. Why are we both dawdling?" Relieved of her regal costume and reclothed in the fur-lined robe. Maryna sponged off Mary Stuart's face and swiftly laid on the discreet mask suitable to the wife of Bogdan Dembowski. Zofia, sniffling a little ("Zofia, enough!"), stood behind her chair embracing the sage-green gown Maryna had chosen that afternoon to wear to the dinner Bogdan was giving at the Hotel Saski. She put the gown on slowly in front of the cheval glass, returned to the dressing table and undid the curls and brushed and rebrushed her hair, then piled it loosely on her head, looked closer into the mirror, added a little melted wax to her eyelashes, stood again, inspected herself once more, listening to the ascending din in the corridor, took several loud, rhythmical breaths, and opened the door to an enveloping wave of shouts and applause. Among the admirers well connected enough to be admitted backstage were some acquaintances but, except for Ryszard, clasping a bouquet of silk flowers to his broad chest, she saw no close friends: those invited to the party had been asked to go on ahead to the hotel. And more than a hundred people were waiting outside the stage door, despite the foul weather. Bogdan offered the shelter of his sword-umbrella with the ivory handle so she could linger for fifteen minutes under the falling snow, and she would have lingered another fifteen had he not waved away the more timid fans, their programs still unsigned, and shepherded Maryna through the crowd toward the waiting sleigh. Ryszard, finally pressing his bouquet into her hands, said the Saski was only seven streets away and that he preferred to walk. How strange, in her native city to be receiving friends in a hotel, but for the last five years her talents having led her inexorably to the summit, an engagement for life at the Imperial Theatre in Warsaw she no longer had an apartment in Krak w. "Strange," she said. To Bogdan, to no-one, to herself. Bogdan frowned. A thunderbolt, like the crack of gunfire, as they arrived at the hotel. A scream, no, only a shout: an angry coachman. They walked up the carpeted marble staircase. "You're all right?" "Of course I'm all right. It's only another entrance." "And I have the privilege of opening the door for you." Now it was Maryna's turn to frown. And how could there not be applause and beaming faces, customary welcome at a first-night party but she really had given a splendid performance as Bogdan opened the door (in answer to her "Bogdan, are you all right?" he had sighed and taken her hand) and she made her entrance. Piotr ran to her arms. She embraced Bogdan's sister and gave her Ryszard's silk flowers; she let herself be embraced by Krystyna, whose eyes had filled with tears. After the guests, gathering closely around her, had each paid tribute to her performance, she looked from face to face, and then sang out gleefully: May you a better feast never behold, You knot of mouth friends! Upon which words everyone laughed, which means, I suppose (I had not arrived yet), that she said Timon's lines in Polish, not English, but also means that nobody except Maryna had read Timon of Athens, for the feast in the play is not a happy one, above all for its giver. Then the guests spread about the large room and began talking among themselves about her performance and, after that, about the larger question afoot (which is more or less when I arrived, chilled and eager to enter the story), while Maryna had forced herself toward humbler, less sardonic thoughts. No jealous rivals here. These were her friends, those who wished her well. Where was her gratitude? She hated her discontents. If I can have a new life, she was thinking, I shall never complain again. "MARYNA?" No answer. "Maryna, what's wrong?" "What could be wrong ... doctor?" He shook his head. "Oh, I see." "Henryk." "That's better." "I'm disturbing you." "Yes" he smiled "you disturb me, Maryna. But only in my dreams, never in my consulting room." Then, before she could rebuke him for flirting with her: "The splendors of your performance last night," he explained. He saw her still hesitating. "Come in" he held out his hand "Sit" he waved at a tapestry-covered settee "Talk to me." Two steps into the room, she leaned against a bookcase. "You're not going to sit?" "You sit. And I'll continue my walk ... here." "You came here on foot in this weather? Was that wise?" "Henryk, please!" He sat on the corner of his desk. She began to pace. "I thought I was coming here to besiege you with questions about Stefan, if he really " "But I've told you," Henryk interrupted, "that the lungs already show a remarkable improvement. Against such a mighty enemy, the struggle waged by doctor and patient is bound to be long. But I think we're winning, your brother and I." "You talk rubbish, Henryk. Has anyone ever told you that?" "Maryna, what's the matter?" "Everyone talks rubbish " "Maryna ..." "Including me." "So" he sighed "it isn't Stefan you wanted to consult me about." She shook her head. "Then let me guess," he said, venturing a smile. "You're making fun of me, my old friend," Maryna said somberly. "Women's nerves, you're thinking. Or worse." "I?" he slapped the desk "I, your old friend, as you acknowledge, and I thank you for that, I not take my Maryna seriously?" He looked at her sharply. "What is it? Your headaches?" "No, it's not about"---she sat down abruptly "me. I mean, my headaches." "I'm going to take your pulse," he said, standing over her. "You're flushed. I wouldn't be surprised if you had a touch of fever." After a moment of silence, while he held her wrist then gave it back to her, he looked again at her face. "No fever. You are in excellent health." "I told you there was nothing wrong." "Ah, that means you want to complain to me. Well, you shall find me the most patient of listeners. Complain, dear Maryna," he cried gaily. He didn't see the tears in her eyes. "Complain!" "Perhaps it is my brother, after all." "But I told you " "Excuse me"---she'd stood "I'm making a fool of myself." "Never! Please don't go." He rose to bar her way to the door. "You do have a fever." "You said I didn't." "The mind can get overheated, just like the body." "What do you think of the will, Henryk? The power of the will." "What sort of question is that?" "I mean, do you think one can do whatever one wants?" "You can do whatever you want, my dear. We are all your servants and abettors." He took her hand and inclined his head to kiss it. "Oh" she pulled away her hand "you disgusting man, don't flatter me!" He stared for a moment with a gentle, surprised expression. "Maryna, dear," he said soothingly. "Hasn't your experience taught you anything about how others respond to you?" "Experience is a passive teacher, Henryk." "But it " "In paradise" she bore down on him, her grey eyes glittering "there will be no experiences. Only bliss. There we will be able to speak the truth to each other. Or not need to speak at all." "Since when have you believed in paradise? I envy you." "Always. Since I was a child. And the older I get, the more I believe in it, because paradise is something necessary." "You don't find it ... difficult to believe in paradise?" "Oh," she groaned, "the problem is not paradise. The problem is myself, my wretched self." "Spoken like the artist you are. Someone with your temperament will always " "I knew you would say that!" She stamped her foot. "I order you. I implore you, don't speak of my temperament!" (Yes she had been ill. Her nerves. Yes she was still ill, all her friends except her doctor said among themselves.) "So you believe in paradise," he murmured placatingly. "Yes, and at the gates of paradise, I would say, Is this your paradise? These ethereal figures robed in white, drifting among the white clouds? Where can I sit? Where is the water?" "Maryna ..." Taking her by the hand, he led her back to the settee. "I'm going to pour you a dram of cognac. It will be good for both of us." "You drink too much, Henryk." "Here." He handed her one of the glasses and pulled a chair opposite her. "Isn't that better?" She sipped the cognac, then leaned back and gazed at him mutely. "What is it?" "I think I will die very soon, if I don't do something reckless ... grand. I thought I was dying last year, you know." "But you didn't." "Must one die to prove one's sincerity!" FROM A LETTER to nobody, that is, to herself: It's not because my brother, my beloved brother, is dying and I will have no one to revere ... it's not because my mother, our beloved mother, grates on my nerves, oh, how I wish I could stop her mouth ... it's not because I too am not a good mother (how could I be? I am an actress) ... it's not because my husband, who is not the father of my son, is so kind and will do whatever I want ... it's not because everyone applauds me, because they cannot imagine that I could be more vivid or different than I already am ... it's not because I am thirty-five now and because I live in an old country, and I don't want to be old (I do not intend to become my mother) ... it's not because some of the critics condescend, now I am being compared with younger actresses, while the ovations after each performance are no less thunderous (so what then is the meaning of applause?) ... it's not because I have been ill (my nerves) and had to stop performing for three months, only three months (I don't feel well when I am not working) ... it's not because I believe in paradise ... oh, and it's not because the police are still spying and making reports on me, though all those reckless statements and hopes are long past (my God, it's thirteen years since the Uprising) ... it's not for any of these reasons that I've decided to do something that nobody wants me to do, that everyone regards as folly, and that I want some of them to do with me, though they don't want to; even Bogdan, who always wants what I want (as he promised, when we married), doesn't really want to. But he must. "PERHAPS IT IS a curse to come from anywhere. The world, you see," she said, "is very large. I mean," she said, "the world comes in many parts. The world, like our poor Poland, can always be divided. And subdivided. You find yourself occupying a smaller and smaller space. Though you're at home in that space " "On that stage," said the friend helpfully. "If you will," she said coolly. "That stage." Then she frowned. "Surely you're not reminding me that all the world's a stage?" "BUT HOW CAN you leave your place, which is here?" "My place, my place," she cried. "I have none!" "And you can't abandon your " "Friends?" she hooted. "Actually, Irena and I were thinking of your public." "Who says I am abandoning my public? Will they forget me if I choose to absent myself? No. Will they welcome me back should I choose to return? Yes. As for my friends ..." "Yes?" "You can be sure I have no intention of abandoning my friends." "MY FRIENDS," she repeated, "are much more dangerous than my enemies. I'm thinking of their approval. Their expectations. They want me to be as I am, and I cannot disabuse them entirely. They might cease to love me. "I've explained it to them. But I could have announced it to them, like a whim. Recently, I thought I was ready to do it. At dinner in a hotel, the party after a first-night performance. I was going to raise my glass. I am leaving. Soon. Forever. Someone would have exclaimed, Oh Madame, how can you? And I'd have replied, I can, I can. But I didn't have the courage. Instead, I offered a toast to our poor dismembered country." (Continues...) http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/12/books/booksspecial/sontag-1st-america. html Susan Sontag Found Crisis of Cancer Added a Fierce Intensity to Life January 30, 1978 By THE NEW YORK TIMES She didn't even have a doctor -- "I'd always been in excellent health," she shrugs -- and Susan Sontag made the appointment for herself as an afterthought while arranging a checkup for her son. Fortuitous timing, as it turned out: Not only did she have breast cancer, "but they said I'd have been dead in six months if I hadn't caught it." That was two years ago. In the meantime, Susan Sontag has, among other things, has a mastectomy and various follow-up operations; written another book (the provocative "On Photography," which was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and last week won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism); undergone chemotherapy, started her third novel, and re-evaluated her whole life. Being Susan Sontag, a name regularly coupled with the description "the intellectual" (if not "the essayist," "the filmmaker" or "the novelist"), she has also put her critical mind to work on the matter at hand, and come up with a thoughtful treatise called "Illness as Metaphor." The work, which started out as a lecture and is now being converted into another book, deals with the cultural and literary associations that have long surrounded such potent diseases as cancer and tuberculosis. Her own first responses, Miss Sontag admits, were on a more visceral level: "Panic. Animal terror. I found myself doing very primitive sorts of things, like sleeping with the light on the first couple of months. I was afraid of the dark. You really do feel as though you're looking into that black hole." These days Miss Sontag, who turned 45 last week, neither looks nor sounds like a woman in the grip of terror. Tall, rangy and handsome, her coal-black hair streaked dramatically with silver, she exudes energy and warmth. Nonetheless, she makes a point of openness about her illness, "because it can be helpful to other people, and because it's very important to break the taboo. People are very reluctant to deal with the thought of death; they see it as some shameful secret, and to many people cancer equals death. I thought that, too. And I had to rethink everything -- what I thought, what I wanted to do." After considering such possibilities as abandoning routing and taking off for exotic, faraway places, Miss Sontag decided what she most wanted was just to continue her normal life: living with her son, David ("my best friend"), who at 25 is commuting to Princeton University, writing, going to movies, seeing friends. "For the first eight months, all I wanted was to be with loved ones and hold hands and talk. The entire first year I was thinking about death all the time, but in many ways it's been a positive experience," she said. "It has added a fierce intensity to my life, and that's been pleasurable. It sounds very banal, but having cancer does put things into perspective. It's fantastic knowing you're going to die; it really makes having priorities and trying to follow them very real to you. That has somewhat receded now; more than two years have gone by, and I don't feel the same sort of urgency. In a way I'm sorry; I would like to keep some of that feeling of crisis." Despite a couple of later scares that the cancer might have spread, Miss Sontag's doctor announced cheerily not long ago: "Your actuarial prospects are sprucing up." "I laughed," she says, grinning. I laugh a lot, which is partly my black sense of humor, but also I think it is good to be in contact with life and death. Many people spend their lives defending themselves against the notion that life is melodrama. I think it is good not to damp down these conflicts and dramas and agonize. You get terrific energy from facing them in an active and conscious way. For me, writing is a way of paying as much attention as possible. In addition to living her illness -- and thus her life -- as fully as possible, Miss Sontag is concentrating on her fiction. She now says she regrets all the years spent writing the essays for which she became renowned on subjects ranging from the esthetics of camp to Cuba, Vietnam and political radicalism. Fierce intensity does not appear to be a new element in the life of Miss Sontag, who grew up in Arizona and California, where she attended "dreadful high school" where she was reprimanded for reading Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" instead of the assigned portion of Reader's Digest. She graduated from high school at 15, married at 17, graduated from the University of Chicago at 18 and went on to graduate work in philosophy at Harvard. Along the way she bore a son and began evolving the esthetic and political iconoclasm that became the hallmark of her work. Having cancer has prompted Miss Sontag to re-examine, among other things, her early and unhappy marriage to Philip Rieff, who is now a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is disturbed by current notions about a "cancer-prone character type: someone unemotional, inhibited, repressed." "I immediately thought, I'm exactly the type," she says with a laugh. "You look back on you life and think, I was married for eight years, why did I stay married that long; why was I a good student in school, maybe I was repressing my delinquent impulses; I repress my emotions! And then I realized, who doesn't? That's also called being civilized. I don't know a single person who doesn't repress emotions. How can you now, if you're educated and involved in mental activity that requires control, planning, routine? "But of course I identified with that profile, because those are the things we all fear now, that we're not expressive enough. That's the going psychological dogma, just as in the 19th century it was the opposite. But I don't believe emotions are the cause of disease." Among Miss Sontag's present emotions is "a little bit of glee," she concedes, looking pleased with herself. "I have this irrepressible optimism now that so far I'm getting away with it." Damocles over your head," Susan Sontag says with a gentle smile. "It's an important truth. Death is part of the dignity and seriousness of life." http://www.nytimes.com/1978/01/30/books/booksspecial/sontag-cancer.html Screen: 'Brother Carl' August 12, 1972 By ROGER GREENSPUN Brother Carl" is Susan Sontag's second movie. But it is the first movie in which she seems to see film as a means to life rather than as a repository for ideas. "Duet for Cannibals" (1969) really dealt with a kind of rarefied mental cannibalism. In a very open way, "Brother Carl" really deals with human relationships. Two women, Karen and Lena, visit an island, a Swedish resort, where Lena's ex-husband, Martin, lives in comparative seclusion with a mentally disturbed ballet dancer named Carl. Carl is brother by guild rather than blood, for Martin is somehow responsible for his breakdown, and Carl, who totally depends upon him, regards him as an enemy. Lena is young and full of life, and to some extent "Brother Carl" is the story of how she offers her life, first to Karen, then to Martin, and finally to Carl -- before committing it in total and apparently wasteful sacrifice. Karen is older and very tired, and to some extent the film is the story of how her life is saved by the enigmatic Carl, who forms a bond with her own desperately withdrawn young daughter, Anna, and effectively brings the girl out of her private distances and back into the world. I have greatly simplified the story, which is very complex and full of symbolic event and confrontation, and which is also a little foolish. In a sense, "Brother Carl" is all about learning to give, and its climactic "miracle" (Miss Sontag's word) is essentially to evoke laughter from a little girl. These suggest sentiments worthy of Hollywood in the 1930's and 1940's, but that Miss Sontag is willing to treat them openly and seriously is, paradoxically, perhaps her greatest source of strength. There are a directness and an awkwardness of gesture and of larger movement in "Brother Carl" that count among its most attractive qualities, and that go a long way to compensate for its occasionally strained pretensions. It is a very imperfect film, with one bad performance (Genevieve Page as Karen) and several performances that seem to have been directed toward an excessive inexpressiveness. But I think that it indicates the taking of considerable imaginative and emotional risks, as "Duet for Cannibals" did not, and the result is a real movie. "Brother Carl" was filmed in Sweden with an English-language sound track. It opened yesterday at the New Yorker Theater. http://www.nytimes.com/1972/08/12/books/booksspecial/sontag-carl.html --------------------------------- Susan Sontag's 'Duet for Cannibals' at Festival September 25, 1969 By ROGER GREENSPUN The special providence that protects movie critics decrees that when they do take up honest work they often make surprisingly good movies. Godard and Truffaut come to mind at once, but also a whole line of "Cahiers du Cinema" critics including Chabrol, Rivette, and Eric Rohmer. In America, we have Peter Bogdanovich ("Targets") and now Susan Sontag with "Duet for Cannibals," which played last night at the New York Film Festival. Miss Sontag's credits extend, of course, a considerable distance beyond movie criticism, but she has been one of the best of critics, and I have heard some of her colleagues remark, with disarming generosity, that she has proved herself so good at making movies you'd never guess she had written about them. Except for some bandages out of Godard, two wigs out of Antonioni, and a leading lady out of Bernardo Bertolucci (Adriana Asti, who is more interesting here than she was in "Before the Revolution"), "Duet for Cannibals" doesn't seem to owe much to anybody except to Miss Sontag and her own idiomatic, uncluttered sense of the medium. The film is in Swedish, made in Sweden for a Swedish producer, but the subtitles are Miss Sontag's, and I suspect that as much has been gained as lost in the various translations and transpositions required in realizing the project. The cannibals are a middle-age radical German political activist and the theoretician, Bauer -- Hans Erborg -- living with his young Italian wife Francesca -- Miss Asti -- in Sweden. Their victims are a young Swede who goes to work as Bauer's secretary, and his mistress, who eventually finds herself working as the Bauers's cook and companion. For all the movie tells us, Bauer's credentials are real enough (down to a chrome-plated cigarette lighter -- gift of Bertolt Brecht), but everything in his present life partakes of fraud calculated to intrigue, upset, and entrap his assistant. His erratic and violent behavior, the temptation palpably and leeringly offered of his beautiful young wife, eventually the intellectual challenge of what move he will make next, engage the young man and put him repeatedly off balance. Before it is all over the girl is at work too, making love to the master, accepting advances from the mistress, feeding and being fed by both of them, and lying between them in their connubial bed. There are too many insane people in the world, comments the young hero after he is attacked by a madman on a city street and of course he included the Bauers, who also attack -- and win -- because they try anything and stand by nothing. Nevertheless, I don't think "Duet for Cannibals" means to be a parable about the power of the insane over the sane, or the strong over the weak, or even the inventively absurd over the rational and passionate. I don't know what it does mean to be, and I am content for a while to rest with its moods and its complicated, often funny motions. But if the movie fails -- as I think it does -- to open up beyond the strength and the tact of its specific scenes, it invites that failure in the limitations of its own point of view and in its insistence on insoluble mystery to the point where mystery grows boring without getting less mysterious. The young couple's final escape offers relief of a rather low level -- mostly that the charade is over for them and us. The personal games increase in intensity, but nothing very much is at stake, and personality is never deeper than the next level of plausible disguise. "Duet for Cannibals" will be shown again at Alice Tully Hall on Friday at 6:30 P.M. http://www.nytimes.com/1969/09/25/books/booksspecial/sontag-duet.html --------------------------------- Screen: Sontag's 'Promised Lands' July 12, 1974 By NORA SAYRE Susan Sontag's film about Israel, "Promised Lands," which was made in October and November of 1973, isn't intended to be a documentary. However, that country's situation is just too factually complex to be treated as a tone poem. In an effort to eschew talking heads, there's a lot of voice-over narration, as people walk through the streets, but sometimes we don't know who's talking. There's some handsome photography -- especially of figures in landscapes -- although what's seen and what is said often don't go together, and many shots seem irrelevant. The movie opened yesterday at the First Avenue Screening Room. One's ready to be moved by the subject. But the viewer almost has to function as an editor, since the selection of the footage is so haphazard. Hence the emotions of or about Israel don't come through, even though glimpses of graveyards and corpses and the consciousness of Auschwitz, the lingering shock of the October attack and the awareness that the struggle between Arabs and Jews may be insoluble -- as one man says, "There's no solution to a tragedy" -- run through the marrow of the picture. Throughout, the ideas and the people and the machines of war are examined from a distance, as though everything had been observed through some kind of mental gauze. The Israelis -- particularly those in robes -- are filmed as if they were extremely foreign or exotic. Also, Israel seems like a nearly all-male country, since few women appear and none have been interviewed. There are a few sympathetic words for the Arabs, but their existence seems shadowy and abstract -- almost as bloodless as the statues in a wax museum devoted to Israeli history. Two scenes are particularly disturbing. At a mass burial, the camera rushes in on a weeping profile in a way that's intrusive -- because we've been given so little sense of the dead or even of the war. Later, in a hospital, a shell-shocked soldier relives his battlefield experiences under drugs, while a psychiatrist and the hospital staff recreate the noises of shooting and bombing. (This is said to be therapeutic for the patient. The staff looks as though it rather enjoys the task.) It should be devastating to watch this man burrow into the pillow, shudder, dive beneath the bed. But these moments have been filmed with such confusion that we can't respond to his suffering -- indeed, suffering's hardly conveyed in "Promised Lands." Because the movie is dull and badly organized, the war is made to seem unreal. Unlike Claude Lanzmann's very fine documentary, "Israel Why," which was shown at the 1973 New York Film Festival, the Sontag film won't increase your understanding of Israel. Perhaps the latter should have been a book instead of a film. http://www.nytimes.com/1974/07/12/books/booksspecial/sontag-lands.html --------------------------------- Novelist, radical Susan Sontag, 71, dies in New York Washington Times, 4.12.29 http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php From combined dispatches Susan Sontag, a critic, novelist and essayist who blamed America for the September 11 terror attacks and once declared that "the white race is the cancer of human history," died in New York yesterday at age 71. Mrs. Sontag died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. The hospital did not release the cause of death, although Mrs. Sontag was first treated for breast cancer in the 1970s. Mrs. Sontag was 31 when her essay "Notes on 'Camp' " established her as a prominent critic. Her essays on art, culture and politics were published in influential journals, including the New York Review of Books. "The white race is the cancer of human history," she wrote in a 1967 essay in Partisan Review. "It is the white race and it alone -- its ideologies and inventions -- which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself." Such comments led novelist Tom Wolfe to dismiss Mrs. Sontag as "just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review." An outspoken admirer of communist revolutionaries, including Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh and Cuba's Fidel Castro, Mrs. Sontag was a fierce opponent of U.S. foreign policy. She angered many Americans in 2001 when, less than two weeks after the terrorist hijackings of September 11, she wrote an article that suggested the United States deserved to be attacked. "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world,' " Mrs. Sontag wrote, "but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" She added: "In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of [the September 11] slaughter, they were not cowards." In 2000, Mrs. Sontag won the National Book Award for the historical novel "In America." Born Susan Rosenblatt in New York in 1933, she later described her childhood as "one long prison sentence." Her father died when she was 5, and her mother later married an Army officer, Capt. Nathan Sontag. At age 17, she married social psychologist Philip Rieff, then 28, just 10 days after meeting him at the University of Chicago. The couple had a son, David, born in 1952, but divorced in the 1960s. In later years, she described her lesbian relationship with photographer Annie Leibowitz as "an open secret." Ex-radical author David Horowitz noted yesterday that in 1969, he published the Sontag essay, "On the Right Way (For Us) to Love the Cuban Revolution" in Ramparts magazine. "There is no right way to love the Cuban Revolution. That was my second thought. It's a pity [Mrs. Sontag] never had second thoughts, too," Mr. Horowitz said. --------------- Telegraph: Susan Sontag http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/12/29/db2901.x ml&sSheet=/portal/2004/12/29/ixportal.html Susan Sontag (Filed: 29/12/2004) Susan Sontag, the American novelist and essayist who died yesterday aged 71, was a paragon of radical intelligence and austere beauty of whom it was said that, if she had not existed, the New York Review of Books would have had to invent her. Called "the most intelligent woman in America" by Jonathan Miller, Susan Sontag was a slow, unprolific writer who agonised over her work. In 25 years of grind, she produced six slender volumes of crafted essays. Published intially in popular magazines and periodicals, her work made intelligent criticism of modern culture acceptable and had a profound effect on future generations of authors, critics and journalists. Sontag's first essay, Notes on 'Camp' - an analysis of the preference of some people for tat rather than art - was published in the Partisan Review in 1964. Camp, she wrote, was a form of consumption that converted "bad" art such as comic strips into a source of refined pleasure, ignoring intention and relishing style. This sounded like an attack on elite culture, delivered with the skill and authority of someone well-educated in that culture. Added to her defence of such modernist icons as John Cage, Roland Barthes and Jean-Luc Godard, it earned Susan Sontag the titles "Queen Camp" and "the Natalie Wood of the avant garde". In fact, Susan Sontag's favourite author was Shakespeare, and she was at pains to point out that she did not want to promote bleak modernism for its own sake. "All my work says be serious, be passionate; wake up," she said. "You have to be a member of a capitalist society in the late 20th century to understand that seriousness itself could be in question." There were few strip cartoons in her own library. An avid reader from early childhood, she possessed a collection of 15,000 volumes and could talk fluently across the arts and humanities, on philosophy, literature, film, opera, neurology, psychology or church architecture. She always found time to read; she said that the memory of her drunken mother sleeping away her life provoked her to make do with four hours' sleep a night. Critics who denigrated her as "pseudo-intellectual" overlooked the fact that Susan Sontag employed her seriousness to defend the senses against the intellect. In Against Interpretation - the title of her first collection of essays published in 1966 - she damned Freudian and Marxist interpretation that "excavates; destroys; digs behind the text to find a subtext which is the true one". Interpretation destroyed energy and "sensual capability". It was the "revenge of intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of intellect upon the world." Despite her awesome abilities as a critic, Susan Sontag was at war with herself. In part, she wanted to be an unthinking, passionate artist. Early on she wrote two novels - The Benefactor (1963) and Death Kit (1967) - but these were more intellectual than passionate. As she grew older, the need to express herself grew stronger. It was not until 1992 that she felt she had done herself justice with her novel The Volcano Lover, a heady mixture of intellect and eroticism, about the love triangle between William Hamilton, his wife Emma and Lord Nelson. The book was "released" in Susan Sontag after a conversation with her psychiatrist in which she discovered that her difficulty in writing a popular novel came from a fear that giving readers pleasure might seem trivial. "What worried me was that I would not be writing essays, because they have a powerful ethical impulse," she said. "But my psychiatrist said: 'What makes you think it isn't a contribution to give people pleasure?'" Susan Sontag was born in Arizona on January 16 1933. Her father was a furrier with a business based in China, where he spent much of his time. Her mother, an alcoholic of great beauty, was so afraid of growing old that she forbade her daughters to call her "mother" in public. Susan and her sister lived most of their early childhood with an illiterate Irish nurse. When she was five, Susan's father died in China. Afterwards, her mother took to travelling a great deal. "I don't know where she went or what she did," Susan said. "I guess she had boyfriends.". The family became poor and moved to Los Angeles. Susan read books "to ward off the jovial claptrap of classmates and teachers, the maddening bromides I heard at home". By the age of seven she had read a six-volume edition of Les Mis?rables and had become a socialist. At 14 she took a schoolfriend to tea with Thomas Mann, then living in exile in Los Angeles. At Hollywood High, when Susan was 15, her principal told her that she had outstripped her teachers and sent her to Berkeley, from where she went to Chicago University. At 17 she married Philip Rieff, a lecturer in social theory 11 years her senior, after a 10-day courtship. She heard one student telling another that Rieff had married a "14-year old Indian". Rieff provided her with intellectual companionship. At Boston University he wrote about Freud while she took masters degrees in English and Philosophy and added an MA from Harvard. They had a son, David, but in 1958 the couple separated for a year when Sontag took up a fellowship at Oxford. There she was influenced by the teaching of Iris Murdoch and AJ Ayer, but found student life equally engrossing. "It was being young in a way I had never allowed myself to be," she recalled. On her return to America she divorced Rieff and set off for New York with her son, two suitcases and $70. Her lawyer told her she was the first woman in Californian history to have refused alimony. She taught at Columbia University while writing The Benefactor, and began working on the essays that would secure her reputation. In addition to Against Interpretation, she published the collections Styles Of Radical Will (1969); On Photography (1977); Illness As Metaphor (1978); Under The Sign Of Saturn (1980) and Aids and Its Metaphors (1989). She also wrote four films and appeared as herself in Zelig, Woody Allen's mock-documentary. The best of her essays conveyed dense thought in casual, almost thrown-away paragraphs and sentences. They were demanding in the same way that poetry is demanding; each learned reference was used as selectively as a poet might use images. Such pared-down elegance was the refined product of grim endeavour. An essay of a few thousand words took her six to nine months to write. "I've thousands of pages for a 30-page essay," she said, "30 or 40 drafts of each page." From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, Sontag lived in Paris. In 1976 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and returned to America. Ignoring the advice of American oncologists, she had radically high doses of chemotherapy for two and a half years; the odds were against her living. "I was terrified," she said. "Horrible grief. Above all, to leave my son. And I loved life so much. I was never tempted to say `that's it'. I love it when people fight for their lives." She never became rich from her writing, but was adept at securing grants and scholarships. In necessity, friends helped her out; the money for her cancer treatment was raised by Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books. It was not until The Volcano Lover that she acquired an agent; and only in 1990, when she was awarded a handsome MacArthur fellowship, was she secure enough to buy her apartment in New York. Susan Sontag had a high political profile. She visited Hanoi during the Vietnam war (after which she described the white race as "the cancer of human history") and in 1993 she directed a production of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo when that city was under siege. She was a vociferous critic of the Soviet Union - particularly in its treatment of writers - and was president of PEN in 1987. Days after the attacks of September 11 2001, she criticised American foreign policy, referring to the terrorists' behaviour as "an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions". She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Though known for her hauteur and not indifferent to her public image, Sontag avoided the "celebrity" circuit. Her highbrow attitude made enemies, foremost among them the American academic Camille Paglia, best-known for her enthusiasm for the pop singer Madonna. Paglia never forgave Sontag for snubbing her at a party in 1973. By the late 1980s she was declaring that her intellect had eclipsed Sontag's. "I've been chasing that bitch for 25 years," said Paglia, "and at last I've caught her." "We used to think Norman Mailer was bad," said Susan Sontag, "but she makes Norman Mailer look like Jane Austen." In 2000 she published a novel, In America, about the 19th century Polish actress Helena Modjeska. Although she was criticised for unauthorised use of source material, it won her the National Book Award. Susan Sontag never re-married, and her close relationships with several women provoked speculation; in 1999 she wrote an essay for Women, a compilation of portraits by her longtime friend, the photographer Annie Leibovitz. "I don't talk about my erotic life any more than I do my spiritual life," she said. "It is too complex and always ends up sounding so banal." She is survived by her son, David, whom she described as her "best friend". -------------------------- Guardian: Susan Sontag dies aged 71 http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5092982-103690,00.html Cultural critic called herself a 'zealot of seriousness' David Teather in New York and Sam Jones Wednesday December 29, 2004 Susan Sontag, the writer and activist whose powerful intellect helped shape modern American thinking for nearly half a century, died yesterday at the age of 71. Sontag had described herself as a "zealot of seriousness", championing the avant-garde as well as dissecting contemporary ideas and mores. Her writings covered a wide range of subjects from pornography to the aesthetics of fascism and science fiction films. She had also called herself a "besotted aesthete" and an "obsessed moralist". She died of leukaemia in a specialist cancer centre in New York, the city she was born in. Her outspokenness enraged as much as it attracted admiration. She was attacked for visiting Hanoi during the Vietnam war and declaring "the white race is the cancer of human history"; more recently she caused many to bristle with her comments following the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US. "In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of (the) slaughter, they were not cowards," she said. Lynne Segal, professor of gender studies at Birkbeck College, said: "She had had a particular resurgence over the last 10 years with her stand in criticism of the ongoing military activity in the world, whether from America or from the global growth in ethnic violence. "But long before that, she was one of the lone female Jewish voices to appear as some kind of authority in the shifting American cultural scene," she added. "She helped introduce the voices of those who had been outsiders in American society, like the Jews, and she became part of a new cutting edge cultural elite." Sontag, showered with awards during her career, wrote 17 books, first attracting attention and critical acclaim with her 1964 Notes on Camp. The book helped to introduce the notion that something can be "so bad it's good". "She was very clever at taking something that was part of a cultish interest - like the gay male - and turning it into her own interest," said the writer Andrea Dworkin. She penned four novels, winning the American National Book Award in 2000 for In America, a portrait of the nation on the cusp of modernity in the west of 1876. Her short story The Way We Live Now, published in 1987, was recently chosen for inclusion in an anthology titled The Best American Short Stories of the Century. The story charted the varying responses of a group of people in New York when they discover a close friend has Aids. Ms Sontag's impact, however, has been most keenly felt as an essayist. "The non-fiction was where she was strongest and it is the non-fiction that people will keep reading," said Dworkin. Her works included Illness as Metaphor, in which she condemned the trend of transferring responsibility of diseases such as cancer to the victim, making them feel they have brought the suffering on themselves. She wrote the essay after her own bout with cancer in her breast, lymphatic system and leg. After being diagnosed in 1976 she underwent a mastectomy and was pronounced free of the disease. She wrote and directed four films and penned the play Alice In Bed. Her most recent theatre work was a staging of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in the summer of 1993 in besieged Sarajevo. An impassioned human rights activist, she led campaigns on behalf of persecuted or imprisoned writers and helped galvanise support for Salman Rushdie after his Satanic Verses brought a fatwa from Iranian clerics. Sontag had a degree from the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature and theology at Harvard and Saint Anne's College, Oxford. -------------- Guardian: Susan Sontag http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5093053-111261,00.html Obituary _________________________________________________________________ Susan Sontag The Dark Lady of American intellectual life, an aesthete who reorientated its cultural horizons Eric Homberger Wednesday December 29, 2004 Susan Sontag, the "Dark Lady" of American intellectual life for over four decades, has died of cancer. She was 71. Sontag was a tall, handsome, fluent and articulate woman. She settled in New York, where she lived, off and on, after separating from her husband, the social thinker Philip Rieff, in 1959, and her career went stellar there. Sontag belonged to the small number of women writers and intellectuals, led by Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt and Elizabeth Hardwick, who gave New York life its brilliance, without becoming a "New York Intellectual". She regarded all provincialisms, of Paris, Oxford or New York, as uninteresting. Even America failed to engage her. "I don't like America enough to want to live anywhere else except Manhattan. And what I like about Manhattan is that it's full of foreigners. The America I live in is the America of the cities. The rest is just drive-through." Her first collection of essays, Against Interpretation, published in 1966, was followed in 1969 by Styles Of Radical Will. Under The Sign Of Saturn appeared in 1980, and the long-awaited Where The Stress Falls in 2001. Her passions were for cinema (preferably European), photography, European writers and philosophers, and for aesthetic pronunciamentos of a particular pugnacity. Despite a brimming and tartly phrased political sensibility, she was fundamentally an aesthete. She offered a reorientation of American cultural horizons. On Style, the title essay in her first collection, plus Notes On Camp, set out an economy of culture which was moral without being moralistic, and began a radical displacement of heterosexuality. It was a gay sensibility that she interpreted, and that shaped her response to the visual arts. It was also the central focus of her emotional life. But she remained essentially private, and when she wrote about herself, there was always an element of self-distancing. In a culture expecting easy intimacies from its great figures, she was aloof, poised, posed: she was camera-friendly. But you never could claim to know Sontag, however much New York was alive with gossip about her loves, her ex-loves, her next book. She moved readily from references to philosophers, poets, literary theoreticians and film auteurs. Reviewers were, rightly, dazzled. Though she changed her mind repeatedly, it was always done with style and conviction. If you wanted to argue with Sontag, you had to enter into her work in terms of the way a stance, a position, made sense as an intervention. Sontag dismissed Leni Reifenstahl in 1975, after the photographer had put in decades of work on her rehabilitation - all of which were ruined by the cool brilliance of Sontag's analysis of the allure of fascism. "The color is black," she wrote in Fascinating Fascism, "the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death." Her astringent attack against interpretation ("the project of interpretation is largely reactionary") carried an aesthete's preference for readers, or consumers, to leave works of art alone, not to seek to replace them with something else. This was not a view that found favour among Deconstructionists, but Sontag was indifferent to the corporate earnestness of Yale or Harvard. Born Susan Rosenblatt in New York in 1933, she was the daughter of a fur trader. When he died in 1938, her mother Mildred, and sister Judith (who suffered from asthma) left New York in search of warmer weather. Settling in Miami, and then Tucson, Arizona, they arrived in Los Angeles in 1945 when Mildred married army captain Nathan Sontag. Susan was never formally adopted, though she took his name. She had a deeply solitary and precocious childhood. Intimacy was not the Sontag family style, and she grew up without a gift for small talk, and little gaiety. There was little encouragement to the life of the mind. At North Hollywood high, she was remembered for her style and self-confidence. Sontag attended the University of California, Berkeley, for a semester, before in 1949, at the age of 16, she was admitted to the University of Chicago, where she formed strong bonds with teachers including critic Kenneth Burke and political philosopher Leo Strauss, intellectual father of the current neoconservatives. Sontag had a gift for cultivating men of influence and intellectual power. Later, at Harvard, Paul Tillich became her mentor. But it was a younger teacher at the University of Chicago, sociologist Philip Rieff, whom she married. As a 17-year-old sophomore she walked into his class on Kafka, late. He asked for her name when the class ended. Ten days they were married. Their son David, a writer, was born in 1952. She moved with Rieff to Boston after graduating in 1951. Their marriage had intense conversations but little intimacy. Sontag took a master's degree in philosophy at Harvard, and in 1957 won a fellowship to study for a year at St Anne's College, Oxford. She hated Oxford's sexism, and by Christmas had relocated to Paris, falling in with the expatriate American community around the Paris Review. She met the writer Alfred Chester, who introduced her to Robert Silvers. He provided Sontag with an incomparable platform when the New York Review of Books was launched in 1963. In Paris, Sontag made serious efforts to engage with French film-making, philosophy and writing. Returning to America in 1958, and met by Rieff at the airport, she told him before they got into the car that she wanted a divorce. Reclaiming her son, who had been living with Rieff's parents, she declined Rieff's offers of child support or alimony, moved into a small apartment, took an editorial job on Commentary, and wrote furiously. A self-conscious first novel, The Benefactor (1963) in the nouveau roman style, was accepted by Robert Giroux. Roger Straus, the senior partner of the publishers Farrar, Straus & Giroux, took her under his wing, kept her novels in print (The Death Kit appeared in 1967), and acted as literary impresario. She was invited to the important parties, and appeared regularly in leading literary journals. In 1965 she remarked, in a Partisan Review symposium, that "the white race is the cancer of human history". The age of radical chic had arrived, and Sontag - serious, gorgeous, striding across New Yorkintellectual life, was its most striking adornment. In 1968, indignant at the US role in Vietnam, she visited Hanoi, and published an account of it, Trip To Hanoi. In the early 1970s, Sontag began to write about photog raphy, in a series of essays in the New York Review of Books. She was gripped by the problems, principally aesthetic, of interpreting images. The further she explored, the stronger became her doubts about whether photographs gave what they seemed to be delivering: a slice of truth, a piece of reality. In a gesture of immense self-confidence, her book On Photography (1977) did not contain a single photograph as specimen or illustration. She later returned to many of its themes in Regarding The Pain Of Others (2003), a thinner book, perhaps more directly shaped by her life as a public person, giving learned lectures to large audiences. Many of the most provocative arguments of On Photography were abandoned in the later book. Her studies of languages of illness, Illness As Metaphor, (1978) and AIDS And Its Metaphors (1989) were writ ten under the shadow of her diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer, for which she sought experimental therapy in Paris. In 1998 she was diagnosed with a rare form of uterine cancer, from which she has died. In her studies of language and illness, she sought to remove the second punishment, of blame, that the metaphors of illness sustain. Her career as a novelist came full circle in 1992, when she published Volcano Lover, and In America, winner of the National Book award in 2000. Drawing on historical sources, and written with little of the spirit of her earlier novels, they brought her to a wider readership, but did not have much of the provocative rigour of her essays. Her son survives her. Susan Sontag, writer, born January 16 1933; died December 28 2004 ------------------ Guardian: 'A courageous and unique thinker' http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5093065-111261,00.html Wednesday December 29, 2004 There were tributes yesterday to Susan Sontag from fellow writers and academics: Margaret Atwood, writer: "She was a unique and courageous woman. Even if you didn't agree with her, she was always courageous and always a unique thinker. She always made you think. What made her unique? She wasn't like anyone else. "Whatever she set her mind to - whatever she'd come up with - it wasn't going to be the received opinion. She ran received opinion through the shredder and looked at things again. She was a grown-up emperor's new clothes child. When kids say the emperor's naked, you tell them they shouldn't say those things in public. When adults say it, they get in a lot of trouble - and she didn't mind getting into trouble." Lisa Jardine, professor of English and dean of the faculty of arts at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, and an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge: "It's the end of an era for women. She will leave behind an incredible legacy - everything from self-fulfilment to the morality, or lack of morality, of illness. And I think it will be an all-round legacy. The essays fill out the fiction." Andrea Dworkin, writer: "She did phenomenal work on the camera and how it looks at people, and made a very fine film about Israel and Palestine. But she also wrote several novels that she wanted to be taken seriously as art. I think the fact that they weren't was a consequence of her being a woman." Lynne Segal, professor of gender studies at Birkbeck college: "She helped introduce the voices of those who had been outsiders in American society, like the Jews, and she became part of a new cutting-edge cultural elite. "She wasn't strongly identified with feminism until much later on because, like many mid-century women, she was ambivalent about it. Many feminists would probably have been suspicious of her stand, but she softened as she aged and talked about the vulnerability of illness and of ageing itself." Elizabeth Wurtzel, writer: "She got to have that kind of life where she could write essays for both academics and normal people. I think her passing is very sad for what she was, as much as for what she wrote. "I think it's her essays that she will be remembered for, but I always liked her fiction. It's not about whether her essays were better than her fiction; it's about the fact that she was able to do both." ---------------------- Guardian: A fighter armed with a pen http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5093064-111261,00.html Sam Jones Wednesday December 29, 2004 To some she was "a political pilgrim", to others a "liberal lioness", but there was never debate about Susan Sontag's first love: the written word. Born in New York in January 1933, she spent her formative years in Arizona and Los Angeles poring over Shakespeare, Hopkins, Hugo, Poe and Mann. However, it was only after reading Jack London's Martin Eden that she decided to become a writer. "I got through my childhood," she told the Paris Review, "in a delirium of literary exaltations." At 16 she began studying at the University of Chicago, where she met and married Philip Rieff, a 28-year-old social theory lecturer. They had a son, David, when she was 19 but divorced in 1959 Her studies took her on to Harvard and then Oxford, laying the foundations of what she later termed "probably the best university education on the planet". Sontag wrote novels, non-fiction books, plays and film-scripts as well as essays. From 1987 to 1989 she was president of the Pen American Centre, the writers' organisation, where she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecuted writers. Salman Rushdie, the current Pen president, expressed his gratitude for her backing over the fatwa issued against him in 1989 for his book The Satanic Verses. "Her resolute support, at a time when some wavered helped to turn the tide against what she called 'an act of terrorism against the life of the mind'." She caused outrage after the 9/11 attacks by writing in the New Yorker: "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilisation' or 'liberty' or 'humanity or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" ----------------------- Guardian: Snap judgments http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4704477-110428,00.html James Fenton on how Susan Sontag has adjusted her thinking on photography James Fenton Saturday July 5, 2003 I was surprised to read this, in Susan Sontag's admirable essay on war photography, Regarding the Pain of Others: "Only starting with the Vietnam war is it virtually certain that none of the best-known photographs were set-ups." I don't say this certainty is misplaced. But the thought surprised me. In earlier days, participants seem to have thought nothing of, for instance, "reconstructing" the famous moment of the raising of the stars and stripes on Iwo Jima, for the sake of the camera. But Sontag suggests that photographers are now "being held to a higher standard of journalistic probity". And she adds that, since the arrival of television crews on the battlefield, "the witnessing of war is now hardly ever a solitary venture". And "the practice of inventing dramatic news pictures, staging them for the camera, seems on its way to becoming a lost art". What surprised me was the notion that this raising of journalistic standards had its origin in Vietnam - in, as the context makes clear, the practice of American and other western photographers. It is the western news editors and picture desks who must have pressed for a harsh ban on staged news photographs. It is they who must have made faking it a sacking offence. The North Vietnamese, during this period, were not in the least associated with that sort of realism in their photojournalism. Anything that came out of North Vietnam would have been carefully weighed for its propaganda value, and that included a 1950s documentary on Dien Bien Phu in which the French prisoners of war were made to re-enact their moment of surrender for the sake of the film cameras. Sometimes an event can really have taken place, and yet the photograph of it can turn into a deception. In the Philippines, during the revolution that overthrew President Marcos in 1986, a handsome young priest in a white soutane stood with his arms outstretched in the middle of a road, supposedly defying the tanks. He was facing the setting sun, and the beautiful image was widely used. My Filipino photographer colleagues used to laugh at this photograph which, when you saw it in all its glory, clearly showed in the foreground the lengthened shadows of a row of photographers and cameramen who must have been standing between the priest and the "tanks", which were anyway rather less than tanks and more like armoured cars. The photograph, to my friends, showed an exhibitionist putting on a display of defiance for the sake of the press. (My friends were envious, of course, not to have taken the snap themselves.) Sontag discusses the famous photograph from the Tet offensive in Saigon, 1968, in which General Loan executes a Vietcong prisoner, with a single shot to the temple. In a sense, as she says, this photograph too was staged, since Loan led the prisoner out on to the street where the journalists were gathered, and would not, she believes, "have carried out the summary execution there had they not been available to witness it". The general was making an example of the prisoner. Neil Davies, a famous cameraman in his day (who ended by filming his own death on the streets of Bangkok, during an abortive coup) told me a curious anecdote about this notorious incident. If you watch the film of this execution, you believe that what you see is a man screwing up his face in anticipation of death, another man firing the shot, the blood pouring from the head wound and the body slumping to the ground. You think you witness a complete execution, and this is both horrible and a kind of initiation. But in fact at the moment the shot was fired someone stood between the cameraman (whose name I forget) and the victim, blocking the view for a few seconds. When the film was processed in the studio, the offending moment soon hit the cutting-room floor. Spliced together, the footage was utterly remarkable. The subliminal jerkiness resulting from the cut moment is a part of what makes you think: this is what it is like to be killed, this is how fragile the body is, how powerfully the force of the shot pushes it to one side. You think this is the ultimate reality. But reality has been tidied up for you in this important respect. Regarding the Pain of Others was written in part out of an argument with the author's former self, with certain passages in that famous earlier book, On Photography, in which Sontag wrote, for instance, that "concerned" photography had "done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it". Our capacity to respond to images of suffering was being, on that view, "sapped by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling images". But this time around, Sontag has her own experience of Sarajevo very much in mind, and she particularly dislikes a kind of "fancy rhetoric" that downplays the reality of war and pretends that everything has turned into spectacle. Reality is not to be downplayed in this way. At the heart of the issues concerning photography and conscience there are real people, actually suffering. "To speak of reality becoming a spectacle," she says, "is breath-taking provincialism." Regarding the Pain of Others, by Susan Sontag, is published by Hamish Hamilton on August 7 --------------------- Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Observer review: Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,6121, 1011239,00.html What the eye can't see... A censorious Susan Sontag reproves our lust for horrific images in her second book on photography, Regarding the Pain of Others Peter Conrad Sunday August 3, 2003 Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag Hamish Hamilton ?12.99, pp128 This is Susan Sontag's second book on photography and, like the first, published in 1977, it contains no photographs. Omission or suppression? Sontag is concerned with photography's prurient intrusiveness, its surreal dislocation of reality, its irrelevant aestheticism. Actual photographs are of less interest to her, and are mentioned, in stern verbal paraphrase, only to be reproved for their untrustworthiness. Her earlier book concluded with a call for 'an ecology of images', censuring and perhaps censoring the visual stimuli with which a consumerist society assaults us. She remembers that resonant, impotent demand in Regarding the Pain of Others, and admits that it will never happen. No 'Committee of Guardians' is going to reform news media that enjoy disaster, gloat over horror and operate on the principle that 'If it bleeds, it leads'. Those media have trained us only too well, and we now instinctively transform an intolerable, unintelligible reality into fiction. People who watched the planes slice through the World Trade Centre, or witnessed the collapse of the towers, agreed that the scene was 'unreal' and compared it with an action movie; the Pentagon caters to this craving for scenarios that are apocalyptic but ultimately harmless by deciding in advance on blockbusting titles for its wars, such as Operation Desert Storm. Sontag retells the familiar stories about photographs that sanitise or falsify the conflict they are supposed to be documenting. In the Crimea, Roger Fenton represented war as a 'dignified all-male outing', avoiding all evidence of carnage: in the valley through which the Light Brigade charged, he supervised the placing of cannonballs on the road. In 1945, the Russian victors hoisting the Red Flag over the Reichstag in Berlin took direction from a Soviet war photographer who dreamt up this iconic moment. Having been drip-fed fantasies and outright lies, how can we properly respond to the remote, exotic miseries on which photographic journalists report? In our 'culture of spectatorship', have we lost the power to be shocked? The pain of others titillates us, so long as it is kept at a safe distance. The victims of famine and massacre are always, as Neville Chamberlain dismissively said of the Poles, people we do not know; when genocide recurred during the Bosnian war, we were reminded that the Balkans should not be considered part of Europe. The young Afghan refugee photographed by Steve McCurry for National Geographic became, a poster girl for atrocity; we could see her pain but not feel it. Sontag blames the eyes' indiscriminate lust, claiming 'the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked'. Her book, unillustrated, caters to neither hunger (though she does tantalisingly describe a photograph that obsessed the perverse philosopher Georges Bataille, in which a Chinese criminal, while being chopped up and slowly flayed by executioners, rolls his eyes heavenwards in transcendent bliss). Words are Sontag's antidote to images. Hence her argument that the war photographs of Robert Capa or David Seymour belong in newspapers, where they are 'surrounded by words', rather than in magazines, which juxtapose them with glossy advertising images: the explanatory verbiage is a bulwark, and turns the fickle viewer into a reflective, questioning reader. If you ask me, she has too much faith in the veracity of scribbling hacks. I'm also unconvinced by her contention that images can easily be conscripted as the 'totems of causes', because 'sentiment is more likely to crystallise around a photograph than around a verbal slogan'. Again, her self-denying ordinance prevents her showing any evidence. Before photography, revolutions were instigated by verbal slogans, contagiously chanted by crowds: 'No Taxation without Representation' in 1776, or 'Libert?, Egalit?, Fraternit?' in 1789. Sontag gives us nothing to look at, so I cannot see that anything has changed. At the end of the book, she proposes that 'photographs with the most solemn or heart-rending subject matter' - Matthew Brady's dead soldiers from the Civil War, the walking cadavers at Buchenwald and Dachau photographed by Margaret Bourke-White and Lee Miller, perhaps also Nicholas Nixon's Aids victims - should not be exhibited in galleries or museums, where like 'all wall-hung or floor-supported art' they become incidental to a stroll, displayed as if they were plates on a sushi railway which we can sample or ignore as we please. The 'weight and seriousness' of images like these is more aptly honoured privately in sober silence, she believes, in a book. I hope she does not mean the book - or booklet - she has written. Regarding the Pain of Others is serious enough, but hardly weighty. It is short, and by rights should be a good deal shorter: it derives from an Amnesty lecture, and labours to amplify and relentlessly repeat its original argument. Perhaps I am not being entirely just to a writer I usually admire. The book, I should admit, does contain a single photograph. You can find it on the inside back flap of the jacket, and it shows Sontag herself - a mater dolorosa whose grieving face is framed by a sleek cascade of time-defying jet-black hair - posed next to a wall beside the Seine near the Ile de la C?t?. The photographer is her close friend, Annie Leibovitz, who specialises in the glamorous consecration of celebs for the covers of Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. In her starchy text, Sontag says that 'beautifying is one classic operation of the camera', and regrets the vanity of people who are 'always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering'. By including Leibovitz's portrait, she has exempted herself from her own rule. Do her 30,000 words really balance or outweigh the missing images? It all depends on how you regard the vanity of others, or how much pain you want to cause by telling the truth. -------------------------- WP: Cultural Author, Activist Was a Fearless Thinker http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31194-2004Dec28?language=print er By Adam Bernstein Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, December 29, 2004; Page A01 Susan Sontag, 71, the American intellectual who engaged and enraged equally with her insights into high and low culture, died yesterday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She had leukemia. Philosophy, photography, pornography -- Sontag explored them all with a defiant gusto, informed by an impressive, if lofty, ability to transcend cultural barriers with a barrage of literary and cultural references. She was not averse to self-promotion and indicated that she was one of the few writers able to survive as an essayist. Her books seldom went out of print and were translated into more than 25 languages. She spoke five. Reading by age 3, having tea and cookies with author and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann at 14 and graduating from college at 18, she went on to a long career as a provocateur through dozens of novels and nonfiction works. Cumulatively, they placed her among the foremost thinkers about the meaning of art, politics, war, silence and humanity. She wrote movingly but unsentimentally about her own experiences with cancer -- of the breast at age 43 and the uterus decades later -- and how disease is portrayed in popular culture. Her essay "Illness as Metaphor" (1978) is considered her classic exploration of the subject. Tall, raven-haired with a streak of white, with bold dark eyes and a wry smile, Sontag was a recognizable figure in the mainstream media firmament through lectures and televised debates. She shoved herself to the forefront of contemporaneous debate with her activism against the Vietnam War -- including a trip to Hanoi -- and later denunciations of Communism as stifling the work of intellectuals. Along the way, she raised her voice against authoritarian -- and sometimes democratic -- leaders around the world. In the early 1990s, she staged Samuel Beckett's existential masterpiece "Waiting for Godot" in Sarajevo amid bombing and sniper fire. Sontag won the National Book Award for fiction in 2000 for "In America," about a 19th-century Polish actress who moves to California to start a new life. The author also received a MacArthur "genius" grant, among other honors. Much of her early distinction arose in the 1960s with her advocacy of European artists and thinkers, including philosophers Simone Weil and Walter Benjamin and filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. Occasionally, she caused palpitations among the fervently patriotic for her less-nuanced commentary, to the effect that "America is founded on genocide" and "the quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth." More recently, she wrote in the New Yorker about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, denouncing the use of the word "cowardly" to describe the attackers. "In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of the . . . slaughter, they were not cowards," she wrote. Those declarations were easy fodder for those ready to scorn her as anti-American or a liberal scourge. Time magazine made her a pop celebrity in 1964 when it noted her Partisan Review essay, "Notes On 'Camp,' " in which she plunged into the world of urban and mostly homosexual style. Mentioning the ballet "Swan Lake" along with the fashion accouterment of feather boas, she wrote that camp style is "serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious. . . . The ultimate camp statement: it's good because it's awful." But her work appeared largely in literary journals, including the New York Review of Books. She was elevated to near-sainthood by her admirers, who considered her an unstoppable literary force and crystalline thinker. Writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Susan Walker described Sontag's career as "marked by a seriousness of pursuit and a relentless intelligence that analyzes modern culture on almost every possible level: artistic, philosophical, literary, political, and moral." But she also was lampooned for the headiness of her writing. In a backhanded tribute to her influence in popular culture, the baseball catcher played by Kevin Costner in the 1988 film "Bull Durham" calls her handful of novels "self-indulgent, overrated crap." Sontag's own motivations were simple, she said: to "know everything." She had a lusty devotion to reading that she likened to the pleasure others get from watching television. "So when I go to a Patti Smith concert, I enjoy, participate, appreciate and am tuned in better because I've read Nietzsche," she told Rolling Stone magazine. "The main reason I read is that I enjoy it." Susan Rosenblatt was born Jan. 16, 1933, in New York, the older daughter of a traveling fur trader and an alcoholic teacher. She was raised in Tucson and Los Angeles and was largely left alone as a young girl, she later told an interviewer. Raised by a nanny in her parents' absences, she was 5 when her mother came back from China alone. Her father had died of tuberculosis, and her mother revealed the truth months later only after the girl pressed for details about his return. She took the surname Sontag from her stepfather. Sontag described a girlhood bereft of playmates. Instead, she devoured Djuna Barnes, Shakespeare, Victor Hugo and Jack London. "I got through my childhood," she told the Paris Review, "in a delirium of literary exaltations." She met Thomas Mann after reading the German author's 1924 novel "The Magic Mountain," set in a European sanitarium. On a second read, she spoke the words aloud and was so enthused about the book that she conspired with a friend to meet the author, then living in Los Angeles in exile during the Nazi era. "He seemed to find it perfectly normal that two local high school students should know who Nietzsche and [composer Arnold] Schoenberg were," she wrote in a New Yorker account of the visit. Her stepfather warned her that being so interested in books would make her uninteresting to men. "I just couldn't stop laughing," she once said. "I thought, 'Oh gosh, this guy's a perfect jerk.' " Before graduating from the University of Chicago in 1951 with a bachelor's degree in philosophy, she married Philip Rieff, a sociologist 10 years her senior whom she would divorce in 1959. They had a son, David Rieff of New York, who survives, along with Sontag's sister. After Chicago, Sontag received master's degrees in English and philosophy from Harvard University and did all but her dissertation for a doctorate in philosophy. Her first book, "Freud: The Mind of the Moralist" (1959), was completed in collaboration with her husband. They agreed, however, to put only his name on the title page. Still, she described this time as liberating. She was 26, divorced and ready to experience what she described as a delayed adolescence filled with dance lessons, discussions with politically motivated young people and a desire to make a literary mark. She taught religion at Columbia University before completing her first novel, "The Benefactors" (1963), the study of a dreamy rogue named Hippolyte who soon cannot tell reality from his own imagination. It impressed reviewers, and she began cornering magazine editors, sometimes at cocktail parties, about publishing her work. Her analysis, for the Nation magazine, of Jack Smith's erotically flamboyant film "Flaming Creatures" (1963) brought her attention as an enthusiastic filmwatcher but caustic observer of American morality, which she saw as preventing a full-blown appreciation of the film's "aesthetic vision." Her early essays, including "Notes on 'Camp,' " were collected in "Against Interpretation" (1966), her first major nonfiction book. She argued against critics who hunted for heady significance in a work of art at the expense of its sensual impact. "In most modern instances," she wrote, "interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art." As a radical and incisive thinker, she protested and wrote against the Vietnam War, visiting Hanoi to understand the motivations of the Vietnamese resistance to the U.S. military. She began examining the presentation of disease in popular culture after her diagnosis of cancer in her breast, lymphatic system and leg and was given a 20 percent chance of survival. She underwent a radical mastectomy and chemotherapy that cured her of the cancer. In "Illness as Metaphor" and her book "AIDS and Its Metaphors" (1989), as well as countless interviewers, she condemned the idea of illness as a curse or plague, somehow a metaphor for social, cultural or moral decay. Illness is simply fact, she said. Despite other health conditions, she remained productive, producing a best-selling novel, "The Volcano Lover" (1992), about Lord Nelson and his mistress, Lady Hamilton. She spent much of her life in transit, living in Paris, Berlin and elsewhere while maintaining a home in what she considered the only livable spot in the United States -- New York. "And what I like about Manhattan is that it's full of foreigners," she said. A restless voyager into the 1990s, she staged "Waiting for Godot" in Sarajevo. Even those who best understood her questioned her sanity to thrust herself into a war zone for the sake of art. "I didn't think I was invulnerable, because I had a couple of very close calls, and I don't think I'm a thrill-seeker," she said. "I just thought it's okay to take risks, and if ever I get to the point when I don't, then take me to the glue factory." ----------------------- WP: Thinking Woman http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32435-2004Dec28?language=print er Susan Sontag Was An Irresistible Force Among Intellectuals By Henry Allen Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, December 29, 2004; Page C01 I first saw Susan Sontag in a New York bodega near the corner of 103rd Street and Broadway. This was in 1969. My God, I thought, that's Susan Sontag, the most public of our public intellectuals -- though perhaps not the most intellectual of them, if you listened to her critics. And there she was, studying the ice cream case with a calm, judgmental ferocity -- a tall woman with long, thick hair. She looked strong, for an intellectual, strong and big-chinned to the point of a slight mannishness that I did not hold against her -- androgyny being a sort of psychological beauty spot that can heighten the allure of the woman possessing it. I believe she wore a very long scarf that signaled her citizenship in bohemia. She was almost, but not quite, what I was shopping for in a woman. I thought of speaking to her, of saying something like: "What are you doing in this grungy neighborhood when you're supposed to be down in the Village sipping wine beneath someone's groaning bookshelves; with Cream on the turntable, and blended scents of cat pee, pipe smoke and marijuana in the air; and you talking about the gay-driven fashion of facetiousness you described in the essay that made you famous: "Notes on Camp"? She extracted a few pints of Haagen-Dazs, I think it was, from the cooler. Good taste in ice cream. I wanted to ask her if it was true she didn't own a television. I wanted to ask her about her writing, but I'd read so little of it. I wanted to ask her if she was as stoned as I was. I didn't ask her anything. She paid for her ice cream (Oh if I could only remember the flavors! Rum raisin? She seemed like a secondary-flavor type who would eschew the primary chocolate, strawberry and vanilla -- with a slight chance that she would eat only vanilla, for its minimalist authenticity.) I watched her out the door and sighed to myself: "There it is: my Susan Sontag moment." Why did I care so much? Would I have gotten as worked up if I'd shared a bodega with Hannah Arendt or Alfred Kazin? Sontag, who died Tuesday at the age of 71, had the gift of fame, which is to say she possessed charisma, which may be why she ended up being called overrated, the fate of charismatic people. I had read more about her than by her. An Internet biography site quotes the cranky Hilton Kramer in the Atlantic Monthly: "She was admired not only for what she said but for the pain, shock, and disarray she caused in saying it. Sontag thus succeeded in doing something that is given to very few critics to achieve. She made criticism a medium of intellectual scandal, and this won her instant celebrity in the world where ideas are absorbed into fashions and fashions combine to create a new cultural atmosphere." Also quoted is Commentary essayist Alicia Ostriker, saying that Sontag was "distinguished less by a decided or passionate point of view -- than by an eagerness to explore anything new." She concluded: "Sensitive people are a dime a dozen. The rarer gift Miss Sontag has to offer is brains." Sontag wrote essays about Sartre and novels about the nature of consciousness. She had a taste for the crepuscular haunts of the psyche. After a struggle with breast cancer she wrote one of her most talked-about books, "Illness as Metaphor," about how we make far-fetched meaning out of illness and blame people for their diseases. Another was "On Photography," the most morbid of our art forms. Critic Robert Hughes is quoted as saying: "It is hard to imagine any photographer agreeing point for point with Sontag's polemic. But it is a brilliant, irritating performance, and it opens window after window on one of the great faits accomplis of our culture. Not many photographers are worth a thousand of her words." Denis Donoghue said in the New York Times Book Review: "Her mind is powerful rather than subtle; it is impatient with nuances that ask to be heard, with minute discriminations that, if entertained, would impede the march of her argument." She won prizes, wandered into moviemaking and playwriting, and wrote about science fiction and pornography. Also, she was profiled in Rolling Stone and People magazines, she posed for an ad for Absolut vodka and she appeared in films by Andy Warhol and Woody Allen. I kept reading about her changes of mind, changes made with a blitheness concealed by her conspicuous gravitas: changes on communism (good, bad), Hitler's staff photographer, Leni Riefenstahl (good, bad). In a speech at Town Hall in 1982, delivered to an audience of New York intellectuals, she had the deftness to insert the knife between their panting, left-leaning ribs and then twist it with: "Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only the Nation or the New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?" Oh, the broadsides against her! And the counter-broadsides! In my mind, at least, she metamorphosed from intellectual flavor-of-the-month to anti-Vietnam war provocateur to a template for the life of the mind. (I read somewhere recently that she had acquired a television but never watched it.) Gradually, she calcified into an icon, a sort of walking statue who didn't so much go to parties as appear at them. As for me, I gradually had gotten into the criticism game, and in 1998, I found myself at the 35th anniversary party of the New York Review of Books, in the atrium of the Frick mansion in Manhattan. I hoped -- I knew -- she'd be there. She was -- with a magnificent stripe of white through her still-long hair. (I read that she later switched to a Gertrude Stein crew cut.) She swanned through the crowd of intellectual superstars, projecting what only Queen Elizabeth II had conveyed before to me: "Do not speak to me unless I speak to you first." I obeyed. Everybody seemed to obey. I'm not sure I saw her talk with anyone, though she must have. In any case, I saw that no one has ever or will ever do a better job of being Susan Sontag. Maybe she didn't deserve all the laurels that came with that high station, but she was, in fact, Susan Sontag, an epitome of her age, what cultural historians call a "modal personality," a woman who thought hard and wrote even harder. I wanted to ask her, "You probably don't remember, but in 1969 you were buying ice cream in a bodega at 103rd and Broadw. . . " I forbore. There was nothing that I wanted to talk to her about, and there hadn't been two decades before. I just wanted her to be Susan Sontag. Maybe I wanted her to want to talk to me, but I realized with a wistful realism that there was no reason she would. There we were, ships that once passed in the fluorescent night of a bodega. Maybe if I'd just handed her a pint of Haagen-Dazs rum raisin, and walked away. Maybe vanilla. ----------------------- Los Angeles Times: Ardent Author, Activist, Critic Dies at 71 http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-sontag29dec29,1,5996360,pri nt.story?coll=la-news-obituaries SUSAN SONTAG / 1933-2004 Ardent Author, Activist, Critic Dies at 71 Intensely curious and intellectual, she long challenged conventional thinking in her writing. By Steve Wasserman Times Staff Writer December 29, 2004 Susan Sontag, one of America's most influential intellectuals, internationally renowned for the passionate engagement and breadth of her critical intelligence and her ardent activism in the cause of human rights, died Tuesday of leukemia at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, according to her son, David Rieff. She was 71. The author of 17 books translated into 32 languages, she vaulted to public attention and critical acclaim with the 1964 publication of "Notes on Camp," written for Partisan Review and included in "Against Interpretation," her first collection of essays, published two years later. Sontag wrote about subjects as diverse as pornography and photography, the aesthetics of silence and the aesthetics of fascism, bunraku puppet theater and the choreography of Balanchine, as well as crafting portraits of such writers and intellectuals as Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Elias Canetti. Sontag was a fervent believer in the capacity of art to delight, to inform, to transform. "We live in a culture," she said, "in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. "In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying." In a Rolling Stone article in 1979, Jonathan Cott called Sontag a writer who was "continually examining and testing out her notion that supposed oppositions like thinking and feeling, consciousness and sensuousness, morality and aesthetics can in fact simply be looked at as aspects of each other -- much like the pile on the velvet that, upon reversing one's touch, provides two textures and two ways of feeling, two shades and two ways of perceiving." A self-described "besotted aesthete" and "obsessed moralist," Sontag sought to challenge conventional thinking. "From the moment I met Susan Sontag in 1962, I felt myself to be in the presence of a woman of astonishing intelligence and the most exemplary literary passions," novelist Carlos Fuentes told The Times on Tuesday. "I admired her work and her life without reservation." She was born Jan. 16, 1933, in New York City and raised in Tucson and Los Angeles, the daughter of a schoolteacher mother and a fur trader father who died in China of tuberculosis during the Japanese invasion when Sontag was 5. She was a graduate of North Hollywood High School and attended UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago -- which she entered when she was 16 -- and Harvard and Oxford. In 1950, while at the University of Chicago, she met and 10 days later married Philip Rieff, a 28-year-old instructor in social theory. Two years later, at age 19, she had a son, David, now a prominent writer. She divorced in 1959 and never remarried. Sontag was reading by 3. In her teens, her passions were Gerard Manley Hopkins and Djuna Barnes. The first book that thrilled her was "Madame Curie," which she read when she was 6. She was stirred by the adventure-travel books of Richard Halliburton and the Classic Comics rendition of Shakespeare's "Hamlet." The first novel that affected her was Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables." "I sobbed and wailed and thought [books] were the greatest things," she recalled. "I discovered a lot of writers in the Modern Library editions, which were sold in a Hallmark card store, and I used up my allowance and would buy them all." She remembered as a girl of 8 or 9 lying in bed looking at her bookcase against the wall. "It was like looking at my 50 friends. A book was like stepping through a mirror. I could go somewhere else. Each one was a door to a whole kingdom." Edgar Allan Poe's stories enthralled her with their "mixture of speculativeness, fantasy and gloominess." Upon reading Jack London's "Martin Eden," she determined she would become a writer. "I got through my childhood," she told the Paris Review, "in a delirium of literary exaltations." At 14, Sontag read Thomas Mann's masterpiece, "The Magic Mountain." "I read it through almost at a run," she said. "After finishing the last page, I was so reluctant to be separated from the book that I started back at the beginning and, to hold myself to the pace the book merited, reread it aloud, a chapter each night." Not long after, she and a friend visited Mann at his home in Pacific Palisades. Many decades later, she recalled the visit vividly, in a memoir published by the New Yorker, as an encounter between "an embarrassed, fervid, literature-intoxicated child and a god in exile." Over cookies and tea, while smoking one cigarette after another, Mann spoke of Wagner and Hitler, of Goethe and "Doctor Faustus," his newest book. "He seemed to find it perfectly normal that two local high school students should know who Nietzsche and Schoenberg were," she wrote. He went on to talk about "the value of literature" and "the necessity of protecting civilization against the forces of barbarity." But what struck Sontag most were the "books, books, books in the floor-to-ceiling shelves that covered two of the walls" of his study. She began to frequent the Pickwick bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, where she went "every few days after school to read on my feet through some more of world literature -- buying when I could, stealing when I dared." She also became a "militant browser" of the international periodical and newspaper stand near the "enchanted crossroads" of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, where she discovered the world of literary magazines. She was fond of recounting how, at 15, she had bought a copy of Partisan Review and found it impenetrable. Nevertheless, "I had the sense that within its pages ... momentous issues were at stake. I wanted desperately to crack the code." At 26, she moved to New York City where, for a time, she taught the philosophy of religion at Columbia University. At a cocktail party, she encountered William Phillips, one of Partisan Review's legendary founding editors and asked him how one might write for the journal. He replied, "All you have to do is ask." "I'm asking," she said. Soon Sontag's provocative essays on Albert Camus, Simone Weil, Jean-Luc Godard, Kenneth Anger, Jasper Johns and even the Supremes began to spice Partisan Review's pages. Sontag recoiled at what she regarded as the artificial boundaries separating one subject, or one art form, from another. She devoted herself to demolishing "the distinction between thought and feeling ... which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment.... Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking." Her quest was admired by such writers as Elizabeth Hardwick, a founder of the New York Review of Books, whose editors quickly embraced Sontag. In her introduction to "A Susan Sontag Reader," Hardwick called her "an extraordinarily beautiful, expansive and unique talent." Others were less impressed. John Simon accused Sontag of "a tendency to sprinkle complication into her writing" and of tossing off "high-sounding paradoxes without thinking through what, if anything, they mean." Greil Marcus called her "a cold writer" whose style was "an uneasy combination of academic and hip ... pedantic, effete, unfriendly." Walter Kendrick found her fiction "dull and derivative." In 1976, at 43, Sontag discovered she had advanced cancer in her breast, lymphatic system and leg. She was told she had a one-in-four chance to live five years. After undergoing a radical mastectomy and chemotherapy, she was pronounced free of the disease. "My first reaction was terror and grief. But it's not altogether a bad experience to know you're going to die. The first thing is not to feel sorry for yourself," she said. She set about to learn as much as possible about the disease. She later wrote "Illness as Metaphor," an influential essay condemning the use of tuberculosis and cancer as metaphors that transfer responsibility for sickness to the victims, who are made to believe they have brought suffering on themselves. Illness, she insisted, is fact, not fate. Years later, she would extend the argument in the book-length essay "AIDS and Its Metaphors." An early and passionate opponent of the Vietnam War, Sontag was both admired and reviled for her political convictions. In a 1967 Partisan Review symposium, she wrote that "America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent." In her rage and gloom and growing despair, she concluded that "the truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone -- its ideologies and inventions -- which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself." Considering herself neither a journalist nor an activist, Sontag felt an obligation as "a citizen of the American empire" to accept an invitation to visit Hanoi at the height of the American bombing campaign in May 1968. A two-week visit resulted in a fervent essay seeking to explain Vietnamese resistance to American power. Critics excoriated her for what they regarded as a naive sentimentalization of Vietnamese communism. Author Paul Hollander, for one, called Sontag a "political pilgrim," bent on denigrating Western liberal pluralism in favor of venerating foreign revolutions. That same year, Sontag also visited Cuba, after which she wrote an essay for Ramparts magazine calling for a sympathetic understanding of the Cuban revolution. Two years later, however, she joined Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and other writers in publicly protesting the regime's harsh treatment of Heberto Padilla, one of the country's leading poets. She also denounced Fidel Castro's punitive policies toward homosexuals. Ever the iconoclast, Sontag had a knack for annoying both the right and the left. In 1982, in a meeting in Town Hall in New York to protest the suppression of the Solidarity movement in Poland, she declared that communism was fascism with a human face. She was unsparing in her criticism of much of the left's refusal to take seriously the exiles and dissidents and murdered victims of Stalin's terror and the tyranny communism imposed wherever it had triumphed. Ten years later, almost alone among American intellectuals, she called for vigorous Western -- and American -- intervention in the Balkans to halt the siege of Sarajevo and to stop Serbian aggression in Bosnia and Kosovo. Her solidarity with the citizens of Sarajevo prompted her to make more than a dozen trips to the besieged city. Then, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Sontag offered a bold and singular perspective in the New Yorker: "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" She added, "In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." She was pilloried by bloggers and pundits, who accused her of anti-Americanism. Sontag had never been so public as she became over the next three years, publishing steadily, speaking constantly and receiving numerous international awards, including Israel's Jerusalem Prize, Spain's Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts and Germany's Friedenspreis (Peace Prize). Accepting the prize from Jerusalem's mayor, Ehud Olmert, Sontag said of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians: "I believe the doctrine of collective responsibility as a rationale for collective punishments never justified, militarily or ethically. And I mean, of course, the disproportionate use of firepower against civilians...." In late March 2004, she was found to have a condition that, if left untreated, would be fatal: a pre-acute leukemia that doctors concluded was a consequence of chemotherapy she had undertaken to rid herself of a uterine sarcoma discovered five years before. A little more than four months after the diagnosis, she received a partial bone marrow transplant. In an interview for the Paris Review, in 1995, Sontag was asked what she thought was the purpose of literature. "A novel worth reading," she replied, "is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness." She was the cartographer of her own literary explorations. Henry James once remarked, "Nothing is my last word on anything." For Sontag, as for James, there was always more to be said, more to be felt. In addition to her son, she is survived by a sister, Judith Cohen. Her papers -- manuscripts, diaries, journals and correspondence -- as well as her 25,000-volume personal library were acquired by the UCLA Library in 2002 and will be housed in the Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections. * (BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX) An author of wide-ranging interests A partial list of Susan Sontag's work: Essay collections: "Styles of Radical Will," "On Photography," "Under the Sign of Saturn," "Illness as Metaphor," "Regarding the Pain of Others." Novels and short stories: "The Benefactor," "Death Kit," "I, etcetera," "The Volcano Lover," "In America." Films: "Duet for Cannibals," "Brother Carl," "Promised Lands," "Unguided Tour." Plays: "Alice in Bed," "Lady From the Sea." Source: A Times staff writer ---------------- Boston Globe / Obituaries / Susan Sontag, essayist, social activist, dead at 71 http://www.boston.com/news/globe/obituaries/articles/2004/12/29/susan_so ntag_essayist_social_activist_dead_at_71?pg=full By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff | December 29, 2004 Susan Sontag -- one of America's preeminent intellectuals, whose essays, novels, and political pronouncements made her both revered and reviled for four decades -- died of leukemia yesterday in Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She was 71. Ms. Sontag was a unique figure in world culture, uncategorizable and larger than life. For the most part, she avoided academe and any institutional affiliation, going her own severe way. She refused to be pigeonholed. Along with the essays that won her fame, she wrote novels, short stories, and plays; made four films; and directed theater. Ms. Sontag took all of culture as her preserve. Although she professed to be proudest of her novels, which include the National Book Award-winning ''In America" (2000), she was best known for her essays. She wrote extensively on literature and film, but her two most widely read books are ''On Photography" (1976) and ''Illness as Metaphor" (1978). The latter, a study of the slippery cultural uses that diseases such as cancer and tuberculosis have been put to, grew out of her own experience with breast cancer in the mid-1970s. A formidable, intimidating personage, Ms. Sontag was alternately acclaimed as a priestess of high culture and scorned, in the words of the novelist John Updike, as ''our glamorous camp follower of the French avant-garde." Even Ms. Sontag's harshest detractors had to concede her towering erudition. The novelist Carlos Fuentes once likened her to the great Renaissance thinker Erasmus. ''Erasmus traveled with 32 volumes, which contained all the knowledge worth knowing," Fuentes wrote. ''Susan Sontag carries it in her brain! I know of no other intellectual who is so clear-minded with a capacity to link, to connect, to relate." That capacity to link and connect helped give Ms. Sontag's work its distinctly cosmopolitan cast. She divided her time between New York and Europe, and the world of Anglo-American letters held little interest for her. The figures she most admired tended to be European -- Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti, Jean-Luc Godard -- and, like her, tended to be more comfortable with thought than feeling. Indeed, Ms. Sontag's erudition lent a slightly inhuman aspect to her work. Her bookishness flirted with airlessness, and not a few readers detected solemnity and self-aggrandizement in her lofty intellectual tone. An innate intellectual austerity informed everything she wrote. ''Somebody says: 'The road is straight,' " she said in a 1978 interview. ''OK, then: 'The road is straight as a string.' There's such a profound part of me that feels that 'the road is straight' is all you need to say and all you should say." Ms. Sontag professed to disdain the machinery of publicity, yet this seemed only to add to her fame. She had an undeniable mystique, one that drew as much on her striking appearance as on her intellectual firepower. ''Very intense, very pretty, and very interested in absolutely everything" was how her publisher, Roger Straus, once described her. At various times dubbed ''the Natalie Wood of the US avant-garde" and ''the Dark Lady of American Letters," Ms. Sontag was that rarest of creatures: a celebrity intellectual. Irving Penn photographed her for Vogue. Kevin Costner's character in the movie ''Bull Durham" hails Ms. Sontag as ''brilliant," even as he dismisses her fiction as ''self-indulgent, overrated crap." A song in the Broadway musical ''Rent" cites her. She appeared as herself in Woody Allen's movie ''Zelig." Her habit of dying her hair so as to preserve a lightning-bolt-like white streak inspired a New Yorker cartoon. Ms. Sontag's celebrity sprang in part from her sense of political engagement. During the late 1980s, she served a term as president of the American branch of PEN, the international literary organization, and she was one of the first writers to denounce the death sentence imposed on the novelist Salman Rushdie. To draw attention to the plight of Sarajevo during the early '90s, she visited the besieged city 11 times and directed a production of ''Waiting for Godot" there. ''She was a true friend in need," Rushdie said in a statement yesterday. ''Susan Sontag was a great literary artist, a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, and an indefatigable ally in many struggles." Ms. Sontag's political commitment earned her attacks as well as plaudits. She notoriously wrote that ''the white race is the cancer of human history" (a statement she later lamented, as much rhetorically as politically, in ''Illness as Metaphor"). She rhapsodized over North Vietnam in her 1968 ''Trip to Hanoi." Conversely, she drew the ire of radicals when she spoke at a pro-Solidarity rally in 1982 and said Reader's Digest had more accurately described the reality of Soviet Communism than The Nation had. Even so, nothing could have prepared Ms. Sontag for the firestorm that followed her writing in The New Yorker shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, ''Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world,' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" Although Ms. Sontag tempered her radicalism over the years, she remained very much on the left. Her political views mirrored her aesthetic views. She championed the avant-garde and esoteric. Critics accused her of being an over-eager promoter of the new in such early essay collections as ''Against Interpretation" (1966) and ''Styles of Radical Will" (1969). She famously argued that ''in place of a hermeneutics [interpretation] we need an erotics of art." Yet in many ways Ms. Sontag was a deeply conservative figure. There is an Old Testament righteousness to her cultural pronouncements, and a high moral seriousness informs everything she wrote. Prime instances would be ''AIDS and Its Metaphors" (1988) and ''Regarding the Pain of Others" (2003), which analyzes images of atrocity. It's no small irony that Ms. Sontag's most famous essay should be called ''Notes on Camp." Nonetheless, it was entirely characteristic of her to take so seriously something so inherently frivolous. Susan Lee Rosenblatt was born on Jan 16, 1933, in Manhattan, the daughter of Jack Rosenblatt and Mildren (Jacobsen) Rosenblatt. The Rosenblatts ran a fur-trading business in China. Ms. Sontag and her sister, Judith, were reared in New York by a nanny. After Ms. Sontag's father died, in 1938, the family moved to Miami, then Tucson, because of her asthma. Ms. Sontag's mother met an Air Force captain, Nathan Sontag, and the couple married in 1945. The family moved to California a year later. When Ms. Sontag graduated from North Hollywood High School at 15, the principal announced there was nothing more the school could teach her. Ms. Sontag briefly attended the University of California at Berkeley and then went to the University of Chicago. At 17, she married Philip Rieff, a lecturer at the university. The couple, who divorced in 1958, had a son. Years later, David Rieff would become an editor at Farrar, Straus, & Giroux and edit his mother's books. Taking only two years to graduate from Chicago, Ms. Sontag earned master's degrees in English and philosophy at Harvard. She also did graduate work at Oxford and the Sorbonne. Moving with her son to New York after her divorce, she briefly worked for Commentary magazine and held a series of short-term teaching posts at the City College of New York, Sarah Lawrence, and Columbia University. Ms. Sontag's first book was a novel, ''The Benefactor" (1963). Her other novels include ''Death Kit" (1967) and ''The Volcano Lover" (1992). She also published one collection of short fiction, ''I, etcetera" (1978), and the essay collections ''Under the Sign of Saturn" (1980) and ''Where the Stress Falls" (2002). ''I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am," Ms. Sontag told The Guardian newspaper in 2002, ''because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time." In addition to her son, she leaves a sister, Judith Cohen. Her funeral will be private. A public memorial service will be held at a later date. From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 1 11:15:05 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 06:15:05 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Redemption and American Politics Message-ID: Redemption and American Politics The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4.12.3 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i15/15b01401.htm By DAN P. McADAMS Democrats woke up November 3 to see that they no longer lived in the America they had always imagined. They hoped a well-informed and self-interested citizenry would oust an administration whose tax reform favors mainly the rich, whose foreign policy has cost friends and made enemies abroad, and whose faith-based approach to leadership has exalted conservative ideology over rational discourse and scientific evidence. But President Bush's decisive victory in the popular vote combined with the sea of red spilling across the Tuesday-night electoral map suggests that blue-state Democrats are now out of touch with much of the rest of the country. What explains this disconnect? Already pundits and pollsters have suggested many different possibilities -- from religiosity to gay marriage to the fear of Osama bin Laden. From my standpoint, however, the key factor is narrative. Put simply, the Republicans are better storytellers. More precisely, the Republican Party has groomed candidates and honed messages that resonate deeply with a story of life that Americans hold dear. It is the narrative of redemption -- a story about an innocent protagonist in a dangerous world who sticks to simple principles and overcomes suffering and hardship in the end. This is a story that many productive and caring American adults -- Democrats, Republicans, and Independents -- love to tell about their own lives. Republicans, however, have found ways of talking about public life and political issues that reinforce this story. And to the extent that politics is personal, many Americans may vote their story, rather than their pocketbook. As a research psychologist, I study how people tell stories about their own lives. My students and I collect these stories and analyze them as if they were works of literary fiction. Indeed, they are fiction, to a certain extent. People selectively remember the past and imagine their own futures to produce coherent narratives of the self that will provide their lives with some sense of unity and purpose. Stories give us our identities. In our research, we focus on the life stories told by those adults who score very high on both objective and self-reported psychological measures of social responsibility and productivity. We want to understand especially well-adjusted people who are making the most positive contributions to their work, families, and society at large. Be they liberal or conservative, these highly productive and caring American adults tend to describe their own lives as variations on a general script that we call the redemptive self. The story of the redemptive self in American life has two key themes. The first is the belief that as a young child, I was fortunate, blessed, or advantaged in some manner, even as others around me experienced suffering and pain. I am the innocent protagonist, chosen for a special, manifest destiny. As I journey forth in a dangerous world, I hold to simple truths, basic values of goodness and decency. Research shows that highly productive and caring American adults, especially in their midlife years, are much more likely than other people to remember their past in this way. They are also more likely to claim that they have always operated according to deep personal values that are clear and true. While their values may not be those of George W. Bush, they tell stories about their lives that, like the president's own, underscore the power of moral clarity. Visiting the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans "have an immensely high opinion of themselves and are not far from believing that they form a species apart from the rest of the human race." Tocqueville realized that the Americans' sense of special destiny lay partly in their celebration of the individual self. "One's-Self I sing, a simple separate person," proclaimed Walt Whitman. And, "Is not a man better than a town?" asked Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Self-Reliance. (The fact that a town is made up of individual men -- and women -- seems strangely absent from Emerson's thinking.) Not only are we the chosen people, Emerson suggested, but each individual man (or woman) is chosen for a special destiny. That individual destiny is inscribed within an inner self that is always true and good. In Emerson's uniquely American brand of romantic individualism, the good and productive life is the heroic actualization of the inner self. Flash forward 150 years or so. In interviews, highly productive and caring American adults tend to begin the stories of their own lives in the same way. They speak the language of chosen-ness and manifest destiny, albeit in contemporary and personal ways. To a significantly greater extent than adults who score lower on measures of care and productivity, they will identify a specific incident from childhood as symbolic of their enhanced status, as if to suggest that they have known they were special, that they were chosen, for a very long time. At the same time, productive and caring American adults are especially likely to say that they held an early awareness that the world is not fair and that many other people suffer greatly. The juxtaposition of inner blessing and hardship in the outside world sets up a moral contrast. I need to use my goodness to make the world a better place. I need to use my gift in a positive way. The sense of individual mission that runs through the redemptive self is often linked to life principles consolidated in the teenage years, be the formative influences Ayn Rand, Maya Angelou, Tuesdays With Morrie, or Jesus. (While many cringed, Bush's fans ate it up when he identified Jesus Christ as his "favorite political philosopher" in a 2000 debate with Al Gore.) The protagonists in these stories are not the tormented souls or ironic drifters celebrated by European existentialist writers and postmodern literary critics. They don't wake up in the middle of the night wondering what the meaning of life is. They know what is right, more or less, and they strive to put their life principles into action. There is a decided lack of ambivalence about moral and ethical values in the life stories of highly productive and caring American adults, be they evangelical Christians or card-carrying members of the American Civil Liberties Union. Instead, we witness clear-eyed, no-nonsense protagonists who have too many things to do and too little time to waste on a searching re-examination of what is good and true, who is God, and what they believe in their hearts to be right. From Benjamin Franklin to Michael Jordan, prototypical American heroes and heroines are more pragmatic than reflective. They are too restless for prolonged philosophical debate. They brush aside nagging doubts, ignore complexities. They attach themselves to a few simple principles in life and then they move forward with vigor and confidence. The second major theme in the story of the redemptive self is overcoming hardships and adversity. Especially caring and productive American adults often tell stories about their lives in which emotionally negative events lead directly to reward. These stories take many different forms. Stories of atonement describe a religious move from sin to salvation. Stories of upward social mobility depict the socioeconomic move from rags to respectability and riches. Stories of recovery tell how sick or addicted protagonists regained their health or sobriety. Stories of liberation chart the move from feeling enslaved to feeling free. From Franklin to Oprah, from Horatio Alger to 12-step programs, American folklore and culture have provided a treasure trove of redemptive narratives from which we all (unconsciously) borrow in fashioning the stories of our own lives. The burgeoning popular literature on self-help offers a cornucopia of redemption tales, as do television talk shows, People magazine, and Hollywood. Politicians often celebrate their own redemptive journeys: Ronald Reagan rose from a dysfunctional family; Bill Clinton (nicknamed "the Comeback Kid") recovered from childhood poverty (as well as many self-inflicted wounds); George W. Bush turned his life around in his 40s, after years of drifting and drinking; John Edwards started out "the son of a mill worker," but he rose from there. Surveying American novels and short stories from recent years, the New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote, "There is no public narrative more potent today -- or throughout American history -- than the one about redemption." George W. Bush's personal story follows closely the script of the redemptive self. Born with a special blessing, he came close to squandering it all before he gave up alcohol, found the Lord, and rededicated his life to public service. It is a powerful recovery narrative, starring the kind of guileless protagonist that many Americans love. In this kind of story, moral clarity trumps worldly sophistication (and debating skills). His detractors may call him stupid, simple-minded, and stubborn. But many voters see Bush as sincere and well meaning. They like that he does not seem to obsess over the complexities of the world. They find assurance in his commitment to simple principles. And even those who are not born-again Christians may admire his recovery story. We are all sinners, after all. Yet in the eyes of many people, Bush really seems to have redeemed his sinful past. For the past 10 years or so, he has kept his eyes on the prize. He has remained steadfast, unwavering. He has lived out a destiny to which he feels he has been called. More important than the president's own story, however, is the way in which optimistic (if sometimes simplistic) Republican messages about "values," faith-based initiatives, individual freedom and responsibility, and the "ownership society" reinforce a grand narrative about a good and innocent protagonist who takes charge of his own life, stays focused through adversity, and ultimately triumphs in the end. The heroes in this story are the small-business owners, the entrepreneurs, the soldiers, the preachers, and the un-self-conscious individualists who, like Emerson, trust the good and simple "man" over the ambiguous and complex "town." The enemies are ambiguous and complex collectives of various kinds -- "big government," for example, bureaucracies, the United Nations, and programs and policies that potentially compromise the innocent strivings of the good inner self. It does not matter much that Republicans have actually grown the government (to say nothing of the deficit) rather than shrunk it, that they also advocate certain kinds of government programs and policies. It does not matter because politics is as much about stories as it is about anything else. Republicans are masters at simplifying the world into upbeat narratives about good protagonists who will find redemption in the end. By reducing taxes, empowering faith, and assuring national security, they promise to clear away the many obstacles and complexities that clutter up the world and stand in the path of the redemptive hero's quest. The attacks of September 11 and the "war on terrorism," furthermore, play perfectly into the story of the redemptive self. Terrorism and war show us that the world is a dangerous, unredeemed place. In times of crisis, the good American protagonist must call upon the deepest reservoir of unwavering conviction and hope. A dangerous world is indeed the kind of world that the good and strong hero of the redemptive self seems unconsciously to expect. Under conditions of adversity, he will fight the good fight. He will keep the faith. In the end, his suffering will give way to redemption. And along the way, he may even help to redeem others. Dan P. McAdams is a professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University and author of The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 1 11:15:56 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 06:15:56 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Spanish Basques Approve Secession Measure Message-ID: Spanish Basques Approve Secession Measure NYT December 31, 2004 By RENWICK McLEAN MADRID, Dec. 30 - The Basque Parliament approved a measure on Thursday that says the Basque region has the right to secede from Spain, a move analysts described as the most serious threat to national unity since the establishment of democracy here nearly 30 years ago. The measure, approved by a vote of 39 to 35, is part of a complex plan that calls for an overhaul of the region's relationship with the central government in Madrid. "We express our will to form a new political pact," the plan says, "that grows from a new model for relations with the Spanish state based on freedom of association." Before the vote, which was held in the Basque capital, Vitoria, Juan Jos? Ibarretxe, the president of the Basque region and the main author of the plan, said, "We are not proposing a project for breaking away from Spain, but we are formalizing a project for friendly coexistence between the Basque region and Spain. "The Basque country is not a subordinate part of the Spanish state," he added. "The only way there will be a shared relationship with the state is if we decide there will be one." Political analysts said that the vote gave momentum to the separatist movement in the Basque region, and presented the central government with the task of confronting the movement without inflaming it. "This is the clearest push for independence that the Basque country has made," said Antonio Ca?o, a senior editor at the newspaper El Pa?s. "It is a very clear challenge to the unity of Spain. I'd say it places the country in its biggest crisis of unity since democracy began here." For nearly 40 years, the various regions that make up Spain were kept together by the iron fist of Gen. Francisco Franco. But since his death in 1975, some analysts have wondered if a democratic government would be able to keep the country united. The central government, led by the Socialist Party, has said that it is willing to discuss requests for greater autonomy, but has rejected the claim that the Basque region has the right to unilaterally determine its relationship with Madrid. "We've made it very clear," Mar?a Teresa Fern?ndez de la Vega, the deputy prime minister, said at a conference before the vote. "The plan goes against the Constitution." The plan now moves to the national Parliament, where it will surely be rejected, analysts said. But supporters of the plan, led by Mr. Ibarretxe, said a defeat would not stop them from submitting it to a popular referendum in the Basque region next year. The central government has said such a referendum is illegal. Thursday's vote surprised analysts here, who expected the measure to fail to gain the support of a small group of separatists who had said the plan was too moderate. But three members of the group, a party known as Herri Batasuna, decided to support it, providing enough votes for the majority needed for passage. The Basque region, a mountainous area of two million people on the northern border with France, is one of 17 semi-autonomous regions that make up Spain. Many of them, most notably Catalonia, are also seeking greater autonomy from Madrid. But it is the Basques who are most clearly associated with a drive for looser ties with the central government, and even separatism. The militant group ETA has made headlines for decades through a bloody campaign to establish an independent Basque state, killing more than 800 people since 1968 in the process. The overwhelming majority of Basques oppose ETA, whose tactics may even weaken support for independence, analysts said. But slightly more than half of Basque voters support so-called nationalist parties, which advocate greater autonomy. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/international/europe/31basque.html From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 1 11:16:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 06:16:47 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Women Are Gaining Ground on the Wage Front Message-ID: Women Are Gaining Ground on the Wage Front NYT December 31, 2004 By LOUIS UCHITELLE Ever since the 2001 recession sent the economy into a prolonged period of weak hiring, hundreds of thousands of men and women have gone through some variation of Tom and Marie DeSisto's experience. Concerned that he might be laid off as Verizon cut staff, Mr. DeSisto, 54, accepted an early retirement package, giving up a manager's salary of more than $100,000 a year. Now he earns half that as a high school math teacher in Waltham, Mass., while Mrs. DeSisto, 50, brings home $63,000 as the supervisor of nurses in the same school district. In contrast to her husband's downsized pay, Mrs. DeSisto's salary has risen 75 percent over the last five years as she moved from a nursing job in Framingham, another Boston suburb, to responsibility as supervisor for a growing staff of school nurses in Waltham. That pattern of improving employment prospects and rising wages for women - while many men stood still or got hurt - has done as much if not more than class-action lawsuits, quotas and equal opportunity laws to narrow the gap between men's and women's pay. Working women now earn just over 80 percent of what men do, up from 62 percent 25 years ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It turns out that almost half of that gap closed during two comparatively short periods of relatively hard times, totaling about six years. Those periods correspond with the recessions and cutbacks in the work force that marked the opening years of the last decade and the current one. The gains for women have stuck. As the economy improved in the second half of the 1990's, women did not continue to move ahead, but they held their own, chiefly because so many men, like Mr. DeSisto, failed to get back into the work force at the same pay levels as before. "Everyone's image of how they wanted to close the gender gap was for women to catch up with men in pay, without men going backward," said Rebecca M. Blank, dean of the University of Michigan's School of Public Policy. "Now it is clear that for substantial groups of people in the labor market, that is not how it is closing." The dynamics reflect profound shifts in the economy. Men are more vulnerable than women to layoffs, mainly because they predominate in industries that are walloped in downturns, particularly manufacturing. Then, too, the large influx of nonworking women into low-wage jobs in the 1990's, caused in part by the overhaul of welfare, depressed the median wage of women as a whole. That influx has stopped, and the median wage has responded by rising. College-educated women, having entered the labor force in large numbers for nearly 30 years, are showing up everywhere now, which gives employers the opportunity to fill more executive, administrative and professional jobs with well-trained and hardworking women who are paid well, but often not as well as men in those jobs. Still, as women take these upper-end jobs in growing numbers, the pay level of women as a whole is pulled up. Observing this phenomenon, Francine Blau, a labor economist at Cornell University, declares that the wage gap is closing mainly because of "the rising educational attainment of women who work full time." That may be an important ingredient, but wage data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the closing of the gap in pay between men and women accelerated in the so-called jobless recoveries, when employers cut staff or froze hiring during recessions and continued to do so into the ensuing economic upswings. Americans have experienced two jobless recoveries since World War II. The second may still be in progress, although recent evidence suggests it could finally be yielding to an improving job market. Before the first, in the early 1990's, recessions invariably ended in hiring surges that benefited both men and women and in roughly equal fashion. For some specialists, like Betty Spence, president of the National Association of Female Executives, the fact that women still earn lower pay offers an opportunity to employers bent on cutting labor costs. "Corporations tend to lop off the highly paid guy at the top," she said, "and replace him with a woman who is just as competent and is willing to work just as hard for less pay." For others, like Barbara R. Bergmann, a labor economist at American University in Washington, the spectacle of women gaining ground in harder times is vivid evidence that most occupations are still largely segregated by sex and that men's occupations, while often higher paying, are also more vulnerable to business cycles. Men, for example, still hold most of the best-paying jobs in manufacturing, which has been particularly hard hit in recent years. Women, by contrast, are ensconced in white-collar occupations that tend to ride out job cuts almost untouched. These include education, health care and civil service employment. Ms. Bergmann recognizes that this backdoor route to wage equality may not be the most desirable path. "We would prefer that pay converge in a strong economy," she said, "but however it happens, we should be happy it is happening." Men who work full time still earn nearly 20 percent more than women who do. The score is $693 in median weekly pay, adjusted for inflation, to $560 for women, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. The median means that half of the workers in each sex earn more and half earn less. The current $133 weekly gap has narrowed from $260 in 1979. But $62 of that progress, or 47 percent, has been compressed into the two periods of stepped-up labor cost-cutting that started with the 1990-1991 and the 2001 recessions. In the latest episode, total employment has not yet risen back to its prerecession level. The economy is reviving, but hiring has not improved as much. Employers appear to be still engaging in what David H. Autor, an economist at Harvard University, calls "the cleansing effects of hard times." Men's pay during these cleansings has stagnated or dropped, while women's pay has continued to rise, although more slowly than in good times. Jared Bernstein, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute, argues that men's pay would still be 25 percent higher than women's, as it was in 2000, if men's pay had continued to grow at the 1995-to-2000 pace, when the economy boomed and employers hired in droves. That prosperous five-year stretch was no help at all in closing the wage gap. These were years in which high-technology companies and dot-coms prospered, and they were big employers of well-paid men, whose high wages pulled up the median for their group. Just as this was happening, women's pay was held down. The surge in hiring brought thousands of women from welfare into low-wage jobs, and their presence became a drag on the median wage of women. The wage gap even began to widen a bit, but starting in 1998 manufacturing jobs disappeared in large numbers, and that blow to well-paid blue-collar men pushed down the median pay of all men. The convergence in pay, of course, also reflects the underlying achievement of women in recent years. They are graduating from college in greater numbers than men and pushing into high-end occupations once dominated by men. The share of women, for example, in "executive, administrative and managerial occupations," as the labor bureau calls this category, is more than 46 percent today, up from 40 percent in 1990 and 32 percent in 1983. And there are similar or even greater gains in various administrative and professional ranks. Women are also gradually pushing into high-paid blue-collar occupations, despite continued sexual segregation, and each step forward helps to lift the median pay of women vis-?-vis men. Volvo Trucks North America, for example, is one of the few manufacturing companies that is hiring these days, adding 1,117 people this year at plants in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland. Enough of these hires are women to lift their presence on the assembly lines, where union wages apply, to 15 percent from 13 percent in 2003, the company says. Driving tractor-trailers on long hauls across the country is another bastion of high-paid men's work that women have been trickling into lately. Of the 3,800 drivers at C. R. England, for example, 10 percent are women, up from zero in the 1980's, said Dean England, chief operating officer of the family-owned company based in Salt Lake City. Not many people are able to adjust to the rigors of a lifestyle that keeps them on the road for weeks at a time, Mr. England said. The driver turnover rate at his company is 100 percent a year, but for those who can handle it - men and women - the pay averages $40,000. "They are mostly middle-aged women," Mr. England said, "and they come to us because they are sick of having to work so hard at service jobs that pay only $10 an hour." As for the DeSistos in the Boston suburbs, Marie is working her way up the pay scale while her husband, Tom, is starting a new career as a high school math teacher earning $50,000, half his old pay. "I'm teaching the basics at the start, algebra and geometry, moving along with the kids," he said. "You work with freshmen and sophomores and as the years go by, you teach them trig and higher math." Mr. DeSisto, a civil engineer, had 30 years at Verizon and its predecessors, Bell Atlantic and before that, AT&T. He had expected to work at Verizon into his 60's. But management, bent on downsizing, offered enhanced early retirement packages, with the clear message, Mr. DeSisto said, that layoffs would ensue if the retirement offer was undersubscribed. It was not. Last year, 21,600 people took early retirement at Verizon, a number of them men like Mr. DeSisto with enough tenure to qualify for lump sum pension payouts in the high six figures. After nine months of unemployment, he took the teaching job in the school system that employs his wife. Mrs. DeSisto went back to work as a nurse 11 years ago, when the youngest of the DeSistos' three children was 10, working first in the Framingham schools where her salary rose in time to $36,000 - and then to $56,000 when she shifted to the supervisor's job in Waltham five years ago. Her salary has risen annually ever since, partly through raises but also in recognition of a recently earned master's degree in nursing and business administration. But what truly drives the expansion of school nursing and the rising pay, in her view, is the growing incidence of health problems among students, now that more disabled and ailing children are accepted into the public schools. Her staff has expanded to 16 nurses from 9 when she arrived. "I like to hire nurses with master's degrees and experience," she said. "They are in buildings where they are the only ones with medical knowledge." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/business/31wage.html From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Jan 1 14:48:35 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 06:48:35 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Redemption and American Politics Message-ID: <01C4EFCD.EB2919D0.shovland@mindspring.com> As the war goes on, another story will be told about the Republicans: they led us to disaster. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2005 3:15 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; WTA-Politics Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Redemption and American Politics Redemption and American Politics The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4.12.3 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i15/15b01401.htm By DAN P. McADAMS Democrats woke up November 3 to see that they no longer lived in the America they had always imagined. They hoped a well-informed and self-interested citizenry would oust an administration whose tax reform favors mainly the rich, whose foreign policy has cost friends and made enemies abroad, and whose faith-based approach to leadership has exalted conservative ideology over rational discourse and scientific evidence. But President Bush's decisive victory in the popular vote combined with the sea of red spilling across the Tuesday-night electoral map suggests that blue-state Democrats are now out of touch with much of the rest of the country. What explains this disconnect? Already pundits and pollsters have suggested many different possibilities -- from religiosity to gay marriage to the fear of Osama bin Laden. From my standpoint, however, the key factor is narrative. Put simply, the Republicans are better storytellers. More precisely, the Republican Party has groomed candidates and honed messages that resonate deeply with a story of life that Americans hold dear. It is the narrative of redemption -- a story about an innocent protagonist in a dangerous world who sticks to simple principles and overcomes suffering and hardship in the end. This is a story that many productive and caring American adults -- Democrats, Republicans, and Independents -- love to tell about their own lives. Republicans, however, have found ways of talking about public life and political issues that reinforce this story. And to the extent that politics is personal, many Americans may vote their story, rather than their pocketbook. As a research psychologist, I study how people tell stories about their own lives. My students and I collect these stories and analyze them as if they were works of literary fiction. Indeed, they are fiction, to a certain extent. People selectively remember the past and imagine their own futures to produce coherent narratives of the self that will provide their lives with some sense of unity and purpose. Stories give us our identities. In our research, we focus on the life stories told by those adults who score very high on both objective and self-reported psychological measures of social responsibility and productivity. We want to understand especially well-adjusted people who are making the most positive contributions to their work, families, and society at large. Be they liberal or conservative, these highly productive and caring American adults tend to describe their own lives as variations on a general script that we call the redemptive self. The story of the redemptive self in American life has two key themes. The first is the belief that as a young child, I was fortunate, blessed, or advantaged in some manner, even as others around me experienced suffering and pain. I am the innocent protagonist, chosen for a special, manifest destiny. As I journey forth in a dangerous world, I hold to simple truths, basic values of goodness and decency. Research shows that highly productive and caring American adults, especially in their midlife years, are much more likely than other people to remember their past in this way. They are also more likely to claim that they have always operated according to deep personal values that are clear and true. While their values may not be those of George W. Bush, they tell stories about their lives that, like the president's own, underscore the power of moral clarity. Visiting the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans "have an immensely high opinion of themselves and are not far from believing that they form a species apart from the rest of the human race." Tocqueville realized that the Americans' sense of special destiny lay partly in their celebration of the individual self. "One's-Self I sing, a simple separate person," proclaimed Walt Whitman. And, "Is not a man better than a town?" asked Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Self-Reliance. (The fact that a town is made up of individual men -- and women -- seems strangely absent from Emerson's thinking.) Not only are we the chosen people, Emerson suggested, but each individual man (or woman) is chosen for a special destiny. That individual destiny is inscribed within an inner self that is always true and good. In Emerson's uniquely American brand of romantic individualism, the good and productive life is the heroic actualization of the inner self. Flash forward 150 years or so. In interviews, highly productive and caring American adults tend to begin the stories of their own lives in the same way. They speak the language of chosen-ness and manifest destiny, albeit in contemporary and personal ways. To a significantly greater extent than adults who score lower on measures of care and productivity, they will identify a specific incident from childhood as symbolic of their enhanced status, as if to suggest that they have known they were special, that they were chosen, for a very long time. At the same time, productive and caring American adults are especially likely to say that they held an early awareness that the world is not fair and that many other people suffer greatly. The juxtaposition of inner blessing and hardship in the outside world sets up a moral contrast. I need to use my goodness to make the world a better place. I need to use my gift in a positive way. The sense of individual mission that runs through the redemptive self is often linked to life principles consolidated in the teenage years, be the formative influences Ayn Rand, Maya Angelou, Tuesdays With Morrie, or Jesus. (While many cringed, Bush's fans ate it up when he identified Jesus Christ as his "favorite political philosopher" in a 2000 debate with Al Gore.) The protagonists in these stories are not the tormented souls or ironic drifters celebrated by European existentialist writers and postmodern literary critics. They don't wake up in the middle of the night wondering what the meaning of life is. They know what is right, more or less, and they strive to put their life principles into action. There is a decided lack of ambivalence about moral and ethical values in the life stories of highly productive and caring American adults, be they evangelical Christians or card-carrying members of the American Civil Liberties Union. Instead, we witness clear-eyed, no-nonsense protagonists who have too many things to do and too little time to waste on a searching re-examination of what is good and true, who is God, and what they believe in their hearts to be right. From Benjamin Franklin to Michael Jordan, prototypical American heroes and heroines are more pragmatic than reflective. They are too restless for prolonged philosophical debate. They brush aside nagging doubts, ignore complexities. They attach themselves to a few simple principles in life and then they move forward with vigor and confidence. The second major theme in the story of the redemptive self is overcoming hardships and adversity. Especially caring and productive American adults often tell stories about their lives in which emotionally negative events lead directly to reward. These stories take many different forms. Stories of atonement describe a religious move from sin to salvation. Stories of upward social mobility depict the socioeconomic move from rags to respectability and riches. Stories of recovery tell how sick or addicted protagonists regained their health or sobriety. Stories of liberation chart the move from feeling enslaved to feeling free. From Franklin to Oprah, from Horatio Alger to 12-step programs, American folklore and culture have provided a treasure trove of redemptive narratives from which we all (unconsciously) borrow in fashioning the stories of our own lives. The burgeoning popular literature on self-help offers a cornucopia of redemption tales, as do television talk shows, People magazine, and Hollywood. Politicians often celebrate their own redemptive journeys: Ronald Reagan rose from a dysfunctional family; Bill Clinton (nicknamed "the Comeback Kid") recovered from childhood poverty (as well as many self-inflicted wounds); George W. Bush turned his life around in his 40s, after years of drifting and drinking; John Edwards started out "the son of a mill worker," but he rose from there. Surveying American novels and short stories from recent years, the New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote, "There is no public narrative more potent today -- or throughout American history -- than the one about redemption." George W. Bush's personal story follows closely the script of the redemptive self. Born with a special blessing, he came close to squandering it all before he gave up alcohol, found the Lord, and rededicated his life to public service. It is a powerful recovery narrative, starring the kind of guileless protagonist that many Americans love. In this kind of story, moral clarity trumps worldly sophistication (and debating skills). His detractors may call him stupid, simple-minded, and stubborn. But many voters see Bush as sincere and well meaning. They like that he does not seem to obsess over the complexities of the world. They find assurance in his commitment to simple principles. And even those who are not born-again Christians may admire his recovery story. We are all sinners, after all. Yet in the eyes of many people, Bush really seems to have redeemed his sinful past. For the past 10 years or so, he has kept his eyes on the prize. He has remained steadfast, unwavering. He has lived out a destiny to which he feels he has been called. More important than the president's own story, however, is the way in which optimistic (if sometimes simplistic) Republican messages about "values," faith-based initiatives, individual freedom and responsibility, and the "ownership society" reinforce a grand narrative about a good and innocent protagonist who takes charge of his own life, stays focused through adversity, and ultimately triumphs in the end. The heroes in this story are the small-business owners, the entrepreneurs, the soldiers, the preachers, and the un-self-conscious individualists who, like Emerson, trust the good and simple "man" over the ambiguous and complex "town." The enemies are ambiguous and complex collectives of various kinds -- "big government," for example, bureaucracies, the United Nations, and programs and policies that potentially compromise the innocent strivings of the good inner self. It does not matter much that Republicans have actually grown the government (to say nothing of the deficit) rather than shrunk it, that they also advocate certain kinds of government programs and policies. It does not matter because politics is as much about stories as it is about anything else. Republicans are masters at simplifying the world into upbeat narratives about good protagonists who will find redemption in the end. By reducing taxes, empowering faith, and assuring national security, they promise to clear away the many obstacles and complexities that clutter up the world and stand in the path of the redemptive hero's quest. The attacks of September 11 and the "war on terrorism," furthermore, play perfectly into the story of the redemptive self. Terrorism and war show us that the world is a dangerous, unredeemed place. In times of crisis, the good American protagonist must call upon the deepest reservoir of unwavering conviction and hope. A dangerous world is indeed the kind of world that the good and strong hero of the redemptive self seems unconsciously to expect. Under conditions of adversity, he will fight the good fight. He will keep the faith. In the end, his suffering will give way to redemption. And along the way, he may even help to redeem others. Dan P. McAdams is a professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University and author of The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From paul.werbos at verizon.net Sat Jan 1 15:40:50 2005 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Paul J. Werbos, Dr.) Date: Sat, 01 Jan 2005 10:40:50 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] making gross errors In-Reply-To: <20041231194215.99613.qmail@web13424.mail.yahoo.com> References: <200412311900.iBVJ0R014517@tick.javien.com> <20041231194215.99613.qmail@web13424.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <6.2.0.14.0.20050101093609.01dd2930@incoming.verizon.net> At 02:42 PM 12/31/2004, Michael Christopher wrote: > >>If no one knows anything, how can we possibly expect >NOT to be making gross errors, regularly?<< > >--Good question. And most of us don't have direct >contact with the problems we discuss, so we HAVE to >rely to a large degree on second and third hand >information. Which introduces the element of bias, >especially at times when large groups are becoming >more and more polarized, convinced the other is evil >as opposed to merely operating out of a different set Indeed. The sheer complexity of the flow of information has created a whole lot of 4th hand distortions, in MANY areas of knowledge... but the filtering at each stage is a major part of the problem. There is some kind of spiritual collective intelligence effect, I would argue.. and even some biological approximations to that... But there is also what Janis called "Groupthink," which is a serious problem in our society as a whole. Corporate cultures which prize loyalty and victory without concern for the search for objective truth tend to be vulnerable to such aberrations in general. My statement here was not intended as a disguised comment on the Iraq war as such or on the blue state red state polarization. But certainly there have been times when the projections we send to the Middle East have made me cringe with pain... as with Gore's comment in the 2000 debates "make no mistake, whatever else we do, I stand by Israel..." (There are times when how one phrases or formulates a legitimate concern really do matter... If he had said "I will not tolerate genocide or actions intended to open the door to genocide on either side..." and elaborated... it might have all gone very differently. That may have been a decisive moment in history.) >of axioms about human nature. And axioms about human >nature are notoriously difficult to change, since they >tend to grow out of one's personal sense of identity >more than out of observation of a large number of >specific instances of human behavior. Certainly there are key axioms in people's logic which are making problems seem intractable. For the immediate dangers in the Middle East, the best-informed people I know point to the simple belief that "dialogue" is unnecessary, unproductive and essentially evil. That's one hell of an axiom to try to cope with. Yet fundamentalists in the US or fanatics of almost any stripe tend to share that same axiom, an axiom which almost REQUIRES either a nervous breakdown or gross hypocrisy in the end, if the people are really committed to the axiom. Is that axiom an axiom about behavior? Really, it is more an axiom in people's religious beliefs ... or in their inner vision of what the choices of lifestyle are. Both aspects need to be considered. For all the horrors of extreme fundamentalism... we should remember that there are people in Iraq for whom "Islam" also means a comfortable existence where the boys hang out with their buddies for hours, unthreatened, in local tea houses or lodges -- and they don't want to be forced to turn into the Borg, efficient wired-up robots in high-density housing without any real life whose closest approach to nature is pictures in a perverted shopping mall... Even Russia has recently shown the RESULTS of fears that Exxon would corrupt their government, and REDUCE personal freedom even more than the alternatives we complain about. Instead of condemning these folks for their legitimate fears, we might think about how to address them constructively. Yes, they do bad things to themselves when they cringe with fear and revert to reactionary forms of government, but can we work to find alternatives? Yet to do that, we need to understand them better. Pure partisan ways of thinking, without tempering by the objective search for truth, have a way of blocking the understanding. But then again -- axioms about humans and the human mind are also an important part of the equation. It does make a difference what we believe about the soul, and its connection to the affairs of the world. It makes a difference whether people subscribe to primitive views of heaven versus hell, or proscriptions against abortion. And it makes a difference whether people understand how the human mind -- brain or soul or both -- is hard-wired to try to learn to do its very best and to overcome its initial mistakes, using symbolic reasoning at times to escape from local minima. With complex institutions like the Catholic Church, for example, truth demands that we try to extract what is truly positive and hopeful, and what is truly dangerous and untrustworthy, both at the same time. Both aspects of the church have been important to human development for centuries now. I have occasionally made quick comments about mullahs and TV preachers... which may have been too quick at times. There is of course a diversity in all groups. The specific Saudi mullahs who generate Al Queida membership espouse axioms of thought and action which are nonsustainable -- inconsistent with human survival and, in my view, inconsistent with spiritual survival. (I recall the part of the letter from Paul where he says that those who have the law and not the spirit... have nothing, which is a polite way of putting it.) But Al-Sistani in Iraq seems to have a certain degree of spiritual authenticity, more than anyone else I have heard of in the Middle East in this century. But that leads into a point which is very difficult to discuss. Even in Freudian psychology, there was a debate about "thanatos," a death impulse. Real or not? (It's not part of our modern mathematical formulation of Freudian psychodynamics.) What about evil and such? Hard to ignore such question when discussing the Middle East. And THEIR axioms about Evil are certainly part of what destabilizes the situation. In fact -- many people in the Middle East have reverted back to Zoroastrian ideas so extreme... I could picture Mohammed asking, in exasperation, "Why did I even TRY with these people? They just fall back on the same old stuff I tried to help them out of..." (And I can imagine Jesus saying the same about TV preachers trying to convert everyone to being Pharisees. But curiously enough he actually warned about that sort of stuff well in advance... "Many will come in my name...") And so... there IS stuff going on in the Middle East which I would regard as very real but very destructive (self-destructive) on the spiritual level. When Al-Zarkawi takes such deep pleasure in personally dripping himself in blood and announces that "Iraqi blood tastes better than American blood"... we have to be sober about what we are facing. People may be hurting themselves more than anyone else, because of THEIR misguided axioms about how things work, but it could hurt everyone if they push the entire area into orgies of self-destruction. Again, I have been very impressed by a few subtle points in Modesitt's recent science fiction, the Ethos Effect. > At times, the >study of human beings is actively discouraged (or >dismissed as "psychobabble" or "academic elitism") in >favor of folk theories about what human beings are and >what behavior means. We could all do with a dose of >humility. I suspect neither side in a polarity has the >full view, and the more each reacts against the other, I am not entirely sure which polarity you are referring to in these sentences. There are many. In fact... when I think about the barriers to deeper knowledge of the human mind in US universities today... much of it reminds me of what that friend once said about "how do you do therapy on a jellyfish?" But then again, the schism between science and the soul is not a jellyfish thing. That is the deepest polarization in our understanding. Humility is certainly a key part of the search for truth. But... this leads into very large issues... and I have written to many words already here, I suspect... Happy New Year... Paul From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Jan 1 18:19:49 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 10:19:49 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Another well-known liberal Message-ID: <01C4EFEB.6DCC8710.shovland@mindspring.com> Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 111024 bytes Desc: not available URL: From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sat Jan 1 21:47:25 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 13:47:25 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] liberal/conservative In-Reply-To: <200501011820.j01IKH020573@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050101214725.29172.qmail@web13423.mail.yahoo.com> >>For the immediate dangers in the Middle East, the best-informed people I know point to the simple belief that "dialogue" is unnecessary, unproductive and essentially evil. That's one hell of an axiom to try to cope with.<< --Indeed. The leap from "You can't stop hardcore fanatics with dialog" (probably true) to "You can't have a dialog with anyone who is not on our side" (gross generalization) is all too easy. >>Yet fundamentalists in the US or fanatics of almost any stripe tend to share that same axiom, an axiom which almost REQUIRES either a nervous breakdown or gross hypocrisy in the end, if the people are really committed to the axiom.<< --Very true. The belief that doubt is treason does lead to nervous breakdown, and when a culture is locked into an extreme position and unable to see its own dysfunctional side, a fall is inevitable. The schizophrenia within the Islamic community is easily noticed by Westerners, but the schizophrenia within our own society is harder for us to see, because we are committed to a worldview based on unconscious compartmentalization. Nature does not compartmentalize, and we are eventually forced to see what we thought were very simple, black and white situations, in full color, with all the feelings and perceptions we denied. When a hard-line anti-liberal deplores the "hand-wringing" of liberals, it is an indication that if he were to question his own position, it would lead to guilt and self-doubt. When a leftist deplores the black and white thinking of some conservatives, he cannot see that he is engaging in the same fallacy. Each projects his own shadow onto the other, and eventually there is a role-reversal before balance is reached. The pendulum swing against liberalism, which many conservatives believe is a "return to sanity" will not be permanent. Hopefully the next swing will be toward a harmonious blend of liberal and conservative thinking, instead of reactionary socialism or blind anti-conservatism. michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Dress up your holiday email, Hollywood style. Learn more. http://celebrity.mail.yahoo.com From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Jan 1 22:09:44 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 14:09:44 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] liberal/conservative Message-ID: <01C4F00B.8C3D4A70.shovland@mindspring.com> The so-called "swing to the right," in my view, is really the last gasp of the Reptilian mentality. Even as empathy arises from a newer part of the brain, so do Empaths represent the new order, and Reptilians will go the way of the Neanderthal. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2005 1:47 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] liberal/conservative >>For the immediate dangers in the Middle East, the best-informed people I know point to the simple belief that "dialogue" is unnecessary, unproductive and essentially evil. That's one hell of an axiom to try to cope with.<< --Indeed. The leap from "You can't stop hardcore fanatics with dialog" (probably true) to "You can't have a dialog with anyone who is not on our side" (gross generalization) is all too easy. >>Yet fundamentalists in the US or fanatics of almost any stripe tend to share that same axiom, an axiom which almost REQUIRES either a nervous breakdown or gross hypocrisy in the end, if the people are really committed to the axiom.<< --Very true. The belief that doubt is treason does lead to nervous breakdown, and when a culture is locked into an extreme position and unable to see its own dysfunctional side, a fall is inevitable. The schizophrenia within the Islamic community is easily noticed by Westerners, but the schizophrenia within our own society is harder for us to see, because we are committed to a worldview based on unconscious compartmentalization. Nature does not compartmentalize, and we are eventually forced to see what we thought were very simple, black and white situations, in full color, with all the feelings and perceptions we denied. When a hard-line anti-liberal deplores the "hand-wringing" of liberals, it is an indication that if he were to question his own position, it would lead to guilt and self-doubt. When a leftist deplores the black and white thinking of some conservatives, he cannot see that he is engaging in the same fallacy. Each projects his own shadow onto the other, and eventually there is a role-reversal before balance is reached. The pendulum swing against liberalism, which many conservatives believe is a "return to sanity" will not be permanent. Hopefully the next swing will be toward a harmonious blend of liberal and conservative thinking, instead of reactionary socialism or blind anti-conservatism. michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Dress up your holiday email, Hollywood style. Learn more. http://celebrity.mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sun Jan 2 01:31:19 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sat, 01 Jan 2005 18:31:19 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Another well-known liberal In-Reply-To: <01C4EFEB.6DCC8710.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4EFEB.6DCC8710.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <41D74EE7.1000208@solution-consulting.com> Crude, but at least it is highly offensive . . . Steve Hovland wrote: > > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 111024 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Jan 2 01:47:37 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 17:47:37 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Another well-known liberal Message-ID: <01C4F029.FC068E70.shovland@mindspring.com> >From a social- or cognitive- science point of view, what makes it offensive? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2005 5:31 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Another well-known liberal Crude, but at least it is highly offensive . . . Steve Hovland wrote: > > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > << File: ATT00001.html >> << File: ATT00002.jpeg >> << File: ATT00003.txt >> From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Jan 2 18:23:27 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 10:23:27 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Did Kerry really say that? Message-ID: <01C4F0B5.19FC52D0.shovland@mindspring.com> "George Bush will be the first man in US history to serve two terms without being legitimately elected." From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 2 20:32:49 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 15:32:49 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: (Posner) 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? Message-ID: 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? New York Times Book Review, 5.1.2 By PETER SINGER CATASTROPHE Risk and Response. By Richard A. Posner. 322 pp. Oxford University Press. $28. AN asteroid colliding with the earth could cause the extinction of our species. Is this a risk worth worrying about? More important, is it a risk worth doing something about? Richard A. Posner, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, who produces more books in his leisure hours than most authors do working full time, thinks it is. We should also, he argues, be doing more about other improbable catastrophes. Global warming could cause the melting of icecaps, releasing huge amounts of methane that accelerate further warming, forming a cloud layer so dense as to block out heat from the sun and cause us to go into a deep freeze. High-energy particle accelerators, used by physicists to investigate the fundamental laws of nature, could produce particles that create hyperdense ''strange matter'' that in turn might attract nearby nuclei, thus growing larger and attracting ever more nuclei, until the entire planet is compressed into a sphere no more than 100 meters in diameter. Not worried about these possibilities? Then what about the prospect of bioterrorists genetically modifying an incurable strain of smallpox that wipes out the human species? That might seem a more realistic scenario. ''Catastrophe'' lives up to its title. But it is no sci-fi potboiler, and there will be no movie. Posner made his name defending an economically rational approach to the law, and his new book is dense with complex calculations of the expected costs of catastrophic events, and the amount worth spending in attempts to avert them. The expected costs of a future event are the costs of that event, if it should happen, divided by the probability that it will happen. Thus, if I offer you $1,000 if a tossed coin turns up heads, the expected cost of my offer is $500. (Suppose I offer you $100,000 if a card drawn at random from a full pack is the ace of spades. Would you prefer that offer to $1,000 tied to the toss of the coin? Anyone interested in maximizing his assets would: the expected cost of that offer to me -- and hence the expected value to you -- is $1,923.) When a catastrophe is really catastrophic -- and Posner, it should be emphasized, isn't writing about ''minor'' disasters like the terrorist attacks of 9/11 -- it can have a significant expected cost, even if the event is extremely improbable. Consider, for example, the risk that a high-energy particle accelerator will produce a ''strange matter'' disaster. The official risk-assessment team for one of these accelerators, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, offered a series of estimates, one of which puts the annual risk of a disaster at one in five million. That seems a very small risk. But since the disaster would kill six billion people, that estimate gives it an expected cost of 1,200 lives per year. Even if the risk is estimated more conservatively at one in a billion, it has an expected annual cost of six lives. Would we build such an accelerator if we knew that six people would die every year in which it operates? In the third and most difficult chapter of ''Catastrophe,'' Posner explores ways of calculating the costs of catastrophic risks and of possible responses to them. He rebuts the claim that it is not cost-effective to do anything about global warming, an argument that invariably relies on heavily discounting disasters that will not occur for 50 or 100 years. We may wish to invest money to generate wealth rather than spending it to avert gradual global warming, but, as Posner suggests, the victims of the warming are likely to be concentrated in poor countries and will not necessarily benefit from the increased wealth generated by the richer nations. (On the other hand, abrupt, spiraling global warming that flips over into a deep freeze could kill us all, and then increased wealth will not do us any good anyway.) Any economic discussion of the expected cost of catastrophe must put a dollar value on human life. Some will object to this in principle, but unless we can agree on a figure, it will be impossible to decide what expenditure is worth incurring, to build safer roads, say, or to keep minute quantities of toxic chemicals out of our drinking water. Economists working in this area usually investigate how much people are willing to pay to reduce the risk of death -- for example, by buying safety devices for their homes, or preferring to work in a safer occupation for a lower wage than they could get in a high-risk occupation. The reduction in risk is then multiplied by the sum the average person is willing to pay for it to arrive at the value people implicitly place on their lives. Currently, most government departments use a figure of around $5 million, give or take a million or two. One problem with this approach is that most of us assess large risks differently from small ones. We may pay a steep price to reduce a risk of one in a thousand to one in ten thousand, but we are not much concerned about reducing a risk of one in a million to one in a billion. Yet a rational person who is interested in continuing to live should be willing to pay something for this reduction in risk. Clearly, these data show that while people appear to be moderately competent at assessing large risks, they are not very good at thinking about small risks. Posner, however, mostly takes the data on their face, and suggests that the value of a human life actually varies in accordance with the degree of risk we are considering -- so that the loss of each human life in a highly improbable catastrophe should be valued only at $50,000 instead of the $5 million that it would be valued at if we were considering a more likely disaster. This is bizarre. The real worth of our lives has nothing to do with the probability of a particular cause of death. IN short, Posner really has a much stronger case for saying we should spend more to avert small risks of catastrophe than his own calculations indicate. And the case gets stronger still if we take into account some of the larger ethical issues he rapidly brushes aside, especially the question of how we should view the fact that the extinction of our species would prevent the existence of all future generations of human beings. Barring catastrophe, our species may continue to exist for millions of years, gradually overcoming our problems and achieving a level of happiness, fulfillment and moral virtue -- including concern for the well-being of other species -- that far exceeds anything we have yet known. Arguably, this makes a catastrophe that causes our extinction a much greater tragedy than the ''mere'' death of six billion people. Posner's practical recommendations seem calculated to parcel out irritation to everyone. Physicists will not like the doubts he casts on particle accelerators. Liberals will be alarmed by his support for greater police powers to counteract bioterrorism, including censorship of scientific publications that could help terrorists devise new biological weapons. Conservatives will dislike his support for taxes on carbon dioxide emissions, and will be apoplectic at his proposal that we hand over some of the nation's sovereign powers to an international environmental protection agency to enforce an improved version of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. As for ordinary readers, they will most likely be annoyed by the book's frequent repetitiveness, particularly in the concluding chapter, and may wonder what the two pages urging severe punishment for computer hackers are doing in a book about catastrophes. (Did Posner lose part of his manuscript to a computer virus?) Still, we would be well advised to set aside such minor discontents and take the message of this book seriously. We ignore it at (a small risk of) our (very great) peril. Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. His recent books include ''One World'' and ''The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush.'' http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/books/review/02SINGERL.html From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 2 20:33:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 15:33:58 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Word for Word | Susan Sontag: No Hard Books, or Easy Deaths Message-ID: Word for Word | Susan Sontag: No Hard Books, or Easy Deaths New York Times, 5.1.2 By CHARLES McGRATH SUSAN SONTAG, who died last week at the age of 71, was the pre-eminent intellectual of our time -visible, outspoken, engaged. The life of the mind was for her something both rigorous and passionate, moral and pleasurable, and she brought to it a lifetime of reading, watching and listening (she was a fixture at concerts and dance events) and a prose style of singular clarity and precision. Many of her essays were meditations of a sort, in which she brooded over something - the nature of camp, say, or the seductive power of photography - and then worked out her own thoughts and feelings. In the end, they were almost the same thing. Her ideas were deeply felt, her feelings deepened by reflection. She was by nature a fusionist - someone who could link high art and low, Patti Smith and Nietzsche - and a distruster of false or easy connections, like our way of using metaphor to talk about sickness. An excerpt from her unflinching essay "Illness as Metaphor" appears below, along with selections from other works. Against Interpretation, 1964 Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plentitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, or capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of a critic must be assessed. What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. Notes on Camp, 1964 I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion. Though I am speaking about sensibility only - and about a sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous - these are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions, mainly sensual, that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason. They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their reactions to people and to works of art. But this attitude is na?ve. And even worse. To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. One Culture and the New Sensibility, 1965 Having one's sensorium challenged or stretched hurts. The new serious music hurts one's ears, the new painting does not graciously reward one's sight, the new films and the few interesting new prose works do not go down easily. The commonest complaint about the films of Antonioni or the narratives of Beckett or Burroughs is that they are hard to look at or to read, that they are "boring." But the charge of boredom is really hypocritical. There is, in a sense, no such thing as boredom. Boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustration. And the new languages which the interesting art of our time speaks are frustrating to the sensibilities of most educated people. But the purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer. And, one can also say that, balancing the ostensible anti-hedonism of serious contemporary art, the modern sensibility is more involved with pleasure in the familiar sense than ever. On Photography, 1977 The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied: first, because the possibilities of photography are infinite; and, second, because the project is finally self-devouring. The attempts by photographers to bolster up a depleted sense of reality contribute to the depletion. Our oppressive sense of the transience of everything is more acute since cameras gave us the means to "fix" the fleeting moment. We consume images at an ever faster rate and, as Balzac suspected cameras used up layers of the body, images consume reality. Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it obsolete. Illness as Metaphor, 1978 The policy of equivocating about the nature of their disease with cancer patients reflects the conviction that dying people are best spared the news that they are dying, and that the good death is the sudden one, best of all if it happens while we're unconscious or asleep. Yet the modern denial of death does not explain the extent of the lying and the wish to be lied to; it does not touch the deepest dread. Someone who has had a coronary is at least as likely to die of another one within a few years as someone with cancer is likely to die soon from cancer. But no one thinks of concealing the truth from a cardiac patient: there is nothing shameful about a heart attack. Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene - in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses. Cardiac disease implies a weakness, trouble, failure that is mechanical; there is no disgrace, nothing of the taboo that once surrounded people afflicted with TB and still surrounds those who have cancer. Thirty Years Later..., 1996 I had come to New York at the start of the 1960's, eager to put to work the writer I had, since adolescence, pledged myself to become. My idea of a writer: someone interested in "everything." I had always had interests of many kinds, so it was natural for me to conceive of the vocation of a writer in this way. And reasonable to suppose that such fervency would find more scope in a great metropolis than in any variant of provincial life, including the excellent universities I had attended. The only surprise was that there weren't more people like me. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/weekinreview/02word.html From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 2 20:36:00 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 15:36:00 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Safire: On Language: Personal or Private? Message-ID: On Language: Personal or Private? On Language by William Safire, New York Times Magazine, 5.1.2 By WILLIAM SAFIRE In his year-end news conference, President Bush was asked if his relationship with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who has been undermining democracy, had chilled. Bush replied, ''You know, it's complicated.'' Then he corrected himself: ''It's complex rather than complicated.'' After that surprising display of hairsplitting synonymy, he went on to explain what he meant by complexity: working with the Russians in sharing intelligence on terrorism while implicitly criticizing Putin for his recent centralization of power. Bush liked his choice of the word complex so much that he thrice returned to it moments later when asked about criticism of the Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld: ''The secretary of defense is a complex job. It's complex in times of peace, and it's complex even more so in times of war.'' Simply put, the president rejects complications and is hooked on complexity. Let's examine the difference between those words. Complicated is a participial adjective rooted in the Latin for ''folded together.'' It has always had a slightly sinister connotation: ''There they lie,'' wrote the philosopher Henry Power in 1664, ''all dead, twisted and complicated all together, like a knot of Eels.'' Three years later, the poet John Milton, in ''Paradise Lost,'' wrote of a hellish scene, ''Thick swarming now/With complicated monsters.'' Over the centuries, the word's meaning was rehabilitated somewhat but still retains a primary sense of ''hard to unravel or explain; so intimately intertwined as to be confusing.'' Often it is used as an excuse for an inability to clearly define: to say, ''That's complicated,'' is to duck a question or to cover up ignorance of detail. Although complex, rooted in the Latin for ''encompass or embrace different elements,'' is also the opposite of ''simple,'' it does not seem to brush aside the questioner as one too easily confused. Complex means ''with interconnected parts; compounded of different elements; an intricate combination of ideas.'' In grammar, a complex sentence contains one or more subordinate clauses, like the one beginning ''Although,'' which puts the reader to sleep at the beginning of the paragraph that precedes this one. It is the opposite of the simple declarative sentence, like ''complex is usually a compliment.'' (In simplicity there is strength; in complex ity there are nuances running the risk of voter distrust; in complication there is danger of a need for drastic surgery to disentangle those linguistic eels.) PRIVATE VS. PERSONAL In his defense of the secretary of defense, Bush said, ''He has been around in Washington a long period of time.'' This is an example of lazy verbosity; Alistair Cooke used to deride Yanks who said, ''Welcome to the New York area'' or substituted on a daily basis for ''every day'' or Brits who said ''in two weeks' time.'' The president was sharp, however, when it came to getting personal: a reporter asked about his plan for ''private accounts'' among proposed changes to the Social Security system, and Bush began his response with ''As to personal accounts. . . . '' This past summer, at the Republican convention in New York, the former House majority leader Richard Armey took me aside at a fat-cat function and whispered, ''Personal is the word, not private.'' Sure enough, in all Republican presentations of elements of the future ''ownership society,'' the warm, almost cuddly word personal -- as in ''up close and personal,'' a phrase used in The Times in 1915 to describe the closeness of the Rev. Selden Delaney with his parishioners, later popularized as the title of a 1996 movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert Redford -- is the term used to escape from private, a word that is the antithesis of public and is seen to offend most blue-state citizens. (That's a complicated sentence that wishes it were merely complex.) The private/personal synonyms have much in common with the complicated/complex pair. In both cases, the pair shares an antonym -- ''public'' for the former, ''simple'' for the latter -- and within each pair is a subtle separation by connotation. Private is from the Latin privatus, ''apart from the state,'' its meaning extended to ''belonging to the individual or interest and not owned by any government.'' As a noun, privacy has a good connotation (keep out of my computer, you prying cookie). As an adjective, however, private is often associated in political discourse with ''the truly greedy,'' as in ''private developers.'' Consequently, liberals deride the idea of setting aside a portion of the payroll tax destined for Social Security as the dreaded privatization, while conservatives like to call that percentage set aside a ''personal retirement account.'' Personal probably comes from the Etruscan phersu, ''mask,'' from which we get persona, an assumed character or ''image.'' With the rise of interest in the person, individual or self, personal took on an intimate character: we enjoy e-mail's personal correspondence on our personal digital assistants and grunt happily if wearily at the behest of our personal trainers. In a word, personal is in; impersonal can be an insult, and private -- especially in its verb form as privatize -- has more enemies in the media than friends. DEAR NEAR ''You have ruled out tax cuts,'' a reporter said to the president, ''and no cuts in benefits for the retired and the near retired.'' Then came the semantic zinger: ''What, in your mind, is 'near retired'?'' Bush half-answered that with a reference to ''our seniors,'' but let me deal with the dropping of the adverbial -ly and the overuse of near as a combining form. It became controversial with near miss, a nonsensical version of near thing; some of us patiently but uselessly pointed out that the writer meant ''near hit.'' Near miss has since entrenched itself as an idiom. (Idioms is idioms, and I could care less.) The abovementioned Vlad the Impaler refers to Russian speakers in the nations that broke away from the Soviet Union as the near abroad. And now we have Bush's near retired, presumably but not decidedly people approaching their 60's. Two paragraphs back, today's column was near finished. The compound nouns are chasing the adverbs out of the language. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/magazine/02ONLANGUAGE.html From waluk at earthlink.net Sun Jan 2 20:54:12 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Geraldine Reinhardt) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 12:54:12 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Did Kerry really say that? References: <01C4F0B5.19FC52D0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <016001c4f10d$38083f70$2900f604@S0027397558> At least George Bush received a concession speech from his two opponents, something that still hasn't occurred in Ukraine. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Independent Scholar http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "paleopsych at paleopsych. org (E-mail)" Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2005 10:23 AM Subject: [Paleopsych] Did Kerry really say that? > "George Bush will be the first man in US history to > serve two terms without being legitimately elected." > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Mon Jan 3 00:49:35 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2005 17:49:35 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] How can Steve be successful with propaganda? In-Reply-To: <01C4F029.FC068E70.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4F029.FC068E70.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <41D8969F.9030309@solution-consulting.com> Steve asked, apropos of "Jesus = Liberal" >From a social- or cognitive- science point of view, what makes it offensive? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net Steve, excellent question. First, there is an evaluative process when a person sees / hears a propaganda message, such as "Who is saying this, why are they telling me this?" Successful propaganda must come from authorative sources. If you haven't established yourself as a scholar of christianity, the link rings terribly hollow. Symbols don't occur in vacuum; those that try to do so are irritating since they don't have the imprimatur of authority. Can you get the Pope to endorse the link (ex cathedra)? I doubt it. Second, when you use a universal iconic symbol, whom are you targeting? Liberals will already believe such links (Jesus = Liberal) whereas conservatives will be offended. They will say, and with considerable justification, that it is clear that Jesus revered life and were he here on earth today he would be revolted by the practice of abortion, something that liberalism tied itself to. One such contradiction will cause your Christian targets to reject the link. People in the middle - moderate christians - might be offended because if they have even a passing acquaintance with history, they know how people appropriate religious themes for selfish, destructive ends. That is an empirical question, of course, but such use of icons, especially by "out-group" people, are especially upsetting to the "in group." Have you established your bona fides as an in-group member? Third, scholars will immediately know that Libeal/Conservative labels do not apply to epochs other than our own. For example, to label Washington "liberal" creates much discomfort to those who have studied the early history of our country (Federalists = liberal? I don't think so!0 Republicans under Jefferson waged an intense hate speech campaign asserting that the Federalists were elitists who simply wanted a kind of big business aristocracy. Conservatives? But Hamilton expanded the Federal Government enormously, and instituted deficit spending. Liberals? Jefferson appealed to the masses and used emotional language much more than Federalists (liberal?) yet he hated and distrusted all government (conservative?). The issues weren't the same. The labels simply don't fit that era. Similarly, during the time of Jesus there were two "political" parties, the Sadducees and the Pharasees. They are not liberal or conservative, except by special pleading which makes the comparison invalid. Sadducees doubted life after death and were more inclusive (liberal?) and Pharasees were concerned with preserving traditional Judeism and were big on "letter of the law" (conservative?) but Jesus eschewed both sides. He tangled with both, and appeared to have no interest at all in political institutions. I speak as one who has read the New Testament dozens of times in various translations and two languages, and read several commentaries on the life of Jesus. So to label him that way immediately makes you lose any credibility in the eyes of people who know history and theology. If I could offer some advice, I would say drop the labels and use something that is already successful. The word"liberal" is so full of negative meanings to the majority of US citizens I don't think it can be redeemed for perhaps fifty years. Your efforts to redeem it will be seen as clumsy and manipulative. You as a source will be discounted. Piggyback on a successful idea. Take the tsunami devastation. A photo of the suffering with the (already successful) question, "What would Jesus do?" That is likely to produce a positive affective response from almost everyone.* *(Actually, he would probably say to ignore what governments do and take independent action, sacrificing your own purse to help those in need. He would be more pleased with the enormous church-based fund raising going on now than with forced contributions via taxes. Jesus never taught corporate response [Sinai covenant] but instead emphasized individual response [Elijah covenant], so Jesus says "sell all you have and give it to the poor and come and follow me" but only to the rich youth.). To me, one reason that liberalism has become morally bankrupt is that it substitutes the Sinai covenant for the Elijah /Christian covenant, and substitutes corporate action for individual virtue. I am not sure how you can overcome that, without changing the fundamentals of liberalism. Thanks for the question, Lynn Johnson Steve Hovland wrote: >>From a social- or cognitive- science point >of view, what makes it offensive? > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2005 5:31 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Another well-known liberal > >Crude, but at least it is highly offensive . . . > >Steve Hovland wrote: > > > >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> >> >>------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> >>------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> > << File: ATT00001.html >> << File: ATT00002.jpeg >> << File: ATT00003.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Jan 3 02:10:07 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 18:10:07 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] How can Steve be successful with propaganda? Message-ID: <01C4F0F6.4ADD1380.shovland@mindspring.com> Thanks for your comments. Now, with your mind viewed as a neural net, evaluate this: Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2005 4:50 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] How can Steve be successful with propaganda? Steve asked, apropos of "Jesus = Liberal" >From a social- or cognitive- science point of view, what makes it offensive? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net Steve, excellent question. First, there is an evaluative process when a person sees / hears a propaganda message, such as "Who is saying this, why are they telling me this?" Successful propaganda must come from authorative sources. If you haven't established yourself as a scholar of christianity, the link rings terribly hollow. Symbols don't occur in vacuum; those that try to do so are irritating since they don't have the imprimatur of authority. Can you get the Pope to endorse the link (ex cathedra)? I doubt it. Second, when you use a universal iconic symbol, whom are you targeting? Liberals will already believe such links (Jesus = Liberal) whereas conservatives will be offended. They will say, and with considerable justification, that it is clear that Jesus revered life and were he here on earth today he would be revolted by the practice of abortion, something that liberalism tied itself to. One such contradiction will cause your Christian targets to reject the link. People in the middle - moderate christians - might be offended because if they have even a passing acquaintance with history, they know how people appropriate religious themes for selfish, destructive ends. That is an empirical question, of course, but such use of icons, especially by "out-group" people, are especially upsetting to the "in group." Have you established your bona fides as an in-group member? Third, scholars will immediately know that Libeal/Conservative labels do not apply to epochs other than our own. For example, to label Washington "liberal" creates much discomfort to those who have studied the early history of our country (Federalists = liberal? I don't think so!0 Republicans under Jefferson waged an intense hate speech campaign asserting that the Federalists were elitists who simply wanted a kind of big business aristocracy. Conservatives? But Hamilton expanded the Federal Government enormously, and instituted deficit spending. Liberals? Jefferson appealed to the masses and used emotional language much more than Federalists (liberal?) yet he hated and distrusted all government (conservative?). The issues weren't the same. The labels simply don't fit that era. Similarly, during the time of Jesus there were two "political" parties, the Sadducees and the Pharasees. They are not liberal or conservative, except by special pleading which makes the comparison invalid. Sadducees doubted life after death and were more inclusive (liberal?) and Pharasees were concerned with preserving traditional Judeism and were big on "letter of the law" (conservative?) but Jesus eschewed both sides. He tangled with both, and appeared to have no interest at all in political institutions. I speak as one who has read the New Testament dozens of times in various translations and two languages, and read several commentaries on the life of Jesus. So to label him that way immediately makes you lose any credibility in the eyes of people who know history and theology. If I could offer some advice, I would say drop the labels and use something that is already successful. The word"liberal" is so full of negative meanings to the majority of US citizens I don't think it can be redeemed for perhaps fifty years. Your efforts to redeem it will be seen as clumsy and manipulative. You as a source will be discounted. Piggyback on a successful idea. Take the tsunami devastation. A photo of the suffering with the (already successful) question, "What would Jesus do?" That is likely to produce a positive affective response from almost everyone.* *(Actually, he would probably say to ignore what governments do and take independent action, sacrificing your own purse to help those in need. He would be more pleased with the enormous church-based fund raising going on now than with forced contributions via taxes. Jesus never taught corporate response [Sinai covenant] but instead emphasized individual response [Elijah covenant], so Jesus says "sell all you have and give it to the poor and come and follow me" but only to the rich youth.). To me, one reason that liberalism has become morally bankrupt is that it substitutes the Sinai covenant for the Elijah /Christian covenant, and substitutes corporate action for individual virtue. I am not sure how you can overcome that, without changing the fundamentals of liberalism. Thanks for the question, Lynn Johnson Steve Hovland wrote: >>From a social- or cognitive- science point >of view, what makes it offensive? > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2005 5:31 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Another well-known liberal > >Crude, but at least it is highly offensive . . . > >Steve Hovland wrote: > > > >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> >> >>------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> >>------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> > << File: ATT00001.html >> << File: ATT00002.jpeg >> << File: ATT00003.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > << File: ATT00008.html >> << File: ATT00009.txt >> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 95497 bytes Desc: not available URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Mon Jan 3 02:16:49 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2005 19:16:49 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: (Posner) 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <41D8AB11.6060303@solution-consulting.com> RE: Catastrophes, have you read State of Fear by Crichton? I know, it has all the typical weaknesses of a Crichton novel, but he effectively discounts global warming as a pseudo-fact being pushed by politics and not science. So Posner's argument about warming seems to be based on this pseudo-science. Crichton demolishes the Kyoto treaty using actual peer-reviewed citations in his novel. The whole idea of putting lots of effort into avoiding an event that will not happen is delicious coming from an attorney/judge, since lawyers are twisting science (silicone breast implants cause no problems; Cerebral palsy is not caused by OBs not doing caesarians) and creating imaginary risks (Vioxx is a perfectly good drug when taken with some precautions). More to the point, can we actually estimate probabilities? Five day weather predictions are a joke -- the local weather people have been predicting huge snowstorms that never materialized -- and so how can we predict whether a particle accelerator can produce a mini-black hole? Computer modeling is generally how we get such predictions, and such modeling has been 'way off, at least the ones I have seen. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? > New York Times Book Review, 5.1.2 > By PETER SINGER > > CATASTROPHE > Risk and Response. > By Richard A. Posner. > 322 pp. Oxford University Press. $28. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 3 02:29:20 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 21:29:20 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP Outlook: What Will Be Essential in 2020? Message-ID: What Will Be Essential in 2020? [These articles were spread over three pages, B1-3, in today's Outlook section of the Washington Post, i.e., 5.1.2, each with its own URL.] http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40151-2004Dec31?language=printer What Will Be Essential in 2020? By Philip Kennicott If you're one of those people who use this season to clean up and throw out the accumulated baggage of another year, just take stock of how deeply a basic optimism pervades the house. In the kitchen, a little bit of desiccated saffron waits for the proverbial blue moon when you decide to color a pot of rice. On the bookshelf, Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain" still inhabits its two inches of precious space, waiting for a long, undistracted summer to be given its due. In the closet, your youth hangs in between old winter coats and forlorn ties, waiting for the new you that will emerge from the gym and a regimen built on tofu and greens. There is an optimism so fundamental to life that we hardly notice its presence, an optimism of essentials: We hoard and we plan and we muddle on regardless of a world that gives us little reassurance about our future. Our world is constructed of ephemera -- technology and entertainment and celebrities -- that we know will come and go. And often it feels full of dreadful omens. But before the mind darkens contemplating that glass -- half full, or half empty? -- the body thirsts, simply, essentially. So the glass and the water precede the philosophical messiness of the human condition. And it is comforting, and chastening, from time to time, to work backward, from the anxieties and ambiguous portents of daily life to the basics. What is essential? What will remain essential in . . . oh, let us say 15 years? Outlook has put this question to six diverse writers. Our choices reflect, of course, our own most basic bias toward the essentials of life. We assume that a decade and a half from now we will still be essentially what we are today: mortal beings who struggle in the world to raise families, stay healthy, satisfy curiosity, amuse ourselves and leave behind us a record of who and what we were during our allotted time on the planet. It's never easy to answer this kind of question, which demands equal parts contemplation and speculation. And the question itself -- what is essential? -- is ultimately an elegant rephrasing of the most basic question we face: What is the meaning of our lives? But we ask it now because we are at a moment in American history that is filled with anxiety, and nothing allays fear like getting back to basics. Fifteen years ago, when laptops and portable phones were rare and unwieldy luxuries, not essentials, we saw the Cold War come to an end. Four years ago, at the end of a summer troubled by missing interns and marauding sharks, we saw the post-Cold War idyll shattered by terrorism. One of the things that went up in smoke that day was a crude kind of futurism -- fantasies of a technological golden age, theories of rapid new human evolution. Today, the language of the future has a dark edge to it. We live in a time not just of known unknowns, but unknown unknowns, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said, none too reassuringly. Remember the Long Boom? The theory put forth in the late 1990s that our big worry was no worries? That prosperity and technology and the end of the Cold War meant years, decades even, of troublesome peace and stability? Remember the end of history, Francis Fukuyama's hailing of a new post-ideological age, without the grand historical confrontations of the Cold War? Alluring ideas are not necessarily essential ones. But new ideas replace them, and some of them may prove more lasting. In producing the pages you see here, we have chosen a span of 15 years to make it manageable. Except for the very aged, who may be excused for worrying less about a time they will not see, we can all make out, if somewhat dimly, the year 2020 on the horizon. Thinking about someone else's future, a century from now, is pleasant sport, played without much responsibility; thinking about our own future requires more care and caution. Most predictions involve a little wish fulfillment (pundits are notorious for this), and the good that we wish for -- or the evil we would wish away -- says everything about who we would like to be. In the end, the particulars of what people today think will be essential in 2020 matter less than the exercise of pondering the question. It is an antidote to the myopia and chaos of our public life, a bulwark against Cassandra and Pangloss alike, against fear mongering and complacency. This centering question -- what is essential? -- is elemental to our spiritual and religious life, our daily habits, our arts and sciences, and yet seems all too often utterly absent from our political world. A politician who would confront the rabble of Scandal, Cant and Empty Symbols with a little impatience and a dismissive wave of the hand, saying, "that's not essential," might rise to the first rank of public life. But then again, politicians are not a breed apart, but a reflection of some part of ourselves, perhaps that part of us which, like Milton's Mammon, keeps looks and thoughts "downward bent," admiring the pavement and not the vaults of heaven. Perhaps in 15 years, if someone should return to these pages, everything he or she reads here will have been proved wrong. But a failure of prescience is not so lamentable as a failure of hope -- and by focusing on what will be essential, rather than what will change, we ground our speculation in hope. The future sketched here, even if it is not all that we would like it to be, is nevertheless one we expect to see. Author's e-mail: kennicottp at washpost.com Phil Kennicott, a staff writer for the Style section, is The Post's culture critic. --------------- http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40155-2004Dec31?language=printer Some Dramatic Insight . . . Okay. It's 3 a.m. Lying on the sofa, you've drifted off into some flighty dream listening to the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air . . . only to be jolted awake by the static scream of the television set. If you remember nights like that, chances are you also remember losing your patience while trying to make an urgent call on a rotary phone. From UHF to satellite, VHF to Direct TV, the technological advances have been phenomenal, but they have accompanied a disturbing trend -- the evolution of the media as purveyors of entertainment rather than news, as investigators into celebrity lives rather than into current events. These changes leave me guessing what we will encounter in the next decades. Perhaps we will have put aside those 3-D glasses in favor of personal LCDs that will allow us to view news clips (indistinguishable from fiction) just centimeters from our eyes while riding the subway; or maybe we'll catch "click-a-flicks" in which one click of a ballpoint pen will project the latest blockbuster hit (with real politicians and celebrities morphed into the leading roles) onto any surface. Or should we look beyond PlayStation and Xbox and see that our obsession with gang violence, carjackings, presidential assassinations and sex is just the vulgar precursor to affective computer games that will make us feel as if we really are invading malls and churches or attacking public transportation systems as suicide bombers? As the media that once assumed the responsibility for educating and informing us devolve into mere entertainment, we shall, ironically, find ourselves looking to one of the oldest forms of entertainment -- theater -- to educate and inform us. What will be essential then will be to develop theater that does not yield to special effects in an effort merely to amuse but takes us places where we often do not want to go, the places of our most intimate personal fears and not just fear-fueled fantasies. It is in the political and social arena that the theater will thrive, tackling 2020's versions of the Columbine massacre, 9/11 and the Iraq war and compensating for the failings of our sources of news and information. We've seen this trend already, beginning with the works of playwrights Adrienne Kennedy and Ed Bullins in the 1960s and '70s and more recently with August Wilson, Kia Corthorn, David Hare and Tony Kushner. How will theater compete with the technologically driven media? Hip-hop moguls like Russell Simmons have already brought that genre as far as Broadway, expanding theater's boundaries. That's promising. At any rate, let's hope the stage can resist the cravings to pry into individuals' personal lives by creating reality theater. Let's hope we won't be inviting audiences to "go backstage and witness the uncensored drama" where the greenroom, the egos and the insecurities would all be put on display. Most likely, I think, is that, in a world where the news media will have been given over entirely to shock programming, theater will provide an essential forum for tackling the affairs of our nation. And there's no denying that current affairs are as dramatic as ever before. Theater may draw back the curtain to focus on the essential issues. Author's e-mail: TimothyJavon at msn.com By Javon Johnson, the author of 11 plays, including "Breathe" and "Hambone." -------------------- http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40153-2004Dec31?language=printer . . . and Portable Serenity Few industries are supposed to have more to look forward to than the travel industry. We hear that by the year 2020, the skies will be filled with gigantic double-decker airplanes, and everyone will be spending a sizable portion of their income and even their time going somewhere else. Despite these predictions, my guess is that more and more of us will find the confidence to stay at home, and that after peaking around 2015, the leisure travel industry will go into gradual but terminal decline. Weeds will grow in the atriums of the world's big airports and vast concrete hotels will stand empty by azure shores. We will by then have grasped what is essential to successful travel: We will have understood that our deepest problems and anxieties are not resolved by transporting ourselves somewhere else. The prospect of a vacation can usually persuade even the most downcast that life is worth living. Aside from love, few events are anticipated more eagerly, or form the subject of more enriching daydreams, than our vacations. They seem to offer us perhaps our finest chance to achieve happiness outside the constraints of work. During the long working weeks, we can be vitally sustained by our dreams of going somewhere else, a place with better weather, more interesting customs and inspiring landscapes -- a place where it seems we stand a chance of finally being happy. But of course the reality of travel seldom matches the daydreams. The tragicomic disappointments are well known: the sense of disorientation, the mid-afternoon despair, the arguments, the lethargy before ancient ruins. When we look at pictures of places we want to go and see (and imagine how happy we would be if only we were there), we are inclined to forget one crucial thing: that we will have to take ourselves along with us. That is, we won't just be in India/South Africa/Australia/Prague/Peru in a direct, unmediated way; we'll be there with ourselves, still imprisoned in our own bodies and minds -- with all the problems this entails. By 2020, we stand to recognize that our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic or material goods is critically dependent on first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, for self-expression and respect. We will not enjoy -- we are not able to enjoy -- sumptuous tropical gardens and attractive wooden beach huts when a relationship to which we are committed abruptly reveals itself to be suffused with incomprehension and resentment, or when we remember that our career is not heading in the direction we would like it to. The key ingredients of happiness remain stubbornly psychological. The travel industry conspires to make us forget this essential truth. It promises us that happiness can be attained by changing the color of the sky. But no one was ever cheered up by a beautiful location for longer than about 15 minutes -- unless, that is, they were ready to be happy anyway. By 2020, what will be essential to travel, if you must undertake it, is a calm heart and a satisfied mind, and an awareness that we cannot solve most of our ills by changing locations. For those who stay at home, Pascal's famous aphorism will be the guiding light: "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." Author's e-mail:adb at netcomuk.co.uk By Alain de Botton, the author of seven books, including "The Art of Travel" (Vintage), who lives in London. ----------------------- http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40152-2004Dec31?language=printer We'll Need a Threatometer . . . If you believe the sci-fi films of the 20th century, life in the year 2020 will indeed be much simpler -- either because we'll all be wearing spandex jumpsuits all the time, or because we'll all be living underground like cockroaches. But despite my natural tendency to think about the Worst-Case Scenarios ((TM) and ? Quirk Productions), I consider myself a realistic optimist. As a result, I think the future in store for us 15 years from now is unlikely to be dramatically different from the present -- just dirtier, multifunctional and miniaturized. So here's my short list of the essential gear for surviving in 2020: o EyePod Sunglasses. From AppleApparel, these special spectacles will not only screen out those increasingly nasty UV rays but will also filter out the visual and aural messages that will be assaulting us from all directions, via electronic billboards on everything from street signs to urinals. These glasses will be essential for maintaining sanity, focus and safe driving skills. They will also, however, allow the wearer to download music, videos and the latest episode of Dr. Phil. o Nasal filters. These will be standard issue due to air pollution, the ever-increasing threat of bioterrorism and the continued ubiquity of stick-on air fresheners. o Swiss Army Gloves. Repackaging the basics for human survival in the ultimately handy format. The 2020 model will include a compass, scissors, pocketknife, sewing kit, flint, magnifying glass, gas mask, water purifier, GPS-enabled satellite phone, web browser and, of course, a toothpick. o George Foreman Low-Fat Grill with Meat Thermometer/Terrorist Threatometer. The latest version will not only remove all the fat from a hamburger, but also monitor the color-coded alerts from the Homeland Security Advisory System, allowing you to decide in an instant if you need to eat and run. o Groomba. Indispensable in a time-challenged society: A tiny, spiderlike robotic grooming device that will trim your hair, shave you and give you a facial while you are sleeping. o MiVo. This microscopic camera implant will record your life onto a small hard drive in 30-minute segments. Via remote control, Homeland Security can use it to watch you packing your suitcase for a flight; or you can set it yourself to record a "season pass" of all family events, skipping the boring parts. o Beau-toxe. A new Botox-infused cologne that will simultaneously eliminate your wrinkles and attract the opposite sex. Essential? You be the judge. o Arm & Hammer Baking Soda. Still good for sooooo many things. Author's e-mail: david at quirkbooks.com By David Borgenicht, co-author of "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook" (Chronicle Books). ------------------------ http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40147-2004Dec31?language=printer We'll Have to Use Data Wisely "You know more than you think you do," Benjamin Spock encouraged parents in the first line of "Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care," more than half a century ago. Nowadays, when we think about all the information available to us at the tap of a finger and the flash of a screen, it sometimes seems that we know more than we ever thought we'd know about our children, ourselves, our health. The essential question is what to do with all that knowledge. By 2020, we will know much more, and the question of how to use that vastly expanded knowledge to make intelligent choices will be our health imperative. We already know an astonishing amount, at times more than we really can handle: Ask any parent who has had to make an agonizing decision about a fetus with a genetic problem, or any adult who has had to decide whether to be tested for Huntington's disease. Soon we'll understand much more, about a fetus, a baby, a child, an adult, about genetic susceptibility and risk, about predicting who might get heart disease, mental illness and certain types of cancer. You won't just say in a general way, oh yes, that runs in my family -- you'll be able to know specifically what runs, so to speak, in your veins. And the health challenge to us, as individuals, and as a society, will be what to do with this information, how to use it well and wisely at every level. "The whole world is going to see how cardiovascular disease, obesity-related disease, mental illness, how these major causes of death and morbidity arise in utero or in childhood, how they're multi-generational, and the challenge is how to interrupt these processes so people can live long and healthy lives," says Matthew W. Gillman, associate professor of ambulatory care and prevention at Harvard Medical School, whose research focuses on long-lasting health effects of early human development. Most of the great advances in human health, he points out, are connected to public health improvement, to greater public hygiene or safety or greater understanding applied on a population-wide basis, to changes we make in our society or our environment that affect everyone. Our job will be to look for ways to use our increased information to improve the health of the population, as well as the health care of the individual. If we do this right, we'll pick our questions carefully, bearing in mind that a screening test is only valuable if a reasonable intervention is available. We're already doing it in certain areas, guided by family history: Hey, you have a high risk of cardiovascular disease, so modify your lifestyle and your diet in ways that will really change your odds! And you, over there, you have a higher-than-average chance of developing a hidden cancer, so you need to get yourself checked more often than most people. Well, imagine those pieces of advice to the nth degree, a custom-made set of lifestyle advisories so you don't end up like poor Uncle Al, or so that your sweet 1-year-old, who happens to share his genetic susceptibilities, doesn't take any baby steps in that direction. Or imagine a carefully tailored set of pharmaceutical recommendations about which drugs are likely to work well for you and which may be a little dangerous, all based on your genetic makeup. But doing this right will mean thinking not just about what will work for you, but about how this understanding of susceptibility, environment and prevention should help us shape our medical system and our social policy. If we do this right, it ought to mean sense and safety; if we push too hard and too egotistically, it could mean, unfortunately, a custom-made set of predictions, anxieties and paranoid, late-night hypochondrias, or the kind of anxious hovering over a child that leads to limited expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies. Doing it right will mean using screening tests intelligently to pinpoint problems where early detection and prevention change the odds. Doing it right will mean learning to assimilate additional information about individual risk, and yet not letting that information limit our horizons. And above all, doing it right will mean thinking not only individually -- as privileged consumers of health care -- but for everyone, so that this information is available to all, so that we use what we learn about risk and prevention to make the world a little safer, improve our health care delivery as well as our health, and meet the challenge of staying healthy in 2020. By Perri Klass, associate professor of pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine and co-author of "Quirky Kids: Understanding and Helping Your Child Who Doesn't Fit In" (Ballantine). ------------------------------- http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40145-2004Dec31?language=printer . . . See Today as the Past Like bulbs lying dormant in the ground before pushing their way to the surface, the forces ready to transform the world by 2020 are all around us, yet hidden. And like the bulbs, those forces already contain substance and direction that we who have planted them cannot clearly discern. For historians 15 years hence, it will be essential to work backward, from blossoms to roots. And when they do, they will undoubtedly have to sift through the implications of globalization -- whether to interpret it as the seed of a tighter world community or as the root of a profound, more pessimistic shift in the world and in the United States. America sailed into world prominence under the banner of progress. Buoyed by decades of material advances, 20th-century historians largely made it their task to explain how the United States became the richest and most powerful country in the world. Policymakers in the United States assumed then, as they do now, that a uniform human nature inspired all individuals, from childhood on, to strive for more goods. Discounting the crazy quilt of ethnic variety, our leaders have long seen people in all nations as yearning for a free enterprise economy and a democratic government patterned after the United States. So strong has been our sense of this ineluctable march forward that our nation has even resorted to military force to hasten globalization, American style. With this outlook, it has been easy to miss a great paradox that might be about to unfold: that the closer the peoples of the world draw together through communication, commerce and a shared commitment to human rights, the more they may claim their freedom to nurture distinctive ways. The homogenization of human societies, so evident in the closing decades of the 20th century, could come to an abrupt halt. That could be a positive thing. Building on sustainable, indigenous economies, countries could find ways to participate in a world community without sacrificing their distinctive customs. Coercion could give way to voluntary interaction; local decision-making could replace national and international centralization. Freed from equally smothering isolation or forced integration, human creativity and individual identity might flower in an era of plenty. However, historians in 2020 may be forced to explain a grimmer set of unintended consequences of globalization, starting with the plunge of the U.S. dollar, followed by the decimation of textile industries in developing countries no longer able to compete with China. A round of protective legislation restricting world trade could follow. Our innate selfishness, seen earlier as the basis for normal, healthy economies, could be our undoing as we disregard the consequences of our actions on the larger environment. The radiating effects of the vanishing rain forests could alter climates, thus drastically reducing food production. And astronomical prices for oil products might sap demand for industrial goods. The mutually reinforcing violence of terrorist groups engaged in relentless conflict with militarized, national regimes could make munitions the mainstay of industrial production. International cooperation in science and the arts might abate as fear of terrorists closed off access to the West's universities. And demographic trends will make it hard for Europe and the United States to support their own aging populations, much less provide poverty relief to keep overpopulated, underdeveloped countries from turning into seedbeds of intolerance and xenophobia. Now may be the time when essential choices are made about these future scenarios. In 2020, what will be essential is for historians to pinpoint the moment when either train of irreversible change -- one optimistic and one pessimistic -- passed the point of no return. They will know the outcome; we can only watch and hope. Author's e-mail: appleby at history.ucla.edu By Joyce Appleby, professor emerita of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of "A Restless Past: History and the American Public" (Rowman & Littlefield). -------------------------- http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40146-2004Dec31?language=printer . . . And Nurture A New Generation Raising a successful child with just values is the most important human activity, and it will be as complex, demanding and fulfilling in 2020 as it is today. This mystical process cannot be reduced to a single essential ingredient, but one crucial factor that determines whether a child succeeds or fails is the presence of caring adults. I grew up in rural South Carolina in the 1940s and 1950s in a racially segregated social order born of the ugly history of slavery. Fortunately for me, my parents and other adults never let the unjust external barriers become my internal ones. They provided buffers to combat a hostile world that told black children we weren't important. And they prepared me by precept and example to spend my life challenging that world. The changes from that time have been remarkable, and by 2020 the world will look very different from today. Many of our children will be parents, and they will find themselves enmeshed in a popular culture shaped by technological, social and economic forces hurtling past us before we even realize it. In such conditions, the need to instill in their children a set of ironclad core values -- honesty, integrity and service -- will become even more important. Adults hold a sacred trust to protect children from physical and spiritual poverty, violence and greed, and to show them how to care about something beyond themselves. Children need adult mentors in their homes, schools and communities who struggle to live what they preach. As the writer James Baldwin said, our children do not always do what we say, but they almost always do what we do. If we lie, children will. If we give nothing to the poor, they won't. If we don't vote, they will not fulfill their civic responsibilities as adults. If we tell or laugh at racial jokes, they will too. If we are violent and tolerate the glorification of violence, so will they. Our children tend to try to meet our expectations -- good or bad. They need adults who expect and help them to succeed. Parents need to teach children to respect others and themselves and to respond to people because they are good or wise or loving, not merely because they are powerful or rich. And adults need to stress nonviolent ways of resolving conflict in a violence-saturated world. Poor parents will need support to be good parents, meaning jobs with decent wages and health coverage in safe communities that offer educational opportunities for all. We know that America could harness its stupendous financial and intellectual treasure to break the cycle of poverty that limits our nation's progress and threatens our leadership in the world. Perhaps by 2020 the barriers that cause millions of children to fail will at last be cleared away. Author's e-mail: marian.edelman at childrensdefense.org By Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund. ----------------------------- http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40154-2004Dec31?language=printer Quotes: Bare Essentials Scientific truth as an absolute value. -- Richard Dawkins, Oxford professor and author of "The Ancestor's Tale" Vigilance against electronic snooping (and not just by governments). -- K. Anthony Appiah, Princeton professor and author of "The Ethics of Identity" Print. If for the past 400 years we'd been getting all of our info electronically, and somebody invented a way to put it on paper and deliver it to our doorsteps so we could read it in the back yard or bath or bus, people would say this new print technology is so wonderful it will replace the Internet. -- Walter Isaacson, president, Aspen Institute The ability to type. -- John McWhorter, senior fellow, Manhattan Institute As we develop "affective" computers, remembering that simulated thinking may be thinking, but simulated feeling is not feeling, simulated love is never love. -- Sherry Turkle, director of the Initiative on Technology and Self, MIT The great privacy of sleep; ambiguous, haunting images that come to us in the night; warm beds. -- Colm Toibin, author of "The Master" The "Oxford Book of English Verse" and sunblock. -- Thomas Mallon, novelist and critic Sunscreen, strong encryption, noise-canceling earphones. -- Edward Tenner, author of "Why Things Bite Back" Sunscreen and a dictionary; everything else for a good life will be optional. -- Rami G. Khouri, executive editor, the Daily Star, Beirut Solar power and backyard vegetable gardens. -- Jeanne DuPrau, author of "The City of Ember" An organized health system for all, smaller serving portions (with a lot less calories and fat) and confiscatory tax levels on SUVs. -- Alfred Sommer, dean, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health A long-overdue law that will make the egregious habit of "personal blogging" a crime. -- Laura Zigman, author of "Animal Husbandry" The same thing that has been essential throughout civilization -- engineering that advances quality of life. -- Henry Petroski, Duke professor and author of "Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering" An understanding heart. -- Julia Alvarez, author of "Finding Miracles" Solitude. -- Bill Joy, co-founder and former chief scientist, Sun Microsystems An awareness that globalism begins at home and that the "outside world," so-called, is in your front yard, your back yard, your living room and perhaps your bedroom. -- Pico Iyer, travel writer and author of "Sun After Dark" A working knowledge of Mandarin and English, and technologically sophisticated children to program household robots. -- Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University Basic knowledge of the Chinese language and history. -- Minxin Pei, director, China Program, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace A well-educated nation. -- Robert D. Ballard, discoverer of RMS Titanic Inclusiveness. -- Eugenio Arene, executive director, Council of Latino Agencies A more effective and expansive United Nations. -- J. Bryan Hehir, Harvard professor and former president, Catholic Charities Biometric ID cards, replacing passports, driver's licenses, national identification papers, proof of entitlement to pensions and state benefits and anything else we need ID for. -- Mary Dejevsky, chief editorial writer for London's Independent newspaper Complete genetic screening, which will allow prevention of most of the diseases known to man. -- Arthur Agatston, creator, South Beach Diet Cities remade to be beautiful and walkable. -- Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, architect Mass transit. Wireless headsets. Gyms will require trainers to have a psychology degree, or they'll have a resident psychologist. -- Matt Berens, personal trainer Krispy Kremes. -- Michael J. McKenna, cycling class instructor Nineteen years into the war on terror, an essential in all homes, offices and cars will be portable and powerful personal electrical generators. -- Peggy Noonan, author, political commentator Patience. The lines will just keep getting longer. -- Dennis Nishi, illustrator Fluency in foreign cultures and an affordable cup of coffee. -- Amy Gutmann, president, University of Pennsylvania 1920s vintage clothing for centennial celebrations of the Harlem Renaissance and the ratification of the 19th Amendment. -- A'Lelia Bundles, author of "On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker" A sense of humor. -- Nigella Lawson, author of "How to Be a Domestic Goddess" Retirement. -- Charles Foehrkolb, MARC train conductor From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 3 02:36:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 21:36:52 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Did Kerry really say that? In-Reply-To: <01C4F0B5.19FC52D0.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4F0B5.19FC52D0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: He certainly did not. Kerry conceded gracefully, as did Algore. So did Nixon, when the Democrats in Texas and Chicago swung those states for the Democrats. It does not pay to be a sore loser. Some of his supporters say so, though. When you add up all the illegal motor voters and other illegal voters, the net was titled toward both Algore and Kerry. There was a book about all this by one of the Wall St. Journal writers. Frank On 2005-01-02, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > "George Bush will be the first man in US history to serve two terms > without being legitimately elected." From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Mon Jan 3 02:55:23 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2005 19:55:23 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] How can Steve be successful with propaganda? In-Reply-To: <01C4F0F6.4ADD1380.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4F0F6.4ADD1380.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <41D8B41B.5030605@solution-consulting.com> Steve, I hope this is helpful: I think you are preaching to the choir. Imagine three groups, right, center, left. Conservatives would not accept Stalin as one of them, of course, but would suggest he is closer to liberalism, since modern liberalism has been excessively influenced by socialism and Marxism. So conservatives would reject it out of hand. They are generally well educated, and some studies have shown that conservatives actually know more about history than liberals. (More later) Moderates would see this as manipulative and distrust it. You are using a label pejoratively, and they would say, "If he does that to conservatives, he will turn on us next!" E.g.: The label/photo violates the reciprocity/reversability principle: Would you want someone pushing pejoratively labeled photos attacking liberalism? Since that is one of the three ways to determine what is ethical, moderates will be repelled. They will see it as unethical. (rightfully so, IMHO) Only the liberals would see that with glee, and why are you catering to them? If you want to influence people, you have to base your communication on deep truth, not on arbitrary labels. What you fail to understand is that the sine qua non of conservatism is the notion that government cannot perfect humanity. It is one of the tenets of the faith (from reading history - ). Liberals seem to believe that government can help perfect society. Stalin had huge faith in government's ability to perfect humanity, hence his disasterous embrace of Lysenko, causing famines and deaths of millions of peasants. So Stalin is a liberal run amok. (So also: Hitler, same basic idea; for a similarly flavored idea, study the essay by Virginia Postrel on Forbes.com: Resilience vs. anticipation - free but registration required. If you can't find it, let me know) Have you read Radical Son by Horowitz? He can help you understand the actual conservative mind set, if you want to influence conservatives. If you want to influence moderates, you have to understand moderation. Read "How Good People Make Tough Choices" by Kidder. It will explain the three bases of ethical behavior and that will improve your communication. So far, your labeling does violate the reciprocity ('golden rule') principle. Would you approve of someone labeling Keynes as "baby killer" or FDR as "warmonger"? LJ Steve Hovland wrote: >Thanks for your comments. > >Now, with your mind viewed as a neural net, >evaluate this: > > > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2005 4:50 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: [Paleopsych] How can Steve be successful with propaganda? > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Jan 3 04:36:07 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 20:36:07 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: (Posner) 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? Message-ID: <01C4F10A.B049A580.shovland@mindspring.com> I think the idea that global warming is primarily caused by man is suspect, but I have heard that there is global warming on Mars as well, suggesting that the entire solar system is heating up. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2005 6:17 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: (Posner) 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? RE: Catastrophes, have you read State of Fear by Crichton? I know, it has all the typical weaknesses of a Crichton novel, but he effectively discounts global warming as a pseudo-fact being pushed by politics and not science. So Posner's argument about warming seems to be based on this pseudo-science. Crichton demolishes the Kyoto treaty using actual peer-reviewed citations in his novel. The whole idea of putting lots of effort into avoiding an event that will not happen is delicious coming from an attorney/judge, since lawyers are twisting science (silicone breast implants cause no problems; Cerebral palsy is not caused by OBs not doing caesarians) and creating imaginary risks (Vioxx is a perfectly good drug when taken with some precautions). More to the point, can we actually estimate probabilities? Five day weather predictions are a joke -- the local weather people have been predicting huge snowstorms that never materialized -- and so how can we predict whether a particle accelerator can produce a mini-black hole? Computer modeling is generally how we get such predictions, and such modeling has been 'way off, at least the ones I have seen. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? > New York Times Book Review, 5.1.2 > By PETER SINGER > > CATASTROPHE > Risk and Response. > By Richard A. Posner. > 322 pp. Oxford University Press. $28. > << File: ATT00005.html >> << File: ATT00006.txt >> From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Jan 3 04:41:34 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 20:41:34 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] How can Steve be successful with propaganda? Message-ID: <01C4F10B.7382E930.shovland@mindspring.com> Thanks for the book recommendations. The stack in my "reading room" is kind of tall at the moment, but I'll keep this for future reference. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2005 6:55 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] How can Steve be successful with propaganda? Steve, I hope this is helpful: I think you are preaching to the choir. Imagine three groups, right, center, left. Conservatives would not accept Stalin as one of them, of course, but would suggest he is closer to liberalism, since modern liberalism has been excessively influenced by socialism and Marxism. So conservatives would reject it out of hand. They are generally well educated, and some studies have shown that conservatives actually know more about history than liberals. (More later) Moderates would see this as manipulative and distrust it. You are using a label pejoratively, and they would say, "If he does that to conservatives, he will turn on us next!" E.g.: The label/photo violates the reciprocity/reversability principle: Would you want someone pushing pejoratively labeled photos attacking liberalism? Since that is one of the three ways to determine what is ethical, moderates will be repelled. They will see it as unethical. (rightfully so, IMHO) Only the liberals would see that with glee, and why are you catering to them? If you want to influence people, you have to base your communication on deep truth, not on arbitrary labels. What you fail to understand is that the sine qua non of conservatism is the notion that government cannot perfect humanity. It is one of the tenets of the faith (from reading history - ). Liberals seem to believe that government can help perfect society. Stalin had huge faith in government's ability to perfect humanity, hence his disasterous embrace of Lysenko, causing famines and deaths of millions of peasants. So Stalin is a liberal run amok. (So also: Hitler, same basic idea; for a similarly flavored idea, study the essay by Virginia Postrel on Forbes.com: Resilience vs. anticipation - free but registration required. If you can't find it, let me know) Have you read Radical Son by Horowitz? He can help you understand the actual conservative mind set, if you want to influence conservatives. If you want to influence moderates, you have to understand moderation. Read "How Good People Make Tough Choices" by Kidder. It will explain the three bases of ethical behavior and that will improve your communication. So far, your labeling does violate the reciprocity ('golden rule') principle. Would you approve of someone labeling Keynes as "baby killer" or FDR as "warmonger"? LJ Steve Hovland wrote: >Thanks for your comments. > >Now, with your mind viewed as a neural net, >evaluate this: > > > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2005 4:50 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: [Paleopsych] How can Steve be successful with propaganda? > > > << File: ATT00008.html >> << File: ATT00009.txt >> From paul.werbos at verizon.net Mon Jan 3 16:22:54 2005 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Paul J. Werbos, Dr.) Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2005 11:22:54 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] zero point energy, pilot waves, reality and von Neumann In-Reply-To: References: <5.2.1.1.0.20040608175218.00b9a3d0@incoming.verizon.net> Message-ID: <6.2.0.14.0.20050103092454.01cbca58@incoming.verizon.net> Good morning, folks! This morning I feel I am finally beginning to make REAL sense of some of the real fundamental issues suggested by the subject line here. Some of you may wonder why it too me so long. But physics has become such a huge and tangled subject that being too quick to draw conclusions won't work so well any more. Sorting out the tangle, while maintaining high standards of understanding things, is not so easy. Clearly there are many basic themes which no one earth fully understands as yet. So let me start with zero point. I was cheered greatly when Jack started to emphasize the distinction between two KINDS of "energy from vacuum": (1) the more classical notion of zero point energy (ZPE) based effectively on the "(1/2)hw" terms which emerge in some formulations of quantum field theory (QFT) as H0- ::H0::, the raw free Hamiltonian versus the normal form of that Hamiltonian. (The exact same ZPE noise is assumed in texts on semiclassical models of quantum optics.) (2) more sophisticated but less definite ideas, such as vacuum breakdown or forces linked to dark energy or negative energy. Jack has not always treated other people in an optimal way -- but I think he is basically right that the first seems very unlikely, while the second has a very real chance of working out somehow, someday, if we can figure out what is going on more precisely and more completely. NEVERTHELESS -- even though I do not believe that the (1/2)hw noise is really there, the first major theme of my cond-mat 2004 paper is description of a chip that should be able to prove that it is there and exploit its energy **IF** it should be there. (I like the idea of trying to do full justice to alternative viewpoints even when I do not really believe them.) All the information I have received so far, in feedback from that paper, has been very encouraging. (However, I do have some concern that the chip simulation and design work should at least include quantum effects in chips enough to reflect such basic parameters as coherence length of the radiation. Not all E&M or chip simulators do that. I think we are on course to do it right, but in real-world engineering one must be careful not to make too many assumptions.) Such a chip would be important scientifically, and possibly even useful, if it does work, even if (1/2)hw ZPE does not exist. Why am I so very, very skeptical that the (1/2)hw stuff is there? I'm sure that Hal Puthoff has heard many reasons -- but mine go a bit beyond what he has heard. Someone on Jack's lists said a long time ago that "of course the vacuum noise is there; it explains stuff like Lamb shifts, and we can't escape that. Read..." (By the way, Jack, feel free to repost this on the most relevant lists. With the caveat that it does not represent my employers or anyone else, and that it should be understood as informal Saturday morning stuff.) I was very puzzled by that statement -- but went back to other business. This week I think I understand what the key misunderstanding there was. I was very lucky to have learned QFT initially from Mandl's old but concise textbook Introduction to Quantum Field Theory. (I think there is a kind of updated paperback version available from amazon, but I haven't bought it.) He simply lays out in a step by step way what all the main contributions to the Lamb shift were back in the old days, and shows the Feynman diagrams for each contribution. When you look at the actual calculation, laid out in a straightforward and concise way, it is crystal clear that every term results from using the normal form Hamiltonian, ::H::, and that the supposed (1/2)hw terms have no relation at all to the results. But -- this past month, since Mandl is back at work, I looked at some other books to review the Lamb shift stuff. And I was astounded to see that another very standard text by Bjorken and Drell really does invoke intuitive (1/2)hw arguments, and describes how it is following the original historic development of the understanding of Lamb shifts. A more modern canonical treatment in Weinberg's QFT text is so utterly formal that it does not provide clear intuition one way or the other. Probably the generation of physicists who learned QFT from Boglyubov or Zuber would know what I learned from Mandl's text, but it seems that a lot has been lost here and there. Likewise -- the old papers by Coleman and Mandelstam on Sine-Gordon and Massive Thirring Model show a very clear and strong understanding of the role of the NORMAL FORM Hamiltonian in quantum field theory. Coleman seems to adopt the attitude that of course everyone knows that the normal form Hamiltonian is what we use, in all field theories, so it is beneath our dignity to emphasize the point... but in fact, a lot of the best people in axiomatic field theory do not really know, and it is not always spelled out in the textbooks. It is as if people were working in group theory and forgot to mention half the axioms, and didn't really care about the resulting confusion. As for the OTHER concepts of energy from vacuum ... I think we need to know/understand more about how such things work, before we can harness them. And that's why it's important for more of us to work on the basic understanding... -------------- Pilot waves.... I have to admit I feel a bit of envy for those of you who have had a chance to really work with people like Vigier (really, De Broglie), Hoyle and Sudarshan. Gold is not Hoyle and Vigier was not DeBroglie, but they do represent some very critical understanding. I did have the pleasure of good correspondence with DeBroglie many years ago... and I regret that it took so long for me to make sense of questions that he and I both felt the same about. People become annoyed when they need to keep asking the same question for more than a decade or two... but if it hasn't been answered yet, we still have to face up to it. (Of course, some would say we can always give up on reality and go pray in a monastery, but even the abbots might question that approach.) Once we allow for backwards-time effects, all the Bells Theorem objections to a local realistic model of physics go away. (See my quant-ph papers for lots of explanation.) But how does one represent the electron then? The electron as just a wave does not make sense. DeBroglie was clear about that long ago, and his book with Vigier remains reasonable on that point. Furthermore, the kind of statistical behavior we get from continuous wave fields matches BOSONIC QFT, not fermionic. (Again, see quant-ph. See also chapter 4 of Walls and Milburn, and chapter 3 of Howard Carmichael's book on statistics of quantum optics. I really do HIGHLY recommend studying both those chapters. This empirically-grounded work has an element of reality and clarity far beyond what I have seen in texts which are supposedly more general. Yet it is far more solid and theoretically grounded than more seat-of-the-pants optics work.) And finally, the electron self-energy renormalization and "Rutherford scattering" analysis of the electron all looks a lot more like a point particle; it doesn't fit the idea of a smooth soliton big enough to explain the mass of the electron (and it doesn't explain how the electron would hold together anyway in the face of self-repulsion). DeBroglie was equally clear that a pure point particle model does not work either, because of the well-known double slit (actually diffraction grating) kind of experiment. Since neither model of the electron could work, he simply proposed a kind of COMBINATION -- a "point particle" (actually, a tiny zone of nonlinear energy concentration) and a "pilot wave" (actually an asymptotic linearized solution of the nonlinear wave equations), BOTH propagating over ORDINARY 3+1-D Minkowski space-time. Again, his book with Vigier was quite clear. Only much later, as DeBroglie failed to find a good account for the spectrum of helium, did people like Bohm and even Vigier start to "defect to Fock space" because of the difficulty of OPERATIONALIZING De Broglie's vision. How to translate the VISION in the book by DeBroglie and Vigier into real mathematics, without defecting to Fock space? Again, my papers in quant-ph, the chapter in Walls-Milburn and the chapter in Carmichael, all develop the kind of mathematics which really makes it possible to operationalize all this -- FOR BOSONIC QFTs. (Section 3e of my cond-mat 2004 paper fills in a critical gap, and the 1984 paper in Physics Reports by Hillery, OConnell, X and Wigner is also critical. OConnell is alive and well in Louisiana, and might have something to contribute here.) Now... here is a critical point, which I see very clearly today. The original DeBroglie idea of a continuous pilot wave and a nonlinear "core" -- approximated as a continuous field and a point particle -- WILL NOT WORK in getting us to derive the predictions of quantum electrodynamics (QED). It will not work because the continuous pilot wave as DeBroglie envisioned would HAVE to be quantized in a bosonic form. Even as an approximation it is not adequate. The physics is fundamentally different. After a lot of very complex OTHER analysis, my conclusion is as follows: the only mathematics which works is to assume that the "pilot wave," instead of being a normal continuous field, is a highly chaotic kind of wave motion, analogous to the wave form of ordinary AM radio waves, where two frequencies are BOTH present. The duality of "wave-like" (more continuous) and "particle-like" (very small radius) behavior of the electron can be explained as a duality very similar to that between the high (RF) and low (audio) frequencies in an ordinary radio wave. ---------------------- Of course, these words -- like the book of DeBroglie and Vigier itself -- require a mathematical formulation to be of any value whatsoever. In fact... it is the analysis of the mathematics which led me to believe these words. The mathematics is what I begin to understand more clearly today. ------------ Back in the quant-ph papers, I reasoned as follows. If a realistic continuous field model has exact equivalence to any desired BOSONIC QFT -- we could explain the success of the standard model of physics in neoclassical terms by finding a bosonic quantum field theory equivalent to the standard model. There is a HUGE mainstream literature on "bosonization" and "nuclear democracy" and "duality" which suggests that this should not be too hard. For example, Vachaspati (see arXiv.org) has lots of papers on a bosonic dual standard model. However -- when you really try to rely on the mainstream, you learn of its feet of clay even more than you do from a distance... In the end...after hundreds of papers... it all seems to come back to the old idea of Alfred Goldhaber (and Wilczek) that sometimes a bound state of two bosonic magnetic monopoles ends up being a fermion. I have seen lots of nice abstract reasoning about this... but not earthy examples. To construct a real (and reliable) theory we need earthy examples. (And Schwinger's way of generalizing monopoles into "dyons" is important in extending this, in principle, as are many ideas in The Skyrme Model by Makhankov, Rybakov and Sanyuk.) So we need a more constructive mathematical version of these ideas. One might ask: "why do you bother with all this? Why not just represent the electron as a point particle, in the obvious and natural mathematical implementation of the ideas in section 3e of your cond-mat 2004 paper?" There are two main reasons why I don't regard this as the most promising approach: (1) point particle QED MUST be represented as a kind of limit (as in QED regularization itself!), because of things like infinite electron self-repulsion -- and we need a rational basis for choosing a "regularization,' in effect; and (2) there are still the old DeBroglie arguments against a classical type of point particle model. After learning to think in terms of coherent fields, as in quantum optics and bosonic statistics... it takes some adjustment to get back into particle-like thinking again. For example, we must recall that: psi(x1,s1; x2,s2;... xn,sn) = psi1(x1...sn)*psi2(x1...sn) defines a totally symmetric (bosonic) wave function when psi1 and psi2 are totally antisymmetric (fermionic). When electric charge is like a totally conserved and quantized topological charge, we can safely "truncate" or project the statistics of a bosonic field into subspaces of "definite charge." Thus the statistics of the classical bosonic field theory basically give us something a lot like traditional "one electron" (or "N" electrons for a charge of N) wave functions, EXCEPT that we must include virtual electron/positron pairs, which are no different from what QED really assumes. One way of interpreting Goldhaber's ideas more constructively is to say... a bound state of two monopoles is a lot like a simple hydrogen atom, a bound state whose wave function can be represented as the PRODUCT of "two wave functions," because of the way that the separation of variables works. THIS IS NOT like the kind of multiplication of wave functions that QM typically uses for two uncoupled particles; it is just an artifact of the way we exploit separation of variables. The key idea here is as follows: for a continuous nonlinear field theory, like the classical Skyrme model or a system of two bound classical dyons, we may find no TRUE separation of variables, but we MAY find a separation of variables at asymptotic distances from the core or center of the system (aka chaotic soliton). Thus in the asymptotic limit, or as "soliton radius r goes to zero", the set of solutions for the system OR FOR the matrix of statistical covariances of the system, my converge to a product, like psi=psi1*psi2, where psi1 is "broad" (like the center of gravity wave function for a nonlocalized hydrogen atom) and psi2 is "narrow" (like the wave function of electron RELATIVE to proton in that hydrogen atom). Even if psi is naturally a single-valued function, it may happen to be REPRESENTED as a product of two two-valued (fermionic) functions in this process. Thus the mysterious fermionic weirdness discussed by Goldhaber and by Makhankov, Rybaov and Sanyuk may be disentangled and presented in a more straightforward Von-Neumann-like way by deriving it in this kind of context. Yes, we still have to consider spatial rotations in explaining why CERTAIN PDE yield these kinds of asymptotic solutions, but this is how it works. And then.. translating it into a physical picture... it is almost like saying the electron is really more LIKE a point particle, but that it uses a kind of AM radar system to pilot itself through double slits and the like. The fact that the math works out is what ultimately guarantees the match to experiment... and we do need to take all this and get the equations all down on paper and so on. (One more week of vacation left to me... maybe enough, maybe not...). The word "chaotic" sounds messy .. but the analysis in terms of matrices of statistical moments is extremely orderly. And then, another curious issue emerges. IN THIS CONTEXT, a very different kind of "zero point" fluctuation becomes much more interesting and plausible as a modification of the basic model I have just outlined. In the "nonlinear core zone" of such a chaotic electron model, a very special kind of white noise in space (limited to what perturbs the core zone locally) or thermal fluctuation across space-time becomes possible. Normally, in fields, simple diffuse white noise is very messy, because of issues of positive-definiteness of covariance matrices in Minkowski space (whose metric is not definite in sign). But within "world line" (or, better, world-channels) of massive particles like electrons, it is a different story. Can this be made mathematically meaningful an relativistic? Sure: consider additions to curvature of a world-line. I wonder whether this addition to the model may be crucial, in the end, to really understand what goes on in tunneling, at the Josephson junction. Perhaps a lot of that rigorous work by Kunio Yasue on stochastic point electrons may indeed turn out to be crucial piece of the final rigorous unified story here. But.. one step at a time. All of this needs to be put down mathematically (the no-noise and particle-noise versions), and used to fill in the details of part 3e of cond-mat 2004. If any of you can do this better or faster than I, I will be delighted (at least if you do cite the useful but incomplete contribution I have made so far). Given the approach of return to work, and return to some rather urgent life-or-death government policy issues... I may not have time to fill in all details here. Happy New Year... Paul P.S. For the "thermal" variation of the particle-noise idea, I have one image of treating collisions in space time in a way analogous to today's treatments of molecules in space, in closing a stoichiometric kind of statistical argument. In the end, it may all be a kind of approximation, as is traditional first-order chemical thermodynamics... but it may be very useful as a starting point, in much the same way. Before we can get to second order thermodynamics -- as in cond-mat 2004 chips! -- we must develop the space-time analogue of first-order thermodynamics! At least, that is one possible way to go, after the simpler noise-free fermionic PDE statistics are worked out per the asymptotic separation of variables concepts. And of course, the separation of variables is not isotropic in this case. Like a classical dipole expansion. From waluk at earthlink.net Mon Jan 3 16:57:04 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Geraldine Reinhardt) Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 08:57:04 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: (Posner) 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? References: <01C4F10A.B049A580.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <010401c4f1b5$41bd0de0$0a00f604@S0027397558> Let's keep an eye on Mars as it warms up. Shortly we earthlings will need to make a move and Mars might be one good place to homestead. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Independent Scholar http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2005 8:36 PM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: (Posner) 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? >I think the idea that global warming is primarily > caused by man is suspect, but I have heard > that there is global warming on Mars as well, > suggesting that the entire solar system is > heating up. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. > [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] > Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2005 6:17 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: (Posner) > 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? > > RE: Catastrophes, have you read State of Fear by > Crichton? I know, it > has all the typical weaknesses of a Crichton novel, > but he effectively > discounts global warming as a pseudo-fact being > pushed by politics and > not science. So Posner's argument about warming seems > to be based on > this pseudo-science. Crichton demolishes the Kyoto > treaty using actual > peer-reviewed citations in his novel. > > The whole idea of putting lots of effort into > avoiding an event that > will not happen is delicious coming from an > attorney/judge, since > lawyers are twisting science (silicone breast > implants cause no > problems; Cerebral palsy is not caused by OBs not > doing caesarians) and > creating imaginary risks (Vioxx is a perfectly good > drug when taken with > some precautions). > > More to the point, can we actually estimate > probabilities? Five day > weather predictions are a joke -- the local weather > people have been > predicting huge snowstorms that never materialized -- > and so how can we > predict whether a particle accelerator can produce a > mini-black hole? > Computer modeling is generally how we get such > predictions, and such > modeling has been 'way off, at least the ones I have > seen. > > Lynn > > > > Premise Checker wrote: > >> 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? >> New York Times Book Review, 5.1.2 >> By PETER SINGER >> >> CATASTROPHE >> Risk and Response. >> By Richard A. Posner. >> 322 pp. Oxford University Press. $28. >> > << File: ATT00005.html >> << File: ATT00006.txt >> > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 4 00:19:46 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 19:19:46 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Basque Talk of Secession Creates Crisis for Madrid Message-ID: Basque Talk of Secession Creates Crisis for Madrid New York Times, 5.1.3 By RENWICK McLEAN MADRID, Jan. 2 - The Basque region's declaration last week that it has the right to secede from Spain has pushed Prime Minister Jos? Luis Rodr?guez Zapatero toward the first crisis of his tenure, political analysts say. Throughout his nearly nine months in office, Mr. Zapatero has largely promoted policies that are solidly supported by the Spanish public, helping him to avoid major setbacks or controversies. But editorial writers and politicians say his affinity for following the polls has kept him from taking on tough issues, chief among them the growing signs in recent months that the Basque region was moving toward an overt challenge to the central government's authority. "Now it's time for him to respond," said an editorial in the Madrid daily El Mundo. "The coherence and decisiveness of his answer will determine not only his own political future, but also the survival of the current federal model endorsed by the Spanish people." The political principles invoked by Mr. Zapatero in his previous policy decisions offer little guidance on how he will handle this challenge, analysts say. Since taking office in April, Mr. Zapatero has emphasized that the central policy of his government is to follow the will of the people. But now he finds himself staring at a possible constitutional standoff with a man making the very same claim. Juan Jos? Ibarretxe, the president of the self-proclaimed Basque Country and the driving force behind last week's declaration, says he is simply being a good democrat by proposing that the future of the region he governs should be decided by its people and not by Madrid. As the leader of a democratic government, he says, he must follow the principle of majority rule. Mr. Zapatero has used the same argument to fend off criticism of many of his policies, from withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq to sanctioning gay marriage. The looming conflict between the men in many ways reflects an age-old question posed by democracy: What are the rights and powers of the minority in a system based on majority rule? The United States fought a civil war in part to resolve the question, after Southern states said that since they had freely joined the union, they were free to leave it. The situation in Spain is not nearly as dire, but the question is similar: Can the Basque region unilaterally alter its relationship with Madrid, even secede, if a majority of its people want to? Mr. Zapatero says that the answer is clearly no, contending that the Spanish Constitution forbids it. But Mr. Ibarretxe says that at the end of the day the central government's opinion is irrelevant. If neither budges, Spain could be thrown into a genuine constitutional crisis, the analysts say. Mr. Ibarretxe has tried to ease tensions by pointing out that he is not proposing outright independence from Spain. But many political analysts wonder why the Basque region would risk angering Madrid by stating that it has the right to secede if it does not intend to do so. Some experts say Basque leaders are using the talk of secession only as a threat to persuade the central government to give them greater autonomy. In fact, many politicians, even some of Mr. Ibarretxe's allies, say outright independence makes little sense with Spain's growing integration into the European Union. "In a Europe where states are disappearing," said Josu I?aki Erkoreka, a representative in Parliament of the Basque Nationalist Party, "it doesn't make sense to propose a political model that is based on an old reality." Even if independence is not the goal, the Basque declaration last week demands immediate attention from Mr. Zapatero, political analysts here say. "This is without a doubt the greatest challenge presented to the Spanish state and the democratic parties since the transition" to democracy after the death of Franco in 1975, the editorial in El Mundo said. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/03/international/europe/03madrid.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 4 00:20:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 19:20:43 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Communications: Myths Run Wild in Blog Tsunami Debate Message-ID: Communications: Myths Run Wild in Blog Tsunami Debate New York Times, 5.1.3 By JOHN SCHWARTZ As the horror of the South Asian tsunami spread and people gathered online to discuss the disaster on sites known as Web logs, or blogs, those of a political bent naturally turned the discussion to their favorite topics. To some in the blogosphere, it simply had to be the government's fault. On Democratic Underground, a blog for open discussion and an online gathering place for people who hate the Bush administration, a participant asked, "Since we know that the atmosphere has become contaminated by all the atomic testing, space stuff, electronic stuff, earth pollutants, etc., is it logical to wonder if: Perhaps the 'bones' of our earth where this earthquake spawned have also been affected?" The cause of the earthquake and resulting killer wave, the writer said, could be the war in Iraq. "You know, we've exploded many millions of tons of ordnance upon this poor planet," the writer said. "All that 'shock and awe' stuff we've just dumped onto the Asian part of this earth - could we have fractured something? Perhaps the earth was just reacting to something that man has done to injure it. The earth is organic, you know. It can be hurt." The ridicule began immediately. Online insults, referred to colloquially as flames, rose high on other sites. "What would life be without D.U.?" asked an editor at Wizbang, a politically conservative blog (www.wizbangblog.com), using the initials of Democratic Underground. "Get out the tin foil hats," a contributor to the blog wrote. The interplay between the sites, left and right, is typical of the rumbles in cyberspace between rivals at different ends of the political spectrum. In many ways, Web logs shone after the tsunami struck: bloggers in the regions posted compelling descriptions of the devastation, sometimes by text messages sent from their cellphones as they roamed the countryside looking for friends and family members. And blogs were quick to create links to charities so that people could help online. But the blogosphere's tendency toward crackpot theorizing and political smack down could not be suppressed for long. "It's so much of what they feed on, so much of what they are," said James Surowiecki, the author of "The Wisdom of Crowds." Blogs have gone from obscurity to ubiquity in a blink. Bloggers were selected as "People of the Year" by ABC News, and Merriam-Webster declared "blog" its "word of the year." According to a study released yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, more than eight million Americans have started blogs, and 27 percent of Internet users surveyed said they read blogs - a 58 percent jump since last February - and 12 percent of Internet users have posted comments to blogs. Still, 62 percent of Americans say they are not sure what the term "blog" means. Odd blog postings are not just for commoners. Norodom Sihanouk, the former king of Cambodia, posted a message in French to his Web site, www.norodomsihanouk.info, saying that an astrologer had warned him that an "ultra-catastrophic cataclysm" would strike the region, but Cambodia would be undamaged if the proper rituals were observed. King Sihanouk said that the thousands of dollars he spent on the ceremonies protected his nation from the disaster, and that he would donate $15,000 to disaster relief. Mr. Surowiecki pointed out that there is nothing new about ill-informed rumor-mongering or other forms of oddness. "There were always cranks," he said. "Rumors have always been fundamental about the way people talk, or think, about politics or complicated issues." Instead of a corner bar or a Barcalounger, however, the location for today's speech is an online medium with a potential audience of millions. But there is another, more important difference, Mr. Surowiecki and others say. Internet discourse can be self-correcting, with near-instant feedback from readers. What was lost in the sniping over the Democratic Underground posting was the fact that the follow-up comments were a sober discussion of what actually causes earthquakes. The first response to the posting asked, "Earthquakes have been happening since the beginning of time ... How would you explain them?" Further comments explained the movement of tectonic plates and provided links to sites explaining earthquakes and tsunamis from the United States Geological Survey and other authoritative sources. "Not to make fun, as I'm sure it's not a unique misconception ... but the reality is simple plate tectonics," one participant wrote. "The entire Pacific Ocean is slowly but surely closing in on itself. What happened is that the floor of the Indian Ocean slid over part of the Pacific Ocean, releasing massive tension in the Earth's crust. "That's it. No mystic injury to the Gaia spirit or anything." Online discussion can evolve toward truth, said Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in the interactive telecommunications program at New York University and a blogger. One result is a process that can be more reliable than many new media, where corrections are often late and small, if they appear at all. Dr. Shirky said the key to reasonable discussion was to get beyond flames and the "echo chamber" effect of like-minded people simply reinforcing the opinions of one another and to let the self-correcting mechanisms do their job in a civil way. "You hope the echo chamber effect and the fact-checking effect will balance out into a better and more nuanced set of narratives, and a more rigorously checked set of facts," he said. But in such a sharply contentious world, "The risk is it will largely divide itself into competing narratives where what even constitutes a fact is different in different camps." To Xeni Jardin, an editor of BoingBoing.net, the "self-healing" quality of debate is one of the most important results of the electronic medium. "When information that is provably untrue surfaces on the Net or surfaces in discussion groups, people want to be right - they want to know the truth," she said. In her own blog, she said, "Sometimes people spend really a long time researching background information on an item that we post" and correct the record through comments. In the tsunami discussion on Democratic Underground, some participants continued to post farfetched theories about what caused the earthquake based on pseudoscience and conspiracy, and on Wizbang, the vituperation continued unabated, spreading even to many victims of the disaster. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/03/international/worldspecial4/03bloggers.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 4 00:21:39 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 19:21:39 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Magazine: Heavy Questions Message-ID: Heavy Questions New York Times Magazine, 5.1.2 By ELIZABETH WEIL The road changes just past the Starr County sign. The shoulder disappears, the grass is left uncut and the black-eyed Susans and big pink Texas sage have to compete with the orange traffic cones set out by the border patrol. Just two counties up from the Texas tip, where the flood plains along the Rio Grande change to rolling hills and eroding cliffs, Starr County, largely Mexican-American, is one of the poorest counties in the nation. Fifty-nine percent of its children live below the poverty level, and in the strange new arithmetic of want, in which poverty means not starvation but its opposite, it is also one of the fattest. In the colonias on the edge of Rio Grande City -- jerry-rigged neighborhoods that are home to many illegal immigrants and lack adequate municipal services -- houses that look as if they might fall down neighbor houses that look like fortresses, a result of the boom-and-bust drug economy. Little gorditos run around in juice-stained diapers, and as the kids get older, they only get fatter. By the time they are 4 years old, 24 percent of the children are overweight or obese; by kindergarten, 28 percent; and by elementary school, 50 percent of the boys are overweight or obese, along with 35 percent of the girls. The concern is not just cosmetic. Overweight children are at significantly greater risk for developing Type 2 diabetes, and by early adulthood, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, colon cancer, breast cancer, gallbladder disease, arthritis and sleep apnea. ''Stop by any time,'' said the local school district superintendent, Roel Gonzalez, inviting me to visit. The child of migrant farm workers, Gonzalez is perhaps the children's greatest advocate and the community's greatest critic. ''I will take you down the hall in any one of my schools, and you will see most of the children aren't slim anymore; they're all beefy. Kids are 30, 40 pounds overweight already, and they're only in high school. We're basically walking time bombs.'' The burden of childhood obesity is one created by adults and borne by children, and while the problem is widespread in America, there are few places where the children are lumbering under the load the way they are in Starr County, the point on the U.S. map where all the vectors that lead to obesity form a tidy asterisk. Some reasons are clear and well documented, but others are less transparent. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, rates of childhood obesity are among the worst in the Mexican-American population, and Starr County is 98 percent Mexican-American. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, among other sources, also shows that as socioeconomic status falls, rates of childhood obesity rise, and Starr County is desperately poor. Not only is Starr County in Texas -- one of the fattest states in the Union -- but it is also on the U.S.-Mexico border, the fattest part of Texas. The overall effect is devastating: almost half the adults in Starr County have Type 2 diabetes. A child is considered at risk if a close family member -- mother, father, sibling, aunt, uncle -- has diabetes, meaning virtually every child in Starr County is at risk of contracting the disease. Complicating matters, self-discipline is typically not a hallmark of the school-age years. When you talk to children about losing weight, ''you see a blank stare,'' Gonzalez said. ''They hear you, but there's really not anything they can do.'' Vans of well-meaning doctors regularly barrel down from San Antonio and Houston, feeling the smooth blacktop change to bumpy gravel as they near their destination and knowing that if nothing changes soon, if the children continue to put on ever more pounds, they will be responsible for having watched over the first generation of American children to have shorter expected life spans than their parents. During the 2003-2004 school year, Peggy Visio, special projects coordinator for the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, made 13 trips to Rio Grande City, the largest town in Starr County. Visio, who specializes in diabetes prevention, worked previously with Sioux Indians in South Dakota, and her university recently received a grant from a private donor enabling her to start a program in the Rio Grande Valley. Beginning last January, Visio screened 2,931 elementary-school children, assuming she'd find about 600 at high risk for diabetes. Instead she found 1,172. Forty-five families volunteered to enroll a child in her program, a combination of weekly nutrition and exercise classes, plus two sessions of lab work to measure each child's height, weight, blood pressure and blood sugar and to examine each child for signs of diabetes. As part of the project's design, half of the families met with Visio and her staff in person, and half met via video link in order to test the efficiency of telemedicine -- that is, seeing a doctor, nurse or nutritionist remotely. (All participants came to the lab in person.) Starr County has 15 physicians; the ratio of residents to doctors is 3,412 to 1. (The statewide ratio is 661 to 1.) There are no behavioral therapists or pediatric dietitians in Starr County. The nearest pediatric endocrinologist lives about 70 miles from Rio Grande City. One of the first things Visio did when she started the Diabetes Risk Reduction via Community-Based Telemedicine program, or Dirrect, in Starr County was to analyze the food served in the Rio Grande City Consolidated Independent School District, where all children receive both free breakfast and free lunch; so many qualified that it was easier just to serve everybody. The food service is run by Edna Ramon, who is 80 years old and began her job nearly two generations ago when malnutrition, not obesity, was the district's main problem. Ramon still talks about her memories of the dry hair and bony hands she saw on the children in the district in those early days. Visio analyzed Ramon's menus and quickly established that with breakfasts containing as many as 600 calories and lunches with 800, every child was on track to gain at least nine pounds during the school year. In addition, children were drinking huge quantities of sugary drinks -- sodas, fruit drinks and sports drinks -- which they bought from vending machines and at convenience stores and also drank at home. In the two months between her first two visits -- between initially screening the children and starting the program itself -- the children gained an average of two pounds. Visio also found at the outset that 13 percent of the prekindergarten and 18 percent of the kindergarten students she screened had acanthosis nigricans, a disorder characterized by dark, thick patches on the skin. Acanthosis nigricans can signal insulin resistance, warning of diabetes, a disease in which the body does not produce or properly use insulin. Insulin, a hormone produced by the pancreas, controls the level of sugar in the body and helps the body use glucose as fuel. Excess fat tissue and insufficient muscle, which come from a lack of exercise, predispose a person to diabetes. Left untreated, diabetes can lead to blindness and loss of limbs; many of the children she found with acanthosis nigricans had never been to a doctor. Visio -- an intensely organized and practical 47-year-old woman who makes spreadsheets of her own children's after-school activities and who cooks meals on Sunday for the entire week -- was deeply worried and deeply frustrated. ''People who were supposed to be helping these children'' -- school nurses, school food-service officials, even parents -- ''were teaching them the wrong things. They wanted to make the children happy by giving them what they wanted. It was making the children sick.'' According to Nancy Butte, director of the Viva la Familia Project at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, 40 to 60 percent of the prevalence of childhood obesity in the Hispanic population can be attributed to genetic factors. ''Much has been written about children who are overweight,'' said Butte, explaining her study, ''but little is known about why Hispanic children in particular tend to be more at risk for obesity.'' Many believe that there is, most likely, a set of genes that makes some people more susceptible than others. Butte suggests that at least part of the genetic component may be related to ''the thrifty-gene hypothesis,'' the theory that some combinations of chromosomes create a situation in which cells are more inclined to store calories efficiently for times of scarcity. Some researchers have speculated that because many Mexican-Americans are descendants of American Indian hunter-gatherers, who evolved to store fat more easily for times of famine, those living a sedentary life in modern westernized societies with access to fast food may be more prone to gain weight. Butte has embarked on a five-year program of intensive metabolic and physiological testing, taking blood samples from Hispanic children and their parents, scrutinizing how children metabolize calories and analyzing body composition. She explained that the self-reported data she collected did not show great differences in calorie intake between children who were obese and children who weren't. But as Butte notes, ''We know they have to be eating more,'' and everyone tends to underestimate how many calories they eat. In order to assess how individuals actually metabolize what they consume, Butte is also gathering data in a ''room calorimeter,'' an extreme measure that involves a sealed chamber equipped with a bed, toilet, sink, desk, TV, CD player and telephone, where children spend up to 24 hours. Here, caloric intake, as well as how much oxygen a child breathes and how much carbon dioxide she exhales, can be precisely recorded. Outside factors are not helping, either. Throughout America, high-calorie fast food is cheaper than food that's good for you. Starr County has its share of franchises, including McDonald's, Dairy Queen, Jack in the Box and Burger King. What's more, in the Rio Grande Valley, as elsewhere, children are not getting enough exercise, a fact linked by some to the general indifference to exercise along with the misapprehension of risk: the risk of, say, letting your kid run around the neighborhood versus the risk of encouraging a sedentary life by keeping her home. ''If you look at the probability of something that's in the headlines -- that your kid is abducted -- the probability of that happening to your child is very low, though certainly it's a terrible thing,'' said Deanna Hoelscher, director of the Human Nutrition Center at the University of Texas's School of Public Health at Houston. ''But if it happens, everybody hears about it, so the perception is that the risk is very high. However, the probability of your kid being overweight right now is very high, because a lot of kids are overweight. So you have to balance things out. Though of course, providing safe places for children to play would alleviate parents' fears.'' While to date few have studied them, the sociological underpinnings of childhood obesity in Hispanic communities seem to operate on three levels: inside Hispanic -- and American -- culture as a whole, inside specific communities like Starr County and inside families. Visio's most rewarding work has been inside individual families; as she puts it, ''I've got to get to that home, that mom, that family, that grandmother. Get inside that child's world. The child doesn't have the money to buy groceries.'' One afternoon she met with Cristen Gonzalez, who was 9 years old, and Cristen's mother, Gracie, a schoolteacher in Rio Grande City, to discuss the situation at home. Two months before, Christen started Visio's program. At that time, Cristen, the oldest of three children, was well into the overweight range. Cristen has a small, sweet voice, is on the elementary-school drill team and wants to rescue animals when she grows up. She also wants to be a good girl, and in the context of Visio's program, with its focus on healthful food and weekly nutrition and exercise classes, her mother was concerned. ''She's been obsessing about the program,'' whispered Gracie, who was also hoping to lose weight. Cristen drew quietly at a folding table. ''This week especially, she's been so self-conscious. I can't have it anymore.'' Guilt is a major problem in dealing with childhood obesity -- the guilt parents feel in denying their children food or inadvertently making them self-conscious about their weight, the guilt children try to instill in their parents in order to get what they want. Gracie, by all rights, has a lot to feel proud about. The Gonzalez family is strong, loving, disciplined and intact. Gracie and her husband both have good jobs in the school district; they don't eat much fast food, going out for only one meal a week, lunch after church on Sunday; and they are still married -- and that puts them way ahead of most families in the county, where jobs and structured families are scarce. Once, a few years ago, when a friend of Cristen's came to sleep over, the little girl saw Gracie in the kitchen and begged her to make her spaghetti; people rarely cooked in her house. The girl also found it exotic that Cristen had a bedtime; she was used to falling asleep around midnight from sheer exhaustion. Still, life for the Gonzalezes was not so easy. Three kids plus two working parents did not leave Gracie time each week to plan menus and shop carefully for groceries, which Visio explained she should do. So harried was Gracie that she sometimes caught up on paperwork while her children ate dinner. This meant, to Visio's eyes at least, that Cristen was more or less having to tackle her weight problem alone. Visio asked Gracie what her past week was like. ''Crazy,'' she replied. ''So crazy. My husband had to take care of his parents, and my little Anthony'' -- who is 5 -- ''lost his two front teeth running into his best friend's head. I walked out of a staff meeting to get here. I've barely had time to eat.'' Visio pressed her, ''Have you been sitting down for meals together at night?'' The Journal of Adolescent Health has reported that families that eat together consume healthier food. Gracie smiled and shook her head. ''Haven't had time.'' ''Do you think this weekend you can make menus again, go shopping?'' ''Next week.'' ''Cristen needs you -- you just told me, she's obsessing on the program.'' ''Don't make me feel worse,'' Gracie said. ''I already feel bad enough.'' Cristen looked up from her drawing again. ''Twenty minutes, just 20 minutes,'' Visio said. ''Everyone has 20 minutes. I'm sorry to tell you this, Gracie, but if you're not sitting down to meals together and showing her you eat just like you're telling her to, you're putting it all on her.'' Across town at the John and Olive Hinojosa Elementary School, on an unpaved road beside one of the colonias, 50 second and third graders in red-and-white uniforms spent phys-ed class having a dance party under a big gazebo. It's rare to see children in Rio Grande City being so active outside. The average high temperature is above 87 degrees for nine months of the year, and even in the cooler months, the north wind blows fiercely across the Rio Grande plain. Despite the day's heat, the dance party was a grand success, the kids jumping and shaking and feeling confident and comfortable. But paradoxically, that confidence can create its own problems. Sometimes, explained Olga Smedley, the principal, that self-certainty gives the children the upper hand in dealings with their parents. Starr County has three bridges to Mexico, and countless places for unofficial crossings. Some women who live in the area arrived from Mexico pregnant in order to have American-born children. As a result, many parents are trying to raise children in a country where they aren't supposed to be. ''A lot of these parents give in to their kids too much,'' said Smedley, a pretty and trim mother of three who grew up in the Rio Grande City area and does her best to resist her chubby 6-year-old's relentless requests for shrimp scampi. The upended power dynamics can lead parents to cede authority to children and lead children to bully their parents. ''These children threaten their parents,'' Smedley said. ''They say: 'If you spank me, or if you do this, I'm going to call child protective services. I'm going to call the police.' '' Smedley explained that the kids are just being kids, but the parents, perhaps feeling vulnerable, capitulate. ''Who's in control?'' Smedley asked, her eyes widening and her frustration apparent. ''I told the parents -- it's because you're allowing it.'' The odd power dynamic affects food choices as well. After Visio trimmed back the fat and sugar from the school lunch and breakfast menus -- no more breakfasts of sugar-coated cereals and a bag of cookies; in fact, cookies are no longer served, and cereals are low in sugar -- many teachers were pleased. But the children, not surprisingly, were not happy, a feeling they expressed by staging lunchroom protests and hanging signs outside some cafeterias that read ''No more diet'' and ''We want to eat cool stuff -- pizza, nachos, burritos, cheese fries.'' Visio expected as much from the kids, but what caught her short was how much the children's hounding got to their parents, and how often those parents caved to their children's shortsighted, unhealthful wishes. ''We have one morbidly obese girl, and since we changed the menus, her mother has been stuffing her backpack with three bags of chips and three candy bars, every day,'' Visio said. ''This is in addition to a full breakfast and lunch. Some of these parents are just afraid to say no. They love their children, but their children have them convinced that if they eat a healthy diet, they will starve.'' The issues affecting the Hispanic child-obesity epidemic have been the hardest to talk about, and Roel Gonzalez, the school superintendent, has appointed himself the man for the job. ''I know we always hear sad stories about different groups of people, but this is one group that's very sad,'' Gonzalez said over breakfast one morning. Many of the concerns he described are true of American culture as a whole and crystallized in Starr County. ''The attitude here is hoard as much as you can right now, because there might not be tomorrow.'' Some health care researchers who are studying obesity and diabetes among Hispanics talk about an undercurrent called fatalismo -- the belief that there's little you can do to alter your own destiny, so why not live for today? ''But we have to change,'' Gonzalez said. ''We don't have more time. This is something we need to get on now, but we're going to go slowly. Like my dad says, if you're in a hurry, go slow, and I'm in an awful hurry.'' Gonzalez grew up in Starr County, left for a time to work in upstate New York and Washington and now every morning puts on a suit and heads to Che's, the restaurant downstairs in Rio Grande City's one elegant old border hotel, where we met one day. Gonzalez sees himself as the children's advocate in the ''Lean on Me'' tradition, the stalwart authority figure, the local boy made good. ''The kids are not negotiable,'' he said in his husky, urgent voice, stopping often to greet every customer who walked in by name. ''You can have my parking space, my office, I don't care, but I will never negotiate the kids. Those children's lives are my responsibility. Not only academically -- their lives physically are in my hands.'' Gonzalez has decided that the children deserve not only positive change -- when Visio approached Gonzalez about revising the breakfast and lunch menus for the kids in her diabetes program, he instructed her to alter menus for the entire district -- but also to hear adults speak the truth about the particular problems in their community. In the past year, he set up salad bars for all the teachers (''the teachers have to model it, because kids idolize their teachers, and if they don't, they're bad teachers''). He also hired Rey Ramirez, a local Hispanic athlete -- a Texas track and field champion -- to try to get his town physically active again. As a farmhand, Gonzalez's father never had to seek out exercise, but Gonzalez himself, like a lot of his neighbors, is packing a few extra pounds. He understands what the children are up against. ''Out here it's 110 degrees at 6 in the afternoon, and not very many people want to go outside and play. Myself, I get up every morning and walk. I get up at 4:45 a.m. or 5, and it's hard. Some mornings, I just want to stay in bed. If it's so hard for me, I can only imagine what it's like for a child.'' Gonzalez also talked about how attitudes toward self-reliance have changed significantly in the course of a single generation. He told a story I heard several times from people over 40 in Rio Grande City. ''When I went to school they gave you colored coupons,'' he said. ''The blue one meant you paid for your lunch. The white one was a reduced price. The pink one was free, and you didn't want to be seen with the pink one. People would tear you apart.'' Now government assistance is a major part of the fabric of society. In addition to free meals for their children in school, many adults in Starr County receive food stamps, health care and utility and housing subsidies. Much of this is beneficial, of course, but Gonzalez also explained that it has contributed to eroding the old norms. A while back, for instance, Gonzalez caught a girl smoking marijuana. ''I told her that's not what I would call normal behavior for a girl of 12, and she said, 'It's normal in my house.' It's normal in my house. We've got to change what's normal.'' The parents in Gonzalez's community are as loving as you'll find anywhere, but, as Gonzalez explained, there is an inclination to overempathize or overcompensate with their children. This is happening across cultures and classes throughout the country. Children are indulged and are obese everywhere, but the conditions in Starr County aggravate the problem. His term to describe this is ''pobrecito syndrome,'' an affliction of parents and other adults, passed down to youngsters, part fatalismo and part a communal throwing up of the hands. Pobrecito means ''poor little thing,'' and ''the pobrecito syndrome,'' Gonzalez said, occurs when parents ''feel sorry for their child and they're doing the best they can but -- they're just so sorry and they really do nothing. All they do without intending to is perpetuate the problem, and so it continues.'' Or to put it another way, some parents can have bad habits -- regarding food, drugs, exercise, financial responsibility -- that they want to change, or say they want to change, but can't. ''Basically, it's an addiction. We just can't get the parents off the TV, and we can't get them to stop eating fast food. We can't get them to do anything. And the kids aren't going to get off the TV if the parents don't get off the TV. It's going to be a long, hard battle, because it's very hard to reach the child if the parent is entrenched.'' Several years ago, Gonzalez and his wife started a Subway franchise in Rio Grande City in order to provide a quick, affordable option to greasy fast food. It was one small step -- like his current efforts to secure financing to build an indoor pool and nice walking paths in town -- but Gonzalez realizes the problems run much deeper. ''We have drugs everywhere,'' he said. ''The cemeteries are full of people who OD'ed. We have kids coming to school who've seen a father or a brother shot, kids who are dealing with a parent in prison.'' Still, when Gonzalez says he's been up all night thinking about a kindergartner who weighs 90 pounds -- the average for an American kindergartner is about half that -- it's easy to believe him. ''We have to catch them between kindergarten and second grade, because after that it gets real hard,'' he told me. ''The ones that are slightly obese, what we call 'chubbies,' at that stage they can change. But once they get too big, it's next to impossible.'' With so many children and parents overweight or obese, there's little stigma attached to being fat. Teasing about extra heft or gentle nudging to eat more healthfully doesn't begin until the problem is quite dire. ''They think, I look good. They don't already see that they're in the danger zone.'' Gonzalez slipped his suit jacket back on to rush off to the high school for the day. ''These kids mean the world to me. We've got to make the first move. If we ask the kids to make the first move, we're going to lose the battle.'' In her pink terry tank top and shorts, Cristen stopped by the Rio Grande health center to be weighed and measured by Visio's team before heading to a pool party for the drill team. By 9 a.m., the morning was scorchingly hot already, and in line at the health center in front of Cristen stood a boy in a dark blue T-shirt and dark blue pants named Alfredo. Daniel Hale, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, and one of the nation's leading experts on childhood diabetes, looked at the blood pressure cuff and said to Alfredo, ''I bet we need a little bit bigger one for you.'' Then he said to the boy, ''So, what have you been doing?'' Alfredo said, ''The kids all went to the pool on Friday, but I didn't want to go, so I just stayed home.'' Hale measured him at 4 feet 11 inches, then he put him on the body-composition analyzer scale, where Alfredo registered 171 pounds and 46 percent body fat. ''The problem is,'' Hale said after the boy left, ''most of the potential solutions rest either on very large changes in public policy or very small changes that individuals and families must make in the context of their own home. There's very little we in the public-health community can do. We don't have very much control over what children eat, we don't have much control over safety, which affects where children play, and we're not in people's homes, where kids are taking part in the major sedentary behavior, known as television watching. And here in South Texas, where you can get an Extreme Gulp, which is 52 ounces of soda, and a bag of chips for a dollar, and there aren't many outlets for physical activity, the kids are at great risk. The biggest problem is not that that kid doesn't feel comfortable swimming. The biggest problem is that the long-term consequences of an unhealthy lifestyle begin to accumulate 15 to 20 years after those lifestyles are initiated. When these kids are in their 20's, the consequences are really going to come home to roost.'' When it came to Cristen's turn, she weighed in at 10 pounds less than two months before, when she started the program. Her mother, Gracie, two younger lean children in tow, said proudly: ''It wasn't until she started school that you couldn't see her neck. Now you can see more of her neck.'' Cristen smiled and stood up for herself. ''I have to say, I have a neck, and it's right here.'' Elizabeth Weil is an author of ''Crib Notes: A Random Reference for the Modern Parent,'' published by Chronicle Books. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/magazine/02OBESITY.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 4 00:26:07 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 19:26:07 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Korean Missionaries Carrying Word to Hard-to-Sway Places Message-ID: Korean Missionaries Carrying Word to Hard-to-Sway Places NYT November 1, 2004 By NORIMITSU ONISHI [This came shortly after I abandoned reality. I am not sure of its relevance to reality, actually. I have over a hundred articles still backlogged. They will come five a day for a few more days and go to everyone on my lists. On the 10th, I'll send them only selected lists and step them up to ten a day. If you want to get everything, let me know and I'll put you on my master list. Sometimes, even still, I'll send articles of general interest, like things about computer problems, to all my lists.] AMMAN, Jordan - A South Korean missionary here speaks of introducing Jesus in a "low voice and with wisdom" to Muslims, the most difficult group to convert. In Baghdad, South Koreans plan to open a seminary even after Iraqi churches have been bombed in two recent coordinated attacks. In Beijing, they defy the Chinese government to smuggle North Koreans to Seoul while turning them into Christians. South Korea has rapidly become the world's second largest source of Christian missionaries, only a couple of decades after it started deploying them. With more than 12,000 abroad, it is second only to the United States and ahead of Britain. The Koreans have joined their Western counterparts in more than 160 countries, from the Middle East to Africa, from Central to East Asia. Imbued with the fervor of the born again, they have become known for aggressively going to - and sometimes being expelled from - the hardest-to-evangelize corners of the world. Their actions are at odds with the foreign policy of South Korea's government, which is trying to rein them in here and elsewhere. It is the first time that large numbers of Christian missionaries have been deployed by a non-Western nation, one whose roots are Confucian and Buddhist, and whose population remains two-thirds non-Christian. Unlike Western missionaries, whose work dovetailed with the spread of colonialism, South Koreans come from a country with little history of sending people abroad until recently. They proselytize, not in their own language, but in the local one or English. "There is a saying that when Koreans now arrive in a new place, they establish a church; the Chinese establish a restaurant; the Japanese, a factory," said a South Korean missionary in his 40's, who has worked here for several years and, like many others, asked not to be identified because of the dangers of proselytizing in Muslim countries. In Iraq, eight South Korean missionaries were briefly kidnapped in April. Then, in June, Kim Sun Il, a 33-year-old man who had planned to do missionary work, was taken hostage and beheaded. In July, nearly 460 North Korean defectors arrived in South Korea, thanks to a smuggling network set up by missionaries in China. In 1979, only 93 South Koreans were serving as missionaries, according to the Korea Research Institute for Missions. Compared with South Korea's 12,000, there are about 46,000 American and 6,000 British missionaries, according to missionary organizations in South Korea and the West. Roman Catholicism first came to the Korean Peninsula in the late 18th century, followed a century later by Protestant missionaries from the United States. Christianity failed to set firm roots in Japan and China, where 19th-century missionaries were seen as agents of Western imperialism. But it spread quickly on the Korean Peninsula, where American missionaries helped Korean nationalists fight against Japanese colonial rulers and informed the outside world of the brutalities of Japanese colonialism. It was only in the last two decades, however, with the growth of the South Korean economy and its newly democratic government's decision to allow its citizens to travel freely overseas, that South Korean Christianity took on a missionary gloss. Today, an equal number of missionaries are born again or members of Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptists denominations, said Steve S. C. Moon, executive director of the Korea Research Institute for Missions. These missionaries, like their Western counterparts, tend to focus on activities that are evangelical, educational and medical, and their beliefs are far more traditional than those of newer sects like the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, the Korean-rooted movement. A typical case is the Presbyterian Onnuri Church, founded 19 years ago with the main purpose of training missionaries. It now has 500 in 53 countries, though it focuses on China, Indonesia and India, said Kim Joong Won, director of its missionary program. Until June, Onnuri had a church in Baghdad where Kim Sun Il, who was beheaded, had gone to worship. "He is a martyr to God's glory," said Mr. Moon of the research institute. "Korean missionaries are eager to do God's work and glorify God. They want to die for God." Because religious visas are difficult to obtain in the Middle East, many come on student visas or set up computer or other businesses, and evangelize discreetly. One Korean who has worked here several years and spoke of evangelizing in a "low voice and with wisdom," said that over intimate meals with three or four Muslims he would let the conversation drift to Jesus. So delicate is his work that he never mentions words like "missionary" or "evangelize." Muslims who have converted to Christianity are never identified as such - a necessary precaution in a society where some families engage in so-called honor killings of relatives who have left Islam. Many missionaries also focus on bringing Arab Catholics or Chaldeans into the evangelical fold. "There are so many ways to do our work," said the missionary in his 40's, who works in a local church in Amman and delivers English sermons that are translated into Arabic. "Just as American missionaries did in Korea by building schools and hospitals, there are many ways here," he said. "One important group is Iraqi refugees. They come here. They are tired physically and spiritually. They are so lonely. We help them. They realize they are being helped by Christians. Then they ask about Jesus." About 30 missionary families have settled here in Amman. Others wait to return to Iraq, which they left in June under intense pressure from the South Korean government. John Jung has been working with an Iraqi pastor, Estawri Haritounian, 40, to open a seminary at the National Protestant Evangelical Church in Baghdad. "Saddam Hussein's regime allowed Christians to gather in private houses, so it was difficult, though possible, for us to evangelize," said Mr. Jung, who has been traveling in and out of Iraq for several years. "But now it has become even more difficult for Christians in Iraq. Christians are afraid of Muslims for the first time. We are frustrated we can't be in Iraq at this important time. But as soon as the security allows, we will go back to Baghdad." In Baghdad, Mr. Haritounian explained recently that the church had been founded half a century ago with the help of British missionaries. American missionaries replaced them later and were in turn succeeded by South Koreans. "We dreamed this dream, Pastor John and I, to start a seminary in Baghdad," said Mr. Haritounian, showing eight completed, though empty, classrooms. Mr. Jung, in Amman, said they hoped to start classes as soon as the security improved in Baghdad. "We'll start with only 15 students, but we hope to grow in the future," he said. Many in Amman said South Koreans had an advantage over others, especially now that the war in Iraq has aggravated anti-American feelings in the Middle East. "People expect missionaries to be from America or Europe, so Koreans can do their work quietly," Mr. Haritounian said. "Because of the bad image of Americans now, it will be more difficult for American missionaries to work here." Dennis Merdian, 50, an American missionary, said that in one difficult project he and a South Korean counterpart agreed immediately that it would be better for the South Korean to take the lead. "He wasn't carrying the American government with him," Mr. Merdian said. But because of their short history of living overseas, some South Koreans expect that other cultures will behave the same way their own does and that Christianity will spread abroad as quickly as it did in South Korea, said Mr. Moon of the Korea Research Institute for Missions. "Western missionaries tend to carry a sense of guilt because of their imperialist past," he said. "But Koreans don't have that historical baggage, and they are not inhibited in reaching out to people with the Gospel. So in their missionary work, they tend not to consult the local people, but make decisions in one direction." Shadi Samir, 28, a Jordanian pastor who has worked with South Koreans and recently visited Seoul, said he had seen inexperienced missionaries commit cultural blunders. "They come here full of energy and go out on the streets where they approach women and tell them Jesus loves them," Mr. Samir said. "By making such mistakes, they create problems not only for themselves and other Koreans, but also for us." Kim Dong Moon, a missionary who works in the Middle East and also writes about the missionary movement, said some South Korean missionaries had been deported from the Middle East and ended up on blacklists. "There are some pushy Korean missionaries whose approach is: 'Come to the Kingdom of God now! Or, go to hell,' " Mr. Kim said recently in Seoul. In China, South Koreans concentrate on converting the Chinese, as well as the ethnic North Koreans living in northeastern China. After they are smuggled out of China to South Korea, though, only about a third of the North Koreans continue practicing Christianity, missionaries said. Other South Koreans train North Korean Christians to return to the North to spread the Gospel. "North Korea, which is occupied by the devil Kim Jong Il, is the biggest target of our missionary work," said Kim Sang Chul, president of the Commission to Help North Korean Refugees, a Christian organization. The missionary here in Amman in his 40's said that, in his previous posting in the Philippines, he was awed when he saw American missionaries fly to remote islands and, wherever they spotted signs of life in the jungle below, drop food packets as the first contact with what missionaries call "unreached people." "So even here, it is very difficult, but not impossible," he said. "We are planting one church at a time." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/01/international/asia/01missionaries.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 4 00:29:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 19:29:58 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Geoffrey Miller: Cultural production and political ideology as courtship displays Message-ID: Cultural production and political ideology as courtship displays http://www.unm.edu/~psych/faculty/political_peacocks.htm [He's the author of The Mating Mind, a highly original book arguing how sexual selection made men AND women human. This article came out before he finished the book. This article should interest transhumanists, too, as they contemplate post-humans. They should come in at least two sexes!] Political peacocks by Geoffrey F. Miller published as: Miller, G. F. (1996). Political peacocks. Demos Quarterly, 10 (Special issue on evolutionary psychology), pp. 9-11. The puzzle Suddenly, in the spring of 1986 in New York, hundreds of Columbia University students took over the campus adminstration building and demanded that the university sell off all of its stocks in companies that do business in South Africa. As a psychology undergraduate at Columbia, I was puzzled by the spontaneity, ardour, and near-unanimity of the student demands for divestment. Why would mostly white, mostly middle-class North Americans miss classes, risk jail, and occupy a drab office building for two weeks, in support of political freedom for poor blacks living in a country six thousand miles away? The campus conservative newspaper ran a cartoon depicting the protest as an annual springtime mating ritual, with Dionysian revels punctuated by political sloganeering about this year's arbitrary cause. At the time, I thought the cartoon tasteless and patronizing. Now, I wonder if it contained a grain of truth. Although the protests achieved their political aims only inefficiently and indirectly, they did function very effectively to bring together young men and women who claimed to share similar political ideologies. Everyone I knew was dating someone they'd met at the sit-in. In many cases, the ideological commitment was paper-thin, and the protest ended just in time to study for semester exams. Yet the sexual relationships facilitated by the protest sometimes lasted for years. The hypothesis that loud public advertisements of one's political ideology function as some sort of courtship display designed to attract sexual mates, analogous to the peacock's tail or the nightingale's song, seems dangerous. It risks trivializing all of political discourse, just as the conservative cartoon lampooned the Columbia anti-apartheid protests. The best way to avoid this pitfall is not to ignore the sexual undertones to human political behavior, but to analyze them seriously and respectfully using the strongest and most relevant theory we have from evolutionary biology: Darwin's theory of sexual selection through mate choice. The history Most people think of Darwinian evolution as a blind, haphazard, unguided process in which physical environments impose capricious selection pressures on species, which must adapt or die. True, for natural selection itself. But Darwin himself seems to have become rather bored with natural selection by the inanimate environment after he published The Origin of Species in 1859. He turned to much more interesting question of how animal and human minds can shape evolution. In his 1862 book On the various contrivances by which British and foreign orchids are fertilized by insects he outlined how the perceptual and behavioral capacities of pollinators shape the evolution of flower color and form. In his massive two-volume work of 1868, The variation of animals and plants under domestication, he detailed how human needs and tastes have shaped the evolution of useful and ornamental features in domesticates. Further works on animal emotions in 1872 and the behavior of climbing plants in 1875 continued the trend towards an evolutionary psychology. Most provocatively, Darwin combined the frisson of sex with the spookiness of mind and the enigma of human evolution in his two-volume masterpiece of 1871, The descent of man, and Selection in relation to sex. Darwin observed that many animals, especially females, are rather picky about their sexual partners. But why would it ever pay to reject a suitor? Being choosy requires time, energy, and intelligence - costs that can impair survival. The basic rationale for mate choice is that random mating is stupid mating. It pays to be choosy because in a sexually reproducing species, the genetic quality of your mate will determine half the genetic quality of your offspring. Ugly, unhealthy mates usually lead to ugly, unhealthy offspring. By forming a joint genetic venture with an attractive, high-quality mate, one's genes are much more likely to be passed on. Mate choice is simply the best eugenics and genetic screening that female animals are capable of carrying out under field conditions, with no equipment other than their senses and their brains. Often, sexual selection through mate choice can lead to spectacular results: the bowerbird's elaborate nest, the riflebird's riveting dance, the nightingale's haunting song, and the peacock's iridescent tail, for example. Such features are complex adaptations that evolved through mate choice, to function both as advertisements of the male's health and as aesthetic displays that excite female senses. One can recognize these courtship displays by certain biological criteria: they are expensive to produce and hard to maintain, they have survival costs but reproductive benefits, they are loud, bright, rhythmic, complex, and creative to stimulate the senses, they occur more often after reproductive maturity, more often during the breeding season, more often in males than in females, and more often when potential mates are present than absent. Also, they tend to evolve according to unpredictable fashion cycles that change the detailed structure and content of the displays while maintaining their complexity, extremity, and cost. By these criteria, most human behaviors that we call cultural, ideological, and political would count as courtship displays. Victorian skeptics objected to Darwin's theory of sexual selection by pointing out that in contemporary European society, women tended to display more physical ornamentation than men, contrary to the men-display-more hypothesis. This is true only if courtship display is artificially restricted to physical artefacts worn on the body. Whereas Victorian women ornamented themselves with mere jewelry and clothing, men ornamented themselves with the books they wrote, pictures they painted, symphonies they composed, country estates they bought, honors they won, and vast political and economic empires they built. Although Darwin presented overwhelming evidence for his ingenious sexual selection theory, it fell into disrepute for over a century. Even Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, preferred to view male ornaments as outlets for a surplus of male energy, rather than as adaptations evolved through female choice. Even now, we hear echoes of Wallace's fallacious surplus-of-energy argument in most psychological and anthropological theories about the "self-expressive" functions of human art, music, language, and culture. The Modern Synthesis of Mendelian genetics and Darwinism in the 1930s continued to reject female choice, assuming that sexual ornaments simply intimidate other males or keep animals from mating with the wrong species. Only in the 1980s, with a confluence of support from mathematical models, computer simulations, and experiments in animal and human mate choice, has Darwin's sexual selection theory been re-established as a major part of evolutionary biology. Unfortunately, almost everything written about the evolutionary origins of the human mind, language, culture, ideology, and politics, has ignored the power of sexual selection through mate choice as a force that creates exactly these sorts of elaborate display behaviors. The hypothesis Humans are ideological animals. We show strong motivations and incredible capacities to learn, create, recombine, and disseminate ideas. Despite the evidence that these idea-processing systems are complex biological adaptations that must have evolved through Darwinian selection, even the most ardent modern Darwinians such as Stephen Jay Gould, Richards Dawkins, and Dan Dennett tend to treat culture as an evolutionary arena separate from biology. One reason for this failure of nerve is that it is so difficult to think of any form of natural selection that would favor such extreme, costly, and obsessive ideological behavior. Until the last 40,000 years of human evolution, the pace of technological and social change was so slow that it's hard to believe there was much of a survival payoff to becoming such an ideological animal. My hypothesis, developed in a long Ph.D. dissertation, several recent papers, and a forthcoming book, is that the payoffs to ideological behavior were largely reproductive. The heritable mental capacities that underpin human language, culture, music, art, and myth-making evolved through sexual selection operating on both men and women, through mutual mate choice. Whatever technological benefits those capacities happen to have produced in recent centuries are unanticipated side-effects of adaptations originally designed for courtship. Language, of course, is the key to ideological display. Whereas songbirds can only toy with protean combinations of pitch, rhythm, and timbre, language gives humans the closest thing to telepathy in nature: the ability to transmit complex ideas from one head to another, through the tricks of syntax and semantics. Language opens a window into other minds, expanding the arena of courtship display from the physical to the conceptual. This has enormous implications for the way that sexual selection worked during the last few hundred thousand years of human evolution. As human courtship relied more heavily on language, mate choice focused more on the ideas that language expresses. The selection pressures that shaped the evolution of the human mind came increasingly not from the environment testing whether one's hunting skills were sufficient for survival, but from other minds testing whether one's ideas were interesting enough to provoke some sexual attraction. Every ancestor of every human living today was successful in attracting someone to mate with them. Conversely, the millions of hominids and early humans who were too dull and uninspiring to become our ancestors carried genes for brains that were not as ideologically expressive as ours. A wonderful effect of this runaway sexual selection was that brain size in our lineage has tripled over the last two million years, giving us biologically unprecedented capacities for creative thought, astonishing expressiveness, and intricate culture. A more problematic effect is that our ideological capacities were under selection to be novel, interesting, and entertaining to other idea-infested minds, not to accurately represent the external world or their own transient and tangential place in it. This general argument applies to many domains of human behaviour and culture, but for the remainder of the paper, I will focus on political ideology. The predictions and implications The vast majority of people in modern societies have almost no political power, yet have strong political convictions that they broadcast insistently, frequently, and loudly when social conditions are right. This behavior is puzzling to economists, who see clear time and energy costs to ideological behavior, but little political benefit to the individual. My point is that the individual benefits of expressing political ideology are usually not political at all, but social and sexual. As such, political ideology is under strong social and sexual constraints that make little sense to political theorists and policy experts. This simple idea may solve a number of old puzzles in political psychology. Why do hundreds of questionnaires show that men more conservative, more authoritarian, more rights-oriented, and less empathy-oriented than women? Why do people become more conservative as the move from young adulthood to middle age? Why do more men than women run for political office? Why are most ideological revolutions initiated by young single men? None of these phenomena make sense if political ideology is a rational reflection of political self-interest. In political, economic, and psychological terms, everyone has equally strong self-interests, so everyone should produce equal amounts of ideological behavior, if that behavior functions to advance political self-interest. However, we know from sexual selection theory that not everyone has equally strong reproductive interests. Males have much more to gain from each act of intercourse than females, because, by definition, they invest less in each gamete. Young males should be especially risk-seeking in their reproductive behavior, because they have the most to win and the least to lose from risky courtship behavior (such as becoming a political revolutionary). These predictions are obvious to any sexual selection theorist. Less obvious are the ways in which political ideology is used to advertise different aspects of one's personality across the lifespan. In unpublished studies I ran at Stanford University with Felicia Pratto, we found that university students tend to treat each others' political orientations as proxies for personality traits. Conservatism is simply read off as indicating an ambitious, self-interested personality who will excel at protecting and provisioning his or her mate. Liberalism is read as indicating a caring, empathetic personality who will excel at child care and relationship-building. Given the well-documented, cross-culturally universal sex difference in human mate choice criteria, with men favoring younger, fertile women, and women favoring older, higher-status, richer men, the expression of more liberal ideologies by women and more conservative ideologies by men is not surprising. Men use political conservatism to (unconsciously) advertise their likely social and economic dominance; women use political liberalism to advertise their nurturing abilities. The shift from liberal youth to conservative middle age reflects a mating-relevant increase in social dominance and earnings power, not just a rational shift in one's self-interest. More subtley, because mating is a social game in which the attractiveness of a behavior depends on how many other people are already producing that behavior, political ideology evolves under the unstable dynamics of game theory, not as a process of simple optimization given a set of self-interests. This explains why an entire student body at an American university can suddenly act as if they care deeply about the political fate of a country that they virtually ignored the year before. The courtship arena simply shifted, capriciously, from one political issue to another, but once a sufficient number of students decided that attitudes towards apartheid were the acid test for whether one's heart was in the right place, it became impossible for anyone else to be apathetic about apartheid. This is called frequency-dependent selection in biology, and it is a hallmark of sexual selection processes. What can policy analysts do, if most people treat political ideas as courtship displays that reveal the proponent's personality traits, rather than as rational suggestions for improving the world? The pragmatic, not to say cynical, solution is to work with the evolved grain of the human mind by recognizing that people respond to policy ideas first as big-brained, idea-infested, hypersexual primates, and only secondly as concerned citizens in a modern polity. This view will not surprise political pollsters, spin doctors, and speech writers, who make their daily living by exploiting our lust for ideology, but it may surprise social scientists who take a more rationalistic view of human nature. Fortunately, sexual selection was not the only force to shape our minds. Other forms of social selection such as kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and even group selection seem to have favoured some instincts for political rationality and consensual egalitarianism. Without the sexual selection, we would never have become such colourful ideological animals. But without the other forms of social selection, we would have little hope of bringing our sexily protean ideologies into congruence with reality. Further Readings Andersson, M. (1994). Sexual selection. Princeton U. Press. Betzig, L. (1986). Despotism and differential reproduction: A Darwinian view of history. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine. Buss, D. M. (1994). The evolution of desire: Human mating strategies. New York: Basic Books. Cronin, H. (1991). The ant and the peacock: Altruism and sexual selection from Darwin to today. Cambridge U. Press. Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex (2 vols.). London: John Murray. Fisher, H. (1992). Anatomy of love: The natural history of monogamy, adultery, and divorce. New York: Simon & Schuster. Miller, G. F. (1993). Evolution of the human brain through runaway sexual selection: The mind as a protean courtship device. Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University Psychology Department. (Available through UMI Microfilms; Book in preparation for MIT Press/Bradford Books). Miller, G. F. (in press). Sexual selection in human evolution: Review and prospects. For C. Crawford & D. Krebs (Eds.), Evolution and Human Behavior: Ideas, Issues, and Applications. Lawrence Erlbaum. Miller, G. F., & Todd, P. M. (1995). The role of mate choice in biocomputation: Sexual selection as a process of search, optimization, and diversification. In W. Banzaf & F. Eeckman (Eds.), Evolution and biocomputation: Computational models of evolution. Lecture notes in computer science 899. (pp. 169-204). Springer-Verlag. Pomiankowski, A., & Moller, A. (1995). A resolution of the lek paradox. Proc. R. Soc. London B, 260(1357), 21-29. Ridley, M. (1993). The red queen: Sex and the evolution of human nature. New York: Viking. Wright, R. (1994). The moral animal: Evolutionary psychology and everyday life. New York: Pantheon Books. From HowlBloom at aol.com Tue Jan 4 07:11:30 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 02:11:30 EST Subject: [Paleopsych] =?utf-8?q?=E2=80=9CNot_Pooch=2C_but_Rudolf_was_Man?= =?utf-8?b?4oCZcyBiZXN0IEZyaWVuZCHigJ0=?= Message-ID: <66.4dc9a0b4.2f0b9ba2@aol.com> >From the pen of Val Geist. In my opinion, this is bloody brilliant: ?Not Pooch, but Rudolf was Man?s best Friend!? Reindeer were our salvation as they allowed us to speed towards complex cultures and obliterate our powerful rival, Neanderthal man. Without Reindeer, it is not unlikely that we would be still in a stone-age culture, and Neanderthal would be probably alive and well, and excluding us from much of Eurasia. In the above paper I explain step by step how we managed to gain on Neanderthal and ultimately starve him out. And reindeer were central to that! The paper explains why. Why start with that? It?s as good as any point, because human evolution is tied to it and we can radiate wherever we care to look. In a (big!) nutshell: With the first glacial maximum of the last glaciation (Wuerm/ Wisconsinian) at about 60,000 BP, Neanderthal shrank back from the severely aired Mediterranean basin towards the rich European periglacial zones, allowing desert-adapted Cro-Magnids to escape out of Africa and move east to at least Australia. Because ocean levels were then at last 100 m lower we know nothing archeologically about this break out. However, we have reason to assume that boat cultures developed along the ocean shores. At about 40,000 BP, during an interstadial, Cro-Magnids thrust north and split, one branch going west along the glacial front of the Scandinavian ice sheath. The other branch heads east towards central Asia. Cro-Magnon occupies a wedge of land just south of the Scandinavian ice sheath an just north of Neanderthal geographic distribution which clings close to mountains and montane glaciers. This situation continues for some five to six thousand years, till Neanderthal goes extinct. We and they were thus close together for thousands of years, and the demise of Neanderthal man was slow. Only then did we occupy all of Europe. There is no evidence for warfare between us and them. How was prolonged co-existence possible? Why no interbreeding? What killed off Neanderthal? Examining the Cro-magnids we note that some 95 % of the bones recovered from their sites are reindeer bones; other species such as mammoth, wooly rhino, giant deer, are rare in Upper Paleolithic deposits, but common in Neanderthal sites. Cro-magnids, but not Neanderthal man, distinguish themselves as artists. However, the cave artists are fascinated not by reindeer, on which they depend for food, but with dangerous beasts. To make along story short: the evidence suggests that the painters were young men. They were very courageous young men for it takes real guts to crawl deep into the earth with the equipment they had and then paint a scene. Now, Dale Guthrie, who has written a book on this subject, argues that the paintings reflect the wishes of young men to give an excellent account of their prowess ? by confronting the largest an most dangerous of the fauna. In short: cave art is bravado by young men. Though they ate reindeer, they dreamt mammoth etc.! Reindeer were food; mammoths were sport! The Cro-magnids grew large, athletic bodies and huge brains! They apparently killed reindeer in excess, then stored the products. The trick was to catch the reindeer crossing in a canyon at an acceptable place where they can be killed in excess of need with hand-thrown attl- attls. To do so regularly, demanded that the hunters had to predict accurately when the reindeer crossed at what place. Reindeer migrations are tied to chronologic time and can only be predicted by someone who could keep track of annual chronologic time, that is, by someone who had a calendar. Mashack postulated 1972 that the ?baton de commandement? made of the 2nd antler tine of reindeer bulls was a lunar calendar. Since reindeer cross rivers at predictable places, a calendar allowed one to anticipate and plan for reindeer migrations. Therefore reindeer could be exploited to the high level observable. With reindeer meat and products preserved, Cro magids were free to indulge in other activities for times between reindeer fall and spring migrations. Hunting for sport large and dangerous creatures was one option which, besides ?glory?, also supplied fresh meat and welcome relief from dried, smoked and fermented reindeer. Neanderthal was dependent not on reindeer, which he killed occasionally, but on large-bodied megafauna from the mammoth steppe ? mammoth, woolly rhino, horses, bison, giant deer. He was restricted to the over-wintering areas of these giants close to large glaciers which, harboring cold pockets, prevented the icing over of ranges and thus provided predictable winter habitat for the food of Neanderthal. With the arrival of Cro- Magnon these large creatures begin to decline. They had not done so when only Neanderthal occupied Europe. Therefore, the most likely cause of Neanderthal?s - slow ? extinction, was the demise of his favorite megafaunal prey. Without migratory reindeer, and our ability to accurately predict the timing of their migrations and kill in excess, we could not have persisted, let alone developed superlative athletic bodies and a culture that lasted some 25,000 years. >From Neanderthal?s perspective, reindeer were a frustrating beast which appeared in herds then vanished. However ? and this is new ? there is another angle: reindeer were not an appropriate food for Neanderthal! They were distinctly inferior as food to mammoth, rhino and horses! This why: Neanderthal was a super-athlete, as he had to be practicing the specialized type of hunting he did. For a human to be a super athlete, especially one with so large a brain as Neanderthal possessed, requires a very large supply of Essential Fatty Acids (EFA?s), which are linnoleic acid (Omega-6) and alpha-linnoleic acid (Omega-3). Unfortunately, these highly reactive fatty acids are degraded in the rumen of ruminants, so that the fat of ruminants (reindeer are ruminants) has relatively less of the essential fatty acids. However, these fatty acids are quite abundant in the fat of what we call mono-gastrics, that is, in herbivores that first digest their food via a true stomach before it is fermented in the hind gut and ceacum. Consequently, the soft fats of mammoth, rhino, horses, onagers, but also of bears and wild pigs was far preferable to Neanderthal than the hard and nutritionally inferior fats of reindeer and bison. This means that Neanderthal, as a specialized carnivore, to fulfill its physiological needs, must have chosen to hunt creatures other than reindeer, and had no particular reason to hunt reindeer, except as an occasional change in diet. Cro-Magnon, the descendant of coastal people had acquaintance with fish diets. Fatty fish have a large abundance of Essential Fatty Acids, especially the rare Omega-3 variety. Cro-Magnon, early on, catches migratory salmon, whose appearance in rivers can also be predicted by the use of a calendar. Therefore, any nutritional deficit in reindeer fat could be readily made up by eating some dried and smoked salmon. Also, all reindeer hunters eat the rumen content of reindeer, a potential source of some EFA?s. There is no evidence that Neanderthal caught salmon, but there is such for Upper Paleolithic people in Europe. There is no evidence that the content of true stomachs has ever been eaten by hunters. Neanderthal was thus vulnerable as his athletic physiology required large supplies of volatile fatty acids which he historically, as a carnivore in food habits, readily obtained from the fat of the monogastric megafauna. That?s what allowed him to thrive during the many months of winter when no greenery was in sight. Neanderthal hearths, in the absence of Cro-magnids, are about 1/5th as frequent as those of the Upper Paleolithic. With Cro-magnids, greatly out-numbering Neanderthal and thriving on reindeer and salmon ? and ? hunting the megafauna for sport, there would an effect on megafauna abundance, reducing this the staff of live for Neanderthal. And there was no ready way to counter-adapt, as reindeer were inferior food to Neanderthal, as Neanderthal had no calendar, and fishing for salmon was apparently not in. Cro-magnids, which were not war-like and whose recovered skeletons show no evidence of homicide, were much too smart to confront the athletically much superior Neanderthal. Hybridization was out as the physically highly demanding way of hunting by Neanderthal could not be practiced by hybrids. Hybrid disadvantage kept the gene pools apart. ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 4 21:15:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 16:15:41 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Prospect: The Asian aesthetic Message-ID: The Asian aesthetic http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/ArticleView.asp?link=yes&P_Article=12875 Prospect Magazine, 4.11 Hollywood used to give just a nod to the east. But now a real alternative has emerged to change the face of world cinema Mark Cousins At the end of August, a Chinese film, Hero, topped the US box office chart for the first time, despite already being available on DVD. A lush kung fu film in the manner of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, it was directed by former cinematographer Zhang Yimou. Screen International called it "one of the most eagerly awaited films in Asian film history. " It also went to number one in France and cut a swathe through the box office in many Asian countries. This is unheard of, yet Zhang's follow-up, the even more beautiful House of Flying Daggers, looks set to follow Hero's extraordinary breakthrough. Shot partly in the rust-red forests of Ukraine, it has already broken box office records in China itself. Something remarkable is happening in Asian cinema, and Hollywood has cottoned on. "Check out the latest US movie production slate and it is hard to escape the conclusion that Hollywood is turning Japanese," commented the Guardian in July. "And Korean. With a dash of Thai and Hong Kong thrown in." No fewer than seven new versions of box office hits from Asia are preparing to go before western cameras. Tom Cruise is developing a remake of the Hong Kong/Thai horror picture, The Eye; Martin Scorsese is in pre-production with a new version of Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong policier; a Japanese thriller, Dark Water, is being reworked for Jennifer Connelly; British director Gurinder Chadha is remaking the Korean feminist crime comedy, My Wife is a Gangster. This is not the first time that Hollywood's imitation of Asian cinema has seemed like flattery. Star Wars borrowed from Kurosawa; the Matrix films used Hong Kong fight techniques. But western film industries have never banked on the east to this degree before. Virtually every Hollywood studio has optioned an Asian project. Their interest in the continent's movies has become a groundswell. Part of this is the usual Tinseltown faddiness, but that is not all. Dark Water, The Eye and The Ring films - also being updated in the US - unnerved Hollywood because they beat it at its own game. They found new, subtle, inventive ways of doing what producers in southern California have spent a century perfecting: jangling audiences' nervous systems. From Frankenstein to Jaws and The Blair Witch Project, western cinema has prided itself on being able to electrify filmgoers with novel terrors. All of a sudden, Japan and Korea have stolen its thunder. Directors from these countries are using the power of suggestion, and turning the screw of tension to scare audiences profoundly. They build up tension more slowly, hint at unseen horrors, use sound more evocatively. The American studio system is constantly in search of fresh material and ideas. In the last few years, Asia has been western cinema's new source. Asian cinema, however, doesn't merit our attention merely because it has captured Hollywood's. Despite the brouhaha caused by Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 in Cannes this year, the lasting impression of the festival was the overwhelming beauty of a quartet of films from China, Japan, Hong Kong and Thailand. I have been going to Cannes for well over a decade but had never seen audiences applaud the visual magnificence of an individual scene as they did with House of Flying Daggers. Meanwhile, Hirokazu Kore-eda's Nobody Knows was one of the greatest works of observation that cinema has produced. And although I had to stand throughout Wong Kar Wai's two-hour 2046, the world it created was so ravishing I didn't even shift on my feet. Finally, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady delivered one of the festival's greatest coups. While Hollywood can easily ransack Asian horror cinema to renew its own techniques, it is unlikely ever to match the beauty of these four. How is it that, despite the occasional blink of recognition, the west has remained so blind to Asian cinema for so long? There has always been a sense in which America and Europe owned film. They invented it at the end of the 19th century in unfashionable places like New Jersey, Leeds and the suburbs of Lyons. At first, they saw their clumsy new camera-projectors merely as more profitable versions of Victorian lantern shows. Then the best of the pioneers looked beyond the mechanical and fairground properties of their invention. A few directors, now mostly forgotten, saw that the flickering new medium was more than a divertissement. This crass commercial invention began to cross the Rubicon to art. DW Griffith in California glimpsed its grace, German directors used it as an analogue to the human mind and the modernising city, Soviets emphasised its agitational and intellectual properties, and the Italians reconfigured it on an operatic scale. So heady were these first decades of cinema that America and Europe can be forgiven for assuming that they were the only game in town. In less than 20 years western cinema had grown from nickelodeon to vast rococo picture palace; its unknowns became the most famous people in the world; it made millions. It never occurred to its Wall Street backers that another continent might borrow their magic box and make it its own. But film industries emerged in Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Delhi and Bombay, some of which would outgrow those in the west. India made its first feature around 1912 and was producing more than 200 films a year by 1930, Chinese production managed 400 films between 1928 and 1931 alone, and Japan was quicker off the mark - four production companies were established by 1908, four years before Hollywood became a production centre, and by the end of the 1920s, Japan was releasing 400 films a year. Vast production factories were built. On sound stages as grand as anything in Hollywood or Rome, huge sets re-created scenes from Asian history. In some ways the film industries of the east mirrored their western forbears. Just like scandal-ridden Hollywood, the eastern film world killed the thing it loved, its movie stars. The Chinese actress Ruan Lingyu was as famous and enigmatic as Greta Garbo, yet the Shanghai tabloids hounded her. When she took a fatal overdose in 1935 (aged 25), her funeral procession was three miles long, three women committed suicide during it and the New York Times ran a front page story, calling it "the most spectacular funeral of the century." Despite her key role in Chinese cinema in its heyday, she appears in almost no western film encyclopedias. She was better known in America and Europe than almost any other figure from Asian cinema. And yet her fame did not introduce eastern to western cinema in any meaningful way. In the five years before Ruan's death, her country had produced more than 500 films, mostly conventionally made in studios in Shanghai, without soundtracks. As western film industries refitted for sound, the film industries of China and Japan entered a golden age. Tokyo and Shanghai were as much the centres of movie innovation as southern California. China's best directors - Bu Wancang and Yuan Muzhi - introduced elements of realism to their stories. The Peach Girl (1931) and Street Angel (1937) respectively are regularly voted among the best ever made in the country. But after 1937, Yuan Muzhi went to Yen'an to work with Mao's communists, and in 1938 the Chinese film industry moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong. There, directors like Wang Weiyi and Zhu Shilin paved the way for the flourishing of Hong Kong cinema in the 1950s and again in the 1970s. India set a different course. In the west, the arrival of talkies gave birth to a new genre - the musical - but in India, every one of the 5,000 films made between 1931 and the mid-1950s had musical interludes. The effects of this were far-reaching. Movie performers had to be able to dance. There were two parallel star systems - that of actors and that of playback singers. The films were stylistically more wide-ranging than the western musical, encompassing realism and escapist dance within individual sequences, and they were often three hours long rather than Hollywood's 90 minutes. The cost of such productions, combined with the national reformism of the Congress party, resulted in a distinctive national style of cinema. Performed in Hindi (rather than any of the numerous regional languages) and addressing social and peasant themes in an optimistic and romantic way, "All India films" (the style associated with Bollywood) represented nearly half the continent's annual output of 250-270 movies throughout the 1940s and 1950s. They were often made in Bombay, the centre of what is now known as Bollywood. By the 1970s, annual production in India reached 500 and a decade later it had doubled once more. All India Films, as well as some of the more radical work inspired by the Indian Communist party, found markets in the middle east, Africa and the Soviet Union. By the late 1980s, however, the centre of gravity had moved away from Hindi production in Bombay. Madras began to produce an astonishing ten films a week (more than Los Angeles), and there were around 140 productions a year in Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam. In Japan, the film industry had long ceased to rival India's in size but was distinctive in two ways. Until the 1930s, commentators called benshis attended every screening, standing in front of the audience, clarifying the action and describing characters. Directors did not need to show every aspect of their tale, and tended to produce tableau-like visuals. Even more unusually, its industry was director-led. Whereas in Hollywood, the producer was the central figure - he chose the stories and hired the director and actors - in Tokyo, the director chose the stories and hired the producer and actors. The model was that of an artist and his studio of apprentices. Employed by a studio as an assistant, a future director worked with senior figures, learned his craft, gained authority, until promoted to director with the power to select screenplays and performers. These radical digressions from the norms of industrial cinema are in part explained by Japan's psychological retreat from 20th-century westernism. Its chauvinistic belief in Japanese superiority led to its invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and China proper in 1937, to catastrophic effect. Yet in the 1930s and 1940s, no national cinema was more artistically accomplished than Japan's. Its directors had considerable freedom, their nation was (over)confident and the result was cinema of the highest order. The films of Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi and Mikio Naruse were the greatest of these. Mizoguchi's were usually set in the 19th century and unpicked the social norms which impeded the liberties of the female characters whom he chose as his focus. From Osaka Elegy (1936) to Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) and beyond, he evolved a sinuous way of moving his camera in and around a scene, advancing towards significant details but often retreating at moments of confrontation or emotion. No one had used the camera with such finesse before. Great western directors like Vincent Minnelli and Bernardo Bertolucci would borrow his techniques. Perhaps significantly, given the political climate, Mikio Naruse's best films were also beautifully controlled accounts of women's lives. Even more important for film history, however, is the work of the great Ozu. Born in Tokyo in 1903, he rebelled at school, watched lots of American film comedies in the 1920s, and imported their boisterous irreverence into his own work. Then he rejected much of their physicality and from I Was Born, But... (1932), embarked on a string of domestic films about middle-class families which are the most poised and resigned in world cinema. Brilliantly cast and judged, Ozu's films - the most famous is Tokyo Story (1953) - went further than Mizoguchi's emotional reserve. Where Hollywood cranked up drama, Ozu avoided it. His camera seldom moved. It nestled at seated height, framing people square on, listening quietly to their articulations. This sounds boring, but the effect is the opposite. The families we see are bracingly alive. Their hard-earned wisdom is deeply moving. The human elements alone in Ozu's films would have been enough to endear him to many of those in future generations - Wim Wenders in Germany, Hou Hsiao Hsien in Taiwan and Abbas Kiarostami in Iran - who have called him the greatest of film directors. But there was his technique too. Ozu rejected the conventions of editing, cutting not on action but for visual balance. His films analyse the space in which his characters move rather like the cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque - intellectually, unemotionally, from many angles. Even more strikingly, Ozu regularly cut away from his action to a shot of a tree or a kettle or clouds, not to establish a new location but as a moment of repose. Many historians now compare such "pillow shots" to the Buddhist idea that mu - empty space or nothing - is itself an element of composition. By the beginning of the 1950s, and despite the ravages of nationalism, war and independence struggles, the three great Asian powers had national cinemas of distinction. Influenced by western directors, those in the east rethought the medium musically and spatially, making it rapturous or rigorous, according to their own national sensibilities. Western directors still took no notice. They had new darlings by this stage - directors like Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Marcel Carne; actors like Ingrid Bergman, Judy Garland, Bob Hope and Humphrey Bogart. But their blindness to Asian cinema was now chronic. Then, in 1951, a film festival in Venice, started by Mussolini's cronies in 1932, awarded its top prize, the Golden Lion, to a Japanese film - Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon. Audiences on the Lido couldn't work out what they loved more, the film's ravishing cinematography, or its philosophical disquisition on relativism. Rashomon went on to be shown in cosmopolitan cities throughout the west and to win the Oscar for best foreign film. (Japanese films won again in 1954 and 1955.) The floodgates opened. Kurosawa had been crowned. The effect was compounded by his remarkable, cancer-themed Ikiru, made two years after Rashomon. Lucas, Coppola and Scorsese were soon paying attention. Japanese cinema was pored over for new discoveries. Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai was f?ted in 1955 and remade in Hollywood in 1960 as The Magnificent Seven. Kurosawa had himself been influenced by John Ford, but at least the flow was now two-way. India, too, found the limelight. A new master director, Mehboob Khan, gained international acclaim - and an Oscar nomination - for Mother India, an epic often compared to Gone with the Wind. In their belated rush to raid the treasures of the east, the western cognoscenti even started to take notice of Japan's least showy director, Ozu. Still, it took a while. Despite festival screenings of his work and six of his films being named "best film of the year" in Japan, Ozu was recognised by few people abroad. Eventually, the British Film Institute called him "one of the greatest artists of the 20th century in any medium, in any country." Wim Wenders declared him "a sacred treasure of the cinema." Watching the Asian films in Cannes this year, I had an idea of what it must have been like in Venice in 1951 or 1954. The sheer loveliness of the breakthrough films of 50 years ago was somehow feminine - certainly delicate, rich, soft, and shallow-focused. Each of the latest new wave of Asian films is highly decorated, tapestry-like, with an emphasis on detail, visual surface, colour and patterning, and centred on a woman, or feminised men. It comes as no surprise, for example, that Zhang Yimou's House of Flying Daggers is so beautiful. His Raise the Red Lantern was visually striking and he started as a cinematographer on the breakthrough work of modern Chinese cinema, Yellow Earth. Daggers, however, may be one of the most photographically distinguished films ever made. In it, the actress Zhang Ziyi, who starred in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, plays Mei, a blind dancer in the year 859 who is sympathetic to a revolutionary group threatening the Tang dynasty. An early sequence takes place in a large pavilion decorated entirely by peonies. A local captain suspects that Mei is a subversive and sets her a test. In the pavilion, he surrounds her with 100 vertically mounted drums. She stands in the middle, dressed in a coat of gold silk, embroidered with turquoise chrysanthemums. Presented with dishes of dry beans, the captain flicks one at a drum. The camera follows it though space. As it strikes the taut surface, Mei spins and flicks the enormously long sleeve of her coat in the direction of the sound. It travels as the bean did and strikes the drum in a rococo flourish. Then the captain flicks another bean, and Mei spins and flicks again. Then another. Then a small handful which scatter around the circle of drums. Mei responds to the percussive effect, her sleeves darting and soaring, her face still serene and expressionless, at the centre of the vortex. The bean shots are computer-generated - the most satisfying use of CGI yet. The combination of such cinematic modernity with martial arts choreography, photographic splendour and, centrally, Zhang's enigmatic performance, makes this scene, at once, a classic. If anything, Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai's 2046 goes even further. It, too, is a widescreen film of seductively shallow focus, surface patterning and feminine beauty. Zhang Ziyi stars again, this time joined by two other great Chinese actresses, Gong Li and Maggie Cheung. Like Wong's previous film, In the Mood for Love, it is an evocative exercise in atmosphere and music, set in Hong Kong in the 1960s. Tony Leung plays a brilliantined writer caught in a destructive web of relationships. Wong and his cinematographers take the colours and lighting of Edward Hopper but reconfigure them into wide, flat, scroll-like images where everything has a melancholic sheen, where women move in slow motion, their stilettos clicking in night-time alleyways. To this Wong adds a futuristic element. A dazzling bullet train rockets forward through time to the world of 2046, a place where robotic people symbolise the empty state of love. At first glance, the Japanese director Kore-Eda's new film, Nobody Knows, is different from the aesthetic worlds of Zhang and Wong. Set in present-day Japan, it tells the story of a neglectful mother who rents an apartment with one of her children and who, when she moves in, opens her suitcases to reveal two more. In his way, however, the former documentary director is equally interested in stillness, in shallow focus and in production design. The mother leaves her children, but instead of declining into Lord of the Flies chaos, they subtly transform their apartment into a world suitable for themselves: scruffy, but full of play and adventure. Nobody Knows is another tapestry film like Daggers, but it is about the timeless ways in which children amuse themselves. Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film Tropical Malady is more enigmatic still. In its first half, a soldier befriends a young peasant man who lives in the country. They drift around, sit talking, grow fond of each other. In one scene the soldier puts his head in his friend's lap, in another the soldier licks his hand. As their growing eroticism looks as if it might become explicit, the peasant walks into the jungle. Then the screen goes black: no sound, no picture, as if the film has broken. Then a second film begins. The actors are the same but their situation is more fable-like. A monkey talks to one of the characters, the other is the spirit of a tiger running naked through the jungle. Tropical Malady is likely to be seen as one of the most experimental films of its time, but what is again striking is its gentleness and stillness. Though made in very different countries, the films of Weerasethakul, Zhang, Wong and Kore-eda share certain ideas about art. Just as the work of Ozu can be fully understood only by balancing its psychological aspects with more abstract Buddhist questions of space and stillness, so the influence of Buddhism can be seen in these new films. Despite the range of western cinema today, most of it derives from the assumption that movies are narrative chains of cause and effect, that their characters have fears and desires, and that we follow the film by understanding these fears and desires. The new films of Zhang and the others make similar assumptions but are less driven by them and balance questions of selfhood with Zen ideas about negation and equilibrium. This makes their beauty hard to replicate in the west. But Buddhism is not the whole picture. Another Asian philosophy explains the sense of gender and use of space in these films. Unlike Maoism, which pictured a clear moral opposition between the good workers and bad bosses, and unlike Confucian philosophy, in which masculinity is noble and femininity is not, Taoism is less clear-cut. Morally, it sees good within bad and vice versa. The feminine is a virtue in the same way that emptiness may be for artists. Every one of the great Asian films in the pipeline evinces Taoist ideas of sex and space. In none of them is gender polarised. In all of them, space is crucial. And the influence is acknowledged. Zhang, for example, has talked about the way Chinese painting has affected his work. His shots are often very wide. Space and landscape weigh as heavily within the frame as the human elements. Art historians have long discussed the Taoist component of such paintings. Indian cinema, deriving from Hindu aesthetics, is not currently as innovative as that of other Asian countries. Although Indian film continues to be economically successful, and has become synonymous with high spectacle, the Hindu nationalism of the country's recent, backward-looking BJP government has coincided with a spell of cinematic complacency. As the art form most swayed by money and market, cinema would appear to be too busy to bother with questions of philosophy. Other Asian nations are proving that this is not the case. Just as deep ideas about individual freedom have led to the bracingly driven aspirational cinema of Hollywood, so Buddhism and Taoism explain the distinctiveness of Asian cinema at its best. In Venice in 1951 and Cannes in 2004, audiences left the cinemas with heads full of dazzling images. But the greatness of Rashomon, Ugetsu, 2046 or House of Flying Daggers is, in the end, not to do with imagery at all. Yes, they are pictorially distinctive, but it is their different sense of what a person is, and what space and action are, which makes them new to western eyes. Mark Cousins is author of "The Story of Film" (Pavilion) From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 4 21:18:45 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 16:18:45 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Oh, Fine, You're Right. I'm Passive-Aggressive. Message-ID: Oh, Fine, You're Right. I'm Passive-Aggressive. NYT November 16, 2004 By BENEDICT CAREY The marriage seemed to come loose at the seams, one stitch at a time, often during the evening hour between work and dinner. She would be preparing the meal, while he kept her company in the sun room next to kitchen, usually reading the paper. At times the two would provoke each other, as couples do - about money, about holiday plans - but those exchanges often flared out quickly when he would say, simply, "O.K., you're right," and turn back to the news. "Looking back, instead of getting angry, I was doing this as a dismissive way of shutting down the conversation," said Peter G. Hill, 48, a doctor in Massachusetts who has recently separated from his wife. Even reading the paper at that hour was his way of adamantly relaxing, in defiance of whatever it was she thought he should be doing. "It takes two to break up, but I have been accused of being passive-aggressive, and there it is," he said. Everyone knows what it looks like. The friend who perpetually arrives late. The co-worker who neglects to return e-mail messages. The very words: "Nothing. I'm just thinking." Yet while "passive-aggressive" has become a workhorse phrase in marriage counseling and an all-purpose label for almost any difficult character, it is a controversial concept in psychiatry. After some debate, the American Psychiatric Association dropped the behavior pattern from the list of personality disorders in its most recent diagnostic manual - the DSM IV - as too narrow to be a full-blown diagnosis, and not well enough supported by scientific evidence to meet increasingly rigorous standards of definition. The decision is likely to have more effect on teaching guidelines and research than on treatment and insurance coverage. But psychologists and psychiatrists with long experience treating this kind of behavior say it is hard to study precisely because it is so covert, common and widely variable. These experts make a distinction between passive-aggressive behavior, which most people display at times, and passive-aggressive personality, which is ingrained and habitual. In milder forms it can come across as a maddening blend of evasiveness and contrition, agreeableness and impudence, and in severe cases is often masked by more obvious mental illness, like depression. Yet whether pathological or not, they say, the pattern is often traceable to a distinct childhood experience. New research suggests that in many cases it stems from a positive, socially protective instinct - to keep peace at home, avoid costly mistakes at work, even preserve some self-respect. "Some of the people being demeaned as passive-aggressive are in fact being extremely careful not to commit mistakes, a strategy that has been successful for them," if not entirely conscious, said Dr. E. Tory Higgins, director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia University. They become difficult, he said, "when their cautious instincts are overwhelmed by demands that they perceive as unreasonable." The classic description of the behavior captures a stubborn malcontent, someone who passively resists fulfilling routine tasks, complains of being misunderstood and underappreciated, unreasonably scorns authority and voices exaggerated complaints of personal misfortune. But the phrase itself has its roots in the military. Near the end of World War II, a colonel in the United States War Department used it to describe an "immature" behavior among enlisted men, many of them at the end of long tours: "a neurotic type reaction to routine military stress, manifested by helplessness, or inadequate responses, passiveness, obstructionism or aggressive outbursts." This kind of insolence, among adults protecting themselves from what they saw as unreasonable, arbitrary authority, was in part an adaptive behavior, psychologist say, an effort to preserve some independence amid extreme pressure to conform. A similar family dynamic accounts for early development of the behavior, some researchers argue. Dr. Lorna Benjamin, co-director of a clinic at the University of Utah's Neuropsychiatric Institute in Salt Lake City, said people with strong passive tendencies often grew up in loving but demanding families, which gave them responsibilities they perceived to be unmanageable. First-born children are prime candidates, she said: when younger siblings are born, the oldest may suddenly be expected to take on far more extra work than he or she can handle, and over time begin to resent parents' demands without daring to defy them. This hostile cooperation is at the core of passive-aggression, she and other researchers say, and in later in life it is habitually directed at any authority figure, whether a boss, a teacher or a spouse making demands. These passive-aggressive people, Dr. Benjamin said, "are full of unacknowledged contradiction, of angry kindness, compliant defiance, covert assertiveness." This history hardly excuses the multitude of hedging, foot-dragging mopes that populate everyday life, but it can help explain some of their exploits. One Los Angeles woman, who asked not to be identified (and swore she was not being passive-aggressive), described a former co-worker who intentionally made assignments late to employees when she didn't approve of a project. At the end of some days, she wrote, this archetypal passive-aggressive used to hide under her desk to avoid saying goodnight to people. Sometimes, however, mild passive-aggressive behavior can be an effective means to avoid potentially costly confrontations. In such cases the cooperation is more significant than the underlying resentment or hostility. "A joke can be the most skillful passive-aggressive act there is,'' said Dr. Scott Wetzler, a clinical psychologist at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and the author of "Living With the Passive-Aggressive Man." "They recognize a coming confrontation, and have found a clever way to release the tension." It is just this instinctive ability to pre-empt and defuse that, paradoxically, may lead to more problematic passive-aggressive behavior. Dr. Higgins of Columbia has described a personal quality he calls prevention pride, a kind of native caution in the face of new challenges, an effort to avoid all errors. He assesses whether a person is high or low in this style by asking a battery of questions, like how often they broke their parents rules, how often they take risks, how often they have been in trouble by not being careful enough. The style is adaptive, he said, in that it allows people with a certain temperament to avoid failure and embarrassment. In one recent experiment, Dr. Higgins and Dr. Ozlem Ayduk, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, tested how these especially cautious people reacted to conflict in relationships. The researchers had 56 couples who had been together at least two months keep detailed diaries, answering questions about conflicts, thoughts about the relationship, moods and their partners' behavior. After three weeks, the researchers compared the diaries and found that people who had a highly cautious personal style and were especially sensitive to rejection were significantly more likely than the others to respond to conflicts by going silent, withdrawing their affection and acting cold. "The people in this study were not the type who would ever say, 'I hate you' to the person's face because they are so careful not to do something that puts them out there," and directly offend their partner, Dr. Ayduk said. The evidence that this sensitivity can be appealing, at least for a while, is recorded in millions of relationships that have lasted for years. A 45-year-old college instructor in Hawaii recently broke off a long relationship with a man she said was a "wonderful, devoted listener, an extremely sensitive person." But in time, she said, it was apparent that he was also passive-aggressive. On one occasion, she said, he gave away her seat on an airplane while she was finding a storage compartment for her luggage, saying he thought she had taken another seat. On others, he would arrive home early from work and finish off meals they normally shared, without explanation. And when he was in one of his moods, the listening ceased; she may as well not have been in the room. "The challenging thing was, you never know what you did wrong," she said. "That's the difficulty, all these scenarios, I could not point to what I did. I never knew." The person who has become hostile may not know exactly why, either. In some cases, psychologists say, people unable to recognize or express their annoyance often don't feel entitled to it; they instinctually let the "little things" pass without taking the time to find out why they are so angry about them. Unsure of themselves, they take care not to offend a spouse, a co-worker or friend. The anger remains. When the behavior pattern is deeply ingrained and compulsive, it is neither adaptive nor merely bewildering, but can be dangerous, some experts say. At her clinic in Salt Lake City, Dr. Benjamin treats many people with multiple diagnoses, from attention deficit disorder to obsessive-compulsive disorder to intractable depression, many of them with other problems, like substance abuse or multiple suicide attempts. "And I would say that in close to half of them this passive-aggressive behavior is running the whole show," she said. When and if they do get therapy, psychiatrists say, people with strong passive-aggressive instincts are usually determined to fail: the therapist becomes the scorned authority figure. The patients will take their medications and then report with relish that they don't work. The patients will follow advice and then complain that it is senseless, useless. "They are not doing this on purpose; it's part of a deep-seated ambivalence about getting better," a determination to expose the authority as incompetent, said Dr. Marjorie Klein, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin. It is left to the individual therapist's skill to deflect or disarm this determination and get patients to at least experiment with an alternate strategy to engage their lives. In one, called cognitive behavior therapy, they learn to monitor their thoughts, moment by moment, to recognize when they are angry, and to challenge unexamined assumptions about confrontation. For example, some people assume that confronting their boss about a raise will be a catastrophe, said Dr. Wetzler of Montefiore, but it often simply is not the case, especially if they have prepared themselves by learning the market value of their skills at other companies. Yet Dr. Benjamin said that often the childhood roots of the behavior must be faced and felt, and that means revisiting the parental relationship and learning that it does not have to set the pattern for all relationships with authority. "The main challenge is to help them shift from winning by losing to winning by winning," she said, "to see that it is they who benefit most when they win, not their therapist, their spouse or their boss." Just living with the behavior in someone else can be as tough as treating it. To manage garden variety passive-aggressive behavior, psychiatrists often advise a kind of protective engagement: don't attack the person; that only reinforces your position as an authority making demands. Take into account the probable cause of the person's unexpressed anger and acknowledge it, if possible, when being stonewalled during a discussion. And be sure to be on guard against likely retaliation. "If he agrees to go over to your relatives' place for Thanksgiving, but you know he's upset about it, make sure you have alternate transportation to get over there," Dr. Wetzler said. "He may take the car and not manage to get home in time to make it." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/16/health/psychology/16pass.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 4 21:20:08 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 16:20:08 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap Message-ID: God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap New York Times, 5.1.4 "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"This was the question posed to scientists, futurists and other creative thinkers by John Brockman, a literary agent and publisher of The Edge, a Web site devoted to science. The site asks a new question at the end of each year. Here are excerpts from the responses, to be posted Tuesday at www.edge.org. Roger Schank Psychologist and computer scientist; author, "Designing World-Class E-Learning" Irrational choices. I do not believe that people are capable of rational thought when it comes to making decisions in their own lives. People believe they are behaving rationally and have thought things out, of course, but when major decisions are made - who to marry, where to live, what career to pursue, what college to attend, people's minds simply cannot cope with the complexity. When they try to rationally analyze potential options, their unconscious, emotional thoughts take over and make the choice for them. Richard Dawkins Evolutionary biologist, Oxford University; author, "The Ancestor's Tale" I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all "design" anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe. Judith Rich Harris Writer and developmental psychologist; author, "The Nurture Assumption" I believe, though I cannot prove it, that three - not two - selection processes were involved in human evolution. The first two are familiar: natural selection, which selects for fitness, and sexual selection, which selects for sexiness. The third process selects for beauty, but not sexual beauty - not adult beauty. The ones doing the selecting weren't potential mates: they were parents. Parental selection, I call it. Kenneth Ford Physicist; retired director, American Institute of Physics; author, "The Quantum World" I believe that microbial life exists elsewhere in our galaxy. I am not even saying "elsewhere in the universe." If the proposition I believe to be true is to be proved true within a generation or two, I had better limit it to our own galaxy. I will bet on its truth there. I believe in the existence of life elsewhere because chemistry seems to be so life-striving and because life, once created, propagates itself in every possible direction. Earth's history suggests that chemicals get busy and create life given any old mix of substances that includes a bit of water, and given practically any old source of energy; further, that life, once created, spreads into every nook and cranny over a wide range of temperature, acidity, pressure, light level and so on. Believing in the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy is another matter. Joseph LeDoux Neuroscientist, New York University; author, "The Synaptic Self" For me, this is an easy question. I believe that animals have feelings and other states of consciousness, but neither I nor anyone else has been able to prove it. We can't even prove that other people are conscious, much less other animals. In the case of other people, though, we at least can have a little confidence since all people have brains with the same basic configurations. But as soon as we turn to other species and start asking questions about feelings and consciousness in general we are in risky territory because the hardware is different. Because I have reason to think that their feelings might be different than ours, I prefer to study emotional behavior in rats rather than emotional feelings. There's lots to learn about emotion through rats that can help people with emotional disorders. And there's lots we can learn about feelings from studying humans, especially now that we have powerful function imaging techniques. I'm not a radical behaviorist. I'm just a practical emotionalist. Lynn Margulis Biologist, University of Massachusetts; author, "Symbiosis in Cell Evolution" I feel that I know something that will turn out to be correct and eventually proved to be true beyond doubt. What? That our ability to perceive signals in the environment evolved directly from our bacterial ancestors. That is, we, like all other mammals including our apish brothers detect odors, distinguish tastes, hear bird song and drumbeats and we too feel the vibrations of the drums. With our eyes closed we detect the light of the rising sun. These abilities to sense our surroundings are a heritage that preceded the evolution of all primates, all vertebrate animals, indeed all animals. David Myers Psychologist, Hope College; author, "Intuition" As a Christian monotheist, I start with two unproven axioms: 1. There is a God. 2. It's not me (and it's also not you). Together, these axioms imply my surest conviction: that some of my beliefs (and yours) contain error. We are, from dust to dust, finite and fallible. We have dignity but not deity. And that is why I further believe that we should a) hold all our unproven beliefs with a certain tentativeness (except for this one!), b) assess others' ideas with open-minded skepticism, and c) freely pursue truth aided by observation and experiment. This mix of faith-based humility and skepticism helped fuel the beginnings of modern science, and it has informed my own research and science writing. The whole truth cannot be found merely by searching our own minds, for there is not enough there. So we also put our ideas to the test. If they survive, so much the better for them; if not, so much the worse. Robert Sapolsky Neuroscientist, Stanford University, author, "A Primate's Memoir" Mine would be a fairly simple, straightforward case of an unjustifiable belief, namely that there is no god(s) or such a thing as a soul (whatever the religiously inclined of the right persuasion mean by that word). ... I'm taken with religious folks who argue that you not only can, but should believe without requiring proof. Mine is to not believe without requiring proof. Mind you, it would be perfectly fine with me if there were a proof that there is no god. Some might view this as a potential public health problem, given the number of people who would then run damagingly amok. But it's obvious that there's no shortage of folks running amok thanks to their belief. So that wouldn't be a problem and, all things considered, such a proof would be a relief - many physicists, especially astrophysicists, seem weirdly willing to go on about their communing with god about the Big Bang, but in my world of biologists, the god concept gets mighty infuriating when you spend your time thinking about, say, untreatably aggressive childhood leukemia. Donald Hoffman Cognitive scientist, University of California, Irvine; author, "Visual Intelligence" I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Space-time, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being. The world of our daily experience - the world of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds - is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm. Indeed the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not. For the point of an interface, such as the Windows interface on a computer, is simplification and ease of use. We click icons because this is quicker and less prone to error than editing megabytes of software or toggling voltages in circuits. Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival. If this is right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant of minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory of consciousness, no theory that explains how mindless matter or energy or fields could be, or cause, conscious experience. Nicholas Humphrey Psychologist, London School of Economics; author,"The Mind Made Flesh" I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to bolster human self-confidence and self-importance - so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others' lives. Philip Zimbardo Psychologist, emeritus professor, Stanford; author, "Shyness" I believe that the prison guards at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, who worked the night shift in Tier 1A, where prisoners were physically and psychologically abused, had surrendered their free will and personal responsibility during these episodes of mayhem. But I could not prove it in a court of law. These eight Army reservists were trapped in a unique situation in which the behavioral context came to dominate individual dispositions, values and morality to such an extent that they were transformed into mindless actors alienated from their normal sense of personal accountability for their actions - at that time and place. The "group mind" that developed among these soldiers was created by a set of known social psychological conditions, some of which are nicely featured in Golding's "Lord of the Flies." The same processes that I witnessed in my Stanford Prison Experiment were clearly operating in that remote place: deindividuation, dehumanization, boredom, groupthink, role-playing, rule control and more. Philip W. Anderson Physicist and Nobel laureate, Princeton Is string theory a futile exercise as physics, as I believe it to be? It is an interesting mathematical specialty and has produced and will produce mathematics useful in other contexts, but it seems no more vital as mathematics than other areas of very abstract or specialized math, and doesn't on that basis justify the incredible amount of effort expended on it. My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance. It proposes that Nature is the way we would like it to be rather than the way we see it to be; and it is improbable that Nature thinks the same way we do. The sad thing is that, as several young would-be theorists have explained to me, it is so highly developed that it is a full-time job just to keep up with it. That means that other avenues are not being explored by the bright, imaginative young people, and that alternative career paths are blocked. Alison Gopnik Psychologist, University of California, Berkeley; co-author, "The Scientist in the Crib" I believe, but cannot prove, that babies and young children are actually more conscious, more vividly aware of their external world and internal life, than adults are. I believe this because there is strong evidence for a functional trade-off with development. Young children are much better than adults at learning new things and flexibly changing what they think about the world. On the other hand, they are much worse at using their knowledge to act in a swift, efficient and automatic way. They can learn three languages at once but they can't tie their shoelaces. David Buss Psychologist, University of Texas; author, "The Evolution of Desire" True love. I've spent two decades of my professional life studying human mating. In that time, I've documented phenomena ranging from what men and women desire in a mate to the most diabolical forms of sexual treachery. I've discovered the astonishingly creative ways in which men and women deceive and manipulate each other. I've studied mate poachers, obsessed stalkers, sexual predators and spouse murderers. But throughout this exploration of the dark dimensions of human mating, I've remained unwavering in my belief in true love. While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many - the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, profound self-sacrifice and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It's difficult to define, eludes modern measurement and seems scientifically woolly. But I know true love exists. I just can't prove it. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/science/04edgehed.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 4 21:21:13 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 16:21:13 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Diet and Lose Weight? Scientists Say 'Prove It!' Message-ID: Diet and Lose Weight? Scientists Say 'Prove It!' New York Times, 5.1.4 By GINA KOLATA With obesity much on Americans' minds, an entire industry has sprung up selling diets and diet books, meal replacements and exercise programs, nutritional supplements and Internet-based coaching, all in an effort to help people lose weight. But a new study, published today, finds little evidence that commercial weight-loss programs are effective in helping people drop excess pounds. Almost no rigorous studies of the programs have been carried out, the researchers report. And federal officials say that companies are often unwilling to conduct such studies, arguing that they are in the business of treatment, not research. "In general, the industry has always been opposed to making outcomes disclosures," said Richard Cleland, the assistant director for advertising practices at the Federal Trade Commission. "They have always given various rationales," Mr. Cleland said, from "'It's too expensive,' to even arguing that part of this is selling the dream, and if you know what the truth is, it's harder to sell the dream." The study, published in today's issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, found that with the exception of Weight Watchers, no commercial program had published reliable data from randomized trials showing that people who participated weighed less a few months later than people who did not participate. And even in the Weight Watchers study, the researchers said, the results were modest, with a 5 percent weight loss after three to six months of dieting, much of it regained. Advertisements for weight loss centers often make it seem that success is guaranteed for anyone who really wants it. They feature smiling, thin, healthy people - results, the advertisements imply, of simply following the program. Scientists, however, want something more. They would like to see carefully controlled studies that follow program participants over a couple of years and compare their success with that of nonparticipants. But that sort of study is almost never done, said Dr. Thomas Wadden, director of the weight and eating disorders program at the University of Pennsylvania and the lead author of the new study. It is not as if no one has asked the companies to conduct such research, he and others said. About a decade ago, Dr. Wadden, Mr. Cleland and others met with commercial weight loss companies at the Federal Trade Commission to discuss getting some solid data on the programs' effectiveness. "We tried to come up with a set of voluntary guidelines with the idea that these would be disclosures that weight loss centers would make prior to consumers' signing on the bottom line," said Mr. Cleland. "At the end of the day we agreed to disagree on the issue of outcomes disclosure. I was convinced that it could be done, but it was not something the industry was going to voluntarily do." The F.T.C., he said, could not force companies to do the studies. Lynn McAfee, the director of medical advocacy for the Council on Size and Weight Discrimination, was aghast at the conclusion. "I don't understand how you can have a product you never evaluate for effectiveness," Ms. McAfee said. "It was a slap in the face to all people of size." Still, patients and their doctors need information, Dr. Wadden said. So he and his colleague, Dr. Adam Gilden Tsai, collected what information they could on the prices, the methods, and the success of nine commercial weight loss programs, like Jenny Craig, eDiets and Optifast and self-help programs, like Overeaters Anonymous. The investigators looked at the data presented on company Web sites, called the companies and searched medical journals for published papers. In their review, they included studies published from 1966 to 2003, finding 108 that assessed commercial programs. Of those, only 10 met their criteria. For example, the studies had to have lasted at least 12 weeks and to have assessed weight-loss outcomes after a year. Dr. Wadden said that even in that handful of studies, hardly any of them reported data for everyone who enrolled in the weight-loss programs. Most included only people who had completed the programs, making the outcomes "definitely best-case scenarios," he said. The costs of commercial weight-loss programs can vary from $65 for three months on eDiets to $167 for the same time in Weight Watchers to more than $2,000 for a medically supervised low-calorie diet. "Given the lack of good comparative data, it may make sense to try the cheaper alternatives first," Mr. Cleland said. Other experts said that patients might want to forgo the programs altogether. "Doctors could do as well as these programs" in helping people lose weight, said Dr. George Blackburn, an obesity specialist at Harvard Medical School, simply by counseling people to diet and exercise. He added, "Doctors can, ought to and are qualified to get involved." The Weight Watchers study, published in 2003 in The Journal of the American Medical Association, involved 423 people who weighed an average of 205 pounds. Half the participants were randomly assigned to attend Weight Watchers meetings and follow the program. The other half tried to lose weight on their own. After two years, the participants in Weight Watchers had lost an average of 6.4 pounds. The other group had lost no weight. Neither group showed a change in blood pressure, cholesterol, blood glucose or insulin. "We found no such evaluations of Jenny Craig or L.A. Weight Loss," Dr. Wadden and Dr. Tsai wrote. Kent Coykendall, a vice president of strategic planning and business development for Jenny Craig, said the company had begun a randomized study of 70 people on the program. But in the meantime, he said, Jenny Craig has the records of tens of thousands of participants attesting to the fact that they lost weight - "a plethora of real data on real people in the real world under real circumstances," Mr. Coykendall said. In their study, Dr. Wadden and Dr. Tsai also looked at programs, like Optifast, Health Management Resources and Medifast, that provide participants with medical supervision and a low-calorie diet - 800 to to 1500 calories per day. Patients who stay with these programs, the companies say, can lose as much as 15 to 25 percent of their weight in three to six months. But the researchers found no randomized controlled trials of their effectiveness. And the studies that were conducted independently of the companies showed that people on the low-calorie diets weighed about the same a year later as people on conventional diets. In addition, the companies' own reports found high dropout rates, with nearly half the participants in an Optifast study dropping out in 26 weeks. But Dr. Larry Stifler, the founder and president of Health Management Resources, objected. "Their criteria - one of the things they always like to see - is randomized controlled trials," Dr. Stifler said. But such studies, he said, are not feasible when a company is offering a treatment. "People can't be told they can either join the program or be in a control group. That's not what this treatment is about," he said. Dr. Stifler said his company had data showing that patients dropped large amounts of weight if they stuck with the diet. When the company assessed patients three years later, some had still kept the weight off. Much of that data has not been published, Dr. Stifler said, but it has been presented at professional meetings. Robert Hallock, vice president and general counsel for Medifast, also said his company had unpublished but promising data. The company keeps track of thousands of patients, he said, and "everyone knows that low-calorie diets and structured programs get huge amounts of weight loss." As for Internet-based weight loss programs, the only study Dr. Wadden and Dr. Tsai found was one that Dr. Wadden, Dr. Leslie Womble and their colleagues conducted, using eDiets, which provides clients with low-calorie recipes and foods. They randomly assigned participants to use eDiets or a standard behavioral weight-loss manual. They also provided counseling and weigh-ins to all the participants. After a year, the eDiet participants had lost 1.1 percent of their weight while those using the manual had lost 4 percent. Susan Burke, vice president of nutrition services at eDiets, says the program has changed since 2001, when that study was done. "It's more personalized and flexible," she says, and clients who use the support programs and diet lose weight. Programs like Take Off Pounds Sensibly (TOPS) and Overeaters Anonymous are free or charge only nominal fees, but it is not clear how participants fare. Carol Trinastic, a spokeswoman for TOPS, said the organization collected data on weight loss. The most recent, from 2003, indicate that members lost 1,271,466 pounds or 5.9 pounds per person. But the modest and temporary weight losses with diet programs are not a surprise, Dr. Wadden said, because no one knows how to elicit permanent weight loss. "I don't blame the diet programs. They're fighting biology," Dr. Wadden said. "Even in the best of circumstances, people will regain a third of what they lost in one year and two-thirds in two years and they may be back to base line in five years." He added, "Weight loss is not for the fainthearted." Of course, some people do lose weight and keep it off, often succeeding after repeated attempts to diet, said Dr. Rena Wing, a professor of psychiatry at Brown and a co-founder of the National Weight Control Registry. To be part of the registry, people must lose 30 pounds or more, by any means, including surgery, and keep the weight off for at least a year. If they regain, they remain in the registry, Dr. Wing said. "Once you're in, you're in," she said. In 10 years, the registry has enrolled 4,700 people. Most gained back some weight, but very few gained back all they lost, Dr. Wing said. But there also are those who say they have tried and tried to reduce, only to regain the weight they so painfully lost. For many, weight loss is never really out of their minds. Often, the fatter the person, the greater the concern. "Your whole life is a diet when you're overweight," said Janet B. Forton, a Pennsylvania woman who finally had weight-loss surgery last year after struggling her entire life to lose weight. "You go to bed at night praying you make the right choices the next day." Why do so many people keep trying to lose weight when they so often gain it right back again? Dr. Peter Herman and Dr. Janet Polivy, psychologists at the University of Toronto, say that just the idea of dieting may give people a positive lift. "It turns out that simply declaring you are going on a diet makes you feel better," Dr. Herman said. "It seems to boost people's spirits. They feel they are empowering themselves and they are already imagining themselves as the new and better selves, taking control of their lives." Ms. McAfee has a different explanation. "It is so penalized to be fat in this society that it's an investment in your future not to be fat," she said. "It you're an ambitious person you'll do anything," and even if the lost weight is regained, "you'll do it again and again." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/health/nutrition/04fat.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 4 21:22:09 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 16:22:09 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say Message-ID: Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say NYT December 31, 2004 By ROBERT PEAR WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 - When the federal government assesses the long-term financial problems of Social Security, it assumes that increases in life expectancy will be slow and measured. But many population experts say they believe that Americans' life expectancy will increase rapidly in the 21st century, making the program's financial problems even worse. President Bush and Congress are preparing for a debate over the future of Social Security, whose solvency depends not only on factors including productivity, inflation and birth rates but also on how long beneficiaries will be living. Life expectancy at birth increased by 30 years in the last century, and many independent demographers, citing the promise of biomedical research and the experience of some other industrialized countries, predict significant increases in this century. The Social Security Administration foresees a much slower rise. "Life expectancy will make a very big difference in the fiscal viability of Social Security, but the agency's projections of longevity appear too conservative," said Prof. Samuel H. Preston of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the nation's leading demographers. Dr. Preston said the agency assumed that "past advances in life expectancy are unrepeatable, even though the medical research establishment is routinely producing important breakthroughs that reduce the incidence or fatality of a variety of diseases." Richard M. Suzman, associate director of the National Institute on Aging, a unit of the National Institutes of Health, said: "There is a long history of government actuaries and statisticians underestimating future gains in life expectancy. The United States is unfortunately well below the outer limits of life expectancy. Other countries are doing much better. That gives us an indication of the potential room for improvement." Tables published by the government's National Center for Health Statistics show that life expectancy at birth was 47.3 years in 1900, rose to 68.2 by 1950 and reached 77.3 in 2002. The latest annual report of the Social Security trustees projects that life expectancy will increase just six years in the next seven decades, to 83 in 2075. A separate set of projections, by the Census Bureau, shows more rapid growth. Social Security says male life expectancy at birth will be 81.2 years in 2075. The Census Bureau, using different methods and assumptions, says that level will be reached much earlier, in 2050. Likewise, Social Security says female life expectancy will reach 85 years by 2075, while the Census Bureau says it will exceed 86 in 2050. For the American population as a whole in the last century, most of the gains in life expectancy at birth occurred from 1900 to 1950. But most of the gains in life expectancy among people who had already reached age 65 were seen after 1950. Last year an expert panel advising the Social Security Administration found "an unprecedented reduction in certain forms of old-age mortality, especially cardiovascular disease, beginning in the late 1960's." The panel said Social Security was wrong to assume a slower decline in mortality rates among the elderly in the next 75 years. Rather, it said, the government should assume that mortality will continue to decline as it did from 1950 to 2000. Ronald D. Lee, a professor of demography and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, said: "I foresee death rates of the elderly in the United States continuing to decline at the same pace they have declined since 1950. In fact, there is evidence that the pace of decline in other developed countries has accelerated in recent decades." The Social Security Administration defends its assumptions. "There is a wide range of opinion among experts on this issue," said Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for the agency. "In the last few years, we've moved a bit closer to the position of other agencies and demographers." Some experts say other factors could ease the effects of longer life on Social Security's solvency. "The higher costs associated with longer life expectancy could be offset in several ways that do not involve a reduction of Social Security benefits," said John R. Wilmoth, another demographer at Berkeley. People who live longer could work longer, for instance. Or the size of the working-age population could increase because of higher birth rates or a larger number of immigrants. Further, some population experts foresee developments that could wind up buttressing the forecasts of the Social Security Administration. S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the era of large increases in life expectancy might be nearing an end, with the spread of obesity and the possible re-emergence of deadly infectious diseases. "There are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic engineering available today with the capacity to repeat the gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the 20th century" with antibiotics, vaccinations and improvements in sanitation, Dr. Olshansky said. Indeed, he said, without new measures on obesity and communicable diseases, "human life expectancy could decline in the 21st century." On the other hand, said James W. Vaupel, director of the program on population, policy and aging at Duke University, life expectancy in the United States is far from any natural or biological limits. "Experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is approaching a ceiling," Dr. Vaupel said. "These experts have repeatedly been proved wrong." At various times, different countries have had the highest reported at-birth life expectancy. But with "remarkable regularity" over the last 160 years, Dr. Vaupel said, life expectancy in the leading country has increased an average of three months a year, or 2.5 years a decade. David A. Wise, a Harvard professor who is director of the program on aging at the private, nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research, said: "Almost all demographers outside the government think that death rates will continue to fall faster than the decline incorporated in the projections of the Social Security Administration. Most think life expectancy will increase more rapidly than Social Security says. That's not good for the finances of Social Security." Nor do economists generally foresee a reversal of the trend toward early retirement. Though researchers have observed a significant decline in chronic disability among the elderly, most workers retire and begin drawing Social Security benefits before they reach 65. Labor unions and some politicians have resisted efforts to raise the eligibility age for full benefits. Such proposals, they say, penalize workers who have spent their lives in physically demanding jobs. Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, said, "Increases in life expectancy at 65 have been a major contributor to the rising cost of Social Security." Future increases could strain pension plans and individual retirement savings, as well as Social Security, she said. "The United States is the richest major country in the world in terms of per capita gross domestic product," Dr. Munnell said. "And life expectancy is clearly associated with income." She added, though, that "if you focus on life expectancy at age 65, the U.S. falls in the middle of the pack." One reason, she said, is that "the United States is not so rich relative to its peers if you look at the average income going to the lowest 40 percent of the population." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/politics/31benefit.html From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Jan 4 23:32:45 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 15:32:45 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Diet and Lose Weight? Scientists Say 'Prove It!' Message-ID: <01C4F272.A467DC00.shovland@mindspring.com> I came across this while trying to figure out which nutrients might jumpstart the production of the leutinizing hormone: http://www.np.edu.sg/~dept-bio/biochemistry/aab/topics/aab_lipid.htm The punchline is about 9-10 pages down: reduced fat, reduced carbs, normal protein, exercise. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 1:21 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Diet and Lose Weight? Scientists Say 'Prove It!' Diet and Lose Weight? Scientists Say 'Prove It!' New York Times, 5.1.4 By GINA KOLATA With obesity much on Americans' minds, an entire industry has sprung up selling diets and diet books, meal replacements and exercise programs, nutritional supplements and Internet-based coaching, all in an effort to help people lose weight. But a new study, published today, finds little evidence that commercial weight-loss programs are effective in helping people drop excess pounds. Almost no rigorous studies of the programs have been carried out, the researchers report. And federal officials say that companies are often unwilling to conduct such studies, arguing that they are in the business of treatment, not research. "In general, the industry has always been opposed to making outcomes disclosures," said Richard Cleland, the assistant director for advertising practices at the Federal Trade Commission. "They have always given various rationales," Mr. Cleland said, from "'It's too expensive,' to even arguing that part of this is selling the dream, and if you know what the truth is, it's harder to sell the dream." The study, published in today's issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, found that with the exception of Weight Watchers, no commercial program had published reliable data from randomized trials showing that people who participated weighed less a few months later than people who did not participate. And even in the Weight Watchers study, the researchers said, the results were modest, with a 5 percent weight loss after three to six months of dieting, much of it regained. Advertisements for weight loss centers often make it seem that success is guaranteed for anyone who really wants it. They feature smiling, thin, healthy people - results, the advertisements imply, of simply following the program. Scientists, however, want something more. They would like to see carefully controlled studies that follow program participants over a couple of years and compare their success with that of nonparticipants. But that sort of study is almost never done, said Dr. Thomas Wadden, director of the weight and eating disorders program at the University of Pennsylvania and the lead author of the new study. It is not as if no one has asked the companies to conduct such research, he and others said. About a decade ago, Dr. Wadden, Mr. Cleland and others met with commercial weight loss companies at the Federal Trade Commission to discuss getting some solid data on the programs' effectiveness. "We tried to come up with a set of voluntary guidelines with the idea that these would be disclosures that weight loss centers would make prior to consumers' signing on the bottom line," said Mr. Cleland. "At the end of the day we agreed to disagree on the issue of outcomes disclosure. I was convinced that it could be done, but it was not something the industry was going to voluntarily do." The F.T.C., he said, could not force companies to do the studies. Lynn McAfee, the director of medical advocacy for the Council on Size and Weight Discrimination, was aghast at the conclusion. "I don't understand how you can have a product you never evaluate for effectiveness," Ms. McAfee said. "It was a slap in the face to all people of size." Still, patients and their doctors need information, Dr. Wadden said. So he and his colleague, Dr. Adam Gilden Tsai, collected what information they could on the prices, the methods, and the success of nine commercial weight loss programs, like Jenny Craig, eDiets and Optifast and self-help programs, like Overeaters Anonymous. The investigators looked at the data presented on company Web sites, called the companies and searched medical journals for published papers. In their review, they included studies published from 1966 to 2003, finding 108 that assessed commercial programs. Of those, only 10 met their criteria. For example, the studies had to have lasted at least 12 weeks and to have assessed weight-loss outcomes after a year. Dr. Wadden said that even in that handful of studies, hardly any of them reported data for everyone who enrolled in the weight-loss programs. Most included only people who had completed the programs, making the outcomes "definitely best-case scenarios," he said. The costs of commercial weight-loss programs can vary from $65 for three months on eDiets to $167 for the same time in Weight Watchers to more than $2,000 for a medically supervised low-calorie diet. "Given the lack of good comparative data, it may make sense to try the cheaper alternatives first," Mr. Cleland said. Other experts said that patients might want to forgo the programs altogether. "Doctors could do as well as these programs" in helping people lose weight, said Dr. George Blackburn, an obesity specialist at Harvard Medical School, simply by counseling people to diet and exercise. He added, "Doctors can, ought to and are qualified to get involved." The Weight Watchers study, published in 2003 in The Journal of the American Medical Association, involved 423 people who weighed an average of 205 pounds. Half the participants were randomly assigned to attend Weight Watchers meetings and follow the program. The other half tried to lose weight on their own. After two years, the participants in Weight Watchers had lost an average of 6.4 pounds. The other group had lost no weight. Neither group showed a change in blood pressure, cholesterol, blood glucose or insulin. "We found no such evaluations of Jenny Craig or L.A. Weight Loss," Dr. Wadden and Dr. Tsai wrote. Kent Coykendall, a vice president of strategic planning and business development for Jenny Craig, said the company had begun a randomized study of 70 people on the program. But in the meantime, he said, Jenny Craig has the records of tens of thousands of participants attesting to the fact that they lost weight - "a plethora of real data on real people in the real world under real circumstances," Mr. Coykendall said. In their study, Dr. Wadden and Dr. Tsai also looked at programs, like Optifast, Health Management Resources and Medifast, that provide participants with medical supervision and a low-calorie diet - 800 to to 1500 calories per day. Patients who stay with these programs, the companies say, can lose as much as 15 to 25 percent of their weight in three to six months. But the researchers found no randomized controlled trials of their effectiveness. And the studies that were conducted independently of the companies showed that people on the low-calorie diets weighed about the same a year later as people on conventional diets. In addition, the companies' own reports found high dropout rates, with nearly half the participants in an Optifast study dropping out in 26 weeks. But Dr. Larry Stifler, the founder and president of Health Management Resources, objected. "Their criteria - one of the things they always like to see - is randomized controlled trials," Dr. Stifler said. But such studies, he said, are not feasible when a company is offering a treatment. "People can't be told they can either join the program or be in a control group. That's not what this treatment is about," he said. Dr. Stifler said his company had data showing that patients dropped large amounts of weight if they stuck with the diet. When the company assessed patients three years later, some had still kept the weight off. Much of that data has not been published, Dr. Stifler said, but it has been presented at professional meetings. Robert Hallock, vice president and general counsel for Medifast, also said his company had unpublished but promising data. The company keeps track of thousands of patients, he said, and "everyone knows that low-calorie diets and structured programs get huge amounts of weight loss." As for Internet-based weight loss programs, the only study Dr. Wadden and Dr. Tsai found was one that Dr. Wadden, Dr. Leslie Womble and their colleagues conducted, using eDiets, which provides clients with low-calorie recipes and foods. They randomly assigned participants to use eDiets or a standard behavioral weight-loss manual. They also provided counseling and weigh-ins to all the participants. After a year, the eDiet participants had lost 1.1 percent of their weight while those using the manual had lost 4 percent. Susan Burke, vice president of nutrition services at eDiets, says the program has changed since 2001, when that study was done. "It's more personalized and flexible," she says, and clients who use the support programs and diet lose weight. Programs like Take Off Pounds Sensibly (TOPS) and Overeaters Anonymous are free or charge only nominal fees, but it is not clear how participants fare. Carol Trinastic, a spokeswoman for TOPS, said the organization collected data on weight loss. The most recent, from 2003, indicate that members lost 1,271,466 pounds or 5.9 pounds per person. But the modest and temporary weight losses with diet programs are not a surprise, Dr. Wadden said, because no one knows how to elicit permanent weight loss. "I don't blame the diet programs. They're fighting biology," Dr. Wadden said. "Even in the best of circumstances, people will regain a third of what they lost in one year and two-thirds in two years and they may be back to base line in five years." He added, "Weight loss is not for the fainthearted." Of course, some people do lose weight and keep it off, often succeeding after repeated attempts to diet, said Dr. Rena Wing, a professor of psychiatry at Brown and a co-founder of the National Weight Control Registry. To be part of the registry, people must lose 30 pounds or more, by any means, including surgery, and keep the weight off for at least a year. If they regain, they remain in the registry, Dr. Wing said. "Once you're in, you're in," she said. In 10 years, the registry has enrolled 4,700 people. Most gained back some weight, but very few gained back all they lost, Dr. Wing said. But there also are those who say they have tried and tried to reduce, only to regain the weight they so painfully lost. For many, weight loss is never really out of their minds. Often, the fatter the person, the greater the concern. "Your whole life is a diet when you're overweight," said Janet B. Forton, a Pennsylvania woman who finally had weight-loss surgery last year after struggling her entire life to lose weight. "You go to bed at night praying you make the right choices the next day." Why do so many people keep trying to lose weight when they so often gain it right back again? Dr. Peter Herman and Dr. Janet Polivy, psychologists at the University of Toronto, say that just the idea of dieting may give people a positive lift. "It turns out that simply declaring you are going on a diet makes you feel better," Dr. Herman said. "It seems to boost people's spirits. They feel they are empowering themselves and they are already imagining themselves as the new and better selves, taking control of their lives." Ms. McAfee has a different explanation. "It is so penalized to be fat in this society that it's an investment in your future not to be fat," she said. "It you're an ambitious person you'll do anything," and even if the lost weight is regained, "you'll do it again and again." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/health/nutrition/04fat.html _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Jan 4 23:33:55 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 15:33:55 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say Message-ID: <01C4F272.CD4FD050.shovland@mindspring.com> Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 1:22 PM To: World Transhumanist Ass.; paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say NYT December 31, 2004 By ROBERT PEAR WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 - When the federal government assesses the long-term financial problems of Social Security, it assumes that increases in life expectancy will be slow and measured. But many population experts say they believe that Americans' life expectancy will increase rapidly in the 21st century, making the program's financial problems even worse. President Bush and Congress are preparing for a debate over the future of Social Security, whose solvency depends not only on factors including productivity, inflation and birth rates but also on how long beneficiaries will be living. Life expectancy at birth increased by 30 years in the last century, and many independent demographers, citing the promise of biomedical research and the experience of some other industrialized countries, predict significant increases in this century. The Social Security Administration foresees a much slower rise. "Life expectancy will make a very big difference in the fiscal viability of Social Security, but the agency's projections of longevity appear too conservative," said Prof. Samuel H. Preston of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the nation's leading demographers. Dr. Preston said the agency assumed that "past advances in life expectancy are unrepeatable, even though the medical research establishment is routinely producing important breakthroughs that reduce the incidence or fatality of a variety of diseases." Richard M. Suzman, associate director of the National Institute on Aging, a unit of the National Institutes of Health, said: "There is a long history of government actuaries and statisticians underestimating future gains in life expectancy. The United States is unfortunately well below the outer limits of life expectancy. Other countries are doing much better. That gives us an indication of the potential room for improvement." Tables published by the government's National Center for Health Statistics show that life expectancy at birth was 47.3 years in 1900, rose to 68.2 by 1950 and reached 77.3 in 2002. The latest annual report of the Social Security trustees projects that life expectancy will increase just six years in the next seven decades, to 83 in 2075. A separate set of projections, by the Census Bureau, shows more rapid growth. Social Security says male life expectancy at birth will be 81.2 years in 2075. The Census Bureau, using different methods and assumptions, says that level will be reached much earlier, in 2050. Likewise, Social Security says female life expectancy will reach 85 years by 2075, while the Census Bureau says it will exceed 86 in 2050. For the American population as a whole in the last century, most of the gains in life expectancy at birth occurred from 1900 to 1950. But most of the gains in life expectancy among people who had already reached age 65 were seen after 1950. Last year an expert panel advising the Social Security Administration found "an unprecedented reduction in certain forms of old-age mortality, especially cardiovascular disease, beginning in the late 1960's." The panel said Social Security was wrong to assume a slower decline in mortality rates among the elderly in the next 75 years. Rather, it said, the government should assume that mortality will continue to decline as it did from 1950 to 2000. Ronald D. Lee, a professor of demography and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, said: "I foresee death rates of the elderly in the United States continuing to decline at the same pace they have declined since 1950. In fact, there is evidence that the pace of decline in other developed countries has accelerated in recent decades." The Social Security Administration defends its assumptions. "There is a wide range of opinion among experts on this issue," said Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for the agency. "In the last few years, we've moved a bit closer to the position of other agencies and demographers." Some experts say other factors could ease the effects of longer life on Social Security's solvency. "The higher costs associated with longer life expectancy could be offset in several ways that do not involve a reduction of Social Security benefits," said John R. Wilmoth, another demographer at Berkeley. People who live longer could work longer, for instance. Or the size of the working-age population could increase because of higher birth rates or a larger number of immigrants. Further, some population experts foresee developments that could wind up buttressing the forecasts of the Social Security Administration. S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the era of large increases in life expectancy might be nearing an end, with the spread of obesity and the possible re-emergence of deadly infectious diseases. "There are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic engineering available today with the capacity to repeat the gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the 20th century" with antibiotics, vaccinations and improvements in sanitation, Dr. Olshansky said. Indeed, he said, without new measures on obesity and communicable diseases, "human life expectancy could decline in the 21st century." On the other hand, said James W. Vaupel, director of the program on population, policy and aging at Duke University, life expectancy in the United States is far from any natural or biological limits. "Experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is approaching a ceiling," Dr. Vaupel said. "These experts have repeatedly been proved wrong." At various times, different countries have had the highest reported at-birth life expectancy. But with "remarkable regularity" over the last 160 years, Dr. Vaupel said, life expectancy in the leading country has increased an average of three months a year, or 2.5 years a decade. David A. Wise, a Harvard professor who is director of the program on aging at the private, nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research, said: "Almost all demographers outside the government think that death rates will continue to fall faster than the decline incorporated in the projections of the Social Security Administration. Most think life expectancy will increase more rapidly than Social Security says. That's not good for the finances of Social Security." Nor do economists generally foresee a reversal of the trend toward early retirement. Though researchers have observed a significant decline in chronic disability among the elderly, most workers retire and begin drawing Social Security benefits before they reach 65. Labor unions and some politicians have resisted efforts to raise the eligibility age for full benefits. Such proposals, they say, penalize workers who have spent their lives in physically demanding jobs. Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, said, "Increases in life expectancy at 65 have been a major contributor to the rising cost of Social Security." Future increases could strain pension plans and individual retirement savings, as well as Social Security, she said. "The United States is the richest major country in the world in terms of per capita gross domestic product," Dr. Munnell said. "And life expectancy is clearly associated with income." She added, though, that "if you focus on life expectancy at age 65, the U.S. falls in the middle of the pack." One reason, she said, is that "the United States is not so rich relative to its peers if you look at the average income going to the lowest 40 percent of the population." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/politics/31benefit.html _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From waluk at earthlink.net Wed Jan 5 02:13:33 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Geraldine Reinhardt) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 18:13:33 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say References: <01C4F272.CD4FD050.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <034501c4f2cc$2d052aa0$7506f604@S0027397558> Today on my way home I as usual took my designated exit off the freeway. There parked alongside the shoulder of road was an elderly gentleman in a fancy black sedan. Usually I never stop but this person looked a bit bewildered.....actually confused, so I braked and asked if he needed help. Turns out that he was on his way to a medical appointment, an eye doctor to be exact, and he needed to know which direction for Pasteur Drive. He then said he was from San Francisco, a doctor himself, and had become very confused trying to decipher his secretary's directions. He also mentioned he was recently widowed and was seeing his wife's ophthalmologist because she had spoken so highly of his ability with glaucoma procedures. Now I knew very well where Pasteur Drive was (it was two exits beyond my apartment turn off) but I wasn't certain if the road was clearly marked. I then asked the gentleman if he would like to follow me and I'd lead him to his turn off. How happy he became! I then asked the name of the ophthalmologist he had his appointment with. "Dr. Rubin.....only I know I'll not make it in time". "Amazing", I replied. "He's the eye doctor for both my husband and me"! "But.... I don't know if I'm continuing....he alarmed me during my last appointment when he was talking about doing corrective eye surgery". "How old do you suppose Dr. Rubin is", asked the stranger. Not wishing to age Dr. Rubin more than his years, I replied: "Maybe in his late 50's or somewhere in his 60's". I knew Rubin had to be hitting retirement age. "Oh" replied the doctor from San Francisco, "I performed capillary surgery until I was 73 and then decided I needed to give it up". "Yet my hands didn't falter and I was always on top of each case." As I drove to Pasteur Drive I thought about comparisons between repairing eye stuff and capillary surgery....were they similar? For me, the person who needs to operate on my eyes should be young, bright and brilliant. Yet why should eyes be that different from capillaries? Could be that we "see with our eyes". What if we "looked" with our hearts? Either way, when is a doctor too old to assume his role of physician? I'd say that if many of us can continue with our calling, doctors need to do the same. But....I'd like my eye-surgeon to retain a younger partner. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Independent Scholar http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 3:33 PM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, > Critics Say > NYT December 31, 2004 > By ROBERT PEAR --snip-- From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Wed Jan 5 14:04:10 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh (from webmail)) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 09:04:10 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say In-Reply-To: <01C4F272.CD4FD050.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4F272.CD4FD050.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <1104933850.41dbf3daaae79@rauh.net> Quoting Steve Hovland : > > Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) And live longer. ;-) Christian > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 1:22 PM > To: World Transhumanist Ass.; paleopsych at paleopsych.org > Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life > Spans, Critics Say > > Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say > NYT December 31, 2004 > By ROBERT PEAR > > WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 - When the federal government assesses > the long-term financial problems of Social Security, it > assumes that increases in life expectancy will be slow and > measured. But many population experts say they believe that > Americans' life expectancy will increase rapidly in the > 21st century, making the program's financial problems even > worse. > > President Bush and Congress are preparing for a debate over > the future of Social Security, whose solvency depends not > only on factors including productivity, inflation and birth > rates but also on how long beneficiaries will be living. > > Life expectancy at birth increased by 30 years in the last > century, and many independent demographers, citing the > promise of biomedical research and the experience of some > other industrialized countries, predict significant > increases in this century. The Social Security > Administration foresees a much slower rise. > > "Life expectancy will make a very big difference in the > fiscal viability of Social Security, but the agency's > projections of longevity appear too conservative," said > Prof. Samuel H. Preston of the University of Pennsylvania, > one of the nation's leading demographers. > > Dr. Preston said the agency assumed that "past advances in > life expectancy are unrepeatable, even though the medical > research establishment is routinely producing important > breakthroughs that reduce the incidence or fatality of a > variety of diseases." > > Richard M. Suzman, associate director of the National > Institute on Aging, a unit of the National Institutes of > Health, said: "There is a long history of government > actuaries and statisticians underestimating future gains in > life expectancy. The United States is unfortunately well > below the outer limits of life expectancy. Other countries > are doing much better. That gives us an indication of the > potential room for improvement." > > Tables published by the government's National Center for > Health Statistics show that life expectancy at birth was > 47.3 years in 1900, rose to 68.2 by 1950 and reached 77.3 > in 2002. The latest annual report of the Social Security > trustees projects that life expectancy will increase just > six years in the next seven decades, to 83 in 2075. A > separate set of projections, by the Census Bureau, shows > more rapid growth. > > Social Security says male life expectancy at birth will be > 81.2 years in 2075. The Census Bureau, using different > methods and assumptions, says that level will be reached > much earlier, in 2050. > > Likewise, Social Security says female life expectancy will > reach 85 years by 2075, while the Census Bureau says it > will exceed 86 in 2050. > > For the American population as a whole in the last century, > most of the gains in life expectancy at birth occurred from > 1900 to 1950. But most of the gains in life expectancy > among people who had already reached age 65 were seen after > 1950. > > Last year an expert panel advising the Social Security > Administration found "an unprecedented reduction in certain > forms of old-age mortality, especially cardiovascular > disease, beginning in the late 1960's." > > The panel said Social Security was wrong to assume a slower > decline in mortality rates among the elderly in the next 75 > years. Rather, it said, the government should assume that > mortality will continue to decline as it did from 1950 to > 2000. > > Ronald D. Lee, a professor of demography and economics at > the University of California, Berkeley, said: "I foresee > death rates of the elderly in the United States continuing > to decline at the same pace they have declined since 1950. > In fact, there is evidence that the pace of decline in > other developed countries has accelerated in recent > decades." > > The Social Security Administration defends its assumptions. > > > "There is a wide range of opinion among experts on this > issue," said Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for the agency. "In > the last few years, we've moved a bit closer to the > position of other agencies and demographers." > > Some experts say other factors could ease the effects of > longer life on Social Security's solvency. > > "The higher costs associated with longer life expectancy > could be offset in several ways that do not involve a > reduction of Social Security benefits," said John R. > Wilmoth, another demographer at Berkeley. > > People who live longer could work longer, for instance. Or > the size of the working-age population could increase > because of higher birth rates or a larger number of > immigrants. > > Further, some population experts foresee developments that > could wind up buttressing the forecasts of the Social > Security Administration. S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of > epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of > Illinois at Chicago, said the era of large increases in > life expectancy might be nearing an end, with the spread of > obesity and the possible re-emergence of deadly infectious > diseases. > > "There are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, > vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic > engineering available today with the capacity to repeat the > gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the 20th > century" with antibiotics, vaccinations and improvements in > sanitation, Dr. Olshansky said. > > Indeed, he said, without new measures on obesity and > communicable diseases, "human life expectancy could decline > in the 21st century." > > On the other hand, said James W. Vaupel, director of the > program on population, policy and aging at Duke University, > life expectancy in the United States is far from any > natural or biological limits. > > "Experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is > approaching a ceiling," Dr. Vaupel said. "These experts > have repeatedly been proved wrong." > > At various times, different countries have had the highest > reported at-birth life expectancy. But with "remarkable > regularity" over the last 160 years, Dr. Vaupel said, life > expectancy in the leading country has increased an average > of three months a year, or 2.5 years a decade. > > David A. Wise, a Harvard professor who is director of the > program on aging at the private, nonpartisan National > Bureau of Economic Research, said: "Almost all demographers > outside the government think that death rates will continue > to fall faster than the decline incorporated in the > projections of the Social Security Administration. Most > think life expectancy will increase more rapidly than > Social Security says. That's not good for the finances of > Social Security." > > Nor do economists generally foresee a reversal of the trend > toward early retirement. Though researchers have observed a > significant decline in chronic disability among the > elderly, most workers retire and begin drawing Social > Security benefits before they reach 65. > > Labor unions and some politicians have resisted efforts to > raise the eligibility age for full benefits. Such > proposals, they say, penalize workers who have spent their > lives in physically demanding jobs. > > Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement > Research at Boston College, said, "Increases in life > expectancy at 65 have been a major contributor to the > rising cost of Social Security." Future increases could > strain pension plans and individual retirement savings, as > well as Social Security, she said. > > "The United States is the richest major country in the > world in terms of per capita gross domestic product," Dr. > Munnell said. "And life expectancy is clearly associated > with income." > > She added, though, that "if you focus on life expectancy at > age 65, the U.S. falls in the middle of the pack." > > One reason, she said, is that "the United States is not so > rich relative to its peers if you look at the average > income going to the lowest 40 percent of the population." > > http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/politics/31benefit.html > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From ross.buck at uconn.edu Wed Jan 5 17:11:57 2005 From: ross.buck at uconn.edu (Ross Buck) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 12:11:57 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say In-Reply-To: <034501c4f2cc$2d052aa0$7506f604@S0027397558> Message-ID: <200501051725.j05HPQ008712@tick.javien.com> I understand that Dewey did his best work in his 80's, but of course his job did not depend all that much on hand-eye coordination! Cheers, Ross Ross Buck, Ph. D. Professor of Communication Sciences and Psychology Communication Sciences U-1085 University of Connecticut Storrs, CT 06269-1085 860-486-4494 fax 860-486-5422 buck at uconnvm.uconn.edu http://www.coms.uconn.edu/docs/people/faculty/rbuck/index.htm "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." -- Blaise Pascal -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org] On Behalf Of Geraldine Reinhardt Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 9:14 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say Today on my way home I as usual took my designated exit off the freeway. There parked alongside the shoulder of road was an elderly gentleman in a fancy black sedan. Usually I never stop but this person looked a bit bewildered.....actually confused, so I braked and asked if he needed help. Turns out that he was on his way to a medical appointment, an eye doctor to be exact, and he needed to know which direction for Pasteur Drive. He then said he was from San Francisco, a doctor himself, and had become very confused trying to decipher his secretary's directions. He also mentioned he was recently widowed and was seeing his wife's ophthalmologist because she had spoken so highly of his ability with glaucoma procedures. Now I knew very well where Pasteur Drive was (it was two exits beyond my apartment turn off) but I wasn't certain if the road was clearly marked. I then asked the gentleman if he would like to follow me and I'd lead him to his turn off. How happy he became! I then asked the name of the ophthalmologist he had his appointment with. "Dr. Rubin.....only I know I'll not make it in time". "Amazing", I replied. "He's the eye doctor for both my husband and me"! "But.... I don't know if I'm continuing....he alarmed me during my last appointment when he was talking about doing corrective eye surgery". "How old do you suppose Dr. Rubin is", asked the stranger. Not wishing to age Dr. Rubin more than his years, I replied: "Maybe in his late 50's or somewhere in his 60's". I knew Rubin had to be hitting retirement age. "Oh" replied the doctor from San Francisco, "I performed capillary surgery until I was 73 and then decided I needed to give it up". "Yet my hands didn't falter and I was always on top of each case." As I drove to Pasteur Drive I thought about comparisons between repairing eye stuff and capillary surgery....were they similar? For me, the person who needs to operate on my eyes should be young, bright and brilliant. Yet why should eyes be that different from capillaries? Could be that we "see with our eyes". What if we "looked" with our hearts? Either way, when is a doctor too old to assume his role of physician? I'd say that if many of us can continue with our calling, doctors need to do the same. But....I'd like my eye-surgeon to retain a younger partner. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Independent Scholar http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 3:33 PM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, > Critics Say > NYT December 31, 2004 > By ROBERT PEAR --snip-- _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 5 18:24:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 13:24:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Fewer New York Schools Are Cited for Poor Performance Message-ID: Fewer New York Schools Are Cited for Poor Performance New York Times, 5.1.5 By ELISSA GOOTMAN [So poor performing schools do get closed! Though not many.] Fewer New York City schools are in danger of being shut down by the state for poor performance this year than in previous years, state and city education officials announced yesterday. The number of city schools on the state list, known as schools under registration review, fell to 35 from 46 last year and from an all-time high of 104 six years ago. The state started compiling the list in 1989. Statewide, there are 52 schools on the list. Sixteen city schools were taken off the list after showing significant improvement on last year's standardized test scores, while seven city schools were added. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the newly truncated list proved that the changes he has imposed in the past two years are working. They include giving schools literacy and math coaches and parent coordinators and instituting a uniform curriculum in elementary schools. "Today's announcement is another strong indication that we're turning the corner," Mr. Bloomberg said. "We all know that there is a lot of work still to be done to create the public school system that our children deserve, and we know success won't happen overnight. Expecting that is folly." But others were more circumspect, noting that even fewer schools - six - were added to the list two years ago, before the mayor's changes were imposed. Between 16 and 19 schools have been removed from the list for each of the last eight years. "I would say, O.K., it's a starting point, but golly you're a long way from the finish line," said Merryl H. Tisch, a member of the state Board of Regents from New York City. "If you were a parent of a kid in one of those SURR schools, how would you feel?" Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, noted that many of the schools that were removed from the list this year and last had been part of the Chancellor's District, a collection of troubled schools that, under the two previous chancellors, received special attention like smaller classes and extra teacher training. Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein dismantled the special grouping. In recent years, the list of schools under registration review has often been confused with another list of failing schools: the Schools in Need of Improvement. That list, which is required under the federal No Child Left Behind law, includes many more schools (328 in New York City this year) because it uses a higher threshold for success and judges schools based on both their overall performance and the performance of various sub-groups, like special education students. One of the city schools identified as failing yesterday was Far Rockaway High School in Queens, which on Monday was the scene of a triumphant news conference at which the mayor and the chancellor proclaimed victory in their efforts to crack down on disorder there and at other dangerous city schools. Chancellor Klein said the apparent contradiction could be easily explained. "One of the reasons it's on the SURR list is because they lost control of the school," he said. "Instead of focusing on teaching and learning, they were focusing on disruptive behaviors." Mr. Klein said that in the next few weeks, city education officials would decide whether to close any schools based on the new figures. Since the 1997-1998 school year, 38 city schools under registration review have been or are being closed. Elsewhere in the state, four schools were added to the list: Roosevelt High School in Yonkers, Stanton Academy and Public School 37 in Buffalo, and Hempstead High School on Long Island. Other city schools added to the list were the High School of Graphic Communication Arts in Manhattan; and, in the Bronx, P.S. 156, Junior High School 151, P.S. 230, P.S. 396 and the Monroe Academy for Visual Arts and Design. Edna Straus, the principal of Middle School 88 in Brooklyn, where the mayor held a news conference yesterday, said she got her school off the list by "constantly looking at data" on student performance and recruiting certified math teachers through the Teaching Fellows program, which enables people in other professions to become teachers. She said she was frustrated to still be labeled a School in Need of Improvement but thrilled to be removed from the most dire of failing schools lists. "When parents have an image of a SURR school, they have an image of a school that's in chaos," she said. "That doesn't exist here." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/05/education/05school.html From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 5 18:25:17 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 13:25:17 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: F. K. Freas, Who Drew the Devilish Face of Mad Magazine, Dies at 82 Message-ID: F. K. Freas, Who Drew the Devilish Face of Mad Magazine, Dies at 82 New York Times, 5.1.5 By DOUGLAS MARTIN Frank Kelly Freas, an artist and illustrator whose work included luminous images of amiable aliens beloved by science-fiction fans, the jug-eared visage of Alfred E. Neuman for Mad magazine and the crew shoulder patch for Skylab I astronauts, died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 82. His wife, Laura Brodian Freas, confirmed his death in an interview with The Associated Press. Mr. Freas (pronounced Freeze) was best known for the illustrations in more than 300 magazines and books that won him 11 Hugo awards, presented by the World Science Fiction Society and considered among the highest honors for a science-fiction illustrator. His whimsical, highly personalized style was characterized by vibrant colors and a sort of cosmic haze well suited for depicting bejeweled alien princesses. Wrinkles and other details added realism. Mr. Freas did not invent Alfred E. Neuman, the gap-toothed champion of adolescent rebellion whose motto was "What, me worry?" and who was given to making pronouncements like "A teacher is someone who talks in our sleep." But he told The Virginian-Pilot in 2001 that his illustrations gave "Alfie" his personality. Mad's freckled mascot was created by Norman Mingo and first appeared in a Mad Reader paperback in December 1954. He next appeared on the cover of Mad in March 1955. Mr. Freas started at Mad in February 1957 and by July 1958 was the magazine's new cover artist. He painted most of its covers until October 1962. Among his more memorable works was a 1960 painting of a green-tinged Neuman announcing, "This magazine is revolting." His "Great Moments in Medicine" illustration showed a recumbent patient and surrounding family members shocked when presented with a doctor's bill. A barrage of enraged letters from doctors followed. One pointed out that one of the doctor's instruments was a gauge used in aircraft manufacture, a perhaps understandable slip on the part of a science-fiction writer who once spent a week in a nuclear submarine in pursuit of verisimilitude. Other works by Mr. Freas ranged from six posters for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution, to portraits of 400 saints for the Franciscans, to classic miniature paintings done in a 16th-century technique. His picture of a werewolf appeared in the movie "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban." What became one of his most famous works showed a giant robot holding a dead man in his hand. It first appeared on the cover of the October 1953 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine. Years later, two members of the rock group Queen asked Mr. Freas to reprise the image with band members in the robot's hand. In 1977 it appeared on the cover of Queen's album "News of the World," which contains the ubiquitous tune "We Will Rock You." Frank Kelly Freas, the son of two photographers, was born in Hornell, N.Y., on Aug. 27, 1922, and was raised in Canada. He was hooked on science fiction by the time he was 10. He flirted with medicine and engineering as possible occupations, but drifted toward art and attended classes at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. During World War II, he painted pulchritudinous women on the noses of bombers. An early job was painting internal organs for anatomy textbooks. His picture of a satyr on the cover of the November 1950 Weird Tales began 50 years of professional illustrating. His work appeared in magazines like Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and illustrated articles by writers like Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. In an interview with Contemporary Authors, Mr. Freas said he regarded himself as an illustrator rather than an artist. "I prefer storytelling pictures and picture-generating stories," he said. The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction called him "the most popular illustrator in the history of science fiction." Mr. Freas both wrote and illustrated several books, including "Frank Kelly Freas: The Art of Science Fiction" (Donning, 1977) and "Frank Kelly Freas: A Separate Star" (Greenswamp, 1985). Mr. Freas was married to the former Pauline H. Bussard from 1952 until her death in 1987. In addition to Laura, his wife, he is survived by his daughter, Jacqueline; his son, Jeremy; and six grandsons. His experience with Mad ended when Mr. Freas was turned down for a raise. He was also a little tired of painting the same grinning face. "Alfred E. Neuman was making me stale," he said in an interview in "The Mad World of William M. Gaines" by Frank Jacobs (Bantam, 1972). "I found it difficult to shift my artistic gears from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/05/arts/design/05freas.html From waluk at earthlink.net Wed Jan 5 21:14:26 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Geraldine Reinhardt) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 13:14:26 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say References: <01C4F2EA.AE5D84D0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <000201c4f36b$e1bc97e0$1503f604@S0027397558> Being up to date is important not only in medicine but in most jobs. The person who refuses to remain current is readying herself for the retirement pile. A twinge of gray or lots of it shouldn't be a determining factor but for surgical procedures, be it eye or capillary, I'd prefer someone with a steady hand. Gerry http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'Geraldine Reinhardt'" Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 9:14 PM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > Personally, I would prefer someone with a twinge > of gray who is up to date on procedures :-) > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Geraldine Reinhardt [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] > Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 6:14 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Cc: shovland at mindspring.com > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > > Today on my way home I as usual took my designated > exit > off the freeway. There parked alongside the shoulder > of road was an elderly gentleman in a fancy black > sedan. Usually I never stop but this person looked a > bit bewildered.....actually confused, so I braked and > asked if he needed help. > > Turns out that he was on his way to a medical > appointment, an eye doctor to be exact, and he needed > to know which direction for Pasteur Drive. He then > said he was from San Francisco, a doctor himself, > and > had become very confused trying to decipher his > secretary's directions. He also mentioned he was > recently widowed and was seeing his wife's > ophthalmologist because she had spoken so highly of > his > ability with glaucoma procedures. > > Now I knew very well where Pasteur Drive was (it was > two exits beyond my apartment turn off) but I wasn't > certain if the road was clearly marked. I then asked > the gentleman if he would like to follow me and I'd > lead him to his turn off. How happy he became! I > then > asked the name of the ophthalmologist he had his > appointment with. "Dr. Rubin.....only I know I'll not > make it in time". > > "Amazing", I replied. "He's the eye doctor for both > my husband and me"! "But.... I don't know if I'm > continuing....he alarmed me during my last > appointment > when he was talking about doing corrective eye > surgery". > > "How old do you suppose Dr. Rubin is", asked the > stranger. > > Not wishing to age Dr. Rubin more than his years, I > replied: "Maybe in his late 50's or somewhere in his > 60's". I knew Rubin had to be hitting retirement > age. > > "Oh" replied the doctor from San Francisco, "I > performed capillary surgery until I was 73 and then > decided I needed to give it up". "Yet my hands > didn't > falter and I was always on top of each case." > > As I drove to Pasteur Drive I thought about > comparisons > between repairing eye stuff and capillary > surgery....were they similar? For me, the person who > needs to operate on my eyes should be young, bright > and > brilliant. Yet why should eyes be that different > from > capillaries? > > Could be that we "see with our eyes". What if we > "looked" with our hearts? > > Either way, when is a doctor too old to assume his > role > of physician? I'd say that if many of us can > continue > with our calling, doctors need to do the same. > But....I'd like my eye-surgeon to retain a younger > partner. > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > Independent Scholar > http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Steve Hovland" > To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" > > Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 3:33 PM > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > > >> Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, >> Critics Say >> NYT December 31, 2004 >> By ROBERT PEAR > > --snip-- > > > From waluk at earthlink.net Wed Jan 5 21:22:37 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Geraldine Reinhardt) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 13:22:37 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say References: <01C4F2EA.AE5D84D0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <000d01c4f36c$af4c5790$1503f604@S0027397558> The worst thing a medical person or any professional can do is slack on keeping up to date. A twinge of gray or lots of it should not be a determining factor. Yet when it comes to either eye or capillary surgery, I need someone with a steady hand. Gerry Reinhart-Waller http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'Geraldine Reinhardt'" Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 9:14 PM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > Personally, I would prefer someone with a twinge > of gray who is up to date on procedures :-) > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Geraldine Reinhardt [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] > Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 6:14 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Cc: shovland at mindspring.com > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > > Today on my way home I as usual took my designated > exit > off the freeway. There parked alongside the shoulder > of road was an elderly gentleman in a fancy black > sedan. Usually I never stop but this person looked a > bit bewildered.....actually confused, so I braked and > asked if he needed help. > > Turns out that he was on his way to a medical > appointment, an eye doctor to be exact, and he needed > to know which direction for Pasteur Drive. He then > said he was from San Francisco, a doctor himself, > and > had become very confused trying to decipher his > secretary's directions. He also mentioned he was > recently widowed and was seeing his wife's > ophthalmologist because she had spoken so highly of > his > ability with glaucoma procedures. > > Now I knew very well where Pasteur Drive was (it was > two exits beyond my apartment turn off) but I wasn't > certain if the road was clearly marked. I then asked > the gentleman if he would like to follow me and I'd > lead him to his turn off. How happy he became! I > then > asked the name of the ophthalmologist he had his > appointment with. "Dr. Rubin.....only I know I'll not > make it in time". > > "Amazing", I replied. "He's the eye doctor for both > my husband and me"! "But.... I don't know if I'm > continuing....he alarmed me during my last > appointment > when he was talking about doing corrective eye > surgery". > > "How old do you suppose Dr. Rubin is", asked the > stranger. > > Not wishing to age Dr. Rubin more than his years, I > replied: "Maybe in his late 50's or somewhere in his > 60's". I knew Rubin had to be hitting retirement > age. > > "Oh" replied the doctor from San Francisco, "I > performed capillary surgery until I was 73 and then > decided I needed to give it up". "Yet my hands > didn't > falter and I was always on top of each case." > > As I drove to Pasteur Drive I thought about > comparisons > between repairing eye stuff and capillary > surgery....were they similar? For me, the person who > needs to operate on my eyes should be young, bright > and > brilliant. Yet why should eyes be that different > from > capillaries? > > Could be that we "see with our eyes". What if we > "looked" with our hearts? > > Either way, when is a doctor too old to assume his > role > of physician? I'd say that if many of us can > continue > with our calling, doctors need to do the same. > But....I'd like my eye-surgeon to retain a younger > partner. > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > Independent Scholar > http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Steve Hovland" > To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" > > Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 3:33 PM > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > > >> Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, >> Critics Say >> NYT December 31, 2004 >> By ROBERT PEAR > > --snip-- > > > From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 5 23:22:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 18:22:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Susan Sontag Package No. 2 Message-ID: Susan Sontag Package No. 2 Deliver us from faraway evil http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2005/01/04/deliver_us_f rom_faraway_evil?mode=PF by Alex Beam, Globe Columnist, 5.1.4 'Susan Sontag died," my mother murmured, not raising her head from the two-day-old Financial Times I had bought her in the hangarlike waiting room of Juan Santamaria International Airport in San Jose, Costa Rica. Just the day before, she heard a fellow tourist refer to the ''late" actor Jerry Orbach. ''He isn't dead, is he?" she asked me, and I had no idea. That evening, I snuck into the VIP enclave (''Servicio Real") of our hotel and snitched a day-old Miami Herald. Frazier Moore's Associated Press obituary confirmed that the gravel-voiced Orbach, now famous as detective Lennie Briscoe from ''Law & Order" reruns, had died at age 69. At 25, Orbach, an up-and-coming song-and-dance man who would later win a Tony award for his role in the musical ''Promises, Promises," starred in the original ''Fantasticks." Who knew? Oh, and 137,000 people died that same week in a tsunami in Southeast Asia. ''A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." Just because the famous aphorism is attributed to Joseph Stalin doesn't mean it isn't true. It is a commonplace of the pulpit and the editorial page that we are all joined in one great brotherhood of man and woman, that ''each man's joy is joy to me, each man's grief is my own," to cite a popular hymn. But for many years I have wondered if that is true. I think compassion is like a radar signal that loses force the further it radiates from our hearts. I can easily understand why someone is more affected by the loss of a favorite actor, of a well-regarded talk-show host -- the circulating e-mail tributes to the late David Brudnoy are wonderfully articulate and emotional -- or by the death of an author one has enjoyed, than by the passing of tens of thousands of faraway strangers. In 1994, I remember seeing a picture of dozens of bodies washing over a waterfall during the Rwandan genocide, and reacting with shock and indifference. Those events seemed to be taking place in a galaxy far, far away. Human apathy toward mass deprivation is legendary. Aid organizations know this. For decades, the relief organization Save the Children has urged first-world donors to underwrite the well-being of a specific child somewhere in the Third World. Why? Because no one cares about saving children in the abstract. But people do care about saving Marzina, an 8-year-old from Bangladesh, who is currently seeking a sponsor. The media likewise know that gargantuan disaster stories have to be correctly packaged to capture readers' attention. There is an old, politically incorrect saying in newsrooms: How do you change a front-page story about massive flood devastation into a 50-word news brief buried inside the paper? Just add two words: ''In India." I was in a remote hotel last week and tripped across a news report from Deutsche Welle, Germany's government-supported international network. With tens of thousands of Asians already confirmed dead, DW headlined the disappearance of four Germans in the tsunami. My immediate reaction was: Who cares about four Germans? Answer: The Germans care about the Germans. The Americans care about the Americans. And so on. Europeans and others sometimes dismiss America's ''overreaction" to the Sept. 11 attacks. Statistically speaking, the losses on 9/11 equaled those during a few hours of one of the European continent's epic land battles. But the impact was felt all over the Eastern seaboard, and all over the country. A man who lived a few houses down from me died on one of the airliners. Waiting in line to move my son's belongings into his college dorm in New York City a year later, I met several families from New Jersey for whom the memory of the year-old attacks remained painful and dramatic. They hadn't experienced an event, they had lived through a tragedy. When my family returned home from our vacation on Saturday, we were greeted by a handwritten note from a friend, saying she may have lung cancer. One of my sons burst out crying. Her biopsy was yesterday; as of this writing we don't know the results. For us, that's a tragedy. The rest is news. Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam at globe.com. ---------------------- ARMAVIRUMQUE: THE NEW CRITERION'S WEBLOG http://www.newcriterion.com/weblog/2004_12_01_cano.html#1104279513716842 25 12.28.2004 Susan Sontag: a Prediction [Posted 6:17 PM by Roger Kimball] When a friend called me this morning with the news that Susan Sontag had died at the age 71, just about the first thing I thought was, "well, we'll have a huge, hagiographical, front-page obituary tomorrow in The New York Times." Check to see if I am correct. In the meantime, as you prepare yourself for the Times's litany about 1) what a penetrating critical intelligence Sontag wielded and 2) what a "courageous" and challenging "dissident" voice she provided (those quotation marks are proleptic: let's see if the Times uses those words), here is another "courageous," "penetratingly intelligent" dissident voice, that of Salman Rushdie, who provided this bouquet in his capacity as President of the PEN American Center: Susan Sontag was a great literary artist, a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, and an indefatigable ally in many struggles. She set a standard of intellectual rigor to which I and her many other admirers continue to aspire, insisting that with literary talent came an obligation to speak out on the great issues of the day, and above all to defend the sovereignty of the creative mind and imagination against every kind of tyranny. Those with strong stomachs can read all of Mr. Rusdie's encomium [106]here. There can be no doubt that Susan Sontag, the doyenne of (to use Tom Wolfe's apposite coinage) radical chic, commanded rare celebrity throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Accordingly, her influence in those decades and beyond was great. The question is, was it a beneficent or a baneful influence? Sontag has been celebrated as a towering intellectual. In fact, though, what she offered were not so much arguments or insights as the simulacra of arguments and the mood or emotion of insights. I wrote at length about Sontag in my book [107]The Long March: How the Cultural Revoution of the 1960s Changed America. I draw upon that book and some other writings about her in what follows. Sontag burst upon the scene in the early 1960s with a handful of precious essays: "Notes on `Camp'" (1964) and "On Style" (1965) in Partisan Review, "Against Interpretation" (1964) in Evergreen Review; "One Culture and the New Sensibility" (1965), an abridged version of which first appeared in Mademoiselle; and several essays and reviews in the newly launched New York Review of Books Almost overnight these essays electrified intellectual debate and catapulted their author to celebrity. Not that Sontag's efforts were unanimously praised. The critic John Simon, to take just one example, wondered in a sharp letter to Partisan Review whether Sontag's "Notes on `Camp'" was itself "only a piece of `camp.'" No, the important things were the attentiveness, speed, and intensity of the response. Pro or con, Sontag's essays galvanized debate: indeed, they contributed mightily to changing the very climate of intellectual debate. Her demand, at the end of "Against Interpretation," that "in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art"; her praise of camp, the "whole point" of which "is to dethrone the serious"; her encomium to the "new sensibility" of the Sixties, whose acolytes, she observed, "have broken, whether they know it or not, with the Matthew Arnold notion of culture, finding it historically and humanly obsolescent": in these and other such pronouncements Sontag offered not arguments but a mood, a tone, an atmosphere. Never mind that a lot of it was literally nonsense: it was nevertheless irresistible nonsense. It somehow didn't matter, for example, that the whole notion of "an erotics of art" was ridiculous. Everyone likes sex, and talking about "erotics" seems so much sexier than talking about "sex"; and of course everyone likes art: How was it that no one had thought of putting them together in this clever way before? Who would bother with something so boring as mere "interpretation"--which, Sontag had suggested, was these days "reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling," "the revenge of the intellect upon art"--when we could have (or pretend to have) an erotics instead? In "Susie Creamcheese Makes Love Not War," a devastating--and devastatingly funny--review of the Sontag oeuvre as of 1982, the critic Marvin Mudrick noted that Sontag was a critic whose every half-baked idea is a reject or thrift-shop markdown from the pastry cooks of post-World War II French intellectualism. . . . [W]hat matters [to her] isn't truth or sincerity or consistency or reality; what matters is "style" or getting away with it. Mudrick is especially good on Sontag's use of the word "exemplary": "Barthes's ideas have an exemplary coherence"; "Some lives are exemplary, others not"; Rimbaud and Duchamp made "exemplary renunciations" in giving up art for, respectively, gun-running and chess; "Silence exists as a decision--in the exemplary suicide of the artist . . ."; etc. Dilating on Sontag's effusions about silence--"the silence of eternity prepares for a thought beyond thought, which must appear from the perspective of traditional thinking . . . as no thought at all"--Mudrick usefully points out the similarity between Sontag and that other sage of silence, Kahlil Gibran: "Has silence or talk about it," Mudrick asks, "ever anywhere else been so very . . . exemplary?" Norman Podhoretz has suggested that the "rapidity" of Sontag's rise was due partly to her filling the role of "Dark Lady of American Letters," vacated when Mary McCarthy was "promoted to the more dignified status of Grande Dame as a reward for her years of brilliant service. The next Dark Lady would have to be, like her, clever, learned, good-looking, capable of writing [New York-intellectual] family-type criticism as well as fiction with a strong trace of naughtiness." The "ante on naughtiness," Podhoretz notes, had gone up since McCarthy's day: "in an era of what Sherry Abel has called the `fishnet bluestocking,' hints of perversion and orgies had to be there." In this context, it is worth noting that one of Sontag's characteristic productions was "The Pornographic Imagination" (1967), which appears in Styles of Radical Will (1969), her second collection of essays. In essence, it is a defense of pornography--though not, of course, as something merely salacious; Sontag doesn't champion pornography the way its usual clients do: for its content, for the lubricious stimulation it supplies. Instead, she champions pornography for its "formal" resources as a means of "transcendence." (The dancer and connoisseur of sodomy [108]Toni Bentley clearly has taken a page from Sontag on the issue of sex and transcendence.) It is hardly news that sexual ecstasy has often poached on religious rhetoric and vice versa; nor is it news that pornography often employs religious metaphors. That is part of its perversity--indeed its blasphemy. But Sontag decides to take pornography seriously as a solution to the spiritual desolations of modern secular culture. One of Sontag's great gifts has been her ability to enlist her politics in the service of her aestheticism. For her, it is the work of a moment to move from admiring pornography--or at least "the pornographic imagination"--to castigating American capitalism. Accordingly, toward the end of her essay she speaks of the traumatic failure of capitalist society to provide authentic outlets for the perennial human flair for high-temperature visionary obsession, to satisfy the appetite for exalted self-transcending modes of concentration and seriousness. The need of human beings to transcend "the person" is no less profound than the need to be a person, an individual. "The Pornographic Imagination," like most of Sontag's essays, is full of powerful phrases, seductive insights, and extraordinary balderdash. Sontag dilates on pornography's "peculiar access to some truth." What she doesn't say is that The Story of O (for example) presents not an instance of mystical fulfillment but a graphic depiction of human degradation. Only someone who had allowed "form" to triumph over "content" could have ignored this. In a way, "The Pornographic Imagination" is itself the perfect camp gesture: for if camp aims to "dethrone the serious" it is also, as Sontag points out, "deadly serious" about the demotic and the trivial. Sontag is a master at both ploys. Having immersed herself in the rhetoric of traditional humanistic learning, she is expert at using it against itself. This of course is a large part of what has made her writing so successful among would-be "avant-garde" intellectuals: playing with the empty forms of traditional moral and aesthetic thought, she is able to appear simultaneously unsettling and edifying, daringly "beyond good and evil" and yet passionately engag?. In the long march through the institutions, Sontag has been an emissary of trivialization, deploying the tools of humanism to sabotage the humanistic enterprise. "The Pornographic Imagination" also exhibits the seductive Sontag hauteur in full flower. After telling us that pornography can be an exciting version of personal transcendence, she immediately remarks that "not everyone is in the same condition as knowers or potential knowers. Perhaps most people don't need `a wider scale of experience.' It may be that, without subtle and extensive psychic preparation, any widening of experience and consciousness is destructive for most people." Not for you and me, Dear Reader: we are among the elect. We deserve that "wider scale of experience"; but as for the rest, as for "most people," well . . . As a writer, Sontag is essentially a coiner of epigrams. At their best they are witty, well phrased, provocative. A few are even true: "Nietzsche was a histrionic thinker but not a lover of the histrionic." But Sontag's striving for effect (unlike Nietzsche, she is a lover of the histrionic) regularly leads her into muddle. What, for example, can it mean to say that "the AIDS epidemic serves as an ideal projection for First World political paranoia" or that "risk-free sexuality is an inevitable reinvention of the culture of capitalism"? Nothing, really, although such statements do communicate an unperturbable aura of left-wing contempt for common sense. In "One Culture and the New Sensibility" Sontag enthusiastically reasons that "if art is understood as a form of discipline of the feelings and a programming of sensations, then the feeling (or sensation) given off by a Rauschenberg painting might be like that of a song by the Supremes." But of course the idea that art is a "programming of the sensations" (a phrase, alas, of which Sontag is particularly fond) is wrong, incoherent, or both, as is the idea that feelings or sensations might be "given off" by any song or painting, even one by Rauschenberg (odors, yes; sensations, no). As often happens, her passion for synesthesia and effacing boundaries leads her into nonsense. And then there were Sontag's own political activities. Cuba and North Vietnam in 1968, China in 1973, Sarajevo in 1993 (where she went to direct a production of Waiting for Godot--surely one of the consummate radical chic gestures of all time). Few people have managed to combine na?ve idealization of foreign tyranny with violent hatred of their own country to such deplorable effect. She has always talked like a political radical but lived like an aesthete. At the annual PEN writers' conference in 1986, Sontag declared that "the task of the writer is to promote dissidence." But it it turns out that, for her, only dissidence conducted against American interests counts. Consider the notorious essay she wrote about "the right way" for Americans to "love the Cuban revolution." Sontag begins with some ritualistic denunciations of American culture as "inorganic, dead, coercive, authoritarian." Item: "America is a cancerous society with a runaway rate of productivity that inundates the country with increasingly unnecessary commodities, services, gadgets, images, information." One of the few spots of light, she tells us, is Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, which teaches that "America's psychic survival entails her transformation through a political revolution." (It also teaches that, for blacks, rape can be a noble "insurrectionary act," a "defying and trampling on the white man's laws," but Sontag doesn't bother with that detail.) According to her, "the power structure derives its credibility, its legitimacy, its energies from the dehumanization of the individuals who operate it. The people staffing IBM and General Motors, and the Pentagon, and United Fruit are the living dead." Since the counterculture is not strong enough to overthrow IBM, the Pentagon, etc., it must opt for subversion. "Rock, grass, better orgasms, freaky clothes, grooving on nature--really grooving on anything--unfits, maladapts a person for the American way of life." And here is where the Cubans come in: they enjoy this desirable "new sensibility" naturally, possessing as they do a "southern spontaneity which we feel our own too white, death-ridden culture denies us. . . . The Cubans know a lot about spontaneity, gaiety, sensuality and freaking out. They are not linear, desiccated creatures of print culture." Indeed not: supine, desiccated creatures of a Communist tyranny would be more like it, though patronizing honky talk about "southern spontaneity" doubtless made things seem much better when this was written. In the great contest for writing the most fatuous line of political drivel, Sontag is always a contender. This essay contains at least two gems: after ten years, she writes, "the Cuban revolution is astonishingly free of repression and bureaucratization"; even better perhaps, is this passing remark delivered in parentheses: "No Cuban writer has been or is in jail, or is failing to get his work published." Readers wishing to make a reality check should consult Paul Hollander's classic study Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society, which cites Sontag's claim and then lists, in two or three pages, some of the many writers and artists who have been jailed, tortured, or executed by Castro's spontaneous gaiety. Sontag concocted a similar fairy tale when she went to Vietnam in 1968 courtesy of the North Vietnamese government. Her long essay "Trip to Hanoi" (1968) is another classic in the literature of political mendacity. Connoisseurs of the genre will especially savor Sontag's observation that the real problem for the North Vietnamese is that they "aren't good enough haters." Their fondness for Americans, she explains, keeps getting in the way of the war effort. They genuinely care about the welfare of the hundreds of captured American pilots and give them bigger rations than the Vietnamese population gets, "because they're bigger than we are," as a Vietnamese army officer told me, "and they're used to more meat than we are." People in North Vietnam really do believe in the goodness of man . . . and in the perennial possibility of rehabilitating the morally fallen. It would be interesting to know what Senator John McCain, a prisoner of war who was brutally tortured by the North Vietnamese, had to say about this little fantasia. Sontag acknowledges that her account tended somewhat to idealize North Vietnam; but that was only because she "found, through direct experience, North Vietnam to to be a place which, in many respects, deserves to be idealized." Unlike any country in Western Europe, you understand, and above all unlike the United States. "The Vietnamese are `whole' human beings, not `split' as we are." In 1967, shortly before her trip to Hanoi, Sontag had this to say about the United States: A small nation of handsome people . . . is being brutally and self-righteously slaughtered . . . by the richest and most grotesquely overarmed, most powerful country in the world. America has become a criminal, sinister country--swollen with priggishness, numbed by affluence, bemused by the monstrous conceit that it has the mandate to dispose of the destiny of the world. In "What's Happening in America (1966)," Sontag tells readers that what America "deserves" is to have its wealth "taken away" by the Third World. In one particularly notorious passage, she writes that "the truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history." What can one say? Sontag excoriates American capitalism for its "runaway rate of productivity." But she has had no scruples about enjoying the fruits of that productivity: a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1964, a Merrill Foundation grant in 1965, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1966, etc., etc., culminating in 1990 with a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award. Sontag preserved her radical chic credentials to the end. In the 1960s in was Vietnam and Cuba; in the 1990s it was Sarajevo. The one constant was unremitting animus against the United States: its culture, its politics, its economy, its very being. Following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001, Sontag took to the pages of The New Yorker to explain that the assault of September 11 was "not a `cowardly' attack on `civilization' or `liberty' or `humanity' or `the free world' [note the scare quotes] but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions. . . . [W]hatever may be said of the perpetrators of [September 11's] slaughter, they were not cowards." Does she say, then, that they were murderous fanatics? Hardly. Sontag is at once too ambivalent and too admiring for that: too ambivalent about the "world's self-proclaimed superpower" and too admiring of the murderous Muslim fanatics. Sontag enjoyed an extraordinary career. But, pace Salman Rushdie, her celebrity was not the gratifying product of intellectual distinction but the tawdry coefficient of a lifelong devotion to the mendacious and disfiguring imperatives of radical chic. 106. http://www.pen.org/sontag.html 107. http://www.newcriterion.com/constant/longmarch.htm 108. http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/dec04/bentley.htm --------------------- Susan Sontag - Remembering an intellectual heroine. By Christopher Hitchens http://slate.msn.com/id/2111506/ Posted Wednesday, Dec. 29, 2004, at 8:37 AM PT Between the word "public" and the word "intellectual" there falls, or ought to fall, a shadow. The life of the cultivated mind should be private, reticent, discreet: Most of its celebrations will occur with no audience, because there can be no applause for that moment when the solitary reader gets up and paces round the room, having just noticed the hidden image in the sonnet, or the profane joke in the devotional text, or the secret message in the prison diaries. Individual pleasure of this kind is only rivaled when the same reader turns into a writer, and after a long wrestle until daybreak hits on his or her own version of the mot juste, or the unmasking of pretension, or the apt, latent literary connection, or the satire upon tyranny. The 20^th century was perhaps unusual in the ways in which it forced such people to quit their desks and their bookshelves and to enter the agora. Looking over our shoulders, we do not find that we have much respect or admiration for those who simply survived, or who kept the private life alive. We may owe such people more than we know, but it is difficult to view them as exemplary. Our heroes and heroines are those who managed, from Orwell through Camus and Solzhenitsyn, to be both intellectual and engaged. (This combination of qualities would also be true of a good number of our fools and villains, from Celine to Shaw, with Sartre perhaps occupying the middle position.) Susan Sontag passed an extraordinary amount of her life in the pursuit of private happiness through reading and through the attempt to share this delight with others. For her, the act of literary consumption was the generous parent of the act of literary production. She was so much impressed by the marvelous people she had read--beginning with Jack London and Thomas Mann in her girlhood, and eventually comprising the almost Borgesian library that was her one prized possession--that she was almost shy about offering her own prose to the reader. Look at her output and you will see that she was not at all prolific. If it doesn't seem like that--if it seems as if she was always somewhere in print--it is because she timed her interventions very deftly. By the middle 1960s, someone was surely going to say something worth noticing about the energy and vitality of American popular culture. And it probably wasn't going to be any of the graying manes of the old Partisan Review gang. Sontag's sprightly, sympathetic essays on the diminishing returns of "high culture" were written by someone who nonetheless had a sense of tradition and who took that high culture seriously (and who was smart enough to be published in Partisan Review). Her acute appreciation of the importance of photography is something that now seems uncontroversial (the sure sign of the authentic pioneer), and her "Notes on 'Camp' " were dedicated to the memory of Oscar Wilde, whose fusion of the serious and the subversive was always an inspiration to her, as it is, I can't resist adding, to too few female writers. In a somewhat parochial time, furthermore, she was an internationalist. I once heard her rather sourly described as American culture's "official greeter," for her role in presenting and introducing the writers of other scenes and societies. There was no shame in that charge: She--and Philip Roth--did a very great deal to familiarize Americans with the work of Czeslaw Milosz and Danilo Kis, Milan Kundera and Gy?rgy Konr?d. In Against Interpretation, published in 1966, she saw more clearly than most that the future defeat of official Communism was inscribed in its negation of literature. When Arpad Goncz, the novelist who eventually became a post-Communist president of Hungary, was invited to the White House, he requested that Susan be placed on his guest list. It's hard to think of any other American author or intellectual who would be as sincerely mourned as Susan will be this week, from Berlin to Prague to Sarajevo. (Updated, Dec. 31: On Thursday, Mayor Muhidin Hamamdzic of Sarajevo announced that the city will name a street after her, and the city's Youth Theater said that it would mount a plaque for her on its wall.) Mention of that last place name impels me to say another thing: this time about moral and physical courage. It took a certain amount of nerve for her to stand up on stage, in early 1982 in New York, and to denounce martial law in Poland as "fascism with a human face." Intended as ironic, this remark empurpled the anti-anti-Communists who predominated on the intellectual left. But when Slobodan Milosevic adopted full-out national socialism after 1989, it took real guts to go and live under the bombardment in Sarajevo and to help organize the Bosnian civic resistance. She did not do this as a "tourist," as sneering conservative bystanders like Hilton Kramer claimed. She spent real time there and endured genuine danger. I know, because I saw her in Bosnia and had felt faint-hearted long before she did. Her fortitude was demonstrated to all who knew her, and it was often the cause of fortitude in others. She had a long running battle with successive tumors and sarcomas and was always in the front line for any daring new treatment. Her books on illness and fatalism, and her stout refusal to accept defeat, were an inspiration. So were the many anonymous hours and days she spent in encouraging and advising fellow sufferers. But best of all, I felt, was the moment when, as president of American PEN, she had to confront the Rushdie affair in 1989. It's easy enough to see, now, that the offer of murder for cash, made by a depraved theocratic despot and directed at a novelist, was a warning of the Islamist intoxication that was to come. But at the time, many of the usual "signers" of petitions were distinctly shaky and nervous, as were the publishers and booksellers who felt themselves under threat and sought to back away. Susan Sontag mobilized a tremendous campaign of solidarity that dispelled all this masochism and capitulation. I remember her saying hotly of our persecuted and hidden friend: "You know, I think about Salman every second. It's as if he was a lover." I would have done anything for her at that moment, not that she asked or noticed. With that signature black-on-white swoosh in her hair, and her charismatic and hard-traveling style, she achieved something else worthy of note--the status of celebrity without any of the attendant tedium and squalor. She resolutely declined to say anything about her private life or to indulge those who wanted to speculate. The nearest to an indiscretion she ever came was an allusion to Middlemarch in the opening of her 1999 novel In America, where she seems to say that her one and only marriage was a mistake because she swiftly realized "not only that I was Dorothea but that, a few months earlier, I had married Mr. Casaubon.") A man is not on his oath, said Samuel Johnson, when he gives a funeral oration. One ought to try and contest the underlying assumption here, which condescendingly excuses those who write nil nisi bonum of the dead. Could Susan Sontag be irritating, or hectoring, or righteous? She most certainly could. She said and did her own share of foolish things during the 1960s, later retracting her notorious remark about the white "race" being a "cancer" by saying that it slandered cancer patients. In what I thought was an astonishing lapse, she attempted to diagnose the assault of Sept. 11, 2001, as the one thing it most obviously was not: "a consequence of specific [sic] American alliances and actions." Even the word "general" would have been worse in that sentence, but she had to know better. She said that she didn't read reviews of her work, when she obviously did. It could sometimes be very difficult to tell her anything or to have her admit that there was something she didn't know or hadn't read. But even this insecurity had its affirmative side. If she was sometimes a little permissive, launching a trial balloon only to deflate it later (as with her change of heart on the filmic aesthetic of Leni Riefenstahl) this promiscuity was founded in curiosity and liveliness. About 20 years ago, I watched her having an on-stage discussion with Umberto Eco in downtown New York. Eco was a bit galumphing--he declared that his favorite novel was Lolita because he could picture himself in the part of Umberto Umberto. Susan, pressed to define the word "polymath," was both sweet and solemn. "To be a polymath," she declared, "is to be interested in everything--and in nothing else." She was always trying to do too much and square the circle: to stay up late debating and discussing and have the last word, then get a really early night, then stay up reading, and then make an early start. She adored trying new restaurants and new dishes. She couldn't stand affectless or bored or cynical people, of any age. She only ventured into full-length fiction when she was almost 60, and then discovered that she had a whole new life. And she resisted the last malady with terrific force and resource, so that to describe her as life-affirming now seems to me suddenly weak. Anyway--death be not proud. Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a regular contributor to Slate. His most recent book is [30]Love, Poverty and War. He is also the author of [31]A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq and of [32]Blood, Class and Empire. -------------- Susan Sontag (1933-2004): Remembering the voice of moral responsibilityand unembarrassed hedonism http://www.villagevoice.com/generic/show_print.php?id=59762&page=indiana &issue=0501&printcde=MzMxNDgxNzMzNg==&refpage=L25ld3MvMDUwMSxpbmRpYW5hLD U5NzYyLDIuaHRtbA== by Gary Indiana 5.1.4 Like Maria Callas's voice, Susan Sontag's mind, to borrow a phrase from the great filmmaker Werner Schroeter (one of countless underappreciated artists Sontag championed), was "a comet passing once in a hundred years." In a dauntingly, often viciously anti-intellectual society, Sontag made being an intellectual attractive. She was the indispensible voice of moral responsibility, perceptual clarity, passionate (and passionately reasonable) advocacy: for aesthetic pleasure, for social justice, for unembarrassed hedonism, for life against death. Sontag took it as a given that our duty as sentient beings is to rescue the world. She knew that empathy can change history. She set the bar of skepticism as high as it would go. Allergic to received ideas and their hypnotic blandishments, she was often startled to discover how devalued the ethical sense, and the courage to exercise it, had become in American consumer culture. Sontag had impeccable instincts for saying and doing what needed to be said and done while too many others scrambled for the safety of consensus. Hence the uproar when she declared, at the height of Solidarity's epochal crisis in 1982, that "communism . . . is fascism with a human face." Hence also the depressingly rote indignation mobilized against her response to a New Yorker survey about the 9-11 attacks, published on September 24, 2001a survey that most respondents used to promote themselves, their latest books, the depth of their own "feelings." Of course it was, and still is, easier for many Americans to pretend the events of 9-11 were inexplicable eruptions of violence against American virtuousness, perpetrated by people who "hate us for our freedoms." Indeed, the habitual assertion of the American way of life's superiority is probably what persuades supposedly serious writers to weigh in on a civil catastrophe by promoting their own narrow interests, dropping in news of their current travel itineraries, their marriages, their kidsoh, and how shaken they were by the tragic events. It takes unusual bravery to cite, in a large media venue, cause and effect as operant elements in a man-made emergencyespecially when the programmed pieties and entrenched denial mechanisms of society run in the opposite direction. Sontag drew her own better-than-well-informed conclusions about what happened on 9-11. The habit of independent thought has so little currency in 21st-century America that dissent is the last thing most Americans consider worth protecting. What Jean Genet referred to as "the far Right and its imbecilic mythology" have already been activated in several "obituary" pieces, including one fulminating, hateful dismissal of Sontag's entire lifework. It's lowering to realize how terminally bitter the American right really is: Even in its current triumphal micro-epoch, it needs to demonize somebody. Sontag's political "lapses," cited even in sympathetic articles, are in fact the public moments one should most admire her for. She was usually right, and when she hadn't been, she said so. It's customary these days to damn people for "inconsistency," as if it's somehow virtuous to persist forever in being wrong. Sontag interrogated her own ideas with merciless rigor, and when she discovered they no longer applied, or were defectively inadequate or just plain bad, she never hesitated to change her mind in public. Certainly she felt the same revulsion and horror at the atrocity of 9-11 that any New Yorker, any citizen of the world, did. But she also had the moral scruple to connect the attacks to generally untelevised, lethal American actions abroad, to the indiscriminate carnage that has typified both state policy and terrorist violence in the new century. Where, exactly, does the difference lie? Unlike our government's loudest warmongers and their media cheerleaders, Sontag put her own life on the line, many times, in defense of her principlesin Israel during the Six Day War, in Hanoi during the American bombardment, in Sarajevo throughout much of the conflict there. Like Genet, she was willing to go anywhere, at a moment's notice, out of solidarity with people on the receiving end of contemporary barbarism. The range of her talents and interests was no less impressive than her moral instincts. She once told me that "every good book is worth reading at least once" (in her case, it was usually at least twice). Her appetite for cultural provenderopera, avant-garde theater, film, dance, travel, historical inquiry, cuisine of any kind, architecture, the history of ideaswas inexhaustible. If you told her about something she didn't know, she soon knew more about it than you did. She routinely went directly from a museum to a screening, then to a concert; and if there was a kung fu movie playing somewhere after all that, off she went, whether you were still ambulatory or not. I know I'm in a minority, but I remain a fan of Sontag's early novels The Benefactor and Death KitSontag herself cared little for them in later years. Not enough people have seen the films she directed: Duet for Cannibals and Brother Carl in Sweden, Promised Lands in Israel, Unguided Tour in Venice. These early and middle works could be considered noble experiments, operating on a high level of fluency and daring. None of these works are as sumptuously realized as her best essays, or her later novels The Volcano Lover and In America. At times, her reverence for the European modernists who influenced her eclipses her own seldom mentioned, American gift for absurdist black humor. (Death Kit has anything but a reputation for hilarity, but it's one of the most darkly funny narratives written in America during the Vietnam War.) Many of Sontag's essays, for that matter, have threads of Firbankian whimsy and manic satire running through themand no, I'm not referring to "Notes on Camp." There's no way to summarize her restless cultural itinerary and her immense services to "the republic of letters" in the space of an obituary. What I can speak of, here, again, is the indelible example she set as a moral being, citizen, and writer. She sedulously distinguished between the merely personal and the insights personal experience generated. "I" appears less frequently in her writings than in those of any other significant American writer I can think of. If Sontag was less averse, in recent times, to saying "I," it could be that she at last realized she'd earned the authority for "I" to mean more, coming from her, than it does coming from most people. (In America, "I" isn't simply a pronoun, but a way of life.) It's my guess that growing up in Arizona and Southern California, among people who placed no special value on intelligence and none at all on its cultivation, Sontag's first line of defense against being hurt by other people was the same thing (aside from physical beauty) that distinguished her from ordinary peoplethat awesome intellect. She could be ferociously assertive, and at times even hurtful, without at all realizing the tremendous effect she had on people. In some ways, like any American intellectual, she often felt slighted or underappreciated, even when people were actually paying keen attention to her. Her personal magnetism was legendary. Even in later times, she had the glamour of a film star. She almost never wore makeup (though she did, finally, find a shade of lipstick she could stand), and usually wore black slacks, black sweaters, and sometimes a black leather jacket, though occasionally the jacket would be brown. She had the body language of a young person: She once explained to me that people get old when they started acting like old people. I never heard her say a dumb word, even in moments of evident distress. She did, from time to time, do things that seemed quite odd, but then, who doesn't? Her will to keep experiencing, learning, and feeling "the old emotions"and, sometimes, to make herself empty, restock her interiority, break with old ideascame with a project of self-transcendence that Sontag shouldered, like Sisyphus's stone, cheerfully, "with fervor." She once told Dick Cavett, after the first of her struggles with cancer, that she didn't find her own illness interesting. She stipulated that it was moving to her, but not interesting. To be interesting, experience has to yield a harvest of ideas, which her illness certainly didbut she communicated them in a form useful to others in ways a conventional memoir couldn't be. (To be useful, one has to reach others on the level of thought, not only feelingthough the two are inseparable.) In light of her own illness, she set about removing the stigma then attached to cancer, dismantling the punitive myths this fearsome illness generated at the time. We don't look at illness in the same way we did before Illness as Metaphor and the widespread examination of our relationship to medicine that it triggered. Her detachment in this regard was a powerful asset. Many years ago, I went with her one morning to her radiologist. The radiologist had gotten back some complicated X-rays and wanted to discuss them. On the way uptown, Susan was incredibly composed, long resigned to hyper-vigilance as the price of staying alive. At the clinic, she disappeared into the doctor's office for a worryingly long time. When she came out, finally, she was laughing. "She put the X-rays up," Susan told me, "and said, 'This really doesn't look good.' So I looked them over, and thought about it. Then I said, 'You're right. These don't look good. But you know something, these aren't my X-rays.' " They weren't her X-rays. Her most recent procedure had left a temporary, subcutaneous line of staple sutures running from her throat to her abdomen. The tiny metal clamps she knew were there would have glowed on an X-ray. For some reason this was the first memory that flashed to mind when the sad news came that she was gone. ----------- Notes on Camp Sontag http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/frontpage6.asp 5.1.10 by Sheelah Kolhatkar "I can remember going to some very, very high-powered and glamorous parties, with her or because of her, at, say, Roger Straus," recalled the writer Stephen Koch, who became friends with Susan Sontag in 1965, when she was in her early 30s. "And you would walk in, and it was wall-to-wall Nobel Prize winners and Mikhail Baryshnikov and George Balanchine and Richard Avedon it was like walking into a Hirschfeld cartoon. And she flourished there. She was Susan Sontag, and it was just part of that. There was a certain high-gloss celebrity thing she would occasionally do." Indeed, there were many other things that Sontag did in addition to being a glamorous intellectual superstara role she played well until her death last week of leukemia at age 71. She wrote books, both provocative essays and novels; read some of the 15,000 volumes of fiction and philosophy she said were stashed in her Chelsea apartment; traveled to war-torn countries; attended the ballet; and obsessively watched films. She created ideological enemies as swiftly as she did allies. But perhaps its the 1975 black-and-white photograph, taken by her friend, Peter Hujarof her reclining on a bed, staring off into the middle distance, perhaps contemplating Artaudthat most captures how we like to remember her: young, sultry, brilliant, precocious. It was the 1960s that, in many ways, Susan Sontag represented besta time in America when it was fun to be an intellectual, when the worlds of high and low culture were converging and it was cool to be provocatively outspoken, intimidatingly well-read, the smartest one at the party. Perhaps she made it so. After all, as her friend, Mr. Koch, and countless others since her death have observed, Sontag was more than a witty, attractive brain. She was a starsomething that has much to do with the intellectual climate of the 60s, but mostly to do with Sontag herself. "For one, she was glamorous-looking. One ought not to ignore that, as if it had nothing to do with Susans celebrity," said Robert Boyers, a professor at Skidmore College and the editor of the literary journal Salmagundi, who got to know Sontag in the late 1960s and became friends with her in the 70s. "Susan knew that she was very beautiful and very photogenic, and she always liked to have her photograph taken by first-rate photographers. "I remember the first time in the 70s," he continued, "when I went to a poster shop in Paris, and I saw all these racks of postcards of movie stars, and was astonished to see the numbers of postcard images of Susan Sontag on those racks. There was Grace Kelly, and Susan Sontag." "Somehow in the 60s, she had become an icon, like Twiggy or something," said Jim Miller, the chair of the liberal-studies program at the New School, who occasionally crossed paths with Sontag and who looked up to her as a student in the 60s. "Thats what made it unusual. You know, in France, intellectuals are celebrities all the time. In America, its quite unusual but not unheard of. You know, you get a hot chick at a party full of frumpy professors and people go, Whoa!" Although Sontag was schooled in the 1950s, first at the rigorous mental training ground that was the University of Chicago and later at Harvard, with sojourns to Oxford and the Sorbonne, she produced the work that would make her known in the 1960s. She moved to New York, the city of her birth, on Jan. 1, 1959, freshly divorced and with a young son, and into a tiny apartment on West End Avenue. She taught in the religion department at Columbia University and contributed to publications like the Partisan Review; the essay "Notes on Camp," which sparked her notoriety, was published there in 1964. She was absorbed into the fold of Farrar, Straus (later "and Giroux"), which would become her lifelong publishing house, in 1961, when she signed a contract for her first novel, The Benefactor. Her essay collection, Against Interpretation, was published in 1966. It was a moment when the division between elite culture and mass culture was quickly collapsing, and Sontag was a primary figure in both causing and explaining it; her "Notes on Camp" addressed gay popular culture through an academic lens, and was permission for the cultural elite to delve into "lowbrow" fields such as film and rock criticism. "Being an intellectual used to mean, until the mid-1960s, attempting in ones work and ones posture to uphold that distinction between high and low, and basically to resist the efforts to erode it, whereas in the 60s it came to seem impossible to do that any longer," said Mr. Boyers. "The 1960s was a time in which many intellectuals, who had largely been absorbed in their own work and in finding niches in the academy, suddenly felt called upon to take positions and put themselves on the line." Sontag had a sharp sense of what was about to prove riveting to the types of people she viewed as her peersputting herself at the front edge of trends, or at least capitalizing effectively on what was already happening. (She could explain Jean-Luc Godard movies to people who were going to see them but still hadnt a clue what they were.) Mr. Koch first came to know Ms. Sontag in 1965, when he was 24 and she about 32, after he reviewed The Benefactor in the Antioch Review and sent her a copy. The two struck up a friendship over a Chinese dinner around 114th Street and Broadway. "I even remember what we ate: smoked fish," recalled Mr. Koch. "She was wearing a car coat. She was very friendly. I was filled with ideas of what I wanted to do and where I wanted to publish, and she said, Oh, dont publish there. Ill show you where to publish." She was a worthwhile ally to cultivate. Sontag led Mr. Koch around town, introducing him to Richard Kluger, then the books editor at the New York Herald Tribune, and to the literary editor at The Nation. She read his manuscripts and introduced him to editors, taking him under her wing, as she is known to have done for many (mostly male) young thinkers throughout her career. He visited her apartment, then a tiny two-bedroom she shared with her son David, with a living room lined with framed movie stills. "She was very girlish, smiled a lot, and had a very radiant glow," said Mr. Koch. "She understood about how she was becoming famous. It was extremely interesting to watch," he continued. "She once said, I was at a screening of a movie last night, and a lot of people were interested in the fact that I was there. It bothered her. But on the whole, she carried herself with her gathering celebrity very well. The talent for being famous, Hemingway had to a world-class degree. Susan had it to a remarkable degree. She had an innate talent for being well-known. People say, Oh, well, she went after celebrity. She was a natural celebrityit came to her like breathing in and breathing out." "She was a very young, beautiful woman," recalled the poet Richard Howard, a close friend of Sontags who sometimes accompanied her to literary salons and occasionally baby-sat her sonwhen she wasnt bringing the youngster along with her to parties and readings. "She went out a lot and saw a lot of people and stayed up late. She was interested in everything that people did late at night. She was open to almost anything. She was a very exciting and open friend, very frank and direct. She was around; she was everywhere." Sontag was often compared to Mary McCarthy, the reigning smart-girl-about-town of her day, which didnt necessarily thrill her. "Mary McCarthy once told Susan, I hear youre the new me," said Morris Dickstein, a professor of literature and film at the CUNY graduate school, who sat in on some classes with Sontag while an undergraduate at Columbia in the 1960s. "Mary McCarthy was then the reigning woman intellectual. Its absurd to think there had to be only one woman intellectual, but its clear that Camille Paglia had that same All About Eve feeling toward Susan Sontag that Susan Sontag had toward Mary McCarthy. Of course theres room for more than one, but somehow there was this idea that there had to be only one star with a kind of queen-bee quality. I guess its men who created that feelingthat there has to be this one mesmerizing woman who combines brains and beauty, intellect and sensuality." Still, friends maintain that whether or not Sontag sought fame, most of it, from the glamour to the intellectual prowess, came naturally to her. Mr. Koch described her as an "innate highbrow." "She was someone looking up to the greats," said Mr. Koch. "She wasnt trying to be like Mary McCarthy. She was trying to be like Gide. She was trying to be like Henry James. Not in imitating their work, but moving toward what she would call seriousness." Ms. Paglia, a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, said that despite their famous disagreements (and Ms. Paglias repeated dissing of her predecessors work in print), she looked up to Sontag. "When I was young, I was looking for role models for a life as a thinking woman," said Ms. Paglia. "She was a rigorous female thinker at a time when careers for women were not encouraged at all. Our self-conception is parallel. This is an American model of a woman intellectual who is not afraid of pop culture, who is not afraid of the media. That is what I admire about her in the 1960s." You may reach Sheelah Kolhatkar via email at: [9]skolhatkar at observer.com. From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 5 23:23:26 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 18:23:26 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Where Was God During the Tsunami? Message-ID: Where Was God During the Tsunami? [There follows the Wikipedia article on the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Socially, it was the most important earthquake in history, with the possible exception of the alleged earthquake that destroyed the alleged Atlantis, since the Lisbon earthquake lead to widespread doubts about the goodness of the Creator if not his existence. [The Plague also had by far the most important social impact in Europe, though it killed the same third of the population in China and India as it did in Europe. In Europe, the medieval theological fiction of the "just price" came to differ not greatly from the market price over the decades. But after the plague struck, the labor supply was so diminished that its price should have gone way up. The fiction of "finding the law" in eternal principles like the "just price" ceased to be viable. Common law, the accretion of judicial decisions, allowed the fiction to be maintained. If the principles say this happens in case A and that happens in case B, a judge would decide what happens in case A 1/2. The judge would not make law; he would find law by filling it in. A major overhaul of the law, called a statute, was very rare, though there was some movement in that direction with, say, the Second Statute of Westminster of 12. (Exactly why the First Statute was not a true statute, I am not sure.) [Anyhow, after the Black Death, one of the first statutes was the Statute of Laborers, which (futilely) tried to prevent the price of labor from rising. The trend to the deliberate creation of law, and thus a new concept of law, really got going as the result of the Black Death. By 1776 in a world changed, not by another plague, but by the experience of 193 years of having to deal with changed circumstances (dating from Roanoke Island), Mr. Jefferson could speak of "the Right of the People to ... institute new Government, laying its Foundations on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." [In China and India, the Plague caused no such upheaval from law as eternal to (ultimately) law as fostering happiness, and no earthquake outside of Europe triggered such a widespread questioning of religion. [Why?] Guardian: How can religious people explain something like this? http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1380094,00.html How can religious people explain something like this? Earthquakes led 18th-century thinkers to ask questions we shy away from Martin Kettle Tuesday December 28, 2004 The modern era flatters itself that human beings can now know and shape almost everything about the world. But an event like the Indonesian earthquake exposes much of this for the hubris that it is. Perhaps we have talked so much about our civilization's potential to destroy the planet that we have forgotten that the planet also has an untamed ability to destroy civilisation too. Whatever else it has achieved, the Indian Ocean tsunami has at least reminded mankind of its enduring vulnerability in the face of nature. The scale of suffering that it has wreaked - 20,000 deaths and counting - shows that we share such dangers with our ancestors more fully than most of us realised. An entirely understandable reaction to such an event is to set one's face against any large questions that it may raise. But this week provides an unsought opportunity to consider the largest of all human implications of any major earthquake: its challenge to religion. A few days after the 9/11 attacks on New York, I had dinner with the Guardian's late columnist Hugo Young. We were still so close to the event itself that only one topic of conversation was possible. At one stage I asked Hugo how his Catholicism allowed him to explain such a terrible act. I'm afraid that's an easy one, he replied. We are all fallen beings, Hugo declared, and our life in this world is a vale of tears. So some human beings will always kill one another. The attack on New York should therefore be seen not as an act of God, but as an act of fallen humanity. Then he paused, and added: "But I admit I have much more difficulty with earthquakes." Earthquakes and the belief in the judgment of God are, indeed, very hard to reconcile. However, no religion that offers an explanation of the world can avoid making some kind of an attempt to fit the two together. And an immense earthquake like the one that took place off Sumatra on Sunday inevitably poses that challenge afresh in dramatic terms. There is, after all, only one big question to ask about an event of such destructive power as the one that has taken place this week: why did it happen? As with previous earthquakes, any explanation of this latest one poses us a sharp intellectual choice. Either there is an entirely natural explanation for it, or there is some other kind. Even the natural one is by no means easy to imagine, but it is at least wholly coherent. The tsunami took place, say the seismologists, because a massive tectonic rupture on the sea bed generated tremors through the ocean. These unimaginable forces sent their energy coursing across thousands of miles of water, resulting in death and destruction in a vast arc from Somalia to Indonesia. But what do world views that do not allow scientists undisputed authority have to say about such phenomena? Where do the creationists stand, for example? Such world views are more widespread, even now, than a secularised society such as ours sometimes prefers to think. For most of human history people have tried to explain earthquakes as acts of divine intervention and displeasure. Even as the churches collapsed around them in 1755, Lisbon's priests insisted on salvaging crucifixes and religious icons with which to ward off the catastrophe that would kill more than 50,000 of their fellow citizens. Others, though, began to draw different conclusions. Voltaire asked what kind of God could permit such a thing to occur. Did Lisbon really have so many more vices than London or Paris, he asked, that it should be punished in such a appalling and indiscriminate manner? Immanuel Kant was so amazed by what happened to Lisbon that he wrote three separate treatises on the problem of earthquakes. Our own society seems to be more squeamish about such things. The need for mutual respect between peoples and traditions of which the Queen spoke in her Christmas broadcast seems to require that we must all respect religions in equal measure, too. The government, indeed, is legislating to prevent expressions of religious hatred in ways that could put a cordon around the critical discussion of religion itself. Yet it is hard to think of any event in modern times that requires a more serious explanation from the forces of religion than this week's earthquake. Voltaire's 18th-century question to Christians - why Lisbon? - ought to generate a whole series of 21st-century equivalents for all the religions of the world. Certainly the giant waves generated by the quake made no attempt to differentiate between the religions of those whom it made its victims. Hindus were swept away in India, Muslims were carried off in Indonesia, Buddhists in Thailand. Visiting Christians and Jews received no special treatment either. This poses no problem for the scientific belief system. Here, it says, was a mindless natural event, which destroyed Muslim and Hindu alike. A non-scientific belief system, especially one that is based on any kind of notion of a divine order, has some explaining to do, however. What God sanctions an earthquake? What God protects against it? Why does the quake strike these places and these peoples and not others? What kind of order is it that decrees that a person who went to sleep by the edge of the ocean on Christmas night should wake up the next morning engulfed by the waves, struggling for life? From at least the time of Aristotle, intelligent people have struggled to make some sense of earthquakes. Earthquakes do not merely kill and destroy. They challenge human beings to explain the world order in which such apparently indiscriminate acts can occur. Europe in the 18th century had the intellectual curiosity and independence to ask and answer such questions. But can we say the same of 21st-century Europe? Or are we too cowed now to even ask if the God can exist that can do such things? [42]martin.kettle at guardian.co.uk -------------- To God, an age-old question The Telegraph - Calcutta : International http://www.telegraphindia.com/1041231/asp/foreign/story_4195540.asp A woman gestures as she cries on a street of Nagapattinam, some 350 km south of Chennai. (AFP) London, Dec. 30 (Reuters): It is one of the oldest, most profound questions, posed by some of the most learned minds of every faith throughout the course of human history. It was put eloquently this week by an old woman in a devastated village in southern Indias Tamil Nadu. Why did you do this to us, God? she wailed. What did we do to upset you? Perhaps no event in living memory has confronted the worlds great religions with such a basic test of faith as this weeks tsunami, which indiscriminately slaughtered Indonesian Muslims, Indians of all faiths, Thai and Sri Lankan Buddhists and tourists who were Christians and Jews. In temples, mosques, churches and synagogues across the globe, clerics are being called upon to explain: How could a benevolent God visit such horror on ordinary people? Traditionalists of diverse faiths described the destruction as part of gods plan, proof of his power and punishment for human sins. This is an expression of Gods great ire with the world, Israeli chief rabbi Shlomo Amar said. Pandit Harikrishna Shastri, a priest of New Delhis Birla temple said the disaster was caused by a huge amount of pent-up man-made evil on earth and driven by the positions of the planets. Azizan Abdul Razak, a Muslim cleric and vice president of Malaysias Islamic opposition party, Parti Islam se-Malaysia, said the disaster was a reminder from god that he created the world and can destroy the world. Many faiths believe disasters foretell the end of time or the coming of a Messiah. Some Christians expect chaos and destruction as foretold in the Bibles final book, Revelations. Maria, a 32-year-old Jehovahs Witness in Cyprus who believes that the apocalypse is coming said people who once slammed the door in her face were stopping to listen. It is a sign of the last days, she said. But for others, such calamities can prompt a repudiation of faith. Secularist Martin Kettle wrote in Britains Guardian newspaper that the tsunamis should force people to ask if the God can exist that can do such things? or if there is no God, just nature. This poses no problem for the scientific belief system. Here, it says, was a mindless natural event which destroyed Muslim and Hindu alike, he wrote. A non-scientific belief system, especially one that is based on any kind of notion of a divine order, has some explaining to do, however. It is a question that clergy have to deal with nearly every day, not just at times of great catastrophe but when providing consolation for the daily sorrows of life, said US Rabbi Daniel Isaak, of Congregation Neveh Shalom, in Portland, Oregon. It is really difficult to believe in a God that not only creates a tsunami that kills 50 or 60 thousand people, but that puts birth defects in children, he said. In one modern view, he said, God does not interfere in the affairs of his creation. This is not something that God has done. The world has certain imperfections built into the natural order, and we have to live with them. The issue isnt Why did God do this to us? but How do we human beings care for one another? ---------------------- Waves of destruction wash away belief in God's benevolence http://www.smh.com.au/news/Opinion/Waves-of-destruction-wash-away-belief -in-Gods-benevolence/2004/12/29/1103996611542.html Sydney Morning Herald December 30, 2004 Compassion is the best response when humanity faces the problem of evil, writes Edward Spence. "Why did you do this to us, God? What did we do to upset you?" asked a woman in India this week, a heart-wrenching question asked in common these past few days by Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Christians. Nothing could have prepared us for what happened when the tsunami unleashed its terror. So we seek answers where answers are hard to come by, in either secular or sacred realms. Traditionally, the Judeo-Christian God, considered the most supreme and perfect being in the universe, has been ascribed the following necessary attributes: omniscience (all-knowing), omnipresence (present everywhere at all times and at once), omnipotence (almighty and powerful) and benevolence (all good and caring). How, then, did a God as powerful and benevolent as this allow such a thing to happen? If he is benevolent then he cannot also be omnipotent, for a God who has both these attributes would have wanted to, cared to and been able to prevent such a catastrophe. Perhaps, though omnipotent, He is not benevolent. That might explain why, although it was within His power to stop the tsunami, He simply chose not to: God has His own reasons and we are not to ask why. However, this answer will not suffice since by definition God is perfect. Being perfect, He must of necessity not merely be omnipotent but benevolent as well. A possible solution to this problem, traditionally known as the problem of evil, was offered by the heretical Manicheans, who believed not in one supreme being but two: one good God responsible for all the good things in life and another bad God, Satan, responsible for all the evil in the world. St Augustine, a follower in his early 20s, became an ardent critic of this doctrine, thinking a weak God powerless to defeat Satan was not worth worshipping. Philosophically, if God is perfect, then there can be only one perfect God, not two. In any case, evil is an imperfection and thus not a characteristic that can be attributed to God. If the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are at play and the deaths caused by the tsunami are a cosmic payback in the form of karma, does that offer a solution, albeit a philosophical one, to the problem of evil? I think not. For how can children, some as young as a few months, who had not yet lived their lives, deserve to be punished so cruelly for their past sins - especially when they have not been offered the promised divine opportunity to atone for those sins through another life? Even if solutions are forthcoming to these philosophical conundrums, humanely speaking they make little sense. Perhaps that is why some people remain sceptical about the presence of any divine providence ruling over us. A compromise solution, between secular scepticism and a psychological need for the sacred, was offered by the Greek philosopher Epicurus. Although believing in gods, he claimed these divine beings would not want to diminish their heavenly happiness by mingling in the sordid affairs of mortals. For Epicurus, the gods were not crazy but simply indifferent to both human joys and sorrows. When it comes to social or natural evils, we are all alone. But if natural disasters are merely random events caused by the uncaring and blind forces of nature, does this offer us any comfort or meaning in the face of the apocalyptic events on Boxing Day? Even if our heads offer us such solutions, our hearts refuse to follow. For the problem of evil is an existential problem that confronts our own individual mortality and vulnerability to unknown and unexpected disasters. Ultimately, heartfelt tears shed in earnest and with compassion, with offerings of charity for those who have suffered, are more meaningful than any theological and philosophical treatise on the problem of evil. Especially at Christmas when, according to the gospels, love is the single core message. Perhaps this is the essence, if the legend is true, of what God learnt from us when He walked and suffered as a man among us. Ultimately, the problem of evil confronts us not as a puzzle to be solved but as a mystery to be experienced. And as Jesus and Plato before him indicated, the meaning of the mystery of life can be found only by experiencing another great mystery - the mystery of love. Dr Edward Spence is a philosopher at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University. -------------------- Tremors of Doubt: What kind of God would allow a deadly tsunami? http://opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006097 BY DAVID B. HART Wall St. Journal. Friday, December 31, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST On Nov. 1, 1755, a great earthquake struck offshore of Lisbon. In that city alone, some 60,000 perished, first from the tremors, then from the massive tsunami that arrived half an hour later. Fires consumed much of what remained of the city. The tidal waves spread death along the coasts of Iberia and North Africa. Voltaire's "Po?me sur le d?sastre de Lisbonne" of the following year was an exquisitely savage--though sober--assault upon the theodicies prevalent in his time. For those who would argue that "all is good" and "all is necessary," that the universe is an elaborately calibrated harmony of pain and pleasure, or that this is the best of all possible worlds, Voltaire's scorn was boundless: By what calculus of universal good can one reckon the value of "infants crushed upon their mothers' breasts," the dying "sad inhabitants of desolate shores," the whole "fatal chaos of individual miseries"? Perhaps the most disturbing argument against submission to "the will of God" in human suffering--especially the suffering of children--was placed in the mouth of Ivan Karamazov by Dostoyevsky; but the evils Ivan enumerates are all acts of human cruelty, for which one can at least assign a clear culpability. Natural calamities usually seem a greater challenge to the certitudes of believers in a just and beneficent God than the sorrows induced by human iniquity. Considered dispassionately, though, man is part of the natural order, and his propensity for malice should be no less a scandal to the conscience of the metaphysical optimist than the most violent convulsions of the physical world. The same ancient question is apposite to the horrors of history and nature alike: Whence comes evil? And as Voltaire so elegantly apostrophizes, it is useless to invoke the balances of the great chain of being, for that chain is held in God's hand and he is not enchained. As a Christian, I cannot imagine any answer to the question of evil likely to satisfy an unbeliever; I can note, though, that--for all its urgency--Voltaire's version of the question is not in any proper sense "theological." The God of Voltaire's poem is a particular kind of "deist" God, who has shaped and ordered the world just as it now is, in accord with his exact intentions, and who presides over all its eventualities austerely attentive to a precise equilibrium between felicity and morality. Not that reckless Christians have not occasionally spoken in such terms; but this is not the Christian God. The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to "powers" and "principalities"--spiritual and terrestrial--alien to God. In the Gospel of John, especially, the incarnate God enters a world at once his own and yet hostile to him--"He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not"--and his appearance within "this cosmos" is both an act of judgment and a rescue of the beauties of creation from the torments of fallen nature. Whatever one makes of this story, it is no bland cosmic optimism. Yes, at the heart of the gospel is an ineradicable triumphalism, a conviction that the victory over evil and death has been won; but it is also a victory yet to come. As Paul says, all creation groans in anguished anticipation of the day when God's glory will transfigure all things. For now, we live amid a strife of darkness and light. When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering--when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children's--no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends. We are permitted only to hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms--knowing all the while that it is only charity that can sustain us against "fate," and that must do so until the end of days. Mr. Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, is the author of "The Beauty of the Infinite" (Eerdmans). ------------------ CHE: The Cultural and Historical Significance of the Tsunami Disaster The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.7 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i18/18a02602.htm By DAVID GLENN The terrible Lisbon earthquake of 1755 inspired poems, novels, and decades of theological debate. The Managua earthquake of 1972 is widely believed to have hastened the end of Anastasio Somoza Debayle's regime in Nicaragua. (Somoza diverted international relief aid into private bank accounts; citizens were not amused.) Last month's Indian Ocean tsunamis will almost certainly have long-term repercussions of their own. Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, a professor of earth science at Wesleyan University, explores the aftermath of trauma in his new book, Earthquakes in Human History: The Far-Reaching Effects of Seismic Disruptions (Princeton University Press), which he wrote with Donald Theodore Sanders, a freelance science writer. Q. You were born in Indonesia. Based on your studies of other earthquakes worldwide, how do you think this new disaster will shape the country's future? A. Events don't just stop short. The present situation that we have in Sumatra is very indicative of that. We are now terribly concerned about possibly as many as 100,000 people who might have died there. But we should also think about those who survived. There are many people who have settled along the coast to serve tourists...and have been able to invest, let's say, first in a bike, then a small motorbike, then maybe a small Toyota. And they were coming up in life from the lowermost poverty levels. Now, suddenly, within a few minutes, in an hour, all that is gone....It will take at least a decade for those people to reconstruct their lives. Q. In your book, you point out that after almost every major historical earthquake, people have argued that divine retribution was at work. A. Many people in Indonesia are well educated enough by now to no longer really believe in that. But there is still a strong religious undercurrent. So I'm very sure that a number of people there do believe that this is some kind of a punishment....That kind of fear will continue as long as there are aftershocks. And we know that after an earthquake like this, we'll have aftershocks for at least a year. So during this period, of course, people will go to churches and mosques and pray for liberation from continuing punishment, not realizing that this is a natural phenomenon that cannot be handled by whoever is upstairs. Q. It took weeks for people in the American colonies to learn about the Lisbon earthquake. Images of last week's tsunamis were transmitted immediately. A. It may mean that we also forget more quickly. We now see this, and we think, How terrible and how incredible, and We'll have to send some money. But like everything else in this world, things are going faster. So maybe in another month, other difficulties will attract the headlines. That's the kind of thing that I always find the most unfortunate. Over time I think we have become more shallow. -------------------- 1755 Lisbon earthquake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake 1755 Lisbon earthquake According to Paul Kiernan, expert of Lisbon history and Partner at the H&K law firm in Washington DC, the 1755 [5]Lisbon earthquake took place on [6]November 1, [7]1755 at 9:20 in the morning. It was one of the most destructive and deadly [8]earthquakes in history, killing over 100,000 people. The quake was followed by a [9]tsunami and fire, resulting in the near total destruction of Lisbon. The quake had a strong impact on [10]18th century society, including accelerating a political conflict in [11]Portugal and being the subject of the first scientific study of an earthquake's effect over a large area. Modern [12]geologists estimate that the Lisbon earthquake approached magnitude 9 on the [13]Richter scale. Contents [14]1 The earthquake [15]2 The day after [16]3 Social implications [17]4 The birth of seismology [18]5 External link [[19]edit] The earthquake Missing image Convento_do_Carmo_ruins_in_Lisbon.jpg The [20]ruins of the Carmo convent, which was destroyed in the Lisbon earthquake The earthquake struck in early morning of November 1, the [21]All Saints Day [22]Catholic holiday. Contemporary reports state that the earthquake lasted between three-and-a-half to six minutes, causing gigantic fissures five meters wide to rip apart the city centre. The survivors rushed to the open space of the docks for safety and watched as the water receded, revealing the sea floor, littered by lost cargo and old shipwrecks. Tens of minutes later an enormous [23]tsunami engulfed the harbour, and the city downtown. In the areas unaffected by the tsunami, fire quickly broke out, and flames raged for five days. Lisbon was not the only [24]Portuguese city affected by the catastrophe. All the south of the country, namely the [25]Algarve, was affected and destruction was generalized. The shockwaves of the earthquake were felt throughout [26]Europe and [27]North Africa. Tsunamis up to twenty meters in height swept the coast from North Africa to [28]Finland and across the [29]Atlantic to [30]Martinique and [31]Barbados. Of a population of 275,000, about 90,000 were killed. Another 10,000 were killed across the [32]Mediterranean in [33]Morocco. Eighty-five percent of Lisbon's buildings were destroyed, including its famous palaces and libraries. Several buildings which had suffered little damage due to the earthquake were destroyed by the fire. The brand new Opera House, opened only six months before, was burned to the ground. The Royal Palace stood just beside the [34]Tagus river in the modern square of Terreiro do Pa?o, and was destroyed by the earthquake and the tsunami. Inside, the 70,000-volume library and hundreds of works of art, including paintings by [35]Titian, [36]Rubens, and [37]Correggio, were lost. The precious royal archives concerning the exploration of the Atlantic and old documents also disappeared. The earthquake also destroyed the major churches of Lisbon, namely the [38]Cathedral of Santa Maria, and the [39]Basilicas of S?o Paulo, Santa Catarina, S?o Vincente de Fora, and the Misericordia. The ruins of the Carmo convent can still be visited today in the centre of the city. The Royal Hospital of All-Saints was consumed by fire and hundreds of patients burned to death. [[40]edit] The day after Due to a stroke of luck, the royal family escaped unharmed from the catastrophe. King [41]Joseph I of Portugal and the court had left the city, after attending mass at sunrise. The reason was the will of one of the princesses to have a holy day away from the city. The king was very fond of his four daughters and decided to oblige her wishes. After the catastrophe, Joseph I developed a fear of living within walls, and the court was accommodated in a huge complex of tents and pavilions in the hills of Ajuda, then in the outskirts of Lisbon. Like the king, the prime minister Sebasti?o de Melo (the [42]Marquis of Pombal) survived the earthquake. With the pragmatism that characterized his rule, the prime minister immediately started to organize the reconstruction. He was not paralysed with shock and is reported to have answered: Now? We bury the dead and take care of the living. His quick response put fire-fighters in the city to extinguish the flames, and sent in teams to remove the thousands of corpses, quelling fears that corpses would lead to an epidemic. As for the city itself, the prime minister and the king hired architects and engineers and less than a year later, Lisbon was already free from the debris and being reconstructed. The king was keen to have a new, perfectly ordained city. Big squares and rectilinear, large avenues were the mottos of the new Lisbon. At the time, somebody asked the Marquis of Pombal what was the need of such wide streets. The Marquis answered: one day they will be small... And indeed, the chaotic traffic of Lisbon reflects the wisdom of the reply. The new downtown, known nowadays as the Pombaline Downtown, is one of Lisbon's attractions. These buildings are also among the first seismic protected constructions in the world. Small wooden models were built for testing and the earthquake was simulated by marching troops around them. [[43]edit] Social implications The earthquake shook a lot more than a city and its buildings. Lisbon was the capital of a devout Catholic country, with a history of investments in the church and evangelisation of the colonies. Moreover, the catastrophe struck on a Catholic holiday and destroyed every important church. For the religious minds of the 18th century, this manifestation of the anger of God was difficult to explain. In the following days, priests roamed the city hanging people suspected of heresy on sight, blaming them for the disaster. Many contemporary writers, such as [44]Voltaire, mentioned the earthquake on their writings. The Lisbon earthquake made many people wonder about the existence of a God who permitted these events to happen. In the internal politics, the earthquake was also devastating. The prime minister was the favourite of the king, but the high nobility despised him as an upstart. The feelings were returned and a constant struggle for power and royal favour was taking place. After November 1, the competent response of the Marquis of Pombal severed the power of the aristocratic faction. Conflicts were constant and silent opposition to King Joseph I started to rise. This would end in an attempted murder of the king and the elimination of the powerful Tavora family. See [45]Tavora affair for the whole account. [[46]edit] The birth of [47]seismology The competent action of the prime minister was not limited to the practicalities of the reconstruction. The Marquis ordered a query to be sent to all [48]parishes of the country, regarding the earthquake and its effects. Questions included: * how long did the earthquake last? * how many aftershocks were felt? * what kind of damage was caused? * did animals behave strangely? (this question may sound strange but it anticipated studies by [49]Chinese seismologists in the 1960s) * what happened in the water holes? and many others. The answers are still archived in the Tower of Tombo, the national historical archive. Studying and cross-referencing the priests' accounts, modern scientists were able to reconstruct the event in a scientific perspective. Without the query designed by the [50]Marquis of Pombal, the first attempt of a seismological, objective description, this would be impossible. This is why the Marquis is regarded as the precursor of seismological sciences. The [51]geological causes of this earthquake and the seismic activity in the region of Lisbon are still being discussed by modern scientists. Since Lisbon is located in a centre of a [52]tectonic plate, there are no obvious reasons for the event. Portuguese geologists have suggested that the earthquake is related with the first steps of development of an [53]Atlantic [54]subduction zone. Note: Despite the fact that the prime minister Sebasti?o de Melo is mentioned here as [55]Marquis of Pombal, the title was only granted in [56]1770. See also: [57]List of earthquakes [[58]edit] External link * [59]Historical Depictions of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake (http://nisee.berkeley.edu/lisbon/) References 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbon 6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_1 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755 8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake 9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami 10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18th_century 11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portugal 12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologist 13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_scale 14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#The_earthquake 15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#The_day_after 16. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#Social_implications 17. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#The_birth_of_seismol ogy 18. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#External_link 19. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1755_Lisbon_earthquake&action= edit§ion=1 20. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruins 21. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Saints_Day 22. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic 23. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami 24. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portugal 25. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algarve 26. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe 27. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Africa 28. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland 29. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Ocean 30. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martinique 31. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbados 32. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_sea 33. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morocco 34. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagus 35. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titian 36. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubens 37. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_da_Correggio 38. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral 39. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica 40. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1755_Lisbon_earthquake&action= edit§ion=2 41. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_I_of_Portugal 42. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_of_Pombal 43. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1755_Lisbon_earthquake&action= edit§ion=3 44. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire 45. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavora_affair 46. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1755_Lisbon_earthquake&action= edit§ion=4 47. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismology 48. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parish 49. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China 50. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_of_Pombal 51. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology 52. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics 53. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Ocean 54. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subduction 55. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_of_Pombal 56. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1770 57. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes 58. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1755_Lisbon_earthquake&action= edit§ion=5 59. http://nisee.berkeley.edu/lisbon/ From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Jan 5 23:31:50 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 15:31:50 -0800 (GMT-08:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Where Was God During the Tsunami? Message-ID: <22876411.1104967910804.JavaMail.root@wamui06.slb.atl.earthlink.net> At the controls. -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker Sent: Jan 5, 2005 3:23 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org, "World Transhumanist Ass." , Transhuman Tech Subject: [Paleopsych] Where Was God During the Tsunami? Where Was God During the Tsunami? [There follows the Wikipedia article on the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Socially, it was the most important earthquake in history, with the possible exception of the alleged earthquake that destroyed the alleged Atlantis, since the Lisbon earthquake lead to widespread doubts about the goodness of the Creator if not his existence. [The Plague also had by far the most important social impact in Europe, though it killed the same third of the population in China and India as it did in Europe. In Europe, the medieval theological fiction of the "just price" came to differ not greatly from the market price over the decades. But after the plague struck, the labor supply was so diminished that its price should have gone way up. The fiction of "finding the law" in eternal principles like the "just price" ceased to be viable. Common law, the accretion of judicial decisions, allowed the fiction to be maintained. If the principles say this happens in case A and that happens in case B, a judge would decide what happens in case A 1/2. The judge would not make law; he would find law by filling it in. A major overhaul of the law, called a statute, was very rare, though there was some movement in that direction with, say, the Second Statute of Westminster of 12. (Exactly why the First Statute was not a true statute, I am not sure.) [Anyhow, after the Black Death, one of the first statutes was the Statute of Laborers, which (futilely) tried to prevent the price of labor from rising. The trend to the deliberate creation of law, and thus a new concept of law, really got going as the result of the Black Death. By 1776 in a world changed, not by another plague, but by the experience of 193 years of having to deal with changed circumstances (dating from Roanoke Island), Mr. Jefferson could speak of "the Right of the People to ... institute new Government, laying its Foundations on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." [In China and India, the Plague caused no such upheaval from law as eternal to (ultimately) law as fostering happiness, and no earthquake outside of Europe triggered such a widespread questioning of religion. [Why?] Guardian: How can religious people explain something like this? http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1380094,00.html How can religious people explain something like this? Earthquakes led 18th-century thinkers to ask questions we shy away from Martin Kettle Tuesday December 28, 2004 The modern era flatters itself that human beings can now know and shape almost everything about the world. But an event like the Indonesian earthquake exposes much of this for the hubris that it is. Perhaps we have talked so much about our civilization's potential to destroy the planet that we have forgotten that the planet also has an untamed ability to destroy civilisation too. Whatever else it has achieved, the Indian Ocean tsunami has at least reminded mankind of its enduring vulnerability in the face of nature. The scale of suffering that it has wreaked - 20,000 deaths and counting - shows that we share such dangers with our ancestors more fully than most of us realised. An entirely understandable reaction to such an event is to set one's face against any large questions that it may raise. But this week provides an unsought opportunity to consider the largest of all human implications of any major earthquake: its challenge to religion. A few days after the 9/11 attacks on New York, I had dinner with the Guardian's late columnist Hugo Young. We were still so close to the event itself that only one topic of conversation was possible. At one stage I asked Hugo how his Catholicism allowed him to explain such a terrible act. I'm afraid that's an easy one, he replied. We are all fallen beings, Hugo declared, and our life in this world is a vale of tears. So some human beings will always kill one another. The attack on New York should therefore be seen not as an act of God, but as an act of fallen humanity. Then he paused, and added: "But I admit I have much more difficulty with earthquakes." Earthquakes and the belief in the judgment of God are, indeed, very hard to reconcile. However, no religion that offers an explanation of the world can avoid making some kind of an attempt to fit the two together. And an immense earthquake like the one that took place off Sumatra on Sunday inevitably poses that challenge afresh in dramatic terms. There is, after all, only one big question to ask about an event of such destructive power as the one that has taken place this week: why did it happen? As with previous earthquakes, any explanation of this latest one poses us a sharp intellectual choice. Either there is an entirely natural explanation for it, or there is some other kind. Even the natural one is by no means easy to imagine, but it is at least wholly coherent. The tsunami took place, say the seismologists, because a massive tectonic rupture on the sea bed generated tremors through the ocean. These unimaginable forces sent their energy coursing across thousands of miles of water, resulting in death and destruction in a vast arc from Somalia to Indonesia. But what do world views that do not allow scientists undisputed authority have to say about such phenomena? Where do the creationists stand, for example? Such world views are more widespread, even now, than a secularised society such as ours sometimes prefers to think. For most of human history people have tried to explain earthquakes as acts of divine intervention and displeasure. Even as the churches collapsed around them in 1755, Lisbon's priests insisted on salvaging crucifixes and religious icons with which to ward off the catastrophe that would kill more than 50,000 of their fellow citizens. Others, though, began to draw different conclusions. Voltaire asked what kind of God could permit such a thing to occur. Did Lisbon really have so many more vices than London or Paris, he asked, that it should be punished in such a appalling and indiscriminate manner? Immanuel Kant was so amazed by what happened to Lisbon that he wrote three separate treatises on the problem of earthquakes. Our own society seems to be more squeamish about such things. The need for mutual respect between peoples and traditions of which the Queen spoke in her Christmas broadcast seems to require that we must all respect religions in equal measure, too. The government, indeed, is legislating to prevent expressions of religious hatred in ways that could put a cordon around the critical discussion of religion itself. Yet it is hard to think of any event in modern times that requires a more serious explanation from the forces of religion than this week's earthquake. Voltaire's 18th-century question to Christians - why Lisbon? - ought to generate a whole series of 21st-century equivalents for all the religions of the world. Certainly the giant waves generated by the quake made no attempt to differentiate between the religions of those whom it made its victims. Hindus were swept away in India, Muslims were carried off in Indonesia, Buddhists in Thailand. Visiting Christians and Jews received no special treatment either. This poses no problem for the scientific belief system. Here, it says, was a mindless natural event, which destroyed Muslim and Hindu alike. A non-scientific belief system, especially one that is based on any kind of notion of a divine order, has some explaining to do, however. What God sanctions an earthquake? What God protects against it? Why does the quake strike these places and these peoples and not others? What kind of order is it that decrees that a person who went to sleep by the edge of the ocean on Christmas night should wake up the next morning engulfed by the waves, struggling for life? From at least the time of Aristotle, intelligent people have struggled to make some sense of earthquakes. Earthquakes do not merely kill and destroy. They challenge human beings to explain the world order in which such apparently indiscriminate acts can occur. Europe in the 18th century had the intellectual curiosity and independence to ask and answer such questions. But can we say the same of 21st-century Europe? Or are we too cowed now to even ask if the God can exist that can do such things? [42]martin.kettle at guardian.co.uk -------------- To God, an age-old question The Telegraph - Calcutta : International http://www.telegraphindia.com/1041231/asp/foreign/story_4195540.asp A woman gestures as she cries on a street of Nagapattinam, some 350 km south of Chennai. (AFP) London, Dec. 30 (Reuters): It is one of the oldest, most profound questions, posed by some of the most learned minds of every faith throughout the course of human history. It was put eloquently this week by an old woman in a devastated village in southern Indias Tamil Nadu. Why did you do this to us, God? she wailed. What did we do to upset you? Perhaps no event in living memory has confronted the worlds great religions with such a basic test of faith as this weeks tsunami, which indiscriminately slaughtered Indonesian Muslims, Indians of all faiths, Thai and Sri Lankan Buddhists and tourists who were Christians and Jews. In temples, mosques, churches and synagogues across the globe, clerics are being called upon to explain: How could a benevolent God visit such horror on ordinary people? Traditionalists of diverse faiths described the destruction as part of gods plan, proof of his power and punishment for human sins. This is an expression of Gods great ire with the world, Israeli chief rabbi Shlomo Amar said. Pandit Harikrishna Shastri, a priest of New Delhis Birla temple said the disaster was caused by a huge amount of pent-up man-made evil on earth and driven by the positions of the planets. Azizan Abdul Razak, a Muslim cleric and vice president of Malaysias Islamic opposition party, Parti Islam se-Malaysia, said the disaster was a reminder from god that he created the world and can destroy the world. Many faiths believe disasters foretell the end of time or the coming of a Messiah. Some Christians expect chaos and destruction as foretold in the Bibles final book, Revelations. Maria, a 32-year-old Jehovahs Witness in Cyprus who believes that the apocalypse is coming said people who once slammed the door in her face were stopping to listen. It is a sign of the last days, she said. But for others, such calamities can prompt a repudiation of faith. Secularist Martin Kettle wrote in Britains Guardian newspaper that the tsunamis should force people to ask if the God can exist that can do such things? or if there is no God, just nature. This poses no problem for the scientific belief system. Here, it says, was a mindless natural event which destroyed Muslim and Hindu alike, he wrote. A non-scientific belief system, especially one that is based on any kind of notion of a divine order, has some explaining to do, however. It is a question that clergy have to deal with nearly every day, not just at times of great catastrophe but when providing consolation for the daily sorrows of life, said US Rabbi Daniel Isaak, of Congregation Neveh Shalom, in Portland, Oregon. It is really difficult to believe in a God that not only creates a tsunami that kills 50 or 60 thousand people, but that puts birth defects in children, he said. In one modern view, he said, God does not interfere in the affairs of his creation. This is not something that God has done. The world has certain imperfections built into the natural order, and we have to live with them. The issue isnt Why did God do this to us? but How do we human beings care for one another? ---------------------- Waves of destruction wash away belief in God's benevolence http://www.smh.com.au/news/Opinion/Waves-of-destruction-wash-away-belief -in-Gods-benevolence/2004/12/29/1103996611542.html Sydney Morning Herald December 30, 2004 Compassion is the best response when humanity faces the problem of evil, writes Edward Spence. "Why did you do this to us, God? What did we do to upset you?" asked a woman in India this week, a heart-wrenching question asked in common these past few days by Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Christians. Nothing could have prepared us for what happened when the tsunami unleashed its terror. So we seek answers where answers are hard to come by, in either secular or sacred realms. Traditionally, the Judeo-Christian God, considered the most supreme and perfect being in the universe, has been ascribed the following necessary attributes: omniscience (all-knowing), omnipresence (present everywhere at all times and at once), omnipotence (almighty and powerful) and benevolence (all good and caring). How, then, did a God as powerful and benevolent as this allow such a thing to happen? If he is benevolent then he cannot also be omnipotent, for a God who has both these attributes would have wanted to, cared to and been able to prevent such a catastrophe. Perhaps, though omnipotent, He is not benevolent. That might explain why, although it was within His power to stop the tsunami, He simply chose not to: God has His own reasons and we are not to ask why. However, this answer will not suffice since by definition God is perfect. Being perfect, He must of necessity not merely be omnipotent but benevolent as well. A possible solution to this problem, traditionally known as the problem of evil, was offered by the heretical Manicheans, who believed not in one supreme being but two: one good God responsible for all the good things in life and another bad God, Satan, responsible for all the evil in the world. St Augustine, a follower in his early 20s, became an ardent critic of this doctrine, thinking a weak God powerless to defeat Satan was not worth worshipping. Philosophically, if God is perfect, then there can be only one perfect God, not two. In any case, evil is an imperfection and thus not a characteristic that can be attributed to God. If the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are at play and the deaths caused by the tsunami are a cosmic payback in the form of karma, does that offer a solution, albeit a philosophical one, to the problem of evil? I think not. For how can children, some as young as a few months, who had not yet lived their lives, deserve to be punished so cruelly for their past sins - especially when they have not been offered the promised divine opportunity to atone for those sins through another life? Even if solutions are forthcoming to these philosophical conundrums, humanely speaking they make little sense. Perhaps that is why some people remain sceptical about the presence of any divine providence ruling over us. A compromise solution, between secular scepticism and a psychological need for the sacred, was offered by the Greek philosopher Epicurus. Although believing in gods, he claimed these divine beings would not want to diminish their heavenly happiness by mingling in the sordid affairs of mortals. For Epicurus, the gods were not crazy but simply indifferent to both human joys and sorrows. When it comes to social or natural evils, we are all alone. But if natural disasters are merely random events caused by the uncaring and blind forces of nature, does this offer us any comfort or meaning in the face of the apocalyptic events on Boxing Day? Even if our heads offer us such solutions, our hearts refuse to follow. For the problem of evil is an existential problem that confronts our own individual mortality and vulnerability to unknown and unexpected disasters. Ultimately, heartfelt tears shed in earnest and with compassion, with offerings of charity for those who have suffered, are more meaningful than any theological and philosophical treatise on the problem of evil. Especially at Christmas when, according to the gospels, love is the single core message. Perhaps this is the essence, if the legend is true, of what God learnt from us when He walked and suffered as a man among us. Ultimately, the problem of evil confronts us not as a puzzle to be solved but as a mystery to be experienced. And as Jesus and Plato before him indicated, the meaning of the mystery of life can be found only by experiencing another great mystery - the mystery of love. Dr Edward Spence is a philosopher at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University. -------------------- Tremors of Doubt: What kind of God would allow a deadly tsunami? http://opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006097 BY DAVID B. HART Wall St. Journal. Friday, December 31, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST On Nov. 1, 1755, a great earthquake struck offshore of Lisbon. In that city alone, some 60,000 perished, first from the tremors, then from the massive tsunami that arrived half an hour later. Fires consumed much of what remained of the city. The tidal waves spread death along the coasts of Iberia and North Africa. Voltaire's "Po?me sur le d?sastre de Lisbonne" of the following year was an exquisitely savage--though sober--assault upon the theodicies prevalent in his time. For those who would argue that "all is good" and "all is necessary," that the universe is an elaborately calibrated harmony of pain and pleasure, or that this is the best of all possible worlds, Voltaire's scorn was boundless: By what calculus of universal good can one reckon the value of "infants crushed upon their mothers' breasts," the dying "sad inhabitants of desolate shores," the whole "fatal chaos of individual miseries"? Perhaps the most disturbing argument against submission to "the will of God" in human suffering--especially the suffering of children--was placed in the mouth of Ivan Karamazov by Dostoyevsky; but the evils Ivan enumerates are all acts of human cruelty, for which one can at least assign a clear culpability. Natural calamities usually seem a greater challenge to the certitudes of believers in a just and beneficent God than the sorrows induced by human iniquity. Considered dispassionately, though, man is part of the natural order, and his propensity for malice should be no less a scandal to the conscience of the metaphysical optimist than the most violent convulsions of the physical world. The same ancient question is apposite to the horrors of history and nature alike: Whence comes evil? And as Voltaire so elegantly apostrophizes, it is useless to invoke the balances of the great chain of being, for that chain is held in God's hand and he is not enchained. As a Christian, I cannot imagine any answer to the question of evil likely to satisfy an unbeliever; I can note, though, that--for all its urgency--Voltaire's version of the question is not in any proper sense "theological." The God of Voltaire's poem is a particular kind of "deist" God, who has shaped and ordered the world just as it now is, in accord with his exact intentions, and who presides over all its eventualities austerely attentive to a precise equilibrium between felicity and morality. Not that reckless Christians have not occasionally spoken in such terms; but this is not the Christian God. The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to "powers" and "principalities"--spiritual and terrestrial--alien to God. In the Gospel of John, especially, the incarnate God enters a world at once his own and yet hostile to him--"He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not"--and his appearance within "this cosmos" is both an act of judgment and a rescue of the beauties of creation from the torments of fallen nature. Whatever one makes of this story, it is no bland cosmic optimism. Yes, at the heart of the gospel is an ineradicable triumphalism, a conviction that the victory over evil and death has been won; but it is also a victory yet to come. As Paul says, all creation groans in anguished anticipation of the day when God's glory will transfigure all things. For now, we live amid a strife of darkness and light. When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering--when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children's--no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends. We are permitted only to hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms--knowing all the while that it is only charity that can sustain us against "fate," and that must do so until the end of days. Mr. Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, is the author of "The Beauty of the Infinite" (Eerdmans). ------------------ CHE: The Cultural and Historical Significance of the Tsunami Disaster The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.7 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i18/18a02602.htm By DAVID GLENN The terrible Lisbon earthquake of 1755 inspired poems, novels, and decades of theological debate. The Managua earthquake of 1972 is widely believed to have hastened the end of Anastasio Somoza Debayle's regime in Nicaragua. (Somoza diverted international relief aid into private bank accounts; citizens were not amused.) Last month's Indian Ocean tsunamis will almost certainly have long-term repercussions of their own. Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, a professor of earth science at Wesleyan University, explores the aftermath of trauma in his new book, Earthquakes in Human History: The Far-Reaching Effects of Seismic Disruptions (Princeton University Press), which he wrote with Donald Theodore Sanders, a freelance science writer. Q. You were born in Indonesia. Based on your studies of other earthquakes worldwide, how do you think this new disaster will shape the country's future? A. Events don't just stop short. The present situation that we have in Sumatra is very indicative of that. We are now terribly concerned about possibly as many as 100,000 people who might have died there. But we should also think about those who survived. There are many people who have settled along the coast to serve tourists...and have been able to invest, let's say, first in a bike, then a small motorbike, then maybe a small Toyota. And they were coming up in life from the lowermost poverty levels. Now, suddenly, within a few minutes, in an hour, all that is gone....It will take at least a decade for those people to reconstruct their lives. Q. In your book, you point out that after almost every major historical earthquake, people have argued that divine retribution was at work. A. Many people in Indonesia are well educated enough by now to no longer really believe in that. But there is still a strong religious undercurrent. So I'm very sure that a number of people there do believe that this is some kind of a punishment....That kind of fear will continue as long as there are aftershocks. And we know that after an earthquake like this, we'll have aftershocks for at least a year. So during this period, of course, people will go to churches and mosques and pray for liberation from continuing punishment, not realizing that this is a natural phenomenon that cannot be handled by whoever is upstairs. Q. It took weeks for people in the American colonies to learn about the Lisbon earthquake. Images of last week's tsunamis were transmitted immediately. A. It may mean that we also forget more quickly. We now see this, and we think, How terrible and how incredible, and We'll have to send some money. But like everything else in this world, things are going faster. So maybe in another month, other difficulties will attract the headlines. That's the kind of thing that I always find the most unfortunate. Over time I think we have become more shallow. -------------------- 1755 Lisbon earthquake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake 1755 Lisbon earthquake According to Paul Kiernan, expert of Lisbon history and Partner at the H&K law firm in Washington DC, the 1755 [5]Lisbon earthquake took place on [6]November 1, [7]1755 at 9:20 in the morning. It was one of the most destructive and deadly [8]earthquakes in history, killing over 100,000 people. The quake was followed by a [9]tsunami and fire, resulting in the near total destruction of Lisbon. The quake had a strong impact on [10]18th century society, including accelerating a political conflict in [11]Portugal and being the subject of the first scientific study of an earthquake's effect over a large area. Modern [12]geologists estimate that the Lisbon earthquake approached magnitude 9 on the [13]Richter scale. Contents [14]1 The earthquake [15]2 The day after [16]3 Social implications [17]4 The birth of seismology [18]5 External link [[19]edit] The earthquake Missing image Convento_do_Carmo_ruins_in_Lisbon.jpg The [20]ruins of the Carmo convent, which was destroyed in the Lisbon earthquake The earthquake struck in early morning of November 1, the [21]All Saints Day [22]Catholic holiday. Contemporary reports state that the earthquake lasted between three-and-a-half to six minutes, causing gigantic fissures five meters wide to rip apart the city centre. The survivors rushed to the open space of the docks for safety and watched as the water receded, revealing the sea floor, littered by lost cargo and old shipwrecks. Tens of minutes later an enormous [23]tsunami engulfed the harbour, and the city downtown. In the areas unaffected by the tsunami, fire quickly broke out, and flames raged for five days. Lisbon was not the only [24]Portuguese city affected by the catastrophe. All the south of the country, namely the [25]Algarve, was affected and destruction was generalized. The shockwaves of the earthquake were felt throughout [26]Europe and [27]North Africa. Tsunamis up to twenty meters in height swept the coast from North Africa to [28]Finland and across the [29]Atlantic to [30]Martinique and [31]Barbados. Of a population of 275,000, about 90,000 were killed. Another 10,000 were killed across the [32]Mediterranean in [33]Morocco. Eighty-five percent of Lisbon's buildings were destroyed, including its famous palaces and libraries. Several buildings which had suffered little damage due to the earthquake were destroyed by the fire. The brand new Opera House, opened only six months before, was burned to the ground. The Royal Palace stood just beside the [34]Tagus river in the modern square of Terreiro do Pa?o, and was destroyed by the earthquake and the tsunami. Inside, the 70,000-volume library and hundreds of works of art, including paintings by [35]Titian, [36]Rubens, and [37]Correggio, were lost. The precious royal archives concerning the exploration of the Atlantic and old documents also disappeared. The earthquake also destroyed the major churches of Lisbon, namely the [38]Cathedral of Santa Maria, and the [39]Basilicas of S?o Paulo, Santa Catarina, S?o Vincente de Fora, and the Misericordia. The ruins of the Carmo convent can still be visited today in the centre of the city. The Royal Hospital of All-Saints was consumed by fire and hundreds of patients burned to death. [[40]edit] The day after Due to a stroke of luck, the royal family escaped unharmed from the catastrophe. King [41]Joseph I of Portugal and the court had left the city, after attending mass at sunrise. The reason was the will of one of the princesses to have a holy day away from the city. The king was very fond of his four daughters and decided to oblige her wishes. After the catastrophe, Joseph I developed a fear of living within walls, and the court was accommodated in a huge complex of tents and pavilions in the hills of Ajuda, then in the outskirts of Lisbon. Like the king, the prime minister Sebasti?o de Melo (the [42]Marquis of Pombal) survived the earthquake. With the pragmatism that characterized his rule, the prime minister immediately started to organize the reconstruction. He was not paralysed with shock and is reported to have answered: Now? We bury the dead and take care of the living. His quick response put fire-fighters in the city to extinguish the flames, and sent in teams to remove the thousands of corpses, quelling fears that corpses would lead to an epidemic. As for the city itself, the prime minister and the king hired architects and engineers and less than a year later, Lisbon was already free from the debris and being reconstructed. The king was keen to have a new, perfectly ordained city. Big squares and rectilinear, large avenues were the mottos of the new Lisbon. At the time, somebody asked the Marquis of Pombal what was the need of such wide streets. The Marquis answered: one day they will be small... And indeed, the chaotic traffic of Lisbon reflects the wisdom of the reply. The new downtown, known nowadays as the Pombaline Downtown, is one of Lisbon's attractions. These buildings are also among the first seismic protected constructions in the world. Small wooden models were built for testing and the earthquake was simulated by marching troops around them. [[43]edit] Social implications The earthquake shook a lot more than a city and its buildings. Lisbon was the capital of a devout Catholic country, with a history of investments in the church and evangelisation of the colonies. Moreover, the catastrophe struck on a Catholic holiday and destroyed every important church. For the religious minds of the 18th century, this manifestation of the anger of God was difficult to explain. In the following days, priests roamed the city hanging people suspected of heresy on sight, blaming them for the disaster. Many contemporary writers, such as [44]Voltaire, mentioned the earthquake on their writings. The Lisbon earthquake made many people wonder about the existence of a God who permitted these events to happen. In the internal politics, the earthquake was also devastating. The prime minister was the favourite of the king, but the high nobility despised him as an upstart. The feelings were returned and a constant struggle for power and royal favour was taking place. After November 1, the competent response of the Marquis of Pombal severed the power of the aristocratic faction. Conflicts were constant and silent opposition to King Joseph I started to rise. This would end in an attempted murder of the king and the elimination of the powerful Tavora family. See [45]Tavora affair for the whole account. [[46]edit] The birth of [47]seismology The competent action of the prime minister was not limited to the practicalities of the reconstruction. The Marquis ordered a query to be sent to all [48]parishes of the country, regarding the earthquake and its effects. Questions included: * how long did the earthquake last? * how many aftershocks were felt? * what kind of damage was caused? * did animals behave strangely? (this question may sound strange but it anticipated studies by [49]Chinese seismologists in the 1960s) * what happened in the water holes? and many others. The answers are still archived in the Tower of Tombo, the national historical archive. Studying and cross-referencing the priests' accounts, modern scientists were able to reconstruct the event in a scientific perspective. Without the query designed by the [50]Marquis of Pombal, the first attempt of a seismological, objective description, this would be impossible. This is why the Marquis is regarded as the precursor of seismological sciences. The [51]geological causes of this earthquake and the seismic activity in the region of Lisbon are still being discussed by modern scientists. Since Lisbon is located in a centre of a [52]tectonic plate, there are no obvious reasons for the event. Portuguese geologists have suggested that the earthquake is related with the first steps of development of an [53]Atlantic [54]subduction zone. Note: Despite the fact that the prime minister Sebasti?o de Melo is mentioned here as [55]Marquis of Pombal, the title was only granted in [56]1770. See also: [57]List of earthquakes [[58]edit] External link * [59]Historical Depictions of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake (http://nisee.berkeley.edu/lisbon/) References 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbon 6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_1 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755 8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake 9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami 10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18th_century 11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portugal 12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologist 13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_scale 14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#The_earthquake 15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#The_day_after 16. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#Social_implications 17. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#The_birth_of_seismol ogy 18. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#External_link 19. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1755_Lisbon_earthquake&action= edit?ion=1 20. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruins 21. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Saints_Day 22. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic 23. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami 24. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portugal 25. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algarve 26. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe 27. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Africa 28. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland 29. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Ocean 30. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martinique 31. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbados 32. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_sea 33. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morocco 34. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagus 35. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titian 36. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubens 37. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_da_Correggio 38. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral 39. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica 40. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1755_Lisbon_earthquake&action= edit?ion=2 41. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_I_of_Portugal 42. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_of_Pombal 43. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1755_Lisbon_earthquake&action= edit?ion=3 44. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire 45. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavora_affair 46. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1755_Lisbon_earthquake&action= edit?ion=4 47. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismology 48. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parish 49. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China 50. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_of_Pombal 51. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology 52. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics 53. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Ocean 54. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subduction 55. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_of_Pombal 56. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1770 57. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes 58. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1755_Lisbon_earthquake&action= edit?ion=5 59. http://nisee.berkeley.edu/lisbon/ From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Thu Jan 6 00:52:41 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2005 17:52:41 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Where Was God During the Tsunami? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <41DC8BD9.6070701@solution-consulting.com> Frank, thank you, an invigorating and challenging set of essays. Nice selection. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > Where Was God During the Tsunami? > From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Thu Jan 6 00:57:59 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2005 17:57:59 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say In-Reply-To: <1104933850.41dbf3daaae79@rauh.net> References: <01C4F272.CD4FD050.shovland@mindspring.com> <1104933850.41dbf3daaae79@rauh.net> Message-ID: <41DC8D17.60309@solution-consulting.com> It would be logical to simply raise the retirement age. For me, it is now 66 years; why not make it 67 and finally 68? Push the concept further: With 68 as the early retirement age, and 70 as the regular retirement age, the cliff social security will run off in 30 years disappears. People with medical need to retire should be allowed something earlier, like roofers and cement workers (in a previous incarnation, I was in construction). Unfortunately we have made social security an entitlement, not a welfare system, which it actually is (none of my money will come back to me, it has been spend on bureaucratic boondoggle and turned into T-bills). Christian Rauh (from webmail) wrote: >Quoting Steve Hovland : > > >>Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) >> >> > >And live longer. ;-) > >Christian > > > >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >> >>-----Original Message----- >>From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 1:22 PM >>To: World Transhumanist Ass.; paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life >>Spans, Critics Say >> >>Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say >>NYT December 31, 2004 >>By ROBERT PEAR >> >>WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 - When the federal government assesses >>the long-term financial problems of Social Security, it >>assumes that increases in life expectancy will be slow and >>measured. But many population experts say they believe that >>Americans' life expectancy will increase rapidly in the >>21st century, making the program's financial problems even >>worse. >> >>President Bush and Congress are preparing for a debate over >>the future of Social Security, whose solvency depends not >>only on factors including productivity, inflation and birth >>rates but also on how long beneficiaries will be living. >> >>Life expectancy at birth increased by 30 years in the last >>century, and many independent demographers, citing the >>promise of biomedical research and the experience of some >>other industrialized countries, predict significant >>increases in this century. The Social Security >>Administration foresees a much slower rise. >> >>"Life expectancy will make a very big difference in the >>fiscal viability of Social Security, but the agency's >>projections of longevity appear too conservative," said >>Prof. Samuel H. Preston of the University of Pennsylvania, >>one of the nation's leading demographers. >> >>Dr. Preston said the agency assumed that "past advances in >>life expectancy are unrepeatable, even though the medical >>research establishment is routinely producing important >>breakthroughs that reduce the incidence or fatality of a >>variety of diseases." >> >>Richard M. Suzman, associate director of the National >>Institute on Aging, a unit of the National Institutes of >>Health, said: "There is a long history of government >>actuaries and statisticians underestimating future gains in >>life expectancy. The United States is unfortunately well >>below the outer limits of life expectancy. Other countries >>are doing much better. That gives us an indication of the >>potential room for improvement." >> >>Tables published by the government's National Center for >>Health Statistics show that life expectancy at birth was >>47.3 years in 1900, rose to 68.2 by 1950 and reached 77.3 >>in 2002. The latest annual report of the Social Security >>trustees projects that life expectancy will increase just >>six years in the next seven decades, to 83 in 2075. A >>separate set of projections, by the Census Bureau, shows >>more rapid growth. >> >>Social Security says male life expectancy at birth will be >>81.2 years in 2075. The Census Bureau, using different >>methods and assumptions, says that level will be reached >>much earlier, in 2050. >> >>Likewise, Social Security says female life expectancy will >>reach 85 years by 2075, while the Census Bureau says it >>will exceed 86 in 2050. >> >>For the American population as a whole in the last century, >>most of the gains in life expectancy at birth occurred from >>1900 to 1950. But most of the gains in life expectancy >>among people who had already reached age 65 were seen after >>1950. >> >>Last year an expert panel advising the Social Security >>Administration found "an unprecedented reduction in certain >>forms of old-age mortality, especially cardiovascular >>disease, beginning in the late 1960's." >> >>The panel said Social Security was wrong to assume a slower >>decline in mortality rates among the elderly in the next 75 >>years. Rather, it said, the government should assume that >>mortality will continue to decline as it did from 1950 to >>2000. >> >>Ronald D. Lee, a professor of demography and economics at >>the University of California, Berkeley, said: "I foresee >>death rates of the elderly in the United States continuing >>to decline at the same pace they have declined since 1950. >>In fact, there is evidence that the pace of decline in >>other developed countries has accelerated in recent >>decades." >> >>The Social Security Administration defends its assumptions. >> >> >>"There is a wide range of opinion among experts on this >>issue," said Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for the agency. "In >>the last few years, we've moved a bit closer to the >>position of other agencies and demographers." >> >>Some experts say other factors could ease the effects of >>longer life on Social Security's solvency. >> >>"The higher costs associated with longer life expectancy >>could be offset in several ways that do not involve a >>reduction of Social Security benefits," said John R. >>Wilmoth, another demographer at Berkeley. >> >>People who live longer could work longer, for instance. Or >>the size of the working-age population could increase >>because of higher birth rates or a larger number of >>immigrants. >> >>Further, some population experts foresee developments that >>could wind up buttressing the forecasts of the Social >>Security Administration. S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of >>epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of >>Illinois at Chicago, said the era of large increases in >>life expectancy might be nearing an end, with the spread of >>obesity and the possible re-emergence of deadly infectious >>diseases. >> >>"There are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, >>vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic >>engineering available today with the capacity to repeat the >>gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the 20th >>century" with antibiotics, vaccinations and improvements in >>sanitation, Dr. Olshansky said. >> >>Indeed, he said, without new measures on obesity and >>communicable diseases, "human life expectancy could decline >>in the 21st century." >> >>On the other hand, said James W. Vaupel, director of the >>program on population, policy and aging at Duke University, >>life expectancy in the United States is far from any >>natural or biological limits. >> >>"Experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is >>approaching a ceiling," Dr. Vaupel said. "These experts >>have repeatedly been proved wrong." >> >>At various times, different countries have had the highest >>reported at-birth life expectancy. But with "remarkable >>regularity" over the last 160 years, Dr. Vaupel said, life >>expectancy in the leading country has increased an average >>of three months a year, or 2.5 years a decade. >> >>David A. Wise, a Harvard professor who is director of the >>program on aging at the private, nonpartisan National >>Bureau of Economic Research, said: "Almost all demographers >>outside the government think that death rates will continue >>to fall faster than the decline incorporated in the >>projections of the Social Security Administration. Most >>think life expectancy will increase more rapidly than >>Social Security says. That's not good for the finances of >>Social Security." >> >>Nor do economists generally foresee a reversal of the trend >>toward early retirement. Though researchers have observed a >>significant decline in chronic disability among the >>elderly, most workers retire and begin drawing Social >>Security benefits before they reach 65. >> >>Labor unions and some politicians have resisted efforts to >>raise the eligibility age for full benefits. Such >>proposals, they say, penalize workers who have spent their >>lives in physically demanding jobs. >> >>Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement >>Research at Boston College, said, "Increases in life >>expectancy at 65 have been a major contributor to the >>rising cost of Social Security." Future increases could >>strain pension plans and individual retirement savings, as >>well as Social Security, she said. >> >>"The United States is the richest major country in the >>world in terms of per capita gross domestic product," Dr. >>Munnell said. "And life expectancy is clearly associated >>with income." >> >>She added, though, that "if you focus on life expectancy at >>age 65, the U.S. falls in the middle of the pack." >> >>One reason, she said, is that "the United States is not so >>rich relative to its peers if you look at the average >>income going to the lowest 40 percent of the population." >> >>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/politics/31benefit.html >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> > > > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From waluk at earthlink.net Thu Jan 6 03:20:25 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Geraldine Reinhardt) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 19:20:25 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say References: <200501051725.j05HPQ008712@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <025201c4f39e$ab344b90$1503f604@S0027397558> If a scholar does excellent work then the fruits of his labor should continue until he can no longer function with either a pen or keyboard. Ernst Mayr, now over 100 years old, is such a person. I recently came upon information that he and Jared Diamond have authored a new text: The Birds of Northern Melanesia: Speciation, Ecology, & Biogeography by Ernst Mayr, Jared Diamond, H. Douglas Pratt. Gerry Reinhart-Waller ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ross Buck" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 9:11 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans,Critics Say >I understand that Dewey did his best work in his 80's, >but of course his job > did not depend all that much on hand-eye > coordination! > > Cheers, Ross > > Ross Buck, Ph. D. > Professor of Communication Sciences > and Psychology > Communication Sciences U-1085 > University of Connecticut > Storrs, CT 06269-1085 > 860-486-4494 > fax 860-486-5422 > buck at uconnvm.uconn.edu > http://www.coms.uconn.edu/docs/people/faculty/rbuck/index.htm > > > "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as > when they do it from > religious conviction." > > -- Blaise Pascal > > > -----Original Message----- > From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org > [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org] On Behalf > Of Geraldine Reinhardt > Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 9:14 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future > LifeSpans, Critics Say > > Today on my way home I as usual took my designated > exit > off the freeway. There parked alongside the shoulder > of road was an elderly gentleman in a fancy black > sedan. Usually I never stop but this person looked a > bit bewildered.....actually confused, so I braked and > asked if he needed help. > > Turns out that he was on his way to a medical > appointment, an eye doctor to be exact, and he needed > to know which direction for Pasteur Drive. He then > said he was from San Francisco, a doctor himself, > and > had become very confused trying to decipher his > secretary's directions. He also mentioned he was > recently widowed and was seeing his wife's > ophthalmologist because she had spoken so highly of > his > ability with glaucoma procedures. > > Now I knew very well where Pasteur Drive was (it was > two exits beyond my apartment turn off) but I wasn't > certain if the road was clearly marked. I then asked > the gentleman if he would like to follow me and I'd > lead him to his turn off. How happy he became! I > then > asked the name of the ophthalmologist he had his > appointment with. "Dr. Rubin.....only I know I'll not > make it in time". > > "Amazing", I replied. "He's the eye doctor for both > my husband and me"! "But.... I don't know if I'm > continuing....he alarmed me during my last > appointment > when he was talking about doing corrective eye > surgery". > > "How old do you suppose Dr. Rubin is", asked the > stranger. > > Not wishing to age Dr. Rubin more than his years, I > replied: "Maybe in his late 50's or somewhere in his > 60's". I knew Rubin had to be hitting retirement > age. > > "Oh" replied the doctor from San Francisco, "I > performed capillary surgery until I was 73 and then > decided I needed to give it up". "Yet my hands > didn't > falter and I was always on top of each case." > > As I drove to Pasteur Drive I thought about > comparisons > between repairing eye stuff and capillary > surgery....were they similar? For me, the person who > needs to operate on my eyes should be young, bright > and > brilliant. Yet why should eyes be that different > from > capillaries? > > Could be that we "see with our eyes". What if we > "looked" with our hearts? > > Either way, when is a doctor too old to assume his > role > of physician? I'd say that if many of us can > continue > with our calling, doctors need to do the same. > But....I'd like my eye-surgeon to retain a younger > partner. > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > Independent Scholar > http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Steve Hovland" > To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" > > Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 3:33 PM > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > > >> Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, >> Critics Say >> NYT December 31, 2004 >> By ROBERT PEAR > > --snip-- > > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From waluk at earthlink.net Thu Jan 6 03:25:45 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Geraldine Reinhardt) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 19:25:45 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say References: <01C4F272.CD4FD050.shovland@mindspring.com><1104933850.41dbf3daaae79@rauh.net> <41DC8D17.60309@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <026901c4f39f$6ada2f50$1503f604@S0027397558> I'm very excited about thoughts of making the retirement age 70 or even 75. Then possibly career decisions will be made with care. So often a teenager views his/her life in the short term.....join the military and retire and 38. Sitting around and watching the grass grow is very unfulfilling not to mention boring. Even people with medical needs can find a way to be employed (if only on the computer). Gerry Reinhart-Waller ----- Original Message ----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. To: The new improved paleopsych list Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 4:57 PM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say It would be logical to simply raise the retirement age. For me, it is now 66 years; why not make it 67 and finally 68? Push the concept further: With 68 as the early retirement age, and 70 as the regular retirement age, the cliff social security will run off in 30 years disappears. People with medical need to retire should be allowed something earlier, like roofers and cement workers (in a previous incarnation, I was in construction). Unfortunately we have made social security an entitlement, not a welfare system, which it actually is (none of my money will come back to me, it has been spend on bureaucratic boondoggle and turned into T-bills). Christian Rauh (from webmail) wrote: Quoting Steve Hovland : Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) And live longer. ;-) Christian Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 1:22 PM To: World Transhumanist Ass.; paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say NYT December 31, 2004 By ROBERT PEAR WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 - When the federal government assesses the long-term financial problems of Social Security, it assumes that increases in life expectancy will be slow and measured. But many population experts say they believe that Americans' life expectancy will increase rapidly in the 21st century, making the program's financial problems even worse. President Bush and Congress are preparing for a debate over the future of Social Security, whose solvency depends not only on factors including productivity, inflation and birth rates but also on how long beneficiaries will be living. Life expectancy at birth increased by 30 years in the last century, and many independent demographers, citing the promise of biomedical research and the experience of some other industrialized countries, predict significant increases in this century. The Social Security Administration foresees a much slower rise. "Life expectancy will make a very big difference in the fiscal viability of Social Security, but the agency's projections of longevity appear too conservative," said Prof. Samuel H. Preston of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the nation's leading demographers. Dr. Preston said the agency assumed that "past advances in life expectancy are unrepeatable, even though the medical research establishment is routinely producing important breakthroughs that reduce the incidence or fatality of a variety of diseases." Richard M. Suzman, associate director of the National Institute on Aging, a unit of the National Institutes of Health, said: "There is a long history of government actuaries and statisticians underestimating future gains in life expectancy. The United States is unfortunately well below the outer limits of life expectancy. Other countries are doing much better. That gives us an indication of the potential room for improvement." Tables published by the government's National Center for Health Statistics show that life expectancy at birth was 47.3 years in 1900, rose to 68.2 by 1950 and reached 77.3 in 2002. The latest annual report of the Social Security trustees projects that life expectancy will increase just six years in the next seven decades, to 83 in 2075. A separate set of projections, by the Census Bureau, shows more rapid growth. Social Security says male life expectancy at birth will be 81.2 years in 2075. The Census Bureau, using different methods and assumptions, says that level will be reached much earlier, in 2050. Likewise, Social Security says female life expectancy will reach 85 years by 2075, while the Census Bureau says it will exceed 86 in 2050. For the American population as a whole in the last century, most of the gains in life expectancy at birth occurred from 1900 to 1950. But most of the gains in life expectancy among people who had already reached age 65 were seen after 1950. Last year an expert panel advising the Social Security Administration found "an unprecedented reduction in certain forms of old-age mortality, especially cardiovascular disease, beginning in the late 1960's." The panel said Social Security was wrong to assume a slower decline in mortality rates among the elderly in the next 75 years. Rather, it said, the government should assume that mortality will continue to decline as it did from 1950 to 2000. Ronald D. Lee, a professor of demography and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, said: "I foresee death rates of the elderly in the United States continuing to decline at the same pace they have declined since 1950. In fact, there is evidence that the pace of decline in other developed countries has accelerated in recent decades." The Social Security Administration defends its assumptions. "There is a wide range of opinion among experts on this issue," said Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for the agency. "In the last few years, we've moved a bit closer to the position of other agencies and demographers." Some experts say other factors could ease the effects of longer life on Social Security's solvency. "The higher costs associated with longer life expectancy could be offset in several ways that do not involve a reduction of Social Security benefits," said John R. Wilmoth, another demographer at Berkeley. People who live longer could work longer, for instance. Or the size of the working-age population could increase because of higher birth rates or a larger number of immigrants. Further, some population experts foresee developments that could wind up buttressing the forecasts of the Social Security Administration. S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the era of large increases in life expectancy might be nearing an end, with the spread of obesity and the possible re-emergence of deadly infectious diseases. "There are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic engineering available today with the capacity to repeat the gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the 20th century" with antibiotics, vaccinations and improvements in sanitation, Dr. Olshansky said. Indeed, he said, without new measures on obesity and communicable diseases, "human life expectancy could decline in the 21st century." On the other hand, said James W. Vaupel, director of the program on population, policy and aging at Duke University, life expectancy in the United States is far from any natural or biological limits. "Experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is approaching a ceiling," Dr. Vaupel said. "These experts have repeatedly been proved wrong." At various times, different countries have had the highest reported at-birth life expectancy. But with "remarkable regularity" over the last 160 years, Dr. Vaupel said, life expectancy in the leading country has increased an average of three months a year, or 2.5 years a decade. David A. Wise, a Harvard professor who is director of the program on aging at the private, nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research, said: "Almost all demographers outside the government think that death rates will continue to fall faster than the decline incorporated in the projections of the Social Security Administration. Most think life expectancy will increase more rapidly than Social Security says. That's not good for the finances of Social Security." Nor do economists generally foresee a reversal of the trend toward early retirement. Though researchers have observed a significant decline in chronic disability among the elderly, most workers retire and begin drawing Social Security benefits before they reach 65. Labor unions and some politicians have resisted efforts to raise the eligibility age for full benefits. Such proposals, they say, penalize workers who have spent their lives in physically demanding jobs. Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, said, "Increases in life expectancy at 65 have been a major contributor to the rising cost of Social Security." Future increases could strain pension plans and individual retirement savings, as well as Social Security, she said. "The United States is the richest major country in the world in terms of per capita gross domestic product," Dr. Munnell said. "And life expectancy is clearly associated with income." She added, though, that "if you focus on life expectancy at age 65, the U.S. falls in the middle of the pack." One reason, she said, is that "the United States is not so rich relative to its peers if you look at the average income going to the lowest 40 percent of the population." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/politics/31benefit.html _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Thu Jan 6 04:58:03 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2005 21:58:03 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say In-Reply-To: <026901c4f39f$6ada2f50$1503f604@S0027397558> References: <01C4F272.CD4FD050.shovland@mindspring.com><1104933850.41dbf3daaae79@rauh.net> <41DC8D17.60309@solution-consulting.com> <026901c4f39f$6ada2f50$1503f604@S0027397558> Message-ID: <41DCC55B.3010700@solution-consulting.com> Gerry's excitment about raising the retirement age is something I wish we can clone onto vast numbers. We have to create an atmosphere where people do love their work, find meaning in it, and feel valued and appreciated by society as they do work. Social psychologists might be able to craft messages about fulfillment from work and retirement being boring. LJ Geraldine Reinhardt wrote: > I'm very excited about thoughts of making the retirement age 70 or > even 75. Then possibly career decisions will be made with care. So > often a teenager views his/her life in the short term.....join the > military and retire and 38. > Sitting around and watching the grass grow is very unfulfilling not to > mention boring. Even people with medical needs can find a way to be > employed (if only on the computer). > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 4:57 PM > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future > LifeSpans, Critics Say > > It would be logical to simply raise the retirement age. For me, it is > now 66 years; why not make it 67 and finally 68? Push the concept > further: With 68 as the early retirement age, and 70 as the regular > retirement age, the cliff social security will run off in 30 years > disappears. > > People with medical need to retire should be allowed something > earlier, like roofers and cement workers (in a previous incarnation, I > was in construction). Unfortunately we have made social security an > entitlement, not a welfare system, which it actually is (none of my > money will come back to me, it has been spend on bureaucratic > boondoggle and turned into T-bills). > > Christian Rauh (from webmail) wrote: > >>Quoting Steve Hovland : >> >> >>>Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) >>> >>> >> >>And live longer. ;-) >> >>Christian >> >> >> >>>Steve Hovland >>>www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>>-----Original Message----- >>>From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>>Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 1:22 PM >>>To: World Transhumanist Ass.; paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life >>>Spans, Critics Say >>> >>>Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say >>>NYT December 31, 2004 >>>By ROBERT PEAR >>> >>>WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 - When the federal government assesses >>>the long-term financial problems of Social Security, it >>>assumes that increases in life expectancy will be slow and >>>measured. But many population experts say they believe that >>>Americans' life expectancy will increase rapidly in the >>>21st century, making the program's financial problems even >>>worse. >>> >>>President Bush and Congress are preparing for a debate over >>>the future of Social Security, whose solvency depends not >>>only on factors including productivity, inflation and birth >>>rates but also on how long beneficiaries will be living. >>> >>>Life expectancy at birth increased by 30 years in the last >>>century, and many independent demographers, citing the >>>promise of biomedical research and the experience of some >>>other industrialized countries, predict significant >>>increases in this century. The Social Security >>>Administration foresees a much slower rise. >>> >>>"Life expectancy will make a very big difference in the >>>fiscal viability of Social Security, but the agency's >>>projections of longevity appear too conservative," said >>>Prof. Samuel H. Preston of the University of Pennsylvania, >>>one of the nation's leading demographers. >>> >>>Dr. Preston said the agency assumed that "past advances in >>>life expectancy are unrepeatable, even though the medical >>>research establishment is routinely producing important >>>breakthroughs that reduce the incidence or fatality of a >>>variety of diseases." >>> >>>Richard M. Suzman, associate director of the National >>>Institute on Aging, a unit of the National Institutes of >>>Health, said: "There is a long history of government >>>actuaries and statisticians underestimating future gains in >>>life expectancy. The United States is unfortunately well >>>below the outer limits of life expectancy. Other countries >>>are doing much better. That gives us an indication of the >>>potential room for improvement." >>> >>>Tables published by the government's National Center for >>>Health Statistics show that life expectancy at birth was >>>47.3 years in 1900, rose to 68.2 by 1950 and reached 77.3 >>>in 2002. The latest annual report of the Social Security >>>trustees projects that life expectancy will increase just >>>six years in the next seven decades, to 83 in 2075. A >>>separate set of projections, by the Census Bureau, shows >>>more rapid growth. >>> >>>Social Security says male life expectancy at birth will be >>>81.2 years in 2075. The Census Bureau, using different >>>methods and assumptions, says that level will be reached >>>much earlier, in 2050. >>> >>>Likewise, Social Security says female life expectancy will >>>reach 85 years by 2075, while the Census Bureau says it >>>will exceed 86 in 2050. >>> >>>For the American population as a whole in the last century, >>>most of the gains in life expectancy at birth occurred from >>>1900 to 1950. But most of the gains in life expectancy >>>among people who had already reached age 65 were seen after >>>1950. >>> >>>Last year an expert panel advising the Social Security >>>Administration found "an unprecedented reduction in certain >>>forms of old-age mortality, especially cardiovascular >>>disease, beginning in the late 1960's." >>> >>>The panel said Social Security was wrong to assume a slower >>>decline in mortality rates among the elderly in the next 75 >>>years. Rather, it said, the government should assume that >>>mortality will continue to decline as it did from 1950 to >>>2000. >>> >>>Ronald D. Lee, a professor of demography and economics at >>>the University of California, Berkeley, said: "I foresee >>>death rates of the elderly in the United States continuing >>>to decline at the same pace they have declined since 1950. >>>In fact, there is evidence that the pace of decline in >>>other developed countries has accelerated in recent >>>decades." >>> >>>The Social Security Administration defends its assumptions. >>> >>> >>>"There is a wide range of opinion among experts on this >>>issue," said Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for the agency. "In >>>the last few years, we've moved a bit closer to the >>>position of other agencies and demographers." >>> >>>Some experts say other factors could ease the effects of >>>longer life on Social Security's solvency. >>> >>>"The higher costs associated with longer life expectancy >>>could be offset in several ways that do not involve a >>>reduction of Social Security benefits," said John R. >>>Wilmoth, another demographer at Berkeley. >>> >>>People who live longer could work longer, for instance. Or >>>the size of the working-age population could increase >>>because of higher birth rates or a larger number of >>>immigrants. >>> >>>Further, some population experts foresee developments that >>>could wind up buttressing the forecasts of the Social >>>Security Administration. S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of >>>epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of >>>Illinois at Chicago, said the era of large increases in >>>life expectancy might be nearing an end, with the spread of >>>obesity and the possible re-emergence of deadly infectious >>>diseases. >>> >>>"There are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, >>>vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic >>>engineering available today with the capacity to repeat the >>>gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the 20th >>>century" with antibiotics, vaccinations and improvements in >>>sanitation, Dr. Olshansky said. >>> >>>Indeed, he said, without new measures on obesity and >>>communicable diseases, "human life expectancy could decline >>>in the 21st century." >>> >>>On the other hand, said James W. Vaupel, director of the >>>program on population, policy and aging at Duke University, >>>life expectancy in the United States is far from any >>>natural or biological limits. >>> >>>"Experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is >>>approaching a ceiling," Dr. Vaupel said. "These experts >>>have repeatedly been proved wrong." >>> >>>At various times, different countries have had the highest >>>reported at-birth life expectancy. But with "remarkable >>>regularity" over the last 160 years, Dr. Vaupel said, life >>>expectancy in the leading country has increased an average >>>of three months a year, or 2.5 years a decade. >>> >>>David A. Wise, a Harvard professor who is director of the >>>program on aging at the private, nonpartisan National >>>Bureau of Economic Research, said: "Almost all demographers >>>outside the government think that death rates will continue >>>to fall faster than the decline incorporated in the >>>projections of the Social Security Administration. Most >>>think life expectancy will increase more rapidly than >>>Social Security says. That's not good for the finances of >>>Social Security." >>> >>>Nor do economists generally foresee a reversal of the trend >>>toward early retirement. Though researchers have observed a >>>significant decline in chronic disability among the >>>elderly, most workers retire and begin drawing Social >>>Security benefits before they reach 65. >>> >>>Labor unions and some politicians have resisted efforts to >>>raise the eligibility age for full benefits. Such >>>proposals, they say, penalize workers who have spent their >>>lives in physically demanding jobs. >>> >>>Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement >>>Research at Boston College, said, "Increases in life >>>expectancy at 65 have been a major contributor to the >>>rising cost of Social Security." Future increases could >>>strain pension plans and individual retirement savings, as >>>well as Social Security, she said. >>> >>>"The United States is the richest major country in the >>>world in terms of per capita gross domestic product," Dr. >>>Munnell said. "And life expectancy is clearly associated >>>with income." >>> >>>She added, though, that "if you focus on life expectancy at >>>age 65, the U.S. falls in the middle of the pack." >>> >>>One reason, she said, is that "the United States is not so >>>rich relative to its peers if you look at the average >>>income going to the lowest 40 percent of the population." >>> >>>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/politics/31benefit.html >>>_______________________________________________ >>>paleopsych mailing list >>>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>>_______________________________________________ >>>paleopsych mailing list >>>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> >>> >>> >> >> >> >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Jan 6 05:23:14 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 21:23:14 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say Message-ID: <01C4F36C.C4B80BB0.shovland@mindspring.com> I have heard many people do their best work after 55. Having reached that age, it seems to me that it may take that long to gain enough skill and experience to do something really well. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Geraldine Reinhardt [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 7:20 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say If a scholar does excellent work then the fruits of his labor should continue until he can no longer function with either a pen or keyboard. Ernst Mayr, now over 100 years old, is such a person. I recently came upon information that he and Jared Diamond have authored a new text: The Birds of Northern Melanesia: Speciation, Ecology, & Biogeography by Ernst Mayr, Jared Diamond, H. Douglas Pratt. Gerry Reinhart-Waller ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ross Buck" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 9:11 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans,Critics Say >I understand that Dewey did his best work in his 80's, >but of course his job > did not depend all that much on hand-eye > coordination! > > Cheers, Ross > > Ross Buck, Ph. D. > Professor of Communication Sciences > and Psychology > Communication Sciences U-1085 > University of Connecticut > Storrs, CT 06269-1085 > 860-486-4494 > fax 860-486-5422 > buck at uconnvm.uconn.edu > http://www.coms.uconn.edu/docs/people/faculty/rbuck/index.htm > > > "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as > when they do it from > religious conviction." > > -- Blaise Pascal > > > -----Original Message----- > From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org > [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org] On Behalf > Of Geraldine Reinhardt > Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 9:14 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future > LifeSpans, Critics Say > > Today on my way home I as usual took my designated > exit > off the freeway. There parked alongside the shoulder > of road was an elderly gentleman in a fancy black > sedan. Usually I never stop but this person looked a > bit bewildered.....actually confused, so I braked and > asked if he needed help. > > Turns out that he was on his way to a medical > appointment, an eye doctor to be exact, and he needed > to know which direction for Pasteur Drive. He then > said he was from San Francisco, a doctor himself, > and > had become very confused trying to decipher his > secretary's directions. He also mentioned he was > recently widowed and was seeing his wife's > ophthalmologist because she had spoken so highly of > his > ability with glaucoma procedures. > > Now I knew very well where Pasteur Drive was (it was > two exits beyond my apartment turn off) but I wasn't > certain if the road was clearly marked. I then asked > the gentleman if he would like to follow me and I'd > lead him to his turn off. How happy he became! I > then > asked the name of the ophthalmologist he had his > appointment with. "Dr. Rubin.....only I know I'll not > make it in time". > > "Amazing", I replied. "He's the eye doctor for both > my husband and me"! "But.... I don't know if I'm > continuing....he alarmed me during my last > appointment > when he was talking about doing corrective eye > surgery". > > "How old do you suppose Dr. Rubin is", asked the > stranger. > > Not wishing to age Dr. Rubin more than his years, I > replied: "Maybe in his late 50's or somewhere in his > 60's". I knew Rubin had to be hitting retirement > age. > > "Oh" replied the doctor from San Francisco, "I > performed capillary surgery until I was 73 and then > decided I needed to give it up". "Yet my hands > didn't > falter and I was always on top of each case." > > As I drove to Pasteur Drive I thought about > comparisons > between repairing eye stuff and capillary > surgery....were they similar? For me, the person who > needs to operate on my eyes should be young, bright > and > brilliant. Yet why should eyes be that different > from > capillaries? > > Could be that we "see with our eyes". What if we > "looked" with our hearts? > > Either way, when is a doctor too old to assume his > role > of physician? I'd say that if many of us can > continue > with our calling, doctors need to do the same. > But....I'd like my eye-surgeon to retain a younger > partner. > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > Independent Scholar > http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Steve Hovland" > To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" > > Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 3:33 PM > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > > >> Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, >> Critics Say >> NYT December 31, 2004 >> By ROBERT PEAR > > --snip-- > > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Jan 6 05:27:26 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 21:27:26 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say Message-ID: <01C4F36D.5B483460.shovland@mindspring.com> This is something we need to take into our own hands, perhaps with some help from the system. After 20-25 years in any business most people are done with that profession. Sad to say, many people go through their entire life without becoming motivated by something that really turns them on. That is something mass media could help with, just running ads that ask: at this point in your life, what would you really like to do with your time. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 8:58 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say Gerry's excitment about raising the retirement age is something I wish we can clone onto vast numbers. We have to create an atmosphere where people do love their work, find meaning in it, and feel valued and appreciated by society as they do work. Social psychologists might be able to craft messages about fulfillment from work and retirement being boring. LJ Geraldine Reinhardt wrote: > I'm very excited about thoughts of making the retirement age 70 or > even 75. Then possibly career decisions will be made with care. So > often a teenager views his/her life in the short term.....join the > military and retire and 38. > Sitting around and watching the grass grow is very unfulfilling not to > mention boring. Even people with medical needs can find a way to be > employed (if only on the computer). > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 4:57 PM > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future > LifeSpans, Critics Say > > It would be logical to simply raise the retirement age. For me, it is > now 66 years; why not make it 67 and finally 68? Push the concept > further: With 68 as the early retirement age, and 70 as the regular > retirement age, the cliff social security will run off in 30 years > disappears. > > People with medical need to retire should be allowed something > earlier, like roofers and cement workers (in a previous incarnation, I > was in construction). Unfortunately we have made social security an > entitlement, not a welfare system, which it actually is (none of my > money will come back to me, it has been spend on bureaucratic > boondoggle and turned into T-bills). > > Christian Rauh (from webmail) wrote: > >>Quoting Steve Hovland : >> >> >>>Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) >>> >>> >> >>And live longer. ;-) >> >>Christian >> >> >> >>>Steve Hovland >>>www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>>-----Original Message----- >>>From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>>Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 1:22 PM >>>To: World Transhumanist Ass.; paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life >>>Spans, Critics Say >>> >>>Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say >>>NYT December 31, 2004 >>>By ROBERT PEAR >>> >>>WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 - When the federal government assesses >>>the long-term financial problems of Social Security, it >>>assumes that increases in life expectancy will be slow and >>>measured. But many population experts say they believe that >>>Americans' life expectancy will increase rapidly in the >>>21st century, making the program's financial problems even >>>worse. >>> >>>President Bush and Congress are preparing for a debate over >>>the future of Social Security, whose solvency depends not >>>only on factors including productivity, inflation and birth >>>rates but also on how long beneficiaries will be living. >>> >>>Life expectancy at birth increased by 30 years in the last >>>century, and many independent demographers, citing the >>>promise of biomedical research and the experience of some >>>other industrialized countries, predict significant >>>increases in this century. The Social Security >>>Administration foresees a much slower rise. >>> >>>"Life expectancy will make a very big difference in the >>>fiscal viability of Social Security, but the agency's >>>projections of longevity appear too conservative," said >>>Prof. Samuel H. Preston of the University of Pennsylvania, >>>one of the nation's leading demographers. >>> >>>Dr. Preston said the agency assumed that "past advances in >>>life expectancy are unrepeatable, even though the medical >>>research establishment is routinely producing important >>>breakthroughs that reduce the incidence or fatality of a >>>variety of diseases." >>> >>>Richard M. Suzman, associate director of the National >>>Institute on Aging, a unit of the National Institutes of >>>Health, said: "There is a long history of government >>>actuaries and statisticians underestimating future gains in >>>life expectancy. The United States is unfortunately well >>>below the outer limits of life expectancy. Other countries >>>are doing much better. That gives us an indication of the >>>potential room for improvement." >>> >>>Tables published by the government's National Center for >>>Health Statistics show that life expectancy at birth was >>>47.3 years in 1900, rose to 68.2 by 1950 and reached 77.3 >>>in 2002. The latest annual report of the Social Security >>>trustees projects that life expectancy will increase just >>>six years in the next seven decades, to 83 in 2075. A >>>separate set of projections, by the Census Bureau, shows >>>more rapid growth. >>> >>>Social Security says male life expectancy at birth will be >>>81.2 years in 2075. The Census Bureau, using different >>>methods and assumptions, says that level will be reached >>>much earlier, in 2050. >>> >>>Likewise, Social Security says female life expectancy will >>>reach 85 years by 2075, while the Census Bureau says it >>>will exceed 86 in 2050. >>> >>>For the American population as a whole in the last century, >>>most of the gains in life expectancy at birth occurred from >>>1900 to 1950. But most of the gains in life expectancy >>>among people who had already reached age 65 were seen after >>>1950. >>> >>>Last year an expert panel advising the Social Security >>>Administration found "an unprecedented reduction in certain >>>forms of old-age mortality, especially cardiovascular >>>disease, beginning in the late 1960's." >>> >>>The panel said Social Security was wrong to assume a slower >>>decline in mortality rates among the elderly in the next 75 >>>years. Rather, it said, the government should assume that >>>mortality will continue to decline as it did from 1950 to >>>2000. >>> >>>Ronald D. Lee, a professor of demography and economics at >>>the University of California, Berkeley, said: "I foresee >>>death rates of the elderly in the United States continuing >>>to decline at the same pace they have declined since 1950. >>>In fact, there is evidence that the pace of decline in >>>other developed countries has accelerated in recent >>>decades." >>> >>>The Social Security Administration defends its assumptions. >>> >>> >>>"There is a wide range of opinion among experts on this >>>issue," said Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for the agency. "In >>>the last few years, we've moved a bit closer to the >>>position of other agencies and demographers." >>> >>>Some experts say other factors could ease the effects of >>>longer life on Social Security's solvency. >>> >>>"The higher costs associated with longer life expectancy >>>could be offset in several ways that do not involve a >>>reduction of Social Security benefits," said John R. >>>Wilmoth, another demographer at Berkeley. >>> >>>People who live longer could work longer, for instance. Or >>>the size of the working-age population could increase >>>because of higher birth rates or a larger number of >>>immigrants. >>> >>>Further, some population experts foresee developments that >>>could wind up buttressing the forecasts of the Social >>>Security Administration. S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of >>>epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of >>>Illinois at Chicago, said the era of large increases in >>>life expectancy might be nearing an end, with the spread of >>>obesity and the possible re-emergence of deadly infectious >>>diseases. >>> >>>"There are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, >>>vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic >>>engineering available today with the capacity to repeat the >>>gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the 20th >>>century" with antibiotics, vaccinations and improvements in >>>sanitation, Dr. Olshansky said. >>> >>>Indeed, he said, without new measures on obesity and >>>communicable diseases, "human life expectancy could decline >>>in the 21st century." >>> >>>On the other hand, said James W. Vaupel, director of the >>>program on population, policy and aging at Duke University, >>>life expectancy in the United States is far from any >>>natural or biological limits. >>> >>>"Experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is >>>approaching a ceiling," Dr. Vaupel said. "These experts >>>have repeatedly been proved wrong." >>> >>>At various times, different countries have had the highest >>>reported at-birth life expectancy. But with "remarkable >>>regularity" over the last 160 years, Dr. Vaupel said, life >>>expectancy in the leading country has increased an average >>>of three months a year, or 2.5 years a decade. >>> >>>David A. Wise, a Harvard professor who is director of the >>>program on aging at the private, nonpartisan National >>>Bureau of Economic Research, said: "Almost all demographers >>>outside the government think that death rates will continue >>>to fall faster than the decline incorporated in the >>>projections of the Social Security Administration. Most >>>think life expectancy will increase more rapidly than >>>Social Security says. That's not good for the finances of >>>Social Security." >>> >>>Nor do economists generally foresee a reversal of the trend >>>toward early retirement. Though researchers have observed a >>>significant decline in chronic disability among the >>>elderly, most workers retire and begin drawing Social >>>Security benefits before they reach 65. >>> >>>Labor unions and some politicians have resisted efforts to >>>raise the eligibility age for full benefits. Such >>>proposals, they say, penalize workers who have spent their >>>lives in physically demanding jobs. >>> >>>Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement >>>Research at Boston College, said, "Increases in life >>>expectancy at 65 have been a major contributor to the >>>rising cost of Social Security." Future increases could >>>strain pension plans and individual retirement savings, as >>>well as Social Security, she said. >>> >>>"The United States is the richest major country in the >>>world in terms of per capita gross domestic product," Dr. >>>Munnell said. "And life expectancy is clearly associated >>>with income." >>> >>>She added, though, that "if you focus on life expectancy at >>>age 65, the U.S. falls in the middle of the pack." >>> >>>One reason, she said, is that "the United States is not so >>>rich relative to its peers if you look at the average >>>income going to the lowest 40 percent of the population." >>> >>>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/politics/31benefit.html >>>_______________________________________________ >>>paleopsych mailing list >>>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>>_______________________________________________ >>>paleopsych mailing list >>>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> >>> >>> >> >> >> >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > << File: ATT00024.html >> << File: ATT00025.txt >> From waluk at earthlink.net Thu Jan 6 05:30:43 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Geraldine Reinhardt) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 21:30:43 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say References: <01C4F36C.C4B80BB0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <032101c4f3b0$df39d740$1503f604@S0027397558> Doing good work after 55 is reserved for those NOT in the sciences....I've heard that scientists are washed up after 35. Since I'm a bit older than you, I marvel at when these young scholars THINK they have gained expertise in their discipline. I continue learning each day. Gerry Reinhart-Waller http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 9:23 PM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans,Critics Say >I have heard many people do their best work after 55. > > Having reached that age, it seems to me that it may > take that long to gain enough skill and experience > to do something really well. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Geraldine Reinhardt [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] > Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 7:20 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > > If a scholar does excellent work then the fruits of > his > labor should continue until he can no longer > function > with either a pen or keyboard. Ernst Mayr, now over > 100 years old, is such a person. I recently came > upon > information that he and Jared Diamond have authored a > new text: The Birds of Northern Melanesia: > Speciation, > Ecology, & Biogeography by Ernst Mayr, Jared Diamond, > H. Douglas Pratt. > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Ross Buck" > To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" > > Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 9:11 AM > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future LifeSpans,Critics Say > > >>I understand that Dewey did his best work in his >>80's, >>but of course his job >> did not depend all that much on hand-eye >> coordination! >> >> Cheers, Ross >> >> Ross Buck, Ph. D. >> Professor of Communication Sciences >> and Psychology >> Communication Sciences U-1085 >> University of Connecticut >> Storrs, CT 06269-1085 >> 860-486-4494 >> fax 860-486-5422 >> buck at uconnvm.uconn.edu >> http://www.coms.uconn.edu/docs/people/faculty/rbuck/index.htm >> >> >> "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as >> when they do it from >> religious conviction." >> >> -- Blaise Pascal >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org >> [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org] On Behalf >> Of Geraldine Reinhardt >> Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 9:14 PM >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security >> Underestimates Future >> LifeSpans, Critics Say >> >> Today on my way home I as usual took my designated >> exit >> off the freeway. There parked alongside the >> shoulder >> of road was an elderly gentleman in a fancy black >> sedan. Usually I never stop but this person looked >> a >> bit bewildered.....actually confused, so I braked >> and >> asked if he needed help. >> >> Turns out that he was on his way to a medical >> appointment, an eye doctor to be exact, and he >> needed >> to know which direction for Pasteur Drive. He then >> said he was from San Francisco, a doctor himself, >> and >> had become very confused trying to decipher his >> secretary's directions. He also mentioned he was >> recently widowed and was seeing his wife's >> ophthalmologist because she had spoken so highly of >> his >> ability with glaucoma procedures. >> >> Now I knew very well where Pasteur Drive was (it was >> two exits beyond my apartment turn off) but I wasn't >> certain if the road was clearly marked. I then >> asked >> the gentleman if he would like to follow me and I'd >> lead him to his turn off. How happy he became! I >> then >> asked the name of the ophthalmologist he had his >> appointment with. "Dr. Rubin.....only I know I'll >> not >> make it in time". >> >> "Amazing", I replied. "He's the eye doctor for >> both >> my husband and me"! "But.... I don't know if I'm >> continuing....he alarmed me during my last >> appointment >> when he was talking about doing corrective eye >> surgery". >> >> "How old do you suppose Dr. Rubin is", asked the >> stranger. >> >> Not wishing to age Dr. Rubin more than his years, I >> replied: "Maybe in his late 50's or somewhere in his >> 60's". I knew Rubin had to be hitting retirement >> age. >> >> "Oh" replied the doctor from San Francisco, "I >> performed capillary surgery until I was 73 and then >> decided I needed to give it up". "Yet my hands >> didn't >> falter and I was always on top of each case." >> >> As I drove to Pasteur Drive I thought about >> comparisons >> between repairing eye stuff and capillary >> surgery....were they similar? For me, the person >> who >> needs to operate on my eyes should be young, bright >> and >> brilliant. Yet why should eyes be that different >> from >> capillaries? >> >> Could be that we "see with our eyes". What if we >> "looked" with our hearts? >> >> Either way, when is a doctor too old to assume his >> role >> of physician? I'd say that if many of us can >> continue >> with our calling, doctors need to do the same. >> But....I'd like my eye-surgeon to retain a younger >> partner. >> >> Gerry Reinhart-Waller >> Independent Scholar >> http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk >> >> >> ----- Original Message ----- >> From: "Steve Hovland" >> To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" >> >> Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 3:33 PM >> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security >> Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say >> >> >>> Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) >>> >>> Steve Hovland >>> www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>> Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, >>> Critics Say >>> NYT December 31, 2004 >>> By ROBERT PEAR >> >> --snip-- >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> > > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Thu Jan 6 12:59:36 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh (from webmail)) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 07:59:36 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] For people to think about... Message-ID: <1105016376.41dd3638b9903@rauh.net> I really enjoy the liberal/conservative image bits thing. This is my first take on the game. No one should be offended, it is not something that pops out randomly, there is a lot of thought put into this. Have fun, Christian Rauh -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: marilynmanson.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 12603 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: britneyspears.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 13277 bytes Desc: not available URL: From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Thu Jan 6 13:07:30 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh (from webmail)) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 08:07:30 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say In-Reply-To: <41DC8D17.60309@solution-consulting.com> References: <01C4F272.CD4FD050.shovland@mindspring.com> <1104933850.41dbf3daaae79@rauh.net> <41DC8D17.60309@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <1105016850.41dd3812e0a12@rauh.net> It would be even more logical to teach math to policy makers and use equations instead of a constants to calculate such things. And then improve on the mathematical model, like we do in all sciences. A science of social security? Christian Quoting "Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D." : > It would be logical to simply raise the retirement age. For me, it is > now 66 years; why not make it 67 and finally 68? Push the concept > further: With 68 as the early retirement age, and 70 as the regular > retirement age, the cliff social security will run off in 30 years > disappears. > > People with medical need to retire should be allowed something earlier, > like roofers and cement workers (in a previous incarnation, I was in > construction). Unfortunately we have made social security an > entitlement, not a welfare system, which it actually is (none of my > money will come back to me, it has been spend on bureaucratic boondoggle > and turned into T-bills). > > Christian Rauh (from webmail) wrote: > > >Quoting Steve Hovland : > > > > > >>Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) > >> > >> > > > >And live longer. ;-) > > > >Christian > > > > > > > >>Steve Hovland > >>www.stevehovland.net > >> > >> > >>-----Original Message----- > >>From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > >>Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 1:22 PM > >>To: World Transhumanist Ass.; paleopsych at paleopsych.org > >>Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life > >>Spans, Critics Say > >> > >>Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say > >>NYT December 31, 2004 > >>By ROBERT PEAR > >> > >>WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 - When the federal government assesses > >>the long-term financial problems of Social Security, it > >>assumes that increases in life expectancy will be slow and > >>measured. But many population experts say they believe that > >>Americans' life expectancy will increase rapidly in the > >>21st century, making the program's financial problems even > >>worse. > >> > >>President Bush and Congress are preparing for a debate over > >>the future of Social Security, whose solvency depends not > >>only on factors including productivity, inflation and birth > >>rates but also on how long beneficiaries will be living. > >> > >>Life expectancy at birth increased by 30 years in the last > >>century, and many independent demographers, citing the > >>promise of biomedical research and the experience of some > >>other industrialized countries, predict significant > >>increases in this century. The Social Security > >>Administration foresees a much slower rise. > >> > >>"Life expectancy will make a very big difference in the > >>fiscal viability of Social Security, but the agency's > >>projections of longevity appear too conservative," said > >>Prof. Samuel H. Preston of the University of Pennsylvania, > >>one of the nation's leading demographers. > >> > >>Dr. Preston said the agency assumed that "past advances in > >>life expectancy are unrepeatable, even though the medical > >>research establishment is routinely producing important > >>breakthroughs that reduce the incidence or fatality of a > >>variety of diseases." > >> > >>Richard M. Suzman, associate director of the National > >>Institute on Aging, a unit of the National Institutes of > >>Health, said: "There is a long history of government > >>actuaries and statisticians underestimating future gains in > >>life expectancy. The United States is unfortunately well > >>below the outer limits of life expectancy. Other countries > >>are doing much better. That gives us an indication of the > >>potential room for improvement." > >> > >>Tables published by the government's National Center for > >>Health Statistics show that life expectancy at birth was > >>47.3 years in 1900, rose to 68.2 by 1950 and reached 77.3 > >>in 2002. The latest annual report of the Social Security > >>trustees projects that life expectancy will increase just > >>six years in the next seven decades, to 83 in 2075. A > >>separate set of projections, by the Census Bureau, shows > >>more rapid growth. > >> > >>Social Security says male life expectancy at birth will be > >>81.2 years in 2075. The Census Bureau, using different > >>methods and assumptions, says that level will be reached > >>much earlier, in 2050. > >> > >>Likewise, Social Security says female life expectancy will > >>reach 85 years by 2075, while the Census Bureau says it > >>will exceed 86 in 2050. > >> > >>For the American population as a whole in the last century, > >>most of the gains in life expectancy at birth occurred from > >>1900 to 1950. But most of the gains in life expectancy > >>among people who had already reached age 65 were seen after > >>1950. > >> > >>Last year an expert panel advising the Social Security > >>Administration found "an unprecedented reduction in certain > >>forms of old-age mortality, especially cardiovascular > >>disease, beginning in the late 1960's." > >> > >>The panel said Social Security was wrong to assume a slower > >>decline in mortality rates among the elderly in the next 75 > >>years. Rather, it said, the government should assume that > >>mortality will continue to decline as it did from 1950 to > >>2000. > >> > >>Ronald D. Lee, a professor of demography and economics at > >>the University of California, Berkeley, said: "I foresee > >>death rates of the elderly in the United States continuing > >>to decline at the same pace they have declined since 1950. > >>In fact, there is evidence that the pace of decline in > >>other developed countries has accelerated in recent > >>decades." > >> > >>The Social Security Administration defends its assumptions. > >> > >> > >>"There is a wide range of opinion among experts on this > >>issue," said Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for the agency. "In > >>the last few years, we've moved a bit closer to the > >>position of other agencies and demographers." > >> > >>Some experts say other factors could ease the effects of > >>longer life on Social Security's solvency. > >> > >>"The higher costs associated with longer life expectancy > >>could be offset in several ways that do not involve a > >>reduction of Social Security benefits," said John R. > >>Wilmoth, another demographer at Berkeley. > >> > >>People who live longer could work longer, for instance. Or > >>the size of the working-age population could increase > >>because of higher birth rates or a larger number of > >>immigrants. > >> > >>Further, some population experts foresee developments that > >>could wind up buttressing the forecasts of the Social > >>Security Administration. S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of > >>epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of > >>Illinois at Chicago, said the era of large increases in > >>life expectancy might be nearing an end, with the spread of > >>obesity and the possible re-emergence of deadly infectious > >>diseases. > >> > >>"There are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, > >>vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic > >>engineering available today with the capacity to repeat the > >>gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the 20th > >>century" with antibiotics, vaccinations and improvements in > >>sanitation, Dr. Olshansky said. > >> > >>Indeed, he said, without new measures on obesity and > >>communicable diseases, "human life expectancy could decline > >>in the 21st century." > >> > >>On the other hand, said James W. Vaupel, director of the > >>program on population, policy and aging at Duke University, > >>life expectancy in the United States is far from any > >>natural or biological limits. > >> > >>"Experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is > >>approaching a ceiling," Dr. Vaupel said. "These experts > >>have repeatedly been proved wrong." > >> > >>At various times, different countries have had the highest > >>reported at-birth life expectancy. But with "remarkable > >>regularity" over the last 160 years, Dr. Vaupel said, life > >>expectancy in the leading country has increased an average > >>of three months a year, or 2.5 years a decade. > >> > >>David A. Wise, a Harvard professor who is director of the > >>program on aging at the private, nonpartisan National > >>Bureau of Economic Research, said: "Almost all demographers > >>outside the government think that death rates will continue > >>to fall faster than the decline incorporated in the > >>projections of the Social Security Administration. Most > >>think life expectancy will increase more rapidly than > >>Social Security says. That's not good for the finances of > >>Social Security." > >> > >>Nor do economists generally foresee a reversal of the trend > >>toward early retirement. Though researchers have observed a > >>significant decline in chronic disability among the > >>elderly, most workers retire and begin drawing Social > >>Security benefits before they reach 65. > >> > >>Labor unions and some politicians have resisted efforts to > >>raise the eligibility age for full benefits. Such > >>proposals, they say, penalize workers who have spent their > >>lives in physically demanding jobs. > >> > >>Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement > >>Research at Boston College, said, "Increases in life > >>expectancy at 65 have been a major contributor to the > >>rising cost of Social Security." Future increases could > >>strain pension plans and individual retirement savings, as > >>well as Social Security, she said. > >> > >>"The United States is the richest major country in the > >>world in terms of per capita gross domestic product," Dr. > >>Munnell said. "And life expectancy is clearly associated > >>with income." > >> > >>She added, though, that "if you focus on life expectancy at > >>age 65, the U.S. falls in the middle of the pack." > >> > >>One reason, she said, is that "the United States is not so > >>rich relative to its peers if you look at the average > >>income going to the lowest 40 percent of the population." > >> > >>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/politics/31benefit.html > >>_______________________________________________ > >>paleopsych mailing list > >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org > >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > >>_______________________________________________ > >>paleopsych mailing list > >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org > >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > >> > >> > >> > > > > > > > >_______________________________________________ > >paleopsych mailing list > >paleopsych at paleopsych.org > >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > > > > > > From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Jan 6 14:43:27 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 06:43:27 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] For people to think about... Message-ID: <01C4F3BB.07E79D30.shovland@mindspring.com> A good start. Actually, I think part of the point is to make things that some people will find highly offensive. For example, I would like to do things that make Christian Fundamentalists crazier than they already are. That would make it easier to isolate them and keep them from poisoning the mainstream. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Christian Rauh (from webmail) [SMTP:christian.rauh at uconn.edu] Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2005 5:00 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] For people to think about... I really enjoy the liberal/conservative image bits thing. This is my first take on the game. No one should be offended, it is not something that pops out randomly, there is a lot of thought put into this. Have fun, Christian Rauh << File: marilynmanson.jpg >> << File: britneyspears.jpg >> << File: ATT00015.txt >> From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 6 14:57:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 09:57:02 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Gerard Debreu, 83, Dies; Won Nobel in Economics Message-ID: Gerard Debreu, 83, Dies; Won Nobel in Economics New York Times, 5.1.6 By RIVA D. ATLAS Gerard Debreu, the winner of the 1983 Nobel in economic sciences for his research on the balance of supply and demand, died Friday in Paris. Mr. Debreu, who was 83, died of natural causes, according to a statement released yesterday by the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for nearly 30 years. His residence was an assisted-living center in Paris, where he moved about a year ago after suffering a stroke, his son-in-law, Richard De Soto, said. Mr. Debreu won the Nobel for his work on a mathematical approach to one of the most basic economic problems: how prices function to balance what producers supply with what buyers want. A slender 100-page book he wrote that was published in 1959, "Theory of Value: An Axiomatic Analysis of Economic Equilibrium," is considered a classic of the field. "He brought to economics a mathematical rigor that had not been seen before," Prof. Robert Anderson said in the university's statement yesterday. In contrast to other winners in economics, Mr. Debreu focused on basic research rather than applications of economic theory. "You would not get much of an economic policy discussion out of him," Assar Lindbeck, chairman of the panel that reviewed nominations for the Nobel committee, said when he announced the award to Mr. Debreu 21 years ago. "He is the kind of teacher who starts in the top left corner of the blackboard, fills it with formulae and reaches the bottom right corner at the end of the class." Mr. Debreu's work had an impact on the work of many other economists, said Kenneth Arrow, professor emeritus of economics at Stanford who collaborated with Mr. Debreu in the 1950's. Economists applied Mr. Debreu's theories to problems like analyzing business cycles and measuring the cost to the economy of inefficiencies like traffic congestion, Mr. Arrow said. Mr. Debreu was born on July 4, 1921, in Calais, France; he became an American citizen in 1975. He received his doctorate from the University of Paris in 1956. He broke off his studies in mathematics in 1944 after D-Day, to enlist in the French Army. He was an officer of the French Legion of Honor and a commander of the French National Order of Merit. >From 1950 to 1960, Mr. Debreu was associated with the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago; he was later at Yale University, serving as an associate professor. He worked at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford from 1960 to 1961. He joined the faculty at Berkeley in 1962, where he was a professor of economics and mathematics until his retirement in 1991. Mr. Debreu continued to lecture at Berkeley and elsewhere after his retirement, Mr. De Soto said. Mr. Debreu is survived by his wife, Francoise Debreu of Walnut Creek, Calif.; and two daughters, Chantal De Soto of Aptos, Calif., and Florence Tetrault of Vancouver, British Columbia. A service at the columbarium of P?re-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris will be held tomorrow. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/06/obituaries/06debreu.html From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 6 15:03:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 10:03:41 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Really?: The Claim: Sex Can Set Off a Heart Attack Message-ID: Really?: The Claim: Sex Can Set Off a Heart Attack NYT November 16, 2004 By ANAHAD O'CONNOR THE FACTS Rumors flew in 1979 when Nelson A. Rockefeller died of a heart attack in circumstances described by his speechwriter as "undeniably intimate." But the notion that sexual activity can touch off a heart attack has been around for some time. Experts say the belief that physical exertion in the bedroom places strain on the heart prompts many heart patients to limit their sexual activities or to abstain altogether. While there appears to be some truth to the claim, research suggests that it is largely exaggerated. In 1996, a team of scientists at Harvard conducted a study of more than 800 heart attack survivors around the country. Their findings, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, suggested that the chance of sex causing a heart attack was about two in a million, even in subjects who had already had one attack. That is double the risk for healthy people in the hours after sexual intercourse, they said, but still no real cause for concern for most people with cardiovascular disease. The study did not look at the intensity of the sexual activity or whether the relations were extramarital. It found that the risk of suffering a heart attack brought on by sex dropped as the participants' amount of exercise increased. People who exercised the most had virtually no risk. In 2001, a group of Swedish researchers who studied 699 heart attack survivors reported similar results, finding that the risk was small but highest among patients who were sedentary. Their study appeared in the journal Heart. "While there is some truth to the mythology," said Dr. Murray Mittleman, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and an author of the 1996 study, "the absolute increase in risk is so small that for the vast majority of people it should be one less thing to worry about." THE BOTTOM LINE Sexual activity can set off a heart attack, although the risk is extremely low. scitimes at nytimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/16/health/16real.html From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 6 15:04:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 10:04:11 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Gannett: Aging boomers create demand for robots Message-ID: Aging boomers create demand for robots http://www.shreveporttimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041115/NEWS05/411150323/1064 Monday, November 15, 2004 By Kevin Maney Gannett News Service You're in no danger, aging baby boomers. We'll clean and care for you and keep you company. Never mind the humanoid Automated Domestic Assistants walking rich people's pets in the movie I, Robot, or the accordion-armed Robot B9 in TV classic Lost in Space warning of danger on lonely planets. The real force driving the development of personal robots -- and what eventually will create demand for them in the marketplace -- is aging baby boomers. That's the secret among robotics researchers and budding robot companies. As boomers get older, they increasingly will be unable to care for themselves or their homes. They'll face a social and medical system straining to help them. But they'll be comfortable with technology. Robot experts predict that a decade from now, boomers might buy a specialized R2D2-like robot to clean the kitchen and a health care 'bot to monitor vital signs and make sure pills are taken. Yet another robot -- built more like a skinny, 5-foot-tall human -- might specialize in fetching things from shelves or the basement, reducing chances for falls. "As the demographics change, robots could help solve some problems," says Rodney Brooks, director of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The question is, where is that transition?" "At some point, there will be an explosion," says Sebastian Thrun, director of Stanford University's AI lab. With that in mind, robot projects are popping up everywhere. Most are experimental, but some are becoming commercial products. Robots that are likely to serve the elderly seem to fall into three broad categories. Though the categories don't officially have names, you could call them homebots, carebots and joybots. A look at those categories speaks volumes about what's going on in robotics. Homebots The Roomba is Burlington, Mass.-based iRobot's first offering. Set it in the middle of a room, turn it on, and it finds its way around using artificial intelligence, vacuuming every square inch. Thrun says, "There will be robots that pick up dishes from the table and put them in the dishwasher within five years." That means that homebots probably will be some of the first mass-market robots, emerging just as boomers reach a point where they can't do much housework but don't want to move out of their homes. Still, early versions will be anything but perfect. Making even single-purpose robots has its difficulties. For example, computers and software still aren't good enough to give a robot the visual capabilities of a 2-year-old human. Carebots A handful of hospitals and nursing homes are experimenting with robots. At Johns Hopkins University Hospital, a gadget dubbed Robo-doc helps busy doctors monitor patients following surgery. Carnegie Mellon has worked on robots that can safely walk nursing home patients, for instance, from their rooms to the dining hall. Those are the early versions of carebots that could help tend to the elderly in their homes. A robot could autonomously do straightforward tasks such as monitor blood pressure, dispense pills and call 911 if its owner was in a heap on the floor and not moving. For more complex judgments, the Tbot could connect to and be controlled by a human nurse or doctor via the Internet. Much of that is possible within the next decade, robot experts say. But certain barriers persist. "To give health care to the elderly, robots need the manual dexterity of a 6-year-old, and we don't have that yet," says MIT's Brooks. Joybots "Whether or not you have to love your robot is another question," Brooks says. "I don't need my ATM to be cute." Here is a great point of departure between U.S. and Japanese robotics research. U.S. labs and companies generally approach robots as tools. The Japanese approach them as beings. That explains a lot about experimental robot projects coming out of Japan. Sony's Qrio looks humanoid, and the company bills it as "an entertainment robot that lives with you, makes life fun, makes you happy." It can learn to distinguish different people's faces and voices. But, it doesn't do housework. Such joybots one day might help with another difficulty that can accompany aging: loneliness. If so, a Qrio could become a significant segment of a coming personal robotics industry. From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 6 15:05:53 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 10:05:53 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: The Humanities for Cocktail Parties and Beyond Message-ID: The Humanities for Cocktail Parties and Beyond The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.7 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i18/18b00501.htm By RICK LIVINGSTON In any introductory-humanities course, there is an elephant-in-the-room question. I try to wait at least three weeks into the term before asking my students to face it squarely: Why study the humanities? The students' first response, of course, is because they have to. Most of my courses fulfill one of the general-education requirements at Ohio State University, and I usually have a healthy mix of precocious freshmen and procrastinating seniors. If I go on to ask why the students think the university has such requirements, they are initially baffled. After trying out a few wiseacre responses ("Because they want our tuition money!"), they almost always say -- wait for it -- that the humanities help you make small talk at cocktail parties. With any luck we go on to talk seriously about common knowledge and cultural expectations. But the cocktail-party comment tends to hang in the air like secondhand smoke, clouding the intellectual atmosphere. It suggests that our primary subject is petty snobbery and chitchat. The comment is a clich?, obviously, but one I have to confront every year. Thinking about the clich? sent me back to T.S. Eliot's 1950 play, The Cocktail Party. Eliot portrays social life as a series of hypocrisies, deceptions, and embarrassments, redeemable only by religious conversion. Theological insight alone, the play suggests, can help us endure the unending round of mannered niceties that make up an ordinary life. My students tend to shut down when I start talking about their souls, or they consult the syllabus to see whether I've included a conversion experience among the course requirements. In confronting the cocktail-party clich?, I've had to consider how to convey the value of the humanities without resorting to divine intervention. Luckily my position as associate director of a humanities institute on my campus has allowed me to experiment with alternative ways of engaging students in humanistic inquiry. One of the institute's missions is to bring students and faculty members together outside traditional classroom settings, as an antidote to the sometimes intimidating experience of attending one of the country's largest universities. Over the years we've learned that it is in such informal settings that students often begin to tie together the different subjects they've been studying. Connecting the dots allows them to get a larger picture of the education they've been receiving. That's why we've come up with a program we call (only half-jokingly) Big Ideas. Here's how it works: Each quarter we choose a topic big enough to accommodate a range of approaches and cover more than one discipline. Past examples include evil, passion, war, and cities. We invite both faculty members and outside guests to have dinner with students and to give us their thoughts about the topics. Brief presentations are followed by open conversation, with students taking the lead in raising questions and responding. Although we do bring in some of the best teachers at the university, the goal of Big Ideas is not really to teach the students specific facts. It is to give them practice in taking ideas seriously and to allow them to experience interesting conversations. You're probably thinking: "Shouldn't they be doing that on their own? When I was in college, we would stay up late talking about ideas. What's wrong with these kids?" But conversation about ideas seldom happens naturally, and nowadays it is rarer than ever. As historians of talk like Theodore Zeldin and Peter Burke have observed, conversation is not a spontaneous outpouring of well-formed sentences. It is a specific form of social behavior, with its own settings, tacit rules, and strategies. Like any social skill, it improves with practice. Students today have few chances to practice serious talking. Our most visible examples of conversation come from TV: the political debate that is little more than a shouting match, and the celebrity interview. What students lack is experience with grown-up conversation, in which curiosity and respect can lead to self-discovery and mutual illumination. At their best, the Big Ideas classes get students involved in such conversations. Our course on evil, for instance, picked up on President Bush's use of a morally charged vocabulary (the "axis of evil") to orient U.S. foreign policy. We brought in four guest speakers: a philosopher, a historian of religion, a theologian, and a judge. Then students talked about personal experiences with evil, ranging from anger to sexual abuse, and about evil in the world -- including terrorism and the Holocaust. In the process, students confronted their own beliefs about God and human nature, and tested their intuitions about differences among the illegal, the immoral, and the downright evil. Nothing was resolved, of course, but the students got a clearer sense of the necessity -- and the difficulty -- of making such distinctions. In our course on cities, we began by talking about the places where we had grown up, and how they had changed over our lifetimes. We met with an architect to talk about high rises and skylines. Ideas about consumerism and sustainability became the focus of a class with an urban planner, and a sociologist talked with us about the effects of globalization on the shape of cities. Finally, an artist who is designing a waterfront park came to discuss ideas about making public art in and out of neglected urban spaces. Students learned a vocabulary for talking about the changes they can see happening in their neighborhoods as well as in the world at large. Inevitably, there is a certain amount of overlap among the sessions; predictably, discussions sometimes meander and leave the topic altogether. But most of the sessions include a moment when some of the students catch fire and carry the rest of us forward, or when someone gets the idea of dialogical inquiry and asks more, and better, questions. Sometimes students discover that their intuitions don't match their convictions. Most interesting, however, are the times when, as in the discussion of war and peace during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, we find ourselves trying hard to make sense of the world together. I've thought a lot about what makes the courses work. The topics belong to no one field: Different disciplines may contribute perspectives to the issues we cover, but when faced with the problem of evil, for instance, we are all amateurs. We use no set body of material, and students' own experiences and examples often become common points of reference. Each course is for one academic credit -- enough to make the students take the class seriously; but the grade is pass or fail, so students don't need to demonstrate mastery of a subject. To keep the atmosphere informal, we meet in a dining hall rather than a classroom. And mixing up faculty members with outside guests shows that ideas can live off campus, too. Maybe the most unexpected lesson of Big Ideas, however, is that professors appreciate making conversation, too. It can be tough to step out of the comfort zones of our expertise, to let go of disciplinary jargon. But the opportunity to speak, not as a professional to novices, but as a citizen with other (albeit younger) citizens, can be liberating. It's not just a cocktail party -- and that, I think, is the main point. Rick Livingston is the associate director of the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities and a senior lecturer in comparative studies at Ohio State University at Columbus. From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 6 15:08:42 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 10:08:42 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Sex, Booze, and Getting Old - Welcome to the Human Nature blog. By William Saletan Message-ID: Sex, Booze, and Getting Old - Welcome to the Human Nature blog. By William Saletan http://slate.msn.com/id/2111786/ 5.1.4 You and I are cultural and political creatures living in an age of science and technology. From sexuality to liposuction to surveillance to cloning, we're being overrun by technologies full of implications about who we are and how we should live. The purpose of Human Nature is to expose and discuss those implications. In the weeks to come, what you'll find here is a steady diet of news updates and quick takes, coupled with longer columns exploring some topics more thoroughly. Let's start with a few updates. DEATH Item: We're going to live longer than Social Security administrators expect. Source: "many population experts" Outlet: [28]New York Times, Dec. 31 Gist: Life expectancy at birth rose 21 years from 1900 to 1950 (47.3 to 68.2) and another nine years from 1950 to 2002, reaching 77.3 years. The Social Security Administration assumes life expectancy will now grow more slowly, increasing only six years by 2075. Longevity experts say this assumption is too low. Why? 1) Life expectancy has increased by three months per year pretty regularly for 160 years. 2) Government projections have historically underestimated increases in longevity. 3) After 1950, although the rate of increase declined for the general population, it increased for the population over age 65. 4) Our average life expectancy is far below any biological "ceiling." Financial implication: We're doing such a good job of keeping people alive that we're going to bankrupt ourselves. Critique: Three of the four "expert" arguments are social science dressed up as natural science. They're just demographic extrapolations from the past to the future, with no biological theory to explain why we could increase the longevity of old people as easily as we increased the longevity of young people. The fourth argument is biological but tells us only about a ceiling. It doesn't matter how high the ceiling is if we don't have a ladder to get there--and that's the argument on the other side. As the token skeptic puts it in the Times, "There are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic engineering available today with the capacity to repeat the gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the 20^th century." Buried political story: Read down to the 10^th paragraph of the Times article. For the American population as a whole in the last century, most of the gains in life expectancy at birth occurred from 1900 to 1950. But most of the gains in life expectancy among people who had already reached age 65 were seen after 1950. Last year an expert panel advising the Social Security Administration found "an unprecedented reduction in certain forms of old-age mortality, especially cardiovascular disease, beginning in the late 1960's." In other words, as old people increased their share of the country's economic and political power, they consumed more of the country's medical attention. Further down, the Times adds, "Nor do economists generally foresee a reversal of the trend toward early retirement. Though researchers have observed a significant decline in chronic disability among the elderly, most workers retire and begin drawing Social Security benefits before they reach 65." Disability down. Cardiovascular disease down. Longevity up. Social Security benefits earlier. This isn't a biological problem. It's a political problem. Punch line: Two other problems may solve this one. One expert observes that obesity is proliferating and lethal infectious diseases are thriving in our increasingly connected world. Human self-destruction may spare us the financial cost of human self-absorption. SEX Item: More adult women are having unprotected intercourse. Source: [29]National Center for Health Statistics Outlet: [30]Washington Post, Jan. 4 Gist: From 1995 to 2002, the percentage of sexually active adult women not using contraception rose from 5.2 to 7.4. This could increase unintended pregnancies by more than 20 percent. Liberal spin: This is the tragic result of insufficient sex education, too much abstinence-only curriculum, more people without insurance coverage, and lower federal funding of family planning relative to inflation. One liberal complains that drug companies "have cut way back" on free samples and tells the Post, "It is absolutely unconscionable that women have a co-pay of $20 or $25 [a month] for contraceptives and men are getting off scot-free." Critique: 1) If erosion of sex ed is the problem, why is contraceptive use [31]increasing among teenagers? 2) Before you blame health insurers and drug companies, ask how safe, reliable, and expensive birth control was before they got into it. 3) Doesn't "co-pay" mean we're socializing some of the cost, and nobody's getting off scot-free? 4) Have we really been relying on free samples to get birth control to poor women? If so, shouldn't we make that subsidy public and stop leeching off greedy drug companies? Conservative spin: Women are rejecting birth control because they want to get pregnant or don't like birth control's side effects. An abstinence proponent tells the Post, "The women making these choices are making a conscious choice. They are not stupid." Critique: We'll quote you on that next time you propose legislation--like, say, [32]S. 2466--to regulate women's choices on the grounds that they're dupes of the abortion industry. FAT Item: There's no evidence that commercial weight-loss programs work. Source: [33]Annals of Internal Medicine Outlet: [34]New York Times, Jan. 4 Gist: 1) Virtually no commercial diet program has "published reliable data from randomized trials showing that people who participated weighed less a few months later than people who did not participate." 2) Since there's no good evidence, maybe you should avoid the most expensive programs. 3) The most expensive programs are supervised by doctors. 4) "Doctors could do as well as these programs" just by telling people to diet and exercise. 5) All diet programs fail because "they're fighting biology." Critique: Thanks for the help. VICE Item: Medicare will pay for alcoholism screening and for counseling to quit smoking. Source: [35]Medicare administrators Outlets: New York Times, Dec. 24; [36]Los Angeles Times, Jan. 2 Gist: Alcoholism screening begins this week. Coverage of smoking cessation counseling begins in March. Both will cost a lot of money but save more by preventing cancer, heart and liver disease, and other maladies. Cultural analysis: We're socializing treatment of smoking and drinking because we now view them as diseases, not vices. Economic analysis: We socialized treatment of the consequences of smoking and drinking when we created Medicare 40 years ago. Now we're just cutting costs. William Saletan is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of [37]Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. References 28. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/politics/31benefit.html 29. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad350.pdf 30. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45599-2005Jan3.html 31. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_23/sr23_024.pdf 32. http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/Fetal_Pain/S2466.html 33. http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/abstract/142/1/56 34. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/health/nutrition/04fat.html 35. http://www.cms.hhs.gov/ 36. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-medicare2jan02,1,1081095.story?coll=la-headlines-nation 37. http://www.bearingright.com/ From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Jan 6 15:54:37 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 07:54:37 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Real time politics Message-ID: <01C4F3C4.F8C29DA0.shovland@mindspring.com> This was being faxed to congress during the confirmation hearing: Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 118685 bytes Desc: not available URL: From waluk at earthlink.net Thu Jan 6 21:19:30 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Geraldine Reinhardt) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 13:19:30 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say References: <01C4F3BA.96FE95B0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <059301c4f435$6a1c4c60$7a03f604@S0027397558> A giant uroborus is at work devouring our creativity be we engineers or other corporate types. Yet there are many of us who choose careers other than the business world. Those of us in such lifeways have all the leeway to THINK yet receive little in the way of monetary compensation. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Independent Scholar http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'Geraldine Reinhardt'" Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2005 6:40 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans,Critics Say > In many corporate situations engineers are less > inventive after a certain age, but it's not because > they are less creative. > > It's because they know that if they do something > brilliant they won't get much more than a pat on > the back and a demand to do something even > better. They know that most of the financial > rewards will go to managers. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Geraldine Reinhardt [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] > Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 9:31 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Cc: shovland at mindspring.com > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future LifeSpans,Critics Say > > Doing good work after 55 is reserved for those NOT in > the sciences....I've heard that scientists are washed > up after 35. > > Since I'm a bit older than you, I marvel at when > these > young scholars THINK they have gained expertise in > their discipline. I continue learning each day. > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Steve Hovland" > To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" > > Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 9:23 PM > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future LifeSpans,Critics Say > > >>I have heard many people do their best work after 55. >> >> Having reached that age, it seems to me that it may >> take that long to gain enough skill and experience >> to do something really well. >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Geraldine Reinhardt >> [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] >> Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 7:20 PM >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security >> Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say >> >> If a scholar does excellent work then the fruits of >> his >> labor should continue until he can no longer >> function >> with either a pen or keyboard. Ernst Mayr, now over >> 100 years old, is such a person. I recently came >> upon >> information that he and Jared Diamond have authored >> a >> new text: The Birds of Northern Melanesia: >> Speciation, >> Ecology, & Biogeography by Ernst Mayr, Jared >> Diamond, >> H. Douglas Pratt. >> >> Gerry Reinhart-Waller >> >> ----- Original Message ----- >> From: "Ross Buck" >> To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" >> >> Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 9:11 AM >> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security >> Underestimates Future LifeSpans,Critics Say >> >> >>>I understand that Dewey did his best work in his >>>80's, >>>but of course his job >>> did not depend all that much on hand-eye >>> coordination! >>> >>> Cheers, Ross >>> >>> Ross Buck, Ph. D. >>> Professor of Communication Sciences >>> and Psychology >>> Communication Sciences U-1085 >>> University of Connecticut >>> Storrs, CT 06269-1085 >>> 860-486-4494 >>> fax 860-486-5422 >>> buck at uconnvm.uconn.edu >>> http://www.coms.uconn.edu/docs/people/faculty/rbuck/index.htm >>> >>> >>> "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as >>> when they do it from >>> religious conviction." >>> >>> -- Blaise Pascal >>> >>> >>> -----Original Message----- >>> From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org >>> [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org] On >>> Behalf >>> Of Geraldine Reinhardt >>> Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 9:14 PM >>> To: The new improved paleopsych list >>> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security >>> Underestimates Future >>> LifeSpans, Critics Say >>> >>> Today on my way home I as usual took my designated >>> exit >>> off the freeway. There parked alongside the >>> shoulder >>> of road was an elderly gentleman in a fancy black >>> sedan. Usually I never stop but this person looked >>> a >>> bit bewildered.....actually confused, so I braked >>> and >>> asked if he needed help. >>> >>> Turns out that he was on his way to a medical >>> appointment, an eye doctor to be exact, and he >>> needed >>> to know which direction for Pasteur Drive. He then >>> said he was from San Francisco, a doctor himself, >>> and >>> had become very confused trying to decipher his >>> secretary's directions. He also mentioned he was >>> recently widowed and was seeing his wife's >>> ophthalmologist because she had spoken so highly of >>> his >>> ability with glaucoma procedures. >>> >>> Now I knew very well where Pasteur Drive was (it >>> was >>> two exits beyond my apartment turn off) but I >>> wasn't >>> certain if the road was clearly marked. I then >>> asked >>> the gentleman if he would like to follow me and I'd >>> lead him to his turn off. How happy he became! I >>> then >>> asked the name of the ophthalmologist he had his >>> appointment with. "Dr. Rubin.....only I know I'll >>> not >>> make it in time". >>> >>> "Amazing", I replied. "He's the eye doctor for >>> both >>> my husband and me"! "But.... I don't know if I'm >>> continuing....he alarmed me during my last >>> appointment >>> when he was talking about doing corrective eye >>> surgery". >>> >>> "How old do you suppose Dr. Rubin is", asked the >>> stranger. >>> >>> Not wishing to age Dr. Rubin more than his years, I >>> replied: "Maybe in his late 50's or somewhere in >>> his >>> 60's". I knew Rubin had to be hitting retirement >>> age. >>> >>> "Oh" replied the doctor from San Francisco, "I >>> performed capillary surgery until I was 73 and then >>> decided I needed to give it up". "Yet my hands >>> didn't >>> falter and I was always on top of each case." >>> >>> As I drove to Pasteur Drive I thought about >>> comparisons >>> between repairing eye stuff and capillary >>> surgery....were they similar? For me, the person >>> who >>> needs to operate on my eyes should be young, bright >>> and >>> brilliant. Yet why should eyes be that different >>> from >>> capillaries? >>> >>> Could be that we "see with our eyes". What if we >>> "looked" with our hearts? >>> >>> Either way, when is a doctor too old to assume his >>> role >>> of physician? I'd say that if many of us can >>> continue >>> with our calling, doctors need to do the same. >>> But....I'd like my eye-surgeon to retain a younger >>> partner. >>> >>> Gerry Reinhart-Waller >>> Independent Scholar >>> http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk >>> >>> >>> ----- Original Message ----- >>> From: "Steve Hovland" >>> To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" >>> >>> Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 3:33 PM >>> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security >>> Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say >>> >>> >>>> Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) >>>> >>>> Steve Hovland >>>> www.stevehovland.net >>>> >>>> >>>> Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, >>>> Critics Say >>>> NYT December 31, 2004 >>>> By ROBERT PEAR >>> >>> --snip-- >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> paleopsych mailing list >>> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> paleopsych mailing list >>> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> > > From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Thu Jan 6 21:52:28 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 13:52:28 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] disaster fallacy In-Reply-To: <200501061555.j06FtI018677@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050106215228.90700.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> >>"Why did you do this to us, God? What did we do to upset you?" asked a woman in India this week, a heart-wrenching question asked in common these past few days by Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Christians.<< --What a horribly mistaken question! To attribute natural disasters to the will of a powerful being whose judgment is beyond question is such a horrid thing to do to oneself and one's children. Blaming other humans cannot be far behind, if it preserves the view of God as benevolent ruler. "Oh, so it wasn't God, it was THEM!! They brought God's wrath upon us!" (or eliminate God from the equation altogether, by blaming Jews, Americans, or whatever group seems all-powerful and easy to blame). Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - Get yours free! http://my.yahoo.com From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Jan 6 22:04:14 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 14:04:14 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] disaster fallacy Message-ID: <01C4F3F8.9B11CAD0.shovland@mindspring.com> The God that really is God has nothing to do with these human concerns. I do not find it comfortable to believe that, but I think it is true. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2005 1:52 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] disaster fallacy >>"Why did you do this to us, God? What did we do to upset you?" asked a woman in India this week, a heart-wrenching question asked in common these past few days by Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Christians.<< --What a horribly mistaken question! To attribute natural disasters to the will of a powerful being whose judgment is beyond question is such a horrid thing to do to oneself and one's children. Blaming other humans cannot be far behind, if it preserves the view of God as benevolent ruler. "Oh, so it wasn't God, it was THEM!! They brought God's wrath upon us!" (or eliminate God from the equation altogether, by blaming Jews, Americans, or whatever group seems all-powerful and easy to blame). Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - Get yours free! http://my.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From paul.werbos at verizon.net Fri Jan 7 18:28:01 2005 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Paul J. Werbos, Dr.) Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2005 13:28:01 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] disaster fallacy In-Reply-To: <20050106215228.90700.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> References: <200501061555.j06FtI018677@tick.javien.com> <20050106215228.90700.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <6.2.0.14.0.20050107125732.01dd5968@incoming.verizon.net> At 04:52 PM 1/6/2005, Michael Christopher wrote: > >>"Why did you do this to us, God? What did we do to >upset you?" asked a woman in India this week, a >heart-wrenching question asked in common these past >few days by Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and >Christians.<< > >--What a horribly mistaken question! To attribute >natural disasters to the will of a powerful being >whose judgment is beyond question is such a horrid >thing to do to oneself and one's children. Blaming >other humans cannot be far behind, if it preserves the The press says it happened already. In a way, it is not totally surprising. Some people asked:"Who would want to kill hundreds of thousands of Moslems, and is the most powerful person who would want to do so?" So they concluded: "It must be George Bush. As Osama says, the US is the great Satan, and Satan has great powers, so of course he did this..." If I believe the press... there are many, many people who have followed this obvious human-style logic. Aside from the obvious issues of therapy... the real zinger question is as follows: since we too are human, and not born any better than these crazy people, what is it that we are being equally crazy about? Yesterday, my family had me watch a DVD which offers one possible answer: The Day After Tomorrow. When it came out, the press was full of righteous indignation about this "speculative transparent anti-Bush propaganda." I didn't see it then... in part because I don't GO to the movies much at all anyway. But... I wonder how much our defensive reactions are a kind of hiding from reality as bad as the example Michael mentioned? Certainly the "little Ice Age" scenario for this century is very speculative (SO FAR AS I KNOW, being a scientist but nonspecialist.). But so far as I know, it is just as speculative to say it won't happen as to say it will. OK, that's a comment on the limits of my knowledge. In this context, I regret I did not sit in in the recent NSF workshop on this topic. It would be nice to have a sense of the conditional probabilities here. But I didn't see anything really crazy in the movie... except perhaps the relatively happy ending. All along, I have been thinking... OK, in the worst case we might lose about half the human economic base over about a century. But on a logarithmic scale, that is not nearly so bad as two or three other risks -- such as proliferation and possible use of WMD, or the long-term impact of the stagnation which might result if people overreact against technology, or perhaps even some kind of spiritual crisis -- all of which threaten outright extinction. The movie brings home the point that "half" may still be rather unpleasant, and that Little Ice Ages have been a bit faster than a century in the past. Yes, we shouldn't expect it to happen... but it seems more likely, say, than the 3 percent probability asteroid they thought we were facing briefly a week ago. A rational person does not ignore such odds. It would be like crossing a street without looking both ways, at an hour when the odds are 30-to-1 against a car hitting you. Now -- the movie raises the valid point in logic that we should not waste half the world's GNP growth over the next century, with certainly, in order to avoid, say, a 10 percent POSSIBILITY of losing half of it. It does not mention how Kyoto has a bigger impact on GNP than on CO2, under today's circumstances. (And I do not know if it is really 10 percent probability. Could be much more or less, conditional upon knowledge which exists which I have not calibrated. But I certainly would NOT defer to biased political partisans on either side.) HOWEVER -- WHAT IF the actions needed to cut CO2 by a factor of 6 in 30 years happen to be almost exactly the same as what we need to reduce the probability of the OTHER more definite types of catastrophes involving dependence on imported oil and gas? (It used to be "imported oil" -- but things have changed in a very serious way already over the past few decades.) Do any of you folks have opinions about the work of Cavallo at DHS, like his paper in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists? What if those actions look as if they would actually end up bringing a long-term net PROFIT to the economy, instead of costing trillions? After the movie... I came away with a sort of shock a bit different from what most people would legitimately experience. Some people would feel self-righteous in the following way: "I have marched against CO2, so I'm OK." No way. That's like marching for happiness. I does no good at all if it does not actually strengthen real action. Maybe some epsilon benefit, but no more. So OK... having human weaknesses... there is an element of self-righteousness in my reaction too. I like to believe I have done more than anyone else on earth to actually push us to a real solution that could prevent that kind of risk. (Did I send copies of my slides describing my proposal for a "Middle Way" strategy on CO2? It has some resemblence to -- and citation of -- the work by Marty Hoffert et al published in Science a year and a half ago -- but it is different in carrying it forward to the action implications. And besides, Marty did give me a chance to feed into the Science paper a bit as well.) But... I have a long history of making the right point at the right time, but not energetically enough. This time, I have probably been more effective in the use of time to that end, but even so I have "day job" stuff (restarting next Monday) and some unique responsibilities in basic science... and maybe one lesson from the movie is that this deserves more full-time championing of the right logic than I am yet putting into it. On the other hand .. full-time champions and correct logic do not always go together, and the champions these days (outside of industry) usually aren't into the kinds of partnerships that might address the gap... too much ego out there... Maybe the Clinton/Gore partnership was very effective at one time, in this kind of way, but Gore drifted away from a lot of his original search-for-the-truth role. Political flattery can be ever so seductive to so many people... =================================== Well, enough words. Back to restudying magnetic monopoles... while I still have a chance... Best, Paul From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Jan 7 18:39:58 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 10:39:58 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] disaster fallacy Message-ID: <01C4F4A5.3C82C200.shovland@mindspring.com> I think that humanity en masse is more likely to continue along crazily, so perhaps the best we can do is save ourselves, save our families, save anyone who is rational enough to listen and prepare. When I am doing photography, I compete with a bunch of people who have fallen into the habit of flying around the world taking pictures. I am deliberately concentrating on one world class city, San Francisco. When the peak oil s*** hits the fan I will have established myself as the go-to- man in the Bay Area for a lot of people. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Paul J. Werbos, Dr. [SMTP:paul.werbos at verizon.net] Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 10:28 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] disaster fallacy At 04:52 PM 1/6/2005, Michael Christopher wrote: > >>"Why did you do this to us, God? What did we do to >upset you?" asked a woman in India this week, a >heart-wrenching question asked in common these past >few days by Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and >Christians.<< > >--What a horribly mistaken question! To attribute >natural disasters to the will of a powerful being >whose judgment is beyond question is such a horrid >thing to do to oneself and one's children. Blaming >other humans cannot be far behind, if it preserves the The press says it happened already. In a way, it is not totally surprising. Some people asked:"Who would want to kill hundreds of thousands of Moslems, and is the most powerful person who would want to do so?" So they concluded: "It must be George Bush. As Osama says, the US is the great Satan, and Satan has great powers, so of course he did this..." If I believe the press... there are many, many people who have followed this obvious human-style logic. Aside from the obvious issues of therapy... the real zinger question is as follows: since we too are human, and not born any better than these crazy people, what is it that we are being equally crazy about? Yesterday, my family had me watch a DVD which offers one possible answer: The Day After Tomorrow. When it came out, the press was full of righteous indignation about this "speculative transparent anti-Bush propaganda." I didn't see it then... in part because I don't GO to the movies much at all anyway. But... I wonder how much our defensive reactions are a kind of hiding from reality as bad as the example Michael mentioned? Certainly the "little Ice Age" scenario for this century is very speculative (SO FAR AS I KNOW, being a scientist but nonspecialist.). But so far as I know, it is just as speculative to say it won't happen as to say it will. OK, that's a comment on the limits of my knowledge. In this context, I regret I did not sit in in the recent NSF workshop on this topic. It would be nice to have a sense of the conditional probabilities here. But I didn't see anything really crazy in the movie... except perhaps the relatively happy ending. All along, I have been thinking... OK, in the worst case we might lose about half the human economic base over about a century. But on a logarithmic scale, that is not nearly so bad as two or three other risks -- such as proliferation and possible use of WMD, or the long-term impact of the stagnation which might result if people overreact against technology, or perhaps even some kind of spiritual crisis -- all of which threaten outright extinction. The movie brings home the point that "half" may still be rather unpleasant, and that Little Ice Ages have been a bit faster than a century in the past. Yes, we shouldn't expect it to happen... but it seems more likely, say, than the 3 percent probability asteroid they thought we were facing briefly a week ago. A rational person does not ignore such odds. It would be like crossing a street without looking both ways, at an hour when the odds are 30-to-1 against a car hitting you. Now -- the movie raises the valid point in logic that we should not waste half the world's GNP growth over the next century, with certainly, in order to avoid, say, a 10 percent POSSIBILITY of losing half of it. It does not mention how Kyoto has a bigger impact on GNP than on CO2, under today's circumstances. (And I do not know if it is really 10 percent probability. Could be much more or less, conditional upon knowledge which exists which I have not calibrated. But I certainly would NOT defer to biased political partisans on either side.) HOWEVER -- WHAT IF the actions needed to cut CO2 by a factor of 6 in 30 years happen to be almost exactly the same as what we need to reduce the probability of the OTHER more definite types of catastrophes involving dependence on imported oil and gas? (It used to be "imported oil" -- but things have changed in a very serious way already over the past few decades.) Do any of you folks have opinions about the work of Cavallo at DHS, like his paper in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists? What if those actions look as if they would actually end up bringing a long-term net PROFIT to the economy, instead of costing trillions? After the movie... I came away with a sort of shock a bit different from what most people would legitimately experience. Some people would feel self-righteous in the following way: "I have marched against CO2, so I'm OK." No way. That's like marching for happiness. I does no good at all if it does not actually strengthen real action. Maybe some epsilon benefit, but no more. So OK... having human weaknesses... there is an element of self-righteousness in my reaction too. I like to believe I have done more than anyone else on earth to actually push us to a real solution that could prevent that kind of risk. (Did I send copies of my slides describing my proposal for a "Middle Way" strategy on CO2? It has some resemblence to -- and citation of -- the work by Marty Hoffert et al published in Science a year and a half ago -- but it is different in carrying it forward to the action implications. And besides, Marty did give me a chance to feed into the Science paper a bit as well.) But... I have a long history of making the right point at the right time, but not energetically enough. This time, I have probably been more effective in the use of time to that end, but even so I have "day job" stuff (restarting next Monday) and some unique responsibilities in basic science... and maybe one lesson from the movie is that this deserves more full-time championing of the right logic than I am yet putting into it. On the other hand .. full-time champions and correct logic do not always go together, and the champions these days (outside of industry) usually aren't into the kinds of partnerships that might address the gap... too much ego out there... Maybe the Clinton/Gore partnership was very effective at one time, in this kind of way, but Gore drifted away from a lot of his original search-for-the-truth role. Political flattery can be ever so seductive to so many people... =================================== Well, enough words. Back to restudying magnetic monopoles... while I still have a chance... Best, Paul _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Fri Jan 7 20:06:20 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 12:06:20 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] introspection In-Reply-To: <200501071900.j07J08027146@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050107200620.78545.qmail@web13421.mail.yahoo.com> >>Aside from the obvious issues of therapy... the real zinger question is as follows: since we too are human, and not born any better than these crazy people, what is it that we are being equally crazy about?<< --Always a good question (usually asked of the "other side" but not one's own). I do see hysteria on both the Left and the Right in the US, as well as utopianism, political correctness and other blind spots. It seems to be a product of the mass splitting in half, each half projecting its own blindness onto the other, its own dark side, its own self-importance and arrogance. Those who can stand in the middle and avoid fallacies on either side are few and far between, although I'm sure we all have moments where we reluctantly take one side for pragmatic reasons, not entirely secure in adopting that side's total worldview. Perhaps what is really missing is a systems theory view of beliefs in general. One side can accuse the other of being blind, without seeing how its own position is increasingly determined by blind opposition to the other. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Easier than ever with enhanced search. Learn more. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Jan 7 20:20:40 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 12:20:40 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] introspection Message-ID: <01C4F4B3.4DFDD2A0.shovland@mindspring.com> I'm not sure that the right/left divide is as serious as conservative media bias would have us believe. I do think there is some value in fragmenting the body politic into many pieces so we can reconstitute some major blocks that make sense at this point in time. We live in a strange world where beliefs have more status than facts. Can't get too much crazier than that :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 12:06 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] introspection >>Aside from the obvious issues of therapy... the real zinger question is as follows: since we too are human, and not born any better than these crazy people, what is it that we are being equally crazy about?<< --Always a good question (usually asked of the "other side" but not one's own). I do see hysteria on both the Left and the Right in the US, as well as utopianism, political correctness and other blind spots. It seems to be a product of the mass splitting in half, each half projecting its own blindness onto the other, its own dark side, its own self-importance and arrogance. Those who can stand in the middle and avoid fallacies on either side are few and far between, although I'm sure we all have moments where we reluctantly take one side for pragmatic reasons, not entirely secure in adopting that side's total worldview. Perhaps what is really missing is a systems theory view of beliefs in general. One side can accuse the other of being blind, without seeing how its own position is increasingly determined by blind opposition to the other. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Easier than ever with enhanced search. Learn more. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 7 20:44:06 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 15:44:06 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Edge: The World Question Center 2005 Message-ID: Howard, For your leisurely weekend reading. I draw specific attention to the responses by Zimbardo (mentions the Lucifer Effect), Alun Anderson, Pentland, Lanier, Margolis, Harris, Blackmore, Seligman, and Gopnik. I'm going to suggest to Brockman for 2006, "What would it take for you to reverse your three most cherished beliefs?" Happy Gregorian calendar new year! ------------ The World Question Center 2005 http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html ______________________________________________________________________ "What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?" ______________________________________________________________________ God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap: Fourteen scientists ponder everything from string theory to true love. Space Without Time, Time Without Rest: John Brockman's Question for the Republic of Wisdom--It can be more thrilling to start the New Year with a good question than with a good intention. That's what John Brockman is doing for the eight time in a row. What do you believe to be true, even though you can't prove it? John Brockman asked over a hundred scientists and intellectuals... more? ... Edge Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it? ______________________________________________________________________ The 2005 Edge Question has generated many eye-opening responses from a "who's who" of third culture scientists and science-minded thinkers. The 120 contributions comprise a document of 60,000 words. The New York Times ("Science Times") and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ("Feuilliton") have been granted rights to publish excepts in their print and online editions simultaneously with Edge publication. The editors of "Science Times" and "Feuilliton", respectively, are making their own selections. The Italian newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore will follow on Sunday, January 9th. This year there's a focus on consciousness, on knowing, on ideas of truth and proof. If pushed to generalize, I would say it is a commentary on how we are dealing with the idea of certainty. We are in the age of "searchculture", in which Google and other search engines are leading us into a future rich with an abundance of correct answers along with an accompanying na?ve sense of certainty. In the future, we will be able to answer the question, but will we be bright enough to ask it? This is an alternative path. It may be that it's okay not to be certain, but to have a hunch, and to perceive on that basis. There is also evidence here that the scientists are thinking beyond their individual fields. Yes, they are engaged in the science of their own areas of research, but more importantly they are also thinking deeply about creating new understandings about the limits of science, of seeing science not just as a question of knowing things, but as a means of tuning into the deeper questions of who we are and how we know. It may sound as if I am referring to a group of intellectuals, and not scientists. In fact, I refer to both. In 1991, I suggested the idea of a third culture, which "consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are. " I believe that the scientists of the third culture are the pre-eminent intellectuals of our time. But I can't prove it. Happy New Year! John Brockman Publisher & Editor ______________________________________________________________________ This year's Edge Question was suggested by Nicholas Humphrey. ______________________________________________________________________ CONTRIBUTORS ______________________________________________________________________ [280]IAN McEWAN Novelist; Author, Saturday [mcewan100.jpg] What I believe but cannot prove is that no part of my consciousness will survive my death. I exclude the fact that I will linger, fadingly, in the thoughts of others, or that aspects of my consciousness will survive in writing, or in the positioning of a planted tree or a dent in my old car. I suspect that many contributors to Edge will take this premise as a given--true but not significant. However, it divides the world crucially, and much damage has been done to thought as well as to persons, by those who are certain that there is a life, a better, more important life, elsewhere. That this span is brief, that consciousness is an accidental gift of blind processes, makes our existence all the more precious and our responsibilities for it all the more profound. |[281]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [282]ROBERT TRIVERS Evolutionary biologist, Rutgers University; Author, Natural Selection and Social Theory [trivers100.jpg] Think true, cannot prove. I believe that deceit and self deception play a disproportinate role in human-generated disasters, including misguided wars, international affairs more gnerally, the collapse of civilizations, and state affairs, including disastrous social, political and economic policies and miscarriages of justice. I believe deceit and self deception play an important role in the relative underdevelopment of the social sciences. I believe that processes of self deception are important in limiting the achievement of individuals. |[283]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [284]IAN WILMUT Biologist; Cloning Researcher; Roslin Institute, Edinburgh; Coauthor, The Second Creation [Wilmut100.jpg] I believe that it is possible to change adult cells from one phenotype to another. The birth of Dolly provided the insight behind this belief. She was the first adult cloned from another adult, of any species. Previously biologists had believed that the mechanisms that direct the formation of all of the different tissues that make up an adult were so complex and so rigidly fixed that they could not be reversed. Her birth demonstrated that the mechanisms that were active in the nucleus transferred from the mammary epithelial cell could be reversed by unknown factors in the recipient unfertilised egg. We take for-granted the process by which the single cell embryo at fertilisation gives rise to all of the many tissues of an adult. As almost all of those cells have the same genetic information, the changes must be brought about by sequential differences in function of the genes. An impression is beginning to emerge of the factors that bring about these sequential changes, although much more remains to be learned. In particular, very little is known of the hierarchy of influence of the several regulatory factors. I believe that a greater understanding of these mechanisms will allow us to cause cells from one tissue to form another different tissue. We have long been accustomed to the idea that cells are influenced by their external environment and use specific methods of tissue culture to control their function in the laboratory. The new research introduces an additional dimension. We will learn how to increase the activity of the intracellular factors to achieve our aims. This may be by direct introduction of the proteins, use of small molecule drugs to modulate expression of regulatory genes or transient expression of those key genes. We have much to learn about the optimal approach to transdifferentiation. Is it necessary to reverse the process of differentiation to an early stage in the same pathway? Or is it possible to achieve change directly from one path to another? The answer may vary from one tissue to another. The medical implications will be profound. Cells of specific tissues will be available from patients either for research to understand genetic differences or for their therapy, This is not to suggest that we cease research on embryo stem cells because knowledge from their use will be essential to develop the new approaches that I envisage. Conversely, understanding of the mechanisms of reprogramming cells will create important new opportunities in the use of embryo stem cells. As many options as possible should be available to the researcher and clinician. It is my belief that, ultimately, this approach to tissue formation will be the greatest inheritance of the Dolly experiment. The ramifications are far wider than those that involve the production of cloned offspring. |[285]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [286]ANTON ZEILINGER [zeilinger100.jpg] What I believe but cannot prove is that quantum physics teaches us to abandon the distinction between information and reality. The fundamental reason why I believe in this is that it is impossible to make an operational distinction between reality and information. In other words, whenever we make any statement about the world, about any object, about any feature of any object, we always make statements about the information we have. And, whenever we make scientific predictions we make statements about information we possibly attain in the future. So one might be tempted to believe that everything is just information. The danger there is solipsism and subjectivism. But we know, even as we cannot prove it, that there is reality out there. For me the strongest argument for a reality independent of us is the randomness of the individual quantum event, like the decay of a radioactive atom. There is no hidden reason why a given atom decays at the very instant it does so. So if reality exists and if we will never be able to make an operational distinction between reality and information, the hypothesis suggests itself that reality and information are the same. We need a new concept which encompasses both. In a sense, reality and information are the two sides of the same coin. I feel that this is the message of the quantum. It is the natural extension of the Copenhagen interpretation. Once you adopt the notion that reality and information are the same all quantum paradoxes and puzzles disappear, like the measurement problem or Schr?dinger's cat. Yet the price to pay is high. If my hypothesis is true, many questions become meaningless. There is no sense then to ask, what is "really" going on out there. Schr?dinger's cat is neither dead nor alive unless we obtain information about her state. By the way, I also believe that some day all computers will be quantum computers. The reason I believe this is the ongoing miniaturization of electronic components. And, certainly, we will learn to overcome decoherence. We will learn how to observe quantum phenomena outside the shielded environment of laboratories. I hope I will still be alive when this happens. |[287]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [288]JARED DIAMOND Biologist; Geographer, UCLA; Author, Collapse [diamond100.jpg] When did humans complete their expansion around the world? I'm convinced, but can't yet prove, that humans first reached the continents of North America, South America, and Australia only very recently, at or near the end of the last Ice Age. Specifically, I'm convinced that they reached North America around 14,000 years ago, South America around 13,500 years ago, and Australia and New Guinea around 46, 000 years ago; and that humans were then responsible for the extinctions of most of the big animals of those continents within a few centuries of those dates; and that scientists will accept this conclusion sooner and less reluctantly for Australia and New Guinea than for North and South America. Background to my conjecture is that there are now hundreds of thousands of sites with undisputed evidence of human presence dating back to millions of years ago in Africa, Europe, and Asia, but none with even disputed evidence of human presence over 100,000 years ago in the Americas and Australia. In the Americas, undisputed evidence suddenly appears in all the lower 48 U.S. states around 14,000 years ago, at numerous South American sites soon thereafter, and at hundreds of Australian sites between 46,000 and 14,000 years ago. Evidence of most of the former big mammals of those continents--e.g., elephants and lions and giant ground sloths in the Americas, giant kangaroos and one-ton Komodo dragons in Australia--disappears within a few centuries of those dates. The transparent conclusion: people arrived then, quickly filled up those continents, and easily killed off their big animals that had never seen humans and that let humans walk up to them, as Galapagos and Antarctica animals still do today. But some Australian archaeologists, and many American archaeologists, resist this obvious conclusion, for several reasons. Archaeologists try hard to find convincing earlier sites, because it would be a dramatic discovery. Every year, discoveries of many purportedly older sites are announced, then to be forgotten. As the supporting evidence dissolves or remains disputed, we're now in a steady state of new claims and vanishing old claims, like a hydra constantly sprouting new heads. There are still a few sites known for the Americas with evidence of human butchering of the extinct big animals, and none known for Australia and New Guinea--but one expects to find very few sites anyway, among all the sites of natural deaths for hundreds of thousands of years, if the hunting was all finished locally (because the prey became extinct) within a few decades. American archaeologists are especially persistent in their quest for pre-14,000 sites--perhaps because secured dating requires use of multiple dating techniques (not just radiocarbon), but American archaeologists distrust alternatives to radiocarbon (discovered by U.S. scientists) because the alternative dating techniques were discovered by Australian scientists. Every year, beginning graduate students in archaeology and paleontology, working in Africa or Europe or Asia, go out and discover undisputed new sites with ancient human presence. Every year, new such discoveries are announced to the other three continents, but none has ever met the requirements of evidence accepted for Africa, Europe, or Asia. The big animals of the latter three continents survive, because they had millions of years to learn fear of human hunters with very slowly evolving skills; most big animals of the former three continents didn't survive, because they had the misfortune that their first encounter with humans was a sudden one, with fully modern skilled hunters. To me, the case is already proved. How many more decades of unconvincing claims will it take to convince the holdouts among my colleagues? I don't know. It makes better newspaper headlines to report "Wow!! New discovery overturns the established paradigm of American archaeology!!" than to report, "Ho hum, yet another reportedly paradigm-overturning discovery fails to hold up." |[289]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [290]DANIEL GOLEMAN Psychologist; Author, Emotional Intelligence [goleman100.jpg] I believe, but cannot prove, that today's children are unintended victims of economic and technological progress. To be sure, greater wealth and advanced technology offers all of us better lives in many ways. Yet these unstoppable forces seem to have had some disastrous results in how they have been transforming childhood. Even as children's IQs are on a steady march upward over the last century, the last three decades have seen a major drop in children's most basic social and emotional skills--the very abilities that would make them effective workers and leaders, parents and spouses, and members of the community. Of course there are always individual exceptions--children who grow up to be outstanding human beings. But the Bell Curve for social and emotional abilities seems to be sliding in the wrong direction. The most compelling data comes from a random national sample of more than 3,000 American children ages seven to sixteen--chosen to represent the entire nation--rated by their parents and teachers, adults who know them well. First done in the early 1970s, and then roughly fifteen years later, in the mid-80s, and again in the late 1990s, the results showed a startling decline. The most precipitous drop occurred between the first and second cohorts: American children were more withdrawn, sulky and unhappy, anxious and depressed, impulsive and unable to concentrate, delinquent and aggressive. Between the early 1970s and the mid-80s, they did more poorly on 42 indicators, better on none. In the late 1990s, scores crept back up a bit, but were nowhere near as high as they had been on the first round, in the early 70s. That's the data. What I believe, but can't prove, is that this decline is due in large part to economic and technological forces. For one, the ratcheting upward of global competition means that over the last two decades or so each generation of parents has had to work longer to maintain the same standard of living that their own parents had--virtually every family has two working parents today, while 50 years ago the norm was only one. It's not that today's parents love their children any less, but that they have less free time to spend with them than was true in their parents' day. Increasing mobility means that fewer children live in the same neighborhood as their extended families--and so no longer have surrogate parenting from close relatives. Day care can be excellent, particularly for children of privileged families, but too often means less well-to-do children get too little caring attention in their day. For the middle class, childhood has become overly organized, a tight schedule of dance or piano lessons and soccer games, children shuttled from one adult-run activity to another. This has eroded the free time in which children can play together on their own, in their own way. When it comes to learning social and emotional skills, I suspect the lessoning of open time with family, relatives and other children translates into a loss of the very activities that have traditionally allowed the natural transmission of these skills. Then there's the technological factor. Today's children spend more time than ever in human history alone, staring at a video monitor. That amounts to a natural experiment in childrearing on an unprecedented scale. While this may mean children as adults will be more at ease with their computers, I doubt it does anything but de-skill them when it comes to relating to each other person-to-person. We know that the prefrontal-limbic neural circuitry crucial for social and emotional abilities is the last part of the human brain to become anatomically mature, not finishing this developmental task until the mid-20s. During that window, children's life abilities become set as neurons come online and are interconnected for better or for worse. A child's experiences dictate how those connections are made. A smart strategy for helping every child get the right social and emotional skill-building would be to bring such lessons into the classroom rather than leaving it to chance. My hunch, which I can't prove, is that this offers the best way to keep children from paying of modern life for us all. |[291]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [292]MARTI HEARST Computer Scientist, UC Berkeley, School of Information Management & Systems [hearst100.jpg] The Search Problem is solvable. Advances in computational linguistics and user interface design will eventually enable people to find answers to any question they have, so long as the answer is encoded in textual form and stored in a publicly accessible location. Advances in reasoning systems will to a limited degree be able to draw inferences in order to find answers that are not explicitly present in the existing documents. There have been several recent developments that prompt me to make this claim. First, computational linguistics (also known as natural language processing or language engineering) has made great leaps forward in the last decade, due primarily to advances stemming from the availability of huge text collections, from which statistics can be derived. Today's automatic language translation systems, for example, are now derived almost entirely from statistical patterns extracted from text collections. They now work as well as hand-engineered systems, and promise to continue to improve. As another example, recent government-sponsored research in the area of (simple) question answering has produced a radical leap forward in the quality of results in this arena. Of course, another important development is the rise of the Web and its most voracious consumer, the internet search engine. It is common knowledge that search engines make use of information associated with link structure to improve results rankings. But search engine companies also have enormous, albeit somewhat impoverished, repositories of information about how people ask for information. This behavioral information can be used to build better search tools. For example, some spelling correction algorithms make use of how people have corrected erroneous spellings in the past, by observing pairs of queries that occur one after the next. The second query is assumed to be the correction, if it is sufficiently similar to the first. Patterns are then derived that convert from different types of misspellings to their corrections. Another development in the field of computational linguistics is the manual creation of enormous lexical ontologies, which are then used to build axioms and rules about language use. These modern ontologies, unlike their predecessors, are of a large enough scale and simple enough design to be useful, although this work is in the early stages. There are also many attempts to build such ontologies automatically from large text collections; the most promising approach seems to be to combine the automated and the manual approaches. As a side note, I am skeptical about the hype surrounding the Semantic Web--it is very difficult to characterize concepts in a systematic way, and even more so to force all the world's creators of information to conform to one schema. Automated analysis tools adapt to what people really do, rather than try to force people's expressions of information to conform to a standard. Finally, advances in user interface design are key to producing better search results. The search field has learned an enormous amount in the ten years since the Web became a major presence in society, but as is often noted in the field, the interface itself hasn't changed much: after all this time, we still type words into a blank box and then select from a list of results. Experience shows that a search interface has to be a qualitative leap better than the standard in order to entice people to switch. I believe headway will be made in this area, most likely occurring in tandem with advances in natural language analysis. It may well be the case that advances in audio, image, and video processing will keep pace with those of language analysis, thus making possible the answering of questions that can be answered by information stored in graphical and audio form. However, my expertise does not extend to these fields, so I will not make a claim about this. |[293]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [294]TIMOTHY TAYLOR Archaeologist, University of Bradford; Author, The Buried Soul [taylor100.jpg] "All your life you live so close to the truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque" wrote Tom Stoppard in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Something I believe is true even though I cannot prove it, is that both cannibalism and slavery were prevalent in human prehistory. Neither belief commands specialist academic consensus and each phenomenon remains highly controversial, their empirical "signatures" in the archaeological record being ambiguous and fugitive. Truth and belief are uncomfortable words in scholarship. It is possible to define as true only those things that can be proved by certain agreed criteria. In general, science does not believe in truth or, more precisely, science does not believe in belief. Understanding is understood as the best fit to the data under the current limits (both instrumental and philosophical) of observation. If science fetishized truth, it would be religion, which it is not. However, it is clear that under the conditions that Thomas Kuhn designated as " normal science" (as opposed to the intellectual ferment of paradigm shifts) most scholars are involved in supporting what is, in effect, a religion. Their best guesses become fossilized as a status quo, and the status quo becomes an item of faith. So when a scientist tells you that "the truth is . . .", it is time to walk away. Better to find a priest. Until recently, most archaeologists would be inclined to say that the truths about cannibalism and about slavery are that each has been sharply historically limited and that each is a more or less aberrant cultural phenomenon. The reason for such a belief is that it is only in a small number of cases that either thing be proved beyond reasonable doubt. But I see the problem in the starting point. If we shift our background expectations and say that coercing a living person to do one's bidding is perhaps the very first form of property ownership ("the slavery latent in the family" to use Marx and Engels' telling phrase), and that eating the dead (as very many wild vertebrates do) makes sense in nutritional and competitive terms, then the archaeologist's duty is to empirically establish those times and places where slavery and cannibalism had ceased to exist. The only reason we have hitherto insisted on proof-positive rather than proof-negative in relation to these phenomena is that both seem grotesque to us now, and we have rather a high opinion of our natural civility. This is the most interesting point, and the focus of my attention is how culturally-elaborated mechanisms of restraint and inter-personal respect emerged and allowed such refined scruples. |[295]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [296]RANDOLPH NESSE, M.D. Psychiatrist, University of Michigan; Coauthor, Why We Get Sick [nesse100.jpg] I can't prove it, but I am pretty sure that people gain a selective advantage from believing in things they can't prove. I am dead serious about this. People who are sometimes consumed by false beliefs do better than those who insist on evidence before they believe and act. People who are sometimes swept away by emotions do better in life than those who calculate every move. These advantages have, I believe, shaped mental capacities for intense emotion and passionate beliefs because they give a selective advantage in certain situations. I am not advocating for irrationality or extreme emotionality. Many, perhaps even most problems of individuals and groups arise from actions based on passion. The Greek initiators and Enlightenment implementers recognized correctly that the world would be better off if reason displaced superstition and crude emotion. I have no interest in going back on that road and fundamentalism remains a severe threat to enlightened civilization. I am arguing, however, that if we want to understand these tendencies we need to quit dismissing them as defects and start considering how they came to exist. I came to this belief from seeing psychiatric patients while studying game theory and evolutionary biology. Many patients are consumed by fears, sadness, and other emotions they find painful and senseless. Others are crippled by grandiose fantasies or bizarre beliefs. On the other side are those with obsessive compulsive personality. They do not have obsessive compulsive disorder; they do not wash and count all day. They have obsessive compulsive personality characterized by hyper-rationality. They are mystified by other people's emotional outbursts. They do their duty and expect others will too. They are often disappointed in this, giving rise to frequent resentment if not anger. They trade favors according to the rules, and they can't fathom genuine generosity or spiteful hatred. People who lack passions suffer several disadvantages. When social life results in situations that can be mapped onto game theory, regular predictable behavior is a strategy inferior to allocating actions randomly among the options. The angry person who might seek spiteful revenge is a force to be reckoned with, while a sensible opponent can be easily dealt with. The passionate lover sweeps away a superior but all too practical offer of marriage. It is harder to explain the disadvantages suffered by people who lack a capacity for faith, but consider the outcomes for those who wait for proof before acting, compared to the those who act on confident conviction. The great things in life are done by people who go ahead when it seems senseless to others. Usually they fail, but sometimes they succeed. Like nearly every other trait, tendencies for passionate emotions and irrational convictions are most advantageous in some middle range. The optimum for modern life seems to me to be quite a ways towards the rational side of the median, but there are advantages and disadvantages at every point along the spectrum. Making human life better requires that we understand these capacities, and to do that we must seek their origins and functions. I cannot prove this is true, but I believe it is. This belief spurs my search for evidence which will either strengthen my conviction or, if I can discipline my mind sufficiently, convince me that it is false. |[297]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [298]STEPHEN H. SCHNEIDER Biologist; Climatologist, Stanford University; Author, Laboratory Earth [Schneider100.jpg] I believe that global warming is both a real phenomenon and at least partially a result of human activities such as dumping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In fact I can "prove it"--or can I?--that is the real question. What is "proof"? In the strict old fashioned frequentist statistical belief system data is direct observations of the hypothesized phenomena--temperature increases in my case--and when you get enough of it to produce frequency distributions you can assign objective probabilities to cause and effect hypotheses. But what if the events cannot be precisely measured, or worse, apply to future events like the warming of the late 21st century? Then a frequentist interpretation of " proof" is impossible in principle before the fact, and we instead become subjectivists--Bayesian updaters as some statisticians like to refer to it. In this case we use frequency data and all other data relevant to components of our analysis to form a "prior"--a belief about likelihood of an event or process. Then as we learn more we update our belief--an "a posteriori probability" as the Bayesians call it--or simply a revised prior. It is my strong belief that there is an overwhelming amount of evidence to form a subjective prior with high confidence that the earth's surface has warmed over the past century about 0.7 deg C or so and that at least half of the more recent warming is traceable to human pressures. Is this " proof" of anthropogenic (i.e., we did it) warming? Not in the strict sense of a criminal trial with "beyond a reasonable doubt" criterion--say a 99% objective probability. But in the sense of a civil proceeding, where " preponderance of evidence" is the standard and a likelihood much greater than 50% is adequate to have a case, then global warming is indeed already " proved". So as a frequentist I concede I believe it is real without full "proof", but as a subjectivist, my reading of the many lines of evidence puts global warming well over the minimum thresholds of belief to assert it is already "proved". |[299]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [300]BRIAN GOODWIN Biologist, Schumacher College, Devon, UK; Author, How The Leopard Changed Its Spots [goodwin100.jpg] Nature Is Culture. I believe that nature and culture can now be understood as one unified process, not two distinct domains separated by some property of humans such as written or spoken language, consciousness, or ethics. Although there is no proof of this, and no consensus in the scientific community or in the humanities, the revelations of the past few years provide a foundation for both empirical and conceptual work that I believe will lead to a coherent, unified perspective on the process in which we and nature are engaged. This is not a take-over of the humanities by science, but a genuine fusion of the two based on clear articulations of basic concepts such as meaning and wholeness in natural and cultural processes, with implications for scientific studies, their applications in technology and their expression in the arts. For me this vision has arisen primarily through developments in biology, which occupies the middle ground between culture and the physical world. The key conceptual changes have arisen from complexity theory through detailed studies of the networks of interactions between components within organisms, and between them in ecosystems. When the genome projects made it clear that we are unable to make sense of the information in DNA, attention necessarily shifted to understanding how organisms use this in making themselves with forms that allow them to survive and reproduce in particular habitats. The focus shifted from the hereditary material to its organised context, the living cell, so that organisms as agencies with a distinctive kind of organisation returned to the biological foreground. Examination of the self-referential networks that regulate gene activities in organisms, that carry out the diverse functions and constructions within cells through protein-protein interactions (the proteome), and the sequences of metabolic transformations that make up the metabolome, have revealed that they all have distinctive properties of self-similar, fractal structure governed by power-law relationships. These properties are similar to the structure of languages, which are also self-referential networks described by power-laws, as discovered years ago by G.K. Zipf. A conclusion is that organisms use proto-languages to make sense of both their inherited history (written in DNA and its molecular modifications) and their external contexts (the environment) in the process of making themselves as functional agencies. Organisms thus become participants in cultures with histories that have meaning, expressed in the forms (morphologies and behaviours) distinctive to their species. This is of course embodied or tacit meaning, which cognitive scientists now recognise as primary in human culture also. Understanding species as cultures that have experienced 3.7 billion years of adaptive evolution on earth makes it clear that they are repositories of meaningful knowledge and experience about effective living that we urgently need to learn about in human culture. Here is a source of deep wisdom about living in participation with others that is energy and resource efficient, that recycles everything, produces forms that are simultaneously functional and beautiful, and is continuously innovative and creative. We can now proceed with a holistic science that is unified with the arts and humanities and has at its foundation the principles that arise from a naturalistic ethic based on an extended science that includes qualities as well as quantities within the domain of knowledge. There is plenty of work to do in articulating this unified perspective, from detailed empirical studies of the ways in which organisms achieve their states of coherence and adaptability to the application of these principles in the organic design of all human artefacts, from energy-generating devices and communication systems to cars and factories. The goal is to make human culture as integrated with natural process as the rest of the living realm so that we enhance the quality of the planet instead of degrading it. This will require a rethinking of evolution in terms of the intrinsic agency with meaning that is embodied in the life cycles of different species, understood as natural cultures. Integrating biology and culture with physical principles will be something of a challenge, but there are already many indications of how this can be achieved, without losing the thread of language and meaning that runs through living nature. The emphasis on wholeness that lies at the heart of quantum mechanics and its extensions in quantum gravity, together with the subtle order revealed as quantum coherence, is already stimulating a rethinking of the nature of wholeness, coherence and robust adaptability in organisms as well as quality of life in cultures. Furthermore, the self-similar, fractal patterns that arise in physical systems during phase transitions, when new order is coming into being, have the same characteristics as the patterns observed in organismic and cultural networks involved in generating order and meaning. The unified vision of a creative and meaningful cosmic process seems to be on the agenda as a replacement for the meaningless mechanical cosmos that has dominated Western scientific thought and cultural life for a few hundred years. |[301]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [302]TERRENCE SEJNOWSKI Computational Neuroscientist, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Coauthor, The Computational Brain [sejnowski100.jpg] How do we remember the past? There are many answers to this question, depending on whether you are an historian, artist or scientist. As a scientist I have wanted to know where in the brain memories are stored and how they are storedthe genetic and neural mechanisms. Although neuroscientists have made tremendous progress in uncovering neural mechanisms for learning, I believe, but cannot prove, that we are all looking in the wrong place for long-term memory. I have been puzzled by my ability to remember my childhood, despite the fact that most of the molecules in my body today are not the same ones I had as a childin particular, the molecules that make up my brain are constantly turning over, being replaced with newly minted molecules. Perhaps memories only seem to be stable. Rehearsal strengthens memories, and can even alter them. However, I have detailed memories of specific places where I lived 50 years ago that I doubt I ever rehearsed but can be easily verified, so the stability of long-term memories is a real problem. Textbooks in neuroscience, including one that I coauthored, say that memories are stored at synapses between neurons in the brain, of which there are many. In neural network models of memory, information can be stored by selectively altering the strengths of the synapses, and "spike-time dependent plasticity" at synapses in the cerebral cortex has been found with these properties. This is a hot area of research, but all we need to know here is that patterns of neural activity can indeed modify a lot of molecular machinery inside a neuron. If memories are stored as changes to molecules inside cells, which are constantly being replaced, how can a memory remain stable over 50 years? My hunch is that everyone is looking in the wrong place: that the substrate of really old memories is located not inside cells, but outside cells, in the extracellular space. The space between cells is not empty, but filled with a matrix of tough material that is difficult to dissolve and turns over very slowly if at all. The extracellular matrix connects cells and maintains the shape of the cell mass. This is why scars on your body haven't changed much after decades of sloughing off skin cells. My intuition is based on a set of classic experiments on the neuromuscular junction between a motor neuron and a muscle cell, a giant synapse that activates the muscle. The specialized extracellular matrix at the neuromuscular junction, called the basal lamina, consists of proteoglycans, glycoproteins, including collagen, and adhesion molecules such as laminin and fibronectin. If the nerve that activates a muscle is crushed, the nerve fiber grows back to the junction and forms a specialized nerve terminal ending. This occurs even if the muscle cell is also killed. The memory of the contact is preserved by the basal lamina at the junction. Similar material exists at synapses in the brain, which could permanently maintain overall connectivity despite the coming and going of molecules inside neurons. How could we prove that the extracellular matrix really is responsible for long-term memories? One way to disprove it would be to disrupt the extracellular matrix and see if the memories remain. This can be done with enzymes or by knocking out one or more key molecules with techniques from molecular genetics. If I am right, then all of your memorieswhat makes you a unique individualare contained in the endoskeleton that connects cells to each other. The intracellular machinery holds memories temporarily and decides what to permanently store in the matrix, perhaps while you are sleeping. It might be possible someday to stain this memory endoskeleton and see what memories look like. |[303]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ ALEXANDER VILENKIN Physicist; Institute of Cosmology, Tufts University [vilenkin100.jpg] There are good reasons to believe that the universe is infinite. If so, it contains an infinite number of regions of the same size as our observable region (which is 80 billion light years across). It follows from quantum mechanics that the number of distinct histories that could occur in any of these finite regions in a finite time (since the big bang) is finite. By history I mean not just the history of the civilization, but everything that happens, down to the atomic level. The number of possible histories is fantastically large (it has been estimated as 10 to the power 10150), but the important point is that it is finite. Thus, we have an infinite number of regions like ours and only a finite number of histories that can play out in them. It follows that every possible history will occur in an infinite number of regions. In particular, there should be an infinite number of regions with histories identical to ours. So, if you are not satisfied with the result of the presidential elections, don't despair: you candidate has won on an infinite number of earths. This picture of the universe robs our civilization of any claim for uniqueness: countless identical civilizations are scattered in the infinite expanse of the cosmos. I find this rather depressing, but it is probably true. Another thing that I believe to be true, but cannot prove, is that our part of the universe will eventually stop expanding and will recollapse to a big crunch. But this will happen no sooner than 20 billion years from now, and probably much later. |[304]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [305]OLIVER MORTON Writer; Contributing Editor, Wired, Newsweek International; Author, Mapping Mars [morton100.jpg] I've always found belief a bit difficult; people tend to assume that I have rather strong beliefs, but I don't experience them in that way. As far as knowledge goes I'm a consumer, and sometimes a distributor, not a producer; most of what I believe to be true lies far beyond my capacity for proof, and I try to moderate the timbre of my belief accordingly. I know that almost all my beliefs are based on faith in people, and processes, and institutions, and their various capacities for correcting themselves when in error. I think the same is true for most of us; those who can prove their beliefs in their field of expertise are still reliant on faith in others when it comes to other fields. To acknowledge this at all times is not possible--it would make every utterance tentative, encrust every concept with ceteris paribus clauses. But when faced with a question like this, the role of our faith in people and in social institutions has to be acknowledged. And it does no harm to acknowledge it now and then even when not faced with such a question, in order to reinforce the need to keep people, institutions and the processes of knowledge production held in helpful scrutiny. Which I suppose means that, for me, the real question is what do I believe that I don't think anyone can prove. In answer I'd put forward the belief that there is a future much better, in terms of reduced human suffering and increased human potential, than the present, and that one part of what makes it better is a greater, subtler knowledge of the world at large. If I can't prove this, why do I believe it? Because it's better than believing the alternative. Because it provides a context for social and political action that would otherwise be futile; in this, it is an exhortatory belief. It is also, in part, a self-serving one, in that it suggests that by trying to clarify and disseminate knowledge (a description that makes me sound like the chef at a soup kitchen) I'm doing something that helps the better future, if only a bit. Besides the question of why, though, there's the question of how. And there the answer is "with difficulty". It is not an easy thing for me to make myself believe. But it is what I want to believe, and on my best days I do. |[306]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [307]PAUL STEINHARDT Albert Einstein Professor of Physics, Princeton University. [steinhardt100.jpg] I believe that our universe is not accidental, but I cannot prove it. Historically, most physicists have shared this point-of-view. For centuries, most of us have believed that the universe is governed by a simple set of physical laws that are the same everywhere and that these laws derive from a simple unified theory. However, in the last few years, an increasing number of my most respected colleagues have become enamored with the anthropic principle--the idea that there is an enormous multiplicity of universes with widely different physical properties and the properties of our particular observable universe arise from pure accident. The only special feature of our universe is that its properties are compatible with the evolution of intelligent life. The change in attitude is motivated, in part, by the failure to date to find a unified theory that predicts our universe as the unique possibility. According to some recent calculations, the current best hope for a unified theory--superstring theory--allows an exponentially large number of different universes, most of which look nothing like our own. String theorists have turned to the anthropic principle for salvation. Frankly, I view this as an act of desperation. I don't have much patience for the anthropic principle. I think the concept is, at heart, non-scientific. A proper scientific theory is based on testable assumptions and is judged by its predictive power. The anthropic principle makes an enormous number of assumptions--regarding the existence of multiple universes, a random creation process, probability distributions that determine the likelihood of different features, etc.--none of which are testable because they entail hypothetical regions of spacetime that are forever beyond the reach of observation. As for predictions, there are very few, if any. In the case of string theory, the principle is invoked only to explain known observations, not to predict new ones. (In other versions of the anthropic principle where predictions are made, the predictions have proven to be wrong. Some physicists cite the recent evidence for a cosmological constant as having anticipated by anthropic argument; however, the observed value does not agree with the anthropically predicted value.) I find the desperation especially unwarranted since I see no evidence that our universe arose by a random process. Quite the contrary, recent observations and experiments suggest that our universe is extremely simple. The distribution of matter and energy is remarkably uniform. The hierarchy of complex structures ranging from galaxy clusters to subnuclear particles can all be described in terms of a few dozen elementary constituents and less than a handful of forces, all related by simple symmetries. A simple universe demands a simple explanation. Why do we need to postulate an infinite number of universes with all sorts of different properties just to explain our one? Of course, my colleagues and I are anxious for further reductionism. But I view the current failure of string theory to find a unique universe simply as a sign that our understanding of string theory is still immature (or perhaps that string theory is wrong). Decades from now, I hope that physicists will be pursuing once again their dreams of a truly scientific "final theory" and will look back at the current anthropic craze as millennial madness. |[308]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [309]ELLEN WINNER Psychologist, Boston College; Author, Gifted Children [winner100.jpg] Sometimes our folk theories are correct: Parents do shape their children. According to our folk theories of child development, parents are a major and inescapable influence on their children. Most people believe that how parents treat their children, as well as the values parents impart, leaves a strong and indelible imprint. Yet some psychologists have countered this view and have pointed to the finding that on paper and pencil personality tests, parents and children (especially parents and their adopted children) are often not mirrors of one another. Psychologists have not yet proven to skeptics that parents have a strong influence on their children, but I am convinced that we will be able to demonstrate this. To begin with, producing children whose personality mirrors ones own is hardly the only way for parents to influence their children. We should not expect children to mirror their parents' personalities since they may often develop personalities in reaction to their parents. If you react against something, that something is having an influence on you. A depressed mother may engender a solicitous child. An impulsive parent may engender a careful child intent on not repeating the parent's errors. Another problem with only using personality tests to examine parental influence is that these tests ignore political, social, and moral values and aesthetic tastes. I believe that children end up with much of their parents' values and tastes. We know that one of the best predictors of how people vote is how their parents vote. Parental values such as generosity, ambition, materialism, anti-materialism, etc have powerful effects on children. True, children may react against their parents' values. Materialistic parents have bred hippie children. But how many of these children eventually shed their hippie clothing and go to Wall Street? All too many. If parents had no influence on their children, what is it that keeps psychoanalysts in business? Some children hate their parents. Some feel rage at their parents. Some feel their parents make them feel guilty. Some feel damaged by their parents. Some feel they are carrying on their parents' traditions. Some feel they owe their character strength to their parents. I fervently doubt that these feelings are merely epiphenomenal. Judith Rich Harris, in The Nurture Assumption, took the position that parents have essentially no influence on their children besides passing on their genes and choosing their children's peer group. Steve Pinker said that the publication of this book was a landmark event in the history of psychology. I disagree with Harris' extreme claims and Pinker's endorsement. To demonstrate parents' effects on their children, we will need better measures than quantitative short answer paper and pencil personality tests, and we will need to recognize that parents may influence their children to become like them or to become unlike them. One way to start is to develop a set of predictions about how parents shape their children (either to become like or unlike them), interview people about how they believe they have been shaped by their parents, and look for whether the patterns found fit the predictions. A stronger way is to look at adult adopted children, after the tumultuous adolescent years, and look at the extent to which these children either share their adoptive parents' values or have reacted against those values. Either way (sharing or reacting against), there is a powerful parental influence. The way to disprove my claim would be to show no systematic positive or negative relationships between parents and adoptive children. The belief that parents shape their children is part of our folk theory. Sometimes our folk theories are correct. |[310]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [311]BENOIT MANDELBROT Mathematician, Yale University; Author, The Fractal Geometry of Nature [mandelbrot100.jpg] Wandering through the frontiers of the sciences, and the arts, I have always trusted the eye while leaving aside the issues that elude it. It can mislead--of course--therefore I check endlessly and never rush to print. Meanwhile, for over fifty years, I have watched as some disciplines exhaust the "top down" problems they know how to tackle. So they wander around seeking totally new patterns in a dark and deep mess, where an unlit lamp is of little help. But the eye can continually be trained and, long ago, I have vowed to follow it, therefore work "from the bottom up." Like the Antaeus of Greek myth, I gather strength and persist by often touching the earth. A few of the truths the eye told me have been disproven. Let it be. Others have been confirmed by enormous and fruitful effort, and then blossomed, one being the four thirds conjecture in Brownian motion. Many others remain, one being the MLC conjecture about the Mandelbrot set, in which I believe for no other reason than trust in the eye. |[312]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [313]STANISLAS DEHAENE Cognitive Neuropsychology Researcher, Institut National de la Sant?, Paris; Author, The Number Sense [dehane100.jpg] I believe (but cannot prove) that we vastly underestimate the differences that set the human brain apart from the brains of other primates. Certainly, no one can deny that there are important similarities in the overall layout of the human brain and, say, the macaque monkey brain. Our primary sensory and motor cortices are organized in similar ways. Even in higher brain areas, homologies can be found. In the parietal lobe, using brain-imaging methods, my lab has observed plausible human counterparts to several areas of the macaque brain, involved in eye movement, hand gestures, and even number processing. Yet I fear that those early successes in drawing human-monkey homologies tend to mask other massive differences. If we compare the primary visual areas of macaques and humans, there is already a two-fold difference in surface area, but in parietal and frontal areas, a twenty-to fifty-fold increase is found. Even such a massive distortion may not suffice to "align" the macaque and human brain. Many of us suspect that, in regions such as the prefrontal and inferior parietal cortices, the changes are so dramatic that they may amount to the addition of new brain areas. At a more microscopic level, it is already known that there is a new type of neuron which is found in the anterior cingulate region of humans and great apes, but not in other primates. These "spindle cells" send connections throughout the cortex, and thus contribute to a massive increase in long-distance connectivity in the human brain. Indeed, the change in relative white matter volume is perhaps what is most dramatic about the human brain. I believe that these surface and connectivity changes, although they are in many cases quantitative, have brought about a qualitative revolution in brain function: Breaking the brain's modularity. Jean-Pierre Changeux and I have proposed that the increased connectivity of the human brain gives access to a new mode of brain function, characterized by a very flexible communication between distant brain areas. We may possess roughly the same list of specialized cerebral processors as our primate ancestors. However, I speculate that what might be unique about the human brain is its capacity to access the information inside each processor, and make it available to almost any other processor through long-distance connections. I believe that we humans have a much more developed conscious workspace--a set of brain areas that can fluidly exchange signals, thus allowing us to internally manipulate information and to perform new mental syntheses. Using the workspace's long-distance connections, we can mobilize, in a top-down manner, essentially any brain area and bring it into consciousness. Spontaneous activity and the autonomy of consciousness. Once the internal connectivity of a system exceeds a threshold, it begins to be dominated by self-sustained, reverberating states of activity. I believe that the human workspace system has passed this threshold, and has gained a considerable autonomy relative to the outside world. The human brain is much less at the mercy of signals from the outside world. Its activity never ceases to reverberate from area to area, thus generating a highly structured spontaneous flow of thoughts that we project on the outside world. Of course, spontaneous brain activity is present in all species, but if I am correct we will discover that it is both more evident and more structured in the human brain, at least in higher cortical areas where "workspace" neurons with long-distance axons are denser. Furthermore, if human brain activity can be detached from outside stimulation, we will need to find new paradigms to study it, because bombarding the human brain with stimuli, as we do in most brain-imaging experiments, will not suffice. There is already some evidence for this statement: by directly comparing fMRI activations evoked by the same visual stimuli in humans and macaques, Guy Orban and his colleagues in Leuven have found that prefrontal cortex activity is five times larger in macaques than in humans. In their own words, "there may be more volitional control over visual processing in humans than in monkeys". The profound influence of culture on the human brain. The human species is also unique in its ability to expand its functionality by inventing new cultural tools. Writing, arithmetic, science, are all very recent inventions--our brains did not have time to evolve for them, but I speculate that they were made possible because we can mobilize our old areas in novel ways. When we learn to read, we "recycle" a specific region of our visual system, which has become known as the "visual word form area", for the purpose of recognizing strings of letters and connecting them to language areas. When we learn Arabic numerals, likewise, we build a circuit to quickly convert those shapes into quantities, a fast connection from bilateral visual areas to the parietal quantity area. Even an invention as elementary as finger counting changes dramatically our cognitive abilities: Amazonian people that have not invented counting are unable to make exact calculations as simple as 6-2. Crucially, this "cultural recycling" implies that whenever we look at a human brain, the functional architecture that we see results from a complex mixture of biological and cultural constraints. Education is likely to greatly increase the gap between the human brain and that of our primate cousins. Virtually all human brain imaging experiments today are performed on highly literate volunteers--and therefore, presumably, highly transformed brains. To better understand the differences between the human brain and the monkey brain, we will need to invent new methods, both to decipher the organization of the baby brain prior to education, and to study of how it changes with education. |[314]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [315]TOR N?RRETRANDERS Science Writer; Consultant; Lecturer, Copenhagen; Author, The User Illusion [norretranders100.jpg] I believe in belief--or rather: I have faith in having faith. Yet, I am an atheist (or a "bright" as some would have it). How can that be? It is important to have faith, but not necessarily in God. Faith is important far outside the realm of religion: having faith in other people, in oneself, in the world, in the existence of truth, justice and beauty. There is a continuum of faith, from the basic everyday trust in others to the grand devotion to divine entities. Recent discoveries in behavioural sciences, such as experimental economics and game theory, shows that it is a common human attitude towards the world to have faith. It is vital in human interactions; and it is no coincidence that the importance of anchoring behaviour in riskful trust is stressed in worlds as far apart as S?ren Kierkegaard's existentialist christianity and modern theories of bargaining behaviour in economic interactions. Both stress the importance of the inner, subjective conviction as the basis for actions, the feeling of an inner glow. One could say that modern behavioral science is re-discovering the importance of faith that has been known to religions for a long time. And I would argue that this re-discovery shows us that the activity of having faith can be decoupled from the belief in divine entities. So here is what I have faith in: We have a hand backing us, not as a divine foresight or control, but in the very simple and concrete sense that we are all survivors. We are all the result of a very long line of survivors who survived long enough to have offspring. Amoeba, rodents and mammals. We can therefore have confidence that we are experts in survival. We have a wisdom inside, inherited from millions of generations of animals and humans, a knowledge of how to go about life. That does not in any way imply foresight or planning ahead on our behalf. It only implies that we have a reason to trust out ability to deal with whatever challenges we meet. We have inherited such an ability. Therefore, we can trust each other, ourselves and life itself. We have no guarantee or promises for eternal life, not at all. The enigma of death is still there, ineradicable. But we a reason to have confidence in ourselves. The basic fact that we are still here--despite snakes, stupidity and nuclear weapons--gives us reason to have confidence in ourselves and each other, to trust others and to trust life. To have faith. Because we are here, we have reason for having faith in having faith. |[316]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [317]STEVE GIDDINGS Theoretical Physicist, University of California, Santa Barbara [giddings100.jpg] I believe that black holes do not destroy information, as Hawking argued long ago, and the reason is that strong gravitational effects undermine the statement that degrees of freedom inside and outside the black hole are independent. On the first point, I am far from alone; many string theorists and others now believe that black holes don't destroy information, and thus don't violate quantum mechanics. Hawking himself recently announced that he believes this, and has conceded a famous bet, but has not yet published the work giving a sharp statement where his original logic went wrong. The second point I believe, but cannot yet prove to the point of convincing many of my colleagues. While many believe that Hawking was wrong, there is a lot of dissent over where exactly his calculation fails, and none of the arguments previously presented have sharply identified this point of failure. If black holes emit information instead of destroying it, this probably comes from a breakdown of locality. Lowe, Polchinski, Susskind, Thorlacius, and Uglum have argued that the mechanism for locality violation involves formation of long strings. Horowitz and Maldacena have argued that the singularity at the center of a black hole must be a unique state, in effect squeezing information out in a ghostly way. And others have made other suggestions. But I believe, and my former student Lippert and I have published arguments, that the breakdown of locality that invalidates Hawking's work involves strong gravitational physics that makes it inconsistent to think of separate and independent degrees of freedom inside and outside the black hole. The assumption that these degrees of freedom are separate is fundamental to Hawking's argument. Our argument for where it fails has a satisfying generality that mirrors the generality of Hawking's original work--neither depends on the specifics of what kind of matter exists in the theory. We base our argument on a principle we call the locality bound. This is a criterion for when physical degrees of freedom can be independent (in technical language, described by vanishing of commutators of corresponding operators). Roughly, a degree of freedom corresponding to a particle at position x with momentum p and another at y with momentum q will be independent only if the separation x-y is large enough that they are outside of a black hole that would form from their mutual energy. I believe this is the beginning of a general criterion (which will ultimately more precisely formulated) for when locality breaks down in physics. This could be the beginning of a deeper understanding of holography. And, it should be relevant to black hole physics because of the large relative energies of the Hawking radiation and degrees of freedom falling into a black hole. But this is not fully proven. Yet. |[318]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [319]HOWARD RHEINGOLD Communications Expert; Author, Smart Mobs [rheingold100.jpg] I believe that we humans, who know so much about cosmology and immunology, lack a framework for thinking about why and how humans cooperate. I believe that part of the reason for this is an old story we tell ourselves about the world: Businesses and nations succeed by competing well. Biology is a war, where only the fit survive. Politics is about winning. Markets grow solely from self-interest. Rooted in the zeitgeist of Adam Smith's and Charles Darwin's eras, the scientific, social, economic, political stories of the 19th and 20th centuries overwhelmingly emphasized the role of competition as a driver of evolution, progress, commerce, society. I believe that the outlines of a new narrative are becoming visible--a story in which cooperative arrangements, interdependencies, and collective action play a more prominent role and the essential (but not all-powerful) story of competition and survival of the fittest shrinks just a bit. Although new knowledge in biology about the evolution of altruistic behavior and the role of symbiotic relationships, new understandings of economic behavior derived from experiments in game theory, neuroeconomic research, sociological investigations of institutions for collective action, computation-enabled technologies such as grid computing, mesh networks, and online markets all provide important clues, I don't believe anyone is likely to formulate an algorithm or recipe for human cooperation. I suspect that the complex interdependencies of human thought, behavior and culture entails an equivalent to the limits Heisenberg found to physics and G?del established for mathematics. I believe that more knowledge than what we have now, together with a conceptual framework that is neither reductionistic nor theological, could lead to better-designed economic and political policies and institutions. Institutional and conceptual barriers to mounting such an effort are as formidable as the methodological barriers. I am reminded of Doug Engelbart's problem in the 1950s. He couldn't convince computer engineers, librarians, public policy analysts that computing machinery could be used to augment human thinking, as well as performing scientific calculation and business data processing. Nobody and no institution had ever thought about computing machinery that way, and older ways of thinking about what machines could be designed to do were inadequate. Engelbart had to create "A Framework for Augmenting Human Intellect" before the various hardware, software, and human interface designers could create the first personal computers and networks. By necessity, useful new understandings of how humans cooperate and fail to cooperate is an interdisciplinary task. I don't believe that the obvious importance of such an effort guarantees that it will be successfully accomplished. All our institutions for gathering and validating knowledge--universities, corporate research laboratories, and foundations--reward and support specialization. |[320]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [321]LEO CHALUPA Ophthalmologist and Neurobiologist, University of California, Davis [chalupa100.jpg] Here are three of my unproven beliefs: (i) The human brain is the most complex entity in the known universe; (ii) With this marvelous product of evolution we will be successful in eventually discovering all that there is to discover about the physical world, provided of course, that some catastrophic event doesn't terminate our species; and (iii) Science provides the best means to attain this ultimate goal. When the scientific endeavor is considered in relation to the obvious limitations of the human brain, the knowledge we have gained in all fields to date is astonishing. Consider the well-documented variability in the functional properties of neurons. When recordings are made from a single cell--for instance in the visual cortex to a flashing spot of light--one can't help but be amazed by the trial-to-trial variations in the resulting responses. On one trial this simple stimulus might elicit a high frequency burst of discharges, while on the next trial there could be just a hint of a response. The same thing is apparent when EEG recordings are made from the human brain. Brain waves change in frequency and amplitude in seemingly random fashion even when the subject is lying in a prone position without any variations in behavior or the environment. And such variability is also evident when one does brain imaging; the pretty pictures seen in publications are averages of many trials that have been "massaged" by various computer programs. So how does the brain do it? How can it function as effectively as it does given the "noise" inherent in the system? I don't have a good answer, and neither does anyone else, in spite of the papers that have been published on this problem. But in line with the second of the three beliefs I have listed above, I am certain that someday this question will be answered in a definitive manner. |[322]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [323]CARLO ROVELLI Physicist; Institut Universitaire de France & University of the Mediterraneum; Author, Quantum Gravity [rovelli100.jpg] I am convinced, but cannot prove, that time does not exist. I mean that I am convinced that there is a consistent way of thinking about nature, that makes no use of the notions of space and time at the fundamental level. And that this way of thinking will turn out to be the useful and convincing one. I think that the notions of space and time will turn out to be useful only within some approximation. They are similar to a notion like "the surface of the water" which looses meaning when we describe the dynamics of the individual atoms forming water and air: if we look at very small scale, there isn't really any actual surface down there. I am convinced space and time are like the surface of the water: convenient macroscopic approximations, flimsy but illusory and insufficient screens that our mind uses to organize reality. In particular, I am convinced that time is an artifact of the approximation in which we disregard the large majority of the degrees of freedom of reality. Thus "time" is just the reflection of our ignorance. I am also convinced, but cannot prove, that there are no objects, but only relations. By this I mean that I am convinced that there is a consistent way of thinking about nature, that refers only to interactions between systems and not to states or changes of individual systems. I am convinced that this way of thinking nature will end up to be the useful and natural one in physics. Beliefs that one cannot prove are often wrong, as proven by the fact that this Edge list contains contradictory beliefs. But they are essential in science and often healthy. Here is a good example from 25 centuries ago: Socrates, in Plato's Phaedon says: "... seems to me very hard to prove, and I think I wouldn't be able to prove it ... but I am convinced ... that the Earth is spherical." Finally, I am also convinced, but cannot prove, that we humans have an instinct to collaborate, and that we have rational reasons for collaborating. I am convinced that ultimately this rationality and this instinct of collaboration will prevail over the shortsighted egoistic and aggressive instinct that produces exploitation and war. Rationality and instinct of collaboration have already given us large regions and long periods of peace and prosperity. Ultimately, they will lead us to a planet without countries, without wars, without patriotism, without religions, without poverty, where we will be able to share the world. Actually, maybe I am not sure I truly believe that I believe this; but I do want to believe that I believe this. |[324]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [325]JOHN McCARTHY Computer Scientist; Artificial Intelligence Pioneer, Stanford University [mccarthy100.jpg] I think, as did G?del, that the continuum hypothesis is false. No-one will ever prove it false from the presently accepted axioms of set theory. Chris Freiling's proposed new (1986) axioms prove it false, but they are not regarded as intuitive. I think human-level artificial intelligence will be achieved. |[326]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [327]JAMES O'DONNELL Classicist; Cultural Historian; Provost, Georgetown University; Author, Avatars of the Word [odonnell100.jpg] What do I believe is true even though I cannot prove it? This question has a double edge and needs two answers. First, and most simply: "everything". On a strict Popperian reading, all the things I "know" are only propositions that I have not yet falsified. They are best estimates, hypotheses that, so far, make sense of all the data that I possess. I cannot prove that my parents were married on a certain day in a certain year, but I claim to "know" that date quite confidently. Sure, there are documents, but in fact in their case there are different documents that present two different dates, and I recall the story my mother told to explain that and I believe it, but I cannot "prove" that I am right. I also know Newton's Laws and indeed believe them, but I also now know their limitations and imprecisions and suspect that more surprises may lurk in the future. But that's a generic answer and not much in the forward-looking and optimistic spirit that characterizes Edge. So let me propose this challenge to practitioners of my own historical craft. I believe that there are in principle better descriptions and explanations for the development and sequence of human affairs than human historians are capable of providing. We draw our data mainly from witnesses who share our scale of being, our mortality, and for that matter our viewpoint. And so we explain history in terms of human choices and the behavior of organized social units. The rise of Christianity or the Norman Conquest seem to us to be events we can explain and we explain them in human-scale terms. But it cannot be excluded or disproved that events can be better explained on a much larger time scale or a much smaller scale of behavior. An outright materialist could argue that all my acts, from the day of my birth, have been a determined result of genetics and environment. It was fashionable a generation ago to argue a Freudian grounding for Luther's revolt, but in principle it could as easily be true and, if we could know it, more persuasive to demonstrate that his acts were determined a the molecular and submolecular level. The problem with such a notion is, of course, that we are very far from being able to outline such a theory, much less make it persuasive, much less make it something that another human being could comprehend. Understanding even one other person's life at such microscopic detail would take much more than one lifetime. So what is to be done? Of course historians will constantly struggle to improve their techniques and tools. The advance of dendrochronology (dating wood by the tree rings, and consequently dating buildings and other artifacts far more accurately than ever before) can stand as one example of the way in which technological advance can tell us things we never knew before. But we will also continue to write and to read stories in the old style, because stories are the way human beings most naturally make sense of their world. An awareness of the powerful possibility of whole other orders of possible description and explanation, however, should at least teach us some humility and give us some thoughtful pause when we are tempted to insist too strongly on one version of history--the one we happen to be persuaded is true. Even a Popperian can see that this kind of intuition can have beneficial effect. |[328]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [329]PAMELA McCORDUCK Writer; Author, Machines Who Think [mccorduck100.gif] Although I can't prove it, I believe that thanks to new kinds of social modeling, that take into account individual motives as well as group goals, we will soon grasp in a deep way how collective human behavior works, whether it's action by small groups or by nations. Any predictive power this understanding has will be useful, especially with regard to unexpected outcomes and even unintended consequences. But it will not be infallible, because the complexity of such behavior makes exact prediction impossible. |[330]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [331]MARTIN REES Cosmologist, Cambridge University; UK Astronomer Royal; Author, Our Final Hour [rees100.jpg] I believe that intelligent life may presently be unique to our Earth, but that, even so, it has the potential to spread through the galaxy and beyond--indeed, the emergence of complexity could still be near its beginning. If SETI searches fail, that would not render life a cosmic sideshow Indeed, it would be a boost to our cosmic self-esteem: terrestrial life, and its fate, would become a matter of cosmic significance. Even if intelligence is now unique to Earth, there's enough time lying ahead for it to spread through the entire Galaxy, evolving into a teeming complexity far beyond what we can even conceive. There's an unthinking tendency to imagine that humans will be around in 6 billion years, watching the Sun flare up and die. But the forms of life and intelligence that have by then emerged would surely be as different from us as we are from a bacterium. That conclusion would follow even if future evolution proceeded at the rate at which new species have emerged over the 3 or 4 billion years of the geological past. But post-human evolution (whether of organic species or of artefacts) will proceed far faster than the changes that led to emergence, because it will be intelligently directed rather than being--like pre-human evolution--the gradual outcome of Darwinian natural selection. Changes will drastically accelerate in the present century--through intentional genetic modifications, targeted drugs, perhaps even silicon implants in to the brain. Humanity may not persist as a single species for more than a few centuries--especially if communities have by then become established away from the earth. But a few centuries is still just a millionth of the Sun's future lifetime--and the entire universe probably has a longer future still. The remote future is squarely in the realm of science fiction. Advanced intelligences billions of years hence might even create new universes. Perhaps they'll be able to choose what physical laws prevail in their creations. Perhaps these beings could achieve the computational capability to simulate a universe as complex as the one we perceive ourselves to be in. My belief may remain unprovable for billions of years. It could be falsified sooner--for instance, we (or our immediate post-human descendents) may develop theories that reveal inherent limits to complexity. But it's a substitute for religious belief, and I hope it's true. |[332]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [333]CAROLYN PORCO Planetary Scientist; Leader, Cassini Imaging Team; Director, CICLOPS, Space Science Institute, Boulder [porco100.jpg] This is a treacherous question to ask, and a trivial one to answer. Treacherous because the shoals between the written lines can be navigated by some to the conclusion that truth and religious belief develop by the same means and are therefore equivalent. To those unfamiliar with the process by which scientific hunches and hypotheses are advanced to the level of verifiable fact, and the exacting standards applied in that process, the impression may be left that the work of the scientist is no different than that of the prophet or the priest. Of course, nothing could be further from reality. The whole scientific method relies on the deliberate, high magnification scrutiny and criticism by other scientists of any mechanisms proposed by any individual to explain the natural world. No matter how fervently a scientist may "believe'"something to be true, and unlike religious dogma, his or her belief is not accepted as a true description or even approximation of reality until it passes every test conceivable, executable and reproducible. Nature is the final arbiter, and great minds are great only in so far as they can intuit the way nature works and are shown by subsequent examination and proof to be right. With that preamble out of the way, I can say that for me personally, this is a trivial question to answer. Though no one has yet shown that life of any kind, other than Earthly life, exists in the cosmos, I firmly believe that it does. My justification for this belief is a commonly used one, with no strenuous exertion of the intellect or suspension of disbelief required. Our reconstruction of early solar system history, and the chronology of events that led to the origin of the Earth and moon and the subsequent development of life on our planet, informs us that self-replicating organisms originated from inanimate materials in a very narrow window of time. The tail end of the accretion of the planets--a period known as "the heavy bombardment"--ended about 3.8 billion years ago, approximately 800 million years after the Earth formed. This is the time of formation and solidification of the big flooded impact basins we readily see on the surface of the Moon, and the time when the last large catastrophe-producing impacts also occurred on the Earth. In other words, the terrestrial surface environment didn't settle down and become conducive to the development of fragile living organisms until nearly a billion years had gone by. However, the first appearance of life forms on the Earth, the oldest fossils we have discovered so far, occurred shortly after that: around 3.5 billion years ago or even earlier. The interval in between--only 300 millions years and less than the time represented by the rock layers in the walls of the Grand Canyon--is the proverbial blink of the cosmic eye. Despite the enormous complexity of even the simplest biological forms and processes, and the undoubtedly lengthy and complicated chain of chemical events that must have occurred to evolve animated molecular structures from inanimate atoms, it seems an inevitable conclusion that Earthly life developed very quickly and as soon as the coast was clear long enough to do so. Evidence is gathering that the events that created the solar system and the Earth, driven predominantly by gravity, are common and pervasive in our galaxy and, by inductive reasoning, in galaxies throughout the cosmos. The cosmos is very, very big. Consider the overwhelming numbers of galaxies in the visible cosmos alone and all the Sun-like stars in those galaxies and the number of habitable planets likely to be orbiting those stars and the ease with which life developed on our own habitable planet, and it becomes increasingly unavoidable that life is itself a fundamental feature of our universe ... along with dark matter, supernovae, and black holes. I believe we are not alone. But it doesn't matter what I think because I can't prove it. It is so beguiling a question, though, that humankind is presently and actively seeking the answer. The search for life and so-called "habitable zones" is becoming increasingly the focus of our planetary explorations, and it may in fact transpire one day that we discover life forms under the ice on some moon orbiting Jupiter or Saturn, or decode the intelligible signals of an advanced, unreachably distant, alien organism. That will be a singular day indeed. I only hope I'm still around when it happens. |[334]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [335]CHARLES SIMONYI Computer Scientist, Intentional Software Corporation; formerly Chief Architect, Microsoft Corporation [simonyi100.jpg] I believe that we are writing software the wrong way. There are sound evolutionary reasons for why we are doing what we are doing--that we can call the "programming the problem in a computer language" paradigm, but the incredible success of Moore's law blinded us to being stuck in what is probably an evolutionary backwater. There are many warning signs. Computers are demonstrably ten thousand times better than not so long ago. Yet we are not seeing their services improving at the same rate (with some exceptions--for example games and internet searches.) On an absolute scale, a business or administration problem that would take maybe one hundred pages to describe precisely, will take millions of dollars to program for a computer and often the program will not work. Recently a smaller airline came to a standstill due to a problem in crew scheduling software--raising the ire of Congress, not to mention their customers. My laptop could store 200 pages of text (1/2 megabytes) for each and every crew member at this airline just in its fast memory and hundred times more (a veritable encyclopedia of 20,000 pages) for each person on its hard disk. Of course for a schedule we would need maybe one or two--or at most ten pages per person. Even with all the rules--the laws, the union contracts, the local, state, federal taxes, the duty time limitations, the FAA regulations on crew certification; is there anyone who believes that the problem is not simple in terms of computing? We need to store and process at the maximum 10 pages per person where we have capacity for two thousand times more in one cheap laptop! Of course the problem is complex in terms of the problem domain--but not shockingly so. I would estimate that all the rules possibly relevant to aircraft crew scheduling are expressible in less than a thousand pages--or 1/2 of one percent of the fast memory. Software is surely the bottleneck on the high-tech horn of plenty. The scheduling program for the airline takes many thousand times more memory than what I believe it should be. Hence the software represents complexity that is many thousand times greater than what I believe the problem is--no wonder that some planes are assigned three pilots by the software while the others can't fly because the copilot is not scheduled. Note that the cost of the memory is not the issue--we could afford that waste. But the use of so much memory for software is an indication of some complexity inflation that occurs during programming that is the real bottleneck. What is going on? I like to use cryptography as the metaphor. As we know, in cryptography we take a message and we combine it with a key using a difficult-to-invert function to get the code. Programmers using today's paradigm start from a problem statement, for example that a Boeing 767 requires a pilot, a copilot, and seven cabin crew with various certification requirements for each--and combine this with their knowledge of computer science and software engineering--that is how this rule can be encoded in computer language and turned into an algorithm. This act of combining is the programming process, the result of which is called the source code. Now, programming is well known to be a difficult-to-invert function, perhaps not to cryptography's standards, but one can joke about the possibility of the airline being able to keep their proprietary scheduling rules secret by publishing the source code for the implementation since no one could figure out what the rules were--or really whether the code had to do with scheduling or spare parts inventory--by studying the source code, it can be that obscure. The amazing thing is that today it is the source code--that is the encrypted problem--which is the artifact all of software engineering is focusing on. To add insult to the injury, the "encryption", that is programming, is done manually which means high costs, low throughput and high error rates. In contrast with software maintenance, when the General realizes that he is about to send a wrong encrypted message, no one would think of editing the code after the encryption or "fixing the code"; instead the clear text would be first edited and then this improved message would be re-encrypted at computer speeds and computer accuracy. In other words the message may be wrong, but it won't be wrong because of the encryption and it is easily fixed. We see that the complexity inflation comes from encoding. The problem statement above is obviously oversimplified, but remember that we used just two lines from our realistic budget of a thousand pages and we haven't even used the aviation jargon which can make these statements even more compact and more precise. But once these statements are viewed through the funhouse mirror of software coding, it becomes all but unrecognizable: thousand times fatter, disjointed, foreign. And as any manual product, it will have many flaws--beyond the errors in the rules themselves. What can be done? Follow the metaphor. First, refocus on recording the problem statement--the "cleartext" in our metaphor. This is not a program in any sense of the word--it is just a straightforward recording of the subject matter experts' contributions using their own terms-of-art, their jargon, their own notations. Next, empower the programmers to program not the problem itself, but to express their software engineering expertise and decisions as a computer code for the encoder that takes the recorded problem statement and generates the code from it. This is called generative programming and I believe it is the future of software. |[336]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [337]CHRIS W. ANDERSON Editor-In-Chief, Wired [andersonw100.jpg] The Intelligent Design movement has opened my eyes. I realize that although I believe that evolution explains why the living world is the way it is, I can't actually prove it. At least not to the satisfaction of the ID folk, who seem to require that every example of extraordinary complexity and clever plumbing in nature be fully traced back (not just traceable back) along an evolutionary tree to prove that it wasn't directed by an invisible hand. If the scientific community won't do that, then the arguments goes that they must accept a large red "theory" stamp placed on the evolution textbooks and that alternative theories, such as "guided" evolution and creationism, be taught alongside. So, by this standard, virtually everything I believe in must now fall under the shadow of unproveability. Most importantly, this includes the belief that democracy, capitalism and other market-driven systems (including evolution!) are better than their alternatives. Indeed, I suppose I should now refer to them as the "theory of democracy" and the "theory of capitalism", to join the theory of evolution, and accept the teaching of living Marxism and fascism as alternatives in high schools. |[338]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [339]VERENA HUBER-DYSON Mathematician, Emeritus Professor, Dept of Philosophy, University of Calgary; Author, G?del's Theorems [huber-dyson100.jpg] Most of what I believe I cannot prove, simply for lack of time and energy; truths that I'd claim to know because they have been proved by others. That is how inextricably our beliefs are tied up with labors accomplished by fellow beings. And then there are mathematical truths that we now know are not provable. These phenomena have become favorites with the media but can only be made sense of by a serious scrutiny of the idea of mathematical truth and a specific articulation of a proof-concept, But running across Esther's contribution I came up with a catchy response: I believe in the creative power of boredom. Or, to put it into the form suggested by the Edge question: I believe that, no matter how relentlessly we overfeed our young with prepackaged interactive entertainments, before long they will break out and invent their own amusements. I know from experience; boredom drove me into mathematics during my preteens. But I cannot prove it, till it actually happens. Probably in less than a generation kids will be amusing themselves and each other in ways that we never dreamt of. Such is my belief in human nature, in the resilience of its good sense. Here is an observation from mathematical practice. By now the concept of an algorithm, well- defined, is widely hailed as the way to solve problems, more precisely sequences of problems labeled by a numerical parameter. The implementation of a specific algorithm may be boring, a task best left to a machine, while the construction of the algorithm together with a rigorous proof that it works is a creative and often laborious enterprise. For illustration consider group theory. A group is defined as a structure consisting of a non-empty set and a binary operation obeying certain laws. The theory of groups consists of all sentences true of all groups; its restriction to the formal "first order" language L determined by the group structure is called the elementary theory TG of groups. Here we have a formal proof procedure, proven complete by G?del in his PHD thesis the year before his incompleteness proof was published. The elementary theory of groups is axiomatizable: it consists of exactly those sentences that are derivable from the axioms by means of the rules of first order logic. Thus TG is an effectively (recursively) enumerable subset of L; a machine, unlimited in power and time, could eventually come up with a proof of every elementary theorem of group theory. However, a human group theorist would still be needed to select the interesting theorems out of the bulk of the merely true. The development of TG is no mean task, although its language is severely restricted. The axiomatizability of a theory always raises the question how to recognize the non-theorems. The set FF of those L-sentences that fail in some finite group is recursively enumerable by an enumeration of all finite groups, a simple matter, in principle. But, as all the excitement over the construction of finite simple monsters has amply demonstrated, that again is in reality no simple task. Neither the theory of finite groups nor the theory of all groups is decidable. The most satisfying proof of this fact shows how to construct to every pair (A, B) of disjoint recursively enumerable sets of L-sentences, where A contains all of TG and B contains FF, a sentence S that belongs neither to A nor to B. This is the deep and sophisticated theorem of effective non-separability proved in the early sixties independently by Mal'cev in the SSSR and Tarski's pupil Cobham. It follows that constructing infinite counter-examples in group theory is a truly creative enterprise, while the theory of finite groups is not axiomatizable and so, to recognize a truth about finite groups requires deep insight and a creative jump. The concept of finiteness in group theory is not elementary and yet we have a clear idea of what is meant by talking about all finite groups, a marvelously intriguing situation. To wind up with a specific answer to the 2005 Question: I do believe that every sentence expressible in the formal language of elementary group theory is either true of all finite groups or else fails for at least one of them. This statement may at first sight look like a logical triviality. But when you try to prove it honestly you find that you would need a decision procedure, which would, given any sentence of L, yield either a proof that S holds in all finite groups or else a finite group in which S fails. By the inseparability theorem mentioned above, there is no such procedure. If asked whether I hold the equivalent belief for the theory of all groups I would hesitate because the concept of an infinite counterexample is not as concrete to my mind as that of the totality of all finite groups. These are the areas where personal intuition starts to come into play. |[340]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [341]DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Media Virus [rushkoff100.jpg] I can't prove it more than anecdotally, but I believe evolution has purpose and direction. It appears obvious, yet absolutely unconfirmable, that matter is groping towards complexity. While the laws of nature--and time itself--require objects and life forms attain durability and sustainability for survival, it seems to me more a means to an end than an end in itself. Theology goes a long way towards imbuing substance and processes with meaning--describing life as "matter reaching towards divinity," or as the process through which divinity calls matter back up into itself--but theologians repeatedly make the mistake of ascribing this sense of purpose to history rather than the future. This is only natural, since the narrative structures we use to understand our world tend to have beginnings, middles, and ends. In order to experience the pay-off at the end of the story, we need to see it as somehow built-in to the original intention of events. It's also hard for people to contend with the great probability that we are simply over-advanced fungi and bacteria, hurling through a galaxy in cold and meaningless space. Our existence may be unintentional, meaningless and purposeless; but that doesn't preclude meaning or purpose from emerging as a result of our interaction and collaboration. Meaning may not be a precondition for humanity, but rather a byproduct of it. That's why it's so important to recognize that evolution, at its best, is a team sport. As Darwin's later, lesser-known, but more important works contended, survival of the fittest is not a law applied to individuals, but to groups. Just as it is now postulated that mosquitoes cause their victims to itch and sweat nervously so that other mosquitoes can more easily find the target, most great leaps forward in human evolution--from the formation of clans to the building of cities--are feats of collaborative effort. Better rates of survival are as much a happy side effect of good collaboration as their purpose. If we could stop relating to meaning and purpose as artifacts of some divine creative act, and see them instead as the yield of our own creative future, they become goals, intentions, and processes very much in reach--rather than the shadows of childlike, superstitious mythology The proof is impossible, since it is an unfolding one. Like reaching a horizon, arrival merely necessitates more travel. |[342]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [343]RUDY RUCKER Mathematician, Computer Scientist; CyberPunk Pioneer; Novelist; Author, Infinity and the Mind [rucker100.jpg] Reality Is A Novel. I'd like to propose a modified Many Universes theory. Rather than saying every possible universe exists, I'd say, rather, that there is a sequence of possible universes, akin to the drafts of a novel. We're living in a draft version of the universe--and there is no final version. The revisions never stop. From time to time it's possible to be aware of this. In particular, when you relax and stop naming things and forming opinions, your consciousness spreads out across several drafts of the universe. Things don't need to be particularly one way or the other until you pin them down. Each draft, each spacetime, each sheet of reality is itself rigorously deterministic; there really is no underlying randomness in the world. Instead we have a great web of synchronistic entanglements, with causes and effects flowing forward and backwards through time. The start of a novel matches its ending; the past matches the future. Changing one thing changes everything. If we fully know everything about the Now moment, we know the entire past and future. With this in mind, explaining an given draft of the universe becomes a matter of explaining the contents of a single Now moment of that draft. This in turn means that we can view the evolution of the successive drafts as an evolution of different versions of a particular Now moment. As Scarlett's climactic scene with Rhett is repeatedly rewritten, all the rest of Gone With The Wind changes to match. And this evolution, too, can be deterministic. We can figure we think of there as being two distinct deterministic rules, a Physics Rule and a Metaphysics Rule. The Physics Rule consists of time-reversible laws that grow the Now moment upwards and downwards to fill out the entire past and future of spacetime. And we invoke the Metaphysics Rule to account for the contents of the Now moment. The Metaphysics Rule is deterministic but not reversible; it grows sideways across a dimension that we might call paratime, turning some simple seed into the space-filling pattern found in the Now. The Metaphysics rule is...what? One possibility is that it's something quite simple, perhaps as simple as an eight-bit cellular automaton rule generating complex-looking patterns out of pure computation. Or perhaps the Metaphysics rule is like the mind of an author creating a novel, searching out the best word to write next, somehow peering into alternate realities. Or, yet again, the big Metaphysics rule in the sky could be the One cosmic mind, the Big Aha, the eternal secret, living in the spaces between your thoughts. |[344]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [345]RUPERT SHELDRAKE Biologist, London; Author of The Presence of the Past [sheldrake100.jpg] I believe, but cannot prove, that memory is inherent in nature. Most of the so-called laws of nature are more like habits. There is no need to suppose that all the laws of nature sprang into being fully formed at the moment of the Big Bang, like a kind of cosmic Napoleonic code, or that they exist in a metaphysical realm beyond time and space. Before the general acceptance of the Big Bang theory in the 1960s, eternal laws seemed to make sense. The universe itself was thought to be eternal and evolution was confined to the biological realm. But we now live in a radically evolutionary universe. If we want to stick to the idea of natural laws, we could say that as nature itself evolves, the laws of nature also evolve, just as human laws evolve over time. But then how would natural laws be remembered or enforced? The law metaphor is embarrassingly anthropomorphic. Habits are less human-centred. Many kinds of organisms have habits, but only humans have laws. Habits are subject to natural selection; and the more often they are repeated, the more probable they become, other things being equal. Animals inherit the successful habits of their species as instincts. We inherit bodily, emotional, mental and cultural habits, including the habits of our languages. The habits of nature depend on non-local similarity reinforcement. Through a kind of resonance, the patterns of activity in self-organizing systems are influenced by similar patterns in the past, giving each species and each kind of self-organizing system a collective memory. Is this just a vague philosophical idea? I believe it can be formulated as a testable scientific hypothesis. My interest in evolutionary habits arose when I was engaged in research in developmental biology, and was reinforced by reading Charles Darwin, for whom the habits of organisms were of central importance. As Francis Huxley has pointed out, Darwin's most famous book could more appropriately have been entitled The Origin of Habits. Over the course of fifteen years of research on plant development, I came to the conclusion that for understanding the development of plants, their morphogenesis, genes and gene products are not enough. Morphogenesis also depends on organizing fields. The same arguments apply to the development of animals. Since the 1920s many developmental biologists have proposed that biological organization depends on fields, variously called biological fields, or developmental fields, or positional fields, or morphogenetic fields. All cells come from other cells, and all cells inherit fields of organization. Genes are part of this organization. They play an essential role. But they do not explain the organization itself. Why not? Thanks to molecular biology, we know what genes do. They enable organisms to make particular proteins. Other genes are involved in the control of protein synthesis. Identifiable genes are switched on and particular proteins made at the beginning of new developmental processes. Some of these developmental switch genes, like the Hox genes in fruit flies, worms, fish and mammals, are very similar. In evolutionary terms, they are highly conserved. But switching on genes such as these cannot in itself determine form, otherwise fruit flies would not look different from us. Many organisms live as free cells, including many yeasts, bacteria and amoebas. Some form complex mineral skeletons, as in diatoms and radiolarians, spectacularly pictured in the nineteenth century by Ernst Haeckel. Just making the right proteins at the right times cannot explain such structures without many other forces coming into play, including the organizing activity of cell membranes and microtubules. Most developmental biologists accept the need for a holistic or integrative conception of living organization. Otherwise biology will go on floundering, even drowning, in oceans of data, as yet more genomes are sequenced, genes are cloned and proteins are characterized. I suspect that morphogenetic fields work by imposing patterns on the otherwise random or indeterminate patterns of activity. For example they cause microtubules to crystallize in one part of the cell rather than another, even though the subunits from which they are made are present throughout the cell. Morphogenetic fields are not fixed forever, but evolve. The fields of Afghan hounds and poodles have become different from those of their common ancestors, wolves. How are these fields inherited? I believe, but cannot prove, that they are transmitted by a kind of non-local resonance, and I have suggested the term morphic resonance for this process. The fields organizing the activity of the nervous system are likewise inherited through morphic resonance, conveying a collective, instinctive memory. The resonance of a brain with its own past states also helps to explain the memories of individual animals and humans. Social groups are likewise organized by fields, as in schools of fish and flocks of birds. Human societies have memories that are transmitted through the culture of the group, and are most explicitly communicated through the ritual re-enactment of a founding story or myth, as in the Jewish Passover celebration, the Christian Holy Communion and the American thanksgiving dinner, through which the past become present through a kind of resonance with those who have performed the same rituals before. Others may prefer to dispense with the idea of fields and explain the evolution of organization in some other way, perhaps using more general terms like "emergent systems properties". But whatever the details of the models, I believe that the natural selection of habits will play an essential part in any integrated theory of evolution, including not just biological evolution, but also physical, chemical, cosmic, social, mental and cultural evolution. |[346]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [347]CHRISTINE FINN Archaeologist; Journalist; Writer-in-Residence, University of Bradford; Author, Past Poetic [finn100.jpg] I have a belief that modern humans are greatly under-utilising their cognitive capabilities. Finding proof of this, however, would lie in embracing those very same sentient possibilities--visceral hunches--which were possibly part of the world of archaic humans. This enlarged realm of the senses acknowledges reason, but also heeds the grip of the gut, the body poetic. |[348]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [349]NED BLOCK Philosopher and Psychologist, New York University [block100.jpg] I believe that the "Hard Problem of Consciousness" will be solved by conceptual advances made in connection with cognitive neuroscience. Let me explain. No one has a clue (at the moment) how to answer the question of why the neural basis of the phenomenal feel of my experience of red is the neural basis of that phenomenal feel rather than a different one or none at all. There is an "explanatory gap" here which no one has a clue how to close. This problem is conceptually and explanatorily prior to the issue of what the nature of the self is, as can be seen in part by noting that the problem would persist even for experiences that are not organized into selves. No doubt closing the explanatory gap will require ideas that we cannot now anticipate. The mind-body problem is so singular that no appeal to the closing of past explanatory gaps really justifies optimism, but I am optimistic nonetheless. |[350]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [351]REBECCA GOLDSTEIN Philosopher and Novelist, Trinity College; Author, Incompleteness [goldstein100.jpg] I believe that scientific theories are a means of going--somewhat mysteriously--beyond what we are able to observe of the physical world, penetrating into the structure of nature. The "theoretical" parts of scientific theories--the parts that speak in seemingly non-observational terms--aren't, I believe, ultimately translatable into observations or aren't just algorithmic black boxes into which we feed our observations and churn out our predictions. I believe the theoretical parts have descriptive content and are true (or false) in the same prosaic way that the observational parts of theories are true (or false). They're true if and only if they correspond to reality. I also believe that my belief about scientific theories isn't itself scientific. Science itself doesn't decide how it is to be interpreted, whether realistically or not. That the penetration into unobservable nature is accomplished by way of abstract mathematics is a large part of what makes it mystifying--mystifying enough to be coherently if unpersuasively (at least to me) denied by scientific anti-realists. It's difficult to explain exactly how science manages to do what it is that I believe it does--notoriously difficult when trying to explain how quantum mechanics, in particular, describes unobserved reality. The unobservable aspects of nature that yield themselves to our knowledge must be both mathematically expressible and connected to our observations in requisite ways. The seventeenth-century titans, men like Galileo and Newton, figured out how to do this, how to wed mathematics to empiricism. It wasn't a priori obvious that it was going to work. It wasn't a priori obvious that it was going to get us so much farther into nature's secrets than the Aristotelian teleological methodology it was supplanting. A lot of assumptions about the mathematical nature of the world and its fundamental correspondence to our cognitive modes (a correspondence they saw as reflective of God's friendly intentions toward us) were made by them in order to justify their methodology. I also believe that since not all of the properties of nature are mathematically expressible--why should they be? it takes a very special sort of property to be so expressible--that there are aspects of nature that we will never get to by way of our science. I believe that our scientific theories--just like our formalized mathematical systems (as proved by G?del)--must be forever incomplete. The very fact of consciousness itself (an aspect of the material world we happen to know about, but not because it was revealed to us by way of science) demonstrates, I believe, the necessary incompleteness of scientific theories. |[352]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [353]JONATHAN HAIDT Psychologist, University of Virginia [haidt100.jpg] I believe, but cannot prove, that religious experience and practice is generated and structured largely by a few emotions that evolved for other reasons, particularly awe, moral elevation, disgust, and attachment-related emotions. That's not a prediction likely to raise any eyebrows in this forum. But I further believe (and cannot prove) that hostility toward religion is an obstacle to progress in psychology. Most human beings live in a world full of magic, miracles, saints, and constant commerce with divinity. Psychology at present has little to say about these parts of life; we focus instead on a small set of topics that are fashionable, or that are particularly tractable with our favorite methods. If psychologists took religious experience seriously and tried to understand it from the inside, as anthropologists do with other cultures, I believe it would enrich our science. I have found religious texts and testimonials about purity and pollution essential for understanding the emotion of disgust. |[354]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [355]DONALD I. WILLIAMSON Biologist, University of Liverpool; Author, The Origins of Larvae [williamson100.jpg] I believe I can explain the Cambrian explosion. The Cambrian explosion refers to the first appearance in a relatively short space of geological time of a very wide assortment of animals more than 500 million years ago. I believe it came about through hybridization. Many well preserved Cambrian fossils occur in the Burgess shale, in the Canadian Rockies. These fossils include small and soft-bodied animals, several of which were planktonic but none were larvae. Compared with modern animals, some of them seem to have the front end of one animal and rear end of another. Modern larvae present a comparable set-up: larvae seem to be derived from animals in different groups from their corresponding adults. I have amassed a bookful of evidence that the basic forms of larvae did indeed originate as animals in other groups and that such forms were transferred by hybridization. Animals with larvae are "sequential chimeras", in which one body-form--the larva--is followed by another, distantly related form--the adult. I believe there were no Cambrian larvae, and Cambrian hybridizations produced "concurrent chimeras", in which two distantly related body-forms appeared together. About 700 million years ago, shortly before the Cambrian, animals with tissues (metazoans) made their first appearance. I agree with Darwin that there were several different forms (Darwin suggested four or five), and I believe they resulted from hybridizations between different colonial protists. Protists are mostly single-celled, but colonial forms consist of many similar cells. All Cambrian animals were marine, and, like most modern marine animals, they shed their eggs and sperm into the water, where fertilization took place. Eggs of one species frequently encountered sperm of another, and there were only poorly developed mechanisms to prevent hybridization. Early animals had small genomes, leaving plenty of spare gene capacity. These factors led to many fruitful hybridizations, which resulted in concurrent chimeras. Not only did the original metazoans hybridize but the new animals resulting from these hybidizations also hybridized, and this produced the explosion in animal form. The acquisition of larvae by hybridization came much later, when there was little spare genome capacity in recipes for single animals, and it is still going on. In the echinoderms (the group that includes sea-urchins and starfish) there is evidence that there were no larvae in either the Cambrian or the Ordovician (the following period), and this might well apply to other major groups. Acquiring parts, rather than larvae, by hybridization continued, I believe, throughout the Cambrian and Ordovician and probably later, but, as genomes became larger and filled most of the available space, later hybridizations led to smaller changes in adult form or to acquisitions of larvae. The gradual evolution of better mechanisms to prevent eggs being fertilized by foreign sperm resulted in fewer fruitful hybridizations, but occasional hybridizations still take place. Hybridogenesis, the generation of new organisms by hybridization, and symbiogenesis, the generation of new organisms by symbiosis, both involve fusion of lineages, whereas Darwinian "descent with modification" is entirely within separate lineages. These forms of evolution function in parallel, and "natural selection" works on the results. I cannot prove that Cambrian animals had poorly developed specificity and spare gene capacity, but it makes sense. |[356]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [357]SETH LLOYD Quantum Mechanical Engineer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology [lloyd100.jpg] I believe in science. Unlike mathematical theorems, scientific results can't be proved.They can only be tested again and again, until only a fool would not believe them. I cannot prove that electrons exist, but I believe fervently in their existence. And if you don't believe in them, I have a high voltage cattle prod I'm willing to apply as an argument on their behalf. Electrons speak for themselves. |[358]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [359]MARTIN NOWAK Biological Mathematician, Harvard University; Director, Center for Evolutionary Dynamics [nowak100.jpg] I believe the following aspects of evolution to be true without knowing how to turn them into (respectable) research topics. Important steps in evolution are robust. Multi-cellularity evolved at least ten times. There are several independent origins of eusociality. There were a number of lineages leading from primates to humans. If our ancestors would not have evolved language, somebody else would have. Cooperation and language define humanity. Every special trait of humans is derivative of language. Mathematics is a language and therefore a product of evolution. |[360]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [361]W. DANIEL HILLIS Physicist, Computer Scientist; Chairman, Applied Minds, Inc.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone [hillis100.jpg] I know that it sounds corny, but I believe that people are getting better. In other words, I believe in moral progress. It is not a steady progress, but there is a long-term trend in the right direction--a two steps forward, one step back kind of progress. I believe, but cannot prove, that our species is passing through a transitional stage, from being animals to being true humans. I do not pretend to understand what true humans will be like, and I expect that I would not even understand it if I met them. Yet, I believe that our own universal sense of right and wrong is pointing us in the right direction, and that it is the direction of our future. I believe that ten thousand years from now, people (or whatever we are by then) will be more empathetic and more altruistic than we are. They will trust each other more, and for good reason. They will take better care of each other. They be more thoughtful about the broader consequences of their actions. They will take better care of their future than we do of ours. |[362]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [363]ROBERT R. PROVINE Psychologist and Neuroscientist, University of Maryland; Author, Laughter [provine100.jpg] Human Behavior is Unconsciously Controlled. Until proven otherwise, why not assume that consciousness does not play a role in human behavior? Although it may seem radical on first hearing, this is actually the conservative position that makes the fewest assumptions. The null position is an antidote to philosopher's disease, the inappropriate attribution of rational, conscious control over processes that may be irrational and unconscious. The argument here is not that we lack consciousness, but that we over-estimate the conscious control of behavior. I believe this statement to be true. But proving it is a challenge because it's difficult to think about consciousness. We are misled by an inner voice that generates a reasonable but often fallacious narrative and explanation of our actions. That the beam of conscious awareness that illuminates our actions is on only part of the time further complicates the task. Since we are not conscious of our state of unconsciousness, we vastly overestimate the amount of time that we are aware of our own actions, whatever their cause. My thinking about unconscious control was shaped by my field studies of the primitive play vocalization of laughter. When I asked people to explain why they laughed in a particular situation, they would concoct some reasonable fiction about the cause of their behavior--"someone did something funny," "it was something she said," "I wanted to put her at ease." Observations of social context showed that such explanations were usually wrong. In clinical settings, such post hoc misattributions would be termed "confabulations," honest but flawed attempts to explain one's actions. Subjects also incorrectly presumed that laughing is a choice and under conscious control, a reason for their confident, if bogus, explanations of their behavior. But laughing is not a matter speaking "ha-ha," as we would choose a word in speech. When challenged to laugh on command, most subjects could not do so. In certain, usually playful, social contexts, laughter simply happens. However, this lack of voluntary control does not preclude a lawful pattern of behavior. Laughter appears at those places where punctuation would appear in a transcription of a conversation--laughter seldom interrupts the phrase structure of speech. We may say, "I have to go now--ha-ha," but rarely, "I have to--ha-ha--go now." This punctuation effect is highly reliable and requires the coordination of laughing with the linguistic structure of speech, yet it is performed without conscious awareness of the speaker. Other airway maneuvers such as breathing and coughing punctuate speech and are performed without speaker awareness. The discovery of lawful but unconsciously controlled laughter produced by people who could not accurately explain their actions led me to consider the generality of this situation to other kinds of behavior. Do we go through life listening to an inner voice that provides similar confabulations about the causes of our action? Are essential details of the neurological process governing human behavior inaccessible to introspection? Can the question of animal consciousness be stood on its head and treated in a more parsimonious manner? Instead of considering whether other animals are conscious, or have a different, or lesser consciousness than our own, should we question if our behavior is under no more conscious control than theirs? The complex social order of bees, ants, and termites documents what can be achieved with little, if any, conscious control as we think of it. Is machine consciousness possible or even desirable? Is intelligent behavior a sign of conscious control? What kinds of tasks require consciousness? Answering these questions requires an often counterintuitive approach to the role, evolution and development of consciousness. |[364]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [365]PAUL BLOOM Psychologist, Yale University; Author, Descartes' Baby [bloom100.jpg] John MacNamara once proposed that children come to learn about right and wrong, good and evil, in much the same way that they learn about geometry and mathematics. Moral development is not merely cultural learning, and it does not arise from innate principles that have evolved through natural selection. It is not like the development of language or sexual preference or taste in food. Instead, moral development involves the construction of a intricate formal system that makes contact with the external world in a significant way. This cannot be entirely right. We know that gut-feelings, such as reactions of empathy or disgust, have a major influence on how children and adults reason about morality. And no serious theory of moral development can ignore the role of natural selection in shaping our moral intuitions. But what I like about Macnamara's proposal is that it allows for moral realism. It allows for the existence of moral truths that people come to discover, just as we come to discover truths of mathematics. We can reject the nihilistic position (help by many researchers) that our moral intuitions are nothing more than accidents of biology or culture. And so I believe (though I cannot prove it) that the development of moral reasoning is the same sort of process as the development of mathematical reasoning. |[366]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [367]PHILIP ZIMBARDO Psychologist, Emeritus Professor, Stanford University; Author, Shyness [zimbardo100.jpg] I believe that the prison guards at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, who worked the night shift in Tier 1A, where prisoners were physically and psychologically abused, had surrendered their free will and personal responsibility during these episodes of mayhem. But I could not prove it in a court of law. These eight army reservists were trapped in a unique situation in which the behavioral context came to dominate individual dispositions, values, and morality to such an extent that they were transformed into mindless actors alienated from their normal sense of personal accountability for their actions--at that time and place. The "group mind" that developed among these soldiers was created by a set of known social psychological conditions, some of which are nicely featured in Golding's Lord of the Flies. The same processes that I witnessed in my Stanford Prison Experiment were clearly operating in that remote place: Deindividuation, dehumanization, boredom, groupthink, role-playing, rule control, and more. Beyond the relatively benign conditions in my study, in that Iraqi prison, the guards experienced extreme fatigue and exhaustion from working 12-hour shifts, 7 days a week, for over a month at a time with no breaks. There was fear of being killed from mortar and grenade attacks and from prisoners rioting. There was revenge for buddies killed, and prejudice against these foreigners for their strange religion and cultural traditions. There was encouragement by staff "to soften up" the detainees for interrogation because Tier 1A was the Interrogation-Soft Torture center of that prison. Already in place when these young men and women arrived there for their tour of duty were abusive practices that had been "authorized" from the top of the chain of command: Use of nakedness as a humiliation tactic, sensory and sleep deprivation, stress positions, dog attacks, and more. In addition to the situational variables and processes operating in that behavioral setting were a serious of systemic processes that created the barrel into which these good soldiers were forced to live and work. Most of the reports of independent investigation committees cite a failure of leadership, lack of leadership, or irresponsible leadership as factors that contributed to these abuses. Then there was lack of mission-specific training of the guards, no oversight, no accountability to senior officers, poor resources, overcrowded facilities, confusing commands from civilian interrogators at odds with the CIA, military intelligence and other agencies and agents all working in Tier 1A without clear communication channels and much confusion. I was recently an expert witness for the defense of Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick in his Baghdad trial. Before the trial, I spent a day with him, giving him an in-depth interview, checking all background information, and arranging for him to be psychologically assessed by the military. He is one of the alleged "bad apples" who these investigations have labeled as "morally corrupt." What did he bring into that situation and what did that situation bring into him? He seemed very much to be a normal young American. His psych assessments revealed no sign of any pathology, no sadistic tendencies, and all his psych assessment scores are in the normal range, as is his intelligence. He had been a prison guard at a small minimal security prison where he performed for many years without incident. So there is nothing in his background, temperament, or disposition that could have been a facilitating factor for the abuses he committed at the Abu Ghraib Prison. After a four-day long trial, part of which included my testimony elaborating on the points noted here, the Judge took barely one hour to find him guilty of all eight counts and to sentence Sgt. Frederick to 8 years in prison, starting in solitary confinement in Kuwait, dishonorable discharge, broken in rank from Sgt. to Pvt., loss of his 20 years retirement income and his salary. This military judge held Frederick personally responsible for the abuses, because he had acted out of free will to intentionally harm these detainees since he was not forced into these acts, was not mentally incompetent, or acting in self-defense. All of the situational and systemic determinants of his behavior and that of his buddies were disregarded and given a zero weighting coefficient in assessing causal factors. The real reason for the heavy sentence was the photographic documentation of the undeniable abuses along with the smiling abusers in their "trophy photos." It was the first time in history that such images were publicly available of what goes on in many prisons around the world, and especially in military prisons. They humiliated the military, and the entire chain of command all the way up the ladder to the White House. Following this exposure, investigations of all American military prisons in that area of the world uncovered similar abuses and worse, many murders of prisoners. Recent evidence has revealed that similar abuses started taking place again in Abu Ghraib prison barely one month after these disclosures became public--when the "Evil Eight Culprits" were in other prisons--as prisoners. Based on more than 30 years of research on "The Lucifer Effect"--the transformation of good people into perpetrators of evil--I believe that there are powerful situational and systemic forces operating on individuals in certain situations that can undercut a lifetime of morality and rationality. The Dionysian aspect of human nature can triumph over the Apollonian, not only during Mardi Gras, but in dynamic group settings like gang rapes, fraternity hazing, mob riots, and in that Abu Ghraib prison. I believe in that truth in general and especially in the case of Sgt. Frederick, but I was not able to prove it in a military court of law. |[368]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [369]ALUN ANDERSON Editor-in-Chief, New Scientist [andersona100.jpg] Strangely, I believe that cockroaches are conscious. That is probably an unappealing thought to anyone who switches on a kitchen light in the middle of the night and finds a family of roaches running for cover. But it's really shorthand for saying that I believe that many quite simple animals are conscious, including more attractive beasts like bees and butterflies. I can't prove that they are, but I think in principle it will be provable one day and there's a lot to be gained about thinking about the worlds of these relatively simple creatures, both intellectually--and even poetically. I don't mean that they are conscious in even remotely the same way as humans are; if that we were true the world would be a boring place. Rather the world is full of many overlapping alien consciousnesses. Why do I think they might be multiple forms of conscious out there? Before becoming a journalist I spent 10 years and a couple of post-doctoral fellowships getting inside the sensory worlds of a variety of insects, including bees and cockroaches. I was inspired by A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds, a slim out-of-print volume by Jakob von Uexkull (1864-1944). The same book had also inspired Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, the Nobel Prize winners who founded the field of ethology (animal behaviour). Von Uexkull studied the phenomenal world of animals, what he called their "umwelt", the worlds around animals as they themselves perceive them. Everything that an animals senses means something to it, for it has evolved to fit and create its world. Study of animals and their sensory worlds have now morphed into the field of sensory ecology, or on a wilder path, the newer science of biosemiotics. I studied time studying how honey bees could find their way around my laboratory room (they had learnt to fly in through a small opening in the window) and find a hidden source of sugar. Bees could learn all about the pattern of key features in the room and would show they were confused if objects were moved around when they were out of the room. They were also easily distracted by certain kinds of patterns, particularly ones with lots of points and lines that had very abstract similarities to the patterns on flowers, as well as by floral scents, and by sudden movements that signalled danger. In contrast, when they were busy gorging on the sugar almost nothing could distract them, making it possible for myself to paint a little number on their backs so I distinguish individual bees. To make sense of this ever changing behaviour, with its shifting focus of attention, I always found it simplest to figure out what was happening by imagining the sensory world of the bee, with its eye extraordinarily sensitive to flicker and colours we can't see, as a "visual screen" in the same way I can sit back and "see" my own visual screen of everything happening around me, with sights and sounds coming in and out of prominence. The objects in the bees world have significances or "meaning" quite different from our own, which is why its attention is drawn to things we would barely perceive. That's what I mean by consciousness--the feeling of "seeing" the world and its associations. For the bee, it is the feeling of being a bee. I don't mean that a bee is self-conscious or spends time thinking about itself. But of course the problem of why the bee has its own "feeling" is the same incomprehensible "hard problem" of why the activity of our nervous system gives rise to our own "feelings". But at least the bee's world is very visual and capable of being imagined. Some creatures live in sensory worlds that are much harder to access. Spiders that hunt at night live in a world dominated by the detection of faint vibration and of the tiniest flows of air that allow them to see fly passing by in pitch darkness. Sensory hairs that cover their body give them a sensitivity to touch far more finely grained than we can possibly feel through our own skin. To think this way about simple creatures is not to fall into the anthropomorphic fallacy. Bees and spiders live in their own world in which I don't see human-like motives. Rather it is a kind of panpsychism, which I am quite happy to sign up to, at least until we know a lot more about the origin of consciousness. That may take me out of the company of quite a few scientists who would prefer to believe that a bee with a brain of only a million neurones must surely be a collection of instinctive reactions with some simple switching mechanism between then, rather have some central representation of what is going on that might be called consciousness. But it leaves me in the company of poets who wonder at the world of even lowly creatures. "In this falling rain, where are you off to snail?" wrote the haiku poet Issa. And as for the cockroaches, they are a little more human than the spiders. Like the owners of the New York apartments who detest them, they suffer from stress and can die from it, even without injury. They are also hierarchical and know their little territories well. When they are running for it, think twice before crushing out another world. |[370]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [371]MARGARET WERTHEIM Science writer and Commentator; Author, Pythagoras' Trousers [wertheim100.jpg] We all believe in something and science itself is premised on a whole set of beliefs. Above all, science is founded on the belief that things are comprehensible and that by the ingenuity of our minds and the probing of ever more subtle instruments we will ultimately come to know It All. But is the All inherently knowable? I believe, though I cannot prove it, that there will always be things we do not know--large things, small things, interesting things and important things. If theoretical physics is any guide we might suppose that science is a march towards a finite goal. For the past few decades theoretical physicists have been searching for a so-called "Theory of Everything," what Nobel laureate Stephen Weinberg has also called a "Final Theory." This "ultimate" set of equations that would tie together all the fundamental forces which physicists recognize today--the four essential powers of gravity, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces inside the cores of atoms. But such theory--if we are lucky enough to extract it from the current mass of competing contenders--would not tell us anything about how proteins form or how DNA came into being. Less still would it illuminate the machinations of a living cell, or the workings of the human mind. Frankly, a "theory of everything" would not even help us to understand how snowflakes form. In an age when we have discovered the origin of the universe and observed the warping of space and time it is shocking to hear that scientists do not understand something as "paltry" as the formation of ice crystals. But that is indeed the case. Kenneth Libbrecht, chairman of the Cal tech physics department is a world expert on ice crystal formation, a hobby project he took on more than twenty years ago precisely because as he puts it "there are six billion people on this planet, and I thought that at least one of us should understand how snow crystals form." After two decades of meticulous experimentation inside specially constructed pressurized chambers Libbrecht believes he has made some headway in understanding how ice crystallizes at the edge of the quasi-liquid layer which surrounds all ice structures. He calls his theory "structure dependent attachment kinetics," but he is quick to point out that this is far from the ultimate answer. The transition from water to ice is a mysteriously complex process that has engaged minds as brilliant as Johannes Kepler and Michael Faraday. Libbrecht hopes he can add the small next step in our knowledge of this wondrous substance that is so central to life itself. Studying ice crystals is Libbrecht's hobby--in his "day job" he is one of the hundreds of physicists who are working on the LIGO detector which is designed to detect gravitational waves that are believed to emanate from black holes and other massive cosmological entities. Gravity waves have been predicted by the general theory of relativity, and hence physicists believe they must exist. Here the matter of belief has literally bought into being a an extremely expensive machine. Any successful theory of everything will have to account for gravity, the most mysterious of all the forces and the one physicists least understand. Like the other three forces, physicists believe gravity must ultimately manifest itself in both wave and particle forms. LIGO is designed to detect such waves, if indeed they do exist. Some years ago the science writer John Horgan wrote a marvelously provocative book in which he suggested that science was coming to an end, all the major theoretical edifices now supposedly being in place. Horgan was right in one sense, for high-energy physics may be on the verge of achieving its final unification. But in so many other areas, science is just beginning. Only now are we acquiring the scientific tools and techniques to begin to investigate how our atmosphere works, how ecological systems function, how genes create proteins, how cells evolve, and how brains work. The very success of "fundamental science" has opened doors undreamed of by earlier generations and in many ways it seems there is more than ever that we do not know. At a time when journals tout theories about how to create entire universes it is easy to imagine that science has grasped the whole of reality. In truth our ignorance is vast--and personally I believe it will always be so. Rather than pretend we will soon know it all, I suggest we might adopt instead the attitude of the great fifteenth century champion of science, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. Cusa titled his major work On Learned Ignorance. A complex and poetic fusion of mathematics, scientific speculation and Catholic theology, Cusa puts forward in this book the view that we can never --even in principle--know everything. Only God can do that. We mortals, confined within the world itself can never see it whole, from the outside as it were. But while we cannot know it All, Cusa insists we can know a great deal and that science and mathematics will take our knowledge forward. Our ignorance then can be ever more learned. Not omniscience then, but an ever more subtle and insightful unknowing is the goal that Cusa advocated. In the humble snowflakes Ken Libbrecht studies we have the perfect metaphor for such a view--though they melt on your tongue, each tiny crystal of ice encapsulates a universe whose basic rules we have barely begun to unravel. |[372]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [373]KENNETH FORD Physicist; Retired director, American Institute of Physics; Author, The Quantum World [ford100.jpg] I believe that microbial life exists elsewhere in our galaxy. I am not even saying "elsewhere in the universe." If the proposition I believe to be true is to be proved true within a generation or two, I had better limit it to our own galaxy. I will bet on its truth there. I believe in the existence of life elsewhere because chemistry seems to be so life-striving and because life, once created, propagates itself in every possible direction. Earth's history suggests that chemicals get busy and create life given any old mix of substances that includes a bit of water, and given practically any old source of energy; further, that life, once created, spreads into every nook and cranny over a wide range of temperature, acidity, pressure, light level, and so on. Believing in the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy is another matter. Good luck to the SETI people and applause for their efforts, but consider that microbes have inhabited Earth for at least 75 percent of its history, whereas intelligent life has been around for but the blink of an eye, perhaps 0.02 percent of Earth's history (and for nearly all of that time without the ability to communicate into space). Perhaps intelligent life will have staying power. We don't know. But we do know that microbial life has staying power. Now to a supposition: that Mars will be found to have harbored life and harbors life no more. If this proves to be the case, it will be an extraordinarily sobering discovery for humankind, even more so than the view of our fragile blue ball from the Moon, even more so than our removal from the center of the universe by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton--perhaps even more so than the discovery of life elsewhere in the galaxy. |[374]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [375]DONALD HOFFMAN Cognitive Scientist, UC, Irvine; Author, Visual Intelligence [hoffman100.jpg] I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Spacetime, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being. The world of our daily experience--the world of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds--is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm. Indeed the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not. For the point of an interface, such as the windows interface on a computer, is simplification and ease of use. We click icons because this is quicker and less prone to error than editing megabytes of software or toggling voltages in circuits. Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival. If this is right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant of minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory of consciousness, no theory that explains how mindless matter or energy or fields could be, or cause, conscious experience. There are, of course, many proposals for where to find such a theory--perhaps in information, complexity, neurobiology, neural darwinism, discriminative mechanisms, quantum effects, or functional organization. But no proposal remotely approaches the minimal standards for a scientific theory: quantitative precision and novel prediction. If matter is but one of the humbler products of consciousness, then we should expect that consciousness itself cannot be theoretically derived from matter. The mind-body problem will be to physicalist ontology what black-body radiation was to classical mechanics: first a goad to its heroic defense, later the provenance of its final supersession. The heroic defense will, I suspect, not soon be abandoned. For the defenders doubt that a replacement grounded in consciousness could attain the mathematical precision or impressive scope of physicalist science. It remains to be seen, of course, to what extent and how effectively mathematics can model consciousness. But there are fascinating hints: According to some of its interpretations, the mathematics of quantum theory is itself, already, a major advance in this project. And perhaps much of the mathematical progress in the perceptual and cognitive sciences can also be so interpreted. We shall see. The mind-body problem may not fall within the scope of physicalist science, since this problem has, as yet, no bona fide physicalist theory. Its defenders can surely argue that this penury shows only that we have not been clever enough or that, until the right mutation chances by, we cannot be clever enough, to devise a physicalist theory. They may be right. But if we assume that consciousness is fundamental then the mind-body problem transforms from an attempt to bootstrap consciousness from matter into an attempt to bootstrap matter from consciousness. The latter bootstrap is, in principle, elementary: Matter, spacetime and physical objects are among the contents of consciousness. The rules by which, for instance, human vision constructs colors, shapes, depths, motions, textures and objects, rules now emerging from psychophysical and computational studies in the cognitive sciences, can be read as a description, partial but mathematically precise, of this bootstrap. What we lose in this process are physical objects that exist independent of any observer. There is no sun or moon unless a conscious mind perceives them, for both are constructs of consciousness, icons in a species-specific user interface. To some this seems a patent absurdity, a reductio of the position, readily contradicted by experience and our best science. But our best science, our theory of the quantum, gives no such assurance. And experience once led us to believe the earth flat and the stars near. Perhaps, in due time, mind-independent objects will go the way of flat earth. This view obviates no method or result of science, but integrates and reinterprets them in its framework. Consider, for instance, the quest for neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). This holy grail of physicalism can, and should, proceed unabated if consciousness is fundamental, for it constitutes a central investigation of our user interface. To the physicalist, an NCC is, potentially, a causal source of consciousness. If, however, consciousness is fundamental, then an NCC is a feature of our interface correlated with, but never causally responsible for, alterations of consciousness. Damage the brain, destroy the NCC, and consciousness is, no doubt, impaired. Yet neither the brain nor the NCC causes consciousness. Instead consciousness constructs the brain and the NCC. This is no mystery. Drag a file's icon to the trash and the file is, no doubt, destroyed. Yet neither the icon nor the trash, each a mere pattern of pixels on a screen, causes its destruction. The icon is a simplification, a graphical correlate of the file's contents (GCC), intended to hide, not to instantiate, the complex web of causal relations. |[376]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [377]DENIS DUTTON Philosopher of Art, University of Canterbury, New Zealand; Editor, Arts & Letters Daily [dutton100.jpg] In a 1757 essay, philosopher David Hume argued that because "the general principles of taste are uniform in human nature" the value of some works of art might be essentially eternal. He observed that the "same Homer who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and London." The works that manage to endure over millennia, Hume thought, do so precisely because they appeal to deep, unchanging features of human nature. Some unique works of art, for example, Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, possess this rare but demonstrable capacity to excite the human mind across cultural boundaries and through historic time. I cannot prove it, but I think a small body of such works--by Homer, Bach, Shakespeare, Murasaki Shikibu, Vermeer, Michelangelo, Wagner, Jane Austen, Sophocles, Hokusai--will be sought after and enjoyed for centuries or millennia into the future. As much as fashions and philosophies are bound to change, these works will remain objects of permanent value to human beings. These epochal survivors of art are more than just popular. The majority of works of popular art today are not inevitably shallow or worthless, but they tend to be easily replaceable. In the modern mass art system, artistic forms endure, while individual works drop away. Spy thrillers, romance novels, pop songs, and soap operas are daily replaced by more thrillers, romance novels, pop songs, and soap operas. In fact, the ephemeral nature of mass art seems more pronounced than ever: most popular works are incapable of surviving even a year, let alone a couple of generations. It's different with art's classic survivors: even if they began, as Sophocles' and Shakespeare's did, as works of popular art, they set themselves apart in their durable appeal: nothing kills them. Audiences keep coming back to experience these original works themselves. Against the idea of permanent aesthetic values is cultural relativism, which is taught as the default orthodoxy in many university departments. Aesthetic values have been widely construed by academics as merely contingent reflections of local social and economic conditions. Beauty, if not in the eye of the beholder, has been misconstrued as merely in the eyes of society, a conditioning that determines values of cultural seeing. Such veins of explanation often include no small amount of cynicism: why do people go to the opera? Oh, to show off their furs. Why are they thrilled by famous paintings? Because they're worth millions. Beneath such explanations is a denial of intrinsic aesthetic merit. Such aesthetic relativism is decisively refuted, as Hume understood, by the cross-cultural appeal of a small class of art objects over centuries: Mozart packs Japanese concerts halls, as Hiroshige does Paris galleries, while new productions of Shakespeare in every major language of the world are endless. And finally, it is beginning to look as though empirical psychology is equipped to address the universality of art. For example, evolutionary psychology is being used by literary scholars to explain the persistent themes and plot devices in fiction. The rendering of faces, bodies, and landscape preferences in art is amenable to psychological investigation. The structure of musical perception is now open to experimental analysis as never before. Poetic experience can be elucidated by the insights of contemporary linguistics. None of this research promises a recipe for creating great art, but it can throw light on what we already know about aesthetic pleasure. What's going on most days in the Metropolitan Museum and most nights at Lincoln Center involves aesthetic experiences that will be continuously revived and relived by our descendents into an indefinite future. In a way, this makes the creations of the greatest artists as much permanent achievements as the discoveries of greatest scientists. That much I think I know. The question we should now ask is, What makes this possible? What is it about the highest works of art that gives them eternal appeal? |[378]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [379]DAVID MYERS Psychologist, Hope College; Author, Intuition [myers100.jpg] As a Christian monotheist, I start with two unproven axioms: 1. There is a God. 2. It's not me (and it's also not you). Together, these axioms imply my surest conviction: that some of my beliefs (and yours) contain error. We are, from dust to dust, finite and fallible. We have dignity but not deity. And that is why I further believe that we should a) hold all our unproven beliefs with a certain tentativeness (except for this one!), b) assess others' ideas with open-minded skepticism, and c) freely pursue truth aided by observation and experiment. This mix of faith-based humility and skepticism helped fuel the beginnings of modern science, and it has informed my own research and science writing. The whole truth cannot be found merely by searching our own minds, for there is not enough there. So we also put our ideas to the test. If they survive, so much the better for them; if not, so much the worse. Within psychology, this "ever-reforming" process has many times changed my mind, leading me now to believe, for example, that newborns are not so dumb, that electro convulsive therapy often alleviates intractable depression, that America's economic growth has not improved our morale, that the automatic unconscious mind dwarfs the conscious mind, that traumatic experiences rarely get repressed, that most folks don't suffer low self-esteem, and that sexual orientation is not a choice. |[380]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [381]ESTHER DYSON Editor of Release 1.0; Trustee, Long Now Foundation; Author, Release 2.0 [dysone100.jpg] We're living longer, and thinking shorter. [Disclaimer: Since I'm not a scientist, I'm not even going to attempt to take on something scientific. Rather, I want to talk about something that can't easily be measured, let alone proved. And second, though what I'm saying may sound gloomy, I love the times we live in. There has never been a time more interesting, more full of things to explain, interesting people to meet, worthy causes to support, challenging problems to solve.] It's all about time. I think modern life has fundamentally and paradoxically changed our sense of time. Even as we live longer, we seem to think shorter. Is it because we cram more into each hour? Or because the next person over seems to cram more into each hour? For a variety of reasons, everything is happening much faster and more things are happening. Change is a constant. It used to be that machines automated work, giving us more time to do other things. But now machines automate the production of attention-consuming information, which takes our time. For example, if one person sends the same e-mail message to 10 people, then 10 people have to respond. The physical friction of everyday life--the time it took Isaac Newton to travel by coach from London to Cambridge, the dead spots of walking to work (no iPod), the darkness that kept us from reading--has disappeared, making every minute not used productively into an opportunity cost. And finally, we can measure more, over smaller chunks of time. From airline miles to calories (and carbs and fat grams), from friends on Friendster to steps on a pedometer, from realtime stock prices to millions of burgers consumed, we count things by the minute and the second. Unfortunately, this carries over into how we think and plan: Businesses focus on short-term results; politicians focus on elections; school systems focus on test results; most of us focus on the weather rather than the climate. Everyone knows about the big problems, but their behavior focuses on the here and now. I first noticed this phenomenon in a big way in the US right after 9/11, when it became impossible to schedule an appointment or get anyone to make a commitment. To me, it felt like Russia (where I had been spending time since 1989), where people avoided long-term plans because there was little discernible relationship between effort and result. Suddenly, even in the US, people were behaving like the Russians of those days, reluctant to plan for anything more than a few days out. Of course, that immediate crisis has passed, but there's still the same sense of unpredictability dogging our thinking in the US (in particular). Best to concentrate on the current quarter, because who knows what job I'll have next year. Best to pass that test, because what I actually learn won't be worth much ten years from now anyway. How can we reverse this? It's a social problem, but I think it may also herald a mental one--which I describe as mental diabetes. Whatever's happening to adults, most of us grew up reading books (at least occasionally) and playing with "uninteractive" toys that required us to make up our own stories, dialogue and behavior for them. Today's children are living in an information-rich, time-compressed environment that often seems to replace a child's imagination rather than stimulate it. I posit that being fed so much processed information--video, audio, images, flashing screens, talking toys, simulated action games--is akin to being fed too much processed, sugar-rich food. It may seriously mess up children's information metabolism and their ability to process information for themselves. In other words, will they be able to discern cause and effect, to put together a coherent story line, to think scientifically? I don't know the answers, but these questions are worth thinking about, for the long term. |[382]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [383]DAVID BUSS Psychologist, University of Texas, Austin; Author, The Evolution of Desire [buss100.jpg] True love. I've spent two decades of my professional life studying human mating. In that time, I've documented phenomena ranging from what men and women desire in a mate to the most diabolical forms of sexual treachery. I've discovered the astonishingly creative ways in which men and women deceive and manipulate each other. I've studied mate poachers, obsessed stalkers, sexual predators, and spouse murderers. But throughout this exploration of the dark dimensions of human mating, I've remained unwavering in my belief in true love. While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many--the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, profound self-sacrifice, and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It's difficult to define, eludes modern measurement, and seems scientifically wooly. But I know true love exists. I just can't prove it. |[384]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [385]MARIA SPIROPULU Physicist, currently at CERN [spiropulu100.jpg] I believe nothing to be true (clearly real) if it cannot be proved. I'll take the question and make a pseudo-invariant transformation that makes it more apt to my brain. When Bohr was asked what is the complementary variable of "truth" (Wirklichkeit) he replied with no hesitation "clarity" (Klarheit). Contrary to Bohr, and since neither truth nor clarity are quantum mechanical variables, real truth and comprehensive clarity should be simultaneously achievable given rigorous experimental evidence. [In particular since "Wirklichkeit" means reality, and "Klarheit" is clarity in the sense of good understanding.] In fact I will use clarity (as in "clear reality"), in the place of truth. I will also invent equivalents for proof and for belief. Proof will be interchangeable with "experimental scientific evidence". Belief is more tricky given that it has to do with complex carbonic life. It can be interchangeable with "theoretical assessment" or "assessment by common sense" (depending on the scale and the available technology). In this process (no doubt in a path full of traps and pitfalls) I have cannibalized the original question to the following: What do you (commonsensical/theoretically) assess to be clearly real even though you have no experimental scientific evidence for it? Now this is hard: there are many theoretical assessments for the explanation of the natural phenomena at the extreme energy scales (from the subnuclear to the supercosmic), that possess a degree of clarity. But all of them are inspired by the vast collection of conciliatory data that scale by scale speak of Nature's works. This is so even for string theory. So the answer is still...nothing. Following Bohr's complementarity I would spot that belief and proof are in some way complementary: if you believe you don't need proof, and (arguably) if you have proof you don't need to believe.(I would assign the hard-core string theorists who do not really care about experimental scientific evidence in the first category). But Edge wants us to identify the equivalent(s) of the general theory of relativity in today's scientific thinking(s). Or a prediction of what are the big things in science that come at us unexpectedly. In my field, even frameworks that explain the world using extra dimensions of space (in extreme versions) are not unexpected. As a matter of fact we are preparing to discover or exclude them using the data. My hunch (and wish) is that in the laboratory we will be able to segment spacetime so finely that gravity will be studied and understood in a controlled environment, and that gravitational particle physics will be a new field. |[386]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [387]J. CRAIG VENTER Genomics Researcher; Founder & President, J. Craig Venter Science Foundation [venter100.jpg] Life is ubiquitous throughout the universe. Life on our planet earth most likely is the result of a panspermic event (a notion popularized by the late Francis Crick). DNA, RNA and carbon based life will be found wherever we find water and look with the right tools. Whether we can prove life happens, depends on our ability to improve remote sensing and to visit faraway systems. This will also depend on whether we survive as a species for a sufficient period of time. As we have seen recently in the shotgun sequencing of the Sargasso Sea, when we look for life here on Earth with new tools of DNA sequencing we find life in abundance in the microbial world. In sequencing the genetic code of organisms that survive in the extremes of zero degrees C to well over boiling water temperatures we begin to understand the breadth of life, including life that can thrive in extremes of caustic conditions of strong acids to basic pH's that would rapidly dissolve human skin. Possible indicators of panspermia are the organisms such as Deinococcus radiodurans, which can survive millions of RADs of ionizing radiation and complete desiccation for years or perhaps millennia. These microbes can repair any DNA damage within hours of being reintroduced into an aqueous environment. Our human centric view of life is clearly unwarranted. From the millions of genes that we have just discovered in environmental organisms over the past months we learn that a finite number of themes are used over and over again and could have easily evolved from a few microbes arriving on a meteor or on intergalactic dust. Panspermia is how life is spreads throughout the universe and we are contributing to it from earth by launching billions of microbes into space. |[388]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [389]STEPHEN PETRANEK Editor-in-Chief, Discover Magazine [petranek100.jpg] I believe that life is common throughout the universe and that we will find another Earth-like planet within a decade. The mathematics alone ought to be proof to most people (billions of galaxies with billions of stars in each galaxy and around most of those stars are planets). The numbers suggest that for life not to exist elsewhere in the universe is the unlikely scenario. But there is more to this idea than a good chance. We've now found more than 130 planets just looking at nearby stars in our tiny little corner of the Milky Way. The results suggest there are uncountable numbers of planets in our galaxy alone. Some of them are likely to be earthlike, or at least earth-sized, although the vast majority that we've found so far are huge gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn which are unlikely to harbor life. Furthermore, there were four news events this year that made the discovery of life elsewhere extraordinarily more likely. First, the NASA Mars Rover called Opportunity found incontrovertible evidence that a briny--salty-sea once covered the area where it landed, called Meridiani Planum. The only question about life on Mars now is whether that sea--which was there twice in Martian history--existed long enough for life to form. The Phoenix mission in 2008 may answer that question. Second, a team of astrophysicists reported in July that radio emissions from Sagittarius B2, a nebula near the center of the Milky Way, indicate the presence of aldehyde molecules, the prebiotic stuff of life. Aldehydes help form amino acids, the fundamental components of proteins. The same scientists previously reported clouds of other organic molecules in space, including glycolaldehyde, a simple sugar. Outer space is thus full of complex molecules--not just atoms--necessary for life. Comets in other solar systems could easily deposit such molecules on planets, as they may have done in our solar system with earth. Third, astronomers in 2004 found much smaller planets around other stars for the first time. Barbara McArthur at the University of Texas at Austin found a planet 18 times the mass of Earth around 55 Cancri, a star with three other known planets. A team in Portugal announced finding a 14-mass planet. These smaller planets are likely to be rock, not gas. McArthur says, "We're on our way to finding an extrasolar earth." Fourth, astronomers are not only getting good at finding new planets around other stars, they're getting the resolution of the newest telescopes so good that they can see the dim light from some newly found planets. Meanwhile, even better telescopes are being built, like the large binocular scope on Mt. Graham in Arizona that will see more planets. With light we can analyze the spectrum a new planet reflects and determine what's on that planet--like water. Water, we also discovered recently is abundant in space in large clouds between and near stars. So everything life needs is out there. For it not to come together somewhere else as it did on earth is remarkably unlikely. In fact, although there are Goldilocks zones in galaxies where life as we know it is most likely to survive (there's too much radiation towards the center of the Milky Way, for example), there are almost countless galaxies out there where conditions could be ripe for life to evolve. This is a golden age of astrophysics and we're going to find life elsewhere. |[390]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [391]SIMON BARON-COHEN Psychologist, Autism Research Centre, Cambridge University; Author, The Essential Difference [baroncohen100.jpg] I am not interested in ideas that cannot in principle be proven or disproven. I am as capable as the next guy in believing in an idea that is not yet proven so long as it could in principle be proven or disproven. In my chosen field of autism, I believe that the cause will turn out to be assortative mating of two hyper-systemizers. I believe this because we already have 3 pieces of the jig-saw: (1) that fathers of children with autism are more likely to work in the field of engineering (compared to fathers of children without autism); (2) that grandfathers of children with autism--on both sides of the family--were also more likely to work in the field of engineering (compared to grandfathers of children without autism); and (3) that both mothers and fathers of children with autism are super-fast at the embedded figures test, a task requiring analysis of patterns and rules. (Note that engineering is a chosen example because it involves strong systemizing. But other related scientific and technical fields [such as math or physics] would have been equally good examples to study). We have had these three pieces of the jigsaw since 1997, published in the scientific literature. They do not yet prove the assortative mating theory. They simply point to it being highly likely. Direct tests of the theory are still needed. I will be the first to give up this idea if it is proven wrong, since I'm not in the business of holding onto wrong ideas. But I won't give up the idea simply because it will be unpopular to certain groups (such as those who want to believe that the cause of autism is purely environmental). I will hold onto the idea until it has been properly tested. Popperian science is about being able to let go of an idea when the evidence goes against it, but it is also about being able to hold onto an idea until the evidence has been collected, if you have enough reasons to believe it might be true. The causes of autism are likely to be complex, including at the very least multiple genes interacting with environmental factors, but the assortative mating theory may describe some contributing factors. |[392]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [393]TOM STANDAGE Technology Editor, The Economist [standage100.jpg] I believe that the radiation emitted by mobile phones is harmless. My argument is not based so much on the scientific evidence--because there isn't very much of it, and what little there is has either found no effect or is statistically dubious. Instead, it is based on a historical analogy with previous scares about overhead power lines and cathode-ray computer monitors (VDUs). Both were also thought to be dangerous, yet years of research--decades in the case of power lines--failed to find conclusive evidence of harm. Mobile phones seem to me to be the latest example of what has become a familiar pattern: anecdotal evidence suggests that a technology might be harmful, and however many studies fail to find evidence of harm, there are always calls for more research. The underlying problem, of course, is the impossibility of proving a negative. During the fuss over genetically modified crops in Europe, there were repeated calls for proof that GM technology was safe. Similarly, in the aftermath of the BSE scare in Britain, scientists were repeatedly asked for proof that beef was safe to eat. But you cannot prove that something has no effect: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. All you can do is look for evidence of harm. If you don't find it, you can look again. If you still fail to find it, the question is still open: "lack of evidence of harm" means both "safe as far as we can tell" and "we still don't know if it's safe or not". Scientists are often unfairly accused of logic-chopping when they point this out. Looking back even further, I expect mobile phones will turn out to be merely the latest in a long line of technologies that raised health concerns that subsequently turned out to be unwarranted. In the 19th century, long before the power-line and VDU scares, telegraph wires were accused of affecting the weather, and railway travel was believed to cause nervous disorders. The irony is that since my belief that mobile phones are safe is based on a historical analysis, I am on no firmer ground scientifically than those who believe mobile phones are harmful. Still, I believe they are safe, though I can't prove it. |[394]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [395]LEON LEDERMAN Physicist and Nobel Laureate; Director Emeritus, Fermilab; Coauthor, The God Particle [lederman100.jpg] My friend, the theoretical physicist, believed so strongly in String Theory, "It must be true!" He was called to testify in a lawsuit, which contested the claims of String Theory against Quantum Loop Gravity. The lawyer was skeptical. "What makes you such an authority?" he asked. "Oh, I am without question the world's most outstanding theoretical physicist", was the startling reply. It was enough to convince the lawyer to change the subject. However, when the witness came off the stand, he was surrounded by protesting colleagues. "How could you make such an outrageous claim?" they asked. The theoretical physicist defended, "Fellows, you just don't understand; I was under oath." To believe without knowing it cannot be proved (yet) is the essence of physics. Guys like Einstein, Dirac, Poincar?, etc. extolled the beauty of concepts, in a bizarre sense, placing truth at a lower level of importance. There are enough examples that I resonated with the arrogance of my theoretical masters who were in effect saying that God, a.k.a. the Master, Der Alte, may have, in her fashioning of the universe, made some errors in favoring of a convenient truth over a breathtakingly wondrous mathematics. This inelegant lack of confidence has heretofore always proved hasty. Thus, when the long respected law of mirror symmetry was violated by weakly interacting but exotic particles, our pain at the loss of simplicity and harmony was greatly alleviated by the discovery of the failure of particle-antiparticle symmetry. The connection was exciting because the simultaneous reflection in a mirror and change of particles to antiparticles seemed to restore a new and more powerful symmetry--"CP" symmetry now gave us a connection of space (mirror reflection) and electric charge. How silly of us to have lost confidence in the essential beauty of nature! The renewed confidence remained even when it turned out that "CP" was also imperfectly respected. "Surely," we now believe, "there is in store some spectacular, new, unforeseen splendor in all of us." She will not let us down. This we believe, even though we can't prove it. |[396]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [397]MICHAEL SHERMER Publisher, Skeptic magazine; Columnist, Scientific American; Author Science Friction [shermer100.jpg] I believe, but cannot prove...that reality exists over and above human and social constructions of that reality. Science as a method, and naturalism as a philosophy, together form the best tool we have for understanding that reality. Because science is cumulative--that is, it builds on itself in a progressive fashion--we can strive to achieve an ever-greater understanding of reality. Our knowledge of nature remains provisional because we can never know if we have final Truth. Because science is a human activity and nature is complex and dynamic, fuzzy logic and fractional probabilities best describe both nature and the estimations of our approximation toward understanding that nature. There is no such thing as the paranormal and the supernatural; there is only the normal and the natural and mysteries we have yet to explain. What separates science from all other human activities is its belief in the provisional nature of all conclusions. In science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is the heart of its limitation. It is also its greatest strength. There are, from this ultimate unprovable assertion, three additional insoluble derivatives. 1. There is no God, intelligent designer, or anything resembling the divinity as proffered by the world's religions (although an extra-terrestrial being of significantly greater intelligence and power than us would be indistinguishable from God). After thousands of years of the world's greatest minds attempting to prove or disprove the divinity's existence or nonexistence, with little agreement or consensus amongst scholars as to the divinity's ultimate state of being, a reasonable conclusion is that the God question can never be solved and that one's belief, disbelief, or skepticism ultimately rests on a non-rational basis. 2. The universe is ultimately determined, but we have free will. As with the God question, scholars of considerable intellectual power for many millennia have failed to resolve the paradox of feeling free in a determined universe. One provisional solution is to think of the universe as so complex that the number of causes and the complexity of their interactions make the predetermination of human action pragmatically impossible. We can even put a figure on the causal net of the universe to see just how absurd it is to think we can get our minds around it fully. It has been computed that in order for a computer in the far future of the universe to resurrect in a virtual reality every person who ever lived or could have lived, with all causal interactions between themselves and their environment, it would need 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123 bits (a 1 followed by 10^123 zeros) of memory. Suffice it to say that no computer within the conceivable future will achieve this level of power; likewise no human brain even comes close. The enormity of this complexity leads us to feel as if we are acting freely as uncaused causers, even though we are actually causally determined. Since no set of causes we select as the determiners of human action can be complete, the feeling of freedom arises out of this ignorance of causes. To that extent we may act as if we are free. There is much to gain, little to lose, and personal responsibility follows. 3. Morality is the natural outcome of evolutionary and historical forces, not divine command. The moral feelings of doing the right thing (such as virtuousness) or doing the wrong thing (such as guilt) were generated by nature as part of human evolution. Although cultures differ on what they define as right and wrong, the moral feelings of doing the right or wrong thing are universal to all humans. Human universals are pervasive and powerful, and include at their core the fact that we are, by nature, moral and immoral, good and evil, altruistic and selfish, cooperative and competitive, peaceful and bellicose, virtuous and non-virtuous. Individuals and groups vary on the expression of such universal traits, but everyone has them. Most people, most of the time, in most circumstances, are good and do the right thing for themselves and for others. But some people, some of the time, in some circumstances, are bad and do the wrong thing for themselves and for others. As a consequence, moral principles are provisionally true, where they apply to most people, in most cultures, in most circumstances, most of the time. At some point in the last 10,000 years (around the time of writing and the shift from bands and tribes to chiefdoms and states around 5,000 years ago) religions began to codify moral precepts into moral codes, and political states began to codify moral precepts into legal codes. In conclusion, I believe, but cannot prove...that reality exists and science is the best method for understanding it, there is no God, the universe is determined but we are free, morality evolved as an adaptive trait of humans and human communities, and that ultimately all of existence is explicable through science. Of course, I could be wrong... |[398]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [399]JEFFREY EPSTEIN Money Manager and Science Philanthropist [epstein100.jpg] The great breakthrough will involve a new understanding of time...that moving through time is not free, and that consciousness itself will be seen to only be a time sensor, adding to the other sensors of light and space. |[400]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [401]MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI Psychologist; Director, Quality of Life Research Center, Claremont Graduate University; Author, Flow [csik100.jpg] When I first read your question, I was sure it was a trick--after all, almost nothing I believe in I can prove. I believe the earth is round, but I cannot prove it, nor can I prove that the earth revolves around the sun or that the naked fig tree in the garden will have leaves in a few months. I can't prove quarks exist or that there was a Big Bang--all of these and millions of other beliefs are based on faith in a community of knowledge whose proofs I am willing to accept, hoping they will accept on faith the few measly claims to proof I might advance. But then I realized--after reading some of the early postings--that every one else has assumed implicitly that the "you" in: "even if you cannot prove it" referred not to the individual respondent, but to the community of knowledge--it actually stood for "one" rather than for "you". That everyone seems to have understood this seems to me a remarkable achievement, a merging of the self with the collective that only great religions and profound ideologies occasionally achieve. So what do I believe that no one else can prove? Not much, although I do believe in evolution, including cultural evolution, which means that I tend to trust ancient beliefs about good and bad, the sacred and the profane, the meaningful and the worthless--not because they are amenable to proof, but because they have been selected over time and in different situations, and therefore might be worthy of belief. As to the future, I will follow the cautious weather forecaster who announces: "Tomorrow will be a beautiful day, unless it rains." In other words, I can see all sorts of potentially wonderful developments in human consciousness, global solidarity, knowledge and ethics; however, there are about as many trends operating towards opposite outcomes: a coarsening of taste, reduction to least common denominator, polarization of property, power, and faith. I hope we will have the time and opportunity to understand which policies lead to which outcomes, and then that we will have the motivation and the courage to implement the more desirable alternatives. |[402]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [403]LEE SMOLIN Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity [smolin100.jpg] I am convinced that quantum mechanics is not a final theory. I believe this because I have never encountered an interpretation of the present formulation of quantum mechanics that makes sense to me. I have studied most of them in depth and thought hard about them, and in the end I still can't make real sense of quantum theory as it stands. Among other issues, the measurement problem seems impossible to resolve without changing the physical theory. Quantum mechanics must then be an approximate description of a more fundamental physical theory. There must then be hidden variables, which are averaged over to derive the approximate, probabilistic description which is quantum theory. We know from the experimental falsifications of the Bell inequalities that any theory which agrees with quantum mechanics on a range of experiments where it has been checked must be non-local. Quantum mechanics is non-local, as are all proposals for replacing it with something that makes more sense. So any additional hidden variables must be non-local. But I believe we can say more. I believe that the hidden variables represent relationships between the particles we do see, which are hidden because they are non-local and connect widely separated particles. This fits in with another core belief of mine, which derives from general relativity, which is that the fundamental properties of physical entities are a set of relationships, which evolve dynamically. There are no intrinsic, non-relational properties, and there is no fixed background, such as Newtonian space and time, which exists just to give things properties. One consequence of this is that the geometry of space and time is also only an approximate, emergent description, applicable only on scales too large to see the fundamental degrees of freedom. The fundamental relations are non-local with respect to the approximate notion of locality that emerges at the scale where it becomes sensible to talk about things located in a geometry. Putting these together, we see that quantum uncertainty must be a residue of the resulting non-locality, which restricts our ability to predict the future of any small region of the universe. Hbar, the fundamental constant of quantum mechanics that measures the quantum uncertainty, is related to N, the number of degrees of freedom in the universe. A reasonable conjecture is that hbar is proportional to the inverse of the square root of N. But how are we to describe physics, if it is not in terms of things moving in a fixed spacetime? Einstein struggled with this, and my only answer is the one he came to near the end of his life: fundamental physics must be discrete, and its description must be in terms of algebra and combinatorics. Finally, what of time? I have been also unable to make sense of any of the proposals to do away with time as a fundamental aspect of our description of nature. So I believe in time, in the sense of causality. I also doubt that the "big bang" is the beginning of time, I strongly suspect that our history extends backwards before the big bang. Finally, I believe that in the near future, we will be able to make predictions based on these ideas that will be tested in real experiments. |[404]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [405]JORDAN POLLACK Computer Scientist, Brandeis University [pollack100.jpg] I believe that that systems of self-interested agents can make progress on their own without centralized supervision. There is an isomorphism between evolution, economics, and education. In economics, the supervisor is a central government or super rich investor, in evolution, it is the "intelligent designer", and in education, its the teacher or outside examiners. In economic systems, despite an almost religious belief in Laissez-Faire and incentive-based behavior, economic systems are prone to winner-take-all phenomena and boom-bust cycles. They seem to require benevolent regulation, or "managed competition" to prevent the "rich get richer" dynamic leading to monopoly, which leads inevitably to corruption and kleptocracy. In evolution, scientists reject the intelligent designer as a creationist ruse, but so far our working models for open-ended evolution haven't worked, and prematurely convergence to mediocrity. In education, evidence of auto-didactic learning in video-games and sports is suppressed in academics by top-down curriculum frameworks and centralized high-stakes testing. If we did have a working mechanism design which could achieve continuous progress by decentralized self-interested agents, it would settle the creationist objection as well as apply to the other fields, leading to a new renaissance. |[406]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [407]DAVID GELERNTER Computer Scientist, Yale University; Chief Scientist, Mirror Worlds Technologies; Author, Drawing Life [gelernter100.jpg] I believe (I know--but can't prove!) that scientists will soon understand the physiological basis of the "cognitive spectrum," from the bright violet of tightly-focused analytic thought all the way down to the long, slow red of low-focus sleep thought--also known as "dreaming." Once they understand the spectrum, they'll know how to treat insomnia, will understand analogy-discovery (and therefore creativity), and the role of emotion in thought--and will understand that thought takes place not only when you solve a math problem but when you look out the window and let your mind wander. Computer scientists will finally understand the missing mystery ingredient that made all their efforts to simulate human thought such naive, static failures, and turned this once-thriving research field into a ghost town. (Their failures were "static" insofar as people think in different ways at different times--your energetic, wide-awake mind works very differently from your tired, soon-to-be-sleeping mind; but artificial intelligence programs always "thought" in the same way all the time.) And scientists will understand why we can't force ourselves to fall asleep or to "be creative"--and how those two facts are related. They'll understand why so many people report being most creative while driving, shaving or doing some other activity that keeps the mind's foreground occupied and lets it approach open problems in a "low focus" way. In short, they'll understand the mind as an integrated dynamic process that changes over a day and a lifetime, but is characterized always by one continuous spectrum. Here's what we know about the cognitive spectrum: every human being traces out some version of the spectrum every day. You're most capable of analysis when you are most awake. As you grow less wide-awake, your thinking grows more concrete. As you start to fall asleep, you begin to free associate. (Cognitive psychologists have known for years that you begin to dream before you fall asleep.) We know also that to grow up intellectually means to trace out the cognitive spectrum in reverse: infants and children think concretely; as they grow up, they're increasingly capable of analysis. (Not incidentally, newborns spend nearly all their time asleep.) Here's what we suspect about the cognitive spectrum: as you move down-spectrum, as your thinking grows less analytic and more concrete and finally bottoms on the wholly non-logical, highly concrete type of thought we call dreaming, emotions function increasingly as the "glue" of thought. I can't prove (but I believe) that "emotion coding" explains the problem of analogy. Scientists and philosophers have knocked their head against this particular brick wall for years: how can people say "a brick wall and a hard problem seem wholly different yet I can draw an analogy between them?" If we knew that, we'd understand the essence of creativity. The answer is: we are able to draw an analogy between two seemingly unlike things because the two are associated in our minds with the same emotion. And that emotion acts as a connecting bridge between them. Each memory comes with a characteristic emotion; similar emotions allow us to connect two otherwise-unlike memories. An emotion (NB!) isn't the crude, simple thing we make it out to be in speaking or writing--"happy," "sad," etc.; an emotion can be the delicate, complex, nuanced, inexpressible feeling you get on the first warm day in spring. And here's what we don't know: what's the physiological mechanism of the cognitive spectrum? What's the genetic basis? Within a generation, we'll have the answers. |[408]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [409]JOHN HORGAN Science Writer; Author, Rational Mysticism [horgan100.jpg] I believe neuroscientists will never have enough understanding of the neural code, the secret language of the brain, to read peoples' thoughts without their consent. The neural code is the software, algorithm, or set of rules whereby the brain transforms raw sensory data into perceptions, memories, decisions, meanings. A complete solution to the neural code could, in principle, allow scientists to monitor and manipulate minds with exquisite precision; you might, for example, probe the mind of a suspected terrorist for memories of past attacks or plans for future ones. The problem is, although all brains operate according to certain general principles, each person's neural code is to a certain extent idiosyncratic, shaped by his or her unique life history. The neural pattern that underpins my concept of "George Bush" or "Heathrow Airport" or "surface-to-air missile" differs from yours. The only way to know how my brain encodes this kind of specific information would be to monitor its activity--ideally with thousands or even millions of implanted electrodes, which can detect the chatter of individual neurons--while I tell you as precisely as possible what I am thinking. But data you glean from studying me will be of no use for interpreting the signals of any other person. For ill or good, our minds will always remain hidden to some extent from Big Brother. |[410]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [411]JOHN R. SKOYLES Neuroscience researcher; Coauthor, Up From Dragons [skoyles100.jpg] Here's what I believe but cannot prove: human beings, like all animals, have evolved a range of capacities for fighting disease and recovering from injury, including a variety of 'sickness behaviors'; humans beings alone however have discovered the advantages of off-loading much of the responsibility for managing their sickness behaviors to other people; the result is that for human beings the very nature of illness has changed--human illness is now largely a social phenomenon. This is possible because "illness" is a response. A rise in body temperature, for example, kills many bacteria and changes the membrane properties of cells so viruses cannot replicate. The pain of a broken bone or weak heart makes sure we let it heal or rest. Nature supplied our bodies in this way with a first-aid kit but unfortunately like many medicines their "treatments" are unpleasant. That unpleasantness, not the dysfunction which they seek to remedy is what we call "illness". These remedies, however, have costs as well as benefits making it often difficult for the body to know whether to deploy them. A fever might fight an infection but if the body lacks sufficient energy stores, the fever might kill. The body therefore must make a decision whether the gain of clearing the infection merits the risk. Complicating that decision is that the body is blind, for example, to whether it faces a mild or a life-threatening virus. The body thus deploys its treatments in a precautionary manner. If only one in ten fevers actually clears an infection that would kill, it makes sense to tolerate the cost of the other nine. Most of the body's capacities for fighting disease and repairing injury are deployed in this precautionary way. We feel pain in a broken limb so we treat it over protectively--in nine occasions out of ten we could get by with less protective pain but on the tenth it stops us causing it further injury. But precautionary deployment is costly. Evolution therefore has put the evaluation of such deployment under the control of the brain in attempt to keep their use to a minimum. But the brain on its own often lacks the experience to know our own condition. Fortunately, other people can, particularly those that have studied health and illness. Human evolution therefore changed illness by offloading decisions about deployment whenever possible on to professionals. People that make themselves experienced in disease and injury, after all, have the background knowledge to know our bodies much better than ourselves. Healing professionals--healers, shamans, witch doctors and medics--exist in all human cultures. Of course, such professionals were seen by their patients as offering real treatments--and a few did help such as advising rest, eating well and some medicinal herbs. But most of what they did was ineffective. Doctors indeed had to wait until 1908 and Paul Ehrlich's discovery of Salvarsan for treating syphilis before they had a really effective treatment for a major disease. Nonetheless earlier doctors and healers were considered by themselves and their patients to be in the possession of very powerful cures. Why? The answer I believe was that their ineffective rituals and potions actually worked. Evolution prepared us to offload control of our abilities to fight disease and heal injuries to those that knew more than us. The rituals and quackery of healers might have not worked but they certainly made a patient feel they were in the hands of an expert. That gave a healer great power over their patient. As noted, many of the body's own "treatments" are used on a precautionary basis so they can be stopped without harm. A healer could do this by applying an impressive "cure" that persuaded the body that its own "treatments" were no longer needed. The body would trust its healer and halt its own efforts and so the "illness". The patient as a result would feel much better, if not cured. Human evolution therefore made doctoring more than just a science and a question of prescribing the right treatment. It made it also an art by which a doctor persuades the patient's body to offload its decision making onto them. |[412]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [413]THOMAS METZINGER Johannes Gutenberg-Universit?t Mainz; Author, Being No One [metzinger100.jpg] I believe, but cannot prove, that a First Breakthrough on Consciousness is actually around the corner. "Actually around the corner" means: less than 50 years away. My intuition is that, roughly, all we need for this first breakthrough are four convincing stories. The first story will be about global integration, about the dynamical self-organization of long-range binding operations in the human brain. It will probably involve something like synchrony in multiple frequency bands, and will let us understand how a unified model of the world can emerge in our own heads. The second story will be about "transparency": Why is it that we are unable to consciously experience most of the images our brain generates as images? The answer to this question will give us a real world. The transparency-tale has to do with not being able to see earlier processing stages and becoming a naive realist. The third story will focus on the Now, the emergence of a psychological moment--on a deeper understanding of what William James' called the "specious present". Experts on short term memory and neural network modelers with tell this story for us. As it unfolds, it will explain the emergence of a subjective present and let us understand how conscious experience, in its simplest and most essential form, is the presence of a world. Interestingly, today almost everybody in the consciousness community already agrees on some version of the fourth story: Consciousness is directly linked to attentional processing, more precisely, to a hidden mechanism constantly holding information available for attention. The subjective presence of a world is a clever strategy of making integrated information available for attention. I believe, but cannot prove, that this will allow us to find the global neural correlate for consciousness. However, being a philosopher, I want much more than that--I am also interested in precise concepts. What I will be waiting for is the young mathematician who then comes along and suddenly allows us to see how all of these four stories were actually only one: The genius who gives us a formal model describing the information flow in this neural correlate, and in just the right way. She will harvest the fruits of generations or researchers before her, and this will be the First Breakthrough on Consciousness. Then three things will happen. 1. The Second Breakthrough on Consciousness will take much longer. Things will get messy and complicated. The philosophy and neuroscience of consciousness will get bogged down in diabolic details and ugly technical problems. Public attention will soon shift away from the problem of consciousness per se. Instead, new generations of young researchers will now focus on the nature of self and social cognition. 2. The overall development will have an unexpectedly strong cultural impact. People will not want to face their own mortality. There will be fundamentalist and anti-rational counter movements against the scientific image of man. At the same time crude new ideologies propagating vulgar forms of materialism and primitive forms of hedonism will spring up. Scientists will realize that one can not reductively explain the human mind and then simply look another way, leaving the consequences for someone else to deal with. 3. We will be able to influence consciousness in ways we have never dreamt of. There will be a new form of technology--Consciousness Technology--exclusively focusing on how to manipulate the neural correlate of consciousness in ever more fine-grained, efficient, and risk-free ways. People will realize that we need some sort of applied ethics for this new type of technology. And hopefully we will all together start to tell a new story--a story about how to live with these brains and about what a good state of consciousness actually is. |[414]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [415]JEAN PAUL SCHMETZ Economist; Managing Director of CyberLab Interactive Productions GmbH (Burda Media Group). [schmetz100.jpg] When considering this question one has to remember the basis of the scientific method: formulating hypotheses that can be disproved. Those hypotheses that are not disproved are thought to be true until disproved. Since it is more glamorous for a scientist to formulate hypotheses that it is to spend years disproving existing ones from other scientists and that it is unlikely that someone will spend enough time and energy trying to disprove his/her own statements, our body of scientific knowledge is surely full of statements we believe to be true but will eventually be proved to be false. So I turn the question around: What scientific ideas that have not been disproved, do you believe are false. In my field (theoretical economics), I believe that most ideas taught in economics 101 will be proved false eventually. Most of them would already have been officially defined as false in any other more hard-science, but, because of lack of better hypotheses they are still widely accepted and used in economics and general commentary. Eventually, someone will come up with another type of hypotheses explaining (and predicting) the economic reality in a way that will render most existing economics beliefs false. |[416]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [417]RICHARD DAWKINS Evolutionary Biologist, Oxford University; Author, The Ancestor's Tale [dawkins100.jpg] I believe that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe. |[418]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [419]ALEX (SANDY) PENTLAND Computer Scientist, MIT Media Laboratory [pentland100.jpg] Tribal Mind What would it be like to be part of a distributed intelligence but still with an individual consciousness? Well for starters, you might expect to see the collective mind 'take over' from time to time, directly guiding the individual minds. In humans, the behavior of angry mobs and frightened crowds seem to qualify as examples of a 'collective mind' in action, with non-linguistic channels of communication usurping the individual capacity for rational behavior. But as powerful as this sort of group compulsion can be, it is usually regarded as simply a failure of individual rationality, a primitive behavioral safety net for the tribe in times of great stress. Surely this tribal mind doesn't operate in normal day-to-day behavior--or does it? If we imagined that human behavior was in substantial part due to a collective tribal mind, you would expect that non-linguistic social signaling--the type that drives mob behavior--would be predictive of even the most rational and important human interactions. Analogous with the wiggle dance of the honeybee, there ought to be non-linguistic signals that accurately predict important behavioral outcomes. And that is exactly what I find. Together with my research group I have built a computer system that objectively measures a set of non-linguistic social signals, such as engagement, mirroring, activity, and stress, by looking at 'tone of voice' over one minute time periods. Although people are largely unconscious of this type of behavior, other researchers (Jaffe, Chartrand and Bargh, France, Kagen) have shown that similar measurements are predictive of infant language development, judgments of empathy, depression, and even personality development in children. Working with colleagues, we have found that we can use these measurements of social signaling to automatically predict a wide range of important behavioral outcomes--objective, instrumental, and subjective--with high accuracy, accounting for between 30% and 80% of the total outcome variance. Examples of objective and instrumental behaviors where we can accurately predict the outcome include salary negotiations, dating decisions, and role in the social network. Examples of subjective predictions include hiring preferences, empathy perceptions, and interest ratings. Even for lengthy interactions, accurate predictions can be made by observing only the initial few minutes of interaction, even though the linguistic content of these 'thin slices' of the behavior seem to have little predictive power. I find all of this astounding. We are examining some of the most important interactions a human has: finding a mate, getting a job, negotiating a salary, finding your place in your social network. These are activities for which we prepare intellectually and strategically for decades. And yet the largely unconscious social signaling that occurs at the start of the interaction appears to be more predictive than either the contextual facts (is he attractive? is she experienced?) or the linguistic structure (e.g., strategy chosen, arguments employed, etc.). So what is going on here? One might speculate that the social signaling we are measuring evolved as a method of establishing tribal hierarchy and cohesion, analogous to Dunbar's view that language evolved as grooming behavior. On this view the tribal mind would function as unconscious collective discussion about relationships and resources, risks and rewards, and would interact with the conscious individual minds by filtering ideas by their value relative to the tribe. Our measurements tap into the discussion, and predict outcome by use of social regularities. For instance, in a salary negotiation it is important for the lower-status individual to establish that they are 'team player' by being empathetic, while in a potential dating situation the key variable is the female's level of interest. In our data there seem to be patterns of signaling that reliably lead to these desired states. One question to ask about this social signaling is whether or not it is an independent channel of communication, e.g., is it causal or do the signals arise from the linguistic structure? We don't have the full answer to that yet, but we do know that similar measurements predict infant language and personality development, that adults can change their signaling by adopting different roles or identities within a conversation, and in our studies the linguistic and factual content seems uncorrelated with the pattern or intensity of social signaling. So even if social signaling turns out to be only an adjunct to normal linguistic structure, it is a very interesting addition: it is a little like having speech annotated with speaker intent! So here is what I suspect but can not prove: a very large proportion of our behavior is determined by largely unconscious social signaling, which sets the context, risk, and reward structure within which traditional cognitive processes proceed. This conjecture resonates with Pinker's view about brain complexity, and with Kosslyn's thoughts about social prosthetic systems. It is also provides a concrete mechanism for the well-known processes of group polarization ('the risky shift'), groupthink, and the sometimes irrational behaviors of larger groups. In short, it may be useful to starting thinking of humans as having a collective, tribal mind in addition to their personal mind. |[420]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [421]JARON LANIER Computer Scientist and Musician [jaron100.jpg] My career has been guided by just the sort of unproven guess this year's question seeks. My belief is that the potential for expanded communication between people far exceeds the potential both of language as we think of it (the stuff we say, read and write) and of all the other communication forms we already use. Suppose for a moment that children in the future will grow up with an easy and intimate virtual reality technology and that their use of it will become focused on invention and design instead of the consumption of pre-created holo-video games, surround movies, or other content. Maybe these future children will play virtual musical instrument-like things that cause simulated trees and spiders and seasons and odors and ecologies to spring up just as manipulating a pencil causes words to appear on a page. If people grew up with a virtuosic ability to improvise the contents of a shared virtual world, a new sort of communication might also appear. It's barely possible to imagine what a "reality conversation" would be like. Each person would be changing the shared world at the speed of language, all at once, an image that suggests chaos, but often there would be a coherence, which would indicate meaning. A kid becomes a monster, eats his little brother, who becomes a vitriolic turd, and so on. This is what I've called "Post-symbolic communication," though really it won't exist in isolation of or in opposition to symbolic communication techniques. It will be something different, however, and will expand what people can mean to each other. Post-symbolic communication will be like a shared, waking state, intentional dream. Instead of the word "house", you will express a particular house and be able to walk into it, and instead of the category "house" you will peer into an apparently small bucket that is big enough inside to hold all the universe's houses so you can assess what they have in common directly. It will be a fluid form of experiential concreteness providing similar but divergent expressive power to that of abstraction. Why care? The acquisition of post-symbolic communication will be a centuries-long adventure, an expansion of meaning, something beautiful, and a way to seek cool, advanced technology that focuses on connection instead of mere power. It will be a form of beauty which also enhances survivability; Since the drive for "cool tech" is unstoppable, the invention of provocative cool tech that is lovely enough to seduce the attention of young smart men away from arms races is a prerequisite to the survival of the species. Some of the examples above (houses, spiders) are of people improvising the external environment, but post-symbolic communication might typically look a lot more like people morphing themselves into varied forms. Experiments have already been conducted with kids wearing special body suits and goggles "turning into" triangles to learn trigonometry, or molecules to learn chemistry. It's not only the narcissism of the young (and not so young) human mind or the primality of the control of one's own body that makes self-transformation compelling. Evolution, as generous as she ended up being with us humans, was stingy with potential means of expression. Compare us with the mimic octopus which can morph into all sorts of creatures and objects, and can animate its skin. An advanced civilization of cephalopods might develop words as we know them, but probably only as an adjunct to a natural form of post-symbolic communication. We humans can control precious little of the world with enough agility to keep up with our thoughts and feelings. The fingers and the tongue are the about it. Symbols as we know them in language are a trick, or what programmers call a "hack," that expands the power of little appendage wiggles to refer to all that we can't instantly become or create. Another belief: The tongue that can speak could also someday control fantastic forms beyond our current imaginings. (Some early experiments along these lines have been done, using ultrasound sensing through the cheek. and the results are at least not terrible.) While we're confessing unprovable beliefs, here's another one: The study of the genetic components of pecking order behavior, group belief cues, and clan identification leading to inter-clan hostility will be the core of psychology and sociology for the next few generations, and it will turn out we can't turn off or control these elements of human character without losing other qualities we love, like creativity. If this dark guess is correct, then the means to survival is to create societies with a huge variety of paths to success and a multitude of overlapping, intertwined clans and pecking orders, so that everyone can be a winner from equally valid individual perspectives. When the American experiment has worked best, it has approximated this level of variety. The virtual worlds of post-symbolic communication can provide the highest level of variety to satisfy the dangerous psychic inheritance I'm guessing we suffer as a species. Implicit in the futures I am imagining here is a solution to the software crisis. If children are breathing out fully realized creatures and skies just as they form sentences today, there must be software present which isn't crashing and is marvelously flexible and responsive, yet free of limiting pre-conceptions, which would revive symbolism. Can such software exist? Ah! Another belief! My guess is it can exist, but not anytime soon. The only two good examples of software we have at this time are evolution and the brain, and they both are quite good, so why not be encouraged? The beliefs I chose for this response are not fundamentally untestable. They might be tested someday, perhaps in a few centuries. It's not impossible that medical progress could keep me alive long enough to participate in testing them, so strictly speaking I can't guarantee that I can't ever prove these beliefs to be true. There are not too many potential beliefs that could really never be tested by anyone ever. Consciousness, meaning, truth, and free will and their endless permutations just about complete the list. The reason philosophy is so much harder to talk about than science is that there's so little to talk about. It quickly becomes almost impossible to distinguish repetition from resonance. Proposals like post-symbolic communication, however, frame questions about meaning that are small enough to be fresh and useful. Am I right that there can be meaning outside of words, or are the word-as-center-of-meaning folks correct? |[422]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [423]JOHN BARROW Cosmologist, Cambridge University; Author, The Infinite Book [barrow100.jpg] That our universe is infinite in size, finite in age, and just one among many. Not only can I not prove it but I believe that these statements will prove to be unprovable in principle and we will eventually hold that principle to be self-evident. |[424]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [425]RAY KURZWEIL Inventor and Technologist; Author, The Age of Spiritual Machines [kurzweil.100.jpg] We will find ways to circumvent the speed of light as a limit on the communication of information. We are expanding our computers and communication systems both inwardly and outwardly. Our chips use every smaller feature sizes, while at the same time we deploy greater amounts of matter and energy for computation and communication (for example, we're making a larger number of chips each year). In one to two decades, we will progress from two-dimensional chips to three-dimensional self-organizing circuits built out of molecules. Ultimately, we will approach the limits of matter and energy to support computation and communication. As we approach an asymptote in our ability to expand inwardly (that is, using finer features), computation will continue to expand outwardly, using readily available materials on Earth such as carbon. But we will eventually reach the limits of the resources available on our planet, and will expand outwardly to the rest of the solar system and beyond. So how quickly will we be able to do this? We could send tiny self-replicating robots at close to the speed of light along with electromagnetic transmissions containing the needed software. These nanobots could then colonize far-away planets. At this point, we run up against a seemingly intractable limit: the speed of light. Although a billion feet per second may seem fast, the Universe is spread out over such vast distances that this appears to represent a fundamental limit on how quickly an advanced civilization (such as we hope to become) can spread its influence. There are suggestions, however, that this limit is not as immutable as it may appear. Physicists Steve Lamoreaux and Justin Torgerson of the Los Alamos National Laboratory have analyzed data from an old natural nuclear reactor that two billion years ago produced a fission reaction lasting several hundred thousand years in what is now West Africa. Analyzing radioactive isotopes left over from the reactor and comparing them to isotopes from similar nuclear reactions today, they determined that the physics constant "alpha" (also called the fine structure constant), which determines the strength of the electromagnetic force apparently has changed since two billion years ago. The speed of light is inversely proportional to alpha, and both have been considered unchangeable constants. Alpha appears to have decreased by 4.5 parts out of 108. If confirmed, this would imply that the speed of light has increased. There are other studies with similar suggestions, and there is a table top experiment now under way at Cambridge University to test the ability to engineer a small change in the speed of light. Of course, these results will need to be carefully verified. If true, it may hold great importance for the future of our civilization. If the speed of light has increased, it has presumably done so not just because of the passage of time, but because certain conditions have changed. This is the type of scientific insight that technologists can exploit. It is the nature of engineering to take a natural, often subtle, scientific effect, and control it with a view towards greatly leveraging and magnifying it. If the speed of light has changed due to changing circumstances, that cracks open the door just enough for the capabilities of our future intelligence and technology to swing the door widely open. That is the nature of engineering. As one of many examples, consider how we have focused and amplified the subtle properties of Bernoulli's principle (that air rushing over a curved surface has a slightly lower air pressure than over a flat surface) to create the whole world of aviation. If it turns out that we are unable to actually change the speed of light, we may nonetheless circumvent it by using wormholes (which can be thought of as folds of the universe in dimensions beyond the three visible ones) as short cuts to far away places. In 1935, Einstein and physicist Nathan Rosen described "Einstein-Rosen" bridges as a way of describing electrons and other particles in terms of tiny space-time tunnels. In 1955, physicist John Wheeler described these tunnels as "wormholes," introducing the term for the first time. His analysis of wormholes showed them to be fully consistent with the theory of general relativity, which describes space as essentially curved in another dimension. In 1988, California Institute of Technology physicists Michael Morris, Kip Thorne, and Uri Yertsever described in some detail how such wormholes could be engineered. Based on quantum fluctuation, so-called "empty" space is continually generating tiny wormholes the size of subatomic particles. By adding energy and following other requirements of both quantum physics and general relativity (two fields that have been notoriously difficult to integrate), these wormholes could in theory be expanded in size to allow objects larger than subatomic particles to travel through them. Sending humans would not be impossible, but extremely difficult. However, as I pointed out above, we really only need to send nanobots plus information, which could go through wormholes measured in microns rather than meters. Anders Sandberg estimates that a one-nanometer wormhole could transmit a formidable 10^69 bits per second. Thorne and his Ph.D. students, Morris and Yertsever, also describe a method consistent with general relativity and quantum mechanics that could establish wormholes between Earth and far-away locations quickly even if the destination were many light-years away. Physicist David Hochberg and Vanderbilt University's Thomas Kephart point out that shortly after the Big Bang, gravity was strong enough to have provided the energy required to spontaneously create massive numbers of self-stabilizing wormholes. A significant portion of these wormholes are likely to still be around, and may be pervasive, providing a vast network of corridors that reach far and wide throughout the Universe. It might be easier to discover and use these natural wormholes than to create new ones. Would anyone be shocked if some subtle ways of getting around the speed of light were discovered? The point is that if there are even subtle ways around this limit, the technological powers that our future human-machine civilization will achieve will discover these means and leverage them to great effect. |[426]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [427]STEWART KAUFFMAN Biologist, Santa Fe Institute; Author, Investigations [kauffman100.jpg] Is there a fourth law of thermodynamics, or some cousin of it, concerning self constructing non equilibrium systems such as biospheres anywhere in the cosmos? I like to think there may be such a law. Consider this, the number of possible proteins 200 amino acids long is 20 raised to the 200th power or about 10 raised to the 260th power. Now, the number of particles in the known universe is about 10 to the 80th power. Suppose, on a microsecond time scale the universe were doing nothing other than producing proteins length 200. It turns out that it would take vastly many repeats of the history of the universe to create all possible proteins length 200. This means that, for entities of complexity above atoms, such as modestly complex organic molecules, proteins, let alone species, automobiles and operas, the universe is on a unique trajectory (ignoring quantum mechanics for the moment). That is, the universe at modest levels of complexity and above is vastly non-ergodic. Now conceive of the "adjacent possible", the set of entities that are one "step" away from what exists now. For chemical reaction systems, the adjacent possible from a set of compounds already existing (called the "actual" ) is just the set of novel compounds that can be produced by single chemical reactions among the initial "actual" set. Now, the biosphere has expanded into its molecular adjacent possible since 4.8 billion years ago. Before life, there were perhaps a few hundred organic molecule species on the earth. Now there are perhaps a trillion or more. We have no law governing this expansion into the adjacent possible in this non-ergodic process. My hoped for law is that biospheres everywhere in the universe expand in such a way that they do so as fast as is possible while maintaining the rough diversity of what already exists. Otherwise stated, the diversity of things that can happen next increases on average as fast as it can. |[428]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [429]GARY MARCUS Psychologist, New York University; Author, The Birth of the Mind [marcus100.jpg] If computers are made up of hardware and software, transistors and resistors, what are neural machines we know as minds made up of? Minds clearly are not made up of transistors and resistors, but I firmly believe that at least one of the most basic elements of computation is shared by man and machine: the ability to represent information in terms of an abstract, algebra-like code. In a computer, this means that software is made up of hundreds, thousands, even millions of lines that say things like IF X IS GREATER THAN Y, DO Z, or CALCULATE THE VALUE OF Q BY ADDING A, B, AND C. The same kind of abstraction seems to underlie our knowledge of linguistics. For instance, the famous linguistic dictum that a Sentence consists of a Noun Phrase plus a Verb Phrase can apply to an infinite number of possible nouns and verbs, not just a few familiar words. In its open-endedness, it is an example of mental algebra par excellence. In my lab, we discovered that even infants seem to be able to grasp something quite similar. For example, in the course of just two minutes, a seven-month-old baby can extract the ABA "grammar" inherent in set of made-up sentences like la ta la, ga na ga, je li je. Or the ABB "grammar" in sentences like la ta ta, ga na na, je li li. Of course, this experiment doesn't prove that there is an "algebra" circuit in the brain--psychological techniques alone can't do that. For final proof, we'll need neuroscientific techniques far more sophisticated than contemporary brain imaging, such that we can image the brain at the level of interactions between individual neurons. But every bit of evidence that we can collect now--from babies, from toddlers, from adults, from psychology and from linguistics--seems to confirm the idea that algebra-like abstraction is a fundamental component of thought. |[430]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [431]KARL SABBAGH Writer and Television Producer; Author, The Riemann Hypothesis [sabbagh100.jpg] I believe it is true that if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, of whatever form, it will be familiar with the same concept of counting numbers. Some philosophers believe that pure mathematics is human-specific and that it is possible for an entirely different type of mathematics to emerge from a different type of intelligence, a type of mathematics that has nothing in common with ours and may even contradict it. But it is difficult to think of what sort of life-form would not need the counting numbers. The stars in the sky are discrete points and cry out to be counted by beings throughout the universe, but alien life-forms may not have vision. Intelligent objects with boundaries between being and non-being surely want to be measured-- "I'm bigger that you", "I need a size 312 overcoat"--but perhaps there are life-forms which don't have boundaries but are continuously varying density changes in some Jovian sea. Intelligent life might be disembodied or at least lack a discrete body and merely be transmitted between various points in a solid material matrix, so that it was impossible to distinguish one intelligent being from another. But sooner or later, whether it is to measure the passing of time, the magnitude of distance, the density of one Jovian being compared with another, numbers will have to be used. And if numbers are used, 2 + 2 must always equal 4, the number of stars in the Pleiades brighter than magnitude 5.7 will always be 11 which will always be a prime number, and two measurements of the speed of light in any units in identical conditions will always be identical. Of course, the fact that I find it difficult to think of beings which won't need our sort of mathematics doesn't mean they don't exist, but that's what I believe without proof. |[432]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [433]SCOTT ATRAN Anthropologist, University of Michigan; Author, In God's We Trust [atran.100.jpg] There is no God that has existence apart from people's thoughts of God. There is certainly no Being that can simply suspend the (nomological) laws of the universe in order to satisfy our personal or collective yearnings and whims--like a stage director called on to change and improve a play. But there is a mental (cognitive and emotional) process common to science and religion of suspending belief in what you see and take for obvious fact. Humans have a mental compulsion--perhaps a by-product of the evolution of a hyper-sensitive reasoning device to serve our passions--to situate and understand the present state of mundane affairs within an indefinitely extendable and overarching system of relations between hitherto unconnected elements. In any event, what drives humanity forward in history is this quest for non-apparent truth. |[434]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [435]JESSE BERING Psychologist, University of Arkansas [bering100.jpg] In 1936, shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the moribund philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, author of the classic existential text Tragic Sense of Life, died alone in his office of heart failure at the age of 72. Unamuno was no religious sentimentalist. As a rector and Professor of Greek at the University of Salamanca, he was an advocate of rationalist ideals and even died a folk hero for openly denouncing Francisco Franco's fascist regime. He was, however, ridden with a 'spiritual' burden that troubled him nearly all his life. It was the problem of death. Specifically, the problem was his own death, and what, subjectively, it would be "like" for him after his own death: "The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness." I've taken to calling this dilemma "Unamuno's paradox" because I believe that it is a universal problem. It is, quite simply, the materialist understanding that consciousness is snuffed out by death coming into conflict with the human inability to simulate the psychological state of death. Of course, adopting a parsimonious stance allows one to easily deduce that we as corpses cannot experience mental states, but this theoretical proposition can only be justified by a working scientific knowledge (i.e., that the non-functioning brain is directly equivalent to the cessation of the mind). By stating that psychological states survive death, or even alluding to this possibility, one is committing oneself to a radical form of mind-body dualism. Consider how bizarre it truly is: Death is seen as a transitional event that unbuckles the body from its ephemeral soul, the soul being the conscious personality of the decedent and the once animating force of the now inert physical form. This dualistic view sees the self as being initially contained in bodily mass, as motivating overt action during this occupancy, and as exiting or taking leave of the body at some point after its biological expiration. So what, exactly, does the brain do if mental activities can exist independently of the brain? After all, as John Dewey put it, mind is a verb, not a noun. And yet this radicalism is especially common. In the United States alone, as much as 95% of the population reportedly believes in life after death. How can so many people be wrong? Quite easily, if you consider that we're all operating with the same standard, blemished psychological hardware. It's tempting to argue, as Freud did, that it's just people's desire for an afterlife that's behind it all. But it would be a mistake to leave it at that. Although there is convincing evidence showing that emotive factors can be powerful contributors to people's belief in life after death, whatever one's motivations for rejecting or endorsing the idea of an immaterial soul that can defy physical death, the ability to form any opinion on the matter would be absent if not for our species' expertise at differentiating unobservable minds from observable bodies. But here's the rub. The materialist version of death is the ultimate killjoy null hypothesis. The epistemological problem of knowing what it is "like" to be dead can never be resolved. Nevertheless, I think that Unamuno would be proud of recent scientific attempts to address the mechanics of his paradox. In a recent study, for example, I reported that when adult participants were asked to reason about the psychological abilities of a protagonist who had just died in an automobile accident, even participants who later classified themselves as "extinctivists" (i.e., those who endorsed the statement "what we think of as the 'soul,' or conscious personality of a person, ceases permanently when the body dies") nevertheless stated that the dead person knew that he was dead. For example, when asked whether the dead protagonist knew that he was dead (a feat demanding, of course, ongoing cognitive abilities), one young extinctivist's answer was almost comical. "Yeah, he'd know, because I don't believe in the afterlife. It is non-existent; he sees that now." Try hard as he might to be a good materialist, this subject couldn't help but be a dualist. How do I explain these findings? Like reasoning about one's past mental states during dreamless sleep or while in other somnambulistic states, consciously representing a final state of non-consciousness poses formidable, if not impassable, cognitive constraints. By relying on simulation strategies to derive information about the minds of dead agents, you would in principle be compelled to "put yourself into the shoes" of such organisms, which is of course an impossible task. These constraints may lead to a number of telltale errors, namely Type I errors (inferring mental states when in fact there are none), regarding the psychological status of dead agents. Several decades ago, the developmental psychologist Gerald Koocher described, for instance, how a group of children tested on death comprehension reflected on what it might be like to be dead "with references to sleeping, feeling 'peaceful,' or simply 'being very dizzy.'" More recently, my colleague David Bjorklund and I found evidence that younger children are more likely to attribute mental states to a dead agent than are older children, which is precisely the opposite pattern that one would expect to find if the origins of such beliefs could be traced exclusively to cultural learning. It seems that the default cognitive stance is reasoning that human minds are immortal; the steady accretion of scientific facts may throw off this stance a bit, but, as Unamuno found out, even science cannot answer the "big" question. Don't get me wrong. Like Unamuno, I don't believe in the afterlife. Recent findings have led me to believe that it's all a cognitive illusion churned up by a psychological system specially designed to think about unobservable minds. The soul is distinctly human all right. Without our evolved capacity to reason about minds, the soul would never have been. But in this case, the proof isn't in the empirical pudding. It can't be. It's death we're talking about, after all. |[436]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [437]IRENE PEPPERBERG Research Scientist, MIT School of Architecture and Planning; Author, The Alex Studies [pepperberg100.jpg] I believe, but can't prove, that human language evolved from a combination of gesture and innate vocalizations, via the concomitant evolution of mirror neurons, and that birds will provide the best model for language evolution. Work on mirror neurons over the past decade has provided intriguing evidence, although no solid proof, for the gestural origins of speech. What can be called the mirror neuron hypothesis(MNH) suggests that only a small re-organization of the nonhuman primate brain was needed to create the wiring that underlies speech acquisition/learning. What is missing from the MNH is a model of the development of language from speech; it is here that I believe that a model based on avian vocalizations is most valuable. First, some background. Passerine birds can be divided into two groups: the oscines, who learn their songs, and the sub-oscines, who have a limited number of what seem to be innately-specified songs; the former have a well-defined neural architectures and mechanisms for song acquisition; the latter lack brain structures for song acquisition, although they obviously have brain and vocal tract structures for producing song. The sub-oscines, in parallel with nonhuman primates, often use various activities or gestures (posture, numbers of repetitions of songs, feather erectness, types of flights, etc) to provide additional information about the meaning of their utterances. W. John Smith, for example, can predict a flycatchers actions by the combination of posture, flight, and singing pattern he observes. The songbirds, like human children learning language, will not learn their vocalizations if deafened, and need to hear, babble and practice songs before attaining adult competence; very recent work by Rose et al. demonstrate that even the syntax of their song is learned through early exposure to paired phrases, which are then combined to create the adult vocalizations. Such data, demonstrating how sparrows integrate information about temporally-related events and how they use that information to develop sequential vocal behavior, is a viable model for human syntax acquisition. Now, no one knows if any birds have any mirror neurons, and how their mirror neurons would function if they did exist; some neural data on responses to self-song provide intriguing hints but go no further. I predict (a) the existence of such neurons in oscines and (b) that such neurons will have a robust role in oscine song development, but (c) that only more primitively-functioning mirror neurons (akin to the differences separating monkey and human MNs) will be found in sub-oscines. Now, what about the so-called missing link between learned and unlearned vocal behavior? No one has found such a missing link in the primate line. But Donald Kroodsma has recently discovered a flycatcher (a supposedly sub-oscine bird) that apparently learns its song. The song is simple, but has variations among groups of birds that constitute dialects. No one yet knows if these birds have brain mechanisms for song learning, or what these mechanisms might be. But I predict that Kroodsma's flycatchers will have mirror neurons that function in intermediate manner, between those of the oscines and sub-oscines, and will provide a model for the missing link between nonhuman primate and human communication. |[438]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [439]NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB Mathematical trader; Author, Fooled By Randomness [taleb100.jpg] We are good at fitting explanations to the past, all the while living in the illusion of understanding the dynamics of history. My claim is about the severe overestimation of knowledge in what I call the " ex post" historical disciplines, meaning almost all of social science (economics, sociology, political science) and the humanities, everything that depends on the non-experimental analysis of past data. I am convinced that these disciplines do not provide much understanding of the world or even their own subject matter; they mostly fit a nice sounding narrative that caters to our desire (even need) to have a story. The implications are quite against conventional wisdom. You do not gain much by reading the newspapers, history books, analyses and economic reports; all you get is misplaced confidence about what you know. The difference between a cab driver and a history professor is only cosmetic as the latter can express himself in a better way. There is convincing but only partial empirical evidence of this effect. The evidence can only be seen in the disciplines that offer both quantitative data and quantitative predictions by the experts, such as economics. Economics and finance are an empiricist's dream as we have a goldmine of data for such testing. In addition there are plenty of "experts", many of whom make more than a million a year, who provide forecasts and publish them for the benefits of their clients. Just check their forecasts against what happens after. Their projections fare hardly better than random, meaning that their "stories" are convincing, beautiful to listen to, but do not seem to help you more than listening to, say, a Chicago cab driver. This extends to inflation, growth, interest rates, balance of payment, etc. (While someone may argue that their forecasts might impact these variables, the mechanism of "self-canceling prophecy" can be taken into account). Now consider that we depend on these people for governmental economic policy! This implies that whether or not you read the newspapers will not make the slightest difference to your understanding of what can happen in the economy or the markets. Impressive tests on the effect of the news on prices were done by the financial empiricist Victor Niederhoffer in the 60s and repeated throughout with the same results. If you look closely at the data to check the reasons of this inability to see things coming, you will find that these people tend to guess the regular events (though quite poorly); but they miss on the large deviations, these " unusual" events that carry large impacts. These outliers have a disproportionately large contribution to the total effect. Now I am convinced, yet cannot prove it quantitatively, that such overestimation can be generalized to anything where people give you a narrative-style story from past information, without experimentation. The difference is that the economists got caught because we have data (and techniques to check the quality of their knowledge) and historians, news analysts, biographers, and "pundits" can hide a little longer. Basically historians might get a small trend here and there, but they did miss on the big events of the past centuries and, I am convinced, will not see much coming in the future. It was said: "the wise see things coming". To me the wise persons are the ones who know that they can't see things coming. |[440]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [441]TODD FEINBERG, M.D. Psychiatrist and Neurologist, Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Author, Altered Egos [feinberg100.jpg] I believe the human race will never decide that an advanced computer possesses consciousness. Only in science fiction will a person be charged with murder if they unplug a PC. I believe this because I hold, but cannot yet prove, that in order for an entity to be consciousness and possess a mind, it has to be a living being. Being alive, of course, does not guarantee the presence of a mind. For example, a plant carries on the necessary metabolic functions to be alive, but still does not possess a mind. A chimpanzee, on the other hand, is a different story. All the behavioral features we share with chimps in addition to life, such as intelligence, the ability to deceive, mirror self-recognition, some individual social identity, make chimps seem so much like us that many in the scientific community intuitively grant chimps "beinghood" and consciousness. In addition to being alive, therefore, it appears that a living thing must be a being, must possess a self, to possess a mind. But silicon chips are not alive, and computers are not beings. I argue that this is so because the particular material substance and arrangement of the brain is essential to the creation of consciousness and "beinghood." Computers will never achieve consciousness because in order for a computer to be "conscious like us" it will need to be made of living stuff like us, to grow like us, and unfortunately, to be able to die like us. |[442]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [443]KAI KRAUSE Software: Concepts, Artwork & Interface Design; Byteburg Research Lab above the Rhein River [krause100.jpg] I always felt, but can't prove outright: Zen is wrong. Then is right. Everything is not about the now, as in the "here and how", "living for the moment" On the contrary: I believe everything is about the before then and the back then. It is about the anticipation of the moment and the memory of the moment, but not the moment. In German there is a beautiful little word for it: "Vorfreude", which still is a shade different from "delight" or "pleasure" or even "anticipation". It is the "Pre-Delight", the "Before-Joy", or as a little linguistic concoction: the "ForeFun"; in a single word trying to express the relationship of time, the pleasure of waiting for the moment to arrive, the can't wait moments of elation, of hoping for some thing, some one, some event to happen. Whether it's on a small scale like that special taste of your favorite food, waiting to see a loved one, that one moment in a piece of music, a sequence in a movie....or the larger versions: the expectation of a beautiful vacation, the birth of a baby, your acceptance of an Oscar. We have been told by wise men, Dalais and Maharishis that it is supposedly all about those moments, to cherish the second it happens and never mind the continuance of time... But for me, since early childhood days, I realized somehow: the beauty lies in the time before, the hope for, the waiting for, the imaginary picture painted in perfection of that instant in time. And then, once it passes, in the blink of an eye, it will be the memory which really stays with you, the reflection, the remembrance of that time. Cherish the thought..., remember how.... Nothing ever is as beautiful as its abstraction through the rose-colored glasses of anticipation...The toddlers hope for Santa Claus on Christmas eve turns out to be a fat guy with a fashion issue. Waiting for the first kiss can give you waves of emotional shivers up your spine, but when it then actually happens, it's a bunch of molecules colliding, a bit of a mess, really. It is not the real moment that matters. In Anticipation the moment will be glorified by innocence, not knowing yet. In Remembrance the moment will be sanctified by memory filters, not knowing any more. In the Zen version, trying to uphold the beauty of the moment in that moment is in my eyes a sad undertaking. Not so much because it can be done, all manner of techniques have been put forth how to be a happy human by mastering the art of it. But it also implies, by definition, that all those other moments live just as much under the spotlight: the mundane, the lame, the gross, the everyday routines of dealing with life's mere mechanics. In the Then version, it is quite the opposite: the long phases before and after last hundreds or thousands of times longer than the moment, and drown out the everyday humdrum entirely. Bluntly put: spend your life in the eternal bliss of always having something to hope for, something to wait for, plans not realized, dreams not come true.... Make sure you have new points on the horizon, that you purposely create. And at the same time, relive your memories, uphold and cherish them, keep them alive and share them, talk about them. Make plans and take pictures. I have no way of proving such a lofty philosophical theory, but I greatly anticipate the moment that I might... and once I have done it, I will, most certainly, never forget. |[444]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [445]ELIZABETH SPELKE Psychologist, Harvard University [spelke100.jpg] I believe, first, that all people have the same fundamental concepts, values, concerns, and commitments, despite our diverse languages, religions, social practices, and expressed beliefs. If defenders and opponents of abortion, Israelis and Palestinians, or Cambridge intellectuals and Amazonian jungle dwellers were to get beyond their surface differences, each would discover that the common ground linking them to members of the other group equals that which binds their own group together. Our common conceptual and moral commitments spring from the core cognitive systems that allow an infant to grow rapidly and spontaneously into a competent participant in any human society. Second, one of our shared core systems centers on a notion that is false: the notion that members of different human groups differ profoundly in their concepts and values. This notion leads us to interpret the superficial differences between people as signs of deeper differences. It has quite a grip on us: Many people would lay down their lives for perfect strangers from their own community, while looking with suspicion at members of other communities. And all of us are apt to feel a special pull toward those who speak our language and share our ethnic background or religion, relative to those who don't. Third, the most striking feature of human cognition stems not from our core knowledge systems but from our capacity to rise above them. Humans are capable of discovering that our core conceptions are false, and of replacing them with truer ones. This change has happened dramatically in the domain of astronomy. Core capacities to perceive, act on, and reason about the surface layout predispose us to believe that the earth is a flat, extended surface on which gravity acts as a downward force. This belief has been decisively overturned, however, by the progress of science. Today, every child who plays computer games or watches Star Wars knows that the earth is one sphere among many, and that gravity pulls all these bodies toward one another. Together, my three beliefs suggest a fourth. If the cognitive sciences are given sufficient time, the truth of the claim of a common human nature eventually will be supported by evidence as strong and convincing as the evidence that the earth is round. As humans are bathed in this evidence, we will overcome our misconceptions of human differences. Ethnic and religious rivalries and conflicts will come to seem as pointless as debates over the turtles that our pancake earth sits upon, and our common need for a stable, sustainable environment for all people will be recognized. But this fourth belief is conditional. Our species is caught in a race between the progress of our science and the escalation both of our intergroup conflicts and of the destructive means to pursue them. Will humans last long enough for our science to win this race? |[446]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [447]SAM HARRIS Neuroscience Graduate Student, UCLA; Author, The End of Faith [harris.s100.jpg] Twenty-two percent of Americans claim to be certain that Jesus will return to earth to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years. Another twenty-two percent believe that he is likely to do so. The problem that most interests me at this point, both scientifically and socially, is the problem of belief itself. What does it mean, at the level of the brain, to believe that a proposition is true? The difference between believing and disbelieving a statement--Your spouse is cheating on you; you've just won ten million dollars--is one of the most potent regulators of human behavior and emotion. The instant we accept a given representation of the world as true, it becomes the basis for further thought and action; rejected as false, it remains a string of words. What I believe, though cannot yet prove, is that belief is a content-independent process. Which is to say that beliefs about God--to the degree that they are really believed--are the same as beliefs about numbers, penguins, tofu, or anything else. This is not to say that all of our representations of the world are acquired through language, or that all linguistic representations are on the same logical footing. And we know that different regions of the brain are involved in judging the truth-value of statements drawn from different content domains. What I do believe, however, is that the neural processes that govern the final acceptance of a statement as "true" rely on more fundamental, reward-related circuitry in our frontal lobes--probably the same regions that judge the pleasantness of tastes and odors. Truth may be beauty, and beauty truth, in more than a metaphorical sense. And false statements may, quite literally, disgust us. Once the neurology of belief becomes clear, and it stands revealed as an all-purpose emotion arising in a wide variety of contexts (often without warrant), religious faith will be exposed for what it is: a humble species of terrestrial credulity. We will then have additional, scientific reasons to declare that mere feelings of conviction are not enough when it comes time to talk about the way the world is. The only thing that guarantees that (sufficiently complex) beliefs actually represent the world, are chains of evidence and argument linking them to the world. Only on matters of religious faith do sane men and women regularly dispute this fact. Apart from removing the principle reason we have found to kill one another, a revolution in our thinking about religious belief would clear the way for new approaches to ethics and spiritual experience. Both ethics and spirituality lie at the very heart of what is good about being human, but our thinking on both fronts has been shackled to the preposterous for millennia. Understanding belief at the level of the brain may hold the key to new insights into the nature of our minds, to new rules of discourse, and to new frontiers of human cooperation. |[448]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [449]LYNN MARGULIS Biologist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Author, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution. [margulis100.jpg] I feel that I know something that will turn out to be correct and eventually proved to be true beyond doubt What? That our ability to perceive signals in the environment evolved directly from our bacterial ancestors. That is, we, like all other mammals including our apish brothers detect odors, distinguish tastes, hear bird song and drum beats and we too feel the vibrations of the drums. With our eyes closed we detect the light of the rising sun. These abilities to sense our surroundings are a heritage that preceded the evolution of all primates, all vertebrate animals, indeed all animals. Such sensitivities to wafting plant scents, tasty salted mixtures, police cruiser sirens, loving touches and star light register because of our "sensory cells". These avant guard cells of the nasal passages, the taste buds, the inner ear, the touch receptors in the skin and the retinal rods and cones all have in common the presence at their tips of projections ("cell processes") called cilia. Cilia have a recognizable fine structure. With a very high power ("electron") microscope a precise array of protein tubules, nine, exactly nine pairs of tubules are arranged in a circular array and two singlet tubules are in the center of this array. All sensory cells have this common feature whether in the light-sensitive retina of the eye or the balance-sensitive semicircular canals of the inner ear. Cross-section slices of the tails of human, mouse and even insect (fruit-fly) sperm all share this same instantly recognizable structure too. Why this peculiar pattern? No one knows for sure but it provides the evolutionist with a strong argument for common ancestry. The size (diameter) of the circle (0.25 micrometers) and of the constituent tubules (0.024 micrometers) aligned in the circle is identical in the touch receptors of the human finger and the taste buds of the elephant. What do I feel that I know, what Oscar Wilde said (that "even true things can be proved")? Not only that the sensory cilia derive from these exact 9-fold symmetrical structures in protists such as the "waving feet" of the paramecium or the tail of the vaginal-itch protist called Trichomonas vaginalis. Indeed, all biologists agree with the claim that sperm tails and all these forms of sensory cilia share a common ancestry. But I go much farther. I think the the common ancestor of the cilium, but not the rest of the cell, was a free-swimming entity, a skinny snake-like bacterium that, 1500 million years ago squiggled through muds in a frantic search for food. Attracted by some smells and repelled by others the bacteria, by themselves, already enjoyed a repertoire of sensory abilities that remain with their descendants to this day. In fact, this bacterial ancestor of the cilium never went extinct, rather some of its descendants are uncomfortably close to us today. This hypothetical bacterium, ancestor to all the cilia, was no ordinary rod-shaped little dot. No, this bacterium who still has many live relatives, entered into symbiotic partnerships with other very different kinds of bacteria. Together this two component partnership swam and stuck together both persisted. What kind of bacterium became an attached symbiont that impelled its partner forward? None other than a squirming spirochete bacterium. The spirochete group of bacteria includes many harmless mud-dwellers but it also contains a few scary freaks: the treponeme of syphilis and the borrelias of Lyme disease. We animals got our exquisite ability to sense our surroundings--to tell light from dark, noise from silence, motion from stillness and fresh water from brackish brine--from a kind of bacterium whose relatives we despise. Cilia were once free-agents but they became an integral part of all animal cells. Even though the concept that cilia evolved from spirochetes has not been proved I think it is true. Not only is it true but, given the powerful new techniques of molecular biology I think the hypothesis will be conclusively proved. In the not-too-distant future people will wonder why so many scientists were so against my idea for so long! |[450]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [451]GREGORY BENFORD Physicist, UC Irvine; Author, Deep Time [benford100.jpg] Why is there scientific law at all? We physicists explain the origin and structure of matter and energy, but not the laws that do this. Does the idea of causation apply to where the laws themselves came from? Even Alan Guth's "free lunch" gives us the universe after the laws start acting. We have narrowed down the range of field theories that can yield the big bang universe we live in, but why do the laws that govern it seem to be constant in time, and always at work? One can imagine a universe in which laws are not truly lawful. Talk of miracles does just this, when God is supposed to make things work. Physics aims to find The Laws and hopes that these will be uniquely constrained, as when Einstein wondered if God had any choice when He made the universe. One fashionable escape hatch from this asserts that there are infinitely many universes, each sealed off from the others, which can obey any sort of law one can imagine, with parameters or assumptions changed. This "multiverse" view represents the failure of our grand agenda, of course, and seems to me contrary to Occam's Razor--solving our lack of understanding by multiplying unseen entities into infinity. Perhaps it is a similar philosophical failure of imagination to think, as I do, that when we see order, there is usually an ordering principle. But what can constrain the nature of physical law? Evolution gave us our ornately structured biosphere, and perhaps a similar principle operates in selecting universes. Perhaps our universe arises, then, from selection for intelligences that can make fresh universes, perhaps in high energy physics experiments. Or near black holes (as Lee Smiolin supposed), where space-time gets contorted into plastic forms that can make new space-times. Then an Ur-universe that had intelligence could make others, and this reproduction with perhaps slight variation ion "genetics" drives the evolution of physical law. Selection arises because only firm laws can yield constant, benign conditions to form new life. Ed Harrison had similar ideas. Once life forms realize this, they could intentionally make more smart universes with the right, fixed laws, to produce ever more grand structures. There might be observable consequences of this prior evolution, If so, then we are an inevitable consequence of the universe, mirroring intelligences that have come before, in some earlier universe that deliberately chose to create more sustainable order. The fitness of our cosmic environment is then no accident. If we find evidence of fine-tuning in the Dyson and Rees sense, then, is this evidence for such views? |[452]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [453]ARNOLD TREHUB Psychologist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Author, The Cognitive Brain. [trehub100.jpg] I have proposed a law of conscious content which asserts that for any experience, thought, question, or solution, there is a corresponding analog in the biophysical state of the brain. As a corollary to this principle, I have argued that conventional attempts to understand consciousness by simply searching for the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) in theoretical and empirical investigations are too weak to ground a good understanding of conscious content. Instead, I have proposed that we go beyond NCC and explore brain events that have at least some similarity to our phenomenal experiences, namely, neuronal analogs of conscious content (NAC). In support of this approach, I have presented a theoretical model that goes beyond addressing the sheer correlation between mental states and neuronal events in the brain. It explains how neuronal analogs of phenomenal experience (NAC) can be generated, and it details how other essential human cognitive tasks can be accomplished by the particular structure and dynamics of putative neuronal mechanisms and systems in the brain. A large body of experimental findings, clinical findings, and phenomenal reports can be explained within a coherent framework by the neuronal structure and dynamics of my theoretical model. In addition, the model accurately predicts many classical illusions and perceptual anomalies. So I believe that the neuronal mechanisms and systems that I have proposed provide a true explanation for many important aspects of human cognition and phenomenal experience. But I can't prove it. Of course, competing theories about the brain, cognition, and consciousness can't be proved either. But I can't prove it. Providing the evidence is the best we can do--I think. |[454]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [455]JUDITH RICH HARRIS Writer and Developmental Psychologist; Author, The Nurture Assumption [harris100.jpg] I believe, though I cannot prove it, that three--not two--selection processes were involved in human evolution. The first two are familiar: natural selection, which selects for fitness, and sexual selection, which selects for sexiness. The third process selects for beauty, but not sexual beauty--not adult beauty. The ones doing the selecting weren't potential mates: they were parents. Parental selection, I call it. What gave me the idea was a passage from a book titled Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, by the anthropologist Marjorie Shostak. Nisa was about fifty years old when she recounted to Shostak, in remarkable detail, the story of her life as a member of a hunter-gatherer group. One of the incidents described by Nisa occurred when she was a child. She had a brother named Kumsa, about four years younger than herself. When Kumsa was around three, and still nursing, their mother realized she was pregnant again. She explained to Nisa that she was planning to "kill"--that is, abandon at birth--the new baby, so that Kumsa could continue to nurse. But when the baby was born, Nisa's mother had a change of heart. "I don't want to kill her," she told Nisa. "This little girl is too beautiful. See how lovely and fair her skin is?" Standards of beauty differ in some respects among human societies; the !Kung are lighter-skinned than most Africans and perhaps they pride themselves on this feature. But Nisa's story provides a insight into two practices that used to be widespread and that I believe played an important role in human evolution: the abandonment of newborns that arrived at inopportune times (this practice has been documented in many human societies by anthropologists), and the use of aesthetic criteria to tip the scales in doubtful cases. Coupled with sexual selection, parental selection could have produced certain kinds of evolutionary changes very quickly, even if the heartbreaking decision of whether to rear or abandon a newborn was made in only a small percentage of births. The characteristics that could be affected by parental selection would have to be apparent even in a newborn baby. Two such characteristics are skin color and hairiness. Parental selection can help to explain how the Europeans, who are descended from Africans, developed white skin over such a short period of time. In Africa, a cultural preference for light skin (such as Nisa's mother expressed) would have been counteracted by other factors that made light skin impractical. But in less sunny Europe, light skin may actually have increased fitness, which means that all three selection processes might have worked together to produce the rapid change in skin color. Parental selection coupled with sexual selection can also account for our hairlessness. In this case, I very much doubt that fitness played a role; other mammals of similar size--leopards, lions, zebras, gazelle, baboons, chimpanzees, and gorillas--get along fine with fur in Africa, where the change to hairlessness presumably took place. I believe (though I cannot prove it) that the transition to hairlessness took place quickly, over a short evolutionary time period, and involved only Homo sapiens or its immediate precursor. It was a cultural thing. Our ancestors thought of themselves as "people" and thought of fur-bearing creatures as "animals," just as we do. A baby born too hairy would have been distinctly less appealing to its parents. If I am right that the transition to hairlessness occurred very late in the sequence of evolutionary changes that led to us, then this can explain two of the mysteries of paleoanthropology: the survival of the Neanderthals in Ice Age Europe, and their disappearance about 30,000 years ago. I believe, though I cannot prove it, that Neanderthals were covered with a heavy coat of fur, and that Homo erectus, their ancestor, was as hairy as the modern chimpanzee. A naked Neanderthal could never have made it through the Ice Age. Sure, he had fire, but a blazing hearth couldn't keep him from freezing when he was out on a hunt. Nor could a deerskin slung over his shoulders, and there is no evidence that Neanderthals could sew. They lived mostly on game, so they had to go out to hunt often, no matter how rotten the weather. And the game didn't hang around conveniently close to the entrance to their cozy cave. The Neanderthals disappeared when Homo sapiens, who by then had learned the art of sewing, took over Europe and Asia. This new species, descended from a southern branch of Homo erectus, was unique among primates in being hairless. In their view, anything with fur on it could be classified as "animal"--or, to put it more bluntly, game. Neanderthal disappeared in Europe for the same reason the woolly mammoth disappeared there: the ancestors of the modern Europeans ate them. In Africa today, hungry humans eat the meat of chimpanzees and gorillas. At present, I admit, there is insufficient evidence either to confirm or disconfirm these suppositions. However, evidence to support my belief in the furriness of Neanderthals may someday be found. Everything we currently know about this species comes from hard stuff like rocks and bones. But softer things, such as fur, can be preserved in glaciers, and the glaciers are melting. Someday a hiker may come across the well-preserved corpse of a furry Neanderthal. |[456]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [457]BRUCE STERLING Novelist; Author, Globalhead [sterling100.jpg] I can sum my intuition up in five words: we're in for climatic mayhem. |[458]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [459]ALAN KAY Computer Scientist; Personal Computer Visionary, Senior Fellow, HP Labs [kay100.jpg] Einstein said "You must learn to distinguish between what is true and what is real". An apt longer quote of his is: "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality". I.e. it is "true" that the three angles of a triangle add up to 180 in Euclidean geometry of the plane, but it is not known how to show that this could hold in our physical universe (if there is any mass or energy in our universe then it doesn't seem to hold, and it is not actually known what our universe would be like without any mass or energy). So, science is a relationship between what we can represent and are able to think about, and "what's out there": it's an extension of good map making, most often using various forms of mathematics as the mapping languages. When we guess in science we are guessing about approximations and mappings to languages, we are not guessing about "the truth" (and we are not in a good state of mind for doing science if we think we are guessing "the truth" or "finding the truth"). This is not at all well understood outside of science, and there are unfortunately a few people with degrees in science who don't seem to understand it either. Sometimes in math one can guess a theorem that can be proved true. This is a useful process even if one's batting average is less than .500. Guessing in science is done all the time, and the difference between what is real and what is true is not a big factor in the guessing stage, but makes all the difference epistemologically later in the process. One corner of computing is a kind of mathematics (other corners include design, engineering, etc.). But there are very few interesting actual proofs in computing. A good Don Knuth quote is: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." An analogy for why this is so is to the n-body problems (and other chaotic systems behaviors) in physics. An explosion of degrees of freedom (3 bodies and gravity is enough) make a perfectly deterministic model impossible to solve analytically for a future state. However, we can compute any future state by brute force simulation and see what happens. By analogy, we'd like to prove useful programs correct, but we either have intractable degrees of freedom, or as in the Knuth quote, it is very difficult to know if we've actually gathered all the cases when we do a "proof". So a guess in computing is often architectural or a collection of "covering heuristics". An example of the latter is TCP/IP which has allowed "the world's largest and most scalable artifact--The Internet--to be successfully built. An example of the former is the guess I made in 1966 about objects--not that one could build everything from objects--that could be proved mathematically--but that using objects would be a much better way to represent most things. This is not very provable, but like the Internet, now has quite a body of evidence that suggests this was a good guess. Another guess I made long ago--that does not yet have a body of evidence to support it--is that what is special about the computer is analogous to and an advance on what was special about writing and then printing. It's not about automating past forms that has the big impact, but as McLuhan pointed out, when you are able to change the nature of representation and argumentation, those who learn these new ways will wind up to be qualtitatively different and better thinkers, and this will (usually) help advance our limited conceptions of civilization. This still seems like a good guess to me--but "truth" has nothing to do with it. |[460]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [461]ROGER SCHANK Psychologist & Computer Scientist; Author, Designing World-Class E-Learning [rcs100.jpg] Irrational choices. I do not believe that people are capable of rational thought when it comes to making decisions in their own lives. People believe that are behaving rationally and have thought things out, of course, but when major decisions are made--who to marry, where to live, what career to pursue, what college to attend, people's minds simply cannot cope with the complexity. When they try to rationally analyze potential options, their unconscious, emotional thoughts take over and make the choice for them. As an example of what I mean consider a friend of mine who was told to select a boat as a wedding present by his father in law. He chose a very peculiar boat which caused a real rift between him and his bride. She had expected a luxury cruiser, which is what his father in law had intended. Instead he selected a very rough boat that he could fashion as he chose. As he was an engineer his primary concern was how it would handle open ocean and he made sure the engines were special ones that could be easily gotten at and that the boat rode very low in the water. When he was finished he created a very functional but very ugly and uncomfortable boat. Now I have ridden with him on his boat many times. Always he tells me about its wonderful features that make it a rugged and very useful boat. But, the other day, as we were about to start a trip, he started talking about how pretty he thought his boat was, how he liked the wood, the general placement of things, and the way the rooms fit together. I asked him if he was describing a boat that he had been familiar with as a child and suggested that maybe this boat was really a copy of some boat he knew as a kid. He said, after some thought, that that was exactly the case, there had been a boat like in his childhood and he had liked it a great deal. While he was arguing with his father in law, his wife, and nearly everyone he knew about his boat, defending his decision with all the logic he could muster, destroying the very conceptions of boats they had in mind, the simple truth was his unconscious mind was ruling the decision making process. It wanted what it knew and loved, too bad for the conscious which had to figure how to explain this to everybody else. Of course, psychoanalysts have made a living on trying to figure out why people make the decisions they do. The problem with psychoanalysis is that it purports to be able to cure people. This possibility I doubt very much. Freud was a doctor so I guess he got paid to fix things and got carried away. But his view of the unconscious basis of decision making was essentially correct. We do not know how we decide things, and in a sense we don't really care. Decisions are made for us by our unconscious, the conscious is in charge of making up reasons for those decisions which sound rational. We can, on the other hand, think rationally about the choices that other people make. We can do this because we do not know and are not trying to satisfy unconscious needs and childhood fantasies. As for making good decisions in our lives, when we do it is mostly random. We are always operating with too little information consciously and way too much unconsciously. |[462]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [463]GINO SEGRE Physicist, University of Pennsylvania; Author, A Matter of Degrees [segre100.jpg] The Big Bang, that giant explosion of more than 13 billion years ago, provides the accepted description of our Universe's beginning. We can trace with exquisite precision what happened during the expansion and cooling that followed that cataclysm, but the presence of neutrinos in that earliest phase continues to elude direct experimental confirmation. Neutrinos, once in thermal equilibrium, were supposedly freed from their bonds to other particles about two seconds after the Big Bang. Since then they should have been roaming undisturbed through intergalactic space, some 200 of them in every cubic centimeter of our Universe, altogether a billion of them for every single atom. Their presence is noted indirectly in the Universe's expansion. However, though they are presumably by far the most numerous type of material particle in existence, not a single one of those primordial neutrinos has ever been detected. It is not for want of trying, but the necessary experiments are almost unimaginably difficult. And yet those neutrinos must be there. If they are not, our whole picture of the early Universe will have to be totally reconfigured. Wolfgang Pauli's original 1930 proposal of the neutrino's existence was so daring he didn't publish it. Enrico Fermi's brilliant 1934 theory of how neutrinos are produced in nuclear events was rejected for publication by Nature magazine as being too speculative. In the 1950s neutrinos were detected in nuclear reactors and soon afterwards in particle accelerators. Starting in the 1960s, an experimental tour de force revealed their existence in the solar core. Finally, in1987 a ten second burst of neutrinos was observed radiating outward from a supernova collapse that had occurred almost 200,000 years ago. When they reached the Earth and were observed, one prominent physicist quipped that extra-solar neutrino astronomy "had gone in ten seconds from science fiction to science fact". These are some of the milestones of 20th century neutrino physics. In the 21st century we eagerly await another one, the observation of neutrinos produced in the first seconds after the Big Bang. We have been able to identify them, infer their presence, but will we be able to actually see these minute and elusive particles? They must be everywhere around us, even though we still cannot prove it. |[464]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [465]PIET HUT Astrophysicist, Institute of Advanced Study [hut100.jpg] Science, like most human activities, is based on a belief, namely the assumption that nature is understandable. If we are faced with a puzzling experimental result, we first try harder to understand it with currently available theory, using more clever ways to apply that theory. If that really doesn't work, we try to improve or perhaps even replace the theory. We never conclude that a not-yet understood result is in principle un-understandable. While some philosophers might draw a different conclusion--see the contribution by Nicholas Humphrey--as a scientist I strongly believe that Nature is understandable. And such a belief can neither be proved nor disproved. Note: undoubtedly, the notion of what counts as "understandable" will continue to change. What physicists consider to be understandable now is very different from what had been regarded as such one hundred years ago. For example, quantum mechanics tells us that repeating the same experiment will give different results. The discovery of quantum mechanics led us to relax the rigid requirement of a deterministic objective reality to a statistical agreement with a not fully determinable reality. Although at first sight such a restriction might seem to limit our understanding, we in fact have gained a far deeper understanding of matter through the use of quantum mechanics than we could possibly have obtained using only classical mechanics. |[466]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [467]CLIFFORD PICKOVER Computer scientist, IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center; Author, Calculus and Pizza [pickover100.jpg] If we believe that consciousness is the result of patterns of neurons in the brain, our thoughts, emotions, and memories could be replicated in moving assemblies of Tinkertoys. The Tinkertoy minds would have to be very big to represent the complexity of our minds, but it nevertheless could be done, in the same way people have made computers out of 10,000 Tinkertoys. In principle, our minds could be hypostatized in patterns of twigs, in the movements of leaves, or in the flocking of birds. The philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz liked to imagine a machine capable of conscious experiences and perceptions. He said that even if this machine were as big as a mill and we could explore inside, we would find "nothing but pieces which push one against the other and never anything to account for a perception." If our thoughts and consciousness do not depend on the actual substances in our brains but rather on the structures, patterns, and relationships between parts, then Tinkertoy minds could think. If you could make a copy of your brain with the same structure but using different materials, the copy would think it was you. This seemingly materialistic approach to mind does not diminish the hope of an afterlife, of transcendence, of communion with entities from parallel universes, or even of God. Even Tinkertoy minds can dream, seek salvation and bliss--and pray. |[468]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [469]SUSAN BLACKMORE Psychologist, Visiting Lecturer, University of the West of England, Bristol; Author The Meme Machine [backmore.100.jpg] It is possible to live happily and morally without believing in free will. As Samuel Johnson said "All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience is for it." With recent developments in neuroscience and theories of consciousness, theory is even more against it than it was in his time, more than 200 years ago. So I long ago set about systematically changing the experience. I now have no feeling of acting with free will, although the feeling took many years to ebb away. But what happens? People say I'm lying! They say it's impossible and so I must be deluding myself to preserve my theory. And what can I do or say to challenge them? I have no idea--other than to suggest that other people try the exercise, demanding as it is. When the feeling is gone, decisions just happen with no sense of anyone making them, but then a new question arises--will the decisions be morally acceptable? Here I have made a great leap of faith (or the memes and genes and world have done so). It seems that when people throw out the illusion of an inner self who acts, as many mystics and Buddhist practitioners have done, they generally do behave in ways that we think of as moral or good. So perhaps giving up free will is not as dangerous as it sounds--but this too I cannot prove. As for giving up the sense of an inner conscious self altogether--this is very much harder. I just keep on seeming to exist. But though I cannot prove it--I think it is true that I don't. |[470]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [471]KEITH DEVLIN Mathematician, Stanford University; Author, The Millennium Problems [devlin100.jpg] Before we can answer this question we need to agree what we mean by proof. (This is one of the reasons why its good to have mathematicians around. We like to begin by giving precise definitions of what we are going to talk about, a pedantic tendency that sometimes drives our physicist and engineering colleagues crazy.) For instance, following Descartes, I can prove to myself that I exist, but I can't prove it to anyone else. Even to those who know me well there is always the possibility, however remote, that I am merely a figment of their imagination. If it's rock solid certainty you want from a proof, there's almost nothing beyond our own existence (whatever that means and whatever we exist as) that we can prove to ourselves, and nothing at all we can prove to anyone else. Mathematical proof is generally regarded as the most certain form of proof there is, and in the days when Euclid was writing his great geometry text Elements that was surely true in an ideal sense. But many of the proofs of geometric theorems Euclid gave were subsequently found out to be incorrect--David Hilbert corrected many of them in the late nineteenth century, after centuries of mathematicians had believed them and passed them on to their students--so even in the case of a ten line proof in geometry it can be hard to tell right from wrong. When you look at some of the proofs that have been developed in the last fifty years or so, using incredibly complicated reasoning that can stretch into hundreds of pages or more, certainty is even harder to maintain. Most mathematicians (including me) believe that Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem in 1994, but did he really? (I believe it because the experts in that branch of mathematics tell me they do.) In late 2002, the Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman posted on the Internet what he claimed was an outline for a proof of the Poincare Conjecture, a famous, century old problem of the branch of mathematics known as topology. After examining the argument for two years now, mathematicians are still unsure whether it is right or not. (They think it "probably is.") Or consider Thomas Hales, who has been waiting for six years to hear if the mathematical community accepts his 1998 proof of astronomer Johannes Keplers 360-year-old conjecture that the most efficient way to pack equal sized spheres (such as cannonballs on a ship, which is how the question arose) is to stack them in the familiar pyramid-like fashion that greengrocers use to stack oranges on a counter. After examining Hales' argument (part of which was carried out by computer) for five years, in spring of 2003 a panel of world experts declared that, whereas they had not found any irreparable error in the proof, they were still not sure it was correct. With the idea of proof so shaky--in practice--even in mathematics, answering this year's Edge question becomes a tricky business. The best we can do is come up with something that we believe but cannot prove to our own satisfaction. Others will accept or reject what we say depending on how much credence they give us as a scientist, philosopher, or whatever, generally basing that decision on our scientific reputation and record of previous work. At times it can be hard to avoid the whole thing degenerating into a slanging match. For instance, I happen to believe, firmly, that staples of popular-science-books and breathless TV-specials such as ESP and morphic resonance are complete nonsense, but I can't prove they are false. (Nor, despite their repeated claims to the contrary, have the proponents of those crackpot theories proved they are true, or even worth serious study, and if they want the scientific community to take them seriously then the onus if very much on them to make a strong case, which they have so far failed to do.) Once you recognize that proof is, in practical terms, an unachievable ideal, even the old mathematicians standby of Gdel's Incompleteness Theorem (which on first blush would allow me to answer the Edge question with a statement of my belief that arithmetic is free of internal contradictions) is no longer available. Gdel's theorem showed that you cannot prove an axiomatically based theory like arithmetic is free of contradiction within that theory itself. But that doesn't mean you can't prove it in some larger, richer theory. In fact, in the standard axiomatic set theory, you can prove arithmetic is free of contradictions. And personally, I buy that proof. For me, as a living, human mathematician, the consistency of arithmetic has been proved--to my complete satisfaction. So to answer the Edge question, you have to take a common sense approach to proof--in this case proof being, I suppose, an argument that would convince the intelligent, professionally skeptical, trained expert in the appropriate field. In that spirit, I could give any number of specific mathematical problems that I believe are true but cannot prove, starting with the famous Riemann Hypothesis. But I think I can be of more use by using my mathematician's perspective to point out the uncertainties in the idea of proof. Which I believe (but cannot prove) I have. |[472]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [473]LEONARD SUSSKIND Physicist, Stanford University [susskind100.jpg] Conversation With a Slow Student Student: Hi Prof. I've got a problem. I decided to do a little probability experiment--you know, coin flipping--and check some of the stuff you taught us. But it didn't work. Professor: Well I'm glad to hear that you're interested. What did you do? Student: I flipped this coin 1,000 times. You remember, you taught us that the probability to flip heads is one half. I figured that meant that if I flip 1,000 times I ought to get 500 heads. But it didn't work. I got 513. What's wrong? Professor: Yeah, but you forgot about the margin of error. If you flip a certain number of times then the margin of error is about the square root of the number of flips. For 1,000 flips the margin of error is about 30. So you were within the margin of error. Student: Ah, now I get if. Every time I flip 1,000 times I will always get something between 970 and 1,030 heads. Every single time! Wow, now that's a fact I can count on. Professor: No, no! What it means is that you will probably get between 970 and 1,030. Student: You mean I could get 200 heads? Or 850 heads? Or even all heads? Professor: Probably not. Student: Maybe the problem is that I didn't make enough flips. Should I go home and try it 1,000,000 times? Will it work better? Professor: Probably. Student: Aw come on Prof. Tell me something I can trust. You keep telling me what probably means by giving me more probablies. Tell me what probability means without using the word probably. Professor: Hmmm. Well how about this: It means I would be surprised if the answer were outside the margin of error. Student: My god! You mean all that stuff you taught us about statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics and mathematical probability: all it means is that you'd personally be surprised if it didn't work? Professor: Well, uh... If I were to flip a coin a million times I'd be damn sure I wasn't going to get all heads. I'm not a betting man but I'd be so sure that I'd bet my life or my soul. I'd even go the whole way and bet a year's salary. I'm absolutely certain the laws of large numbers--probability theory--will work and protect me. All of science is based on it. But, I can't prove it and I don't really know why it works. That may be the reason why Einstein said, "God doesn't play dice." It probably is. |[474]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [475]ROBERT SAPOLSKY Neuroscientist, Stanford University, Author, A Primate's Memoir [sapolsky100.jpg] Well, of course, it is tempting to go for something like, "That the wheel, agriculture, and the Macarena were all actually invented by yetis." Or to do the sophomoric pseudo-ironic logic twist of, "That every truth can eventually be proven." Or to get up my hackles, draw up to my full height and intone, "Sir, we scientists believe in nothing that cannot be proven by the whetstone of science, verily our faith is our lack of faith," and then go off in a lab coat and a huff. The first two aren't worth the words, and the third just isn't so. No matter how many times we read Arrowsmith, scientists are subjective humans operating in an ostensibly objective business, so there 's probably lots of things we take on faith. So mine would be a fairly simple, straightforward case of an unjustifiable belief, namely that there is no god(s) or such a thing as a soul (whatever the religiously inclined of the right persuasion mean by that word). I'm very impressed, moved, by one approach of people on the other side of the fence. These are the believers who argue that it would be a disaster, would be the very work of Beelzebub, for it to be proven that god exists. What good would religiosity be if it came with a transparently clear contract, instead of requiring the leap of faith into an unknowable void? So I'm taken with religious folks who argue that you not only can, but should believe without requiring proof. Mine is to not believe without requiring proof. Mind you, it would be perfectly fine with me if there were a proof that there is no god. Some might view this as a potential public health problem, given the number of people who would then run damagingly amok. But it's obvious that there's no shortage of folks running amok thanks to their belief. So that wouldn 't be a problem and, all things considered, such a proof would be a relief--many physicists, especially astrophysicists, seem weirdly willing to go on about their communing with god about the Big Bang, but in my world of biologists, the god concept gets mighty infuriating when you spend your time thinking about, say, untreatably aggressive childhood leukemia. Finally, just to undo any semblance of logic here, I might even continue to believe there is no god, even if it was proven that there is one. A religious friend of mine once said to me that the concept of god is very useful, so that you can berate god during the bad times. But it is clear to me that I don't need to believe that there is a god in order to berate him. |[476]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [477]FREEMAN DYSON Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study, Author, Disturbing the Universe [dysonf100.jpg] Since I am a mathematician, I give a precise answer to this question. Thanks to Kurt G?del, we know that there are true mathematical statements that cannot be proved. But I want a little more than this. I want a statement that is true, unprovable, and simple enough to be understood by people who are not mathematicians. Here it is. Numbers that are exact powers of two are 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 and so on. Numbers that are exact powers of five are 5, 25, 125, 625 and so on. Given any number such as 131072 (which happens to be a power of two), the reverse of it is 270131, with the same digits taken in the opposite order. Now my statement is: it never happens that the reverse of a power of two is a power of five. The digits in a big power of two seem to occur in a random way without any regular pattern. If it ever happened that the reverse of a power of two was a power of five, this would be an unlikely accident, and the chance of it happening grows rapidly smaller as the numbers grow bigger. If we assume that the digits occur at random, then the chance of the accident happening for any power of two greater than a billion is less than one in a billion. It is easy to check that it does not happen for powers of two smaller than a billion. So the chance that it ever happens at all is less than one in a billion. That is why I believe the statement is true. But the assumption that digits in a big power of two occur at random also implies that the statement is unprovable. Any proof of the statement would have to be based on some non-random property of the digits. The assumption of randomness means that the statement is true just because the odds are in its favor. It cannot be proved because there is no deep mathematical reason why it has to be true. (Note for experts: this argument does not work if we use powers of three instead of powers of five. In that case the statement is easy to prove because the reverse of a number divisible by three is also divisible by three. Divisibility by three happens to be a non-random property of the digits). It is easy to find other examples of statements that are likely to be true but unprovable. The essential trick is to find an infinite sequence of events, each of which might happen by accident, but with a small total probability for even one of them happening. Then the statement that none of the events ever happens is probably true but cannot be proved. |[478]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [479]JOHN McWHORTER Linguist, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute; Author, Doing Our Own Thing [mcwhorter100.jpg] This year, researching the languages of Indonesia for an upcoming book, I happened to find out about a few very obscure languages spoken on one island that are much simpler than one would expect. Most languages are much, much more complicated than they need to be. They take on needless baggage over the millennia simply because they can. So, for instance, most languages of Indonesia have a good number of prefixes and/or suffixes. Their grammars often force the speaker to attend to nuances of difference between active and passive much more than a European languages does, etc. But here were a few languages that had no prefixes or suffixes at all. Nor do they have any tones, like many languages in the world. For one thing, languages that have been around forever that have no prefixes, suffixes, or tones are very rare worldwide. But then, where we do find them, they are whole little subfamilies, related variations on one another. Here, though, is a handful of small languages that contrast bizarrely with hundreds of surrounding relatives. One school of thought in how language changes says that this kind of thing just happens by chance. But my work has been showing me that contrasts like this are due to sociohistory. Saying that naked languages like this are spoken alongside ones as bedecked as Italian is rather like saying that kiwis are flightless just "because," rather than because their environment divested them of the need to fly. But for months I scratched my head over these languages. Why just them? Why there? So isn't it interesting that the island these languages is spoken on is none other than Flores, which has had its fifteen minutes of fame this year as the site where skeletons of the "little people" were found. Anthropologists have hypothesized that this was a different species of Homo. While the skeletons date back 13,000 years ago or more, local legend recalls "little people" living alongside modern humans, ones who had some kind of language of their own and could "repeat back" in modern humans' language. The legends suggest that the little people only had primitive language abilities, but we can't be sure here: to the untutored layman who hasn't taken any twentieth-century anthropology or linguistics classes, it is easy to suppose that an incomprehensible language is merely babbling. Now, I can only venture this highly tentatively now. But what I "know" but cannot prove this year is: the reason languages like Keo and Ngada are so strangely streamlined on Flores is that an earlier ancestor of these languages, just as complex as its family members tend to be, was used as second language by these other people and simplified. Just as our classroom French and Spanish avoids or streamlines a lot of the "hard stuff," people who learn a language as adults usually do not master it entirely. Specifically, I would hypothesize that the little people were gradually incorporated into modern human society over time--perhaps subordinated in some way--such that modern human children were hearing the little people's rendition of the language as much as a native one. This kind of process is why, for example, Afrikaans is a slightly simplified version of Dutch. Dutch colonists took on Bushmen as herders and nurses, and their children often heard second-language Dutch as much as their parents. Pretty soon, this new kind of Dutch was everyone's everyday language, and Afrikaans was born. Much has been made over the parallels between the evolution of languages and the evolution of animals and plants. However, I believe that one important difference is that while animals and plants can evolve towards simplicity as well as complexity depending on conditions, languages do not evolve towards simplicity in any significant, overall sense--unless there is some sociohistorical factor that puts a spoke in the wheel. So normally, languages are always drifting into being like Russian or Chinese or Navajo. They only become like Keo and Ngada--or Afrikaans, or creole languages like Papiamentu and Haitian, or even, I believe, English--because of the intervention of factors like forced labor and population relocation. Just maybe, we can now add interspecies contact to the list! |[480]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [481]MARTIN E.P. SELIGMAN Psychologist, University of Pennsylvania, Author, Authentic Happiness [seligman100.jpg] The "rotten-to-the-core" assumption about human nature espoused so widely in the social sciences and the humanities is wrong. This premise has its origins in the religious dogma of original sin and was dragged into the secular twentieth century by Freud, reinforced by two world wars, the Great Depression, the cold war, and genocides too numerous to list. The premise holds that virtue, nobility, meaning, and positive human motivation generally are reducible to, parasitic upon, and compensations for what is really authentic about human nature: selfishness, greed, indifference, corruption and savagery. The only reason that I am sitting in front of this computer typing away rather than running out to rape and kill is that I am "compensated," zipped up, and successfully defending myself against these fundamental underlying impulses. In spite of its widespread acceptance in the religious and academic world, there is not a shred of evidence, not an iota of data, which compels us to believe that nobility and virtue are somehow derived from negative motivation. On the contrary, I believe that evolution has favored both positive and negative traits, and many niches have selected for morality, co-operation, altruism, and goodness, just as many have also selected for murder, theft, self-seeking, and terrorism. More plausible than the rotten-to-the-core theory of human nature is the dual aspect theory that the strengths and the virtues are just as basic to human nature as the negative traits: that negative motivation and emotion have been selected for by zero-sum-game survival struggles, while virtue and positive emotion have been selected for by positive sum game sexual selection. These two overarching systems sit side by side in our central nervous system ready to be activated by privation and thwarting, on the one hand, or by abundance and the prospect of success, on the other. |[482]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [483]ALISON GOPNIK Psychologist, UC-Berkeley; Coauthor, The Scientist In the Crib [gopnik100.jpg] I believe, but cannot prove, that babies and young children are actually more conscious, more vividly aware of their external world and internal life, than adults are. I believe this because there is strong evidence for a functional trade-off with development. Young children are much better than adults at learning new things and flexibly changing what they think about the world. On the other hand, they are much worse at using their knowledge to act in a swift, efficient and automatic way. They can learn three languages at once but they can't tie their shoelaces. This trade-off makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Our species relies more on learning than any other, and has a longer childhood than any other. Human childhood is a protected period in which we are free to learn without being forced to act. There is even some neurological evidence for this. Young children actually have substantially more neural connections than adults--more potential to put different kinds of information together. With experience, some connections are strengthened and many others disappear entirely. As the neuroscientists say, we gain conductive efficiency but lose plasticity. What does this have to do with consciousness? Consider the experiences we adults associate with these two kinds of functions. When we know how to do something really well and efficiently, we typically lose, or at least, reduce, our conscious awareness of that action. We literally don't see the familiar houses and streets on the well-worn route home, although, of course, in some functional sense we must be visually taking them in. In contrast, as adults when we are faced with the unfamiliar, when we fall in love with someone new, or when we travel to a new place, our consciousness of what is around us and inside us suddenly becomes far more vivid and intense. In fact, we are willing to expend lots of money, and lots of emotional energy, for those few intensely alive days in Paris or Beijing that we will remember long after months of everyday life have vanished. Similarly, as adults when we need to learn something new, say when we learn to skydive, or work out a new scientific idea, or even deal with a new computer, we become vividly, even painfully, conscious of what we are doing--we need, as we say, to pay attention. As we become expert we need less and less attention, and we experience the actual movements and thoughts and keystrokes less and less. We sometimes say that adults are better at paying attention than children, but really we mean just the opposite. Adults are better at not paying attention. They're better at screening out everything else and restricting their consciousness to a single focus. Again there is a certain amount of brain evidence for this. Some brain areas, like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, consistently light up for adults when they are deeply engaged in learning something new. But for more everyday tasks, these areas light up much less. For children, though the pattern is different--these areas light up even for mundane tasks. I think that, for babies, every day is first love in Paris. Every wobbly step is skydiving, every game of hide and seek is Einstein in 1905. The astute reader will note that this is just the opposite of what Dan Dennett believes but cannot prove. And this brings me to a second thing I believe but cannot prove. I believe that the problem of capital-C Consciousness will disappear in psychology just as the problem of Life disappeared in biology. Instead we'll develop much more complex, fine-grained and theoretically driven accounts of the connections between particular types of phenomenological experience and particular functional and neurological phenomena. The vividness and intensity of our attentive awareness, for example, may be completely divorced from our experience of a constant first-person I. Babies may be more conscious in one way and less in the other. The consciousness of pain may be entirely different from the consciousness of red which may be entirely different from the babbling stream of Joyce and Woolf. |[484]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [485]STEVEN PINKER Psychologist, Harvard University; Author, The Blank Slate [pinker.100.jpg] In 1974, Marvin Minsky wrote that "there is room in the anatomy and genetics of the brain for much more mechanism than anyone today is prepared to propose." Today, many advocates of evolutionary and domain-specific psychology are in fact willing to propose the richness of mechanism that Minsky called for thirty years ago. For example, I believe that the mind is organized into cognitive systems specialized for reasoning about object, space, numbers, living things, and other minds; that we are equipped with emotions triggered by other people (sympathy, guilt, anger, gratitude) and by the physical world (fear, disgust, awe); that we have different ways for thinking and feeling about people in different kinds of relationships to us (parents, siblings, other kin, friends, spouses, lovers, allies, rivals, enemies); and several peripheral drivers for communicating with others (language, gesture, facial expression). When I say I believe this but cannot prove it, I don't mean that it's a matter of raw faith or even an idiosyncratic hunch. In each case I can provide reasons for my belief, both empirical and theoretical. But I certainly can't prove it, or even demonstrate it in the way that molecular biologists demonstrate their claims, namely in a form so persuasive that skeptics can't reasonably attack it, and a consensus is rapidly achieved. The idea of a richly endowed human nature is still unpersuasive to many reasonable people, who often point to certain aspects of neuroanatomy, genetics, and evolution that appear to speak against it. I believe, but cannot prove, that these objections will be met as the sciences progress. At the level of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, critics have pointed to the apparent homogeneity of the cerebral cortex and of the seeming interchangeability of cortical tissue in experiments in which patches of cortex are rewired or transplanted in animals. I believe that the homogeneity is an illusion, owing to the fact that the brain is a system for information processing. Just as all books look the same to someone who does not understand the language in which they are written (since they are all composed of different arrangements of the same alphanumeric characters), and the DVD's of all movies look the same under a microscope, the cortex may look homogeneous to the eye but nonetheless contain different patterns of connectivity and synaptic biases that allow it to compute very different functions. I believe this these differences will be revealed in different patterns of gene expression in the developing cortex. I also believe that the apparent interchangeability of cortex occurs only in early stages of sensory systems that happen to have similar computational demands, such as isolating sharp signal transitions in time and space. At the level of genetics, critics have pointed to the small number of genes in the human genome (now thought to be less than 25,000) and to their similarity to those of other animals. I believe that geneticists will find that there is a large store of information in the noncoding regions of the genome (the so-called junk DNA), whose size, spacing, and composition could have large effects on how genes are expressed. That is, the genes themselves may code largely for the meat and juices of the organism, which are pretty much the same across species, whereas how they are sculpted into brain circuits may depend on a much larger body of genetic information. I also believe that many examples of what we call "the same genes" in different species may differ in tiny ways at the sequence level that have large consequences for how the organism is put together. And at the level of evolution, critics have pointed to how difficult it is to establish the adaptive function of a psychological trait. I believe this will change as we come to understand the genetic basis of psychological traits in more detail. New techniques in genomic analysis, which look for statistical fingerprints of selection in the genome, will show that many genes involved in cognition and emotion were specifically selected for in the primate, and in many cases the human, lineage. |[486]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [487]JANNA LEVIN Physicist, Columbia University; Author, How The Universe Got Its Spots [levin.100.jpg] I believe there is an external reality and you are not all figments of my imagination. My friend asks me through the steam he blows off the surface of his coffee, how I can trust the laws of physics back to the origins of the universe. I ask him how he can trust the laws of physics down to his cup of coffee. He shows every confidence that the scalding liquid will not spontaneously defy gravity and fly up in his eyes. He lives with this confidence born of his empirical experience of the world. His experiments with gravity, heat, and light began in childhood when he palpated the world to test its materials. Now he has a refined and well-developed theory of physics, whether expressed in equations or not. I simultaneously believe more and less than he does. It is rational to believe what all of my empirical and logical tests of the world confirm--that there is a reality that exists independent of me. That the coffee will not fly upwards. But it is a belief nonetheless. Once I've gone that far, why stop at the perimeter of mundane experience? Just as we can test the temperature of a hot beverage with a tongue, or a thermometer, we can test the temperature of the primordial light left over from the big bang. One is no less real than the other simply because it is remarkable. But how do I really know? If I measure the temperature of boiling water, all I really know is that mercury climbs a glass tube. Not even that, all I really know is that I see mercury climb a glass tube. But maybe the image in my mind's eye isn't real. Maybe nothing is real, not the mercury, not the glass, not the coffee, not my friend. They are all products of a florid imagination. There is no external reality, just me. Einstein? My creation. Picasso? My mind's forgery. But this solopsism is ugly and arrogant. How can I know that mathematics and the laws of physics can be reasoned down to the moment of creation of time, space, the entire universe? In the very same way that my friend believes in the reality of the second double cappuccino he orders. In formulating our beliefs, we are honest and critical and able to admit when we are wrong--and these are the cornerstones of truth. When I leave the caf?, I believe the room of couches and tables is still on the block at 122nd Street, that it is still full of people, and that they haven't evaporated when my attention drifts away. But if I am wrong and there is no external reality, then not only is this essay my invention, but so is the web, edge.org, all of its participants and their ingenious ideas. And if you are reading this, I have created you too. But if I am wrong and there is no external reality, then maybe it is me who is a figment of your imagination and the cosmos outside your door is your magnificent creation. |[488]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [489]HAIM HARARI Physicist, former President, Weizmann Institute of Science [harari100.jpg] The electron has been with us for over a century, laying the foundations to the electronic revolution and all of information technology. It is believed to be a point-like, elementary and indivisible particle. Is it? The neutrino, more than a million times lighter than the electron, was predicted in the 1920's and discovered in the 1950's. It plays a crucial role in the creation of the stars, the sun and the heavy elements. It is elusive, invisible and weakly interacting. It is also considered fundamental and indivisible. Is it? Quarks do not exist as free objects, except at extremely tiny distances, deep within the confines of the particles which are constructed from them. Since the 1960's we believe that they are the most fundamental indivisible building blocks of protons, neutrons and nuclei. Are they? Nature has created two additional, totally unexplained, replicas of the electron, the neutrino and the most abundant quarks, u and d, forming three "generations" of fundamental particles. Each "generation" of particles is identical to the other two in all properties, except that the particle masses are radically different. Since each "generation" includes four fundamental particles, we end up with 12 different particles, which are allegedly indivisible, point-like and elementary. Are they? The Atom, the nucleus and the proton, each in its own time, were considered elementary and indivisible, only to be replaced later by smaller objects as the fundamental building blocks. How can we be so arrogant as to exclude the possibility that this will happen again? Why would nature arbitrarily produce 12 different objects, with a very orderly pattern of electric charges and "color forces", with simple charge ratios between seemingly unrelated particles (such as the electron and the quark) and with a pattern of masses, which appears to be taken from the results of a lottery? Doesn't this "smell" again of further sub-particle structure? There is absolutely no experimental evidence for a further substructure within all of these particles. There is no completely satisfactory theory which might explain how such light and tiny particles can contain objects moving with enormous energies, a requirement of quantum mechanics. This is, presumably, why the accepted "party line" of particle physicists is to assume that we already have reached the most fundamental level of the structure of matter. For over twenty years, the hope has been that the rich spectrum of so-called fundamental particles will be explained as various modes of string vibrations and excitations. The astonishingly tiny string or membrane, rather than the point-like object, is allegedly at the bottom of the ladder describing the structure of matter. However, in spite of absolutely brilliant and ingenious mathematical work, not one experimental number has been explained in more than twenty years, on the basis of the string hypothesis. Based on common sense and on an observation of the pattern of the known particles, without any experimental evidence and without any comprehensive theory, I have believed for many years, and I continue to believe, that the electron, the neutrino and the quarks are divisible. They are presumably made of different combinations of the same small number (two?) of more fundamental sub-particles. The latter may or may not have the string structure, and may or may not be themselves composites. Will we live to see the components of the electron? |[490]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [491]PAUL DAVIES Physicist, Macquarie University, Sydney; Author, How to Build a Time Machine [davies100.jpg] One of the biggest of the Big Questions of existence is, Are we alone in the universe? Science has provided no convincing evidence one way or the other. It is certainly possible that life began with a bizarre quirk of chemistry, an accident so improbable that it happened only once in the entire observable universe--and we are it. On the other hand, maybe life gets going wherever there are earthlike planets. We just don't know, because we have a sample of only one. However, no known scientific principle suggests an inbuilt drive from matter to life. No known law of physics or chemistry favors the emergence of the living state over other states. Physics and chemistry are, as far as we can tell, "life blind." Yet I don't believe that life is a freak event. I think the universe is teeming with it. I can't prove it; indeed, it could be that mankind will never know the answer for sure. If we find life in our solar system, it most likely got there from Earth (or vice versa) in rocks kicked off planets by comet impacts. And to go beyond the solar system is the stuff of dreams. The best hope is that we develop instruments sensitive enough to detect life on extra-solar planets from Earth orbit. But, whilst not impossible, this is a formidable technical challenge. So why do I think we are not alone, when we have no evidence for life beyond Earth? Not for the fallacious popular reason: "the universe is so big there must be life out there somewhere." Simple statistics shows this argument to be bogus. If life is in fact a freak chemical event, it would be so unlikely to occur that it wouldn't happen twice among a trillion trillion trillion planets. Rather, I believe we are not alone because life seems to be a fundamental, and not merely an incidental, property of nature. It is built into the great cosmic scheme at the deepest level, and therefore likely to be pervasive. I make this sweeping claim because life has produced mind, and through mind, beings who do not merely observe the universe, but have come to understand it through science, mathematics and reasoning. This is hardly an insignificant embellishment on the cosmic drama, but a stunning and unexpected bonus. Somehow life is able to link up with the basic workings of the cosmos, resonating with the hidden mathematical order that makes it tick. And that's a quirk too far for me. |[492]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [493]KEVIN KELLY Editor-At-Large, Wired; Author, New Rules for the New Economy [kelly100.jpg] The orthodoxy in biology states that every cell in your body shares exactly the same DNA. It's your identity, your indelible fingerprint, and since all the cells in your body have been duplicated from your initial unique stem cell these zillion of offspring cells all maintain your singular DNA sequence. It follows then that when you submit a tissue sample for genetic analysis it doesn't matter where it comes from. Normally technicians grab some from the easily accessible pars of your mouth, but they could just as well take some from your big toe, or your liver, or eyelash and get the same results. I believe, but cannot prove, that the DNA in your body (and all bodies) varies from part to part. I make this prediction based on what we know about biology, which is that natures abhors uniformity. No where else in nature do we see identity maintained to such exactness. No where else is there such fixity. I do not expect intra-soma variation to diverge very much. Indeed the genetic variation among individual humans is already relatively mild, among the least of all animals, so the diversity within a human body is unlikely to be greater than among human bodies--although that may be possible. More likely, intra-soma variation will be less than racial diversity but greater than zero. Biologists already know (even if the public doesn't) that the full sequence of DNA in your cells changes over time as your chromosomes are shorten each time they divide in growth. Because of a bug in the system, DNA is unable to duplicate itself when it gets to the very very tip of its chain, so at each division it winds up a few hundred bases short. This slight reduction after each of the cell's scores of divisions is currently seen as the chief culprit in cell death and thus your own death. But the variation I believe is happening is more fundamental. My guess is that DNA mutates in a population of the cells in your body much as it does in a population of bodies. The consequences are more than just curious. At the trivial end, if my belief were true, it would matter where you selected to sample your DNA from. And it might also affect when you get it, as this variation could change over time. If true, this variation might have some effect on locating the correct seminal cells for growing replacement organs and tissues. While I have no evidence for my belief right now, it is a provable assertion. It will be shown to be true or false as soon as we have ubiquitous cheap full-genome sequences at discount mall prices. That is, pretty soon. I believe that once we have a constant reading of our individual full DNA (many times over our lives) we will have no end of surprises. I would not be surprised to discover that pet owners accumulate some tiny fragments of their pet's DNA,which has somehow been laterally transferred via viruses to their own cellular DNA. Or that diary farmers amass noticeable fragments of bovine DNA. Or that the DNA in our limbs somehow drift genetically in a "limby" way, distinct from the variation in the cells in our nervous systems. But I consider all this minor compared to a possible major breakthrough in understanding. We have a pretty good idea of how the "selection" in natural selection works: less fit organisms die. But when it comes to understanding how variation arises in Darwinian evolution all we can say is "random mutation" which is another way of saying "we don't know exactly." If there were intra-somatic variation and if we could easily observe it via massive constant full-genome sequencing then we might be able to figure out exactly how a mutation occurs, and whether there are patterns to those mutations, and to what extant such variation is induced or influenced by the body or the environment--all ideas which currently challenge the Darwinian wisdom that the body does not directly influence the genetic makeup of a cell. Monitoring genetic drift within a body may be a window into the origins of mutation itself. Even if these larger ideas don't pan out, the simple fact that DNA in each cell of your body is not 700 identical would be worth investigating. Such a fact would be a surprise, except to me. |[494]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [495]PHILIP W. ANDERSON Physicist and Nobel laureate, Princeton University [anderson100.jpg] Is string theory a futile exercise as physics, as I believe it to be? It is an interesting mathematical specialty and has produced and will produce mathematics useful in other contexts, but it seems no more vital as mathematics than other areas of very abstract or specialized math, and doesn't on that basis justify the incredible amount of effort expended on it. My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance. It proposes that Nature is the way we would like it to be rather than the way we see it to be; and it is improbable that Nature thinks the same way we do. The sad thing is that, as several young would-be theorists have explained to me, it is so highly developed that it is a full-time job just to keep up with it. That means that other avenues are not being explored by the bright, imaginative young people, and that alternative career paths are blocked. |[496]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [497]STEPHEN KOSSLYN Psychologist, Harvard University; Author, Wet Mind [kosslyn100.jpg] Mental processes: An out-of-body existence? These days, it seems obvious that the mind arises from the b rain (not the heart, liver, or some other organ). In fact, I personally have gone so far as to claim that "the mind is what the brain does." But this notion does not preclude an unconventional idea: Your mind may arise not simply from your own brain, but in part from the brains of other people. Let me explain. This idea rests on three key observations. The first is that our brains are limited, and so we use crutches to supplement and extend our abilities. For example, try to multiply 756 by 312 in your head. Difficult, right? You would be happier with a pencil and piece of paper--or, better yet, an electronic calculator. These devices serve as prosthetic systems, making up for cognitive deficiencies (just as a wooden leg would make up for a physical deficiency). The second observation is that the major prosthetic system we use is other people. We set up what I call "Social Prosthetic Systems" (SPSs), in which we rely on others to extend our reasoning abilities and to help us regulate and constructively employ our emotions. A good marriage may arise in part because two people can serve as effective SPSs for each other. The third observation is that a key element of serving as a SPS is learning how best to help someone. Others who function as your SPSs adapt to your particular needs, desires and predilections. And the act of learning changes the brain. By becoming your SPS, a person literally lends you part of his or her brain! In short, parts of other people's brains come to serve as extensions of your own brain. And if the mind is "what the brain does," then your mind in fact arises from the activity of not only your own brain, but those of your SPSs. There are many implications of these ideas, ranging from reasons why we behave in certain ways toward others to foundations of ethics and even to religion. In fact, one could even argue that when your body dies, part of your mind may survive. But before getting into such dark and dusty corners, it would be nice to have firm footing--to collect evidence that these speculations are in fact worth taking seriously. |[498]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [499]JOSEPH LEDOUX Neuroscientist, New York University; Author, The Synaptic Self [ledoux100.jpg] For me, this is an easy question. I believe that animals have feelings and other states of consciousness, but neither I, nor anyone else, has been able to prove it. We can't even prove that other people are conscious, much less other animals. In the case of other people, though, we at least can have a little confidence since all people have brains with the same basic configurations. But as soon as we turn to other species and start asking questions about feelings, and consciousness in general, we are in risky territory because the hardware is different. When a rat is in danger, it does things that many other animals do. That is, it either freezes, runs away or fights back. People pretty much do the same things. Some scientists say that because a rat and a person act the same in similar situations, they have the same kinds of subjective experiences. I don't think we can really say this. There are two aspects of brain hardware that make it difficult for us to generalize from our personal subjective experiences to the experiences of other animals. One is the fact that the circuits most often associated with human consciousness involve the lateral prefrontal cortex (via its role in working memory and executive control functions). This broad zone is much more highly developed in people than in other primates, and whether it exists at all in non-primates is questionable. So certainly for those aspects of consciousness that depend on the prefrontal cortex, including aspects that allow us to know who we are and to make plans and decisions, there is reason to believe that even other primates might be different than people. The other aspect of the brain that differs dramatically is that humans have natural language. Because so much of human experience is tied up with language, consciousness is often said to depend on language. If so, then most other animals are ruled out of the consciousness game. But even if consciousness doesn't depend on language, language certainly changes consciousness so that whatever consciousness another animal has it is likely to differ from most of our states of consciousness. For these reasons, I think it is hard to know what consciousness might be like in another animal. If we can't measure it (because it is internal and subjective) and can't use our own experience to frame questions about it (because the hardware that makes it possible is different), it become difficult to study. Most of what I have said applies mainly to the content of conscious experience. But there is another aspect of consciousness that is less problematic scientifically. It is possible to study the processes that make consciousness possible even if we can't study the content of consciousness in other animals. This is exactly what is done in studies of working memory in non-human primates. One approach by that has had some success in the area of conscious content in non-human primates has focused on a limited kind of consciousness, visual awareness. But this approach, by Koch and Crick, mainly gets at the neural correlates of consciousness rather than the causal mechanisms. The correlates and the mechanisms may be the same, but they may not. Interestingly, this approach also emphasizes the importance of prefrontal cortex in making visual awareness possible. So what about feelings? My view is that a feeling is what happens when an emotion system, like the fear system, is active in a brain that can be aware of its own activities. That is, what we call "fear" is the mental state that we are in when the activity of the defense system of the brain (or the consequences of its activity, such as bodily responses) is what is occupying working memory. Viewed this way, feelings are strongly tied to those areas of the cortex that are fairly unique to primates and especially well developed in people. When you add natural language to the brain, in addition to getting fairly basic feelings you also get fine gradations due to the ability to use words and grammar to discriminate and categorize states and to attribute them not just to ourselves but to others. There are other views about feelings. Damasio argues that feelings are due to more primitive activity in body sensing areas of the cortex and brainstem. Pankseep has a similar view, though he focuses more on the brainstem. Because this network has not changed much in the course of human evolution, it could therefore be involved in feelings that are shared across species. I don't object to this on theoretical grounds, but I don't think it can be proven because feelings can't be measured in other animals. Pankseep argues that if it looks like fear in rats and people, it probably feels like fear in both species. But how do you know that rats and people feel the same when they behave the same? A cockroach will escape from danger--does it, too, feel fear as it runs away? I don't think behavioral similarity is sufficient grounds for proving experiential similarity. Neural similarity helps--rats and people have similar brainstems, and a roach doesn't even have a brain. But is the brainstem responsible for feelings? Even if it were proven in people, how would you prove it in a rat? So now we're back where we started. I think rats and other mammals, and maybe even roaches (who knows?), have feelings. But I don't know how to prove it. And because I have reason to think that their feelings might be different than ours, I prefer to study emotional behavior in rats rather than emotional feelings. I study rats because you can make progress at the neural level, provided that the thing you measure is the same in rats and people. I wouldn't study language and consciousness in rats, so I don't study feelings either, because I don't know that they exist. I may be accused of being short-sighted for this, but I'd rather make progress on something I can study in rats than beat my head against the consciousness wall in these creatures. There's lots to learn about emotion through rats that can help people with emotional disorders. And there's lots we can learn about feelings from studying humans, especially now that we have powerful function imaging techniques. I'm not a radical behaviorist. I'm just a practical emotionalist. |[500]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [501]NEIL GERSHENFELD Physicist, MIT; Author, When Things Start to Think [gershenfeld100.jpg] What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it? Progress. The enterprise that employs me, seeking to understand and apply insight into how the world works, is ultimately based on the belief that this is a good thing to do. But it's something of a leap of faith to believe that that will leave the world a better place--the evidence to date is mixed for technical advances monotonically mapping onto human advances. Naturally, this question has a technical spin for me. My current passion is the creation of tools for personal fabrication based on additive digital assembly, so that the uses of advanced technologies can be defined by their users. It's still no more than an assumption that that will lead to more good things than bad things being made, but, like the accumulated experience that democracy works better than monarchy, I have more faith in a future based on widespread access to the means for invention than one based on technocracy. |[502]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [503]LAWRENCE KRAUSS Physicist, Case Western Reserve University; Author, Atom [krauss100.jpg] I believe our universe is not unique. As science has evolved, our place within the universe has continued to diminish in significance. First it was felt that the Earth was the center of the universe, then that our Sun was the center, and so on. Ultimately we now realize that we are located at the edge of a random galaxy that is itself located nowhere special in a large, potentially infinite universe full of other galaxies. Moreover, we now know that even the stars and visible galaxies themselves are but an insignificant bit of visible pollution in a universe that is otherwise dominated by 'stuff' that doesn't shine. Dark matter dominates the masses of galaxies and clusters by a factor of 10 compared to normal matter. And now we have discovered that even matter itself is almost insignificant. Instead empty space itself contains more than twice as much energy as that associated with all matter, including dark matter, in the universe. Further, as we ponder the origin of our universe, and the nature of the strange dark energy that dominates it, every plausible theory that I know of suggests that the Big Bang that created our visible universe was not unique. There are likely to be a large, and possibly infinite number of other universes out there, some of which may be experiencing Big Bangs at the current moment, and some of which may have already collapsed inward into Big Crunches. From a philosophical perspective this may be satisfying to some, who find a universe with a definite beginning but no definite end dissatisfying. In this case, in the 'metaverse', or 'multiverse' things may seem much more uniform in time. At every instant there may be many universes being born, and others dying. But philosophy aside, the existence of many different causally disconnected universes--regions with which we will never ever be able to have direct communication, and thus which will forever be out of reach of direct empirical verification--may have significant impacts on our understanding of our own universe. Their existence may help explain why our own universe has certain otherwise unexpected features, because in a metaverse with a possibly infinite number of different universes, which may themselves vary in their fundamental features, it could be that life like our own would evolve in only universes with a special set of characteristics. Whether or not this anthropic type of argument is necessary to understand our universe--and I personally hope it isn't--I nevertheless find it satisfying to think that it is likely that not only are we not located in a particularly special place in our universe, but that our universe itself may be relatively insignificant on a larger cosmic scale. It represents perhaps the ultimate Copernican Revolution. |[504]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [505]WILLIAM CALVIN Neurobiologist, University of Washington; Author, A Brief History of the Mind [calvin100.jpg] Dan Dennett has it right in his comments below when he puts the emphasis on acquiring language, not having language, as a precondition for our kind of consciousness. For what it's worth, I have some (likely unproveable) beliefs about why the preschooler's acquisition of a structured language is so important for all the rest of her higher intellectual function. Besides syntax, intellect includes structured stuff such as multistage contingent planning, chains of logic, games with arbitrary rules, and our passion for discovering "how things hang together." Many animals have some version of a critical period for tuning up sensory perception. Humans also seem to have one for structured language, judging from the experience with the deaf children of hearing parents who are not exposed to a rich sign language during the preschool years. Oliver Sacks in "Seeing Voices" described an 11-year-old boy who had been thought to be retarded but proved to be merely deaf. After a year of ASL instruction, Sacks interviewed him: "Joseph saw, distinguished, categorized, used; he had no problems with perceptual categorization or generalization, but he could not, it seemed, go much beyond this, hold abstract ideas in mind, reflect, play, plan. He seemed completely literal--unable to juggle images or hypotheses or possibilities, unable to enter an imaginative or figurative realm.... He seemed, like an animal, or an infant, to be stuck in the present, to be confined to literal and immediate perception..." In the first year, an infant is busy creating categories for the speech sounds she hears. By the second year, the toddler is busy picking up new words, each composed of a series of those phoneme building blocks. In the third year, she starts picking up on those typical combinations of words that we call grammar or syntax. She soon graduates to speaking long structured sentences. In the fourth year, she infers a patterning to the sentences and starts demanding proper endings for her bedtime stories. It is pyramiding, using the building blocks at the immediately subjacent level. Four levels in four years! These years see a lot of softwiring via the pruning and enhancement of the prenatal connections between cortical neurons, partly on the basis of how useful a connection has been so far in life. Some such connections help you assemble a novel combination of words, check them for nonsense via some sort of quality control, and then--mirabile dictu--speak a sentence you've never uttered before. Some must be in workspaces that could plan not only sentences but an agenda for the weekend or a chain of logic or check out a chess move before you make it--even be tickled by structured music with its multiple interwoven melodies. Then tuning up the workspace for structured language in the preschool years would likely carry over to those other structured aspects of intellect. That's why I like the emphasis on acquiring language as a precondition for consciousness: tuning up to sentence structure might make the child better able to perform at nonlanguage tasks which also need some structuring. Improve one, improve them all? Is that what boosts our cleverness and intelligence? Is "our kind of consciousness" nothing but structured intellect with good quality control? Can't prove it, but it sure looks like a good candidate. |[506]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [507]DANIEL C. DENNETT Philosopher, Tufts University Author, Freedom Evolves [dennett100.jpg] I believe, but cannot yet prove, that acquiring a human language (an oral or sign language) is a necessary precondition for consciousness-in the strong sense of there being a subject, an I, a 'something it is like something to be.' It would follow that non-human animals and pre-linguistic children, although they can be sensitive, alert, responsive to pain and suffering, and cognitively competent in many remarkable ways-including ways that exceed normal adult human competence-are not really conscious (in this strong sense): there is no organized subject (yet) to be the enjoyer or sufferer, no owner of the experiences as contrasted with a mere cerebral locus of effects. This assertion is shocking to many people, who fear that it would demote animals and pre-linguistic children from moral protection, but this would not follow. Whose pain is the pain occurring in the newborn infant? There is not yet anybody whose pain it is, but that fact would not license us to inflict painful stimuli on babies or animals any more than we are licensed to abuse the living bodies of people in comas who are definitely not conscious. If selfhood develops gradually, then certain types of events only gradually become experiences, and there will be no sharp line between unconscious pains (if we may call them that) and conscious pains, and both will merit moral attention. (And, of course, the truth of the empirical hypothesis is in any case strictly independent of its ethical implications, whatever they are. Those who shun the hypothesis on purely moral grounds are letting wishful thinking overrule a properly inquisitive scientific attitude. I am happy to give animals and small children "the benefit of the doubt" for moral purposes, but not for scientific purposes. Those who are shocked by my hypothesis should pause, if they can bear it, to notice that it is as just as difficult to prove its denial as its assertion. But it can, I think, be proven eventually. Here's what it will take, one way or the other: (1) a well-confirmed model of the functional architecture of adult human consciousness, showing how long-distance pathways of re-entrant or reverberant interactions have to be laid down and sustained by the sorts of self-stimulation cascades that entrain language use; (2) an interpretation of the dynamics of the model that explains why, absent these well-traveled pathways of neural micro habit, there is no functional unity to the nervous system-no unity to distinguish an I from a we (or a multitude) as the candidate subject(s) subserved by that nervous system; (3) a host of further experimental work demonstrating the importance of what Thomas Metzinger calls the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation (PMIR) in enabling the sorts of experiences we consider central to our own adult consciousness. This work will demonstrate that animal cleverness never requires the abilities thus identified in humans, and that animals are in fact incapable of appreciating many things we normally take for granted as aspects of our conscious experience. This is an empirical hypothesis, and it could just as well be proven false. It could be proven false by showing that in fact the necessary pathways functionally uniting the relevant brain systems (in the ways I claim are required for consciousness) are already provided in normal infant or fetal development, and are in fact present in, say, all mammalian nervous systems of a certain maturity. I doubt that this is true because it seems clear to me that evolution has already demonstrated that remarkable varieties of adaptive coordination can be accomplished without such hyper-unifying meta-systems, by colonies of social insects, for instance. What is it like to be an ant colony? Nothing, I submit, and I think most would agree intuitively. What is it like to be a brace of oxen? Nothing (even if it is like something to be a single ox). But then we have to take seriously the extent to which animals-not just insect colonies and reptiles, but rabbits, whales, and, yes, bats and chimpanzees-can get by with somewhat disunified brains. Evolution will not have provided for the further abilities where they were not necessary for members of these species to accomplish the tasks their lives actually pose them. If animals were like the imaginary creatures in the fictions of Beatrix Potter or Walt Disney, they would have to be conscious pretty much the way we are. But animals are more different from us than we usually imagine, enticed as we are by these charming anthropomorphic fictions. We need these abilities to become persons, communicating individuals capable of asking and answering, requesting and forbidding and promising (and lying). But we don't need to be born with these abilities, since normal rearing will entrain the requisite neural dispositions. Human subjectivity, I am proposing, is thus a remarkable byproduct of human language, and no version of it should be extrapolated to any other species by default, any more than we should assume that the rudimentary communication systems of other species have verbs and nouns, prepositions and tenses. Finally, since there is often misunderstanding on this score, I am not saying that all human consciousness consists in talking to oneself silently, although a great deal of it does. I am saying that the ability to talk to yourself silently, as it develops, also brings along with it the abilities to review, to muse, to rehearse, recollect, and in general engage the contents of events in one's nervous system that would otherwise have their effects in a purely "ballistic" fashion, leaving no memories in their wake, and hence contributing to one's guidance in ways that are well described as unconscious. If a nervous system can come to sustain all these abilities without having language then I am wrong. |[508]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [509]GEORGE B. DYSON Science Historian; Author, Project Orion [dysong.100.jpg] Interspecies coevolution of languages on the Northwest Coast. During the years I spent kayaking along the coast of British Columbia and Southeast Alaska, I observed that the local raven populations spoke in distinct dialects, corresponding surprisingly closely to the geographic divisions between the indigenous human language groups. Ravens from Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, Haida, or Tlingit territory sounded different, especially in their characteristic "tok" and "tlik." I believe this correspondence between human language and raven language is more than coincidence, though this would be difficult to prove. |[510]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [511]DANIEL GILBERT Psychologist, Harvard University [gilbert100.jpg] In the not too distant future, we will be able to construct artificial systems that give every appearance of consciousness--systems that act like us in every way. These systems will talk, walk, wink, lie, and appear distressed by close elections. They will swear up and down that they are conscious and they will demand their civil rights. But we will have no way to know whether their behavior is more than a clever trick--more than the pecking of a pigeon that has been trained to type "I am, I am!" We take each other's consciousness on faith because we must, but after two thousand years of worrying about this issue, no one has ever devised a definitive test of its existence. Most cognitive scientists believe that consciousness is a phenomenon that emerges from the complex interaction of decidedly nonconscious parts (neurons), but even when we finally understand the nature of that complex interaction, we still won't be able to prove that it produces the phenomenon in question. And yet, I haven't the slightest doubt that everyone I know has an inner life, a subjective experience, a sense of self, that is very much like mine. What do I believe is true but cannot prove? The answer is: You! |[512]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [513]MARC D. HAUSER Psychologist, Harvard University: Author, Wild Minds [hauser100.jpg] What makes humans uniquely smart? Here's my best guess: we alone evolved a simple computational trick with far reaching implications for every aspect of our life, from language and mathematics to art, music and morality. The trick: the capacity to take as input any set of discrete entities and recombine them into an infinite variety of meaningful expressions. Thus, we take meaningless phonemes and combine them into words, words into phrases, and phrases into Shakespeare. We take meaningless strokes of paint and combine them into shapes, shapes into flowers, and flowers into Matisse's water lilies. And we take meaningless actions and combine them into action sequences, sequences into events, and events into homicide and heroic rescues. I'll go one step further: I bet that when we discover life on other planets, that although the materials may be different for running the computation, that they will create open ended systems of expression by means of the same trick, thereby giving birth to the process of universal computation. |[514]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [515]NICHOLAS HUMPHREY Psychologist, London School of Economics; Author, The Mind Made Flesh [humphrey100.jpg] I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to bolster human self-confidence and self-importance--so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others' lives. If this is right, it provides a simple explanation for why we, as scientists or laymen, find the "hard problem" of consciousness just so hard. Nature has meant it to be hard. Indeed "mysterian" philosophers--from Colin McGinn to the Pope--who bow down before the apparent miracle and declare that it's impossible in principle to understand how consciousness could arise in a material brain, are responding exactly as Nature hoped they would, with shock and awe. Can I prove it? It's difficult to prove any adaptationist account of why humans experience things the way they do. But here there is an added catch. The Catch-22 is that, just to the extent that Nature has succeeded in putting consciousness beyond the reach of rational explanation, she must have undermined the very possibility of showing that this is what she's done. But nothing's perfect. There may be a loophole. While it may seem--and even be--impossible for us to explain how a brain process could have the quality of consciousness, it may not be at all impossible to explain how a brain process could (be designed to) give rise to the impression of having this quality. (Consider: we could never explain why 2 + 2 = 5, but we might relatively easily be able to explain why someone should be under the illusion that 2 + 2 = 5). Do I want to prove it? That's a difficult one. If the belief that consciousness is a mystery is a source of human hope, there may be a real danger that exposing the trick could send us all to hell. |[516]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [517]HOWARD GARDNER Psychologist, Harvard University; Author, Changing Minds [gardner100.jpg] The Brain Basis of Talent I believe that human talents are based on distinct patterns of brain connectivity. These patterns can be observed as the individual encounters and ultimately masters an organized activity or domain in his/her culture. Consider three competing accounts: #1 Talent is a question of practice. We could all become Mozarts or Einsteins if we persevered. #2 Talents are fungible. A person who is good in one thing could be good in everything. #3 The basis of talents is genetic. While true, this account misleadingly implies that a person with a "musical gene" will necessarily evince her musicianship, just as she evinces her eye color or, less happily, Huntington's disease. My Account: The most apt analogy is language learning. Nearly all of us can easily master natural languages in the first years of life. We might say that nearly all of us are talented speakers. An analogous process occurs with respect to various talents, with two differences: 1. There is greater genetic variance in the potential to evince talent in areas like music, chess, golf, mathematics, leadership, written (as opposed to oral) language, etc. 2. Compared to language, the set of relevant activities is more variable within and across cultures. Consider the set of games. A person who masters chess easily in culture l, would not necessarily master poker or 'go' in culture 2. As we attempt to master an activity, neural connections of varying degrees of utility or disutility form. Certain of us have nervous systems that are predisposed to develop quickly along the lines needed to master specific activities (chess) or classes of activities (mathematics) that happen to be available in one or more cultures. Accordingly, assuming such exposure, we will appear talented and become experts quickly. The rest of us can still achieve some expertise, but it will take longer, require more effective teaching, and draw on intellectual faculties and brain networks that the talented person does not have to use. This hypothesis is currently being tested by Ellen Winner and Gottfried Schlaug. These investigators are imaging the brains of young students before they begin music lessons and for several years thereafter. They also are imaging control groups and administering control (non-music) tasks. After several years of music lessons, judges will determine which students have musical "talent." The researchers will document the brains of musically talented children before training, and how these brains develop. If Account #1 is true, hours of practice will explain all. If #2 is true, those best at music should excel at all activities. If #3 is true, individual brain differences should be observable from the start. If my account is true, the most talented students will be distinguished not by differences observable prior to training but rather by the ways in which their neural connections alter during the first years of training. 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http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 457. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/sterling.html 458. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 459. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/kay.html 460. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 461. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/schank.html 462. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 463. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/segre.html 464. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 465. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/hut.html 466. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 467. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/pickover.html 468. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 469. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/blackmore.html 470. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 471. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/devlin.html 472. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 473. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/susskind.html 474. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 475. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/sapolsky.html 476. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 477. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/dysonf.html 478. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 479. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/mcwhorter.html 480. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 481. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/seligman.html 482. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 483. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/gopnik.html 484. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 485. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/pinker.html 486. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 487. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/levin.html 488. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 489. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/harari.html 490. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 491. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/davies.html 492. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 493. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/kelly.html 494. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 495. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/anderson.html 496. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 497. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/kosslyn.html 498. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 499. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/LeDoux.html 500. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 501. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/gershenfeld.html 502. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 503. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/krauss.html 504. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 505. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/calvin.html 506. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 507. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/dennett.html 508. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 509. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/dysong.html 510. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 511. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/gilbert.html 512. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 513. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/hauser.html 514. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 515. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/humphrey.html 516. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 517. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/gardner.html 518. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html#participants 519. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/brockman.html 520. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/weinberger.html 521. mailto:editor at edge.org From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 8 01:52:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 20:52:58 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: An Epic Gave Finns a Lot to Sing About Message-ID: An Epic Gave Finns a Lot to Sing About New York Times, 5.1.7 By CORI ELLISON You may not think you know a thing about the "Kalevala," but if you're acquainted with Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, the heavy-metal band Amorphis, or Don Rosa's Donald Duck cartoon books, you've got a running start. And if you want to dig deeper, check out the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra's Northern Lights Festival, featuring several works by Sibelius and running through Jan. 23, or any of the several other Finnish musical events taking place around New York this month. If you do, you'll also learn a lot about why Finland's artistic clout so far exceeds its size. The "Kalevala" is Finland's national epic, a hefty volume full of voyages, battles and magic, very much like the Scandinavian "Edda," the Anglo-Saxon "Beowulf," the German "Nibelungenlied" or the Indian "Mahabharata." But unlike those tomes, it is basically a reworking by a single individual - and a modern one - rather than a rough-and-ready collection of unvarnished folk poetry. It was Elias Lonnrot (1802-84), a country doctor and folklore scholar who, by sheer force of will, created the "Kalevala." Beginning in 1828, he made 11 expeditions, ranging as far south as Estonia, as far north as Finnish Lapland, as far west as the Tampere area (100 miles northwest of Helsinki) and as far east as Russian Karelia, in search of the ancient sung poetry, or "runo," tradition then alive in the Eastern Orthodox regions of Finland, though long banned in the Lutheran areas. Lonnrot sought out accomplished runo singers, the best of whom could remember thousands of lines. He could not read or write music, but notated the runos he heard by numbering the strings of his kantele, the five-stringed zither that is the national musical instrument of Finland. Lonnrot then organized the material into a unified body of poetry, as Homer had with the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey." Lonnrot selected the best variants of each story and assembled them into a coherent whole, writing his own connective passages where necessary and imposing his own timeline to create a logically flowing chain of events. He conflated characters to streamline the action and transformed dialect passages into newly minted literary Finnish. On Feb. 28, 1835, Lonnrot completed the first phase of his work on the "Kalevala," and ever since, Feb. 28 has been celebrated as Kalevala Day, the birthday of Finnish culture. Such a freakishly wonderful event could have happened only at that precise split second of history. The German poet Johann Gottfried von Herder was urging Europeans to seek their cultural identity in their ancient folklore, which he termed "the mirror of the soul of the people." Finland, a province of Sweden since 1155, had been annexed as an autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire in 1809 and was beginning to hatch dreams of nationhood. But Finland in 1809 was a far cry from the sleekly sophisticated, Nokia-obsessed nation we know today. The country's educated elite then spoke Swedish, while Finnish was the tongue of servants and peasants. Longfellow's Source During the first millennium A.D. the animistic tribes living near the Gulf of Finland, and speaking an exotic, non-Indo-European language nothing like that of their Scandinavian and Slavic neighbors, laid the foundation of "Kalevala" poetry. This poetry, sung in a narrow, five-note melodic range, lacked both rhyme and stanza structure, but it hewed to a single, all-purpose metric formula that served as a memory aid, so that the unlettered Finns could easily remember old poems and improvise new ones. This "Kalevala meter" is trochaic tetrameter, or four two-syllable feet, in a long-short pattern, similar to Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha": By the shores of Gitche Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water, Stood the wigwam of Nokomis. Longfellow, a contemporary of Lonnrot, had co-opted the Finnish epic's meter, alliteration and even some plot points, trying, as he wrote, "to do for the old Indian legends what the unknown Finnish poets had done for theirs." The "Kalevala," the epic of the people of Kaleva, is dominated by the character of Vainamoinen, a shaman and sorcerer who can charm wild beasts with his kantele and use words as weapons. He is the Gandalf-like "eternal sage" who establishes the land of Kaleva and leads and teaches its people. Promise of Prosperity The "Lord of the Rings" parallels don't end there. Tolkien fashioned Quenya, the lyrical lingo of Middle Earth's elves, after the click and lilt of spoken Finnish. Both the "Kalevala" and Tolkien's saga, modeled after it, outline a hero's journey in pursuit of a powerful sacred object, replete with shape-shifting, demons and magical plants and animals. The "Kalevala" depicts the continuing struggle between the good Kaleva (read the Finns), from whose perspective the story is told, and the bad Pohjola from the foggy north (perhaps the Sami people of Lapland). On a deeper, more esoteric level, the "Kalevala" may be read as a contest between light and darkness, good and evil. The central myth of the "Kalevala" is the story of the Sampo, a mysterious object forged by Vainamoinen's brother, the blacksmith Ilmarinen. We are never told what the Sampo actually is, but it has often been imagined as a sort of magic mill that churns out salt, grain and gold. The Sampo's metaphorical meaning is clear enough: it is the source of prosperity and good fortune. The "Kalevala" swiftly became the de facto collective memory of the Finns, a boost to their national self-esteem, a rallying point for Finnish independence and, eventually, a wellspring of artistic inspiration. It brought a small, obscure nation to the world's attention, raising the Finns to a historical status alongside other old European peoples, while highlighting their uniqueness. Creating an Identity Lonnrot published an expanded "New Kalevala" in 1849, but it would be years before any of it was set to music. Finland was then a political and economic backwater, and Finnish classical music was in its infancy. It slavishly imitated the music of central Europe, the only model it knew. So even the first "Kalevala"-based concert works, like the "Kullervo Overture" (1860) by Filip von Schantz, merely stuffed the epic's sprawling subject matter into a tidy Western musical matrix. Enter the Karelianists, a group of young Finnish artists who revered the "Kalevala" as the cornerstone of Finnish culture. The Karelianist movement peaked in the 1890's and continued until shortly after Finland achieved its independence, in 1917. Its ranks included the poet Eino Leino, the architect Eliel Saarinen and the painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela, whose vivid images of "Kalevala" scenes are still the ones etched in most Finns' minds. These Karelianists also gave the world Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), who, through his embrace of the "Kalevala," would become as great a national symbol and source of pride as the epic itself. His music, the composer Erkki Salmenhaara said, "was stylistically influenced to a great extent by the modality, endless repetition and narrow compass of ancient Finnish folk music and the rhythm of 'Kalevala' poetry - much like primitive Russian folk music was later to influence the music of Stravinsky." A National Music Sibelius was a Swedish speaker by birth, unable to speak a word of Finnish until he was about 8. His mother enrolled him in one of the first schools in Finland to use Finnish as the teaching language, which opened up to him the world of the "Kalevala." Like many Finnish composers before and since, Sibelius felt humbled at the thought of setting the "Kalevala" to music. But he tamed his fears enough to write the symphonic poem "Kullervo" (1892), which put him on the international musical map and, more important, planted the seeds of a national musical language. Rather than idealizing the subject matter, Sibelius took an archaic-flavored, musically radical approach that embraced both the tale's ancient nature and its modern guise. After "Kullervo" Sibelius planned a "Kalevala" opera, "Building of the Boat," with Vainamoinen as the main character. When this project was scuttled, its musical materials were absorbed into the "Lemminkainen Suite" (1896), four tone poems on the exploits of the epic's Don Juan figure. Sibelius had gone on a poetry-collecting jaunt to eastern Karelia in 1892, but he rarely used direct quotes from folk songs or runo tunes, and disparaged their significance in his works, probably for fear of being branded provincial. Though digging for traces of runo tunes in Sibelius's works has been frowned upon in Finland, the folk song scholar A. O. Vaisanen found numerous runo tunes in his work. In the first tableau of "Karelia" (1893), the composer used direct folk music quotes and brought actual runo singers on stage to perform them. More significant than Sibelius's quotations of folk songs is the way that the musical heritage of the "Kalevala" merged seamlessly with his personal musical voice. The narrow melodic range of the runo themes gave birth to his distinctive brand of symphonic motifs, and the endless repetition of "Kalevala" tunes sparked his new ornamental variation technique. The modality of "Kalevala" music helped Sibelius distance himself from the constricting major-minor tonality of Western music. In 1896, Sibelius wrote: "I had to yield to the tonality stemming from ancient folk songs. Now it is apparent that our present system of tonality is crumbling." As the 20th century wore on, enthusiasm for the "Kalevala" waxed and waned, and Karelianism was sometimes stereotyped as conservative jingoism or a retreat from reality. Modernists saw the "Kalevala" culture as a hindrance to the universal aspirations of their art. When the "Kalevala" did influence 20th-century music, it tended to do so more generally, as an emphasis on ancient, mythical sensibilities. The youngest generation of Finnish classical composers has taken scant interest in the "Kalevala," but the epic seems to intrigue young musicians of a more popular stripe. In the 1980's, the folk music band Vrttina began with pure runo singing but more recently has raised hackles among purists for its fusion work. Edward Vesala, a powerful, shamanlike jazz musician, recorded two "Kalevala"-flavored discs, "Snow" (1987) and "Ode to the Death of Jazz" (1990), before his death in 1999. The progressive rock band Kalevala recently released a triple CD, "Kalevala - A Finnish Progressive Rock Epic," on which 30 international bands explore themes and tunes inspired by the "Kalevala." Made for Heavy Metal Of all popular musical styles, heavy metal would seem perfectly matched to the moody Goth fantasy of the "Kalevala." In 1994, Amorphis, Finland's best-known metal band, began exploring the "Kalevala" in its album "Tales >From the Thousand Lakes." Clearly, the impact of the "Kalevala" has been extraordinary, both within and outside Finland. Beyond the realm of high art, Finland's streets, businesses and merchandise (including Kalevala-Koru's imposing replicas of Iron Age jewelry) bear names drawn from the epic, and "Kalevala" tarot decks, video games and comic books abound, including Don Rosa's "Tale of the Sampo," featuring Donald Duck. The epic has been translated into 51 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Esperanto, Greek, Hindi, Swahili - and even Yiddish. Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the "Kalevala," however, is the fact that the heroism it celebrates is accomplished not through physical strength or violence, but through magical songs. If that's not the key to Finland's success story, what is? Cori Ellison is the dramaturge at the New York City Opera. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/07/arts/music/07scan.html From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 8 01:54:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 20:54:11 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Sage: Biblical humor-- modern headlines to bible stories Message-ID: Biblical humor-- modern headlines to bible stories From: Norman Vickers To: A few friends, Mencken-Pensacola list, and a few Episcopalians Thanks to Jazz-friend Ron Smith who sent this along. Enjoy! One of my physician friends from Eastern Kentucky used to call these kind of jokes "Sunday School Jokes" since they were so squeaky-clean they could be told in Sunday School. H.L. Mencken connection: although Mencken was an avowed agnostic, he was a more knowledgeable about the bible than most ministers. See his book, "Treatise on the Gods." I think he'd have gotten a guffaw or two over these. Norman ____________________________________________________________ Biblical Headlines for Modern Times ** If Biblical Headlines were written by today's media ** On Red Sea crossing: WETLANDS TRAMPLED IN LABOR STRIKE Pursuing Environmentalists Killed ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ On David vs. Goliath: HATE CRIME KILLS BELOVED CHAMPION Psychologist Questions Influence of Rock ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ On Elijah on Mt. Carmel: FIRE SENDS RELIGIOUS RIGHT EXTREMIST INTO FRENZY 400 Killed ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ On the birth of Christ: HOTELS FULL, ANIMALS LEFT HOMELESS Animal Rights Activists Enraged by Insensitive Couple ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ On feeding the 5,000: PREACHER STEALS CHILD'S LUNCH Disciples Mystified Over Behavior ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ On healing the 10 lepers: LOCAL DOCTOR'S PRACTICE RUINED "Faith Healer" Causes Bankruptcy ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ On healing of the Gadarene demoniac: MADMAN'S FRIEND CAUSES STAMPEDE Local Farmer's Investment Lost ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ On raising Lazarus from the dead: FUNDAMENTALIST PREACHER RAISES A STINK Will Reading to be Delayed From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Jan 8 16:00:46 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2005 08:00:46 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Why Bad Beliefs Don't Die Message-ID: <01C4F558.2947E040.shovland@mindspring.com> Because beliefs are designed to enhance our ability to survive, they are biologically designed to be strongly resistant to change. To change beliefs, skeptics must address the brain's "survival" issues of meanings and implications in addition to discussing their data. Gregory W. Lester Because a basic tenet of both skeptical thinking and scientific inquiry is that beliefs can be wrong, it is often confusing and irritating to scientists and skeptics that so many people's beliefs do not change in the face of disconfirming evidence. How, we wonder, are people able to hold beliefs that contradict the data? This puzzlement can produce an unfortunate tendency on the part of skeptical thinkers to demean and belittle people whose beliefs don't change in response to evidence. They can be seen as inferior, stupid, or crazy. This attitude is born of skeptics' failure to understand the biological purpose of beliefs and the neurological necessity for them to be resilient and stubbornly resistant to change. The truth is that for all their rigorous thinking, many skeptics do not have a clear or rational understanding of what beliefs are and why even faulty ones don't die easily. Understanding the biological purpose of beliefs can help skeptics to be far more effective in challenging irrational beliefs and communicating scientific conclusions. Biology and Survival Our brain's primary purpose is to keep us alive. It certainly does more than that, but survival is always its fundamental purpose and always comes first. If we are injured to the point where our bodies only have enough energy to support consciousness or a heartbeat but not both, the brain has no problem choosing-it puts us into a coma (survival before consciousness), rather than an alert death-spiral (consciousness before survival). Because every brain activity serves a fundamental survival purpose, the only way to accurately understand any brain function is to examine its value as a tool for survival. Even the difficulty of successfully treating such behavioral disorders as obesity and addiction can only be understood by examining their relationship to survival. Any reduction in caloric intake or in the availability of a substance to which an individual is addicted is always perceived by the brain as a threat to survival. As a result the brain powerfully defends the overeating or the substance abuse, producing the familiar lying, sneaking, denying, rationalizing, and justifying commonly exhibited by individuals suffering from such disorders. Senses and Beliefs One of the brain's primary tools for ensuring survival is our senses. Obviously, we must be able to accurately perceive danger in order to take action designed to keep us safe. In order to survive we need to be able to see the lion charging us as we emerge from our cave or hear the intruder breaking into our house in the middle of the night. Senses alone, however, are inadequate as effective detectors of danger because they are severely limited in both range and scope. We can have direct sensory contact with only a small portion of the world at any one time. The brain considers this to be a significant problem because even normal, everyday living requires that we constantly move in and out of the range of our perceptions of the world as it is right now. Entering into territory we have not previously seen or heard puts us in the dangerous position of having no advance warning of potential dangers. If I walk into an unfamiliar building in a dangerous part of town my survival probabilities diminish because I have no way of knowing whether the roof is ready to collapse or a gunman is standing inside the doorway. Enter beliefs. "Belief" is the name we give to the survival tool of the brain that is designed to augment and enhance the danger-identification function of our senses. Beliefs extend the range of our senses so that we can better detect danger and thus improve our chances of survival as we move into and out of unfamiliar territory. Beliefs, in essence, serve as our brain's "long-range danger detectors." Functionally, our brains treat beliefs as internal "maps" of those parts of the world with which we do not have immediate sensory contact. As I sit in my living room I cannot see my car. Although I parked it in my driveway some time ago, using only immediate sensory data I do not know if it is still there. As a result, at this moment sensory data is of very little use to me regarding my car. In order to find my car with any degree of efficiency my brain must ignore the current sensory data (which, if relied on in a strictly literal sense, not only fails to help me in locating my car but actually indicates that it no longer exists) and turn instead to its internal map of the location of my car. This is my belief that my car is still in my driveway where I left it. By referring to my belief rather than to sensory data, my brain can "know" something about the world with which I have no immediate sensory contact. This "extends" my brain's knowledge of and contact with the world. The ability of belief to extend contact with the world beyond the range of our immediate senses substantially improves our ability to survive. A caveman has a much greater ability to stay alive if he is able to maintain a belief that dangers exist in the jungle even when his sensory data indicate no immediate threat. A police officer will be substantially more safe if he or she can continue to believe that someone stopped for a traffic violation could be an armed psychopath with an impulse to kill even though they present a seemingly innocuous appearance. Beyond the Sensory Because beliefs do not require immediate sensory data to be able to feed valuable survival information to the brain, they have the additional survival function of providing information about the realm of life that does not deal directly with sensory entities. This is the area of abstractions and principles that involves such things as "reasons," "causes," and "meanings." I cannot hear or see the "reason" called a "low pressure zone" that makes a thunderstorm rain on my parade, so my ability to believe that low pressure is the reason assists me. If I were to rely strictly on my senses to determine the cause of the storm I could not tell why it occurred. For all I know it was dragged in by invisible flying gremlins that I need to shoot with my shotgun if I want to clear away the clouds. Therefore my brain's reliance on my "belief" in the reason called "low pressure," rather than on sensory data (or, as in the case of my car, my lack of it) assists in my survival: I avoid an experience of incarceration with myriad dangerous characters following my arrest for shooting into the air at those pesky little gremlins. The Resilience of Beliefs Because senses and beliefs are both tools for survival and have evolved to augment one another, our brain considers them to be separate but equally important purveyors of survival information. The loss of either one endangers us. Without our senses we could not know about the world within our perceptual realm. Without our beliefs we could not know about the world outside our senses or about meanings, reasons, or causes. This means that beliefs are designed to operate independent of sensory data. In fact, the whole survival value of beliefs is based on their ability to persist in the face of contradictory evidence. Beliefs are not supposed to change easily or simply in response to disconfirming evidence. If they did, they would be virtually useless as tools for survival. Our caveman would not last long if his belief in potential dangers in the jungle evaporated every time his sensory information told him there was no immediate threat. A police officer unable to believe in the possibility of a killer lurking behind a harmless appearance could easily get hurt or killed. As far as our brain is concerned, there is absolutely no need for data and belief to agree. They have each evolved to augment and supplement one another by contacting different sections of the world. They are designed to be able to disagree. This is why scientists can believe in God and people who are generally quite reasonable and rational can believe in things for which there is no credible data such as flying saucers, telepathy, and psychokinesis. When data and belief come into conflict, the brain does not automatically give preference to data. This is why beliefs-even bad beliefs, irrational beliefs, silly beliefs, or crazy beliefs-often don't die in the face of contradictory evidence. The brain doesn't care whether or not the belief matches the data. It cares whether the belief is helpful for survival. Period. So while the scientific, rational part of our brains may think that data should supercede contradictory beliefs, on a more fundamental level of importance our brain has no such bias. It is extremely reticent to jettison its beliefs. Like an old soldier with an old gun who does not quite trust that the war is really over, the brain often refuses to surrender its weapon even though the data say it should. "Inconsequential" Beliefs Even beliefs that do not seem clearly or directly connected to survival (such as our caveman's ability to believe in potential dangers) are still closely connected to survival. This is because beliefs do not occur individually or in a vacuum. They are related to one another in a tightly interlocking system that creates the brain's fundamental view of the nature of the world. It is this system that the brain relies on in order to experience consistency, control, cohesion, and safety in the world. It must maintain this system intact in order to feel that survival is being successfully accomplished. This means that even seemingly small, inconsequential beliefs can be as integral to the brain's experience of survival as are beliefs that are "obviously" connected to survival. Thus, trying to change any belief, no matter how small or silly it may seem, can produce ripple effects through the entire system and ultimately threaten the brain's experience of survival. This is why people are so often driven to defend even seemingly small or tangential beliefs. A creationist cannot tolerate believing in the accuracy of data indicating the reality of evolution not because of the accuracy or inaccuracy of the data itself, but because changing even one belief related to matters of the Bible and the nature of creation will crack an entire system of belief, a fundamental worldview and, ultimately, their brain's experience of survival. Implications for Skeptics Skeptical thinkers must realize that because of the survival value of beliefs, disconfirming evidence will rarely, if ever, be sufficient to change beliefs, even in "otherwise intelligent" people. In order to effectively change beliefs skeptics must attend to their survival value, not just their data-accuracy value. This involves several elements. First, skeptics must not expect beliefs to change simply as the result of data or assuming that people are stupid because their beliefs don't change. They must avoid becoming critical or demeaning in response to the resilience of beliefs. People are not necessarily idiots just because their beliefs don't yield to new information. Data is always necessary, but it is rarely sufficient. Second, skeptics must learn to always discuss not just the specific topic addressed by the data, but also the implications that changing the related beliefs will have for the fundamental worldview and belief system of the affected individuals. Unfortunately, addressing belief systems is a much more complicated and daunting task than simply presenting contradictory evidence. Skeptics must discuss the meaning of their data in the face of the brain's need to maintain its belief system in order to maintain a sense of wholeness, consistency, and control in life. Skeptics must become adept at discussing issues of fundamental philosophies and the existential anxiety that is stirred up any time beliefs are challenged. The task is every bit as much philosophical and psychological as it is scientific and data-based. Third, and perhaps most important, skeptics must always appreciate how hard it is for people to have their beliefs challenged. It is, quite literally, a threat to their brain's sense of survival. It is entirely normal for people to be defensive in such situations. The brain feels it is fighting for its life. It is unfortunate that this can produce behavior that is provocative, hostile, and even vicious, but it is understandable as well. The lesson for skeptics is to understand that people are generally not intending to be mean, contrary, harsh, or stupid when they are challenged. It's a fight for survival. The only effective way to deal with this type of defensiveness is to de-escalate the fighting rather than inflame it. Becoming sarcastic or demeaning simply gives the other person's defenses a foothold to engage in a tit-for-tat exchange that justifies their feelings of being threatened ("Of course we fight the skeptics-look what uncaring, hostile jerks they are!") rather than a continued focus on the truth. Skeptics will only win the war for rational beliefs by continuing, even in the face of defensive responses from others, to use behavior that is unfailingly dignified and tactful and that communicates respect and wisdom. For the data to speak loudly, skeptics must always refrain from screaming. Finally, it should be comforting to all skeptics to remember that the truly amazing part of all of this is not that so few beliefs change or that people can be so irrational, but that anyone's beliefs ever change at all. Skeptics' ability to alter their own beliefs in response to data is a true gift; a unique, powerful, and precious ability. It is genuinely a "higher brain function" in that it goes against some of the most natural and fundamental biological urges. Skeptics must appreciate the power and, truly, the dangerousness that this ability bestows upon them. They have in their possession a skill that can be frightening, life-changing, and capable of inducing pain. In turning this ability on others it should be used carefully and wisely. Challenging beliefs must always be done with care and compassion. Skeptics must remember to always keep their eye on the goal. They must see the long view. They must attempt to win the war for rational beliefs, not to engage in a fight to the death over any one particular battle with any one particular individual or any one particular belief. Not only must skeptics' methods and data be clean, direct, and unbiased, their demeanor and behavior must be as well. Related Information Search CSICOP: belief* About the Author Gregory W. Lester, Ph.D. is a psychologist on the graduate faculty of the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, and in private practice in Houston and in Denver, Colorado. Address correspondence to: Gregory W. Lester, Ph.D., 111 Harrison St., Suite 1, Denver, Colorado 80206. From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 8 16:15:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2005 11:15:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: TV Host Says U.S. Paid Him to Back Policy Message-ID: TV Host Says U.S. Paid Him to Back Policy New York Times, 5.1.8 By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK Armstrong Williams, a prominent conservative commentator who was a prot?g? of Senator Strom Thurmond and Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court, acknowledged yesterday that he was paid $240,000 by the Department of Education to promote its initiatives on his syndicated television program and to other African-Americans in the news media. The disclosure of the payment set off a storm of criticism from Democrats over the Bush administration's spending to promote its policies to the public. According to a copy of the contract provided by the department yesterday, Mr. Williams, who also runs a small public relations firm and until yesterday wrote a syndicated newspaper column, was required to broadcast two one-minute advertisements in which Education Secretary Rod Paige extolled the merits of its national standards program, No Child Left Behind. But the arrangement, which started in late 2003 and was first reported yesterday by USA Today, also stipulated that a public relations firm hired by the department would "arrange for Mr. Williams to regularly comment on N.C.L.B. during the course of his broadcasts," that "Secretary Paige and other department officials shall have the option of appearing from time to time as studio guests," and that "Mr. Williams shall utilize his long-term working relationships with 'America's Black Forum' " - an African-American news program - "to encourage the producers to periodically address the No Child Left Behind Act." Mr. Williams, 45, apologized yesterday for blurring his roles as an independent commentator and a paid promoter. "This is a great lesson to me," he told Paul Begala of CNN, who himself has an off-air job as a paid Democratic political consultant but discloses both roles. Mr. Williams declined to blame the department for his woes. "I can easily sit here and criticize the administration," he said. "But I got my own problems today, and that is what I am trying to deal with." The disclosure about the arrangement coincides with a decision by the Government Accountability Office that the administration had violated a law against unauthorized federal propaganda by distributing television news segments that promoted drug enforcement policies without identifying their origin. More than 300 news programs reaching more than 22 million households broadcast the segments. The accountability office made a similar ruling in May about news segments promoting Medicare policies, and the Drug Enforcement Agency stopped distributing the segments then. In a statement, the Department of Education said yesterday that the deal was an appropriate part of its efforts to explain its policy to "minority parents." The statement said: "The contract paid to provide the straightforward distribution of information about the department's mission and N.C.L.B. - a permissible use of taxpayer funds." John Gibbons, a spokesman for the department, said Mr. Williams was the only broadcaster or journalist paid to promote the policy. Mr. Williams and department officials said the department's payments to its public relations contractor, Ketchum, ran to $1 million. House Democrats including the minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, and Representative George Miller, senior minority member of the Education and Workforce Committee, both of California, released a letter to the president suggesting "a deliberate pattern of behavior by your administration to deceive the public and the media in an effort to further your policy objectives" and urging disclosure of "all past and ongoing efforts to engage in covert propaganda." Questioned about the arrangement, Scott McClellan, a spokesman for the president, referred reporters to the Department of Education. In an interview, Mr. Miller called the release of the news segments and the payments to Mr. Williams part of "a very dangerous practice that deceives the public" by concealing the role of taxpayer dollars in promoting partisan policies. "Are they funding propaganda?" he asked. "Are they funding money to their friends?" But public relations executives said that the government distribution of prepared news segments without on-air disclosures of their origin was a bipartisan practice that predated the Bush administration. "The Clinton administration was probably even more active than the Bush administration" in distributing news segments promoting its policies, said Laurence Moskowitz, chairman and chief executive of Medialink, a major producer of promotional news segments. After the Government Accountability Office decision last spring, he said, his firm began advising government clients to disclose each tape's nature in its script. The arrangement with Mr. Williams "is stupid, it is unseemly, and it is tacky," said Jonah Goldberg, a contributing editor at the conservative National Review. The National Association of Black Journalists criticized the administration and Mr. Williams alike yesterday, calling on newspapers that use his column and television stations that use his commentary to "drop him immediately." "I thought we in the media were supposed to be watchdogs, not lapdogs," Bryan Monroe, an official of the black journalists' group and an assistant vice president at Knight Ridder, said in the statement. In an interview, Mr. Williams said his mistake was thinking like a businessman, without worrying enough about journalistic ethics. He began his career in politics as an aide to Mr. Thurmond of South Carolina. He entered the media business, he said, only after he became known for publicly defending Justice Thomas, his former boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, during his stormy confirmation hearings. After that, he said, he continued to operate a small public relations firm, Graham Williams, with his business partner Stedman Graham, who eventually became known as the partner of Oprah Winfrey and left the business. Aside from the Department of Education, Mr. Williams said, his clients were all private businesses. With about five employees, he said, his company's revenue runs to about $300,000 a year at most, and last year ended in a loss. But then he also began writing his newspaper column, syndicated by Tribune Media Services, which dropped him yesterday. He said about 50 papers ran the column. He also began broadcasting a syndicated conservative talk radio show that eventually faded away. And more recently he began a syndicated conservative television show, "The Right Side," and another series for a fledgling African-American cable channel, TV One. Mr. Armstrong said his news show ran on cable channels including Dr. Jerry Falwell's Liberty Television, Sky Angel television, the Christian Television Network and a handful of local stations. Yesterday, Mr. Williams was counting the lessons learned. "I have realized, you know what? I am part of this media elite club, and I have to be more responsible." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/08/national/08education.html From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 8 16:16:28 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2005 11:16:28 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Museum Review: The Tainted Science of Nazi Atrocities Message-ID: Museum Review: The Tainted Science of Nazi Atrocities New York Times, 5.1.8 By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN The welcoming image could not be more inspiring. Or more creepy. It is a "glass man" standing in an alcove, his red veins lining his transparent shell, his multicolored organs neatly stacked in his abdomen, his arms raised aloft like his gaze, reaching toward the heavens, glorying in the display of his inner self. He was constructed in 1935 by the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden for an exhibition about genetic health that traveled to the United States. One of his clones was given to the Buffalo Museum of Science. But about 50 years later, with some belated embarrassment, the museum sent back the glass man, queasy over the company he once kept and the ideals he once represented. He even appears in a 1935 photo in Dresden, gazed at by admiring Nazi officials. Guilt by association, perhaps? Not unfair, given that this powerful exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, called "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race," shows how the Nazis took a widely respected idea and step by step stripped off its admired flesh, showing in one horror after another, the awful possibilities latent within it. That idea was eugenics, which once heralded better living through genetic intervention. It is an idea that lost all respectability from its Nazi associations, though not all its relevance, as contemporary debates about abortion, euthanasia and the genome project make clear. That is one reason that this exhibition, which will be on display through Oct. 16, should be a part of every citizen's experience. Its curator, Susan Bachrach, shaped an imposing collection of objects and images into a narrative of imposing power: the copy of "On the Origin of Species" given by Charles Darwin to his cousin Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term "eugenics" in 1883; a scarred wooden door from an isolation cell used at the Eichberg Psychiatric Clinic in Eltville, Germany; calipers and hair color samples used by Dr. Ernst R?din to specify physical and racial traits in his genetic research; posters urging Germans to screen their lovers' families for genetic flaws. There are instruments of sterilization like those forcibly used on 400,000 men and women in the Nazi era - perhaps 1 percent of the German population of child-bearing age deemed mentally or physically unfit ("It is better to sterilize too many rather than too few," was the official doctrine); and a photograph of blind German children being taught to recognize different races by running their hands over plaster busts. And more horribly: samples of the sedatives Luminal and Veronal like those dispensed by pediatricians to infants at "pediatric wards," in order to execute 5,000 undesirable children. Then, when it seems as if nothing more could shock, one walks into a reproduction of the "shower stalls" used at six facilities in Germany and Austria where the Nazi program for what Hitler called "mercy deaths" expanded its ambitions. Using carbon monoxide gas, more than 70,000 adults were poisoned, including schizophrenic artists, whose drawings and paintings are mounted here on the walls, under the shower heads. By 1945, 200,000 adults had been killed in various Nazi "euthanasia" programs. Ultimately, of course, the techniques perfected on the feebleminded and deformed were turned against the country's primary "typhus," as one poster puts it. "Sterilize the Jew," reads a stamp that was pasted on envelopes, advertising one idea; but that procedure was too time-consuming. So the medical teams who had helped refine Germany's gene pool were dispatched to death camps like Sobibor and Treblinka in Poland to execute the Final Solution. For all its gargantuan horror, this exhibit makes those millions of deaths seem an outgrowth of what came before, a more radical extension of genetics into the netherworld. Much of this has been little known and little acknowledged, even in Germany, where in the 1990's, psychiatric institutions were still finding traces of this unsavory past in files and in jars of preserved specimens, and where many Nazi eugenicists enjoyed prosperous later careers. But at the exhibition everything emerges with a kind of tragic restraint, weighted with carefully outlined detail. There is no resort to clich? or posturing. The opening sections even cause a certain uneasiness, because they make it clear that before the 1930's, eugenic ideas were commonplace. Galton had written: "If the twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle what a galaxy of genius might we not create!" Such enthusiasm was infectious. The ideas, as the historian Daniel J. Kevles points out in the exhibition catalogue, "could and did strike root almost everywhere." "Only healthy seed must be sown," reads a British eugenics poster from 1930. Swedes worried about the genetic effects of Finnish blood. British worried about the Irish. In the United States, such fears helped inspire the restrictive 1924 immigration laws. And in 1927, in the case Buck v. Bell, eight Supreme Court justices agreed that a feeble-minded woman should be sterilized; Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. concluded after considering her genetic history: "Three imbecile generations are enough." By the late 1920's, eugenic sterilization was practiced in two dozen states, with California accounting for more than half of the 16,000 operations between 1907 and 1933. So some ideas and procedures were widely accepted. Moreover, the racial inquiries undertaken by the Germans were also part of physical anthropology as it was then practiced. The study of difference and the tracing of genetic lineage was a legitimate subject of inquiry. Is the Nazi case different because of degree rather than kind? Was German medicine and science so dehumanizing that they caused everything to go awry? Was the element of anti-Semitism decisive, perhaps, leading the anthropologist Josef Wastl to purchase skulls and death masks of Polish Jews and steal 220 Jewish skeletons from a Viennese cemetery for further study? No, it seems that something else took place in Germany in the years after Hitler consulted Fritz Lenz's 1921 treatise, "Foundations of Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene" and invoked its ideas in "Mein Kampf." Eugenics was not incidental to the construction of the Nazi state; it was at its heart. As one slogan said: "National Socialism is the political expression of our biological knowledge." The Nazi state rested on what Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, called "applied biology." One exhibited brochure creates an analogy between societies and organisms; Hitler is the brain guiding the state's biological "regeneration." Its laws were often biological laws (like the "Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring"), its solutions biological solutions. By 1942, 10 million registry cards had been collected documenting the genetic trees of German families. Josef Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, boasted in 1938: "Our starting point is not the individual"; the goal is a "healthy people." There was, of course, some acknowledgment that other things mattered. There was an urge to justify and an urge to conceal. In one chilling document, "euthanasia" gassings are rationalized by meticulously calculating how much food will be saved by the state over the course of a decade, including 13,492,440 kilograms of meat and sausage. And however open Nazi doctrines were about their ruthless prosecution of their biological goals, the "euthanasia" program, given the code name Operation T-4, was considered so extreme in its killings of non-Jewish Germans, that it was conducted in secrecy. Gradually, though, there were slip-ups: two urns of ashes sent to puzzled relatives rather than one; a woman's brooch found in a man's effects; and the peculiar case of 2,000 people dying of natural causes in 40 days at an asylum that had only 100 beds. The gassings eventually stopped because of public pressure, whereupon energies were fully turned to more fundamental ambitions of biological elimination. In these utilitarian justifications and secret machinations, though, there may have also been some sense that these acts were violating other kinds of principles, suggesting that humanity does not live by genes alone. But such hints are slight. And what, after all, could such ethical principles be? The exhibition properly resists the temptations that now seem to haunt all such exhibitions, to create morals, to turn the museum into a therapeutic agency, to generalize from the particular so pain is turned into platitude. We are simply given the facts, shown the objects. As for the ethical principles governing eugenics, in contemporary culture they still remain curiously unsettled. There may be no other realm in which the absolute of Nazi evil has come to seem so bendable. The philosopher Peter Singer, for example, has attained academic respectability while advocating euthanasia and arguing that the killing of an infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. And if eugenics is unambiguously evil, then why do we accept genetic screening of human fetuses for possible abortion? If racial breeding is so offensive, why is the prospect of designer genes considered so appealing? If euthanasia shocks because it was forced, what about if it is welcomed? The ethical issues are rarely presented as starkly as they were in Nazi Germany. This exhibition doesn't make the answers any simpler, but that is one of its virtues. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/08/arts/design/08expe.html From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 8 16:17:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2005 11:17:38 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: Bared in Boston Message-ID: Bared in Boston http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58046-2005Jan7?language=printer 5.1.8 Editor of Campus Sex Magazine Hopes to Put the Harvard Competition to Shame By Libby Copeland Washington Post Staff Writer BOSTON Alecia Oleyourryk is a fast-talking, jumpy senior at Boston University. When she's really concentrating, like now, she picks at her cuticles with a thumbtack. "Desperately grasping his damp skin," she says, picking away and reading aloud from a computer screen. She is editing her new campus sex magazine, called Boink, due out in February. The idea is to beat the Harvard students who last year published a campus sex magazine called H Bomb with references to Freud, French structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, along with skin shots such as a naked guy in an Einstein wig. Desperately grasping . . . She doesn't like the "grasping." "What would you use -- 'cling'?" asks Christopher Anderson, 38, her co-founder. He is not a BU student but he is a man fond of photographing young people who wear no clothes. They're reading an account of sex in a Fenway Park bathroom during a Red Sox game. The piece is tentatively titled "Heading for Home" and includes the phrase "forcefully pushing me against the baby-changing station." It's supposed to be true, but it reminds you of those letters to the editor that start, "Dear Penthouse, I never thought this would happen to me, but . . ." Oleyourryk and Anderson promise more nudity than Harvard delivered -- naughty bits and everything. Faces, too. (Many of the models in Harvard's magazine didn't want their faces shown. Something about wanting careers.) The Harvard editor says her magazine isn't porn, that it serves as "a rebellion against all of our porn-saturated popular culture." Boink has a different ethos. "It is porn," Oleyourryk says. "There's nothing wrong with porn. Porn has such a negative connotation." Oleyourryk is skinny but takes up a lot of space. She pulls her wavy blond hair into a messy ponytail. Her closet is a technicolor chaos of shoes, metallic blue pumps and metallic pink pumps with extremely high heels. What appears to be a red thong dangles from a pull on her bureau, and her bra lies on the couch in the living room of her off-campus apartment. There have been sex magazines at Vassar, Oberlin and Swarthmore, a Sex Week panel at Yale and S&M parties at Bard. As far back as the '70s, University of Chicago students held a "lascivious costume ball," to which students showed up in various states of undress. But Boink is mostly focused on outdoing Harvard. Oleyourryk exhibits an intercollegiate competitiveness that most students reserve for football rankings and U.S. News & World Report scores. Unlike H Bomb, she says, Boink will not have "artsy" sex, which is to say "sex that's okay." There will be fewer avant-garde photographs of girls covered in gold paint or slimy hair, or guys with their nether regions tastefully obscured by shadow. There will instead be a well-lit close-up of a guy's nether region, and a review of a sex toy called the BedBuddy, and photographs of guys kissing, and a heavily tattooed woman clothed only by a huge snake. While H Bomb has university approval and was given a $2,000 grant from the student government, Boink has been shunned by the BU administration and is beholden to no one. "We can do whatever we want," Oleyourryk says. Oleyourryk, 21, felt it would be hypocritical for her not to pose for Boink while asking others to, so she did two photo shoots with a 20-year-old student named Erica Blom. She and Blom didn't know each other before they started working on the magazine, but during the first photo shoot they got to know each other more via a kissing session. Oleyourryk says it felt weird and she tried to imagine Blom as a boy. "I've kissed my friends before but not passionately," she says. "Just like, 'Hey, we're drunk and betcha if we kiss, he'll give us a free beer.' " The magazine's prospective cover came out of the women's second photo session, when they'd apparently gotten to know each other even better. In it, Oleyourryk is wearing only a pair of frilly red panties and her hand is wandering down Blom's torso. Go BU! Beat Harvard. The Natural Order In BU's student union recently, a table of mostly female students who've been reading about Boink in the campus newspaper regard the magazine with mild interest, as though it's no more unusual than a new Taco Bell in the food court. Two of them volunteer that they'd pose for it. Then the conversation devolves into talk of off-campus events like the " '80s Porn Party" and the "Anything-But-Clothes Party," and Boink starts to seem less shocking and more like the natural order of things. Pity today's college students. It's tough to be transgressive these days; all the good stuff's been done. Nudity is about as exciting as it gets, and even nudity isn't such a big deal. If you believe the spring break lore, everyone has already been naked at the tiki bar. College can seem like Las Vegas -- a place where debauchery is tried on like a tight outfit, where no one keeps score of misdeeds. A BU sophomore named Yianni, who doesn't want his last name known because he's posing nude for Boink, says he probably wouldn't pursue nude modeling after graduation. It's "fun" so long as he's in college, he says. "But in the real world, it's not like that." Still, Oleyourryk had to draw the line somewhere. Boink will not depict sex acts, mostly because she isn't sure about the legality of them. Eight printing companies that Anderson approached turned him down, six of them because of Boink's adult content. He finally found a printer in Quebec. Boink's one-upsmanship does not impress the editor of Harvard's H Bomb, whose first issue included a piece called "ART vs. PORN: the polemics of desire." "I find it kind of depressing, to be honest," says Katharina Cieplak-von Baldegg, a junior. "The focus of theirs really is nudity in a way that it never was for us." Cieplak-von Baldegg says in creating H Bomb, she was conscious of "the male gaze and the objectification of women." H Bomb, a nonprofit, is distributed to Harvard students free, while Boink, a commercial venture, will cost $7.95 per issue. Cieplak-von Baldegg feels that charging for nude photographs is "perpetuating the status quo" of commercial porn. Oleyourryk has no such compunctions. She doesn't talk about "the male gaze." There is something like integrity in her refusal to offer high-minded justifications for Boink. She's starting a magazine that she knows people will pay attention to, and that's reason enough. Oleyourryk is an unlikely rebel. She describes herself as having had a "sheltered" upbringing in Oswego, N.Y. Her mom does clerical work, she says, and her dad works for a power company and keeps beef cows on the side. Neither went to college. Oleyourryk describes them as "a bit old-fashioned." They wanted her to go to state school in Oswego, she says, but she demurred: "I'd rather blow off my own leg." She says she has tried to explain Boink to her mom, who thinks it's nice but doesn't seem to grasp the totality of the project. Oleyourryk is a magazine journalism major, but unlike her classmates she does not hope to be a writer for the New Yorker. "I picture a 40-year-old man with bifocals and a pipe," she says. In her heart of hearts, Oleyourryk confesses, she wants to be a Hollywood actress. A 'European' Attitude Time to get naked. Christopher Anderson is at the home of Lindsey, a 19-year-old BU student who occasionally earns money by modeling nude. She is from the Gulf Coast of Florida and doesn't want her last name in Boink or this newspaper, not only to keep this from her parents but because she doesn't want "weirdos" stalking her. That her classmates might recognize the face of that naked girl is also a matter of some concern. "It's definitely creepy," Lindsey says. "I almost didn't do it." But the money Boink pays models -- $100 per nude shoot -- is "more than I have," and she was flattered that Anderson contacted her twice after seeing her picture on a modeling Web site. Both her housemates are out and only a pet ferret is around to observe. Anderson walks in and out of the room in a plaid lumberjack shirt, holding a light meter. For nine years, he ran a software consulting company. Since he sold the company three years ago, he has photographed fine art nudes, supplementing his income with software consulting work. He calls his attitude toward sex "European." He says he shoots the naked body because it is a thing of beauty. After Anderson shot some free photos for the first issue of H Bomb in exchange for ad space, he e-mailed Oleyourryk. They'd been friends ever since she modeled nude for him a few years back. He said he thought H Bomb was a cool idea, but they could do better. She was game. Oleyourryk and other models who've posed for Anderson describe him as polite and professional, but he's well aware that he may come off like those older guys who hang around high schools, chatting up underage girls. He shakes it off. "My mother's worried about that. I'm not worried about that," he says. He circles the room taking test shots while Lindsey sits in a beige chair from Wal-Mart, nervously applying lip balm . "I don't want to do this forever," she says. "This isn't my passion." Her dream is to work for a pharmaceutical company and discover an alternative to antibiotics. In the meantime, she says, she works only with photographers whose work is "tasteful." She won't perform sex acts, or pose with others. She is strawberry blond, dimpled and pretty. She has modeled nude for a photographer friend and not-nude for a tattooist who paid her by needling an abstract design into her back. Anderson mutters something to Lindsey about "some skin, all skin," his voice soft like they're sharing a secret. Lindsey lifts off her T-shirt and stands awkwardly in a white bra with the shirt in her hands. He starts shooting. "I like that, actually," he says in his quiet, soothing voice. "Tilt your head to the side. Bring your chin just a little bit. Yeah, I like the hair falling . . . " Lindsey's hands bunch the T-shirt, unbunch it, bunch it again. 'It's for Entertainment' Just how fulfilling Boink will be to its readers remains to be seen. A reader who buys the magazine for the cover photo of Oleyourryk and Blom might not enjoy an inside photo of two men kissing. Boink is supposed to represent everyone; Anderson says they'd include a transgender person if one volunteered. But successful porn plugs into a niche; it is not tied to lofty college-campus notions of diversity and inclusion. And unlike H Bomb, Boink must be compelling enough to make people buy it. Anderson and Oleyourryk charge on, confident, already planning a second issue for May. On a recent Sunday afternoon, Oleyourryk hosts an editorial meeting with about 20 people. They are mostly BU students and a few from other local schools, equally divided between women and men. Some are preppy and a few are punk or goth, wearing leather jackets or steel-toed boots. Oleyourryk, barefoot, takes a seat on the floor. Issue No. 2 will be devoted to the topic of self-gratification, she announces. The students start offering story ideas and making lewd jokes, and Oleyourryk's cell phone rings. "Mom, can I call you back?" Oleyourryk says. A BU sophomore raises his hand. "Are we going to have any legitimate articles?" he asks, as if he doesn't quite get the point of Boink. After the meeting, Oleyourryk proudly shows off the prospective cover photo, featuring herself, to a Boink student staffer named Simon Snellgrove. She analyzes the positioning of the bodies and the facial expressions and sounds pleased. "Props, babe," Snellgrove says. "I didn't know you had that good a butt." Oleyourryk goes out into the kitchen, where she cooks pasta for dinner. A friend eats Cheerios out of a champagne flute. Oleyourryk and Anderson consider what, ultimately, is the point of their venture. Are they helping people? Are they creating a necessary forum where college students can talk honestly about their desires? "It's not necessary," Oleyourryk says. "It's for entertainment." "It's not like without this nobody's going to talk about sex," Anderson says. The room watches as Oleyourryk joyfully throws a strand of spaghetti at the ceiling, and it sticks briefly before falling. "It's ready!" she says. From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 8 16:21:13 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2005 11:21:13 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] John Gray reviews Mark Garnett, The Snake That Swallowed Its Tail Message-ID: John Gray reviews Mark Garnett, The Snake That Swallowed Its Tail: some contradictions in modern liberalism Imprint Academic, 96pp, ?8.95 ISBN 0907845886 Monday 22nd November 2004 http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSReview_Bshop&newDisplayURN=300000090978 One of the curious features of the present time is that, even though we are all liberal, there is no agreement about what liberalism means. Some people will tell you that the core liberal value is personal liberty, but others insist it is equality. Some say that liberal values require multiculturalism, while others believe they demand a common culture based on personal autonomy. For some, liberalism is a strictly political theory that applies only to the structure of the state. For others, it is a whole way of life. These are not just minor differences. They extend to the basic concepts of liberalism itself and to the underlying philosophical beliefs in line with which they are interpreted. If some liberals see freedom as mere absence of interference, others view it as a positive ability to act. For some liberal thinkers, justice requires protecting private property; for others, it means redistribution. Underlying these differences are even larger divergences: some liberals are ardent supporters of rights, while others are defenders of utilitarianism; some are devotees of social contract theory, and yet others are partisans of value pluralism. What all liberals have in common is a touching certainty that they are right. Liberalism is a missionary faith, and proselytising zeal is not normally conducive to sceptical inquiry. Whatever the core values of liberalism, they can surely conflict with one another - and with other goods such as social cohesion. Yet it rarely occurs to liberals to ask themselves whether their values - however vaguely or inconsistently defined - are viable in the long term. It is this last question that preoccupies Mark Garnett. In The Snake That Swallowed Its Tail, he argues that a highly individualistic type of liberalism - "the philosophy of the short term, of the speed-dating, cold-calling society" - has come to pervade political life in Britain. In the past, thinkers such as John Stuart Mill had a vision of liberal values in which altruism was prized. As Garnett sees it, Mill's "fleshed-out" liberalism was displaced in the Thatcher era by a "hollowed-out", Hobbesian philosophy in which self-interest is at the centre. Liberalism of this latter kind is ultimately self-undermining, he believes: it can end only by "swallowing its tail", at which point a reaction in favour of saner values will set in. Few academic writers know enough about the business of politics to be able to write intelligently about the tangled links between theory and practice. Garnett is one of the few, and his arresting and often amusing account of the political history of postwar Britain as a transition from fleshed-out to hollowed-out liberalism will be read with profit by anyone interested in the role of ideas in politics. This does not mean that his account is always convincing. Like many critics of the narrow version of liberal individualism that has shaped politics since the 1980s, Garnett portrays it as a deeply pessimistic philosophy that owes a great deal to Hobbes. To my mind, it is precisely the opposite. In so far as Margaret Thatcher and her disciples had anything resembling a coherent political vision, it was of a neoliberal utopia. Thatcher believed that the British economy could be revolutionised, and that at the same time Britain's culture could remain unchanged - or revert to the norms of the 1950s. She never understood that the ideology of choice and innovation she promoted in the economy would inevitably spill over into other areas of life. She believed that unfettered choice would somehow be virtuous, and completely failed to foresee the anomic, crime-ridden society that has actually developed. Like other neoliberals, she seems to have imagined that freedom is the natural human condition - a view Thomas Hobbes scorned heartily, and rightly so. If The Snake That Swallowed Its Tail has a positive message, it is "Back to Mill" - the embodiment of the fleshed-out liberal philosophy that has supposedly been abandoned over the past generation. No doubt Garnett is right in thinking that Mill's was a superior form of liberalism, but it is hard to see how it can be revived today. He tells us that it will return only "once Britain has been entirely hollowed out". However, to adapt a well-known adage of Adam Smith's, there is much hollowness in a nation - and in liberalism. Most likely Britain will drift on much as it does at present, a country where everyone believes in liberal values, yet no one knows what they are. John Gray's latest book is Heresies: against progress and other illusions (Granta) From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 8 16:24:31 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2005 11:24:31 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Economists Have Advice for Buyers as the Art Market Heats Up Message-ID: Economists Have Advice for Buyers as the Art Market Heats Up NYT December 1, 2004 By EDUARDO PORTER Art prices are setting records again. In early November "No. 6 (Yellow, White, Blue Over Yellow on Gray)" by Mark Rothko was auctioned at Sotheby's for a record $17.4 million, almost 50 percent above the top end of Sotheby's estimate. "The Ninth Hour," a room with a lifesize wax pope felled by a meteorite, by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, fetched $3 million at auction at Phillips, de Pury & Company, also exceeding its top estimate by half. Not only are modern and contemporary artists being treated like pop stars, but earlier American masters are also soaring like late-1990's Internet stocks. Today Sotheby's is putting "Group With Parasols (a Siesta)," by John Singer Sargent on the block with a top estimate of $12 million. This would be a record for the artist at auction. "We have more collectors today willing to spend more money than we've ever had," said Dara Mitchell, a director of the American paintings department for Sotheby's. These rates of return are now attracting the interest of financial investors. In Britain, there is the Fine Art Management Fund, which has been in the market since March. A former co-owner of Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg established Artvest, an art investment company, in the spring. The New York-based Fernwood Art Investments plans to establish several funds next year to buy and manage art portfolios. And virtually every bank on Wall Street has an art advisory group to assist rich clients. The renewed appetite for art as an investment is rekindling interest in developing systematic ways to assess the value of art and is drawing attention to a small number of scholars who have been applying economics to this new asset class. Two pioneers are Michael Moses and Jianping Mei of the Stern School of Business at New York University. Mr. Moses and Mr. Mei developed an index of repeat sales of the same work of art, compiled from the prices of thousands of artworks sold at auction since 1875. They found that the compound annual rate of return of art from 1953 to 2003 was 12.1 percent, slightly higher than the Standard and Poor's 500 stock index. Mr. Mei and Mr. Moses also found that art prices have a low correlation with stocks, so art can enhance the performance of a portfolio of equities. Perhaps most interestingly, they found that the art-dealer maxim that masterpieces are the best investment is wrong. According to their index, masterpieces - usually meaning the most expensive works of art - tend, instead, to appreciate less, or depreciate more, than the art market as a whole. Economic analysis has also exposed some other peculiar behavior. Two economists from Oxford University have found that presale estimates by auction houses have some systematic biases. In contemporary art, for some reason, the most recently executed artworks are overvalued. For Impressionist and modern art, physically wider paintings may be underestimated. David Galenson, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, has been using the prices of artworks at auction to study patterns of creativity. His findings include useful insights into what makes art valuable. For instance, collectors might think again before paying big prices for late pieces by Pop artists. Their most expensive and critically acclaimed work, according to Mr. Galenson's analysis, was done at the beginning of their careers, when the breakthrough idea that took them to the top - the mechanical reproduction of serial images, for example, or blowing up cartoon frames - was still fresh. The Abstract Expressionists, on the other hand, might be better bought old - once they have experimented enough. Mr. Galenson splits creativity into two camps, inductive and deductive. Inductive-minded artists - say, Claude Monet or Jackson Pollock - will experiment endlessly, with no precise endpoint in mind. Deductive conceptualists, on the other end, rely on the great revolutionary idea that springs forth fully formed - Marcel Duchamp's 1917 urinal, "Fountain," for instance, or "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," which Picasso painted when he was 26. "With conceptual artists you can usually express their real contribution in a sentence," said Mr. Galenson. Mr. Galenson also picks out a broad shift in the market's taste over the last half century, as the appetite for innovation favored the quicker, deductive approach and thus tended to reward younger artists. In particular, he found that artists born before 1920 tended to do their most important work after the age of 40, while those born after 1920 peaked before hitting 40. "A persistently high demand for artistic innovation has produced a regime in which conceptual approaches have predominated," Mr. Galenson wrote in a paper. "The art world has consequently been flooded by a series of new ideas, usually embodied in individual works, generally made by young artists who have failed to make more than one significant contribution in their careers." Todd Millay, vice president in charge of strategy and product development at Fernwood Art Investments thinks this economic approach is helpful. "It's taking the tools and techniques which have been useful to understand other sectors of the economy and applying them to the art market," he said. Mr. Millay is developing quantitative techniques that Fernwood will use to build its art portfolio. Mr. Moses said he and Mr. Mei are also putting together a pricing model based on variables including the number of times an artwork work has been exhibited, written about or sold. And their analysis can provide some benchmarks. For instance, the Sargent up for auction today will be sold, by Sotheby's estimate of $9 to $12 million, at a price somewhere between 375 and 500 times what it fetched in 1962. But Mr. Mei's and Mr. Moses's index of American art has appreciated only 136-fold in that period. "If I'm looking for a financial return, maybe these prices are a bit high," Mr. Moses said. "If you tend to buy above the index-inflated purchase price, your future returns are going to suffer." Ms. Mitchell of Sotheby's stands by the value of the Sargent nonetheless. "Paintings of uniquely superior quality appreciate to a greater degree," she said. "Great paintings have a different curve." She argued that auctioneers have a pretty good handle on what an artwork is worth, benchmarking against other recent works by the artist sold and the overall state of the art market. Auction houses have a big advantage: they already know the fairly small number of people who can spend a few million dollars on a painting. That means they have a pretty good idea of who is likely to bid how much for the next big artwork to be put on the block. "We have relationships with collectors seeking works from certain artists," said Matthew Carey-Williams, senior specialist for contemporary art at Sotheby's. "The first thing we say when we look at a piece of art is 'who is going to buy this?' " Indeed, many art dealers tend to mistrust these economic approaches to art. Andre Emmerich, the New York collector and dealer, argues that there is no systematic method that can measure the shifting tastes that ultimately dictate the value of art in the market. "I'm not very good at these abstract theories at all," Mr. Emmerich said. "Art has much more to do with gut than with anything else." Even some of the proponents of a more analytical approach to art say it is uncertain how much these ideas will help investors beat the art market. Merely measuring the market is tough, because there are so few public transactions to base any analysis on. And many deals take place privately between dealers and collectors, so their details are frequently not known. Mr. Galenson argues that the art auction market is pretty efficient. Indeed, prices tend to reflect what art critics like and dislike. Orley Ashenfelter, a professor of economics at Princeton who studies art auctions, said all this analysis wass interesting, yet "I don't know how you can make money from this." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/01/arts/design/01pric.html From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Jan 8 18:45:32 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2005 10:45:32 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] An urban temple, entrance into holy of holies Message-ID: <01C4F56F.2E4D0130.shovland@mindspring.com> Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 198413 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Jan 8 21:09:51 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2005 13:09:51 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Urban temple: descent to the initiation chamber Message-ID: <01C4F583.5729BAD0.shovland@mindspring.com> Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 103556 bytes Desc: not available URL: From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 9 15:36:20 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2005 10:36:20 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: Was Lincoln Gay? Message-ID: Was Lincoln Gay? New York Times Book Review, 5.1.9 By RICHARD BROOKHISER THE INTIMATE WORLD OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN By C. A. Tripp. Edited by Lewis Gannett. 343 pp. Free Press. $27. THIS book is already getting noticed. In ''The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln,'' C. A. Tripp contends that Lincoln had erotic attractions and attachments to men throughout his life, from his youth to his presidency. He further argues that Lincoln's relationships with women were either invented by biographers (his love of Ann Rutledge) or were desolate botches (his courtship of Mary Owens and his marriage to Mary Todd). Tripp is not the first to argue that Lincoln was homosexual -- earlier writers have parsed his friendship with Joshua Speed, the young store owner he lived with after moving to Springfield, Ill. -- but he assembles a mass of evidence and tries to make sense of it. Tripp died in May 2003, after finishing the manuscript of this book, which means he never had a chance to fix its flaws. The prose is both jumpy and lifeless, like a body receiving electric shocks. Tripp alternates shrewd guesses and modest judgments with bluster and fantasy. He drags in references to Alfred Kinsey (with whom he once worked) to give his arguments a (spurious) scientific sheen. And he has an ax to grind. He is, most famously, the author of ''The Homosexual Matrix.'' Published in 1975, it was a document of gay liberation. Since the other president sometimes thought to have been gay is the wretched James Buchanan, what gay activist wouldn't want to trade up to Lincoln? Still, obsession can discover things that have been overlooked by less fevered minds. Tripp surveys seven of Lincoln's relationships, four with men and three with women, as well as two episodes from his early life. The discussion of Lincoln's youth is worthless. Relying on Lincoln's law partner and earliest biographer, William Herndon, Tripp decides that Lincoln reached puberty when he was 9 years old. Since Kinsey concluded that early maturing boys tended to become witty masturbators with lots of homosexual experience, Tripp concludes the same of Lincoln. He claims even more for Lincoln's adolescence, including a source for his religious heterodoxy. ''Since Lincoln had already arrived on his own at the powerful pleasures of orgasm . . . one can be sure that like most precocious youngsters he was in no mood to give it all up for bookish or Bible reasons.'' One can be sure, if one is as credulous as Tripp. Lincoln's story becomes interesting when Tripp discusses real people. In 1831, when he was 22, Lincoln moved to New Salem, an Illinois frontier town, where he met Billy Greene. Greene coached Lincoln in grammar and shared a narrow bed with him. ''When one turned over the other had to do likewise,'' Greene told Herndon. Bed-sharing was common enough in raw settlements, but Greene also had vivid memories of Lincoln's physique: ''His thighs were as perfect as a human being could be.'' Everyone saw that Lincoln was tall and strong, but this seems rather gushing. Six years later, Lincoln moved to Springfield, where he met Joshua Speed, who became a close friend; John G. Nicolay and John Hay, two early biographers, called him ''the only -- as he was certainly the last -- intimate friend that Lincoln ever had.'' Lincoln and Speed shared a double bed in Speed's store for four years (for two of those years, two other young men shared the room, though not the bed). More important than the sleeping arrangements was the tone of their friendship. Lincoln's letters to Speed before and after Speed's wedding in 1842 are as fretful as those of a general before a dubious engagement. Several of them are signed ''Yours forever.'' By contrast, Lincoln's relations with women are either problematic or distant. Ann Rutledge was the daughter of a New Salem tavernkeeper with whom Lincoln boarded in 1832. Three years later she died of malaria and typhoid. Lincoln biographers have been feuding for decades over whether Lincoln loved her. Tripp, naturally, sides with the skeptics. He concedes that Lincoln was devastated by her death, but argues that it was death itself that distressed him. In 1836 Lincoln courted Mary Owens. Tripp correctly characterizes his diffident suit as ''reaching forward while sharply leaning back.'' In 1837 Owens broke the relationship off. Lincoln then wrote a jeering letter to a friend, explaining that he had lost interest because Owens was so fat. ''I knew she was oversize, but now she appeared a fair match for Falstaff.'' The nervous hostility of this letter, disguised as humor, is cringe-making. (Tripp finds it hilarious.) The longest relationship of Lincoln's life was with his wife, Mary Todd, whom he married in 1842; they had four children, on whom Lincoln doted. Mary Lincoln's character is also dark and bloody ground for biographers. Tripp unhelpfully suggests that she had a psychopathic personality, like ''various outlaw types, from Hitler down to myriad petty criminals.'' Explosive, imperious, profligate, she may well have been mad. But in fairness to her, Lincoln was maddening -- remote and unavailable, when he was not physically absent. Tripp highlights two relations with men from Lincoln's presidency. Col. Elmer Ellsworth was a flashy young drillmaster, ''the greatest little man I ever met,'' as Lincoln put it. Lincoln recruited him to his Springfield law office, made him part of his presidential campaign and gave him a high military post as war loomed. A few weeks after the fall of Fort Sumter, Ellsworth was killed hauling a rebel flag down from a hotel in Alexandria, Va. Lincoln was shattered. For nearly eight months in 1862-3, Capt. David Derickson led the brigade that guarded Lincoln at the Soldiers' Home in the District of Columbia, the Camp David of the day. Derickson, in the words of his regiment's history, published three decades later, ''advanced so far in the president's confidence and esteem that in Mrs. Lincoln's absence he frequently spent the night at his cottage, sleeping in the same bed with him, and -- it is said -- making use of his Excellency's night shirt!'' Tripp can lay out a case, but his discussion of its implications is so erratic that the reader is often left on his own. One wonders: What does it mean to be homosexual? Not all of the men Lincoln admired were. Ellsworth seems straight as a ruler: he was engaged to a woman he passionately loved when he died. Even Derickson married twice and fathered 10 children (one son was serving in his unit while he was sleeping with Lincoln). Tripp argues that a cultural innocence -- the word ''homosexual'' had not yet been coined -- allowed acts of physical closeness between men that had no deeper meaning, as well as acts that did but could escape scrutiny. We know more than our ancestors, and our reward is that, in some ways, we may do less. In any case, on the evidence before us, Lincoln loved men, at least some of whom loved him back. Their words tell us more than their sleeping arrangements. What does Lincoln's erotic life tell us about Lincoln? For a gregarious, popular man, he had few intimates (Tripp's very title is a misnomer). Like many secretive types -- Benjamin Franklin comes to mind -- he kept the world at bay with a screen of banter. Yet behind the laughs lay an almost bottomless sadness, and sympathy for those he saw as fellow sufferers. There were many Lincolns: the joker, the pol, the logician, the skeptical theologian. But the man of sorrows may be the most important. ''The president has a curious vein of sentiment running through his thought which is his most valuable mental attribute,'' as his secretary of state, William Seward, said. Desiring what he could not consistently have did not make him grieve -- what Virgil called the tears of things did that -- but it may have deepened his grief. Towering above these Lincolns is the man who saw liberty and equality as facets of the same thing, and who maintained his (he called it his and the founders') vision in the face of Northern confusion and Southern fury. This is the Lincoln that matters. The rest is biography. Richard Brookhiser is the author of ''Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution.'' http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/09/books/review/09BROOKHE.html From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 9 15:43:07 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2005 10:43:07 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] The New York Times Magazine: The Year in Ideas: A to Z Message-ID: The New York Times Magazine: The Year in Ideas: A to Z http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/12INTRO.html et seq. 2004.12.12 [This is quite long. Note that there is no mention of Steve Sailer in "Fertile Red States." Did Phillip Longman get the idea first?] Introduction I n what has become an annual tradition, The New York Times Magazine takes stock of the passing year by creating a mini-encyclopedia of the most noteworthy ideas of the previous 12 months. We put out feelers, fine-tune our journalistic antennae and call on a fleet of reporters and researchers to scour the infosphere for the most captivating, baffling, promising and influential ideas from all walks of life -- not just science and technology, politics and policy, but also tattoo culture and fast-food management, horticulture and shoe design. Once we separate the wheat of innovation from the chaff of familiar notions, we offer up the alphabetical harvest now before you: 71 of the ideas that emerged -- in ways big and small, for better and worse -- in 2004. Connoisseurs of ''The Year in Ideas'' will discover a few changes in this issue, most notably the addition of the ingenious, whimsical photographs of Zachary Scott. But our central mission -- to salute the absurdly wide range of human originality and insight -- remains the same. You'll find innovations that will make you smile (Self-Storage), that will make you blink (Eyeball Jewelry), that will prompt speculation about the fate of nations (Lawfare) and that will inspire reverence for even the smallest applications of human reason (The Best Way to Skip a Stone). This year was also marked, of course, by a presidential election and an accompanying rise of interest in the social and cultural divisions of the United States; politics became a sort of prism for refracting all manner of concerns about American life. Accordingly, you'll find a healthy dose of entries on demographic trends (Fertile Red States), cultural happenings (Purple-State Country Music), technology (The Global Political Positioning System) and cris de coeur (Neo-Secessionism) that speak, one way or another, to the political moment. While no single digest could capture all the ideas of a nation as bountiful, if divided, as this one, this ''Year in Ideas'' issue presents at least a sampling of the way we were thinking in 2004. Acoustic Keyboard Eavesdropping By STEPHEN MIHM W hen it comes to computer security, do you have faith in firewalls? Think passwords will protect you? Not so fast: it is now possible to eavesdrop on a typist's keystrokes and, by exploiting minute variations in the sounds made by different keys, distinguish and decipher what is being typed. Credit for this discovery goes to Dmitri Asonov, a computer-security researcher for I.B.M. at the Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., who (with Rakesh Agrawal) published his results this year. The principle is a simple one. Keyboards are a bit like drums: the keys rest atop a plastic plate; different areas of the plate yield different sounds when struck. The human ear can't tell the difference, but if the sounds are recorded and processed by a highly sophisticated computer program, the computer can, with a little bit of practice, learn to translate the sounds of keystrokes into the appropriate letters and symbols. This means that firewalls and passwords will amount to nothing if someone manages to bug a room and record the cacophony of keystrokes. Asonov managed to pull off this feat with readily available recording equipment at a short distance. Even as far away as 50 feet, and with significant background noise, he was able to replicate his success using a parabolic microphone. He also anticipated an obvious practical objection: how does a would-be eavesdropper get into a building and spend enough time to ''train'' a computer program to recognize the keystrokes of a particular keyboard? Not a problem: it seems that keyboards of the same make and model sound sufficiently alike -- regardless of who is typing -- that a computer trained on one keyboard can be unleashed on another. Having divulged this vulnerability, Asonov says he felt dutybound to come up with a countermeasure. Keyboards, he proposes, could be engineered in such a way that the sounds of different keys would be indistinguishable from one another. But even if engineers manage that, other loopholes will undoubtedly emerge. Asonov says that he has heard rumors of research into the possibility of using computers to translate the humming of ink-jet printers into the actual text being printed. Thankfully, such approaches remain relatively exotic and beyond the reach of the average eavesdropper. ''Everyone still tries to break firewalls,'' Asonov complains. ''People don't think outside the box.'' 'Acting White' Myth, The By PAUL TOUGH W hen Bill Cosby spoke out publicly in May against dysfunction and irresponsibility in black families, he identified one pervasive symptom: ''boys attacking other boys because the boys are studying and they say, 'You're acting white.''' This idea isn't new; it was first proposed formally in the mid-80's by John Ogbu, a Nigerian professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, and it has since become almost a truism: when smart black kids try hard and do well, they are picked on by their less successful peers for ''acting white.'' The only problem with this theory, according to a research paper released in October, is that for the most part, it isn't true. Karolyn Tyson, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and William Darity Jr., an economist at Duke and U.N.C., coordinated an 18-month ethnographic study at 11 schools in North Carolina. What they found was that black students basically have the same attitudes about achievement as their white counterparts do: they want to succeed, understand that doing well in school has important consequences in later life and feel better about themselves the better they do. So where does the idea of the burden of ''acting white'' come from? One explanation the authors offer will make sense to anyone who has ever seen a John Hughes movie: there's an ''oppositional peer culture'' in every high school -- the stoners and the jocks making fun of the nerds and the student-government types. When white burnouts give wedgies to white A students, the authors argue, it is seen as inevitable, but when the same dynamic is observed among black students, it is pathologized as a racial neurosis. More insidiously, the authors say, the idea that failing black kids pull down successful black kids can be used as an excuse by administrators to conceal or justify discrimination in the public-education system. The one school where the researchers did find anxiety about ''acting white'' was the one in which black students were drastically underrepresented in the gifted-and-talented classes. And significantly, at this particular school, the notion of the burden of ''acting white'' was most pervasive not among the black students interviewed by the researchers, but among their teachers and administrators, who told researchers that blacks are ''averse to success'' and ''don't place a high value on education.'' Animated Society Portrait, The By JOHN BOWE F or a small consideration, Raphael immortalized the Medicis. Whistler and Picasso were known to take portrait work on commission. But after Andy Warhol's silkscreens of Liz Taylor and Jackie Kennedy, society portraits fell somewhat out of style. Until recently, that is, when the brother-and-sister gallerist duo Harry and Maya Stendhal, of the Maya Stendhal Gallery in New York, decided to revive the practice by reinventing the society portrait in the form of a short animated film. The Stendhals commissioned the painter and filmmaker Jeff Scher to do a portrait of a society friend of theirs named Susan Shin, an intellectual-property lawyer and influential charity maven. Scher filmed Shin and then ''rotoscoped'' the footage -- projecting it one frame at a time onto a wall. He then watercolored the hundreds of resulting frames onto paper. Finally, he refilmed hundreds of these hand-painted images, much as you would film the drawings that animate a cartoon. Scher's final project is an endlessly repeating three-minute film -- or loop -- of Shin, flickering, shimmering and changing colors appealingly, if not exactly momentously. (There is a point when Shin smiles that could be called the climax.) Granted, she's no Jessica Rabbit, and the film's facture is a bit amateurish, but the effect is flattering in its own way. Not that facture has much to do with the Stendhals' master plan. The point of the portrait -- a gift to Shin -- was to create a market sensation. And Shin was, for Harry Stendhal, the perfect loss leader, since she is ''an icon of the times,'' he wrote on a Web site he created for her. ''She is glamorous and much sought after in New York, London, Paris, you name it.'' The Stendhals say they are now pleased to announce that clients are lining up to pay $25,000 for their own animated portraits (with the original frames included). Scher recently finished a birthday portrait for a client Maya Stendhal describes as ''a 20-year-old daughter of art collectors from Miami.'' In this work, ''the motion was subtler, more intimate,'' Stendhal notes. ''It's more like a motion portrait of Mona Lisa.'' The artist is now working on a portrait of the actor Gabriel Byrne. After Byrne, Stendhal says, you'll simply have to get on the waiting list. Anti-Concept Concept Store, The By AMANDA FORTINI T his year, Comme des Gar?ons, the avant-garde fashion line designed by Rei Kawakubo, opened a series of ''guerrilla stores'' in hip, yet-to-be-gentrified areas in cities around the world, including Berlin, Barcelona, Helsinki, Singapore, Stockholm, Ljubljana and Warsaw. Kawakubo and her husband and business partner, Adrian Joffe, delineated their guerrilla idea with a no-nonsense precision usually reserved for actual combat operations. The shops, which are installed in raw urban spaces -- the Berlin outpost occupies a former bookstore; the Helsinki a 1950's pharmacy -- sell ''seasonless'' merchandise drawn from current and past collections, must remain unsullied by architects and designers and are required to close after a single year. While the venture might be interpreted as a call to arms against the aggressive commercialism and gaudy architecture of high-concept flagship behemoths like the Rem Koolhaas-designed Prada stores, it has also engendered a delicious absurdity: in their rejection of concept-store pretension, the guerrilla stores have realized its purest expression. A news release issued by Comme des Gar?ons lays out the ''rules'' behind this anti-concept with the earnestness of F.T. Marinetti's futurist manifesto: ''The location will be chosen according to its atmosphere, historical connection, geographical situation away from established commercial areas or some other interesting feature,'' reads one rule. The idea may be easy to send up, but guerrilla retailing is also smart business, allowing companies to tap into new markets at low cost (rents are cheap; advertising is nil) and to reduce inventory by recycling old merchandise. Indeed, others have joined Comme des Gar?ons in employing this marketing tactic. Alife, a Manhattan collective best described as a gallery, store and hipster brain trust, partnered with Levi's this fall to create a line of jeans that sold for one month only, and Vacant, a high-end retailer that bills itself on its Web site as the ''original traveling guerrilla retail concept and exhibition,'' has opened ephemeral store-gallery hybrids in empty spaces across the globe. A spokeswoman for Comme des Gar?ons notes that the guerrilla project has been wildly successful (''Warsaw met 300 percent of its projected monthly sales in the first week''). The company now plans to open shops in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, S-o Paulo and Istanbul. Augmented Bar Code, The By NATHANAEL JOHNSON M eant for mechanical eyes only, the bar code divulges little information to the shopper. But Dara O'Rourke, a U.C. Berkeley professor of labor, says that with a few tweaks, it could help foment a consumer revolution. As he explained in a World Bank Group policy paper in the spring, shoppers choosing, say, turkeys could one day scan bar codes with their cellphone cameras to find out where the birds were from, and even see pictures of the farms. The transformed bar code would call attention to environmentally friendly products and raise the consciousness of shoppers everywhere. The idea isn't entirely fanciful. Software already exists that allows camera phones to read bar codes. And some companies have begun sharing encoded product-tracking information with curious consumers. This year, Heritage Foods started providing a tracking number with every piece of meat it sells. When keyed into the company's Web site, the number provides the animal's medical and feed history. The site also features a turkey Web cam, so you can examine the animals' living conditions for yourself. As Patrick Martins, co-founder of Heritage Foods, puts it, you can ''see Tom naturally mating with Henrietta.'' The disclosure of so much production-process detail has risks: what if a turkey keels over on camera? Many companies are reluctant to throw open their doors while their competitors remain invisible. Still, a sizable number of consumers actually want to know how their sausage (or turkey) is made. These folks are less worried about losing their appetites than they are about buying something seriously unhealthful. O'Rourke, whose 1997 report on Nike factory conditions in Vietnam helped spur consumer boycotts, says he hopes the government will construct a vast product-tracking database available to scanner-wielding consumers. If he gets his wish, the bar code may become the most interested thing on the box. Benign Corporate Oligarchy, The By ROGER LOWENSTEIN W hen Google went public in August, investors hoped the much anticipated event would herald a return to late-90's stock-market populism: the idea that the Internet would not only make us all rich; it would also give us power. But the real idea behind the Google initial public offering goes back much further -- to the kind of noblesse oblige that J.P. Morgan championed. Google's founders, Larry Page, 32, and Sergey Brin, 31, seem like nice modern fellows, but they have old-fashioned ideas about shareholder relations. The shareholder, in their view, is a child -- fickle and hyperactive. Care for him, provide for him and, above all, keep him from the ruinous path of instant gratification. What modern shareholders crave above all are earnings that rise steadily, quarter after quarter, or, even better, earnings that ''beat expectations'' -- the number that analysts predict the company will report -- even by a penny or two. To achieve such beautifully turned out earnings every three months, executives sometimes do dumb things -- go on a merger spree, cut back marketing or fiddle with the accounting -- to give the stock a short-term pop. A recent survey by Campbell Harvey, professor of finance at Duke University, found that a remarkable 78 percent of 302 chief financial officers said they would take some action to ''smooth'' quarterly earnings and meet expectations, even if that action sacrificed long-term value. In the Google prospectus, Page rejected this nonsense in the kind of straightforward English sentences rarely encountered in securities filings. ''Many companies are under pressure to keep their earnings in line with analysts' forecasts. Therefore, they often accept smaller, predictable earnings rather than larger and less predictable returns,'' he wrote. ''Sergey and I feel this is harmful, and we intend to steer in the opposite direction.'' Google's policy was inspired by Warren Buffett, who has been preaching long-term management at Berkshire Hathaway for four decades. Buffett feels no pressure from Wall Street because he is arguably the most successful investor of all time. The young founders of Google don't have that kind of track record, so they sold stock to the public that comes with diluted voting rights. They were thus able to raise lots of money while still retaining control over the company. In the past, this has often spelled trouble. Executives who aren't accountable to shareholder votes can be prone to mischief. The Google founders seem to be saying that executives get into more mischief when they are overly solicitous of short-term investors. Mindful of all the companies that went astray and sometimes lied to meet analysts' expectations, Google will not even issue earnings forecasts. Like latter-day corporate barons, they advance the proposition that shareholders will be better off if the executives are trusted more and interfered with less. Best Way to Skip a Stone, The By CLIVE THOMPSON W ant to break the stone-skipping record? Here's a hint: throw the stone at an angle of precisely 10 degrees to the water. That's what a team of French scientists discovered when they constructed a machine to determine the ideal technique. Lyderic Bocquet, a physicist at the Universite Claude Bernard Lyon, became interested in the mechanics of skipping two years ago, while out tossing stones with his son. ''He asked me, why is the stone skipping and not sinking?'' he recalls. Bocquet realized that while stone skipping had been around since the ancient Greeks, no scientist had ever deduced the ultimate equations for mastery. He wrote a short paper pondering ''the stone-skipping problem,'' whereupon a fellow physicist, Christophe Clanet, suggested they solve it with the aid of a robot. They went on to create a device that could whip metal disks at a tank of water with utter precision. As they began blasting away, the scientists quickly noticed something remarkable. No matter how fast or slow their robot threw, the disks always seemed to skip farther if the stone hit the water at an angle of roughly 20 degrees. Why? In a January paper for Nature, titled ''Secrets of Successful Stone-Skipping,'' they concluded that this was because such an angle produced the briefest impact with the water and thus the least drag on the stone. Armed with this knowledge, they could figure out how to break the world record -- a bouncy 40 skips, set in 2002 by Kurt Steiner. They began pitching stones faster and faster, but at its top performance, the robot could only manage 20 skips. ''It was vibrating, and pieces were falling off it,'' Bocquet says. Nonetheless, the experiment this fall gave them the answer they needed. To achieve a record-breaking 41 skips, you'd have to throw a stone four inches in diameter at 60 miles an hour and at an angle of 10 degrees. You'd also want to perform this trick on a glass-smooth pond, since the scientists' tests were conducted in a perfectly still experimental tank. The scientists admit that there is probably no practical use for this knowledge. For his part, Bocquet admits that he can't manage more than 15 skips himself. ''Going from theory to practice,'' he says, ''is still difficult.'' Blogo Ad, The By SETH STEVENSON B logs are known for their brutal honesty, independence of spirit and genuine emotional conviction. None of these attributes play much of a role in corporate advertising, of course, but they are values that corporate advertisers strive to imitate -- and, where possible, co-opt. So it wasn't all that shocking when Nike launched a blog this June. As a brand, Nike is youthful and forward-looking, and blogs are a great way to reach the young, hip and carefully shod -- those who bristle when products get pitched at them but enjoy discovering cool new things on their own. Nike's blogo ad, titled ''Art of Speed,'' ran for 20 days, posting short films, speed-related trivia, inspirational athlete stories and so forth. So far so good, until October saw a blog launched by . . . General Motors. Not your father's Oldsmobile, indeed. Why would an earnest corporate dinosaur like G.M. get involved with an upstart medium like the blog? ''It's a different attitude from our corporate Web site,'' says Michael Wiley, G.M.'s director of new media and the man behind its blog operation. ''It's more grass roots.'' The G.M. blog, which Wiley describes as a cautious experiment, focuses on the 50th anniversary of the G.M. small-block V-8 engine -- a touchstone for hot-rod enthusiasts. Entries feature some legendary small-block-powered sports cars of the past and are sprinkled with posts from G.M. engineers touting horsepower and torque levels. Readers chime in with their own small-block stories and post questions on the future of small-block technology. It's clearly blogging by car geeks, for car geeks. But it turns out that geek to geek, informal and honest, is a pretty good model for the blogo ad. From a marketing perspective, blogs make perfect sense. They are cheap to produce, immersive and interactive. It's easy to measure their readership and response rates. For small companies, blogs are a quick and dirty promotional tool that cuts out the middleman; for big companies, blogs are a tool of humanization -- an informal, chatty, down-to-earth voice amid the din of bland corporate-speak. ''It's a dream come true,'' says Bob Cargill, senior creative director for Yellowfin Direct Marketing. ''You can embed yourself smack-dab in the middle of your customers, form an ongoing relationship with them and hear exactly what they think of your brand.'' Caller ID 6.0 By MICHAEL CHANDLER R ather than face the embarrassment of misplacing a friend's name or failing to keep up with a conversation, the elderly often avoid social situations, even phone calls. This year, however, a new remedy for social isolation made its appearance: a group of families in Las Vegas and Portland, Ore., began trying out a new caller ID system that's intended to help spark the memories of aging parents. This enhanced caller ID system, designed by Intel, is meant to ease the stress of social activity for the memory-impaired. When the phone rings, a monitor shows both a number and a photograph of the caller. Some extra details can also be displayed on a screen: Tim is calling; he is your oldest son; you talked to him four days ago about the weather and his daughter's piano recital. In future versions, speech-recognition technology could store and display key words from past conversations. Prepping for social encounters is nothing new, says Margaret Morris, a clinical psychologist and senior researcher for Intel. Many people, after all, rely on a spouse to brief them before going into a party: ''Doris is going to be there. You talked to her last time about her tomato plants, remember?'' The enhanced caller ID system replaces a spouse's knowledge with technology. It belongs to a larger home-monitoring apparatus, involving tiny wireless sensors. Matchbook-size computerized devices, or ''motes,'' track individuals' activities and note behavior patterns. Researchers say this technology could help people stay in their homes instead of moving into expensive nursing facilities. These companies hope families unable to keep an eye on the older generation will -- in effect -- pay for virtual eyes instead. Car That Emotes, The By CHRIS BALLARD I n June, four Japanese engineers for Toyota secured a U.S. patent for a car that they say can express moods ranging from angry to happy to sad. The car can raise or lower its body height and ''wag'' its antenna and comes equipped with illuminated hood designs -- capable of changing colors -- that are meant to look like eyebrows, eyes and even tears. The car will try to approximate the feelings of its driver by drawing on data stored in an on-board computer. So, for example, if another car swerves into an expressive car's lane, the right combination of deceleration, brake pressure and defensive steering, when matched with previous input from the driver, will trigger an ''angry'' look. As futuristic as the concept sounds, the premise isn't particularly novel. Ever since the first teenager painted the first set of licking flames onto his muscle car, people have been trying to express themselves through their automobiles. Bumper stickers, fuzzy dice, Baby on Board signs, suction-cup Garfields, Jesus fish, vanity license plates, cartoon Calvins urinating on Ford logos -- each one is meant to convey a message about the driver. So do we really need our cars to express more? The engineers say the answer is yes. Not only so that we can differentiate between, as they write, honks ''asking permission to cut in front'' and honks ''showing gratitude for having been allowed to cut in front'' but so that drivers can potentially ''have greater affinity for their vehicles and make the driving experience more comfortable.'' (Though you might argue that the last thing Americans need is a greater affinity for their vehicles.) Then there is this most obvious use for the car: as a high-tech stand-in for road rage. Along with their patent, the engineers included a simulated graphic of an ''angry'' vehicle that looks a bit like a toaster oven cut in half: the boxy car's front end is lighted up with glowing red U-shaped lights, the headlights are hooded at 45-degree angles and downward-sloping ''eyebrow'' lights glow crimson. (The engineers use red to equal anger, orange for good feelings -- like a ''wink'' -- and blue to represent sadness.) Interpreted correctly, the angry car does look vaguely dissatisfied, but it's hard to imagine anyone's fury being soothed because he gave another driver the ''angry lights.'' For that purpose, there remains a more efficient, if old-fashioned, method of driver communication that seems unlikely to fall out of favor anytime soon: the one-finger salute. Cold-Weather Theory of Witchcraft, The By CHRISTOPHER SHEA I f she floats she's a witch; if she sinks she's innocent -- but now drowned, alas. The witch trials that swept through Europe from the 1300's into the 1700's baffle the rational modern mind. Why Europeans suddenly concluded that many of their neighbors were casting curses and smiting their crops remains a historical mystery. That hardly implies a shortage of theories. Some have traced witch-related paranoia to the demonization of female folk healers and midwives by a nascent male medical establishment. Others have emphasized the theological anxieties of the Reformation or suggested an epidemic of syphilis (whose symptoms could resemble demonic possession). On this side of the Atlantic, fungus-infested rye, which can cause hallucinations, has been proposed as a factor in the Salem, Mass., witch scare of 1692. In the Winter 2004 issue of The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Emily Oster, an economics graduate student at Harvard, suggests a more banal explanation of witch mania: the weather. From 1520 to 1770, according to Oster, spikes in witch trials coincided with sharp drops in temperature. Cold and harsh conditions may have devastated crops, she theorizes, leaving Europeans starving and looking for someone to blame. Oster is not the first scholar to propose a connection between the advent of cold weather and the killing of witches. (The fact that a ''little ice age'' settled over Europe in the era of the witch scare has attracted the attention of researchers.) But she is the first to map temperature against trial records, decade by decade. Among other things, she found that one of the steepest single temperature drops, around 1560, coincides with a mysterious resurgence in trials after a lull of 70 years. The idea that witches lay waste to crops was once conventional wisdom. In a papal bull of 1484, Pope Innocent VIII wrote, ''It has indeed lately come to Our ears . . . many persons of both sexes . . . have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees.'' According to Oster's research, crops really were devastated when charges of necromancy flew. The witches themselves, however, were simply climate-change scapegoats. Concrete You Can See Through By BRENDAN I. KOERNER C oncrete has figured heavily in numerous architectural monstrosities, not least because the cheap, durable substance oozes despair and seems to suck up light. But this year, at the National Building Museum in Washington, the architect Aron Losonczi helped rehabilitate concrete's cheerless reputation by demonstrating a new version of the substance more akin to glass than granite. Losonczi, a 28-year-old from Csongrad, Hungary, is the inventor of LiTraCon (shorthand for ''light-transmitting concrete''), which is made by adding glass or plastic fibers to the usual blend of gravel, sand, cement and water. A LiTraCon wall, though sturdy, is as translucent as an oilskin lampshade. Shadows seep through from one side to the other, even if the slab is of prison-grade thickness. Losonczi has created a company to market his brainchild, but buildings made of LiTraCon are most likely way off. Translucent concrete is tough enough for the task, but the glass or plastic fibers make it too expensive for most large-scale construction. The most sensible commercial use might be see-through barriers of the sort that shield the halls of government from car bombs. Since 9/11, the United States may have a bunker mentality, but that doesn't mean our bunkers need be drab. Criminalizing Reckless Sex By CHRISTOPHER SHEA C olorado prosecutors dropped sexual-assault charges against Kobe Bryant in September after his accuser decided she was unwilling to testify. But Ian Ayres of Yale Law School and Katharine Baker of the Chicago Kent College of Law contend that even the behavior Bryant admitted to -- unprotected consensual sex with a woman he had just met -- was irresponsible and dangerous. They have a proposal to curtail such behavior: outlawing ''reckless sex.'' Ayres and Baker define reckless sex as penetration, without a condom, in a first-time sexual encounter. Because such sex leaves behind forensic evidence, it would be relatively easy for prosecutors to prove that it had occurred. Anyone accused of the crime could then offer the defense that omitting the condom had been consensual. But he or she would have to prove this by a ''preponderance'' of the evidence. Both men and women could theoretically be charged with sexual recklessness -- and sentenced to up to six months in jail. Women would have a fairly easy time defending themselves: a man's insertion of a condom-free penis would almost certainly demonstrate his consent to such an encounter. Ayres and Baker say that raising a legal obstacle to first-time sex without a condom would reap benefits for public health. ''The lion's share of sexually transmitted infections are caused by first-time sexual encounters,'' they argue on the legal-affairs Web site Balkinization. Moreover, failure to wear a condom may amount to prima facie evidence of disdain for women: ''Few men careful enough to use a condom are reckless enough to rape. The same recklessness that causes men to overlook the risk of disease and pregnancy can also lead them to overlook whether the woman has truly consented.'' Of course, Ayres and Baker aren't doing away with the ''he said, she said'' problem as much as shifting it to the question of who did or didn't want the man to wear a condom. But they point out that men could avoid courtroom arguments over consent simply by wearing a condom that first time. The paper has raised objections both obvious (privacy) and subtle (what are implications for gay men?). But before you ridicule the proposal as a parody of the Nanny State, the authors ask that you keep in mind two things: unprotected sex can kill and date rapists almost always walk. Debunking Photoshop Fakery By RYAN BIGGE O ur faith in photography has been forever compromised by computer programs like Photoshop that doctor images with a relatively high degree of ease and verisimilitude. When you come across a provocative photo on the Web -- John Kerry and Jane Fonda protesting together, say -- it can be hard to know what to make of it. But not for Hany Farid. In May, Farid, a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College, unveiled software that helps determine whether a digital image has been tampered with. Much as art experts detect forgeries by studying the minutia of brush strokes, Farid has devised methods of analyzing the clusters of pixels that make up a digital photo. After crunching the numbers, his program generates a map of the suspect image that calls attention to suspicious areas where tampering may have occurred. Here's how it works. Each pixel in a photo represents a small piece of coded information, and Farid's program looks for patterns of information within the overall composition of the photo. Unaltered images, he discovered, tend to have what you might call naturally occurring patterns of information. Images that have been altered, by contrast, tend to have abnormal patterns of information that, while invisible to the eye, are detectable by computer. Making things easier, most doctored images are produced with common manipulations -- like resizing, duplication, adjusting the contrast and airbrushing. Farid began thinking about how to authenticate digital imagery after discovering that photos taken with a digital camera could be considered admissible evidence in United States courts. As a pioneer in this type of forensic analysis, he receives numerous unsolicited e-mail messages from Photoshop-fraud victims, including one from a Brazilian model who claimed Budweiser spliced her head onto the body of another woman in a print ad. ''You gotta love this job if you've got supermodels calling you,'' Farid says. Designated Hitter as Moral Hazard, The By DANIEL H. PINK B aseball purists have long argued that the designated hitter is a moral outrage. Now an economist and a mathematician have found that the D.H. is also a moral hazard. In economics, ''moral hazard'' is the term for the idea that someone insured against risk is more likely to engage in risky behavior. Just as a homeowner who has fire insurance is more likely to risk smoking in bed, these scholars argue, so, too, a pitcher who has a designated hitter batting in his stead is more likely to risk plunking an opposing player. Since the American League instituted the designated hitter in 1973, A.L. pitchers haven't been required to bat. In the National League, which never adopted the D.H., pitchers still must step up to the plate. As a result, A.L. pitchers who hit a batter with a pitch never have to face retaliation in the form of a 95-mile-an-hour fastball to the ribs. But N.L. pitchers who bean an opponent must step into the batter's box later in the game and stand 60 feet, 6 inches away from a snarling Randy Johnson, bent on exacting revenge. John-Charles Bradbury and Doug Drinen of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., realized that this rule difference ''created ideal conditions to test for the existence of moral hazard in a controlled setting.'' In a paper presented at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in January, Bradbury, the economist, and Drinen, the mathematician, noted that the rate of hit batsmen is 15 percent higher in the American League than in the National. Using a computer program written by Drinen, a former college baseball player, the two young scholars mined eight years of detailed play-by-play data on major-league games. After they controlled for pitcher quality, batter quality, game situation and other factors that also contribute to hit batters, they found that the designated-hitter rule itself ''increases the likelihood that any batter will be hit during a plate appearance between 11 and 17 percent.'' And in a study of interleague play that they plan to publish next year, the pattern held: in interleague games in which both sides used a D.H., National League pitchers were more likely than usual to hit batters; in games in which pitchers had to bat, American League throwers were less likely to hit opponents with a pitch. In baseball, it seems, the laws of economics govern the diamond as well as the front office. Do-It-Yourself Attack Ad, The By CLIVE THOMPSON F or a political ad, ''Bush Hates Veterans'' is about as ferocious as they come. ''My question to Mr. Bush is, Do you support the troops? You're the one who hates the troops,'' shouts an angry male voice, as pictures of maimed soldiers fill the screen. ''And you sent them off to die so your friends could get rich!'' You might wonder which TV network would air such a blunt ad, and the answer is none of them. ''Bush Hates Veterans'' is an online ad, viewable at BushFlash.com, the Web site of Eric Blumrich, a 34-year-old Web designer in Montclair, N.J. When the Iraq war began, Blumrich started creating spots attacking the Republicans. He has made 27 of them, and more than 3.2 million people have visited his site to watch them. ''I'd been yelling about politics for years, but no one listened to me,'' he says. ''Then I put up a couple of animations, and everyone watches.'' Normally, we think of political ads as expensive products, financed by established parties and deep-pocketed organizations. But this election, technology made things drastically cheaper. Inexpensive home video cameras could shoot broadcast-quality footage; cheap software for editing could transform the footage into a punchy spot. Suddenly, virtually any average citizen could run his or her own campaign ad, and this year, it sometimes seemed, virtually any citizen did. Partisans who loathed Howard Dean remixed his infamous scream in parody music; others assembled ''American Betrayal?'' an ad pillorying John Kerry over his Vietnam War protests. When MoveOn.org ran a competition for the best self-produced TV spot attacking Bush, 1,500 people submitted ads. ''They were terrific,'' says Eli Pariser, the executive director of MoveOn PAC. ''They were much funnier than the ones you see on TV.'' They were certainly more savage. With no TV censors to appease, online ads could throw punches far below the belt. (Maybe too far: MoveOn was criticized for briefly posting two amateur ads that compared Bush with Hitler.) If this political season was more rancorous than most, it was partly because of this explosion of grass-roots advertising, swapped online by gleeful partisans. Downwardly Defined Celebrity Flaw, The By KATE AURTHUR C elebrity magazines have always concerned themselves with weight gain and other lapses in the appearance of the rich and famous. You're a moneyed, potentially beautiful star, reads the subtext of countless magazine cover articles -- what have you got to be so fat about? But as David Graham, a fashion writer for The Toronto Star, noted this year, things are getting worse. As competition among tabloids increases the demand for celebrity shortcomings, the chattering classes have been forced to expand their definition of what counts as a failing, often scrutinizing celebs for less obvious, even arguable flaws. Consider a few examples. In Star magazine, Kate Hudson was called out for her ''Dumbo ears.'' Jewel was criticized for a ''snaggletooth'' and the actress Christine Taylor for a ''bony back.'' The otherwise impeccable Katie Holmes was cited for having ''mangled ankles'' -- whatever those are. Recent makeover programs like ''The Swan,'' in which noncelebrities undergo spectacular top-to-bottom plastic surgery, seem only to heighten the impulse to nit-pick: if an unlimited budget of time and money can rid a body of nearly any impurity, why should it be too much to expect that wealthy celebrities appear only as smooth, ageless creatures with perfectly proportioned features and figures? Even those who are fit and trim are vulnerable. In an August issue, The National Enquirer ran a cover article about the cellulite afflictions of Britney Spears, Sandra Bullock, Tori Spelling and Lara Flynn Boyle. The inclusion of Boyle was indicative of the phenomenon's cruel double-bind, since she is also regularly accused by the tabloids of having an eating disorder. ''So celebrities like Lara can't win,'' Graham writes. ''In this war, they can only take cover.'' Drug-Trial Registry, The By SHANNON BROWNLEE W hen doctors pull out their prescription pads, chances are good that they are relying on incomplete information about the safety and efficacy of the drugs -- from Celebrex to Zoloft -- you're about to take. That's because studies that come up with negative results tend not to appear in the medical literature, a problem known as ''publication bias.'' For years, critics have argued that drug companies and researchers who fail to publish negative studies are distorting the public record and leading doctors to prescribe the wrong drugs to the wrong patients. This year, Congress considered a novel solution to the problem: the registration of all drug studies involving human subjects in a central database, or clinical-trials registry. Currently, when a company wishes to have a drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration, it must submit all clinical-trial results, both negative and positive, to the agency. But the company is under no legal obligation to disseminate that information -- or any later studies -- to the public. A clinical-trial registry would discourage the cherry-picking of trial results and provide doctors with a more balanced picture of the risks and benefits of the drugs. Eventually, proponents would like to see complete trial results posted, an idea that has been gaining traction, even with the pharmaceutical industry. This fall, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the industry's trade group, announced a voluntary plan for companies to post results of clinical trials on a Web site. But drug makers aren't ready to tell all. They have balked at having to register so-called Phase I and Phase II trials, which are performed early in the course of bringing a drug to market. Companies say they worry that full disclosure will provide their competitors with proprietary information and that it would be all too easy for patients to see one negative study and conclude incorrectly that a drug isn't right for them. Registry proponents counter that doctors and patients should be able to make decisions on the basis of all the evidence -- and that isn't possible, as long as there's no way to know what evidence is out there. Dumb Robots Are Better By D.T. MAX S teven Skaar, a robotics professor at Notre Dame, is the prophet of a not-so-brave new world. His creation is a wheelchair that can take its occupant among just a handful of destinations -- the toilet, the kitchen, the bed. And it makes this journey very slowly. Skaar's students taught the chair its course by painstakingly pushing it along all the permutations of possible routes and methodically saving them in the robot's memory. What's significant about Skaar's wheelchair isn't the invention itself as much as the idea that it represents. This simple robot, Skaar argues, is about as good as a robot gets. Forget ''R.U.R.,'' Karel Capek's 1921 play that first introduced intelligent autonomous interactive mobile humanoids -- no robot is going to run the world for a long time. What happened? Where did the technology pinup of the last century go wrong? The answer, really, is nowhere. To err is human, and we erred in underestimating how remarkable we humans are, Skaar argues. Activities we take for granted -- distinguishing between the bottle of shampoo and the lamp, deciding whether to switch it on or pull it off the shelf -- turn out to be very hard tasks for robots, partly because we don't really know how we do them ourselves. Recognizing that robotic technology is at a ''dead end,'' Skaar says, our solution should be to make a lot of pretty dumb robots that do what they do well. The future, he contends, is going to belong to androids with robotic arms spot-welding the same joint in the same car at the same spot on the assembly line. Not very romantic, but at least there's some poetic justice here. When Capek's brother, Josef, coined the word for the automatons in the play ''R.U.R.,'' he derived it from the Czech word robota, meaning ''slave labor.'' EBay Vigilantism By SUSAN DOMINUS S ince its inception, the Internet has been likened to the Wild West, but a culture further along in its development would provide a more apt reference point: New York City in the 70's -- a vast metropolis, infinitely diverse, with pockets of untamed sleaze suggesting an overall tolerance for corruption in the system. Places like this breed a certain kind of vigilante hero -- not the brazen, spur-clinking swashbucklers of a lawless frontier but the silent, seething types, the unexpected, subterranean enforcers. Enter the eBay vigilantes. This year you could find these people patrolling the electronics and rare-stamp and kitchenware offerings of the world's largest online auction house. Their goal is to stop dishonest auctioneers from selling products they don't actually have, and their deal-busting methods are wily: rescuing naive customers by outbidding them with outlandishly high offers (which they never pay); sending potentially fraudulent sellers seemingly innocent e-mail messages with surveillance systems attached; contacting would-be buyers to let them in on what they say are the telltale signs of a scam -- the hidden bidder list, the request to pay by Western Union, the false location. (Andorra, a principality in the Pyrenees, is frequently listed by swindlers who are based in Romania.) ''I got angry,'' says Greg Schiller, a computer and network technician in New Mexico who regularly spent an hour a day trawling eBay for frauds at the peak of his vigilantism this year. ''You know, the people who use eBay are not wealthy people. They're looking to get a deal. And these guys who are ripping them off are laughing at those people, and they're laughing at the law.'' EBay has a team of more than 1,000 employees -- among them former law-enforcement officials, computer programmers and customer-support representatives -- who are authorized to police the community. The company says it doesn't appreciate what it calls the vigilantes' ''auction interference,'' which can tip off lawbreakers, it claims, without actually stopping them. Not only did eBay decline to thank Schiller for the thousands of fake offers he told them about, but the company also threatened to suspend his account. All he has got in return for his vigilance are some coffee beans, a coffee grinder and a coffee machine from Capresso, a manufacturer grateful for his work in preventing fraudulent eBay sales of its products. Schiller is not one for gourmet coffee, and he isn't looking for compensation, but he says that he was perfectly happy to get the gift all the same. ''At least,'' he says, ''it showed someone's paying attention.'' Electability By MATT BAI W hat makes a candidate ''electable''? That question, more than any other, defined the Democratic primaries and caucuses beginning in January. In polls and focus groups, Democratic voters in the early states of Iowa and New Hampshire repeatedly said that they were willing to vote for whichever challenger stood the best chance of being elected over George W. Bush. Roughly half the voters who chose Kerry in the Iowa caucuses cited electability as their main motive. Electability as a political attribute is nothing new. But in the past, electability was a subtext, something for strategists to exploit while the candidates went on with the important business of debating issues. In this year's campaign, electability became the issue itself. There was a strange result: a nomination fight that worked more like a futures market than an actual campaign. Iowans and New Hampshirites bet on the candidate they thought voters in the rest of the country would choose, rather than choosing the candidate they necessarily preferred. The electability derby reflected, in part, the growing punditization of the American electorate. Deluged by television prognosticators and celebrity consultants, voters now seem to view politics the way operatives do -- as an exercise in strategy, rather than as the means to governing. This was the year that voters, echoing chatter on the Web and cable news, began talking less about the policies that affect them and more about polling samples, the machinations of independently financed 527's and, yes, electability. How well these voters served their own cause is a matter of some debate. Kerry, chosen as the most electable of the field, didn't end up winning a single Southern or Southwestern state (unless your definition is flexible enough to admit California). Which goes to show, perhaps, that Democratic primary voters aren't any better or worse at the prediction game than the experts on TV. Employable Liberal Arts Major, The By RACHEL DONADIO F ew questions make liberal arts majors wince more than the time-honored ''But what are you going to do with that?'' (As the accounting student said to the English major.) Now, with tuition costs rising as fast as parental anxiety levels, colleges have begun asking the same question -- and helping their students answer it through professional training programs that look ahead to the day after graduation. This year, Colgate University and New York University began offering special career-oriented workshops to undergraduates. Colgate's ''Career Development in the New Economy'' program brings in alumni business executives to offer advice and engage in networking; students meet for up to two hours a week, for six to eight weeks during the semester. In its Gateway Program, Colgate will soon offer noncredit courses in fields like law, journalism and marketing and finance. ''The job market is getting competitive, and there are a lot of . . . industry-specific skills that young people need as the professions and the economy continue to diversify,'' said Adam Weinberg, the dean of the college at Colgate University. At New York University, juniors and seniors with high grade-point averages can enroll in the Professional Edge program and take specialized vocational courses for academic credit in N.Y.U.'s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. An art history major could learn to appraise art, or a language student could learn to become a translator. Other colleges are on the same page. Columbia University allows undergraduates to take professional-school courses for credit, as does the University of Southern California. Colleges say they aren't abandoning the liberal arts education but rather bringing the ideal slightly more in line with the job-market reality. Colgate's program makes sure the professions don't ''seep in and otherwise corrupt the strong liberal arts curriculum,'' Weinberg explains. Yet others aren't entirely convinced. ''To dilute the power of the liberal arts with premature professionalism will deprive our society of the thoughtful leadership it needs,'' Anthony Marx, the president of Amherst College, was quoted as saying in The Times earlier this year. If they have the luxury of time, he said, students should ''go deeper into the liberal arts, because that is the seed corn of an intellectual life and informed citizenship.'' After all, college is breathlessly short, and the American working life increasingly long. How many professionals think back fondly to those industry-specific lingo-training courses of their undergraduate days? Escalating High-Heel Shoe, The By AMANDA FORTINI O f the many impractical fashions that have appeared throughout history, none have endured like the high heel. From ladies of the court in 18th-century France who had to be escorted up and down stairs because they tottered on stems so precariously high, to today's socialites and celebrities who mince along in their lofty Manolos, comfort and even mobility have always been an afterthought. Remarking upon the heel's despotic allure, George Bernard Shaw reportedly said, ''If you rebel against high heels, take care to do so in a very smart hat.'' Yet change may be afoot, as it were. Channeling the desire of working women everywhere, Wei-Chieh Tu, a graduate student in industrial design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, has created an escalating high-heel shoe, the height of which can be set at six different levels, ranging from zero to 38 degrees, with the mere push of a button. ''My wife wanted three-inch heels but refused to buy them because she wouldn't be able to wear them all day,'' Tu explains. ''She told me, 'You're an industrial designer; you should do something about that,' and of course I listened to her.'' The resulting shoe is sleek and futuristic, with a green tiered base that echoes Ferragamo's iconic layered rainbow platform of the late 30's. Tu, however, says he drew inspiration from the elegant, foldable Chinese hand fans he saw his mother and grandmother use when he was a child growing up in Taiwan. His ingenious creation not only marries fashion and function but also instills hope that high heels may soon cease to be instruments of torture. Need a towering presence for a meeting at work? Set your shoes at a higher altitude. Got a short date? Lower the shoes to half-mast. Want to add some glam rock to an evening out? Crank the shoes way, way up and saunter around. And best of all, when the vogue in heel height shifts, as it invariably does, there's no shopping required; push a button and -- voila! -- your heels will adjust. If only all heels were as easy to manage. Exoskeleton Strength By NOAH SHACHTMAN T he sci-fi author Robert Heinlein had the idea first: in his 1959 novel, ''Starship Troopers,'' soldiers stepped into suits of powered armor to make themselves stronger, faster and generally better prepared to fight off alien hordes. This year, Homayoon Kazerooni, an engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley, made the idea a reality by introducing a set of high-tech leg braces called the Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton, or Bleex. Strap it on, and a load once backbreaking suddenly feels no heavier than a couple of copies of the Sunday paper. Bleex is a set of modified combat boots, attached to what look like metal braces that snake up the sides of the legs. The prosthetics, which operate with the assistance of a Pentium-5-equivalent processor, are connected to a vest and backpack. About 70 pounds of gear can be crammed into the pack. But once the exoskeleton is turned on, it feels like only a five-pound load; the mechanical legs pick up the rest. Bleex 2, scheduled for June, should be able to carry 150 pounds and amble at a four-miles-an-hour clip. The Pentagon -- which has financed much of Kazerooni's research -- says it wants the machine to literally ease the burden on American troops, who routinely haul more than a hundred pounds of gear into battle. But Kazerooni sees his exoskeleton as more than just a ''war machine,'' he says. The mechanical legs might someday help the elderly get around, for instance. The idea of replacing Grandma's walker is a long way from science fiction. But at least it's real. Eyeball Jewelry By REBECCA SKLOOT G errit Melles is soft-spoken and conservative in an I'd-never-get-a-tattoo-or-piercing sort of way, so he's a bit bashful about having created the latest craze in body modification: eyeball jewelry. We're not talking pierced eyelids or eyebrows -- that's child's play at this point. We're talking jewelry placed directly in the eyeball. Here's how it works. An ophthalmologist anesthetizes your eye, then makes a microscopic incision in the conjunctiva, the eye's transparent outer membrane. The doctor drops a tiny piece of jewelry (called JewelEye) into the incision, and the procedure is over. It takes 10 minutes and costs about $4,000, and you spend the next week feeling as if you have a piece of sand in your eye. When the conjunctiva heals, you can't feel it (even when you rub your eye). Melles, an ophthalmic surgeon with the Netherlands Institute for Innovative Ocular Surgery, uses the word ''subtle'' to describe JewelEye: ''It's not like you'll pass someone on the street and say, Whoa, what's in that person's eye?'' But it's impossible not to stare at it when you're face to face. The jewelry is a small, platinum medallion gently curved to fit the eye. It rests just below the surface, held in place by the conjunctiva, like a charm under Scotch tape. Melles stumbled on the idea while developing implantable devices for treating glaucoma. ''I found a way to safely implant things in the outer layer of the eye,'' he says, ''and I thought, Why not make special shapes people could wear for fun?'' He started with hearts and stars but now makes everything from euro signs to Harley-Davidson symbols. According to Melles, the risk of infection is lower with JewelEye than with ear piercing, because JewelEye is sealed in the eye and never exposed to bacteria. It doesn't migrate, even after millions of blinks and countless eye rubbings, and it's removable. ''We have seen no complications,'' he says, ''and no reason to expect them in the future.'' So why doesn't he have one? ''I'm a doctor,'' he says. ''Doctors don't do that sort of thing.'' FanWing, The By CLIVE THOMPSON W hen you first see the FanWing, you think: there's no way that thing is going to fly. After all, it looks less like an airplane than a big, lumbering combine harvester that has somehow strayed from its wheat field. It has a hollow cylinder where its wings ought to be, and when it trundles down the runway, it moves barely faster than a bicycle. But then it lifts off, angles up and -- whoa -- soars up into the sky. ''People think it's a hoax, even when they see it for themselves,'' says Patrick Peebles, the inventor. Peebles is a former ice-cream-machine-repair instructor and amateur pilot. About 10 years ago, he had an idea for how to radically redesign the airplane so that it would not use wings. Wings, of course, keep a plane aloft in part because of their curved upper surface, which creates lower air pressure above than below, thereby pushing the plane upward. Peebles envisioned something different: he would replace the wing with a tube filled with blades that rotated like the water wheel on a Mississippi riverboat. If the blades spun fast enough, he reasoned, they would reduce the drag on top, allowing the plane to fly. He spent five years tinkering in his living room until he finally got a tiny model airborne. By this year, he was flying a prototype with a 10-foot span, which he introduced to the public at the Farnborough International Air Show in Britain. Compared with a traditional airplane, the FanWing can fly at much lower speeds and with much greater stability. It can take off from a relatively small runway and cruise at the leisurely pace of a car. If it ever catches on, the FanWing would make a good air taxi, ferrying people on short hops from city to city, or out to airports. It is more fuel-efficient than a helicopter and potentially safer than a normal plane, since a FanWing cannot stall, no matter how sharply it points up or down. The only real danger is if the fan blades jam and cease spinning -- then, Peebles admits, ''it drops like a rock.'' Peebles is currently talking to military experts in the United States and Britain about using FanWings as unmanned surveillance vehicles, since they could stay aloft for eight hours on one tank of gas. But whatever the FanWing's commercial success, Peebles can already claim one singular achievement: he has created one of the few truly new aircraft since the Wright brothers. Feral Cities By KEN STIER T his year, the American military was forced to relearn painful lessons in urban warfare. Insurgents in Falluja and Najaf were able to neutralize much of America's technological superiority and inflict costly casualties. It remains to be seen whether the retaking of those Iraqi cities proves to be a Pyrrhic victory. But renewed urban combat is hardly the only global urban crisis. In a World Policy Journal article published this spring, the national security experts Peter Liotta and James Miskel argued that the ''failed state,'' which received so much attention in the 1990's, is being supplemented by the emergence of failed cities, where civil order succumbs to powerful criminal gangs. From Brazil to South Africa, these gangs pose a variety of nontraditional security threats -- from unchecked black-marketeering and the smuggling of people, guns and drugs to public-health breakdowns and alliances with terrorists. Richard Norton, a Naval War College scholar who has developed a taxonomy of what he calls feral cities, says that there are numerous places slipping toward Mogadishu, perhaps the only fully feral city nowadays. As public services disintegrate, residents are forced to hire private security or pay criminals for protection. The police in Brazil have fallen back on a containment policy against gangs ruling the favelas, while the rich try to stay above the fray, fueling the busiest civilian helicopter traffic in the world (there are 240 helipads in S-o Paulo; there are 10 in New York City). In Johannesburg, much of downtown, including the stock exchange, has been abandoned to squatters and drug gangs. In Mexico City, crime is soaring despite the presence of 91,000 policemen. Karachi, Pakistan, where 40 percent of the population lives in slums, plays host to gangland violence and to Al Qaeda cells. As cities around the world descend into disorder, the United States may have to step up training local militaries to undertake armed interventions. Writing in The Naval War College Review last fall, Norton warned that ''traditionally, problems of urban decay and associated issues, such as crime, have been seen as domestic issues best dealt with by internal security or police forces. That will no longer be an option.'' Fertile Red States By NOAM SCHEIBER A fter this year's presidential election, pundits agreed that George W. Bush won by turning out conservative voters in greater numbers than Democrats turned out liberals. According to Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, that feat will only be easier for Republican candidates in the future. Instead of having to rely on the same conservative voters, Republicans may benefit from the fact that there simply will be more voters in conservative states. The reason, Longman argued in The Washington Post this summer, is that voters in red states are having children at much higher rates than their counterparts in blue states. The numbers that Longman revealed were striking. In 2002, Utah, where Bush made his strongest showing this year, had the country's highest fertility rate (the number of births per thousand women of child-bearing age). By contrast, liberal Vermont had the lowest fertility rate that year. Furthermore, 15 out of the country's 17 most fertile states went for Bush in 2000. The Gore states today have an average replacement rate of 1.89 births per woman -- far below the rate of 2.1 necessary to prevent the population from shrinking. (The average rate of the Bush states is 2.06.) These trends are particularly meaningful when you consider that political convictions are often inherited. As Longman notes: ''It's a truism of social science that people wind up having the political and religious orientation of their parents.'' You might object that state fertility rates are a crude unit of measurement, since states are not politically uniform and since people move in and out of them over time. But the evidence became even more compelling when Longman broke it down by demographic group. The fertility rate among Mexican-Americans, who tend to lean Democratic, is high but rapidly declining. Meanwhile, the Puerto Rican and African-American fertility rates are now only slightly higher than that of white America. But rural and religious white voters -- voters who went disproportionately for Bush -- seem to be reproducing at a rate far above the national average. What accounts for the differences? Two factors, according to Longman. First, raising a middle-class child today is expensive. ''People don't have an economic reason to have kids,'' Longman says. ''They need another reason. God may provide that.'' Second, the cost of raising a child is much higher in urban areas than it is in rural areas. If Longman's math is right, then the slide from an evenly divided electorate in 2000 to a 51-48 split this year could be the beginning of a depressing trend for Democrats. Foolproof Death Penalty, The By EMILY BAZELON O pponents of the death penalty have increasingly emphasized the danger of placing the wrong people on death row. When there is a possibility that the innocent will be convicted, they ask, how can the state risk the finality of execution? This year, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, took that problem to heart and proposed a solution -- error-free capital punishment. In May, a blue-ribbon panel convened by Romney offered up recommendations for a death penalty that would be ''as infallible as humanly possible.'' Among the high points of the report: execute only the ''worst of the worst'' -- certain cop killers, terrorists, multiple murderers and individuals in a few other select categories. Pay for top-notch defense lawyers. Caution juries about the questionable value of confessions, eyewitness identifications and testimony by jailhouse snitches. Require scientific evidence to corroborate guilt, with DNA matches as the benchmark. Set up an independent panel to watch out for crime-lab errors. Create a death-penalty-review commission. And base death sentences on a ''no doubt'' standard of proof. Philosophers may gripe about this last requirement -- can anyone be that sure of anything? -- but the commission says it's trying to ensure that not a single juror harbors lingering uncertainty. Romney promptly embraced the commission's report. But with the Legislature firmly in Democratic hands and public support for the death penalty on the decline in the state, the proposal appears to be stalled. The governor hasn't even introduced a bill based on his commission's proposals. For their part, the commissioners say they hope their report will serve as a guide to states with the death penalty, if not to Massachusetts. But Franklin Zimring, a law professor at Berkeley, believes the commission's highly restrictive criteria will have little attraction for determined death-penalty states. The significance of the commission's work, Zimring says, is that it shows how capital punishment has become a luxury. The outgoing governor of Illinois commuted the death sentences of all death-row inmates; meanwhile, the number of people sentenced to death across the United States reached a 30-year low. Now Massachusetts has dreamed up a death penalty that will apply to very few real criminals, suggesting capital punishment isn't necessary to keep the streets safe. ''This may be the first effort to write a solely symbolic criminal statute,'' Zimring said of the Massachusetts proposal. ''We have entered the postmodern era of death-penalty discourse.'' EMILY BAZELON Genetic Family Values By RUSSELL SHORTO T he bond between mother and child is an elemental part of the human fabric. So, some would say, is the promiscuous tendency of the male. With genetic foundations being discovered or claimed for everything from spirituality to fear, it should come as no surprise that two studies this year found evidence that both of these varieties of love reduce to genes and brain chemistry. The glue between mother and infant, according to work done at the National Research Council Institute of Neuroscience in Rome, acts like an opiate. Baby mice genetically altered to be unresponsive to opiates did not cry out when separated from their mothers, as normal mice do. According to Dr. Francesca D'Amato and her team, this supports the notion that a mother's affection works like a pain-relieving opiate in her baby's body. Maternal caresses are not just psychologically soothing, the work suggests, but physically so. Such a chemical mother-child link would seem to leave dads out of the loop, looking for love in all the wrong places. But here too genetics yields insight. It seems that the vole (a small rodent) comes in two varieties: meadow and prairie. Male meadow voles are sexually rapacious, moving endlessly from mate to mate and leaving behind a succession of single-parent households, while the male prairie vole settles in with the female of his choosing and helps raise the young. The difference is the presence of a certain gene, the vasopressin receptor, found in the ventral pallium, one of the brain's pleasure and reward centers. The homebody vole has the gene, which gives him a pleasurable response to sex with his mate and encourages him to stick around. Without it, the meadow vole moves on, always hungering, never sated. By transferring the gene into the meadow vole, however, Dr. Larry Young of Emory University found that the wanton creature instantly stopped roving and turned into a veritable prairie home companion. ''It indicates that, in terms of evolution, a mutation in a single gene could have altered behavior,'' Young says. ''And it means this mutation could disrupt the ability to form bonds, both in extreme cases, such as autism, and in behavior that we wouldn't call a disease, such as promiscuity.'' Both studies also highlight a connection between love and addictive drugs, indicating that such drugs work by hijacking the brain's natural reward circuitry. But while the work points to future research in drug addiction and autism, scientists balk at the idea of using genetics to alter social behavior. ''I don't think we'll be selling drugs to women to help them keep their men,'' Young says. Giga-Waves By CLIVE THOMPSON I n March 2001, the first officer of the cruise ship Caledonian Star saw a wave that chilled his soul. It stood almost 100 feet tall, towering over the surrounding waves, and it didn't slope -- it was a sheer wall of water. It smashed into the ship with such force that it broke windows and flooded the command deck. This watery beast was what scientists are now calling a rogue wave. According to a study released this year, there are more of them roaming the oceans than anyone ever imagined. In July, the European Space Agency announced that it had conducted the first satellite study of the oceans, looking specifically for rogues. In a three-week period, the satellites discovered 10 rogues, some taller than 85 feet. The scientists involved said they were stunned by the results, because for centuries skeptics dismissed reports of gigantic waves as myths. Wave equations normally describe an average wave height; they don't describe rogues. Now scientists are rushing to produce models that illustrate the behavior of rogues -- which rear up and tower twice as high as nearby waves. ''They come out of nowhere, and they're short-lived,'' says Martin Holt, a scientist with Britain's meteorological office. ''You could be in the same area of sea, and you wouldn't even know they were there.'' Holt is a member of the MaxWave project, a three-year effort to understand what causes rogues. In Norway, one researcher has successfully created his own minirogues in a tank of water. If rogues are truly common, the implications for sea safety are significant. Every year, big ships are lost at sea; are some being done in by rogues? Critics say today's ships aren't strong enough to withstand rogue waves, because they weren't designed to face down massive walls of water. A rogue can hit with a force of more than 100 tons per square meter. Certifying agencies and oil companies -- which operate offshore rigs -- are now paying close attention to the MaxWave research. Because if the scientists are right, the biggest sea monsters aren't beneath the surface -- they're right on top. Global Political Positioning System, The By PAUL TOUGH L et's say you somehow find yourself stuck behind enemy lines in the new divided America -- a Democrat in suburban Dallas, say, or a Republican in the East Village. Surely there's someone around who thinks the way you do; but how to locate that lonesome kindred spirit? Now there's a solution: a simple application you can install on your BlackBerry or cellphone (preferably the latest kind, equipped with G.P.S.) that displays the precise redness and blueness of the spot where you're standing -- and points you in the direction of redder or bluer neighborhoods nearby. The program is called RedBlue (pronounced ''red or blue''), and it is the invention of Jason Uechi, a partner in a New York advertising firm who is also a serious tech-head. In January, Uechi stumbled across an innovative Web project called Fundrace.org, which uses publicly available information from the Federal Election Commission to create maps of various cities showing the exact source of every donation of more than $200 to Republican or Democratic candidates or committees. The data generate a vivid image of political geography. The New York City map, unsurprisingly, shows mostly blue dots, for Democratic donors, and the map turns a deep aquamarine on the Upper West Side. But there are also some big red circles, denoting Republican givers, mostly clustered on the Upper East Side and around Wall Street. Uechi borrowed the Fundrace database, wrote some Java code and created a program that users can download onto their phones. He released it in October and offered it free to most users. When you fire it up, the G.P.S. sensor in your phone figures out where you are and which way you're facing, and using the Fundrace data, shows you pre-election donations for each party from the neighborhood you're in. And it can expand its radius to 60 miles, and let you know where to head to find more Republicans or Democrats. Hawkishness as Evolutionary Holdover By CHRISTOPHER SHEA A merican overconfidence on the road to Baghdad has been well catalogued, but it is worth remembering that the United States hardly monopolizes military hubris. Why, for instance, did Saddam Hussein conclude that he could survive a showdown with the United States? And why did the Taliban, rather than turn over Al Qaeda leaders, roll the dice on war with America? Dominic D.P. Johnson offers a bio-political answer to such puzzles in his book ''Overconfidence and War,'' which was published this year by Harvard University Press. ''By virtue of human psychology,'' Johnson writes, ''we should fully expect a bias toward overconfidence by all sides in conflicts today, whether they are superpowers, small states, freedom fighters or terrorists.'' To reach this conclusion, Johnson applies the logic of evolution to international relations. Following one of his mentors, the Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham, he suggests that overconfidence might once have been helpful in war and conflict. On the ancient African savannah, it was actually rational to misestimate your own capacities: a fearsome appearance and bold tactics could intimidate the enemy and help carry the day during lightning raids on enemy camps. But today, given modern weaponry, bureaucratic planning and mass armies, a cocky disposition is as likely to be suicidal as it is glorious. Military overconfidence, in other words, is a psychological holdover -- a cognitive appendix -- from an earlier period in human history. It is perhaps most dangerous when it prompts a decision for war in the first place. And it could be the X-factor explaining the otherwise inexplicable in recent military history: French faith in the Maginot line, Hitler's drive into Russia, the American failure to heed the lessons of French defeat in Vietnam. Most humans are prone to overestimating themselves, but leaders (who are inordinately ambitious and, by definition, have suffered few recent professional setbacks) are especially susceptible. Fittingly, the cover of Johnson's book features George W. Bush in the famous flight suit, flashing an exuberant thumbs-up. Income-Variability Anxiety By NOAM SCHEIBER F or decades, political scientists have believed that the economy is the key to a president's re-election chances: when the economy is buoyant, as it was in 1984 and 1996, the incumbent should cruise to victory. When the economy is dicey, as it was in 1980 and 1992, the advantage tilts toward the challenger. So it is no surprise that with every major economic indicator looking good this year, leading political-science models tended to show George W. Bush winning easily. That obviously didn't happen. And the reason, according to a recent series of papers by Jacob Hacker, a Yale political scientist, is that while incomes have been rising, so has the degree to which those incomes fluctuate. The problem for an incumbent, Hacker argues, is that voters care a great deal about having a stable income, not just about having a large one. When Hacker began tinkering with ways to measure the instability of family income, what he found amazed him. Between the early 1970's and the early 90's, the index of income volatility he devised rose by a factor of 5 (though it fell somewhat toward the end of the 90's). Put differently, a family earning $50,000 a year in 1974 (in today's dollars) had a 2 in 3 chance of making anywhere between $38,000 and $62,000 in 1975. But by the early 90's, a family earning $50,000 would have a 2 in 3 chance of making between $30,000 and $70,000 the following year. The risk of a substantial drop-off in income was much greater. Moreover, the trend wasn't confined to less-well-educated workers. Workers with and without college training saw a similar rise in the volatility of their family incomes. A conservative might argue that most people would gladly accept the risk of seeing their income fall in exchange for the possibility of a large increase. But the social scientific evidence suggests the opposite. Behavioral economists have identified a phenomenon known as ''loss aversion'' -- people's tendency to dislike losing things they already have much more intensely than they like gaining things of equal value. No wonder rising income volatility makes voters more and more anxious about their economic prospects. ''The economy did much less for Bush than you'd have expected,'' Hacker says. ''I would posit one reason is that people feel less secure.'' Inkless Magazine, The By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN F or its latest issue, Visionaire, the high-style, limited-edition publication, corralled Rachel Whiteread, Adam Fuss, Robert Longo, Karl Lagerfeld and a dozen other big art and fashion names to experiment with the technology of laser cutting. The technique, in essence, entails scanning drawings or photographs into a computer, which then prompts a laser to burn holes, or shapes, into paper or any other material. It may be the first inkless (not to mention textless) magazine, if you're not counting those on the Internet, of course. To be precise, the magazine is really a portfolio of laser-cut multiples, all made with heavy black paper, loosely slid between shiny, colored, thick cardboard pages. The magazine cover is silver and black, part laser-cut, part silver-foil-stamped with the image of an apartment building. The look of the laser-cut works ranges from a fine, almost imperceptible black mesh to macrame. If you hold them at a certain angle, either up to the light or so that light can pass through the holes onto the magazine pages, you can see some of the images as faint, ghostly reflections. This is not always easy to do, and the temperamental, alchemical aspect is vaguely akin to holographs or old daguerreotypes, as is the implicit magic that comes with finding a face or flower, as if conjured up, out of the darkness. Fuss photographed a shy girl, who seems more reticent because of the difficulty of making her image out; Mario Sorrenti has printed a skull; Maurizio Cattelan, an inscription in Arabic. Whiteread's work resembles an exquisite doily, and Simon Periton's the back of a torn wicker chair. Laser cutting and engraving have been used by industry for at least a decade to make signs, cut lace and leather, do fine wood inlays and cut fashion patterns. ''The art world is always the last to embrace new technologies for lack of money,'' says David Lasry of Two Palms Press in New York, who has used the technology to make works with the artists Chuck Close and Terry Winters. ''My family went to Yellowstone this summer. Every little trinket was made with laser cutting -- coasters, cutouts of bears, pine trees, every cheesy souvenir. It's just a tool. It saves us months and months of time and is more exact than the human hand. But ultimately, it's what you do with it and whether what you make is good to look at or think about.'' Invitation-Only, Incentivized Campaign Rally, The By MICHAEL CROWLEY I t used to be that campaign rallies symbolized the messy glory of democracy. They were a chance for voters of all stripes to convene noisily and size up a candidate at close range. This year, however, the Bush campaign turned its rallies into something quite the opposite: an organizing tool designed to mobilize its core supporters. It was just one way in which the Bushies masterfully harnessed their volunteers' excitement and refracted it, like sunlight through a magnifying glass, into concentrated results on the ground. The first innovation was exclusivity. Whereas Kerry rallies were generally open to all comers, Bush's events were largely invitation-only. Tickets were offered first to proven supporters of the president. Uninvited walk-ups at R.N.C.-sponsored rallies, meanwhile, sometimes had their names cross-referenced against voter files and contribution records. Many people were asked to sign an endorsement of Bush. But simple loyalty wasn't always enough. Would-be attendees were told that they could increase their chances of getting a coveted ticket or earning a spot nearer to the candidate by putting in some grunt work for the campaign. A prime seat was earned through phone calls, door-knocking, planting yard signs. Another twist was that the work of volunteers often continued long after the cheering stopped. The Bush campaign set up phone banks outside its rallies and led pumped-up supporters straight from the applause lines to the phone lines. Volunteers leaving events were handed campaign signs and sent off on local door-knocking missions. Sometimes they were even herded into buses for canvassing precincts. The concept, says Ken Mehlman, Bush's campaign manager, was ''based on the notion that if you want more of something, you ought to encourage it. We looked at everything the campaign did, and said, 'How do we recruit and encourage more volunteers, and how do we have synergy?''' During the campaign, many Democrats sneered at such tactics. Invitation-only rallies and so-called ''loyalty oaths'' were the stuff of banana-republic dictatorships, they said. But the G.O.P.'s stunning Election Day turnout has them singing a more respectful tune. ''It's easy for Democrats to mock tactics like these,'' says the Democratic strategist Jim Jordan. ''It seems so militaristic and goonish. But it also speaks volumes about why Republicans keep winning presidential races.'' Kill Midlevel Terrorists By DAVID GLENN W hat if Al Qaeda is less an organization than a franchisable idea? What if the future of terrorism doesn't involve tightly coordinated global conspiracies but rather small and self-generated social networks? These prospects have counterterrorism officials scrambling to explore the burgeoning academic field of social network analysis. Typically, network theorists examine civilians' social circles. (This year, three sociologists mapped romantic relationships at a Midwestern high school. Their models revealed that students almost never take up with the exes of their exes' current partner.) Now, however, the Pentagon would like to dismantle terrorist cells with the same methods. The most visible scholar plowing this terrain is Kathleen M. Carley of Carnegie Mellon University, who is supported by the Defense Department's Insight program (aka Interpreting Network Structures to obtain Intelligence on Groups of Hidden Terrorists). In one recent paper, Carley and her colleagues analyzed the cell that carried out the bloody American Embassy bombings in Africa in 1998. If the police had detected this group before the attacks, whom should they have targeted first? Wadih al Hage was the member with the highest level of ''degree centrality'' (direct social ties with other cell members) and ''betweenness centrality'' (that is, centrality in the cell's general diffusion of tasks and ideas). But Ahmed the German had the cell's highest levels of ''cognitive load'' (that is, he juggled the greatest number of tasks, resources and negotiations) and ''task exclusivity'' (the largest number of tasks that no other member of the cell could perform). Carley's answer: the removal of a midlevel operative like Ahmed would have done more to destabilize the cell, even though a superficial glance at a graph of the cell network would have pegged Wadih al Hage as the most important figure. Of course, field agents who stumble onto a potential terrorist cell have a difficult enough time learning the players' actual names, much less their levels of task exclusivity. It is not clear that network analysis will ever prove useful at the front lines. Carley offers one option for future research, however: she wonders whether flooding a cell with wrong information can be even more disruptive than removing its key members. Land-Mine-Detecting Plants By CLIVE THOMPSON T his January, the Danish company Aresa Biodetection announced that it had produced an unusual new variant of thale-cress, a small flowering weed: a strain that turns red in the presence of land mines. Aresa scientists had genetically modified the weed so that it reacts to nitrogen dioxide, a gas commonly emitted by explosives. A result is a new way to detect mines: sprinkle the seeds over a suspect area, wait a few weeks for the thale-cress to grow and -- presto -- wherever they turn red, you have danger. ''It's much more efficient,'' says Simon Ostergaard, Aresa's C.E.O. ''It's very tedious to clear mines the normal way. You're putting a stick in the ground every three centimeters. One man can sometimes only do two square meters a day.'' Given that there are tens of millions of explosives still strewn across 80 countries -- killing and injuring more than 8,000 people a year -- the idea has intriguing merits. The plants could help free up precious abandoned farmland by showing farmers where it is still safe to tread. What's more, the weeds can be genetically altered to detect many other environmental hazards, like heavy metals in the soil. Still, there are plenty of hurdles: Aresa is hoping its invention will pass Europe's strict regulations governing genetically modified crops. Critics aren't convinced the plants are accurate enough, since land-mine clearing cannot, for obvious reasons, tolerate errors. (Worse, cows might be attracted to the weeds growing over mines, with disastrous consequences.) Nevertheless, Ostergaard says he hopes to begin trials in Africa next year. If he is successful, the symbolism couldn't be more lovely: the brutality of land mines quelled by a humble flower. Lawfare By SCOTT MALCOMSON T he Prussian military strategist Karl von Clausewitz never said that international law is war by other means. That distinction falls to the conservative pundit John Fonte, writing this year in The National Interest. In his article ''Democracy's Trojan Horse,'' he accused Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International USA -- standing in for the global human rights movement -- of waging ''what could be characterized as 'lawfare' against the exercise of democratic sovereignty by the American nation-state.'' Fonte worried that this century could become, in another coinage, ''the 'post-democratic' century -- the century in which liberal democracy as we know it is slowly, almost imperceptibly, replaced by a new form of global governance.'' Fonte paints a vivid word-portrait of a stateless, unelected class of ''transnational progressives'' who are quietly undermining democracy in the name of human rights (as they define them). Ultimately, he envisions the United States as locked in a two-front war both with post-democrats and with reactionary ''pre-democrats'' like Osama bin Laden, although he clearly finds left-leaning international lawyers more insidious and, over the long term, more dangerous. Fonte is not alone in noting the rise of a new supranational class. His vision is echoed in an influential book by Anne-Marie Slaughter, ''A New World Order,'' published this year. Slaughter, a former president of the American Society of International Law and in no evident way a conservative, identifies an increasingly powerful transnational network of government officials, N.G.O. representatives and businesspeople that makes Fonte's nightmare seem rather modest. This network administers globalization, whether in trade, security or political idealism. Slaughter does not exactly champion her ''new world order,'' but she does present it as a reality of globalization. Better for a nation to, as Slaughter would put it, ''disaggregate'' some of its sovereign power now than to find itself cut from the global team later. For Kenneth Anderson of American University, however, an aggressively international-law-based approach to human rights is something of a Western hothouse flower: it is able to survive only in the historical parenthesis between the end of the cold war and the coming rise of powers like China and India. ''No one's ever going to stop talking the language of international law,'' Anderson concedes. But in his view, a universal system of rules and values, agreed to by treaty and monitored and uniformly enforced by international bureaucracies and courts, will become a relic of elite utopianism -- regardless of whether it was considered a promise or a threat. Then the lawfare will end, while the real warfare will continue. Listening for Cancer By CLIVE THOMPSON T hree years ago, the nanotechnology expert James Gimzewski realized something startling about human cells: since they have many tiny moving parts, they might be producing tiny vibrations. And since all vibrations produce noise, it would be theoretically possible to listen to the sound of a cell. Gimzewski set about adapting an extremely small device to measure these vibrations and then with another device proceeded to amplify them loud enough for human ears. He discovered that a yeast cell produced about 1,000 vibrations a second. When he amplified the signal, a musical hum filled the room. ''It wasn't at all what I expected,'' he recalls. ''It sounded beautiful.'' Beautiful, and also potentially revolutionary. Gimzewski says that his technique could become a unique tool in the war against cancer: to figure out if a cell is malignant, doctors could simply listen to it. When a cell turns cancerous, its internal machinery alters: it might divide more rapidly, and its walls could take a new shape. Those changes, Gimzewski surmises, would produce distinctive rates of vibration and thus distinctive noises. He has already measured the acoustics of some cells going through death cycles. When he measured an inert yeast cell, its lack of movement produced a dead-sounding hiss. And when he immersed a bunch of yeast in alcohol, the cells emitted a creepy ''screaming'' sound as they suddenly perished. Even minute changes -- like getting warmer -- make the cells sing differently. Gimzewski calls his technique sonocytology, and in August he published the first paper on this field in the journal Science. Gimzewski's work has attracted some unusual enthusiasts. Representatives of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi contacted him (''they apparently thought I'd discovered 'the language of life,''' he says), and a horror-movie director asked if he could use the sound of screaming cells in his soundtrack. But cancer specialists are seriously interested, and Gimzewski is now trying to adapt his device to listen to human cells. Mainstream Mash-Up, The By WM. FERGUSON N ot so long ago, mash-ups -- unauthorized remixes combining the vocals from one recording with the instrumental track from another -- were musical samizdat. Beyond the inherent fascination of hearing, say, Beyonce singing with Nirvana, this was their primal thrill: they were illegal. This year, however, mash-ups moved from the ghetto of bootleg CD's to the speed racks of Virgin Records. The mainstreaming of the mash-up began with the release of a bootleg known as ''The Grey Album.'' A 45-minute sound collage combining the vocals from the rapper Jay-Z's ''Black Album'' with loops from the Beatles' White Album, ''The Grey Album'' was an underground sensation -- and a lightning rod for litigation. After EMI, which owns the White Album copyrights, threatened legal action, nearly 200 Web sites posted tracks from the ''Grey Album'' in protest. In a single day -- Grey Tuesday, Feb. 24 -- one million ''Grey Album'' sound files were downloaded. Rather than bemoan the lawlessness of the Internet, the recording industry did what it does best. It jumped on the bandwagon. Around the time of Grey Tuesday, a New York D.J. named Jeremy Brown got a surprising call from the singer Beck. Professionally known as DJ Reset, Brown was responsible for ''Frontin' on Debra,'' a strikingly graceful mash-up of a languid Beck song with a Neptunes track that includes a cameo by Jay-Z. It had become a favorite on Internet file-sharing networks, eventually receiving airplay on commercial radio stations. According to Brown, Beck said that he approved of the mix and encouraged him to contact his label, Interscope. By mid-October, ''Frontin' on Debra'' became America's first major-label mash-up (on Interscope), available for download on Apple's iTunes Music Store. Jay-Z himself actively embraced the form this fall, working with the leaden rock band Linkin Park. Their collaboration yielded the album ''Collision Course,'' a rather pedestrian entry in the already saturated category of ''Black Album'' mash-ups. No record company can be faulted for chasing a hit formula, but corporate-sponsored mash-ups like ''Collision Course'' may end up killing the genre. The joy of the mash-up lies in the certainty that no matter how many lawyers are involved, Madonna and the Sex Pistols could never coexist except in a flash of inspiration. Also working against the legal mash-up: you're expected to pay for it. Making Vaccines Good Business By DAVID GLENN L eft to their own devices, major drug companies are unlikely to pay much attention to malaria, tuberculosis and other illnesses that afflict poor countries but spare the prosperous West. As a result, the prevention of such diseases has typically been put in the hands of the World Health Organization and other nonprofit entities. But that approach has serious limits, according to an increasingly influential group of market-oriented scholars. Effective treatments and vaccines could be invented and disseminated much more quickly, these scholars say, if private pharmaceutical companies were brought into the game. And for that to happen -- so the argument runs -- Big Pharma needs to be reassured of making a profit. In their new book, ''Strong Medicine: Creating Incentives for Pharmaceutical Research on Neglected Diseases,'' Michael Kremer, an economist at Harvard, and Rachel Glennerster, who directs the Poverty Action Lab at M.I.T., argue that Western governments and foundations should make a legally binding promise to pharmaceutical and biotech companies: if you invent a safe and effective vaccine for malaria, tuberculosis or H.I.V., we'll buy the first (say) 200 million doses at a respectable profit-guaranteeing price. One great virtue of this scheme, the authors suggest, is that the public would pay for only a successful product. If a company invests millions in research but fails to develop a vaccine that meets the contract's specifications, no money would change hands. Kremer -- who contracted malaria himself while working as a volunteer in Kenya in 1986 -- likens his plan to mathematics prizes that are awarded if and only if someone proves a particular theorem. Without such incentives, he says, pharmaceutical companies will steer clear of cash-strapped countries where patent rights are weakly enforced. Already, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has expressed an interest in supporting Kremer and Glennerster's proposal. (The foundation may try to assemble a consortium of donors, perhaps including the World Bank, governments and other private foundations, to make the purchase pledge.) Of course, you might prefer an alternative world in which pharmaceutical companies make fatal diseases their primary concern and pour money into cures for impotence only when offered large prizes by eccentric software moguls. But Kremer and Glennerster may be offering the next best thing. McProfiling By STEPHEN MIHM I magine rolling up to your favorite fast-food restaurant in the family minivan, kids in the back. As you pull into a parking place, a camera on the roof of the burger joint silently zooms in on your vehicle. By the time you've opened the door, a computer has analyzed the image and, based on previous encounters with vehicles the size and shape of the one you're driving, classified you as a likely consumer of, say, chicken nuggets and fries. The computer then instructs the kitchen -- via flashing computer monitors -- to start preparing your supposed favorite dishes before you walk through the door. Sound fanciful? Not at all: a primitive version of just such a device is already on the market. Known as HyperActive Bob, the system is the progeny of HyperActive Technologies, a start-up company based in Pittsburgh. A decade ago, the company's founders began studying a problem that has plagued the fast-food business ever since Ray Kroc set up shop beneath the first pair of golden arches: food is fast only because it is cooked before the customer shows up. But predicting when and how many customers will arrive is next to impossible. Make too few sandwiches, and customers get irked -- the food isn't fast. Make too many, and the food ends up in the trash. By monitoring the amount of incoming foot and vehicle traffic -- and constantly learning from past experience -- HyperActive Bob takes the guesswork out of cooking for the masses. And at a cost of a few thousand dollars, it is within reach of the average fast-food franchise. So far, stripped-down versions of Bob have made their debuts at several chains, including McDonald's, Burger King and Taco Bell; more advanced versions that can predict orders on the basis of the kind of vehicle you drive are in the works. Yet crude models that merely monitor the volume of traffic have already paid remarkable dividends. In restaurants using Bob, wait times have dropped by a minute or more, while the time that burgers, fries and other artery-clogging fare sits around has also declined by 50 to 75 percent. Food is rarely wasted, and employee-retention rates have risen, largely because the device tends to make working the grill far less stressful. Even upper-level employees have taken to Bob. ''I've been a manager for 28 years,'' one McDonald's employee was quoted as saying after seeing Bob at work. ''It's the most impressive thing I've ever seen.'' Micropolis, The By JON GERTNER I t's probably easiest to define a micropolis by what it isn't -- namely, a metropolis, which typically comprises a dense ''core'' city of more than 50,000 people surrounded by a large cluster of suburbs and exurbs. Since 1950, the United States Census Bureau has divided the country into broad swaths of metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. According to the census, you were either in a metro area or you weren't. Any middle ground between big-city living and remote rural living went unrecognized. That's no longer the case. This is the first full year the federal government has gathered data on 573 regions sprinkled around the country known as micropolitan areas: locales with a core city of fewer than 50,000 (as small as 10,000). In the South, that means Mount Airy, N.C., the model for Mayberry in ''The Andy Griffith Show''; in the Midwest, Ashtabula, Ohio; in the West, Heber, Utah; and in the East, Corning, N.Y. There's no typical micropolis -- Dodge City, Kan., and Bennington, Vt., present extreme variations within the category. Still, micro cities are generally more countrified than metro cities. Hub airports are usually very far away; so is good sushi. In addition, the suburbs of micropolitan cities often resemble the low-density exurbs at the fringe of many metro areas. Houses sit on large lots. Big-box retailers serve as commercial centers. The point of the micropolitan category is not so much to give government agencies extra data to crunch. It's to track the growth -- as well as the character -- of a type of influential urban area that already exists but is barely understood by demographers. In this regard, the census is far behind the business community, which has been tapping far-flung small-city America for at least two decades. Wal-Mart and Applebee's, in fact, have built vast empires from the legions who live there. So has the national Republican Party. Strictly speaking, the re-election of George W. Bush may have been less attributable to the so-called rural vote (which can still lie well outside micro or metro areas) than to the micropolitan vote. According to Robert Lang at Virginia Tech, in the newly defined micropolitan areas in the United States, Bush won 60.6 percent of the vote to Kerry's 39.2 percent. And in Ohio, 27 of the 29 micropolitan areas voted red -- a difference that by itself accounts for Bush's victory margin. Neo-Secessionism By JACK HITT E nraged by the president's war and still angry about the last election, the Massachusetts Legislature recently called for a special meeting of New England states to consider secession from the country. Recent, that is, if 1814 is recent. That year, at the Hartford Convention, delegates from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont toyed with an idea the country would hear a good bit more of half a century later: that secession was a right, embedded in the Constitution. These days, in the wake of George W. Bush's re-election, talk of secession is once again whipping through the New England states. Proposals are being floated for a ''Coastopia'' that unites the West Coast and East Coast blue states along with a few select heartland states. One Internet pamphleteer argued: ''In the middle of the country, we have taken Iowa and Illinois, mostly because we need the fine produce of Iowa's soil, and the museums in Chicago are fabulous.'' A proposed map showing the United States of Canada just above ''JesusLand'' has become an instant Internet classic. Paul Lewis, professor of English at Boston College, has written several articles exploring secession and the logical step beyond. Last year he noted that ''Gore's states are contiguous either to Canada or to other Gore states,'' except New Mexico. ''In the most peaceful and democratic way, without invoking images of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, these states need to secede from the Union, reform into provinces and join Canada.'' When contacted, old secession organizations in the Deep South were quick with advice. ''I've heard about this,'' said Michael Hill, president of the League of the South, which advocates the modern secession of old Dixie. ''I say to the Yankee states, 'Go, and be in a hurry about it.''' Growing serious, Hill observed that there isn't really a red-state-blue-state divide. If you examine the map closely, many counties in blue states are red. By population, the real divide is rural versus urban. ''I would encourage them to start secession groups in the cities,'' he said. ''I've always liked the city-state idea. It worked quite well in the Middle Ages.'' But if it didn't work out, and there had to be a War of Southern Aggression to save the Union, Hill saw some good even in that. ''We could go up there and get back some of the stolen silverware they looted from our ancestors 140 years ago.'' Nonhegemonic Curating By CHRISTOPHER SHEA T he opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian this September was a landmark event in the recognition of the history and the plight of native peoples. But the grand opening may prove to be a landmark in the history -- and perhaps the plight -- of museum curating as well. Because Native American mythology is rooted in the idea that Indians have always inhabited this continent, scientifically informed discussion of how North America came to be populated has been banished from the museum's halls. The exhibits, moreover, reject the supposedly Eurocentric notion of historical development. ''Things are looked at very cyclically, not in a linear way,'' one curator told The Washington Post. Thus, spear- and arrowheads dating from 9000 B.C. to the 20th century appear together on one wall, unlabeled, in a beautiful array resembling schools of fish; to get even sketchy details about their provenance, you have to consult a separate electronic display. In another gallery, a young Indian discusses glass blowing on a video screen, alongside images of Tlingit house posts from Alaska, dating to 1830. The implicit message: Indian artists from across the ages are participants in one unified culture. Elsewhere, dozens of earthen figurines are accompanied by only this wall notation: ''Their world is ancient and modern, and forever changing, with memories from the beginning of everything.'' Where specific tribes are discussed, ''community curators'' selected by the tribes -- not anthropologists, not historians -- tell the stories. Not everyone appreciates the new hegemony-free museum. Edward Rothstein of The New York Times complained, ''The result is that monotony sets in; every tribe is equal, and so is every idea.'' But judging from attendance figures -- a healthy 275,400 in October, the first full month of operation -- this new kind of museum has its fans. Certainly, the desire for a fresh start is understandable. After all, curators dismantled the archaic Indian dioramas in the National Museum of Natural History, across the mall, only this year. Phraselator, The By ROBERT MACKEY N o Americans suffer more from their inability to understand, or make themselves understood by, non-English speakers than America's soldiers in Iraq. That's why this year the Pentagon equipped thousands of them with the Phraselator, a hand-held electronic gadget that allows the soldiers to deliver hundreds of useful phrases, prerecorded in Arabic, to the Iraqis they encounter. The device, which looks like an oversize Palm Pilot with a speaker and a microphone on top, breaks into Arabic when it hears an equivalent phrase in English spoken by a user whose voice it recognizes. Like an electronic parrot, the Phraselator may not be much of a conversationalist and can lack charm -- sample phrases include ''Not a step farther,'' ''Put your hands on the wall'' and ''Everyone stop talking'' -- but its boosters claim that because the phrases are prerecorded by native speakers and not computer-generated, the monologues have ''a more natural feel.'' The Phraselator is marketed as ''a complete solution for cross-cultural awareness.'' Its creators at the Pentagon-financed company VoxTec admit that even the new model, the P2, has a drawback: it is still just a ''one-way'' translation device. In other words, it phraselates perfectly well from English into Arabic (or any of the 59 other ''target languages'' it has mastered so far), but the device is no better at understanding foreign languages than the Americans who are wielding it. So the Phraselator allows occupiers to issue commands, but it does not help them comprehend any of what the occupied may have to say in response. Despite this limitation, VoxTec is planning to roll out a consumer version soon, so it won't be long before American tourists will be able to make demands and deliver orders in foreign languages without having to learn a single word of them. Popular Constitutionalism By JEFFREY ROSEN N ow that it seems clear that Republicans will control the courts for the foreseeable future, canny liberals are beginning to wean themselves of the romantic idea that judges inevitably favor liberal values. And now these liberals have a rallying cry -- ''popular constitutionalism'' -- which appears in the title of a book published this year by Larry Kramer, the new dean of Stanford Law School. In the early 90's, Kramer became interested in the idea that the public might do a better job of protecting its rights than the courts. He became convinced that the framers of the Constitution expected it to be interpreted not by unelected judges but by the people themselves -- through petitions, juries, voting and civil disobedience. Several years later, he was astonished to find the Supreme Court striking down laws one after the other and claiming to do so in the name of the founders' vision. Kramer is not the only scholar who has rediscovered the virtues of popular constitutionalism: the movement has both liberal and conservative adherents. Rather than dividing left from right, his book has divided populists from antipopulists. The book was sharply criticized in The New York Times by Laurence Tribe of Harvard, an unapologetic antipopulist who implied that popular constitutionalism could lead to mob rule. Kramer notes that the same predictions, which he considers elitist and alarmist, have been made throughout American history. He argues in his book that progressive movements have typically been popular movements, with the anomalous exception of the Warren Court, which led progressives to embrace the naive belief that they could achieve their goals through the courts rather than through politics. He considers the liberal embrace of judicial supremacy to be a ''shortsighted and dangerous strategy.'' Instead, Kramer says, liberals should resurrect political tools for controlling the courts that presidents from Jefferson to Lincoln embraced -- from Congressional filibusters of controversial nominees to efforts to strip the court of jurisdiction to hear controversial cases. Although these tools were used by conservatives to resist the civil rights movement, Kramer laments that they have been repudiated since the 60's by an unlikely alliance of antipopulists on both the left and right. ''From a historical perspective, it is a truly bizarre state of affairs,'' he says. Presenteeism By JASON ZENGERLE F or some bosses, there's no greater satisfaction than hearing the coughs and sniffles of their workers. Those sickly sounds say something good about their employees: namely, that they're hard-working and dedicated enough to show up at the office even when they're under the weather. Employees who come to work sick, the thinking goes, are a sign of a healthy company. But that thinking may soon change, thanks to a growing body of research on a phenomenon called presenteeism -- the problem of workers being on the job but, because of illness, not operating at top form. According to some health and management experts, presenteeism is a bigger and more costly problem than absenteeism. In the April issue of The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, a team of researchers analyzed information from a medical database of 375,000 employees in the United States as well as five productivity surveys on 10 common health conditions, like hypertension and diabetes. The researchers, primarily from the Institute for Health and Productivity Studies at Cornell University and the health-information company Medstat, found that as much as 60 percent of the total cost of worker illness stems from ''on-the-job productivity losses'' -- exceeding what companies spend on medical and disability benefits and sick days. The biggest productivity drains, according to the study, are relatively benign ailments like headaches, allergies and arthritis. Another recent study, conducted by Walter Stewart, a health researcher, calculated that presenteeism costs American businesses more than $150 billion per year in decreased productivity. A handful of companies have started to wise up. The bank Comerica, for instance, sponsored an in-house health study that determined that at least 10 percent of its workforce of 10,919 suffered from irritable bowel syndrome and that the condition reduced on-the-job productivity by approximately 20 percent. ''People show up for work, but with the pain -- not to mention frequent trips to the bathroom -- they're just not very productive,'' a Comerica vice president said in an article in the October issue of Harvard Business Review. In response, Comerica sponsored a series of hourlong sessions with a gastroenterologist for its employees. Presenteeism-related declines in productivity, the article concluded, ''can be more than offset by relatively small investments in screening, treatment and education.'' And that's music to any boss's ears -- even more than the sound of coughs and sniffles. Professional Amateurs By CLIVE THOMPSON I n January, a man named Jay McNeil peered into his telescope and discovered a nebula -- a developing young star -- out near the Orion constellation. Professional astronomers worldwide hailed the discovery. But McNeil himself is no credentialed scientist; he installs TV satellite dishes for a living. Today's backyard skygazers, it seems, use equipment so sophisticated that they can beat out the world's biggest, well-financed observatories. And that, according to Charles Leadbeater, a social critic, should be no surprise. In a report titled ''The Pro-Am Revolution,'' published by the London-based Demos policy center, Leadbeater argued that a new breed of demi-expert is evolving, collapsing the distinction between an expert and a tinkerer. Cheaper technology offers amateurs increasingly powerful tools; the Internet allows them to collaborate globally and train themselves more rapidly. The upshot is that amateurs are increasingly holding themselves to professional standards and producing significant innovations and discoveries. The Linux computer system was created by geeks working without pay in their spare time, yet it now rivals Microsoft's best products. Patients arrive at hospitals sometimes better informed about their diseases than their doctors. And amateur lobbyists promoted the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which helped persuade Western nations to cancel more than $30 billion in third-world debt. In a way, pro-ams represent a return to our past: until the 20th century, much science was conducted by amateur societies. But the rise of pro-ams also reflects recent social changes. We're living longer, which gives us more time to grow bored with our cubicle jobs and to hunger for a richer life. ''You find people in their 40's and 50's going back to the things they always wanted to do in their youth,'' Leadbeater says. ''So they're becoming musicians, gardeners, astronomers. Normally, we regard leisure just as 'nonwork.' But these people treat their leisure very seriously. They want to get things out of it.'' Leadbeater says that governments ought to find ways to encourage the higher amateurism. After all, he claims that pro-ams live healthier, more satisfied lives -- to say nothing of all the cool stuff they create. Professionals, too, should get used to sharing the stage. Because if Leadbetter is right, the future belongs not to the pros, but to the weekend warriors. Psychopathic C.E.O.'s By MICHAEL STEINBERGER E ver wonder what leads a lavishly compensated C.E.O. to cheat, steal and lie? Perhaps he's a psychopath, and now there is a test, the B-Scan 360, that can help make that determination. The B-Scan was conceived by Paul Babiak, an industrial psychologist, and Robert Hare, the creator of the standard tool for diagnosing psychopathic features in prison inmates. The B-Scan is the first formalized attempt to uncover similar tendencies in captains of industry, and it speaks to a growing suspicion that psychopaths may be especially adept at scaling the corporate ladder. Indeed, Babiak and Hare could not have chosen a more propitious moment to roll out the B-Scan, which is now in the trial stage. The recent rash of damaging corporate scandals -- combined with legislation making boards far more liable for executive malfeasance -- has given companies good reason to screen current employees more rigorously. According to Babiak and Hare, white-collar psychopaths are not apt to become serial rapists or murderers. Rather, they are prone to being ''subcriminal'' psychopaths: smooth-talking, energetic individuals who easily charm their way into jobs and promotions but who are also exceedingly manipulative, narcissistic and ruthless. The purpose of the B-Scan is to smoke out these ''snakes in suits.'' The individual being evaluated does not actually take the test. Instead, it is given to his or her superiors, subordinates and peers. They rate the subject in four broad categories -- organizational maturity, personal style, emotional style and social style -- and 16 subcategories, like reliability, honesty and sincerity. Babiak and Hare say that decisions to promote or dismiss ought not to be made on the basis of the B-Scan alone and that it is possible, with good coaching and training, to turn a talented executive with mild psychopathic tendencies into an effective manager. They acknowledge too that strong corporate leadership may require a certain degree of guile, egoism and callousness. But they point out that the frenzied nature of modern business -- the constant downsizing, the relentless merging and acquiring -- provides a very fertile environment for havoc-wreaking psychopaths, who thrive on chaos and risk-taking. As Hare put it in one interview, ''If I couldn't study psychopaths in prison, I would go down to the Stock Exchange.'' Purple Is the Color of Correction By KATE JACOBS T he latest menace to the American education system has nothing to do with standardized tests or McDonald's outposts in school lunchrooms. Instead, it's a venerable symbol of discipline and authority: the red ink that has been used to grade papers for generations. For the school year that ended in the spring, focus groups and in-store polls conducted by Paper Mate revealed that teachers were migrating away from red ink and toward the kinder, gentler hue of purple. Proponents of purple contend that grading with violet tones is less negative than using angry reds. Sensing a marketing opportunity, Paper Mate increased production of purple pens by 10 percent; Staples and OfficeMax followed suit, stocking more purple-ink products and offering boxes of purple-only pens. Leatrice Eiseman, director of the Pantone Color Institute, calls purple the ideal color for grading. ''Red is rather intimidating,'' she says. ''With the purple, you soften the blow.'' Jan Haag, another advocate of purple pens, says that the comment she hears most often from her students at Sacramento City College is simply ''Thank you for not using red.'' But even advocates of the switch acknowledge that purple is not intrinsically better. Eiseman gives purple a few years before new cultural associations force the teaching establishment to come up with an even newer, even friendlier grading color. KATE JACOBS Purple-State Country Music By STEPHEN METCALF T his may have been the year of two Americas, one devoted to thumping Bibles, the other to sipping Chardonnay, but a handful of country musicians had a different idea: one giant palpitating heartland, turning blue into red and red back into blue -- a kind of One Nation Under a Dobro. Consider the latest craze in country music, one that's revitalizing Nashville while speaking to New York at the same time. Kenny Alphin and John Rich were just another couple of unsigned nobodies when the two decided to start a weekly hootenanny at a bar called the Pub of Love. Alphin and Rich became Big & Rich; and Tuesday nights turned into a bona fide Nashville Happening, involving a loosely knit group of oddball talents that came to be known as the Muzik Mafia. Big & Rich are now stars, but next to the usual adult contemporary pop coming out of Nashville, the two remain goofy heretics: they mix blue-America elements like rap, arena rock and even hints of Nirvana with old-school country. And their Mafia associate, the 31-year-old phenom Gretchen Wilson, is now battling it out with Ashlee Simpson to be the biggest new female singer in the United States. Her first album, ''Here for the Party,'' may be a statement of allegiance to red-state mythos (''I can't swig that sweet Champagne, I'd rather drink beer all night/In a tavern or in a honky tonk or on a four-wheel-drive tailgate/I've got posters on my wall of Skynyrd, Kid and Strait''), but she sings with a smoke-cured voice that recalls Janis Joplin, and she even raps a little. Meanwhile, blue America has returned the favor. The single most intriguing purple-state record of the year certainly belongs to Jack White, of the trendy garage-rock duo the White Stripes, and Loretta Lynn -- yes, that Loretta Lynn. White produced Lynn's comeback album, ''Van Lear Rose,'' after Lynn heard that the 29-year-old White, 40 years her junior, dedicated the White Stripes' album ''White Blood Cells'' to her. By throwing off the stale conventions of Music City -- and surrounding Lynn with garage punkers and blue-state alt-country types -- White helped create an album that Lynn herself declared is ''countrier than anything I've ever cut.'' It's the sound of open skies, a blue collar and a cheatin' heart. And maybe a nice, crisp . . . ros?? Sabermetrics for Football By PAUL CAMPOS and JONATHAN CHAIT O f all sports, football is the most strategic. Football coaches spend the late hours of the night poring over film, crouching over chalkboards and producing phone-book-size playbooks, all in the hope of gleaning some advantage. Occasionally one of them invents a system -- like Bill Walsh's West Coast Offense, or Buddy Ryan's 46 Defense -- that is so revolutionary it overwhelms all opponents, even those with superior talent. Baseball managers, on the other hand, go out for a beer after the game. Strategy in baseball, while fascinating to aficionados, affects the results only around the margins. Even brilliant managers can't win championships with average players. And yet, until very recently, it was baseball and not football that was reshaped by an intellectual revolution called sabermetrics. Created by the statistical guru Bill James, who now works for the Boston Red Sox, sabermetrics is a system for applying statistical analysis to decisions that were previously made according to basic intuitions -- intuitions that, as James and his disciples showed, were often horribly wrong. Now the sabermetric revolution may be gaining a toehold in football as well. And here too the center of the revolution can be found in Massachusetts, where Coach Bill Belichick has led the New England Patriots to victories in two of the last three Super Bowls. Belichick is known for his unorthodox strategies: being more willing than most to not punt on fourth down; running the ball far more than average in certain crucial situations; and eschewing two-point-conversion attempts in situations when orthodox doctrine recommends them. Not coincidentally, experts in the world of football statistical analysis endorse all these strategies. For example, David Romer, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, published a working paper arguing that conventional football wisdom led to far too much punting. Romer analyzed thousands of plays and calculated the chance of scoring from any position on the field. Based on that, he gauged the relative worth of the field position gained by punting against the lost opportunity to score. Romer found that football coaches punt far more than they ought to -- perhaps acting out of fear of the worst outcome (going for it on fourth down and failing), rather than rationally balancing risk and reward. Romer's paper, ''It's Fourth Down and What Does the Bellman Equation Say? A Dynamic Programming Analysis of Football Strategy,'' is far from light reading, so it came as a shock to Romer when he learned that Belichick, who was an economics major at Wesleyan University, had read it. Yet this is not the only example of the Patriots' willingness to turn to the academic world for guidance. A few years ago, Ernie Adams, the Patriots' football research director, asked Harold Sackrowitz, a Rutgers statistician, to give his opinion regarding the team's two-point conversion strategies. Sackrowitz concluded that the strategy was less than optimal -- and the Patriots subsequently did not try any two-point conversions in the 2003-2004 season. Belichick also sticks to running the ball on third down in short-yardage situations, while other coaches pass reasonably often to try to surprise the defense. According to Aaron Schatz, founder of the sabermetrics-inspired Web site FootballOutsiders.com, Belichick's strategy, though predictable, is well warranted by a careful analysis of the risks and rewards involved in using it. Following in James's footsteps, Schatz employs a metric known as defense-adjusted value over average, or DVOA. It takes into account that not all yards gained in football are created equal -- that, for example, gaining 5 yards on third down and 4 is more beneficial, on average, than gaining eight yards on third and 10. Just as it is in baseball sabermetrics, context is crucial to Schatz's analysis. Schatz rates every play a team runs by comparing it with the league average performance for plays in as close to that situation as possible. In Schatz's analysis, the relative success of a play is determined by, among other things, the down and distance, the current score, the field position and the opponent's strength. DVOA, in short, is an attempt to create a tool of analysis for football similar to such Jamesian baseball statistics as offensive winning percentage, runs created and OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage). ''We're trying to see through the biases inherent in a game where the basic situation is constantly changing,'' Schatz told The Boston Globe. ''We're trying to create an intelligent community for discussing the N.F.L.'' In a sense, the community of those who believe that empiricism has a role to play crosses the boundaries of sport. As James says, the Red Sox front office ''has great admiration for both what the Patriots have done and how they've done it.'' Self-Storage By BRUCE GRIERSON T he modern urban traveler tends to move through the day at an allegro pace: he speeds around absorbing too much information to process and, come nightfall, crashes hard. At which point, all the day's complicated protocols are swamped by a simple biological imperative: tune out and recharge. There's no need to bring broadloom or satellite TV into the equation. This person is whipped; all he requires to fall asleep is a little slice of real estate where kids can't poke him and the rain won't short out his BlackBerry. This year, the easyGroup -- a British chain specializing in discount air, sea and road travel -- announced that it will answer the call for no-frills body storage with easyHotel. Beginning next year, a night's accommodation in central London will cost as little as $10 a night. For that, you get a room that's 90 square feet -- or a shade larger than the average American prison cell. ''People are willing to trade off space for price,'' says James Rothnie, easyGroup's director of corporate affairs. The planned micro-suites resemble the Japanese ''capsule'' hotels that embrace businessmen like upholstered sarcophagi, but adapted for a different culture. ''We figured that a Westerner would want to at least stand up in their hotel room,'' Rothnie says. Everything does double duty: the headboard is the closet, the wall is the shelf, the bed is the chair. Conceived by a New York City architect, Joel Sanders -- who with this project has made a strong case for handling the first hotel in space -- prototype rooms are made of wipe-clean metal modules that link together. The need to crash during the day poses problems of its own, given vagrancy laws. But this, too, is now being addressed. For $13.45 plus tax for the first 20 minutes, Manhattanites can now rent a MetroNap ''pod'' on the 24th floor of the Empire State Building. You check in, drift off to the sound of ocean surf or rain, wake up to gentle lighting and a vibrating mattress pad, clean your face at the ''wake station'' and resume your routine. The company plans to expand into corporations, hospitals, highway rest stops and airports. (In fact, the second outlet is opening this month at the International Airport in Vancouver.) The aim here, finally, is a culture shift -- though not quite a downshift into gentler siestaville. ''We want to overcome the bias that people who nap are somehow lazy,'' says Christopher Lindholst, co-founder of MetroNaps. ''We believe there's a clear economic benefit to napping, to companies and to individuals -- it allows them to be more effective during the day.'' Singable National Anthem, The By REBECCA SKLOOT H ere's a little-known fact about the melody of ''The Star Spangled Banner'': before it was our national anthem, it was a belt-it-out-in-the-pub drinking song. According to Ed Siegel, a psychiatrist in Solana Beach, Calif., this may explain why most of us sound like a bunch of yodeling drunks when we sing it. And he has found a way to fix this. Not long after the song became the national anthem in the 1930's, a committee of musicians, congressmen and military officials wrote a code specifying that it be played in the key of B flat major. The problem is, most people can't sing it in B flat major. ''It's just too high,'' Siegel says. ''And what does it say about this country that no one can actually sing our national anthem?'' His solution: Lower the key. Siegel changed the key of the national anthem while running a support group for recovering alcoholic veterans. ''I didn't know what key it was supposed to be in,'' says Siegel, who plays piano strictly by ear. ''I just played in a key everyone could sing, because I wanted to show that they could lose inhibitions without drinking.'' In the end everyone sang, and no one sounded drunk. In June, Siegel persuaded his City Council to pass a resolution saying ''the federal government should establish the key of G major as the song's official key.'' He claims that ''The Star Spangled Banner'' has contributed to a nationwide decrease in singing, because Americans are routinely embarrassed by how badly they sound hollering it out. ''This has caused a form of post-traumatic stress disorder in our culture,'' he says. ''People freak when asked to sing.'' Of course, changing the song's key doesn't fix its absurdly wide range, and the new lows will be too low for some. ''People can mumble those parts if necessary,'' Siegel says. ''But everyone should be able to hit the high notes -- that's where it gets exciting.'' It's no small detail that the song's highest note -- the one most people can't reach -- is the word ''free,'' as in, ''land of the freeeeeeeeee.'' Siegel says he figures the government would want to do whatever it could to allow everyone in the country to hit that note, and he has sent repeated requests to the Pentagon for change. So what does the Pentagon think? ''Huh?'' a Pentagon spokeswoman says. ''We didn't even know the Pentagon had any say over the national anthem.'' Skin Literature By DANIEL H. PINK M ost artists spend their careers trying to create something that will live forever. But the writer Shelley Jackson is creating a work of literature that is intentionally and indisputably mortal. Jackson is publishing her latest short story by recruiting 2,095 people, each of whom will have one word of the story tattooed on his or her body. The story, titled ''Skin,'' will appear only on the collective limbs, torsos and backsides of its participants. And decades from now, when the last of Jackson's ''words'' dies, so, too, will her tale. As of November, Jackson, the Brooklyn-based author of a short-story collection called ''The Melancholy of Anatomy,'' had enrolled about 1,800 volunteers, some from such distant countries as Argentina, Jordan, Thailand and Finland. Participants, who contact Jackson through her Web site, cannot choose which word they receive. And their tattoos must be inked in the font that Jackson has specified. But they do have some freedom to bend and stretch the narrative. They can select the place on their bodies they want to become part of the Jackson opus. In return, Jackson asks her ''words'' to sign a 12-page release absolving her of liability and promising not to share the story with others. (Participants are the only people who will get to see the full text of the story.) They must also send her two photographs -- one of the word on their skin, the other a portrait of themselves without the word visible -- which she may later publish or exhibit. What kind of person signs up for an experiment in epidermal literature? Curiosity seekers and members of ''body modification'' communities have been early adopters. But many enlistees have been surprisingly mainstream. Mothers and daughters are requesting consecutive words. So are couples, perhaps hoping to form the syntactic equivalent of a civil union. For others, the motives are social: Jackson is encouraging her far-flung words to get to know each other via e-mail, telephone, even in person. (Imagine the possibilities. A sentence getting together for dinner. A paragraph having a party.) In addition, Jackson has heard from several dyslexics, who have struggled with mastery of writing and reading. And librarians are signing up in droves. ''A lot of librarians are probably a lot hipper than we think,'' Jackson says. Of course, librarians, like the rest of us, have a due date. And when a participant meets his or her demise, Jackson vows, she will try to attend that person's funeral. But the 41-year-old author understands that some of her 2,095 collaborators, many of whom are in their 20's, might outlive her. If she dies first, she says, she hopes several of them will come to her funeral and make her the first writer ever to be mourned by her words. Soccer Model of Warfare, The By JEFF Z. KLEIN F or decades, the American military's war-fighting paradigm has been provided by football: the massing and coordinated movement of overwhelming force, replete with a playbook of long bombs, end runs, blitzes and, most explicitly, the ''Hail Mary'' maneuver that sealed General Schwarzkopf's victory against Iraq in 1991. But this year, American defense experts debated the heretical possibility that the United States armed forces could learn more from soccer than from the Super Bowl. Late last year, The Armed Forces Journal published ''Football vs. Soccer: American Warfare in an Era of Unconventional Threats,'' an article by Joel Cassman, a career Foreign Service officer, and David Lai, a professor at the United States Air War College. Soccer, they wrote, is the model for unconventional forces like terrorist organizations and guerrilla insurgencies: like a soccer team, they use finesse, patience, surprise attack, improvisation and low technology and make a virtue out of decentralized control and execution. ''Contemporary U.S. adversaries who use soccer strategies tend to look at the entire world as their playing field, taking action at openings where the United States and its allies are vulnerable,'' Cassman and Lai wrote, citing as examples the Sept. 11 attacks, the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole and the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. The solution, according to Cassman and Lai, is for the American armed forces to become far more soccerlike themselves by developing small, flexible units that can operate autonomously to meet the elusive enemy wherever it appears. ''The United States needs to reorient its thinking about war,'' they wrote, ''not as a series of discrete battles ('plays') marching down a field to victory, but rather a continuous struggle'' involving ''a shifting combination of offense and defense'' that takes place ''over a long period.'' Throughout 2004, rebuttal articles appeared touting ''the football advantage'' over what was sometimes sniffily referred to as soccer's ''more continental nuances.'' They argued that the ''gridiron approach'' keeps American casualties down and is generally superior as a war-fighting strategy. But according to John Roos, editor of The Armed Forces Journal,''the military is trying for a more mobile, flexible force in Iraq, so at least for now it's leaning more toward the soccer side.'' Stock Options for Soldiers By JASON ZENGERLE L ike many liberal policy wonks, Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, had some advice for John Kerry before this year's presidential debates. In order to burnish his pro-military credentials, Clemons suggested, Kerry should call on patriotic companies -- particularly those that are profiting from the war in Iraq, like defense and oil firms -- to contribute stock options and other assets to a national fund for American servicemen and women who have seen combat in Iraq. Clemons called his proposal ''Stock Options for Soldiers,'' and as is the case with most unsolicited predebate advice, the candidate politely passed. But Clemons's idea didn't fall completely on deaf ears. In September, he posted the plan on his blog, The Washington Note, which has about 10,000 readers. Now Clemons is fielding calls and e-mail about his proposal from fellow wonks and politicos, as well as from military and corporate types. Clemons envisions corporations contributing any type of asset -- possibly stock options but also cash -- to a national fund for soldiers that would be managed in a transparent fashion along the lines of the Alaska Permanent Fund, which was created in 1976 in order to invest a portion of the state's oil revenue for future generations of Alaskans. Initially, Clemons conceived of the plan somewhat facetiously, mainly as a way to call attention to what he considers war profiteering by hawkish Bush supporters who have benefited financially from the war in Iraq. But now that his idea is being taken more seriously, he is grappling with some of the trickier details of his proposal and crossing his fingers that legislation will be introduced in the next Congress. ''There'll be a lot of kickback the further this idea goes,'' he says. ''But I think the country would like to see the establishment of something broader for the people on the front line -- because the people profiting right now aren't on the front line.'' Strategic Extremism By PAUL TOUGH I t may be hard to believe these days, but in fact, Americans are pretty moderate people, politically. Even on deeply emotional issues like abortion, public opinion tends to coalesce around a mushy compromise position somewhere close to the middle of the road. So why do party platforms and campaign rhetoric tend toward extreme positions? According to a paper in the October issue of the Harvard Institute of Economic Research, there may be a calculated reason behind the nation's current political divide. The lead author, Edward L. Glaeser, a Harvard economist, argues that the parties are employing a tactic that he calls strategic extremism. When the political landscape is balanced in a very particular way, he writes -- the way it is right now -- ''extreme political platforms that deviate sharply from the median voter's preferences can be vote-maximizing.'' There are two main conditions that have to be met before strategic extremism can work. The first is the presence of a lot of voters with relatively extreme positions who don't vote regularly. This was the idea behind Karl Rove's ''base'' strategy this year: target the four million evangelicals who didn't vote in 2000, as well as other reluctant voters with similar positions. If you fire them up enough, you can afford to lose a few voters in the middle. The second condition is what Glaeser calls informational asymmetry. Strategic extremism works only if you are able to target your extreme messages solely at your own base. The polarization of the media has made this easier -- an interview on Fox News will reach more right-leaning voters; an interview on Air America will reach more left-leaning voters. Direct mail (the field in which Karl Rove got his start in politics) is probably the most effective narrow-casting strategy of all. But at the same time, there are other emerging technologies that make this approach risky. Blogs, ''oppo'' researchers and even the mainstream media can reveal a candidate's red-meat rhetoric to the other side, thus firing up his opponent's base. It is anyone's guess, Glaeser says, which set of tools will be more effective in the future. ''Everything depends upon whether changes in technology increase the ability to target faster than they increase the ability to reveal,'' Glaeser says. ''It's direct mailing versus Drudge, and reducing extremism depends on the Drudges expanding faster than the direct mailers.'' Despite the president's campaign rhetoric, Glaeser doesn't expect him to expend much political capital in his second term on the cultural and religious issues that his base cares about. ''This has to do with energizing the base and getting elected,'' Glaeser says. ''I'll be very surprised if this is where he chooses to put his energy.'' Television Blaster, The By STEVEN BODZIN Published: December 12, 2004 W hen stuck in airport waiting rooms, Kristine Smock, a mandolin player, likes to practice her instrument. But in recent years, her plucking has been lost under the tinny voices of CNN anchors. ''I feel like vandalizing the TV's,'' the musician said. ''I imagine myself ripping wires out of walls, axing the screen and splintering, shattering glass.'' A more peaceful solution might be a key-chain-size remote control that turns off nearby televisions, called TV-B-Gone. Its inventor, Mitch Altman, was inspired to develop his TV-zapping device out of frustration with the omnipresent TV sets in bars, restaurants and Laundromats. The technology he went on to develop is simple: an L.E.D. emits the ''power'' codes for every brand of set, one after the next. It takes 69 seconds to hit them all. In the first month after Altman's Web store went live in October, eager customers bought 11,000 remotes, major retailers called and Altman almost recouped the $150,000 investment he had borrowed from his retirement account. He got used to appearing, of all places, on TV. Altman is aware that some users will exploit TV-B-Gone to alter other people's environments. In a vacant Laundromat, the device provides self-defense for the mind. At a sports bar during the Rose Bowl, it could provoke a situation when bodily self-defense is more important. For most customers, however, the problem appears to be not too much power but too little. Several have beseeched Altman to develop gadgets that can conquer other modern nuisances. One correspondent wrote requesting a product ''that will temporarily disable or secretly destroy some component of loud, intrusive car stereos.'' Another letter asks for ''a capacitor'' to knock mobile phones offline. Thermoacoustic Freezer, The By RYAN BIGGE T his April, a fire-hydrant-size apparatus called a thermoacoustic freezer made its debut at a Ben & Jerry's in Manhattan. The event was a relatively quiet affair, which was no small achievement: inside the core of the steel cooling unit, which was attached to a standard ice-cream cabinet, a loudspeaker emitted a 195-decibel screech to keep quarts of ice cream cold. From the outside, you could hear only a soft hum. How did it work? The freezer is based on the principle that sound alters the temperature of the air it travels through. Sound waves oscillate, compressing and expanding in rapid cycles: compression causes the air to get warmer; expansion causes the air to get cooler. An ordinary conversation might cause the temperature to fluctuate within one ten-thousandth of a degree, but crank the volume inside the pressurized thermoacoustic freezer and you create much larger temperature spikes. The trick, then, is to capture the coolness of the expansion half of the wave cycle while wicking away the heat generated during the compression half. An ingeniously designed stack of tightly packed metal screens and heat exchangers in the freezer does just this. Repeat the trick over and over as the sound waves fluctuate thousands of times a minute, and you can prevent your Chunky Monkey from melting. The freezer was created for Ben & Jerry's by a team of researchers led by Steven Garrett, a professor of acoustics at Penn State University. The goal was to devise a method of cooling that was less environmentally hazardous than using chemical refrigerants like hydrofluorocarbons -- which is why the freezer is filled with an inert gas like helium or argon. Garrett and his colleagues are now working to build at least 50 units for long-term testing. Ben & Jerry's, meanwhile, donated its patent rights to Penn State. The company is content to fill freezers rather than build them. 3-Point Problem, The By JOEL LOVELL I n 1979, the National Basketball Association introduced the 3-point line as a way of rekindling fan interest. The hope was that by providing an extra incentive for longer shots, the focus of the game would shift away from lumbering big men and back to sharpshooting guards, and dramatic come-from-behind victories would replace the league's frequent blowouts. Twenty-five years later, though, things haven't worked out as planned. American basketball players can throw down mind-blowing dunks, but leave them wide open for a jumper and chances are pretty good they're going to clang it off the rim. In the last season that N.B.A. teams played without a 3-point line, every team in the league averaged more than 100 points per game; last season, only two teams averaged more than 100. What happened? According to Stu Jackson, the N.B.A.'s senior vice president for basketball operations, the 3-point shot has been its own worst enemy. Rather than looking for their natural shooting range, players are tempted to chuck up glorious but usually errant 3-pointers, and they neglect the art of the midrange jumper. ''If you look at the game overall,'' Jackson said in October, ''including the collegiate and high-school level, since the inception of the 3-point shot -- it's being taken with an increasing amount of frequency, which in part has driven shooting percentages south.'' Jackson's proposed solution is to do away with the 3-point line -- but only for part of the game. His idea is being tested out this season in the N.B.A.'s development league, where the 3-point line will be in effect in just the last three minutes of each quarter. Shooting percentages should go up, scores should be higher and the game should become more aesthetically pleasing. Basketball purists tend to support the idea. ''I kind of liked the 3-pointer before every player on every team was a 3-point shooter,'' said Steve Kerr, the N.B.A.'s all-time leader in 3-point shooting percentage, after hearing of Jackson's proposal. ''It's being shot way too often these days, and it's hurting the game.'' Underwear for Animated People By JASCHA HOFFMAN W hen Pixar animators were creating this year's hit movie ''The Incredibles,'' they noticed a certain limpness in the movements of a key character, the diminutive fashion diva Edna Mode. Her skirt appeared to sag and crumple as she walked. The animators could have taken the trouble to iron out the glitches frame by frame. But they devised a more clever solution: the studio fitted Edna with a virtual petticoat. While her underwear is never actually seen onscreen, it nonetheless helps keep her clothing in place. Welcome to the world of invisible animation. Hollywood's computer animators have had great success when it comes to depicting the human body in motion. Their portrayal of shirts, pants and jackets has proved to be equally lifelike and impressive. But when animators program computer systems to mimic the way interwoven fibers interact with skin -- that is, when virtual clothing is put on the virtual person -- the results are hard to predict and often go awry. Simulated cloth routinely gets snagged in armpits and groins or flutters and tangles spontaneously. Directors simply do not know in advance what an ordinary shirt will do once it is fitted to a moving torso. In the face of persistent wardrobe malfunctions, animators have discovered the virtues of introducing a virtual garment that cannot be seen onscreen but nonetheless alters the computer modeling in a desirable way. For instance, when Tom Hanks's conductor's jacket in ''Polar Express'' kept flapping violently in the wind, it was easier to wrap him inside an invisible shroud than to smooth the jacket out by hand. And while testing a scene of ''The Incredibles'' in which the once-dashing Mr. Incredible is demoted to a dead-end insurance job, animators noticed that his barrel chest kept tugging his button-down shirt out of his trousers. Rather than repeatedly halting production to tuck the shirt back in, they fell back on an old costuming trick and simply sewed his shirttails into a custom-fitted pair of virtual briefs. Vaporized, Oxygenated Cocktail, The By JOEL LOVELL P aris Hilton, things are looking up! An English businessman named Dominic Simler has created a machine that takes hard liquor and reconstitutes it as a breathable mist, which Simler claims is a low-calorie, low-carb, non-hangover-inducing way to consume alcohol. The invention is called AWOL (Alcohol Without Liquid), and it looks, well, like a crack pipe, or maybe like an asthma inhaler (but mostly like a crack pipe). The device consists of two parts -- the vaporizer, into which you pour your liquor of choice, and the oxygen generator, which pumps oxygen through a tube connected to the vaporizer, producing a mist that is then inhaled into the lungs. AWOL was introduced in the United Kingdom in 2003, and early this year a company called Spirit Partners purchased a license to market the device in the United States. While the AWOL USA Web site celebrates the ''euphoric high'' from inhaling oxygenated and vaporized alcohol, various public-health and law-enforcement puritans, looking to ruin everyone's good, clean, liquor-breathing fun, have raised a few concerns. For one, it turns out that alcohol inhaled through the AWOL machine goes into the lungs and is then dispersed into the bloodstream, which critics contend can get users drunk much more quickly and intensely than those who prefer their cocktails the old-fashioned, absorbed-through-the-small-intestine way. To ward off possible alcohol toxicity from binge breathing, the AWOL machine is calibrated so that it takes 15 minutes to inhale one shot of hard liquor, and its inventor recommends that users don't exceed two sessions in a 24-hour period. Seems fair enough -- and yet in the days leading up to the machine's American debut at the Manhattan night club Trust, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, responding to the concerns of local politicians, referred the question of AWOL's legality to the New York State Liquor Authority. So Spirit Partners unveiled its magical machine using Gatorade instead of alcohol, fearing it might otherwise violate a New York state law dating back to 1934 that prohibits the dispensing of alcohol from a different container than the one it was delivered in. Apparently vaporized liquor is no lower in calories and carbohydrates than liquid alcohol, and there's no proof that it doesn't produce hangovers. But what neither Eliot Spitzer nor ''science'' nor any of the buzzkills at the New York State Liquor Authority can deny is that, in the words of one anonymous enthusiast quoted by Spirit Partners, ''this is the greatest thing since the still.'' Virtopsy By RYAN BIGGE A traditional autopsy begins with a deep Y-shaped incision in the chest. Next, the skin is peeled back to expose the rib cage, which must be sawed open with a bone cutter so that various organs can be removed and examined. Such near-eviscerations are rarely very tidy. A team of forensic scientists from Switzerland is trying to make this procedure a little more aesthetically pleasing. Since 2000, Michael Thali and colleagues at the University of Bern's Institutes of Forensic Medicine and Diagnostic Radiology have been developing a bloodless and noninvasive form of digital autopsy. Their Virtopsy Project uses nearly $2 million worth of C.T. (Computed Tomography), M.R.I. (magnetic resonance imaging) and 3-D surface-scanning technology. With Virtopsy, the pathologist has only to press a button and scan the body -- and wait a few minutes. What results is a digitally embalmed body stored on a workstation, a ''corpse'' that can be viewed from any angle or depth. ''It's like a virtual flight through the data set,'' Thali explains. ''You start at the head and go through the thorax, abdomen and pelvis, right down to the legs.'' A click of the mouse will remove a layer of skin, muscle or connective tissue from the skeleton as if it were a piece of clothing. Thali and his colleagues have already performed more than 100 virtopsies, with each virtual analysis confirmed by an actual autopsy afterward. While Thali is cautious to note that virtopsy is ''still a little baby,'' with years of further research required, the procedure has caught the interest of the United States Department of Defense. Last month, Dover Air Force Base in Delaware installed a Virtopsy system to facilitate the analysis and processing of deceased soldiers. Virtual Sketch Artist, The By JASCHA HOFFMAN F or years, crime witnesses have been asked to come down to the police station and describe crime suspects to sketch artists. Recently, though, psychologists have found that when witnesses try to describe a face, they often distort their memory of it. Could there be a better way? Police stations in the English county of Kent say they believe they have found one. This spring, they will introduce EigenFIT, one of several new programs that present a witness with a screen full of various photorealistic portraits. The witness chooses the portrait that seems to bear a resemblance, however slight, to the person he or she remembers. The computer then uses the chosen photo to produce a new generation of potential suspects, which the witness will again narrow down. Once more, the computer clones and mutates the chosen faces, slowly closing in on the face in question. In order to create fresh sets of faces with enough variation, EigenFIT borrows tricks from evolution's playbook, causing traits to appear in a variety of combinations. After dozens of cycles, the computer-generated faces can no longer be distinguished from one another, and the police are left with a single lifelike portrait that no human sketch artist could possibly have drawn. There is one potential problem: our memory of faces can be hazy and coarse, but the software creates images of fine-grained detail. In order to reduce the chances of a mistake, researchers have toyed with letting witnesses blur out the features they simply don't remember. Wal-Mart Sovereignty By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL A mericans claim they favor leaders who understand their wants, have a track record of creating jobs and can be ruthless when required. Sounds like Wal-Mart! Maybe that's why, last spring, the Arkansas-based retail behemoth asked the citizens of Inglewood, Calif., to hand it the reins of government. When the Inglewood City Council rejected Wal-Mart's bid to open a 130,000-square-foot superstore, company executives did not sulk. They disparaged the council as the captive of outside special interests, particularly organized labor. And with the help of election professionals, they collected more than 10,000 signatures to sponsor a ballot referendum to reverse the decision. In the ensuing referendum campaign, the company spent more than $1 million to convey the idea that it would create hundreds of jobs and pump up the local tax base. Opponents emphasized what they saw as the company's legacy of blighted downtowns and falling wages. Ultimately, though, voters were most upset by something else: Wal-Mart's initiative would have exempted the company from Inglewood's zoning, planning and environmental laws and established a provision whereby the deal could be altered only by a two-thirds vote of the public. By the time voters rejected the initiative at the ballot box in April, this strategy had acquired a name: Wal-Mart Sovereignty. There's nothing new about the urge to turn economic power into political power (and vice versa). Misgivings about it aren't new, either. But in times of economic transformation, when society renegotiates what is public and what is private, the questions that arise get really nettlesome. Should inmates pay their debt to society through the middleman of a for-profit prison company? Would you say no even if it meant more criminals on the street? Should sports moguls pocket fortunes from publicly financed stadiums? Would you say no even if it meant your city lost its baseball team? For a long time, Wal-Mart steered clear of such quarrels. It was out of sight, out of mind, building retail space mostly on the ahistorical, apolitical exurban frontier. But more and more, it is encroaching on communities that are more settled -- Inglewood is part of Los Angeles County -- more ideological or snobbier. The Inglewood referendum won't be the last time voters are invited to trade citizen rights for consumer rights -- and no one should make any glib assumptions about which of those rights Americans hold more dear. Wandering Museum, The By BRENDAN I. KOERNER A s you might expect from an artist who swims with sperm whales and communes with penguins, Gregory Colbert has dismissed ordinary museums as ''generic sausages,'' too humdrum to display his unusual photos of himself and others romping with animals. So to house his exhibition ''Ashes and Snow,'' Colbert commissioned the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban to create something as unique as the artwork itself. Ban obliged by designing a mammoth museum space consisting almost entirely of empty cargo containers (the walls) and recycled paper tubes (the roof and columns). The museum will be portable, moving from city to city along with the exhibit. The tour starts this March on Hudson River Park's Pier 54 in Manhattan, and the plan is to continue on to Los Angeles, Paris and Beijing. In each location, the structure's 148 containers will be stacked in a gridlike pattern and more than 200 unframed photos will hang from the cables between the columns. Meanwhile, Colbert is adding pictures to the museum from one of his most recent artistic adventures: a visit to Antarctica with a choreographer, dancers and a gaggle of Russian sailors. No doubt a generic sausage wouldn't do justice to whatever he comes up with. Water That Isn't Wet By WILLIAM S. LIN L ast spring, a peculiar new fire-suppression system made its debut in the United States with a splash -- literally. A division of Tyco International introduced a liquid-based product called Sapphire that can extinguish flames without damaging electronic equipment, precious library collections, priceless works of art or any other ''critical business assets,'' in Tyco's lingo. The system relies on Novec 1230, a colorless chemical agent that resembles water and feels cool to the touch. When released, the fluid transforms into a gas that snuffs out blazes. According to Tyco, it then evaporates at a rate 25 times quicker than normal water, leaving all other items in the room virtually bone dry. Back in 1999, Paul Rivers, a 3M researcher who holds a degree in fire-protection engineering, led a team that first identified the carbon-based molecule as having fire-safety applications. ''When I first saw it,'' he says, ''I was a bit skeptical because I thought it was going to be a 'me too' product''; that is, he presumed it wouldn't differ from fire-suppression chemicals already on the market. But after testing its effectiveness and environmental safety, Rivers and his team became elated. Among its other virtues, Novec 1230, which remains intact in the atmosphere for only five days, would not deplete the ozone layer. In April, Tyco marketers kick-started a publicity campaign with a stop at ''Good Morning America'' and went on to demonstrate the product around the country by dunking laptops, cellphones, flat-screen TV's, books, photographs, paintings and clothing in the liquid. All of the electronic devices worked moments afterward or even while submerged. Floating cellphones could still be heard humming tunes. The other items dried within seconds without any of the usual traces of water damage: no marks, smears or smudges. Charging a standard fee of roughly $30 to $40 per square foot of protection, Tyco claims it has already raked in millions from companies in the telecommunications, banking and television-broadcast industries, among others. There is one field, however, in which Novec 1230 won't be used: since it may cause vomiting if guzzled, it doesn't stand much of a chance of becoming the next Gatorade. You Don't Need Superstars to Win By DEAN ROBINSON E ven as the superstar athlete in our winner-take-all culture adds to his already oversize share of available salary money, media attention and endorsements, there's one thing he may be getting less of these days -- actual victories. This year, a number of teams unable or unwilling to invest in franchise players simply did without and still emerged triumphant. These organizations realized that an effectively endless supply of bigger, faster and better-trained athletes means you can plug cheaper players coglike into systems where the interaction of parts, or style of play, is more important than the parts themselves. In other words, sometimes there is no ''star'' in ''team,'' and that's for the best. In July, the Greek national soccer team won the European Championship. Led by the no-name and minor-league likes of Theodoros Zagorakis (a player who had been unable to keep his starter's spot on a mediocre English team), the Greeks prevailed by beating several countries that fielded known-by-one-name superstars: France (Zidane), the Czech Republic (Nedved) and, twice, Portugal (Figo). Just five months before Euro 2004 ended, the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl for the second time in three years with a team that might as well have been all Greek. Only two Patriots were among the initial selections to the N.F.L.'s Pro Bowl in New England's two championship seasons. (Even Tom Brady, now the face of the team, is still a role player, as a comparison of his modest individual stats with those of his quarterback peers attests.) The Platonic matchup of Team versus Stars took place in June, when the Detroit Pistons defeated the heavily favored Los Angeles Lakers in the N.B.A. Finals. The Lakers had four probable future Hall of Famers (Shaquille O'Neal, Kobe Bryant, Karl Malone and Gary Payton); the Pistons had one second-team All-N.B.A. player (Ben Wallace). But Team routed Stars, 4 games to 1. Larry Brown, the victorious coach, said, ''The sport is about players playing the right way and showing . . . that you can be a team and be successful.'' Indeed, a sequel was made from the same script later in the summer, in Athens. There, the United States Olympic agglomeration of basketball stars like Tim Duncan, Allen Iverson and Stephon Marbury was beaten by the teamwork of Puerto Rico, Lithuania and Argentina. Of course, even as one anonymous team after another takes down the stars, a new star rises: the miracle-working coach in charge of all those role players. From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 9 15:44:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2005 10:44:51 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hell Part 2: The Differences between Hades and the Lake of Fire Message-ID: Hell Part 2: The Differences between Hades and the Lake of Fire http://www.matthewmcgee.org/helwords.html (One of many Bible articles on the "Wielding the Sword of the Spirit" web site at www.matthewmcgee.org) Hell Part 2: The Differences between Hades and the Lake of Fire Matthew McGee Now let's get into a little more detail by becoming familiar with some Hebrew and Greek words that are key to understanding this topic. Sheol (Hebrew) - It is the non-permanent place or temporary address of the disembodied souls of dead. It is not the grave or sepulcher, nor is it the eternal location of the souls of the dead. It is the same as the Greek word "Hades", which we will look at in a moment. Prior to Jesus Christ's resurrection, both the souls of the evil and the righteous went there after death. It is translated "grave" 31 times, "hell" 31 times, and "pit" 3 times in King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. Sheol (or Hades) has two separate halves. One side was and is reserved for the torment of the evil, while the other side, called "Abraham's Bosom" in Luke 16:22, was for the comfort of the righteous. There is and impassable canyon, or gulf, between the two halves. When Christ was resurrected, he led the righteous out of Sheol to Heaven. Many (probably not all) of the Old Testament saints were resurrected into their immortal bodies at that time (Matthew 27:51-53). Since then, the souls of all of the saved people go directly to Heaven when their bodies die. The lost people still go to Sheol and join the lost people of the Old Testament in torment on one side of the canyon when they die. The other side of Sheol formerly known as Abraham's Bosom has been vacant since Jesus Christ led the saints within it to heaven after His resurrection. The English word "Hell" refers to a place of eternal punishment for the wicked. Its meaning does not distinguish between the two separate places for the wicked to be punished, one temporary for the soul, and the other, the Lake of Fire, permanent for the soul and body. Nor does its meaning include the place of comfort for saints prior to Christ's resurrection. In normal English conversation, "Hell" is used only in the negative sense, with no saved people ever going there. This caused some inadequate translations of "Sheol" and "Hades". Often these words are translated "Hell", which, as just explained, is rather ambiguous and non-descriptive. In many other places "Sheol" and "Hades" are translated as "grave", but the grave is only the place for the body after death, not the place for the soul. This confusion often occurs when the verse refers to a righteous man going to "Sheol", such as men like Jacob, Joseph, (Genesis 37:35) and Job (Job 14:13). Of course, these men did not go to a place of torment, but to the comfort side of Sheol (Hades), called Abraham's Bosom. Hades (Greek) - It is identical to Sheol (Hebrew). It is the non-permanent place or temporary address of the disembodied souls of dead. It is not the grave or sepulcher, nor is it the eternal location of the souls of the dead. Hades is translated "Hell" 10 times and "grave" once by KJV. It is the place for the soul, not the body. Gehenna (Greek, but originally from a Hebrew name) - translated "Hell" all 12 times in KJV It is the permanent place for destruction of the "... soul and body ..." (Matthew 10:28). It is a place of "... fire that never shall be quenched" (Mark 9:45). In most of the references, it is clear from the context that those who enter Gehenna, do so in their bodies, not merely as bodiless souls. For this to happen, it must occur after the resurrection of the damned at the great white throne of judgment. Therefore, Gehenna is the Lake of Fire described in Revelation 19 and 20. It is presently uninhabited, but the Beast and the False Prophet will be cast into it at the end of the tribulation (Revelation 19:20). One thousand years later, Satan will be cast into it (Rev 20:10) and will be followed shortly by the lost people of all previous time periods (Revelation 20:15). They will all enter Gehenna together, in there resurrected bodies, where they will remain in torment for all eternity. The future destruction of the wicked is symbolized by the Valley of Hinnom to which Gehenna refers. It is a place south of Jerusalem where the bodies of dead animals and rubbish were taken to be burned. The Valley of Hinnom was also the site of much human sacrifice to the pagan god Molech (2 Kings 23:10, 2 Chronicles 28:3, 33:6, Jeremiah 32:35). The fire burned constantly in the valley since additional fuel was frequently being cast into it. "And they have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my heart. Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that it shall no more be called Tophet, nor the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of slaughter: for they shall bury in Tophet, till there be no place" (Jeremiah 7:31-32). Here we see that in the Valley of Hinnom is a place called "Tophet" whose name means "place of fire". "For Tophet is ordained of old; yea, for the king it is prepared; he hath made it deep and large: the pile thereof is fire and much wood; the breath of the LORD, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle it" (Isaiah 30:33). limne pur (Greek) - "lake of fire" occurs 4 times, all in Revelation 19 and 20. This is Gehenna, into which the resurrected damned are cast. Limne means "lake" and is translated as such all 10 times it occurs by the KJV. Pur means "fire" and is translated so 73 times by the KJV while being translated "fiery" once. Other key terms tartaroo (Greek) - Refers to "Tartarus" and only occurs once in 2 Peter 2:4 where it is translated "hell" "For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment ...." This is probably a separate place from Hades, and may be a place only for fallen angels. There are no Biblical references to people going there. grave (English) - The place for the fleshly body after death, sepulcher. It is not the abode of the soul or spirit. abussos (Greek) - Abyss. It is translated "bottomless pit" 5 times, "deep" twice, and "bottomless" twice by KJV. It is where Satan will be locked up for the 1000 years of Christ's reign on earth. This is thought by many to be the same as the impassable gulf described in Luke 16:26. chasma (Greek) - a gaping opening, chasm, or gulf. It is translated "gulf" in its only occurrence in Luke 16:26, where it is the canyon separating the torment and comfort sides of Hades. Abraam kolpos (Greek) - Abraham's Bosom (Luke 16:22). Abraam is translated "Abraham" all 73 times. Kolpos is translated bosom 5 times and creek once (Acts 27:39). paradeisos - Paradise. It is translated "paradise" all 3 times by the KJV. "Paradise" is not the English translation of any other Greek word in scripture. First we hear the words of the thief and Jesus Christ on their crosses in Luke 23:42-43, "And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise." In 2 Corinthians 12:4, Paul tells how he was "... caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter." In Revelation 2:7, Jesus told the church of Ephesus "... To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life which is in the midst of the paradise of God." The tree of life is also mentioned in Revelation 22:2, in the new heaven and new earth, where it appears to be not just one tree, but a type of tree of which there are more than one. Since the three references show paradise to be in different places, then either paradise has been relocated once and will yet be relocated again, or it is a general term. Summary Sheol (Hebrew) and Hades (Greek) are the temporary place of torment for the souls of the wicked dead. Prior to Christ's resurrection, saints were kept and comforted in the now vacant half of Hades, known as Abraham's Bosom. Gehenna (Greek, but from a Hebrew name) is the Lake of Fire for the permanent place of torment of the souls of the wicked dead in their resurrected bodies. Hell is a rather general and inadequate term that is often used to refer to either Gehenna or the torment side of Hades, both by those who know the basic difference between these two specific places and by those who do not. [4]Roman Road to Salvation How to be saved. References 3. http://www.matthewmcgee.org/email.html 4. http://www.matthewmcgee.org/roman-rd.html From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sun Jan 9 23:41:24 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2005 15:41:24 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Fox news distorts global warming reports Message-ID: <20050109234124.19620.qmail@web13421.mail.yahoo.com> Fox News gets it wrong Steven Milloy comments on a lecture by Lonnie Thompson at the Annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. He uses a common ploy of truncating what Thompson said, to ensure that a quotation fits with his message. According to Milloy, Thompson said, ?Any prudent person would agree that we don?t yet understand the complexities with the climate system.? But what he actually said was ?Any prudent person would agree that we don?t yet understand the complexities with the climate system and, since we don?t, we should be extremely cautious in how much we ?tweak? the system.? (see full press release here). Such manipulations are designed so that Milloy can?t be accused of misquoting, but clearly, he completely contorts Thompson?s point. Milloy also misunderstands the science. In his talk, Thompson described two samples of moss that are 5,000 and 50,000 years old, respectively (based on radiocarbon dating). These samples have been revealed as the Quelccaya ice cap in Peru receded over the last few years. Milloy argues that ?the plant find is a strong indication that, thousands of years ago, the high Andean climate must have been warm enough to cause the glacier to be recessed and to allow for the plants to grow in the first place??. That is correct. But he goes on to say, ?So if natural forces caused those climate changes, isn?t it reasonable to conclude that perhaps natural forces might also be largely responsible for whatever climate changes may be occurring now?? Unfortunately, that isn?t reasonable. Milloy makes the common mistake of confusing (1) different factors that cause climates to change (see forcings) and (2) the rates of climate change. Warming in the early to mid-Holocene (the post-glacial period that covers the last 12,500 years) resulted from changes in the earth?s orbit (as described by Milankovitch). In the western United States, many glaciers disappeared altogether at this time, only to re-form around 4500 years ago. The temperatures slowly changed as the earth?s position altered, in relation to the sun, causing the distribution of energy received on earth to change geographically and seasonally. The changes observed by Thompson (since he started studying the Quelccaya ice cap in the late 1970s) have been extremely large and rapid; in fact, the rate of ice recession has increased over time. Thompson noted in a 2003 peer-reviewed article, that ?The rate of retreat from 1983 to 1991 was three times that measured from 1963 to 1983.? (Climatic Change, vol 59, p.137-159). Evidence of glacier retreat has been observed in almost all parts of the world in the 20th century, and the rate of retreat has also increased in the latter half of the 20th century. This has nothing to do with the slow changes that result from orbital forcing. It is a consequence of rapid worldwide global warming, the rate of which has increased in the last 20 years. As discussed elsewhere in these pages, there is strong evidence that anthropogenic effects are largely responsible for this warming. On a more general point, uninformed commentators often refer to periods in the past when it was warmer, then claim that this somehow ?proves? that contemporary changes are ?normal?. But there were countless warm periods in the past that resulted from quite different conditions than those prevailing today (see this link on the Medieval period, or this link on the "mid-Holocene" period). In some cases, these were due to a different orbital configuration, or different levels of greenhouse gases, or even different world geography (lower mountain ranges, ocean seaways altered, no polar ice sheets etc). What makes the recent changes stand out is that they are extremely rapid and global in extent. Another error commonly made is to pick one spot on earth where it may have been warm, and claim that this demonstrates that the earth as a whole was warm at that time. This is also incorrect. If it was warmer in southern Greenland when the Vikings arrived, this tells us nothing about conditions in the Pacific, or Eurasia or South America. To get a true picture of whether there was ?global warming? at that time requires, not surprisingly, a set of data from many places around the globe (see this discussion on one of the popular "myths" regarding past climate history). Thus, Thompson?s observation about the retreat of the Quelccaya ice cap would be interesting, but not that important, if it was the only data point we had. But it isn?t ? we observe similar things happening in virtually all mountainous regions of the world. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=85 __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - What will yours do? http://my.yahoo.com From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 10 01:27:50 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2005 20:27:50 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Borgrev: Reading Revelation Again Message-ID: Reading Revelation Again http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:L_UW3f_tzTcJ:159.191.39.100/curry/Borgrev.html+%22ward+ewing%22+%22power+of+the+lamb%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 [I don't know who Borgrev is. This page is cached, so I can't get any other of his writings. [I have at last finished by first cycle of books since abandoning reality, the last one, Steve Gregg, _Revelation: Four Views: A Parallel Commentary_. The book shows me how, exclusively in the West, four views (all Protestant inerrantist, at that) can be articulated and given textual support. I don't know whether Jews have done the same thing with the Old Testament or in this way, nor whether anything like it has been done with a sacred text elsewhere. Maybe it's a unique Occidental trait. [I did some Premise Checking, and that is that it's too easy to frame everything for or against the idea of a revealed text and try to find an error and say GOTCHA! The most fun interpretation of Revelation is surely the pre-tribulationist, pre-millenarian one so popular with Evangelicals and the view of the _Left Behind_ novels and, before that, with Hal Lindsey's _The Late, Great Planet Earth. It promises the Rapture of the believers into Heaven, followed by seven years of Tribulation, the banishment of the Devil during a 1000 year reign of Christ (but individual sinning still possible), the brief return of the Devil, his defeat, and a New Earth and a New Heaven. [The problem is that John, whichever John he may have been, spoke rather insistently of the near fulfillment of his visions. I am convinced by the arguments of John A.T. Robinson in _Redating the New Testament_ that all the New Testament was completed by the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 AD. As a devout atheist, I am not bothered by the failure of John's prophecies to come true, nor that he may have made an error in counting the Emperors of Rome by believing in Nero's return (Gregg says we can't have that, that the Bible is wrong!). The historical question is what John intended. The article below, along with Robinson, convinced me that John was speaking of a near fulfillment of his prophecies, and indeed the preterist view is the second of the four elaborated in Gregg's book. The main dispute among preterists is whether John was speaking of the destruction of Jerusalem (and thus the end of the First Covenant--but the Dispensationalists speak of seven before the coming of Christ) alone or of Rome as well. [Jesus, rather clearly to me, thought God would put and end to his creation within six to eight weeks. Since that didn't happen, to make His predictions true, Christians have had to alter the meaning of what he said. Later Christians moved the end ahead, John being one of them. Hmmm, so if Jerusalem and maybe Rome was destroyed, then what about the Second Heaven and the Second Earth. Unfortunately, Gregg changes his parallelism, so I don't know whether the preterists think there has already been a Second Heaven and a Second Earth. (NOTE BENE: Hell and the Lake of Fire will continue. God will NOT destroy them.) [No one has yet explained to me why Evangelicals exhibit signs of the coming of the End, such as the Jews returning to the Holy Land and RFID chips as the Mark of the Beast, when these very same Evangelicals insist that these events will take place *after* the Rapture. The only way I can reconcile this is that the Rapture has indeed already taken place but that, the world being so in league with the Devil, that there were so few true Christians to rapture that their disappearance got no more attention than any other event reported in The National Enquirer.] [And now on to my second Western novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson, one of many works of the 1950s protesting the conformity of the era.] This is G o o g l e's [1]cache of [2]http://159.191.39.100/curry/Borgrev.html as retrieved on Jan 19, 2004 02:39:23 GMT. G o o g l e's cache is the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the web. The page may have changed since that time. Click here for the [3]current page without highlighting. This cached page may reference images which are no longer available. Click here for the [4]cached text only. To link to or bookmark this page, use the following url: http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:L_UW3f_tzTcJ:159.191.39.100/curry /Borgrev.html+%22ward+ewing%22+%22power+of+the+lamb%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 ------------- "Revelation is widely popular for the wrong reasons," says biblical scholar Raymond Brown, "for a great number of people read it as a guide to how the world will end, assuming that the author was given by Christ detailed knowledge of the future that he communicated in coded symbols." Indeed, a substantial percentage of fundamentalist and conservative-evangelical Christians read Revelation as forecasting the imminent "end of the world" and second coming of Christ. The conviction that Jesus is coming soon, or at least that he nay be, is widespread. According to one national public-opinion poll, sixty-two percent of Americans (not just American Christians, mind you) have "no doubts" that Jesus will come again.2 Another poll reports that one-third believe the world will end soon.3 I call a reading of Revelation that emphasizes the imminent second coming of Christ a "millennialist" interpretation. That view has flourished in the last half-century. During the last thirty years, books by Hal Lindsey, beginning with The Late Great Planet Earth, have sold over forty million copies. During the decade of the 1970s, Lindsey was the best-selling nonfiction(?) author in the English-speaking world. In the last several years, a series of novels on "the rapture" by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins have been on the best-seller lists. A millennialist reading of Revelation is a frequent theme of television and radio evangelists and "prophecy conferences" throughout the world. Recently, as I surfed through my viewing options on TV, I saw one of the best-known television evangelists standing in front of a chalkboard displaying biblical "signs of the end" and suggesting that 2007 may be the year of the second coming. Speaking in the context of a fund-raising drive, he sent this message: "You don't want to be burdened when Jesus comes again." The millennialist interpretation is not universally accepted, however. In fact, the interpretation of Revelation divides the contemporary church. But those Christians who reject the milennialist view often lack an alternate interpretation, choosing instead to ignore Revelation. The majority of mainline Christians have little familiarity with this troubling text; they avoid it in personal devotions and seldom hear it preached about (for there are few texts from Revelation in the lectionary, which sets out the portions of the Bible assigned for reading in public worship). Readers are puzzled by Revelation's difficult and bizarre imagery, perplexed by its scenes of destruction and divine violence, and put off by the message, "Jesus is coming soon and you'd better be ready, or you'll be in big trouble." To them, the God of Revelation and the message of Revelation seem to have little to do with the gospel of Jesus. They are willing (even if not happy) to leave Revelation to others. Introduction Revelation stands at the end of the New Testament and thus at the end of the Christian Bible. However, it was not the last document of the New Testament to be written, nor did its author know that it would someday conclude the Christian Bible. Its placement at the end of the New Testament canon is due to its subject matter: "the end"-judgment upon the world, the second coming of Christ, the destruction of Satan, and the advent of the New Jerusalem, described in language that echoes the portrait of Eden at the beginning of Genesis. With Revelation at its end, the Bible moves from "paradise lost" to "paradise restored." Revelation has been controversial from Christian antiquity to the present. In fact, it almost failed to make it into the Bible. Though generally accepted in the Latin-speaking church of the West from the second century onward, Revelation took much longer to be accepted as scripture in the Greek-speaking Eastern church. In the fourth century, the Christian historian Eusebius listed it as one of the disputed books. At about the same time, the early church father Cyril of Jerusalem not only omitted it from his list of canonical books, but forbade its public or private use.4 Though gradually accepted in the East, as late as 810 CE a Byzantine (Eastern) list of canonical writings did not include it. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, it began to be routinely included in Greek manuscripts of the New Testament.5 Much later, leaders of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century had doubts about Revelation. Martin Luther included it in the New Testament only reluctantly and gave it secondary stature (even as he wished it would be thrown into the Elbe River); Ulrich Zwingli denied it scriptural status; and John Calvin largely ignored it (writing commentaries on the other twenty-six books of the New Testament but not on Revelation). Thus what to do with Revelation has been an issue for Christians for a very long time. In this chapter I will describe two very different ways of reading the book and look at the larger issues it raises. First, though, I will introduce it and provide a compact summary of its content. A Christian Apocalypse The book of Revelation is an apocalypse. Indeed, the two words-" Revelation" and "apocalypse"-are synonyms, for both translate the same Greek word, apokalvpsis. Thus Revelation in some Christian circles is called "The Apocalypse." Because Revelation was written by a person named John, the book is often known more fully as "The Revelation of John" or "The Apocalypse of John." (Note that the singular is used, not the plural; the name of the book is not "Revelations.") The word "apocalypse" means an "unveiling" or a "disclosure" or a "revelation." It also names a type of literature. As a literary genre, an apocalypse is defined by both content and style. Its subject matter is one or more visions disclosing or unveiling either the future or the heavenly world or both. Commonly, the present age is seen to be under the rule of evil powers who will soon be overthrown and destroyed by God, ushering in an age of blessedness for the faithful. The coming of the new age is typically marked by intense suffering and cosmic catastrophes. The stylistic features of apocalyptic literature include luxuriant imagery, fabulous beasts, and symbolic numbers.6 Apocalyptic writings flourished in Judaism from about 200 BCE to 100 CE. In the Hebrew Bible, the second half of the book of Daniel, written around 165 BCE, is the most sustained example.7 Revelation was written late in the first century by a man named John living on the island of Patmos off the coast of Asia Minor. Some have thought that John of Patmos was the disciple John, who also wrote the Fourth Gospel and the three letters of John, though virtually all modern scholars reject this identification.8 A few scholars have argued that Revelation was written in the time of the Roman emperor Nero in the 60s of the first century, though most affirm a date around the year 95, near the end of the rule of the emperor Domitian. Though Revelation is an apocalypse, it is also a letter addressed to seven Christian communities in seven cities in Asia Minor. John of Patmos was apparently known in these communities and may have been an itinerant Christian prophet and charismatic authority figure. He knew the Hebrew Bible very well. Though he never formally quotes a single verse, as many as sixty-five percent of the verses in Revelation echo or allude to passages from the Hebrew Bible.9 John's frequent use of the Hebrew Bible led one scholar to speak of the book as "a rebirth of images."10 Like the letters of Paul, Revelation would have been read aloud to its recipients at a community gathering, most likely in the context of worship. It was thus heard by its original audience (not read silently by individuals), and the listeners would have heard it all at once at a single sitting." This in itself has implications for interpretation: hearing Revelation all at once would convey the cumulative effect of John's visions in a way that the private reading of individual texts in isolation from the broad sweep of the book does not. Summary of Content After a brief introduction, John of Patmos speaks of the visionary experience in which he is commanded to write the book. Because the vision illustrates a number of characteristics of Revelation, I quote it at length: I was in the spirit on the Lord's day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, "Write in a book what you see and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus, to Smyrna, to Pergamum, to Thyatira, to Sardis, to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea. John then turns to see who is speaking to him. In his visionary state, he sees the risen Christ: Then I turned to see whose voice it was that spoke to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands I saw one like the Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across his chest. His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the, sun shining with full force. John then "fell at his feet as though dead." But the figure "placed his right hand on me, saying 'Do not be afraid," and then identified himself: "I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive for ever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades." The vision then concludes with the command of the risen Christ: Now write what you have seen, what is, and what is to take place after this. As for the mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand, and the seven golden lampstands: the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches.12 John's inaugural vision illustrates several features of Revelation: emphasis upon visions and "seeing," use of luxuriant imagery, allusion to the Hebrew Bible, and frequent use of symbolic numbers. Most of the book is narrated as a series of visions; in the book as a whole, "I saw" is used about fifty-five times. The luxuriant imagery in John's initial vision speaks for itself, much of it drawn from the Hebrew Bible; there are no fewer than twelve allusions to that older document in this passage. The number seven recurs frequently throughout the book. Here, there are seven stars, seven lampstands, and seven churches; in subsequent chapters, there will be seven letters, seven seals, seven trumpets, and seven bowls. Even when the number seven is not explicitly used, there are series of sevens: seven beatitudes, seven hymns of praise, seven categories of people, seven references to the altar, and seven prophetic affirmations of the second coming of Jesus. 13 Chapters two and three contain the letters to the seven churches. They include an evaluation of each community, threats and/or encouragement, and a promise. Nothing bad is said about Smyrna and Philadelphia; nothing good is said about Sardis and Laodicea; Ephesus, Pergamum, and Thyatira receive mixed verdicts.14 The issues facing the communities are persecution, false teaching, and accommodation to the larger culture. Chapters four through twenty-two contain the long series of visions that fills virtually the rest of the book.15 As chapter four begins, John exclaims, "I looked, and behold, in heaven, an open door!" He then looks through that door into another level of reality. There is no substitute for reading these chapters themselves, preferably at a single sitting. Nevertheless, I provide a summary. The section begins with a vision of God enthroned in heaven, surrounded by twenty-four elders clothed in white with crowns of gold on their heads. Four beasts are around the throne, each with six wings and eyes in the wings-strange creatures from another world. From the throne itself come lightning and thunder and voices. It continues with a vision of the Lamb that was slain but that now lives and is worthy to open the seven seals of the scroll of judgment. As the seven seals are opened, we see the four horsemen of the apocalypse riding forth upon the earth, bringing war, famine, pestilence, and death. Then there is a great earthquake, the sky blackens, the stars fall from the heavens, and the sky rolls up like a scroll. The seventh seal is opened, and it introduces another series of seven judgments: seven angels begin to blow seven trumpets in succession. The blowing of the trumpets unleashes another series of plagues and catastrophes on the earth, including giant locusts that look like horses equipped for battle (bearing tails like scorpions and making a noise like many chariots) and an immense army of two hundred million invading from the east. At the start of chapter twelve, we see a vision of a woman clothed with the sun, a crown of twelve stars on her head and the moon under her feet. She is giving birth to a child whom a great red dragon immediately tries to devour. At the same time, war breaks out in heaven: the archangel Michael and his angels battle against the great dragon, who loses and is cast down to earth. In chapter thirteen, a beast with seven heads and ten horns to whom the dragon has given authority rises out of the sea and takes control of the earth. The number of the beast, we are told, is 666. Then seven angels pour out upon the earth the seven bowls of the wrath of God, and we are shown the judgment and destruction of the "great harlot" or "great whore" who rides upon the beast and whose name is "Babylon the Great." This is soon followed by the battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ on a white horse. Christ leads an army clad in white robes against the armies of the beast and destroys them, their bodies becoming food for carrion birds that gorge themselves with their flesh. The dragon, now named "the devil" and "Satan," is cast into a bottomless pit for a thousand years, during which Christ and the saints rule. After a thousand years, Satan is released, and with Gog and Magog he fights a final battle and is again defeated. Then the last judgment occurs: all the dead, great and small, are raised, the book of life is opened, and all whose names are not in it are cast into the lake of fire, along with the devil, the beast, death, and Hades. After all of this, at the beginning of chapter twenty-one, comes the magnificent concluding vision. The New Jerusalem, adorned as a bride for her husband, descends from the sky-a city in which there will be no more tears, no pain, no death. The city has no need of a temple, for its temple is the Lord God The Almighty and the Lamb. Nor does the city have need of sun or moon, for the glory of God will be its light, and its lamp the Lamb of God. Through it flows the river of the water of life, and in it grows the tree of life whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. There, the servants of God will worship God and the Lamb: They will see God's face, and God's name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. 16 Two Ways of Reading Revelation How are we to read all this? How are we to interpret the visions and images of this strange, violent, unsettling, and yet magnificent book? In this section, I will describe two very different ways of reading the Apocalypse of John in our time. The Futurist Interpretation The central claim of a futurist reading is simple: Revelation tells us about what will happen some time in the future. It has three premises: o What Revelation describes has not yet happened. o As the inspired Word of God, the Bible cannot be wrong. o Therefore, what Revelation describes must still be future. These premises are the foundation of the millennialist reading of Revelation mentioned in the introduction to this chapter. This way of reading the book sees it as a cryptogram, a message encoded in symbols about the signs of the end that will precede the second coming of Christ. To illustrate this way of reading Revelation, I will use the work of the popular millennialist author Hal Lindsey. In his book The Late Great Planet Earth, Lindsey argues that the events foretold by Revelation are unfolding in our time. For him (as well as for other contemporary millennialists), the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948 is a key sign that the end may be near. The reason is that some biblical passages speak of Israel as a nation living in her own land in the time of the end. Only since 1948 has this been true. Lindsey then "decodes" much of the language of Revelation to refer to phenomena of our time. For example, he speculates that the opening of the sixth seal in Revelation 6.12-17 refers to a thermonuclear exchange. The "stars of the sky falling to earth" are orbiting nuclear bombs reentering the atmosphere. The sky vanishing "like a scroll rolling itself up" refers to what happens to the atmosphere in a nuclear explosion. When the sixth angel blows the sixth trumpet in Revelation 9.13-16 and unleashes an army from the east that numbers two hundred million, Lindsey deduces that the reference is to Communist China. Only China, he says, has a large enough population to put so huge an army in the field. So also he speculates that the giant locusts with tails like scorpions and wings that make a noise like many chariots (Rev. 9.7-10) may be a particular kind of attack helicopter. The ten-horned beast from the sea in Revelation 13 is central to Lindsey's interpretation. Recognizing that it has some connection to Rome, he suggests that it refers to a revived Roman Empire composed of a ten-nation confederacy. This confederacy, he suggests, is the European Economic Community, whose membership was nearing ten nations when he wrote, and which was formed by the Treaty of Rome. The horn that received a mortal wound but recovered refers to a future ruler of the ten-nation confederacy who will also become the ruler of the world. Lindsey speaks of this person as "the future F?hrer" and claims that he is already alive, even though we do not yet know who he is. Thus, according to Lindsey, the time of "the rapture," the final "tribulation," the battle of Armageddon, the second coming of Christ, and the last judgment is near. The rapture is the notion that "true-believing Christians" will be taken up from the earth "to meet the Lord in the air" and thus be sp3red the intense suffering that will precede the end. 17 That period of suffering is known as the "tribulation" and is signified in Revelation by the opening of the seven seals, the blowing of the seven trumpets, the pouring out of the seven bowls, all of them unleashing the destructive wrath of God upon the world. The tribulation comes to an end with the battle of Armageddon and the defeat of the armies of the beast by the returning warrior Christ. The futurist reading in its millennialist form has striking effects on the meaning of the Christian message. The gospel (if it can be called that in this context) becomes "the good news" that you can be saved from the soon-to-come wrath of God by believing strongly in Jesus. The focus is on saving yourself and those whom you love (and as many others as you can get to listen to you) from the fate that awaits most of humankind. The message also has striking effects on our attitude toward life on earth, including issues of social justice and the environment. If the world is going to end soon, why worry about improving conditions here? Why worry about preserving the environment? It's all going to end soon anyway. Though Lindsey's approach has attracted millions of Christians, many other Christians (and, I suspect, most readers of this book) find his reading of Revelation to be bizarre and perhaps even amusing. But the central claim of a futurist reading-that Revelation speaks about what will happen some time in the future-is shared by a broad spectrum of Christians, including many who reject a millennialist reading. The latter group of Christians are doubtful, however, that the images of Revelation can be decoded in a highly specific way. They see the book as speaking in vague, general terms about the end of the world and regard attempts to figure out whether we are living in the last days as misguided interpretations or even as manifestations of human pride. They are content to leave the future up to God, even as they affirm with varying degrees of conviction and in a general way that God will bring history to a conclusion consistent with the overall message of Revelation. Indeed, this has probably been the conventional and commonsense way of reading Revelation throughout most of Christian history: it tells us about the future, but we should not become too fascinated with it or too confident that we have discerned the meanings of its symbolic language. But if we think that Lindsey's approach is farfetched at best, what is wrong with it? Is it simply that Lindsey has got the details wrong? That, in his enthusiasm, he has become too specific? Or does he perhaps simply have the timing wrong? Is it the case that Revelation does describe what will happen sometime, in however general a way, even if that time is hundreds or thousands or even millions of years in the future? Or is the futurist approach itself-not just Lindsey's version of it-mistaken? These questions lead us to a second way of reading Revelation. The Past-Historical Interpretation The past-historical reading, which grows out of the belief that we understand the message of Revelation only by setting the text in the historical context in which it was written, emphasizes what Revelation would have meant in the past. 18 In this reading, Revelation tells us what the author believed would happen in his time. This approach takes seriously that the visions of Revelation are found in a letter addressed to specific Christian communities in Asia Minor late in the first century. As such, the text was meant to be a message to them, not a message to people thousands of years later. The book itself indicates that John was thinking of his own time. Seven times in his prologue and epilogue, he tells his audience that he is writing about the near future. His first sentence begins, "The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. "Two verses later, he says, "Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it; for the time is near." In his epilogue, the emphasis upon nearness occurs five times. The italicized phrases above are repeated once each, and three times the author attributes to the risen Christ the words, "I am coming soon." 19 Christians in subsequent centuries have often sought to avoid the implications of "soon" and "near" by saying that God's time is not our time. As the latest book in the New Testament puts it, "With the Lord, one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day."20 But the original hearers of Revelation would not have thought of hearing the language of "soon" with this qualification. It would not have occurred to them to think, "Maybe soon, maybe thousands of years from now." In addition to John's prologue and epilogue, there is also compelling evidence in the main body of the book that the author was writing about realities of his own day. This evidence is most visible in chapters thirteen and seventeen. In chapter thirteen, the ten-horned beast from the sea rules the world and demands worship, just as the Roman Empire ruled the world known to John. Its emperors were hailed as lord and god in temples honoring them throughout the empire. At the end of chapter thirteen, we are told that the "the beast" is a person whose "number is 666." In antiquity, letters of the alphabet had numerical values, and the technique for encoding and decoding a name into a number was called gematria. Using the rules of gematria, the number 666 decodes into "Caesar Nero."21 That John intended to identify the beast of chapter thirteen with the Roman Empire of his day is confirmed in the vision of "the great whore" in chapter seventeen. This woman, dressed in royal attire, rides upon the beast of chapter thirteen, and her name is "Babylon the Great." The Babylonian Empire had vanished some six hundred years earlier, so why would John name this creature Babylon? Historical context provides the answer: just as Babylon had destroyed Jerusalem and the temple in 586 BCE, so Rome had destroyed Jerusalem and the temple in 70 CE. In some Jewish and Christian circles, Babylon had become a symbolic name for Rome.22 The identification of this woman whose name is Babylon with the Roman Empire is made complete by two more details in chapter seventeen. The woman is seated on "seven mountains"; from antiquity, Rome has been known as the city built on seven hills or mountains. The identification becomes explicit in the last verse of the chapter: "The woman you saw is the great city that rules over the kings of the earth."23 In the first century, this could only have meant Rome. For John, the beast and the person whose number was 666 were not figures of the future, but realities of his present. In addition to this evidence in the book, there is a further reason why the past-historical reading supplants the futurist reading. If John was in fact writing about events thousands of years in the future, then the communities to which he wrote had no chance whatsoever of understanding his letter. If the ten-horned beast is really the European Economic Community (or some other future empire), if the giant locusts are really attack helicopters (or symbolize some other future death-dealing machines), and if the army of two hundred million refers to some future army, then the message of Revelation had no significance for the people to whom it was addressed. Though John wrote the letter and apocalypse to a specific audience, its message could not have been intended for them. For all of these reasons, the past-historical reading of Revelation affirms that John was writing about realities of his time. Of course, John was also writing about the future, but it was a future that he expected to happen soon, not a future that is still future from our point in time. His message to the communities to which he was writing was a mixture of warning (especially in the letters in chapters two and three) and encouragement. About his message, I will soon say more. For now, I summarize it very compactly as threefold: o Despite appearances to the contrary, Christ is Lord; Caesar and the beast are not. o God will soon act to overthrow the rule of the beast and its incarnation in Caesar. o Therefore, persevere, endure, be confident, take heart, have faith. The past-historical reading of Revelation has an important implication. To make the implication explicit: to the extent that Revelation is seen as foretelling the future, as prediction, it is mistaken prediction. What the author expected to happen soon did not happen. The Roman Empire continued for another three hundred years, more or less; and when it did fall, the events leading up to its collapse were not like those spoken of in John's visions. Furthermore, Jesus did not return soon. In other words, the past-historical interpretation takes seriously that the Bible is a human product, not a divine product with a divine guarantee. It acknowledges that the Bible can be mistaken. This realization raises the question of what it means to take the Apocalypse of John seriously. Do we take it seriously if we project John's symbols, visions, and end-times scenario from the first century to our time or some fill-future time? Do we honor the message of the book by affirming that what it says will still come to pass? Which reading of the book-the futurist or the past-historical-takes the text more seriously? Ironically, though the millennialist reading claims to take Revelation very seriously indeed, it does not, because it ignores what John was saying to the people to whom he was writing.24 The past-historical reading of Revelation also raises the question of what to think about the second coming of Jesus. Not just John of Patmos, but other early Christians as well, believed that it would be soon. The authors of Mark and Matthew, for example, refer to the imminent coming of "the Son of Man," presumably referring to the second coming of Jesus. The gospel of John also refers to the imminent second coming, though it is not clear that the author accepts the notion literally. Passages in Paul point to the same expectation. Obviously, these early Christians were wrong. What are we to do with this? Do we say that they got the expectation right and that Jesus really will come again, but their timing was offi For a variety of reasons, I do not think that it makes sense to expect a visible future second coming of Christ. The belief can be understood metaphorically, however, as an affirmation that Jesus comes again and again in the lives of Christians: in the eucharist, in the celebration of Christmas each year, in the experience of the Spirit as the presence of Christ, and perhaps in other ways as well.25 The Larger Themes But Revelation is more than mistaken prediction. The book has power.26 Its numinous language about God and Christ has been integrated into Christian worship, liturgy, and art. Its affirmation of another reality that transcends the visible world has been a source of inspiration, hope, and courage. Its archetypal imagery speaks to both the political and spiritual realms of life; indeed, it integrates rather than separates those realms. A Tale of Two Lordships John portrays the central conflict of the book of Revelation in a number of ways. One of the most important is the conflict between competing lordships: Christ's and Caesar's. Is Caesar lord, or is God as known in Jesus lord? John's answer, of course, is clear. But to appreciate it fully, we must know the claims being made for Caesar. Ever since the emperor Augustus had brought the devastating civil wars that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar to an end, ushering in the Pax Romana (the peace of Rome) and a "golden age," the emperors of Rome had been given divine titles. They were known as fihius deus (son of god), dominus (lord), and even deus (god). Augustus was heralded as the savior who had brought peace on earth. As an inscription from 9 BCE in Asia Minor puts it: The most divine Caesar... we should consider equal to the Beginning of all things .... Whereas the Providence which has regulated our whole existence ... has brought our life to the climax of perfection in giving to us the emperor Augustus... who being sent to us as a Savior, has put an end to war .... The birthday of the god Augustus has been for the whole world the beginning of good news (the Greek word is euaggelion, commonly translated "gospel").27 Throughout the empire, in temples of the imperial cult, worship was offered to the emperors. Such worship did not preclude the inhabitants from following their own religion as well. But it did have the effect of providing religious legitimation to the rule of Caesar and empire. Against this, John proclaims the exclusive lordship of God and "the Lamb"-that is, God as known in Jesus. John's first description of Jesus speaks of him as "the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth."28 As "the faithful witness," he is the Lamb that was slain, executed by the power of Rome. As "the firstborn of the dead," he has been vindicated and exalted by God, disclosing Rome as a false pretender lord. Now he rules upon the throne with God and has become "the ruler of the kings of the Earth." Throughout the book, the honor and praise demanded by Caesar is offered to God and Jesus instead. Much of Revelation is doxology, and its hymns of praise have been a fountainhead for Christian hymn-writers ever since: Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty. Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing. Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever. The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign forever and ever. Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.29 Jesus is Lord; Caesar is not. John shares this affirmation in common with the whole of the New Testament. The Ancient Cosmic Combat Myth Among the reasons for the power of the Apocalypse is John's use of one of humankind's most widespread archetypal stories: the ancient cosmic combat myth. John draws on that myth to continue the theme of two lordships and to deepen and amplify his indictment of empire. The cosmic combat myth appears in many cultures, ancient and modern, and it takes many forms.30 The archetypal plot is a story of cosmic conflict between 'good and evil. In the ancient world, the conflict was between a god (or gods) of light, order, and life against an evil power of darkness, disorder, and death. Commonly the evil power was imaged as a dragon or sea monster or primeval serpent. In the ancient Near East, the cosmic combat myth is found in one of the world's oldest creation stories, the Enuma Elish. In that story, the god Marduk creates the world by slaying Tiamat, a seven-headed monster of chaos associated with the sea. In Babylon, that primordial battle was ritually reenacted each year. Traces of the ancient cosmic combat myth are found in the Hebrew Bible. According to Psalm 74, God "broke the heads of the dragons in the waters and crushed the heads of Leviathan."3' Passages in Isaiah echo the myth: "On that day the LoRD with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and will kill the dragon that is in the sea."32 The book of job refers several times to the dragon or sea monster, naming it Rahab and Leviathan.33 In the New Testament, the cosmic combat myth lies behind one of the most central interpretations of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Often called the "Christus Victor" understanding of Good Friday and Easter, it portrays Jesus' death and resurrection as the means whereby God defeated the principalities and powers that hold humankind in bondage.34 In the postbiblical Christian tradition, the cosmic combat myth is reflected in two of the most popular Christian icons: St. George slaying the dragon, and the archangel Michael warring with the dragon. In our own time, this ancient myth is the central plot element of the Star Wars movies: the battle between good and evil symbolized in the conflict between Jedi knights wielding light-sabers against an empire of darkness whose most vivid representative is Lord Darth Vader, commander of the "Death Star." The popularity of the Star Wars saga is due not simply to the stunning special effects, but also to the re-presentation of this ancient story. The series taps into something deep within human memory and consciousness: the awareness of conflict between good and evil and the yearning that good will triumph. Thus Revelation and Star Wars are powerful for the same reason. The myth was also well known in Greco-Roman culture. Its most common form in that context was the story of the god Apollo (son of Zeus and thus son of god) and Python, the ancient monster. When Apollo's mother, Leto, was about to give birth to her child, Python looked for his chance to devour the infant. Apollo was delivered safely, however; and after he had grown up, he battled and killed Python. It is the same story, appearing again and again. John of Patmos obviously knew this version of the ancient myth, and it shapes much of the Apocalypse.35 Now the battle is between, on one side, God and "the Lamb that was slain," and, on the other, the dragon, the ancient serpent, the beast from the abyss, who is also Satan and the devil. Like ancient Tiamat and Leviathan, the beast of Revelation 13 has seven heads. The battle climaxes with an army dressed in white defeating the armies of the beast and Satan cast into a bottomless pit and then into a lake of fire. John is telling one of the most powerful stories known. Revelation and Empire But it is John's identification of the dragon that gives to the Apocalypse a stunning political dimension. John is not simply speaking about a mythological battle between gods in primordial time; he is also talking about a conflict going on in his own time. For John, the present incarnation of the dragon is the Roman Empire. As already noted, the identification of the beast with the Roman Empire is most clearly made in chapters thirteen and seventeen. Moreover, John pointedly reverses the Roman Empire's version of the story of Apollo and Python. Both Caesar Augustus and Nero styled themselves as Apollo, the son of a god and himself the god of light, who had brought in a golden age of order and peace by slaying Python, the mythical power of disorder, darkness, and death. John echoes the story of Apollo's birth and reverses the imperial version of it in the vision found in Revelation 12. There a woman is about to give birth to a son who will rule the nations. A great dragon waits to devour the son, but the child is delivered by being taken up to the throne of God. For John, the child is Jesus, of course. Then we are shown a scene in heaven in which Michael and his angels fight against the dragon and defeat him. Though the war occurs in heaven, the means of the dragon's defeat is an event that happened on earth: he has been conquered "by the blood of the Lamb"-that is, by the death of Jesus. The result: the dragon is cast down to earth and gives his authority, power, and throne to the seven-headed "beast from the sea" who appears at the beginning of Revelation 13. This is a remarkable subversion of the Roman story of Apollo's birth. Jesus, not Caesar, is Apollo, the light of the world who brings in the true golden age of peace on earth. Caesar and the Roman Empire are not Apollo, slaying the beast; they are the incarnation of the dragon, the beast, the ancient serpent. Rome is the opposite of what it claimed to be: the empire that claimed to bring peace on earth, and whose emperors were spoken of as lord, savior, son of god, and even god, was in fact the incarnation of disorder, violence, and death. What's Wrong with Rome? That the book of Revelation indicts the Roman Empire in the strongest terms is thus clear. But why? What was wrong with Rome? Why did John call it "the beast"? An earlier generation of scholars identified the reason as Roman persecution of Christians. In particular, these scholars thought that John's communities were facing a major outbreak of persecution ordered by the emperor Domitian around the year 95. According to this earlier view, Domitian demanded that he be acknowledged as "lord" and "god" in temples to the emperor. Refusal to do so meant possible arrest and even execution. More recently, however, scholars have concluded that there is little historical evidence to support the claim that there was major persecution in the time of Domitian. While some scholars argue that there was no persecution and others argue that there was only minor, limited persecution, most agree that there was no massive persecution of Christians at that time.36 What John says in his letters to the seven churches is consistent with minor rather than massive persecution. He mentions only one martyr in the communities to which he writes-a person named Antipas; and though he does warn of persecutions and trials to come, it is not clear that these have begun.37 In the body of the book, he mentions martyrs several times, but these may well be martyrs from the time of Nero some thirty years earlier. Why does the level of persecution matter? It affects our perception of why John called Rome "the beast." If there was massive Roman persecution of Christians in John's day, then Rome was "the beast" because of what it was doing to Christians. This was why Rome faced God's wrath and destruction. John's message would be, in effect, "Rome has been giving us a hard time, so God's going to destroy her." Seeing the issue this way has an important corollary. It implies that if Caesar had not called himself "lord" and "god," if he had not demanded worship in imperial shrines, if he had left Christians alone, then Caesar would have been okay and imperial Rome would have been okay. In short, this reading makes the issue narrowly religious, domesticating John's indictment of Rome. It suggests that if Rome had allowed "religious freedom" to Christians, then Christians would have had no issue with Rome. The persecution of Christians cannot be eliminated from the passion that drives the Apocalypse. Nevertheless, there are clear indications that it is not simply Rome-as-persecutor but Romeas-empire that accounts for John's indictment of Rome as the incarnation of the dragon, the ancient seven-headed monster that plunges the world into chaos. Recent scholarship has moved in this direction. It sees the book of Revelation as a powerful indictment of the Roman Empire not simply because of its persecution of Christians, but also because that empire was the then-contemporary incarnation of the "domination system" that has marked so much of human history.38 The Indictment of Empire Earlier in this book, the ancient domination system was described as a web of political oppression, economic exploitation, and religious legitimation.39 Elites of power and wealth controlled societies in their own interests and declared the order they imposed to be the will of God. In his indictment of the Roman Empire, John names all of these features.4\0 Political Oppression Rome controlled the world of the first century through a combination of seduction, intimidation, and violence. The Roman Empire personified itself as a woman in the form of the goddess Roma. So also John personifies Rome as a woman, but as "the great whore" dressed in finery, the appealing seductress "with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication. " 41 She practices not only seduction but sorcery, bewitching the inhabitants of earth to follow the ways of empire . 42 Rome is not only a seductive sorceress; it is also a ferocious beast ruling through intimidation and violence. The inhabitants of "the whole earth followed the beast," for they said, "Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?" 143 intimidation was not adequate, the empire used brutal violence. John knew of Rome's reconquest of the Jewish homeland some twenty-five years earlier, the mass crucifixions, and the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. John knew also of Rome's execution of Christian martyrs, including Peter and Paul. But the beast incarnate in the empire of John's day is the slayer not only of Christian martyrs but also of prophets and countless others: "In you was found the blood of prophets and saints, and of all who have been slaughtered on earth."44 Above all, John knew of the murderous power of the empire in its killing of Jesus, "the Lamb." In its execution of Jesus, the empire exposed itself as the beast as well as sealed its doom, for God had vindicated "the Lamb that was slain" against the power of empire. Economic Exploitation It is striking how much of John's picture of "Roma" personified as "the great whore" and "Babylon the Great" emphasizes the wealth of Rome. Chapter eighteen imaginatively celebrates her fall. As it does so, it describes the luxury of empire: "She glorified herself and lived luxuriously clothed in fine linen, in purple and scarlet, adorned with gold, with jewels and with pearls." Her "merchants were the magnates of the earth," and "the kings of the earth lived in luxury with her."45 John provides a vivid picture of cargo ships carrying the wealth of the world to Rome as the center of the domination system. His list of cargo includes luxury items, agricultural products, and human slaves: gold, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all articles of ivory, all articles of costly wood, bronze, iron and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, olive oil, choice flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, slaves, and human lives.46 But all of this will end: "All your dainties and your splendors are lost to you." Those who had grown wealthy from her exploitation will mourn: "Alas, alas the great city, where all who had ships at sea grew rich by her wealth. "47 Religious Legitimation Little more needs to be said about religious legitimation. The Roman Empire's claim that its domination reflected the will of the gods has already been emphasized. John refers to this in the second half of Revelation 13, in his portrait of "the false prophet" who leads people to worship "the beast. "48 Thus, as we have seen, Rome is indicted by John not simply for its persecution of Christians but because it incarnates the domination system. That same system, in different incarnations, was known in Egypt in the time of Moses and in Israel in the time of the predestruction prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Rome and the beast have an ancient lineage. "Babylon the Great" is not a code name simply for Rome; it designates all domination systems organized around power, wealth, seduction, intimidation, and violence. In whatever historical form it takes, ancient or modern, empire is the opposite of the kingdom of God as disclosed in Jesus. This analysis is consistent with the content of John's letters to the seven churches. Some (and perhaps all) of these communities had been established a generation earlier. We should imagine them as having been similar to the communities of Paul: initially remarkably egalitarian communities living by an alternative social vision. Now, a generation later, some are beginning to fall away from the power and passion of the founding vision. John does warn some of his communities of the possibility of persecution, but that is not his focus. His messages to the individual groups commend some for their faithfulness to Jesus and reprove others for their accommodation to the culture and values of empire, calling them back to what they first heard. The communities in Smyrna and Philadelphia, to whom nothing negative is said, are commended for being rich even though poor and for being faithful to Jesus' word even though they have little power. The community in Ephesus is reproached for having abandoned the love its members had at first and is urged to repent "and do the works you did at first." The communities in Pergamum and Thyatira are charged with eating food that has been sacrificed to idols, a symptom of accommodation. To those in Sardis, John says, "You have a name of being alive, but you are dead." That community is urged to "strengthen what remains and is on the point of death" and "to remember what you received and heard." The community at Laodicea, which has become rich and prosperous, is indicted for being "lukewarm, neither hot nor cold." Cumulatively, John's negative indictments portray communities that no longer differentiate themselves from the world of empire. In this context, John's portrait of Rome means, Do not betray the vision of Jesus and accommodate yourself to empire, for it is the beast. In his own words, as he writes about Babylon the Great, the world of empire: "Come out of her, my people, so that you do not take part in her sins, and so that you do not share in her plagues, for her sins are heaped high as heaven. "49 A Tale of Two Cities The tale of two lordships concludes with a tale of two cities. The climax of the Apocalypse is a vision of a very different kind of city. After John's vision of Babylon the Great and its fall, he sees "a new heaven and a new earth" and "the New Jerusalem" descending out of the sky. Babylon the Great, just described, is the city of Rome as well as the Roman Empire. The New Jerusalem is the city of God as well as the kingdom of God. Revelation is thus a tale of two cities: one city comes from the abyss, the other from God.50 John's vision of the New Jerusalem is highly symbolic, with virtually every one of its details based on imagery from the Hebrew Bible. His symbolism echoes the story of creation and paradise even as it moves beyond and speaks of the deepest yearnings of humankind. John sees a "new heaven [sky] and new earth."51 It is a new creation, and in the new creation "the sea was no more." The sea as the home of the ancient monster, from which empire after empire ascended, is gone. Then he sees the New Jerusalem descending out of the sky "prepared as a bride adorned for her husband," and he hears a loud voice proclaiming that God now dwells with humankind: See, the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them. They will be God's peoples, And God will be with them. In the New Jerusalem, the ancient afflictions of humankind are all gone: grief, pain, and death are no more. "God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more." The size and construction of the New Jerusalem are fantastic. It is huge. It is a square, fifteen hundred miles on each side. Indeed, its height is equal to its width and length, so it is a cube, like the holy of holies in the temple in Jerusalem. But the city has no need of a temple, "for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb." The city is made of transparent gold, "pure gold, clear as glass." So also its streets are "pure gold, transparent as glass." It is Jerusalem the Golden.52 Its walls are pure jasper, and its foundations are adorned with every kind of jewel. Its twelve gates are twelve pearls, and they are never shut by day-and there is no night. The significance of the New Jerusalem is universal. Not only is it huge, with open gates, but "the nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it." In this great city, next to "the river of the water of life" is "the tree of life" whose "leaves are for the healing of the nations." It is the city of light, in which there is no more night. It is the city of God, in which God and the Lamb dwell with humankind. But what are we to make of this vision of the New Jerusalem? The city that John contrasts to Babylon and the world of empire is clearly no actual city. One cannot imagine it ever existing, whether in this world or another. So has John left the world of history? Is he, as one might imagine, speaking of "heaven" in his highly symbolic language? We must not too quickly assume so. For it is impossible to reconcile all of what he says with the supposition that he is speaking of heaven. Many of the details John mentions are specific to earthly life: o The new Jerusalem is "on earth," though it is a new earth and heaven. o Kings and nations remain in John's vision, for they come streaming to the light of the New Jerusalem. o The city's tree of life is for the healing of the nations. o The gates of the city are open to the world. Though John's vision recalls the language of paradise (and is in that sense paradise restored), it is not a vision of individuals communing with God in an idyllic garden. It is a vision of humans living together in a city. And it is the opposite of life in the other city, the world of empire. Thus John's vision has historical elements. We need to remember that this is the language of apocalyptic. As such, it is enigmatic, metaphorical, parabolic. John's concluding vision is perhaps best understood as "the dream of God"-God's dream for humankind. 53 Throughout the Bible, God's dream is a dream for this earth, and not for another world. For John, it is the only dream worth dreaming. Concluding Reflections The book of Revelation is not without its flaws. John's portrait of Rome as "the great whore" and of 144,000 men "who have not defiled themselves with women" reflects a misogynistic attitude.54 His portrait of God as sending massive destruction upon the inhabitants of earth is extreme. In one scene, blood flows "as high as a horse's bridle for a distance of about two hundred miles."55 The God of Revelation sometimes has more to do with vengeance than justice, and the difference is crucial.56 Though John cannot be blamed for all the meanings that Christians have sometimes seen in his book, Revelation supports a picture of God as an angry tyrant who plans to destroy the earth and most of its people. Nevertheless, in this final book of the Christian Bible, we find the same twofold focus that marks so much of the Bible as a whole: radical affirmation of the sovereignty and justice of God, and radical criticism of an oppressive domination system pretending to be the will of God. The domination system that John indicts is a subsequent incarnation of the domination system that existed in Egypt in the time of Moses and then within Israel itself in the time of the classical prophets. It is the same domination system that Jesus and Paul and the early Christian movement challenged. Rome and the beast have an ancient lineage. "Babylon the Great" is not simply a symbolic name for Rome, but for domination systems organized around power, wealth, seduction, intimidation, and violence. In whatever ancient or modern forms they take, domination systems are the opposite of the lordship and kingdom of God as disclosed in Jesus. Thus John's indictment of empire sounds the same theme as the central voices of the biblical tradition. As with Moses, the prophets, Jesus, the gospel writers, and Paul, his claim is stark and compelling: God is Lord; the kingdoms and cultures of this world are not. John's vision of the New Jerusalem has both historical and trans-historical elements. Indeed, its power as a trans-historical vision may be the primary reason that Revelation ultimately made it into the Bible. Its speaks of the reunion of God with humankind, thereby overcoming the exile that began in Eden. There every tear shall be wiped away. The river of life flows through it and the tree of life is in it. There we will see God. It is difficult to imagine a more powerful ending to the Bible. NOTES 1. Raymond Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997), p. 773. Two excellent accessible commentaries on Revelation are Adela Yarbro Collins, The Apocalypse (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1979), and Eugene Boring, Revelation (Louisville: Knox, 1989). See also the earlier work by George B. Caird, A Commentary on the Revelation of St. John the Divine (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1966). An excellent highly readable introduction to various ways "the end of the world" has been understood in prophetic and apocalyptic literature and in the history of the church is Reginald Stackhouse, The End of the World? A New Look at an Old Belief (New York: Paulist, 1997). 2. A 1980 Gallup poll cited by Wes Howard-Brook and Anthony Gwyther, Unveiling Empire: Reading Revelation Then and Now (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), p. 16. 3. A U.S. News World Report survey cited by Stackhouse, The End of the World, pp. 1-2. 4. Boring, Revelation p. 3. 5. Adela Yarbro Collins, The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), vol. 5, p. 695. 6. I owe the phrase "fabulous beasts" to Luke Timothy Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), p. 514. On p. 515, he refers to the "apocalyptic menagerie." 7. For a study of Jewish apocalypses not included in the Hebrew Bible, see John Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1984). Apocalyptic literature has antecedents in portions of exilic and postexilic books of the Hebrew Bible, including Ezekiel, Joel, Zechariah, and Isaiah (24-27). 8. The argument that the author of the Fourth Gospel and the author of Revelation are two different people is also ancient, made by an early Christian writer named Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria in the middle of the third century. Dionysius's denial of apostolic authorship of Revelation was among the reasons for the book's slow acceptance as scripture in the Eastern church. 9. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, p. 775. Boring, Revelation, p. 27, notes that there are over five hundred allusions to the Hebrew Bible. 10. Austin Farrer, A Re-Birth of Images (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1949). 11. About two hours are required to read Revelation aloud. For a contemporary dramatic reading of Revelation that seeks to convey what it was like to hear it at a single sitting, see a videotape featuring David Rhoads, professor of New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, The video is available from SELECT, Trinity Lutheran Seminary, Columbus, Ohio. 12. Rev. 1.10-20. 13. For the series of sevens and chapter and verse references, see Boring, Revelation, p. 31. 14. See the useful two-page tabulation in Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, pp. 784-85. 15. Are the vision narratives in these chapters based on actual visionary experiences? Did John "see" all of this in a visionary state of consciousness? Or are the vision narratives literary constructions? It is, I think, impossible to make a discerning judgment. Although I think that John did have visions, the use of repeating structural elements (seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls, and so forth) and the frequent echoing of the Hebrew Bible suggest literary construction. But literary construction can be based on real experiences, of course. 16. Rev. 22.4-5. 17. The "proof text" for the rapture is I Thess. 4.13-18, in which Paul speaks of followers of Jesus "being caught up in the clouds ... to meet the Lord in the air." It is difficult to know how literally Paul meant this language. In any case, he seems (like the author of Revelation) to have believed that the second coming of Christ was near, for he imagines that some of those to whom he is writing (and perhaps he himself) will still be alive when it happens. 18. This approach to Revelation is the foundation of modern scholarly study of the book and is affirmed by virtually all mainline scholars. Many scholars move beyond this approach and also emphasize the literary and/or aesthetic and/or political meanings of the book, but the past-historical reading is their common foundation. 19. Rev. 1.1, 3; 22.6, 10, 7, 12, 20. 20. II Pet. 3.8, echoing Ps. 90.4. It is interesting to note that the context is the delay of the second coming of Christ: II Pet. 3.1-10. [5]21. Rev. 13.18. Nero was caesar (emperor) from 54 until the time of his suicide in 68 CE, when he was still only about thirty years old. Because "666" refers to Nero, some have thought that Revelation must have been written during his reign rather than some thirty years later, near the end of the reign of the emperor Domitian. However, for two different reasons, the name of the beast as Nero need not conflict with a late-first-century date. On the one hand, there was a rumor that Nero had survived and would return to claim the imperial throne. On the other hand, Nero was the first Roman emperor to persecute Christians, and thus the name Nero could refer to the empire in its role as persecutor of the Christian movement. 22. In the New Testament, see I Pet. 5.13. 23. Rev. 17.9, 18. 24. In what he calls a "strong clarifring statement," Raymond Brown writes, "God has not revealed to human beings details about how the world began or how the world will end, and failing to recognize that, one is likely to misread both the first book and the last book of the Bible. The author of Revelation did not know how or when the world will end, and neither does anybody else." An Introduction to the New Testament, p. 810. 25. For further exposition, Marcus Borg and N. T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), chap. 13, esp. pp. 194-96. 26. In The Writings of the New Testament, p. 513, Luke Timothy Johnson comments, "[T]he book of Revelation is one of those rare compositions that speak to something deep and disturbed in the human spirit with a potency never diminished by fact or disconfirmation." 27. Excerpted from Richard Horsley, The Liberation of Christmas (New York: Crossroad, 1989), p. 27. Italics added. See also pp. 25-33. 28. Rev. 1.5. 29. In sequence, Rev. 4.8, 5.12, 7.12, 11.15, 19.6. 30. See Walter Wink's compelling analysis of its presence in comic strips, television cartoons, spy thrillers, and movies, as well as in the policies of contemporary national-security states, in his Engaging the Powers (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), pp. 13-31. I am impressed again and again with the brilliance of this book and commend it to everybody. See also Robert Jewett, The Captain America Complex, rev. ed. (Santa Fe: Bear, 1984); and Robert Jewett and John Sheldon Lawrence, The American Monomyth (Garden City: Doubleday, 1977). 31. Ps. 74.12-13; see also Ps. 89.9-10, where the primordial monster is named Rahab. [6]32. Isa. 27.1. See also 51.9: "Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces, who pierced the dragon?" In Isa. 30.7, Egypt is referred to as "Rahab"; see also Ezek. 29.3, which identifies Pharaoh "as the great dragon." 33. Job 7.12, 9.13, 26.12-13, and all of chap. 41. 34. See especially Gustav Aulen's classic study of Christian understandings of Jesus' death and resurrection: Christus Victor, trans. A. F. Hebert (New York: Macmillan, 1969; first published in 1931). 35. For the way the ancient cosmic combat myth shapes Revelation, see Adela Yarbro Collins, The Combat Myth in the Book of Revelation (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1976). See also compact expositions in Boring, Revelation, p. 151; Wink, Engaging the Powers, pp. 90-93; Collins, Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984), pp. 148-50. On p. 148, Collins writes, "This basic plot or pattern is found in every series of visions in Revelation, beginning with the seven seals (in Rev. 6) ... and in more elaborate form, for example, in the passage that extends from 19.11-22.5" (italics added). 36. Some scholars deny that there was any official Roman persecution of Christians in the time of Domitian. For a persuasive argument that there was minor (but not massive) persecution, see Raymond Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, pp. 807-9. 37. Antipas is mentioned in Rev. 2.13; references in the letters to persecutions to come are found in 2.10 and 3.10. See also 1.9. 38. The most sustained recent study arguing for this point of view is Howard Brook and Gwyther, Unveiling Empire. See also Ward Ewing, The Power of the Lamb (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1990); and Wink, Engaging the Powers, pp. 89-104. See also earlier books by William Stringfellow, Conscience and Obedience (Waco: Word Books, 1977), and Daniel Berrigan, Beside the Sea of Glass: The Song of the Lamb (New York: Seabury, 1978), and The Nightmare of God (Portland, OR: Sunburst, 1983). 39. See chap. 5 above. 40. Wink, Engaging the Powers, p. 99: "Never has a more withering political and economic criticism of empire been penned." 41. Rev. 17.3, 18.3. [7]42. Rev. 18.23. See Wink's comment, Engaging the Powers, p. 93: "People must be made to believe that they benefit from a system that is in fact harmful to them." 43. Rev. 13.3-4. 44. Rev. 18.24. 45. Rev. 18.7, 16; 18.23, 9. 46. Rev. 18.12-13. 47. Rev. 18.14, 19. 48. Wink, Engaging the Powers, p. 93: it "proselytizes by means of a civil religion that declares the state and its leaders divine." [8]49. Rev. 18.4. See the comment of Gerd Theissen, The Religion of the Earliest Churches, trans. John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), p. 244: John drives a wedge "between the community and the world. It was not the emperor cult that was the great problem, but the lack of demarcation between many Christians in the churches and the pagan world, its affairs, and its society." John seeks to resist "tendencies in the community to assimilate to this world . . . . The Roman empire did not declare war on the Christians; a Christian prophet declared war on the Roman empire." 50. For a striking tabulation of the symmetrical contrasts between the two cities, see Howard-Brook and Gwyther, Unveiling Empire, p. 160, and their chapter on "Babylon or New Jerusalem?" pp. 157-96. 51. The paragraphs that follow are all based on Rev. 21.1-22.5. 52. The phrase "gold transparent as glass" makes me wonder if John perhaps did see the New Jerusalem in a visionary state (in contrast to the whole of the vision being a literary creation). Mystical experiences are frequently marked by golden light, so much so that the historian of religions Mircea Eliade refers to such experiences as "experiences of the golden world." Cited by Robert A. Johnson (with Jerry M. Ruhi) in Balancing Heaven and Earth (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), p. 2. 53. As noted in chap. 6, I owe the phrase "the dream of God" to the title of Verna Dozier's book, The Dream of God (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1991). [9]54. Rev. 14.4. For critiques of his misogynistic language and two different ways of dealing with it, see Elisabeth Sch?ssler Fiorenza, Revelation: Vision of a Just World (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1991) and Tina Pippin, Death and Desire: The Rhetoric of Gender in the Apocalypse of John (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992). 55. Rev. 14.20. 56. See John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), p. 586 References 2. http://159.191.39.100/curry/Borgrev.html 3. http://159.191.39.100/curry/Borgrev.html 4. http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:L_UW3f_tzTcJ:159.191.39.100/curry/Borgrev.html+%22ward+ewing%22+%22power+of+the+lamb%22&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&strip=1 5. http://21.Rev.13.18.Nero/ 6. http://32.Isa.27.1.See/ 7. http://42.Rev.18.23.See/ 8. http://49.Rev.18.4.See/ 9. http://54.Rev.14.4.For/ From Schwaderer_Lists at comcast.net Mon Jan 10 04:05:58 2005 From: Schwaderer_Lists at comcast.net (W. David Schwaderer) Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2005 20:05:58 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Edge: The World Question Center 2005 References: Message-ID: <002901c4f6c9$b0df4c60$6401a8c0@ISV2> Thanks for this and the The New York Times Magazine: The Year in Ideas: A to Z I really appreciate it, particularly the A-Z article since you apparantly had to copy each little atricle into a composite. Dave Schwaderer From kendulf at shaw.ca Mon Jan 10 07:51:01 2005 From: kendulf at shaw.ca (Val Geist) Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2005 23:51:01 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Fox news distorts global warming reports References: <20050109234124.19620.qmail@web13421.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <00b501c4f6e9$20dbb8e0$03224346@yourjqn2mvdn7x> Thanks! Very nice and informative summary. Cheers, Val Geist ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Christopher" To: Sent: Sunday, January 09, 2005 3:41 PM Subject: [Paleopsych] Fox news distorts global warming reports > Fox News gets it wrong > > Steven Milloy comments on a lecture by Lonnie Thompson > at the Annual meeting of the American Geophysical > Union in San Francisco. He uses a common ploy of > truncating what Thompson said, to ensure that a > quotation fits with his message. According to Milloy, > Thompson said, "Any prudent person would agree that we > don't yet understand the complexities with the climate > system." But what he actually said was "Any prudent > person would agree that we don't yet understand the > complexities with the climate system and, since we > don't, we should be extremely cautious in how much we > 'tweak' the system." (see full press release here). > Such manipulations are designed so that Milloy can't > be accused of misquoting, but clearly, he completely > contorts Thompson's point. Milloy also misunderstands > the science. > > > In his talk, Thompson described two samples of moss > that are 5,000 and 50,000 years old, respectively > (based on radiocarbon dating). These samples have been > revealed as the Quelccaya ice cap in Peru receded over > the last few years. Milloy argues that "the plant find > is a strong indication that, thousands of years ago, > the high Andean climate must have been warm enough to > cause the glacier to be recessed and to allow for the > plants to grow in the first place.". That is correct. > But he goes on to say, "So if natural forces caused > those climate changes, isn't it reasonable to conclude > that perhaps natural forces might also be largely > responsible for whatever climate changes may be > occurring now?" Unfortunately, that isn't reasonable. > > Milloy makes the common mistake of confusing (1) > different factors that cause climates to change (see > forcings) and (2) the rates of climate change. Warming > in the early to mid-Holocene (the post-glacial period > that covers the last 12,500 years) resulted from > changes in the earth's orbit (as described by > Milankovitch). In the western United States, many > glaciers disappeared altogether at this time, only to > re-form around 4500 years ago. The temperatures slowly > changed as the earth's position altered, in relation > to the sun, causing the distribution of energy > received on earth to change geographically and > seasonally. The changes observed by Thompson (since he > started studying the Quelccaya ice cap in the late > 1970s) have been extremely large and rapid; in fact, > the rate of ice recession has increased over time. > Thompson noted in a 2003 peer-reviewed article, that > "The rate of retreat from 1983 to 1991 was three times > that measured from 1963 to 1983." (Climatic Change, > vol 59, p.137-159). Evidence of glacier retreat has > been observed in almost all parts of the world in the > 20th century, and the rate of retreat has also > increased in the latter half of the 20th century. This > has nothing to do with the slow changes that result > from orbital forcing. It is a consequence of rapid > worldwide global warming, the rate of which has > increased in the last 20 years. As discussed elsewhere > in these pages, there is strong evidence that > anthropogenic effects are largely responsible for this > warming. > > On a more general point, uninformed commentators often > refer to periods in the past when it was warmer, then > claim that this somehow "proves" that contemporary > changes are "normal". But there were countless warm > periods in the past that resulted from quite different > conditions than those prevailing today (see this link > on the Medieval period, or this link on the > "mid-Holocene" period). In some cases, these were due > to a different orbital configuration, or different > levels of greenhouse gases, or even different world > geography (lower mountain ranges, ocean seaways > altered, no polar ice sheets etc). What makes the > recent changes stand out is that they are extremely > rapid and global in extent. Another error commonly > made is to pick one spot on earth where it may have > been warm, and claim that this demonstrates that the > earth as a whole was warm at that time. This is also > incorrect. If it was warmer in southern Greenland when > the Vikings arrived, this tells us nothing about > conditions in the Pacific, or Eurasia or South > America. To get a true picture of whether there was > "global warming" at that time requires, not > surprisingly, a set of data from many places around > the globe (see this discussion on one of the popular > "myths" regarding past climate history). Thus, > Thompson's observation about the retreat of the > Quelccaya ice cap would be interesting, but not that > important, if it was the only data point we had. But > it isn't - we observe similar things happening in > virtually all mountainous regions of the world. > > http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=85 > > > > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > The all-new My Yahoo! - What will yours do? > http://my.yahoo.com > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > -- > No virus found in this incoming message. > Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. > Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.6.9 - Release Date: 1/6/2005 > > -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.6.9 - Release Date: 1/6/2005 From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Jan 10 14:57:39 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 06:57:39 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Fox news distorts global warming reports Message-ID: <01C4F6E1.AD06E040.shovland@mindspring.com> It's about what we'd expect during a rapture Presidency. I hear that these days he doesn't want to hear any bad news. What will happen when reality breaks through the bubble? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Val Geist [SMTP:kendulf at shaw.ca] Sent: Sunday, January 09, 2005 11:51 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Fox news distorts global warming reports Thanks! Very nice and informative summary. Cheers, Val Geist ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Christopher" To: Sent: Sunday, January 09, 2005 3:41 PM Subject: [Paleopsych] Fox news distorts global warming reports > Fox News gets it wrong > > Steven Milloy comments on a lecture by Lonnie Thompson > at the Annual meeting of the American Geophysical > Union in San Francisco. He uses a common ploy of > truncating what Thompson said, to ensure that a > quotation fits with his message. According to Milloy, > Thompson said, "Any prudent person would agree that we > don't yet understand the complexities with the climate > system." But what he actually said was "Any prudent > person would agree that we don't yet understand the > complexities with the climate system and, since we > don't, we should be extremely cautious in how much we > 'tweak' the system." (see full press release here). > Such manipulations are designed so that Milloy can't > be accused of misquoting, but clearly, he completely > contorts Thompson's point. Milloy also misunderstands > the science. > > > In his talk, Thompson described two samples of moss > that are 5,000 and 50,000 years old, respectively > (based on radiocarbon dating). These samples have been > revealed as the Quelccaya ice cap in Peru receded over > the last few years. Milloy argues that "the plant find > is a strong indication that, thousands of years ago, > the high Andean climate must have been warm enough to > cause the glacier to be recessed and to allow for the > plants to grow in the first place.". That is correct. > But he goes on to say, "So if natural forces caused > those climate changes, isn't it reasonable to conclude > that perhaps natural forces might also be largely > responsible for whatever climate changes may be > occurring now?" Unfortunately, that isn't reasonable. > > Milloy makes the common mistake of confusing (1) > different factors that cause climates to change (see > forcings) and (2) the rates of climate change. Warming > in the early to mid-Holocene (the post-glacial period > that covers the last 12,500 years) resulted from > changes in the earth's orbit (as described by > Milankovitch). In the western United States, many > glaciers disappeared altogether at this time, only to > re-form around 4500 years ago. The temperatures slowly > changed as the earth's position altered, in relation > to the sun, causing the distribution of energy > received on earth to change geographically and > seasonally. The changes observed by Thompson (since he > started studying the Quelccaya ice cap in the late > 1970s) have been extremely large and rapid; in fact, > the rate of ice recession has increased over time. > Thompson noted in a 2003 peer-reviewed article, that > "The rate of retreat from 1983 to 1991 was three times > that measured from 1963 to 1983." (Climatic Change, > vol 59, p.137-159). Evidence of glacier retreat has > been observed in almost all parts of the world in the > 20th century, and the rate of retreat has also > increased in the latter half of the 20th century. This > has nothing to do with the slow changes that result > from orbital forcing. It is a consequence of rapid > worldwide global warming, the rate of which has > increased in the last 20 years. As discussed elsewhere > in these pages, there is strong evidence that > anthropogenic effects are largely responsible for this > warming. > > On a more general point, uninformed commentators often > refer to periods in the past when it was warmer, then > claim that this somehow "proves" that contemporary > changes are "normal". But there were countless warm > periods in the past that resulted from quite different > conditions than those prevailing today (see this link > on the Medieval period, or this link on the > "mid-Holocene" period). In some cases, these were due > to a different orbital configuration, or different > levels of greenhouse gases, or even different world > geography (lower mountain ranges, ocean seaways > altered, no polar ice sheets etc). What makes the > recent changes stand out is that they are extremely > rapid and global in extent. Another error commonly > made is to pick one spot on earth where it may have > been warm, and claim that this demonstrates that the > earth as a whole was warm at that time. This is also > incorrect. If it was warmer in southern Greenland when > the Vikings arrived, this tells us nothing about > conditions in the Pacific, or Eurasia or South > America. To get a true picture of whether there was > "global warming" at that time requires, not > surprisingly, a set of data from many places around > the globe (see this discussion on one of the popular > "myths" regarding past climate history). Thus, > Thompson's observation about the retreat of the > Quelccaya ice cap would be interesting, but not that > important, if it was the only data point we had. But > it isn't - we observe similar things happening in > virtually all mountainous regions of the world. > > http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=85 > > > > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > The all-new My Yahoo! - What will yours do? > http://my.yahoo.com > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > -- > No virus found in this incoming message. > Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. > Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.6.9 - Release Date: 1/6/2005 > > -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.6.9 - Release Date: 1/6/2005 _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Mon Jan 10 20:19:34 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 12:19:34 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] fundamentalism and punishment In-Reply-To: <200501101900.j0AJ0Y025756@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050110201934.84368.qmail@web13423.mail.yahoo.com> >>It promises the Rapture of the believers into Heaven, followed by seven years of Tribulation, the banishment of the Devil during a 1000 year reign of Christ (but individual sinning still possible), the brief return of the Devil, his defeat, and a New Earth and a New Heaven.<< --I'm starting to think the way to get a fundamentalist to believe anything is to make sure it involves a lot of punishment. DeMause's theory of childhood trauma leading to political scapegoating seems rather persuasive in that light. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Easier than ever with enhanced search. Learn more. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 10 20:30:44 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 15:30:44 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Edge: The World Question Center 2005 In-Reply-To: <002901c4f6c9$b0df4c60$6401a8c0@ISV2> References: <002901c4f6c9$b0df4c60$6401a8c0@ISV2> Message-ID: You're welcome. I have it fairly well automated. I don't think it took more than an hour. There's a great freeware program from http://www.arachnoid.com. I use an earlier version of Arachnophilia. It's designed to make web pages, but it can also edit text. \p means paragraph break. If I have blank lines, I'll ask the program to replace \p\p\p\ with \p\p (NOT \p\p\ with \p). On 2005-01-09, W. David Schwaderer opined [message unchanged below]: > Thanks for this and the The New York Times Magazine: The Year in Ideas: A to > Z > > I really appreciate it, particularly the A-Z article since you apparantly > had to copy each little atricle into a composite. > > Dave Schwaderer From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Jan 10 20:42:48 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 12:42:48 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] fundamentalism and punishment Message-ID: <01C4F711.E4DC6410.shovland@mindspring.com> It would appear that beliefs are changeable, however slowly. Input is not ignored, it just takes a lot of data points to change beliefs. Speed of change may also vary in people, and at times of crisis those who can't change their beliefs fast enough may die. For example, my wife's grandparents were smart enough to get out of Germany before their number came up. But many couldn't adapt fast enough and died for their beliefs. Why is considered such a virtue to "die for your beliefs?" Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Monday, January 10, 2005 12:20 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] fundamentalism and punishment >>It promises the Rapture of the believers into Heaven, followed by seven years of Tribulation, the banishment of the Devil during a 1000 year reign of Christ (but individual sinning still possible), the brief return of the Devil, his defeat, and a New Earth and a New Heaven.<< --I'm starting to think the way to get a fundamentalist to believe anything is to make sure it involves a lot of punishment. DeMause's theory of childhood trauma leading to political scapegoating seems rather persuasive in that light. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Easier than ever with enhanced search. Learn more. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 10 22:05:14 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 17:05:14 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: The Internet's Future? It Depends on Whom You Ask Message-ID: The Internet's Future? It Depends on Whom You Ask NYT January 10, 2005 By TOM ZELLER Jr. Few topics inspire trips to the crystal ball like technology, although hasty predictions have often only provided future generations with quotes for cocktail party chat. Ken Olson, founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation, remarked in 1977, for instance, that there was no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. And Harry M. Warner, a co-founder of Warner Brothers Studios, is well known for wondering, near the end of the silent-picture era, who would want to hear actors talk. Still, as industries, courts, legislatures and other social institutions struggle to keep pace with each new technological innovation, the desire to peer around the corner is a natural one. Last September, the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a research organization in Washington, sent out a survey asking 24 questions about the future of the Internet to a wide range of technology specialists, scholars and industry leaders. Some 1,200 responded and, as you might expect, widespread agreement is hard to find. Some of the more cherished notions of the Internet age - that it isolates people from real-world interaction, for instance, or that people use the Web to find reinforcement for their political views and filter out opposing ones - generate deeply divided views among the specialists. Some 42 percent of respondents agreed with the assertion that civic involvement will increase in the next 10 years as people seek and find organizations to join online; nearly 30 percent disagreed. Roughly 40 percent viewed the proliferation of online medical resources as a potential boon to health care management and access; 30 percent of the specialists thought that unlikely. One assertion on which there was widespread agreement was that the infrastructure of the Internet will be the target of "at least one devastating attack" in the next 10 years. Sixty-six percent of respondents agreed. But even here, there was dissent. "If you mean very costly, yes," wrote one respondent in the survey. "If you mean a failure that cascades to other segments of society, with widespread suffering or loss of life, then no." Still, for investors, policy makers and others interested in getting a glimpse of what might be just over the horizon, there are hints to be had. The survey results solidly confirm what media watchers may already know (and perhaps fear): that the Internet and the rise of the blogger are expected to drive greater change in the news media and publishing industries than in any other sector of society. Internet specialists also expect broad changes in education and working life, and 50 percent of respondents say they believe - despite all of the lawsuits filed by the recording and movie industries against online pirates - that the vast majority of Internet users will still be freely trading digital materials via anonymous networks by 2014. The predictions are being added to a growing online database called Imagining the Internet, developed jointly by the Pew Project and Elon University in North Carolina. The database, at www.elon.edu/predictions, includes more than 4,000 predictive statements made by hundreds of technology specialists during the dawn of the Internet era - roughly 1990-95. "Every one of us, we know it's not going to pan out exactly the way we think," said Barry Wellman, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto who participated in the survey and a co-editor of the 2002 book, "The Internet in Everyday Life." "But it gets us focusing on what some of the alternatives could be." The specialists might one day eat their words. But so too might those who dare to dismiss them. "He only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools," The New York Times wrote in a withering 1920 editorial dismissing the physics behind Robert Goddard's assertion that rocket travel - and perhaps even a visit to the moon - might one day be possible. A retraction was printed in 1969, as Apollo 11 set off for the moon. "The Times," the editorial said, "regrets the error." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/10/technology/10pew.html From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 10 22:06:33 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 17:06:33 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Editorial: The Silent Kennedy Message-ID: The Silent Kennedy NYT Editorial January 10, 2005 Rosemary Kennedy had a life of little achievement, by Kennedy family standards or any other. She was a slow learner as a girl, mildly retarded, and lost all hope of a productive adulthood in 1941, when her father had her lobotomized to cure her of volatile moods. She spent the rest of her life in institutions and died last Friday at 86. It was a quiet exit. But even a silent life can have profound echoes. Ms. Kennedy's did. It began when her family acknowledged her existence. Her brother John, as president, spoke openly of her. Eunice Kennedy Shriver wrote about her sister in The Saturday Evening Post in 1962. Advocates for the mentally disabled say that candor was a turning point - a step toward acceptance for millions of people who had been ignored, warehoused or, like Ms. Kennedy, brutalized. If the Kennedys could end their shamed silence, so could the nation. Mrs. Shriver went further. She founded the Special Olympics in 1968, turning a backyard camp into an international movement. She has said that her sister's life has no direct link to her advocacy for the disabled. But her siblings have pointed out that Eunice was always one who saw Rosemary's potential, expected more from her and sought to include her in family activities. These values have been the soul of the Special Olympics for nearly 40 years. Anyone who has seen a Special Olympics knows that it remains a realm of good sportsmanship and joy. The organization has grown global and slick, with corporate sponsors and events like figure skating and power lifting, but the athletes' incapacity for cynicism keeps things pure. Think of the grim, medicated world of professional sports, and you might wonder who the disabled ones really are. That blurring of distinctions may be the finest legacy of Rosemary Kennedy's thwarted life. As Mrs. Shriver once said of the mentally disabled in a newspaper interview: "I suppose the fact that I had seen my sister swim like a deer in swimming races and do very, very well just always made me think that they could do everything." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/10/opinion/10mon4.html From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 10 22:45:08 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 17:45:08 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Cosmetics Break the Skin Barrier Message-ID: Cosmetics Break the Skin Barrier New York Times, 5.1.8 By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH Procter & Gamble is about to sell ball bearings - but not the metal kind. Its minuscule mineral spheres are designed to help usher its Olay-brand body lotions deep into the skin. Freeze 24/7, meanwhile, is pushing the muscle relaxant GABA, or gamma-amino butyric acid, a common ingredient in over-the-counter antianxiety supplements. It is not using GABA to relax minds, however. Instead, the goal is to relax the muscles that cause face wrinkles. "We knew that if we could find a way to use GABA topically, it would be a killer app," said Scott E. Gurfein, the founder of the year-old company. The science of smoothing women's skin is going high tech. And cosmetics companies, whether they serve the masses or the elite, are adopting not just the language of Silicon Valley but many of its most sophisticated techniques. Researchers for cosmetics companies have spent several years developing chemical bullets to attack wrinkles. But now, the players in this growing industry are turning to the medical and electronics worlds for ways to keep human skin from bouncing those bullets off the body like so many blanks. "What you are seeing in the skin care world is a mirror of the advancing technology in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology," said Karyn Grossman, a dermatologist and international spokeswoman for the Prescriptives line of Est?e Lauder. Scientists from far outside the cosmetics world are noticing the change. "Skin care," said Neil Gordon, president of the Canadian NanoBusiness Alliance, "is definitely becoming a big area for nanoscience," which involves working to manipulate nature at the supersmall level of individual atoms and molecules. There is a lot at stake. According to Lenka Contreras, vice president of Kline & Company, a research firm, sales of facial treatments represented $7 billion of the overall $12 billion skin care market last year, buoyed by more than 6 percent annual growth the last five years. The Olay line of Procter leads the pack, but Mary Kay and Clinique from Lauder are hot on its heels. Add in Neutrogena, from Johnson & Johnson; Avon; and the Est?e Lauder brand, and you have accounted for about a third of the market, Ms. Contreras said. As American society ages demographically, she expects the healthy growth of recent years to continue unabated, for the tiny players as well as the household names. "Women just don't mind spending a lot of money to look younger," she said. Outfoxing nature's protective instincts - after all, the skin's well-evolved purpose is to keep foreign substances out - is no small task. The field is littered with failed ideas (researchers have pretty much ditched, for example, the idea of microneedles to create tiny pathways for skin care substances). Even some skin care insiders concede that there may be as much hype as substance to a lot of the emerging claims. "We've all been looking at particle sizes and optimized formulas for a while, so maybe the trend now is to talk more about it," said Janice J. Teal, chief scientific officer at Avon Products. Skin creams are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, so there is no government stamp of approval for the safety or effectiveness of any of the new delivery mechanisms. And most are too new to have passed the ultimate test: Will consumers be happy enough to buy them again? Still, many of the new delivery systems have proven their mettle in other fields, which suggests that cosmetics companies might be on to something in their bid to piggyback on proven technologies. Lighting manufacturers already use microparticles in high-tech lamps, while pharmaceutical companies have long used plant extracts to enable the skin to absorb drugs. So now the cosmetics industry is trying to build on research in other fields, in hopes of further proving that it offers more than hope in a jar. Skin care companies are notoriously tight-lipped about their research budgets, but industry insiders say they are throwing tens of millions of dollars into that effort. "The trend in the whole industry," said Allan G. Mottus, a consultant to the beauty industry and publisher of The Informationist, a trade publication, "is to find ways to deliver ingredients to the skin with more efficacy." Indeed it is. Harvey Gideon, Est?e Lauder's executive vice president for research and development, said that the company devoted about 25 percent of its research budget to delivery systems; five years ago, he said, no more than 5 percent was focused on that objective. "We're working on anything you can dream of that will allow us to make smaller amounts of material effective for longer periods of time," he said. The research into delivery systems is beginning to yield lots of "new" products. Olay's latest body lotion, which sells for less than $10, and night cream, which lists for about $20, are expected to hit the market this month, relying on the same basic antiwrinkle ingredients but adding mineral spheres to the lotion and a time-release technology to the cream. The price of the new version is staying the same as the prior model. "We already have excellent active ingredients, so now we're finding better ways to get them into the skin," said Emma Palfreyman, a senior scientist for the Olay division of Procter & Gamble. Similarly, Est?e Lauder's latest version of its Future Perfect antiwrinkle moisturizers include "cell vectors" - little balls of protein material that are slowly dissolved by enzymes in the skin intended to make the product more effective over time. Freeze 24/7 was created solely around a new method of teaming GABA, which does not penetrate skin, with gynostemma, a plant extract that does. The GABA "programs" the gynostemma to mimic its muscle-relaxing properties. The new company, which says its revenue topped $5 million, recently introduced a line of antiwrinkle creams for $95 and up, relying on that technology. The products are on sale in stores like Nordstrom and Sephora. Of all the avenues of research, the most exciting - and the most frustrating - is the emerging field of nanotechnology. "It's too early to tell whether nanotechnology will be particularly advantageous in skin care, but there's no question that everyone is interested in exploring it," said Gerald N. McEwen Jr., vice president for science at the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association. The potential applications of nanotechnology go beyond making particles small enough to penetrate the skin. Sunscreens, for example, work best if they stay on the skin. But zinc and titanium oxides, the most effective sun blocks, often give the skin a matte whitish hue. More troublesome, because it is hard to densely pack the large oxide molecules, harmful rays still manage to get through the gaps. Neutrogena and Lauder have both introduced sunscreens with particles that while not quite nanosize, are tiny enough to be invisible on the skin. But the effort to shrink particles down to the molecular level is hitting snags. In Europe, a consumer reaction against nanotechnology research is on the rise, similar to the outcry against irradiated foods and genetically engineered crops. "There's always a fear that nanoparticles will attack the body," Mr. Gordon conceded. The fears are not without logic - after all, particles tiny enough to penetrate several layers of skin could, at least in theory, pierce all of them, enter the bloodstream, and wind up in organs for which they were not intended. Perhaps not surprisingly, skin care companies are proceeding warily in the nanoscience world. "We are certainly looking at nanotechnology," said Craig S. Slavtcheff, global director for skin cleansing and new technology at Unilever, "but I doubt you'll see a product in less than 5 or 10 years." Many of the companies are, meanwhile, pursuing more immediate pathways. Unilever, which owns the Dove and Ponds brands, is working on a consumer version of an ultrasound machine on the theory that ultrasonic energy can help some molecules better penetrate the skin. Olay is exploring whether applying heat can enhance the penetration of ingredients. It is also looking into ways to use the same technology behind Procter's spin toothbrushes for a hand-held skin polisher. Neutrogena, too, is about to introduce a battery-operated vibrating device topped with replaceable sponges imbedded with an aluminum oxide cream to slough away dead skin. E. Michael McNamara, Neutrogena's president, said the brand also hopes to adapt some Johnson & Johnson technologies for delivering medicine through the skin. There have been dead ends, of course. Microneedles made out of inert silica-based materials seemed like a winning formula for punching temporary holes into the dead cells that make up the skin's outermost layer to deliver antiaging ingredients. The problem was that preservatives, irritants and possibly microbes and bacteria got in as well. "We put two solid years of research into this," John E. Oblong, a principal scientist at Procter & Gamble, said, "then shut it down because it just raised too many negative possibilities." But the research failures are finally being outnumbered by the breakthroughs. And even as they explore better delivery methods, many of the companies are moving onto science Phase 3: the search for ingredients that act as treatments themselves, even as they carry other substances through the skin. "Using substances that work as both delivery systems and ingredients," Mr. Gideon of Est?e Lauder said. "Now that's a promising line of research." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/08/business/08skin.html From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 10 22:47:20 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 17:47:20 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Kristof: It's Time to Spray DDT Message-ID: It's Time to Spray DDT New York Times opinion column by Nicholas D. Kristof, 5.1.8 [This is quite a change from a leftist.] If the U.S. wants to help people in tsunami-hit countries like Sri Lanka and Indonesia - not to mention other poor countries in Africa - there's one step that would cost us nothing and would save hundreds of thousands of lives. It would be to allow DDT in malaria-ravaged countries. I'm thrilled that we're pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the relief effort, but the tsunami was only a blip in third-world mortality. Mosquitoes kill 20 times more people each year than the tsunami did, and in the long war between humans and mosquitoes it looks as if mosquitoes are winning. One reason is that the U.S. and other rich countries are siding with the mosquitoes against the world's poor - by opposing the use of DDT. "It's a colossal tragedy," says Donald Roberts, a professor of tropical public health at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. "And it's embroiled in environmental politics and incompetent bureaucracies." In the 1950's, 60's and early 70's, DDT was used to reduce malaria around the world, even eliminating it in places like Taiwan. But then the growing recognition of the harm DDT can cause in the environment - threatening the extinction of the bald eagle, for example - led DDT to be banned in the West and stigmatized worldwide. Ever since, malaria has been on the rise. The poor countries that were able to keep malaria in check tend to be the same few that continued to use DDT, like Ecuador. Similarly, in Mexico, malaria rose and fell with the use of DDT. South Africa brought back DDT in 2000, after a switch to other pesticides had led to a surge in malaria, and now the disease is under control again. The evidence is overwhelming: DDT saves lives. But most Western aid agencies will not pay for anti-malarial programs that use DDT, and that pretty much ensures that DDT won't be used. Instead, the U.N. and Western donors encourage use of insecticide-treated bed nets and medicine to cure malaria. Bed nets and medicines are critical tools in fighting malaria, but they're not enough. The existing anti-malaria strategy is an underfinanced failure, with malaria probably killing 2 million or 3 million people each year. DDT doesn't work everywhere. It wasn't nearly as effective in West African savannah as it was in southern Africa, and it's hard to apply in remote villages. And some countries, like Vietnam, have managed to curb malaria without DDT. But overall, one of the best ways to protect people is to spray the inside of a hut, about once a year, with DDT. This uses tiny amounts of DDT - 450,000 people can be protected with the same amount that was applied in the 1960's to a single 1,000-acre American cotton farm. Is it safe? DDT was sprayed in America in the 1950's as children played in the spray, and up to 80,000 tons a year were sprayed on American crops. There is some research suggesting that it could lead to premature births, but humans are far better off exposed to DDT than exposed to malaria. I called the World Wildlife Fund, thinking I would get a fight. But Richard Liroff, its expert on toxins, said he could accept the use of DDT when necessary in anti-malaria programs. "South Africa was right to use DDT," he said. "If the alternatives to DDT aren't working, as they weren't in South Africa, geez, you've got to use it. In South Africa it prevented tens of thousands of malaria cases and saved lots of lives." At Greenpeace, Rick Hind noted reasons to be wary of DDT, but added: "If there's nothing else and it's going to save lives, we're all for it. Nobody's dogmatic about it." So why do the U.N. and donor agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, generally avoid financing DDT programs? The main obstacle seems to be bureaucratic caution and inertia. President Bush should cut through that and lead an effort to fight malaria using all necessary tools - including DDT. One of my most exhilarating moments with my children came when we were backpacking together and spotted a bald eagle. It was a tragedy that we nearly allowed DDT to wipe out such magnificent birds, and we should continue to ban DDT in the U.S. But it's also tragic that our squeamishness about DDT is killing more people in poor countries, year in and year out, than even a once-in-a-century tsunami. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/08/opinion/8kristof.html From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 10 22:48:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 17:48:47 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Fish: One University, Under God? Message-ID: One University, Under God? The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.7 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i18/18c00101.htm One University, Under God? What will succeed high theory and race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual energy in academe? Religion. By STANLEY FISH In an episode of the long-running TV drama Law and Order, the character Jack McCoy, an assistant district attorney, addresses a jury made up largely of Jews. The jury's composition has been engineered by the defendant's lawyer, who knew in advance that he would try to justify his client's act of homicide by saying that it had been done in the name of Israel and the Jewish people. McCoy challenges the jury: "Are you going to render your verdict as a citizen or as a Jew? Do you choose citizenship or culture?" It goes without saying that no network program would tackle an issue that did not resonate with the general public. That is especially true of Law and Order, which from its beginning has had its plots follow the headlines. Only if the tension between commitment to the rule of law and commitment to one's ethnic or religious affiliation was in the news would a television writer put it at the heart of a story. Nowadays, in the wake of September 11, there often seems to be nothing else in the news, as we continue to debate the questions that were being asked within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center: Is this a religious war? If so, what exactly is our religion? If not, what kind of war is it? Do the terrorists represent Islam or only some perverted version of that faith? Who is to say? But even before the events of September 2001, there was a growing recognition in many sectors that religion as a force motivating action could no longer be sequestered in the private sphere, where the First Amendment, as read in the light of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, had seemed to place it. It was Locke who had proclaimed (in A Letter Concerning Toleration) that it was above all necessary to "distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion, and to settle the just bounds between the one and the other." Jefferson coined the phrase "wall of separation" and glossed it: "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods or no God; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." To be sure, there are many instances in our history when Locke's "just bounds" were not observed; but even so, for a long time it was still the presumption that the doctrine of religious freedom went in both directions: Individuals could freely practice their religion no matter what it might be, and the state could enter into its deliberations free of any concern that what it did might fall under the interdiction of religion. As we entered the last decade of the century, one could say that the wall of separation was pretty much in place. But in the last 15 years a lot has changed, and by 2000 observers were alert to the change and commenting on it. Peter Beinert, in the midst of the Bush-Gore election campaign, predicted that "religion will increasingly replace electoral politics as the realm where battles for the national soul are fought." We now know that he was not quite right: What we saw in the election of 2004 was the interpenetration of religion and electoral politics, with professions of personal faith becoming as important or more important than the announcement of policy positions. Some Roman Catholic bishops inveighed against John Kerry from the pulpit. A Gallup poll tells us that two out of three Americans believe that the problems of the nation can be solved by religion. The Left Behind books are a publishing phenomenon. One of the most popular movies of the year (or of any year) has its characters speaking Hebrew and Aramaic. Almost every athlete interviewed on television attributes his or her success to Jesus Christ. Every speech given by every politician ends with "God bless America." What's going on here? A full answer would require hundreds of columns and many books, but that answer would certainly take note of a number of developments: a growing lack of confidence in the capacity of the political process to do (or even recognize) the right thing; a feeling, sometimes vague and sometimes sharply articulated, that there is something missing at the heart of American life; the increasing political activism of fundamentalist faiths; the rise of "New Age" spirituality and the proliferation of "spiritual paths"; the emergence of "identity politics," politics that eschews universal standards of judgment in favor of judgments tied to group interests; the related emergence of multiculturalism, which honors the values of particular cultures and calls into question the availability or even the existence of an independent set of values recognized by all rational persons. There have also been specific signs: In 1995, the Supreme Court surprised many by ruling (in Rosenberger v. Rectors) that the University of Virginia must grant financial support to an evangelical magazine, on the reasoning that to deny it money would be to commit the First Amendment sin of viewpoint discrimination. A more recent decision (2002) opened the way to vouchers for church-supported schools so long as the money is funneled through parents and not given directly. So-called faith-based initiatives have been embraced by both major parties. In every sector of American life, religion is transgressing the boundary between private and public and demanding to be heard in precincts that only a short while ago would have politely shown it the door. And the academy is finally catching up. Not that religion has been absent from the university as an object of study. Courses like "The Bible as Literature" and "The American Puritan Experience" have been staples in the curriculum for a long time, as have related courses on the civil wars in 17th-century England and the religious poetry (formerly called "metaphysical") of the same period. The history of religion has always been a growth industry in academe and has brought along with it the anthropology of religion, the sociology of religion, the economics of religion, the politics of religion, and so forth. But it is one thing to take religion as an object of study and another to take religion seriously. To take religion seriously would be to regard it not as a phenomenon to be analyzed at arm's length, but as a candidate for the truth. In liberal theory, however, the category of truth has been reserved for hypotheses that take their chances in the "marketplace of ideas." Religious establishments will typically resist the demand that basic tenets of doctrine be submitted to the test of deliberative reason. (The assertion that Christ is risen is not one for which evidence pro and con is adduced in a juridical setting.) That is why in 1915 the American Association of University Professors denied to church-affiliated institutions of higher learning the name of "university"; such institutions, it was stated, "do not, at least as regards one particular subject, accept the principles of freedom and inquiry." What that meant, in effect, was that in the name of the tolerant inclusion of all views in the academic mix, it was necessary to exclude views that did not honor tolerance as a first and guiding principle. Walter Lippmann laid down the rule: "Reason and free inquiry can be neutral and tolerant only of those opinions which submit to the test of reason and inquiry." And what do you do with "opinions" (a word that tells its own story) that do not submit? Well, you treat them as data and not as candidates for the truth. You teach the Bible as literature -- that is, as a body of work whose value resides in its responsiveness to the techniques of (secular) literary analysis. Or you teach American Puritanism as a fascinating instance of a way of thinking we have moved beyond. Of course, there's still a lot of that, but alongside of it is a growing awareness of the difficulty, if not impossibility, of keeping the old boundaries in place and of quarantining the religious impulse in the safe houses of the church, the synagogue, and the mosque. Again the causes of this shift are many and would require volumes to explain, but some things seem obvious. The enormous effort of John Rawls to maintain the boundaries by elevating for public purposes one's identity as a citizen above one's identity as a believer has produced a vast counterliterature of its own, much of it opening up questions that the liberal academic establishment had thought long settled. The debate was joined from another perspective in 1984 when Richard John Neuhaus published his enormously influential The Naked Public Square, a passionate argument against the exclusion from the political process of religious discourse. Not long afterward, Neuhaus established the journal First Things, a subsidiary of the Institute on Religion and Public Life "whose purpose is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society." Many of the contributors to First Things are high-profile academics situated in our most distinguished private and public universities, and it is clear from their commentaries that they see no bright line dividing their religious lives from the lives they pursue as teachers and scholars. Following in the wake of Rawls and Neuhaus, any number of theologians, philosophers, historians, and political theorists have re-examined, debated, challenged, and at times rejected the premises of liberalism, whether in the name of religion, or communitarianism, or multiculturalism. To the extent that liberalism's structures have been undermined or at least shaken by these analyses, the perspicuousness and usefulness of distinctions long assumed -- reason as opposed to faith, evidence as opposed to revelation, inquiry as opposed to obedience, truth as opposed to belief -- have been called into question. And finally (and to return to where we began), the geopolitical events of the past decade and of the past three years especially have re-alerted us to the fact that hundreds of millions of people in the world do not observe the distinction between the private and the public or between belief and knowledge, and that it is no longer possible for us to regard such persons as quaintly premodern or as the needy recipients of our saving (an ironic word) wisdom. Some of these are our sworn enemies. Some of them are our colleagues. Many of them are our students. (There are 27 religious organizations for students on my campus.) Announce a course with "religion" in the title, and you will have an overflow population. Announce a lecture or panel on "religion in our time," and you will have to hire a larger hall. And those who come will not only be seeking knowledge; they will be seeking guidance and inspiration, and many of them will believe that religion -- one religion, many religions, religion in general -- will provide them. Are we ready? We had better be, because that is now where the action is. When Jacques Derrida died I was called by a reporter who wanted to know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: religion. Stanley Fish, dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, writes a monthly column on campus politics and academic careers. For an archive of his previous columns, see [3]http://chronicle.com/jobs/archive/advice/game.htm References 3. http://chronicle.com/jobs/archive/advice/game.htm E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles. From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 10 22:49:39 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 17:49:39 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: London Journal: Sex and The Spectator: Scandals Turn the Tables Message-ID: London Journal: Sex and The Spectator: Scandals Turn the Tables NYT November 19, 2004 By SARAH LYALL LONDON, Nov. 18 - It is rarely wise to bring sex into the office, but apparently no one informed the frisky employees of The Spectator, currently known in the London media world as The Sextator. "Someone should bottle that magazine's tap water," wrote The Guardian in an editorial this week, referring to the three erotic scandals that have enveloped The Spectator in recent months, involving, among others, its editor, associate editor, publisher, former receptionist, one of its columnists and the home secretary. The extramarital adventures of The Spectator's staff would be little more than gleefully repeated media gossip if it were not for the magazine's special position in British public life. Though its weekly circulation is only about 64,000, the right-leaning Spectator is required reading in Westminster for its boisterous and often contrarian views on the events of the day, and has long had ties to the Conservative Party. The magazine's profile has risen in recent years under the colorful editorship of Boris Johnson, a mop-haired, Latin-spouting old Etonian who also is a Conservative member of Parliament and writes a weekly column for The Daily Telegraph. A man of unusual verbal dexterity, shambling charm and a knack for blustering his way out of embarrassing spots, Mr. Johnson, 40, is perhaps the most recognizable Tory politician since Margaret Thatcher. He is also, in the words of News of the World, a scandal-seeking Sunday tabloid, "a LIAR who DID cheat on his wife and got his society mistress PREGNANT." Mr. Johnson's affair with Petronella Wyatt, who writes about herself in the "Singular Life" column for The Spectator, has long been hinted at in newspaper gossip columns, using the usual codes - "they enjoyed a close friendship" and he was "mentoring" her. When two Sunday tabloids confronted Mr. Johnson recently, he initially dismissed the accusations of an affair as "balderdash" and "an inverted pyramid of piffle." But when Ms. Wyatt's mother, Lady Verushka Wyatt, told reporters that her daughter had hoped Mr. Johnson would leave his wife and four children for her, and confirmed reports that Ms. Wyatt had had an abortion, Mr. Johnson found his carefully constructed multijob edifice beginning to crumble. First, he was removed from his position as the cultural policy spokesman for the Conservative Party, whose leadership rebuked him several weeks earlier after The Spectator printed an opinion article insulting Liverpool. Mr. Johnson then had to endure the humiliation of being placed under a handler of sorts - Andrew Neil, a new chief executive at the magazine. "We are now looking forward to a period of quiet," Mr. Neil announced Tuesday on the BBC's Radio 4 program. "I think the more time the editor spends in Doughty Street editing the magazine, and the less we see of him in the newspapers, then the better for the editor and the better for the magazine." It is unclear what this bodes for Mr. Johnson at The Spectator. "Is Andrew and Boris a wonderful marriage? I wouldn't bet on its longevity," said Peter Preston, who covers the media for The Observer of London. But he added that it was unlikely that The Spectator's owners, Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay, would fire Mr. Johnson. "It would be ridiculous to sack editors of newspapers if they had affairs with deputy editors or whatever," he said. "Very few newspapers would even come out." Mr. Johnson's office indiscretion is only the most recent in a string of them. Over the summer, the magazine went through another unwelcome upheaval when Rod Liddle, 44, its carelessly coiffed associate editor, abandoned his wife for a 23-year-old woman who was then The Spectator's receptionist. The matter would probably have not become such a big deal had it not been for the decision of the rejected wife, Rachel Royce, 42, to embark on a new column for The Daily Mail, "Diary of a Divorcee." In it, she has gleefully treated her readers to intimate details of her life with Mr. Liddle and discussed the happy turns in her own romantic fortunes. "I'm having great sex a lot more often than I ever did with my husband," she wrote. Mr. Liddle has responded in his own columns, in The Spectator and The Sunday Times of London; his new girlfriend, Alicia Munckton, wrote her account in The Mail on Sunday. And in the hall-of-mirrors newspaper world, other writers laid down a barrage of commentary and countercommentary on the incident. Some weeks later, accusations surfaced of yet another affair, between Britain's divorced home secretary, David Blunkett, 57, and Kimberly Fortier, 43, The Spectator's glamorous, married publisher. Neither party has denied or confirmed anything, but rumors had wafted through Westminster for some time. Prurient supposed details of what they did together, and what a former husband of Ms. Fortier said about it, dominated the press at the end of the summer. In the end, Ms. Fortier - who has since reverted to her married name, Kimberly Quinn, on The Spectator masthead - remained with her second husband. Mr. Blunkett went back to work. But media interest in Mrs. Quinn is still so intense that when she appeared recently at The Spectator's annual Parliamentarian of the Year awards at Claridge's Hotel, she had to slip in through an obscure entrance to avoid the press pack. Mr. Johnson, who has a new tabloid handle, the Blond Bombshell, has had a more difficult time, being staked out around the clock by a gang of photographers. The newspapers have gleefully recorded his colorful baggy-shorts-and-bandanna jogging get-up and the Bertie Woosterish comments he tosses at them, like little bonbons. "Bog off," he might say, as he leaves the house. Or, answering their questions, he might tell them that he feels "little short of superb, on cracking form." Most recently, he said to the reporters, "I advise you all very strongly - go for a run, get some exercise and have a beautiful day." Mr. Johnson once said of his political future, "'My chances of being prime minister are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive." Now, it looks as if he is unlikely even to become the leader of the Conservative Party. But he remains a popular figure. "Boris is that rare creature," The Guardian said in its editorial, "a natural blond in show business; both clever and lively, with flair for publicity in a range of activities, some of them admirable." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/19/international/europe/19london.html From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 10 22:51:28 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 17:51:28 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] TCS: (Wikipedia) The Faith-Based Encyclopedia Message-ID: The Faith-Based Encyclopedia http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html By Robert McHenry Published 11/15/2004 Away back about 1993, '94 -- in retrospect, the last of the halcyon days when a relatively small and rather homogeneous group of people around the globe could reasonably consider themselves as constituting the Internet community and could take a strongly proprietary view of its future development -- back then, I am recalling, a cluster of enthusiasts coalesced in an online discussion group devoted to the creation of an encyclopedia on the Internet, an Interpedia, as they called it. As one of the proponents described it, "the Interpedia will be a reference source for people who have connectivity to the internet. It will encompass, at the least, articles submitted by individuals, and articles gleaned from non-copyrighted material. It will have mechanisms for submission, browsing, and authentication of articles. It is, currently, a completely volunteer project with no source of funding except for the contributions of the volunteers and their respective institutions. It also has no governing structure except for a group of people who have volunteered to do specific tasks or who have made major contributions to the discussion. Everyone is encouraged to make a contribution, small or large." The discussion group generated a great quantity of writing, none of it encyclopedic in nature. There were discussions of the software needed for authoring and databasing and registering and validating and so on; discussions of how to attract contributors and of how teams for larger articles might be organized; of how to ensure that articles were editable but at the same time protected from unauthorized alteration. Every so often there were rhapsodic explanations of why the Interpedia, as a noncommercial and collaborative project, was ipso facto superior to all existing encyclopedias, all of which were published for [shudder] profit and all of which had their origin in [shudder] print. Every so often, as the discussion went on and on, a burst of enthusiasm would overcome one of the participants, who would post a message along the lines of "Okay, great! How do we start? What can I do, right now?" There never came an answer to that question. Instead, the discussion would begin another great swing around the circle of technical and procedural matters, to end only when another na?f would beg to be given some concrete direction. Eventually the discussion petered out, in part because some real encyclopedias developed Internet presences, and in part because the volunteer nonleaders of the ungoverned, unstructured project truly did not know where or how to begin. But the dream did not die. A decade later, the Wikipedia project is flourishing. As of November 2004, according to the project's own counts, nearly 30,000 contributors had written about 1.1 million articles in 109 different languages, though some of these language versions of Wikipedia remained quite small. The Manx Gaelic version, for example, had only 3 articles, the Guarani 10, and the Klingon (yes, from the Star Trek series) 48. The largest, the English language version, contained over 382,000 pages that were thought "probably" to be encyclopedic articles. (The "probably" tells as much about the limits of Wikipedia's oversight as any single word possibly could.) This is an impressive amount of work to have been accomplished in the three years since the project began, and the founders were obviously correct in believing that a vast reservoir of willing volunteers awaited just such an opportunity as Wikipedia would offer. The effort has not gone unnoticed, either. A page on the Wikipedia site lists well over a hundred positive mentions this year in the world's media, including the Economist, the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, Slate.com, Slashdot.com, and, yes, TCS. Wikipedia is "one of the most fascinating developments of the Digital Age"; "brilliant"; an "incredible example of open-source intellectual collaboration"; and so forth. Credit the founders, then, with having overcome the obstacles that the Interpedia nonleaders failed to surmount. They built the software (the "wiki" in Wikipedia), they attracted the needed contributors, and they generated the all-important buzz. (They also found that they needed to create a background hierarchy of administrators, sysops, bureaucrats (actually so called), and stewards, watched over by an arbitration committee and finally the founder himself, who retains ultimate authority. Even online, democracy has its limits.) The question is, however, just what have they created? Let's first see what they intended to create. The general FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page tells us: "Wikipedia's goal is to create a free encyclopedia --- indeed, the largest encyclopedia in history, both in terms of breadth and depth and also to become a reliable resource." Note the adjectives, and the order in which they appear: free largest (breadth) largest (depth) "and also" reliable This statement of purpose must be taken with at least a grain of salt, however, because it, like everything else on the Wikipedia site, is editable, by anyone. We can take it that the statement represents the view of the last person to modify it, and those of unknown others who have chosen not to modify it further or to "revert" it, in the lingo, meaning to return it to a prior state. It is entirely consonant with other statements on the site and with instructions given to volunteer editors and copy editors: "Please remember that the original author took the trouble to write a new page for Wikipedia and that however good or bad it is, if you are taking the trouble to copy-edit it then it is probably a valuable contribution." Again with the "probably." The idea that animates the entire undertaking, and links it with the Interpedia of yore, is expressed in the discussion of editing policy: "However, one of the great advantages of the Wiki system is that incomplete or poorly written first drafts of articles can evolve into polished, presentable masterpieces through the process of collaborative editing. This gives our approach an advantage over other ways of producing similar end-products. Hence, the submission of rough drafts should also be encouraged as much as possible." In other words, the process allows Wikipedia to approach the truth asymptotically. The basis for the assertion that this is advantageous vis-?-vis the traditional method of editing an encyclopedia remains, however, unclear. The general FAQ does offer one mild caveat: "As anyone can edit any article, it is of course possible for biased, out of date or incorrect information to be posted. However, because there are so many other people reading the articles and monitoring contributions using the Recent Changes page, incorrect information is usually corrected quickly. Thus the overall accuracy of the encyclopedia is improving all the time as it attracts more and more contributors. You are encouraged to help by correcting articles and passing on your own knowledge." One person's "knowledge," unfortunately, may be another's ignorance. To put the Wikipedia method in its simplest terms: 1. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can submit an article and it will be published. 2. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can edit that article, and the modifications will stand until further modified. Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step: 3. Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy. Does someone actually believe this? Evidently so. Why? It's very hard to say. One possibility that occurs to me is this: The combination of prolificacy and inattention to accuracy that characterizes this process is highly suggestive of the modern pedagogic technique known as "journaling." For decades, (following, we are probably meant to assume, some breakthrough research at a school of education somewhere) young students have been not merely encouraged but required to fill pages of their notebooks with writing. Not stories, nor essays, nor any other defined genre of writing; just writing. The writing is judged solely on bulk: So many pages are required per week or semester, but the writing on those pages need not be grammatical or even intelligible. Even the "talented and gifted" program at my own sons' school employed journaling as a principal activity, merely raising the quota over that of standard classrooms. It may well be that the practice of journaling in the schools, along with the acceptance of "creative spelling" as a form of personal expression not to be repressed, underlies much of the success of Wikipedia. Superimpose on this intellectual preparation the moist and modish notion of "community" and some vague notions about information "wanting" to be free, et voil?! But conceding for a moment that this exercise in encyclopedia making is enjoyed and even believed in fervently by many thousands of participants, let us take note of someone who is absolutely central to the concept of an encyclopedia but who is hardly acknowledged at all by the Wikipedians. I mean, of course, the user. As in the reader. The person who comes to Wikipedia in search of accurate information. I know as well as anyone and better than most what is involved in assessing an encyclopedia. I know, to begin with, that it can't be done in any thoroughgoing way. The job is just too big. Professional reviewers content themselves with some statistics -- so many articles, so many of those newly added, so many index entries, so many pictures, and so forth -- and a quick look at a short list of representative topics. Journalists are less stringent. To see what Wikipedia is like I chose a single article, the biography of Alexander Hamilton. I chose that topic because I happen to know that there is a problem with his birth date, and how a reference work deals with that problem tells me something about its standards. The problem is this: While the day and month of Hamilton's birth are known, there is some uncertainty as to the year, whether it be 1755 or 1757. Hamilton himself used, and most contemporary biographers prefer, the latter year; a reference work ought at least to note the issue. The Wikipedia article on Hamilton (as of November 4, 2004) uses the 1755 date without comment. Unfortunately, a couple of references within the body of the article that mention his age in certain years are clearly derived from a source that used the 1757 date, creating an internal inconsistency that the reader has no means to resolve. Two different years are cited for the end of his service as secretary of the Treasury; without resorting to another reference work, you can guess that at least one of them is wrong. The article is rife with typographic errors, styling errors, and errors of grammar and diction. No doubt there are other factual errors as well, but I hardly needed to fact-check the piece to form my opinion. The writing is often awkward, and many sentences that are apparently meant to summarize some aspect of Hamilton's life or work betray the writer's lack of understanding of the subject matter. A representative one runs thus: "Arguably, he set the path for American economic and military greatness, though the benefits might be argued." All these arguments aside, the article is what might be expected of a high school student, and at that it would be a C paper at best. Yet this article has been "edited" over 150 times. Some of those edits consisted of vandalism, and others were cleanups afterward. But how many Wikipedian editors have read that article and not noticed what I saw on a cursory scan? How long does it take for an article to evolve into a "polished, presentable masterpiece," or even just into a usable workaday encyclopedia article? The history page for this article reveals a most interesting story. Originally, the 1757 birth date was used. Thus the internal inconsistencies of ages and dates that I saw are artifacts of editing. Originally, the two citations of the year Hamilton resigned from the Cabinet agreed; editing has changed one but not the other. In fact, the earlier versions of the article are better written overall, with fewer murky passages and sophomoric summaries. Contrary to the faith, the article has, in fact, been edited into mediocrity. Is this a surprising result? Not really: Take the statements of faith in the efficacy of collaborative editing, replace the shibboleth "community" with the banal "committee," and the surprise dissolves before your eyes. Or, if you are of a statistical turn of mind, think a little about regression to the mean and the shape of the normal distribution curve. However closely a Wikipedia article may at some point in its life attain to reliability, it is forever open to the uninformed or semiliterate meddler. It is true, unfortunately, that many encyclopedia users, like many encyclopedia reviewers, have low expectations. They are satisfied to find an answer to their questions. I would argue that more serious users, however, have two requirements: first, an answer to their questions; second, that those answers be correct. Of course, this may be just me. I have had the experience of making this argument before a roomful of sales executives and marketing people and being met with looks of bafflement on the one hand and dismissal on the other. The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him. Robert McHenry is Former Editor in Chief, the Encyclop?dia Britannica, and author of How to Know (Booklocker.com, 2004). From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 10 22:54:13 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 17:54:13 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Can God See the Future? Message-ID: Can God See the Future? The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4.11.26 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i14/14a01101.htm Some evangelical scholars are taking worldly heat for suggesting that divine knowledge has its limits By BURTON BOLLAG God knows everything that will ever happen. That is the majority view among evangelical Christians. But in recent years a few scholars at evangelical institutions have proposed a radically different view: There is no divine script for the future, they say. Free will plays a big role. The debate over the scholars' ideas has taken on such fervor that last month an evangelical college told one of its professors, a believer in free will, to leave. The fired professor, John E. Sanders, at Huntington College in Indiana, is a leading proponent of an approach known as Open Theism, which declares that God and humans with their free will together determine the future. Bruce A. Ware, senior associate dean of the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and an ardent opponent of Open Theism, says the controversy is of much more than scholarly interest. By rejecting the notion of a supreme being who knows or has even planned the whole future, he says, "Open Theism undermines people's confidence in God." It "makes God pathetic." Other theologians see the debate over Open Theism as a proxy for a struggle over who will lead the evangelical movement -- free-will-believing liberals or old-fashioned Calvinists. As the debate has spread, a number of evangelical institutions, including the six seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention, have started to require faculty members to sign statements saying that they believe in God's complete knowledge of the future. The statements are intended to keep out supporters of Open Theism. But the idea's impact is spreading beyond the walls of evangelical seminaries. "For philosophers who speculate about God, it has breathed new life into the debate," says Kelly James Clark, a professor of philosophy at Calvin College and secretary-treasurer of the Society of Christian Philosophers. An Old Controversy In other branches of Christianity, arguments over free will and omniscience have been conducted for many centuries. During the Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation, theologians risked more than their jobs when they found themselves on the wrong side of a theological dispute. It was not uncommon for trials on charges of doctrinal deviations to involve torture of the accused and their subsequent burning at the stake. Theologians and philosophers in the three great monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, have long debated the proper balance between belief in an all-powerful deity and in human free will. St. Augustine, the 4th-century Latin church father; al-Ashari, the 10th-century Islamic theologian; Maimonides, the medieval Jewish philosopher; and John Calvin, the Protestant reformer, all grappled with the issue. All of them argued in favor of God's power. The scientific revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, and particularly Darwin's theory of evolution, profoundly influenced the debate. Darwinism led many theologians to move away from a more literal reading of the Bible and to reject the concept of a God with absolute power over the physical and human worlds. Process theology, developed in the first half of the 20th century under the influence of works by the English mathematical logician Alfred North Whitehead and others, views God as involved with humankind in a continuous, dynamic process. The idea has much in common with Open Theism but approaches the issue from a philosophical standpoint that transcends Christianity. Open Theism's proponents say their approach emerged from a close, evangelical reading of the Bible. The Holocaust provided a new jolt to traditional thinking about God's omniscience, as theologians grappled with the question of what kind of deity would stand by and allow such horrors to happen. Indeed, the problem of evil has always been central to the debate. Those proclaiming God's infinite power must answer why God's plan contains such atrocities. Those theologians who envision a God who has granted free will to humanity find the explanation for such evils not in God, but in humankind's sinfulness. Despite the tension between free will and God's power, most branches of Christianity have little problem accommodating both concepts today. "Most of the rest of the Protestant world would agree that the future is open and depends to a varying extent on free will," says Matthew S. Collins, a New Testament scholar and a senior official of the Society of Biblical Literature, which brings together scholars from a wide range of theological orientations. John F. Haught, a professor of theology at Georgetown University, says contemporary Roman Catholic theologians have generally come down on the side of free will. "The Catholic interpretation takes the Bible very seriously," he says, "but not so literally." For Christian evangelicals, however, the battle over the extent of divine foreknowledge remains fierce. "I'm a Calvinist," says Mr. Ware, the Southern Baptist dean. "I hold that God has absolute control and has decided everything that will happen." Even the Holocaust? Yes, says Mr. Ware, but that doesn't mean that his deity is a monster. Injustice will be punished, he insists. Whether in this life or the next, "people are all held accountable before God." A New Approach Open Theism represents one of the most serious challenges to the doctrine of the evangelical movement in decades. In the 1980s several works promoting Open Theism appeared, although that label was not yet used. Then, in 1994, a book with the writings of five evangelical scholars was published by InterVarsity Press, a major evangelical academic publisher, under the title, The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God. "It took everyone by surprise," says Mr. Ware, and the book was so influential that "Open Theism was the de facto topic" of each year's annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society from then until last year. With 2,060 full members, the group is the main association of biblical scholars at America's roughly 400 evangelical colleges, seminaries, and Bible schools. As the controversy grew, a number of evangelical institutions became caught up in the debate. In the mid-1990s Bethel College (now Bethel University), in St. Paul, came under strong pressure from the Baptist General Conference, which controls the institution, to dismiss Gregory A. Boyd, a professor of theology who was another leading proponent of Open Theism. A committee set up by the college concluded in 1998 that Mr. Boyd's writings did not violate Baptist doctrine, and the institution decided not to dismiss him. But in a concession to the conservatives, Bethel's president, George K. Brushaber, promised not to hire any other Open Theism supporters. Mr. Boyd has since left Bethel to pursue a career as a writer and a minister in an evangelical church. James H. Barnes III, Bethel's provost, says of the experience, "We had an incredible theological dialogue on campus that could not have been manufactured if we had wanted it." "But," he adds, "it was a draining experience." Meanwhile, the Evangelical Theological Society encouraged a thorough debate of the new approach, holding a panel discussion soon after the seminal book appeared, during which the authors and their opponents struggled over the issues. One of the points debated was the understanding of biblical passages in which God is surprised by events, or in which he is persuaded to change a decision. In the Book of Exodus, for example, God decides to destroy the Hebrews when they turn away from him and worship a golden calf. Moses, with apparent success, pleads with God to relent. "So the Lord changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people," says the Bible. For Open Theists, such texts, in which events unfold through an unscripted give-and-take between God and humanity, must be taken seriously. Conservatives respond that the deity was, in effect, only playing with Moses. "You can't take this at face value," says Mr. Ware of the troublesome passages. In each case, he insists, "God knew the outcome all along." Defending Infallibility At its 2001 annual meeting, the society began the final move against what many members view as heresy. After discussing numerous papers -- some 30 presentations were against Open Theism and only 3 supported it -- the society passed a resolution reaffirming the majority's view: "We believe the Bible clearly teaches that God has complete, accurate, and infallible knowledge of all events past, present, and future." The resolution passed with 70-percent support. A larger number of members certainly agreed with it, but some were uncomfortable with what they saw as the beginning of an effort to expel the dissidents. Edwin M. Yamauchi, a professor of ancient history at Miami University, in Ohio, who is now the society's vice president, said at the time that if the supporters of Open Theism were excluded, "we will be a more orthodox society, but we will be a poorer society." At the 2002 meeting, one of the society's founding members, the retired Swiss-born theologian Roger Nicole, declared Open Theism "a cancer on the soul" of the group and called for the expulsion of two of the movement's key proponents. The society decided to investigate whether the two had violated the group's original, doctrinal statement, which asserts the "inerrant" nature of the Bible. (The statement does not directly address the issue of divine foreknowledge.) Their accusers said the two dissidents had denied the truth of biblical passages proclaiming God's full knowledge of future events. Each man was examined on the basis of what was considered his most flagrant denial of the society's doctrine. For Clark H. Pinnock, a prominent professor of theology who was only months from retirement at McMaster Divinity College, in Hamilton, Ontario, the charges dealt with his book Most Moved Mover (Baker Academic, 2001). John E. Sanders, a midcareer faculty member at Indiana's evangelical Huntington College, was examined on the basis of his The God Who Risks (InterVarsity Press, 1998). A Personal Journey For Mr. Sanders, the road to Open Theism began when he was in high school and only nominally Christian. The death of his brother in a motorcycle accident led him to begin thinking deeply about religion. People tried to comfort him by explaining that the accident was part of God's plan. "I said, 'So God killed my brother so I would become a Christian?' They'd say, 'Oh, no, it's not like that.' But there was a disconnect." Mr. Sanders, who gradually became a committed evangelical, began developing a position that refused to see all events as ordained ahead of time by God. "An 'openness' view says humans are incredibly responsible for what happens," he says. "If a mudslide occurs in Colombia, well, God doesn't just zap manna to the people. He expects us to manifest Christian values and help the people." Mr. Pinnock agrees. "If the future is determined now, then what's the meaning of our lives?" he asks. "Where's the drama?" After 10 months of written communications and preparations, the society's nine-member executive committee called the two accused scholars to a daylong examination in October 2003 at a meeting room in a Best Western Hotel in Chicago. Mr. Ware, the theology dean, assisted Mr. Nicole in presenting the case against the two dissidents. Despite the passions the controversy had ignited, the tone of the meeting remained courteous. "They weren't mean," says Mr. Pinnock. "They were sincere about looking for the boundaries of evangelicalism." At the end of the day, Mr. Pinnock made a surprise announcement. He told the committee that he was willing to change the wording of a long footnote in his book that the group found particularly objectionable. The footnote pointed to a half-dozen biblical prophecies that do not appear to have come true. The changed version waters down that conclusion. For example, in the first Book of Thessalonians, Paul predicts the second coming of Christ in his lifetime. (The society's members agree that this did not happen, and that Jesus Christ has yet to return to earth and install the kingdom of God.) "His word was, however, perfectly appropriate," wrote Mr. Pinnock in his revised footnote, "given the fact that Paul thought that the coming could come at any time." To the thinking of James A. Borland, a faculty member at the Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University and the Evangelical Theological Society's secretary-treasurer, Mr. Pinnock had "recanted." Mr. Pinnock sees it differently. "It wasn't a big change," he says. "It seemed to me an easy way to satisfy them." It did. At its 2003 annual meeting, the following month, the society voted by a large margin not to expel Mr. Pinnock, and by the smallest of margins not to expel Mr. Sanders, who had offered no concessions to his accusers. Continuing Fallout The society's decision not to expel the two men was viewed as inappropriate leniency by some members. Norman L. Geisler, president of the Southern Evangelical Seminary and a former president of the theological society, resigned from the group in protest. "Before my own eyes," he says, "I saw an organization I belonged to go down the tubes and officially approve a view which denies the infallible foreknowledge of God." Yet while conservatives failed to get Mr. Sanders removed from the society, they are forcing him from his faculty job of seven years at Huntington. Last month the college's president, G. Blair Dowden, told a stunned faculty meeting that pressure from the United Brethren Church and the prospect of falling enrollments had become too much to resist. Mr. Sanders, he said, would have to leave. Mr. Dowden says he was not happy with the decision, which was made by the Board of Trustees. He acknowledges that the move could be a blow to academic freedom. Yet a few evangelical churches and seminaries, including some in the Pentecostal and Methodist traditions, are receptive to Open Theism. John E. Phelan Jr. is president and dean of North Park University's Theological Seminary, which is controlled by the Evangelical Covenant Church of America, a fast-growing denomination of more than 750 congregations across the United States and Canada. He has invited both Mr. Pinnock and Mr. Boyd to speak on the campus and says he would not hesitate to hire other supporters of Open Theism. The seminary does not officially support Open Theism, says Mr. Phelan, but he feels that the approach makes an important contribution to theological discussions. "There is a lot of sloppy language used by people," he says. "I would personally like our students and scholars to think more clearly about what it means when you say something was 'God's will.'" As for the fight over Open Theism, Mr. Phelan sees it as "a subtext for a larger struggle going on in evangelicalism," over whether its leaders will adhere to more-conservative Calvinism or more-liberal strains of Christianity. For his part, Mr. Ware, of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, says most members of the Evangelical Theological Society are just happy that the consuming debate over whether to expel the two members has been settled, and that the group can move on to other things. At the same time, he worries that Open Theism itself is spreading. "Scholars have said pretty much everything they will" on the subject, he says. "Now it is moving outside the scholarly world, down into the pews." TWO BIBLICAL PASSAGES IN QUESTION In a dialogue on the sinfulness and impotence of idol worship, the Lord asserts, through Isaiah, the knowledge of all things past, present, and future and the power to intervene freely in the world: "I am God, and there is no one like Me Declaring the end from the beginning And from ancient times things which have not been done. ..." (Isaiah 46:9-10) In Moses' absence, the Israelites have fashioned a golden calf to worship. In response to God's threat to unleash his wrath upon them for this sacrilege, Moses reminds the Lord of his promises to Abraham and Isaac. God then decides he will not destroy the Israelites: "Then Moses entreated the LORD his God ... So the LORD changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people." (Exodus 32:11, 14) SOURCE: New American Standard Bible [I had to correct this. The article said Exodus 3. And the King James Bible should have been used instead of a translation.] From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 10 22:56:45 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 17:56:45 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: Rethinking doomsday Message-ID: Rethinking doomsday | thebulletin.org http://69.36.186.201/article.php?art_ofn=nd04rothstein Rethinking doomsday Loose nukes, nanobots, smallpox, oh my! In this age of endless imagining, and some very real risks, which terrorist threats should be taken most seriously? By Linda Rothstein, Catherine Auer and Jonas Siegel November/December 2004 pp. 36-41, 44-47, 73 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists T his year, beginning with the January/ February 2004 issue, the Bulletin began a series of articles we dubbed "Rethinking Doomsday." The effort was in direct response to the remarkable proliferation of potential death-and-destruction scenarios about which so much has been made since 9/11. There is no doubt that the attacks of September 11, 2001 made clear that Americans faced very real dangers at home that few had foreseen and even fewer had taken seriously. Three years later, many, if not most, of us remain frightened. But so many doomsday scenarios have been paraded on TV, in the newspapers, and in the course of political campaigns, that we can't help asking: How many possible terrorist attacks with how many possible weapons can there be? Must we, while worrying about nuclear holocaust or about terrorists commandeering airplanes or detonating conventional explosives, also worry that tomorrow we will come in contact with an evildoer bearing live smallpox stolen from somewhere in Siberia, with which he intends to infect the entire unsuspecting United States? (Government officials blithely assure us that we are all safer than we were before 9/11, but also say a smallpox epidemic is a case of "not if, but when.") How much time should we have devoted to the idea that the United States faced a gathering threat from Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons? About a plot to poison the food supply? Or should we worry if foreign visitors are seen taking snapshots of the Flatiron Building? Sometimes it seems as if the source of newly announced dangers must be the basement of the White House or a back room at a Washington think tank, where the thousands of monkeys who have yet to type out exact copies of the works of Shakespeare are nonetheless producing dozens of new ideas for attacks on America, to be trotted out on the news at 10. The "rethinking" reader on page 39 lists the articles published in 2004 that led us to our own conclusions about rethinking doomsday. (Many are available at the Bulletin's web site, www.thebulletin.org.) The following is a recap of what we learned. Chemical weapons In "The Dew of Death," Joel Vilensky and Pandy Sinish recounted the strange story of lewisite, an arsenic-based chemical weapon developed by the Chemical Warfare Service during World War I. By the end of the war, the United States was producing 10 tons a day of the stuff, yet it was never used in battle, where it would probably have flopped. Lewisite shares many of the problems that have prevented most chemical weapons from entering the world's armies' battlefield arsenals: Most chemicals are very hard to disseminate in sufficiently undiluted form, and might not work in weather that is too hot, too cold, too windy, or too wet. The dilution problem would also make it very difficult to carry out an attack involving the poisoning of a major city's water supply. Nearly every article about terrorist uses of chemical or biological weapons begins by recalling Aum Shinrikyo's use of sarin gas in 1995 in the Tokyo subway. Employing five separate packages of poison, cult members managed to kill 12 commuters, although another 1,000 had to seek hospital treatment. The attack was shocking, yet fell short of the cult's ambitions. (Shoko Asahara, the leader of the group, aspired either to be Japan's prime minister or to kill as many of his countrymen as possible.) Saddam Hussein's forces used poison gas at Halabja in the open air. Halabja, a Kurdish city in northern Iraq, is perhaps the best known of the several dozen towns and villages Saddam Hussein is thought to have gassed in 1987 and 1988. Some 5,000 of its population of 70,000 died as a result of being bombarded with what might have been a combination of mustard gas, nerve agent, and possibly cyanide. The attack was a monstrous crime, but the Iraqi military succeeded by having complete control over the place, the time, and the choice of a day with ideal weather--and because it faced no danger of experiencing any resistance. Saddam's men were able to spread the poisons systematically (delivery might have been by a combination of dispersal from low-flying planes and attack with chemical shells). The Halabja massacre was not a demonstration of the unique power of chemical weapons, but of the fact that the population was defenseless. Iraq, and probably Iran, also used poison gas during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). Even as thousands of young people were slaughtered in a war that ended in stalemate, the war's less-controlled, battlefield use of chemical weapons is customarily assessed as having lent neither side an advantage. Today, few of the world's militaries would even consider using chemical weapons--they can contaminate the battleground and come back on the attackers if the wind takes an unexpected turn. The major militaries--including those of the United States, Britain, Russia, and Germany--have dumped old munitions (not always carefully) or have spent, or need to spend, billions of dollars to neutralize decaying munitions that could threaten civilians who live near storage sites. Some tiny amount of worry should probably be devoted to leaking chemical munitions. If civilians do not need to fret too much about attacks from the air, they should perhaps worry a little more about chemicals deployed in enclosed or otherwise contained environments, where they can be delivered at concentrated levels. Somehow, though, it's hard to jump from the Aum Shinrikyo case to believing that overseas villains would find it easy to deliver deadly doses at will. On the other hand, a domestic effort, with greater access to American ingenuity and reliable materials and work space in which to generate lethal chemical mixtures would be another matter (see "Homegrown Terror," by Michael Reynolds, page 48). Let's recap. Chemical attack by international terrorists: Possible. Probable? No. Time spent worrying about it? Possibly wasted. Domestic terrorists' use of chemical weapons? Possible. Probable? Best known potential case found by accident--and experts say that as a result of emphasis on international terrorism, domestic cases are being neglected. Biological weapons The Aum Shinrikyo cult recruited technical experts from around the world, had a net worth of more than a billion dollars, and is repeatedly mentioned as the most salient example to show that international terrorists will attack the United States with biological weapons. But all of Aum's attacks occurred in Japan, on its own turf, and the cult's attempts to poison Japanese citizens with botulin or anthrax--efforts it made between 1990 and 1995, before turning to sarin gas--were utter failures. Conversely, the culprit (or culprits) who sent letters containing anthrax spores through the mail in September 2001 has not been apprehended, and his or her identity remains a mystery, at least to the public--this despite the fact that the perpetrator used a strain of anthrax known to be of U.S. origin, that it was milled in a highly sophisticated manner, also suggesting it was likely produced in one of a limited number of facilities, and that in all likelihood the perpetrator works or worked among a fairly limited universe of possible suspects in government or government-contract laboratories. Some worry might be devoted to why the attacks occurred, why they stopped, and whether they might start again. An industry seems to have sprung up devoted to inculcating fear in Americans about contagious diseases, especially smallpox. In the run-up to Gulf War II, it was said that Iraq was likely to unleash smallpox on the American public. Promulgators of panic were less clear about how, where, or why it would do so. But they assured us there would be an epidemic. From what we can tell, they were wrong on nearly all counts. Smallpox is a serious business. And although transmission seems somewhat avoidable--it occurs through close contact, often with someone who has visible signs of the disease, namely, pox--the great historical smallpox epidemics still had 30-50 percent mortality rates. More than 200 years ago, Edward Jenner's development of a vaccine began to change the picture. Still, according to Richard Pilch ("Smallpox: Threat, Vaccine, and U.S. Policy," Center for Nonproliferation Studies) "in the twentieth century, smallpox killed more people than war." Accordingly, after World War II, a major global effort was undertaken to stamp out the disease. By 1980, when the entire world was declared smallpox free, the disease had been eradicated in the United States for some time. All samples of the virus were then destroyed, except for two, which were maintained at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, and at the then-Soviet Union's State Research Center for Virology and Biotechnology, known as Vector. Although there have been no outbreaks in the United States for decades, a supply of vaccine remains--about which there is some controversy, because inoculation with live virus can pose a risk. There is one well-known supply of about 15 million doses, which is generally accepted as entirely usable, and another supply of approximately 80 million doses, which was mysteriously rediscovered in 2002. Because of its exotic provenance, this second supply has been generally considered unsuitable for anything but emergency use. In tests since its discovery, however, the second supply appears to be safe and effective. Meanwhile, the U.S. government has contracted with OraVax for the production of some 300 million additional doses. Stalwart Cold Warriors have long insisted that Russia gave smallpox samples to Iraq, although there is no evidence to support such a claim. (It seems counterintuitive for Russia to eagerly share a deadly microbe if its reintroduction would endanger its own population.) Various U.S. intelligence agencies have also claimed that France, as well as Russia and Iraq, had illicit samples of smallpox. At various times they hypothesized that Iraq either was given smallpox samples by Russia, retained some virus from a 1971-1972 outbreak in Baghdad, or developed it in an indigenous program to adapt camelpox. Of course, no virus was found in Iraq, either during the 1991-1998 period of post-Gulf War I U.N. inspections, or during the pre-Gulf War II U.N. inspections, or as a result of the activities of U.S. search teams during and after the latest conflict since January 2003. So we escaped an attack by Iraq. But would we all be doomed if Al Qaeda terrorists (perhaps bearing some of that rumored French smallpox) decided to infect the United States? It seems unlikely. First, set aside the problems attackers would face in trying to deliver the disease other than through person-to-person contact. (Cold Warriors speculated that the Soviets would fill intercontinental ballistic missiles with the virus and send the missiles over the North Pole.) The key to preventing a major outbreak is a good public health system that can detect a handful of cases before the disease spreads. Meanwhile, helping to slow the spread are two surprising findings: A study by Oregon Health and Science University researchers, reported in the September 2003 issue of Nature Medicine, revealed that in contrast to conventional wisdom that the effects of vaccination lasted only a few years, "90 percent of those vaccinated 25 to 75 years ago maintain a substantial level of immunity." In other words, half the U.S. population (nearly everyone was vaccinated before 1972) has some degree of immunity, a considerable barrier to the rapid spread of smallpox. Simultaneously, if cases were detected, there would be time to vaccinate the unprotected population. As for the vaccine's availability, there seems to be an adequate supply. Doctors at Vanderbilt University report in the September 8 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association that the vaccine in the emergency supply can be diluted to as much as one-tenth and still provide an overall vaccination success rate of 99.4 percent. Let's recap. There are no known smallpox stocks in the hands of evildoers. An antidote exists in plentiful supply. And half the population is already protected. How much time should Americans spend worrying about attack-by-smallpox? Probably not as much as on the spread of naturally occurring nastiness like flu epidemics, Ebola, and hantavirus, and probably not as much as on laboratory concoctions like bioengineered new strains of anthrax. And speaking of anthrax, the U.S. government seems to have learned little from the anthrax-in-the-mail experience. As Susan Wright explains in "Taking Biodefense Too Far," (see page 58), the government is responding to the newer, high-tech threat of specially engineered pathogens against which there may be no defense by spending billions to produce some, in the process creating a cadre of highly specialized germ weaponeers and constructing dozens of special laboratories where they will be able to work in comfortable secrecy. As other Bulletin authors have pointed out, some of these facilities are being placed behind the barriers of the nation's nuclear weapons laboratories, all the better to make it less likely that their dangerous activities will be properly monitored. Officials would no doubt respond that these U.S. facilities will be safe. Well, maybe. But that ignores a long history of poor judgment. The U.S. government conducted open air tests of dangerous biologicals in, among other places, the United States, Central America, the Pacific, and the Caribbean, leaving a trail of contamination behind. Not that other countries have been any more responsible. The Soviets built a major test facility on Vozrozhdeniye Island. Now that the Aral Sea is drying up, it's just a matter of time before the pathogens in the island's soil and in insect and wildlife populations spread to the mainland. Cleanup, if it happens, won't be easy. Britain struggled to clean up its anthrax mess at Gruinard Island--eventually doing so with formaldehyde. Nanotechnology Nanotech is the new, high-tech wild-card of doomsday scenarios. The emerging science of manipulating the supersmall--molecules and atoms--has generated some popular scare stories, such as the "grey goo" scenario, in which a swarm of self-replicating nanobots smothers all life in its path. But is this really a threat? If the number of defensive measures developed to combat grey goo is any indication, not really. So far, there's no such thing as a grey-goo fighting wand or a nanobot-safe shelter. Maybe it is too daunting a task to prepare for a threat that seems so futuristic. Or maybe the informed opinion of some scientists that the out-of-control self-replication of nanomachines is avoidable, if not entirely impossible, has kept the public, government, and industry from over-worrying. The risk of nanomachines uncontrollably self-replicating is "very low," reported Margaret Kosal, now a fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, in the September/October Bulletin. But there's still room for concern: "To say that nanotechnology could never lead to self-replication, or that uncontrolled self-assembly would not have unintended consequences, would be presumptive," concluded Kosal. Other researchers are convinced that "molecular manufacturing"--machines that could someday be able to construct precise atomic structures--has scary potential. In his 1986 book Engines of Creation, K. Eric Drexler envisioned nanomachines capable of building structures from the atom up. He was the first to imagine the implications of a runaway self-replication process. Drexler recently sought to tone down speculation about the possibility of an accidental runaway replication and to legitimize research into molecular manufacturing. In a paper coauthored by Chris Phoenix, Drexler wrote that "the development and use of molecular manufacturing need not at any step involve systems that could run amok as the result of accident or faulty engineering." Still, Drexler and Phoenix were adamant that "no law of nature prevents [a runaway replication's] deliberate development." As with biotechnology, the potential for the misuse of nanotechnology grows when esoteric technological expertise is coupled with access to sophisticated tools. A greater nanotech threat than self-replicating nanobots, according to Drexler, is the potential that "a powerful and convenient manufacturing capacity could be used to make powerful non-replicating weapons in unprecedented quantity, leading to an arms race, war, terrorism, or oppression." Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are already making strides toward the mass production of nanostructures. In April, they announced that they had designed a way to transform a carbon nanotube into a "conveyor belt" capable of transporting a stream of atom-sized particles to a "construction site," where they could hypothetically be combined with other materials to create larger structures. The scenario imagined by Drexler appears similar to those envisioned by Kosal, where nanotechnology could be used to enhance the effectiveness of existing chemical or biological weapons, or to create entirely new weapons. Considering the various factors that presently complicate the delivery of chemical and biological weapons, or the creation of miniature nuclear fusion bombs, this is perhaps one avenue where nanotechnology has the potential to play more than a wild-card role. The U.S. government's message to the public has so far been full of praise for the potential benefits of nanotechnology and lacking in outward concern about potential dangers. Little has been done to guard against the potential for nanotechnology to contribute to mass destruction, or to protect against a less fear-inspiring, but more prescient concern. Only in June did the Defense Department announce that it was funding a five-year project to determine which, if any, characteristics of nanoparticles--the ones now showing up in tennis balls, clothing, and other commercial products--are toxic or have adverse effects. Although there has been some research on the toxicity of nanoparticles and their potential effect on the environment and in the food cycle, scientists still do not know much about the implications and dangers of nanotechnology in general. Let's recap. Death and destruction are unlikely to come at the microscopic "hands" of swarms of nanobots in the near future, but the possibility of such an event isn't likely to leave the public consciousness anytime soon and can't be dismissed out of hand. More immediate concerns should center on the potential misuse of nanotechnology and the dearth of information about the effects of nanoparticles on the environment and in the food chain. Dangerous proliferation In early 2004, President George W. Bush called nuclear weapons the "greatest threat to mankind." But his administration has pursued a broader arsenal, lifted the 10-year ban on RandD on new low-yield nukes, moved to shorten the preparation period for nuclear testing, and deployed an untested missile defense that many perceive as an offensive measure. As Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen reported in the September/ October "Nuclear Notebook," the U.S. arsenal's combined yield is about 1,800 megatons--still overwhelming, if reduced, firepower. The yield of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a mere 15 kilotons. But no one in the administration seems worried about overkill. "The national laboratories, where weapons designers are eager for fresh challenges, are exerting tremendous pressure for a renewed mission complete with new weapons and programs," reported Andy Oppenheimer in "Mini-Nukes: Boom or Bust?" In the same issue, Bret Lortie wrote that the Energy Department looked to be gearing up for new nuclear responsibilities at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Critics called Energy's plan "a shocking blueprint for an increasingly aggressive and robust nuclear weapons program." Speaking of robust, in the May/ June issue Jonas Siegel showed how Defense's proposed budget revealed its plans for pursuing the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. Oh, and not to mention that the Bush administration is building a new plutonium pit fabrication plant capable of churning out 250-900 new weapon cores a year by 2018 (see "Dismantling U.S. Nuclear Warheads"). The United States has also gone back on its own proliferation rules, against the "long-standing prohibition against using commercial nuclear reactors to produce bomb materials--the so-called no-dual-use policy," Kenneth Bergeron reported in the January/February Bulletin. Critics of the administration's plan to produce tritium at Watts Bar are "concerned with the U.S. government's retreat from nonproliferation principles." The United States seems to have a problem with proliferation principles. "It is ironic and hypocritical that the Bush administration has condemned both North Korea and Iran for their apparent efforts to develop nuclear weapons," wrote Ronald Powaski in the January/ February Bulletin. "Clearly, if the Bush administration were serious about halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, it would accept the same standards of behavior that it is attempting to impose on non-nuclear weapons states." Let's recap. The Bush administration warns about proliferation but is going forward with new nuclear plans, which prompts other nuclear weapon states to modify their arsenals (see "Nuclear Policy: France Stands Alone," and "Russian Nuclear Forces, 2004"), and prompts other nations to gain nuclear weapons status. Could proliferation alone be the end of the world? Not technically--you need someone to push the button. But think about this: Who might be next to catch the nuclear fever? Terrorists, maybe? The many nuclear maybes Thinking for a moment about the many different ways in which the United States could come under some kind of nuclear-related attack is enough to make the eyes bulge, pulse race, and head swim. Terrorists could steal or buy an intact nuclear weapon and detonate it in the United States. Or they could steal or buy fissile material, make a crude nuclear weapon, and blow it up within our borders. Or they could couple fissile material to explosives and craft a radiological dispersion device--a "dirty bomb." Let's not forget the more than 100 U.S. nuclear power plants (which some like to call sitting ducks) that are potential targets of attack or sabotage. Of these, the first is the least likely. It would be extremely difficult for terrorists to acquire an intact weapon from one of the eight nuclear weapon states. The security of these weapons, especially those in Russia and Pakistan, is a valid concern. But to detonate an intact, stolen Russian nuke, a terrorist would have to get past security safeguards built into the weapon, such as authorization codes. And Pakistani nuclear weapons (believed to number up to 50) are reportedly stored separately from the weapons' cores. Besides the difficulties associated with obtaining a ready-made, good-to-go nuke, there would be other barriers--such as transporting and preparing to deliver it undetected. This is perhaps the lowest probability, highest consequence scenario of nuclear terrorism. Getting the core material Could terrorists produce an entirely do-it-yourself nuclear bomb? Fabricating fissile material, highly enriched uranium (HEU) or separated plutonium, is exceedingly labor-and resource-intensive--and both activities present many opportunities for detection. Terrorist-produced fissile material is so extremely unlikely that it's safe to call it impossible. But it is possible that a group of nuclear-minded evildoers would attempt to build their own nuclear weapon using stolen or black market fissile material. Al Qaeda's interest in nuclear weapons has been documented, as have meetings between Osama bin Laden and sympathetic nuclear scientists. As Morten Bremer M?rli and Lars van Dassen write on page 19, the major barrier to nuclear terrorism is acquiring fissile material. And there are thousands of tons of fissile material stockpiled around the globe, as David Albright and Kimberly Kramer report on page 14. Certainly, not all of it is a security concern; however, "Not only do nuclear thieves stand a chance in Russia (and elsewhere), they have repeatedly been successful, stealing weapons-usable nuclear material without setting off any alarm or detector," according to Matthew Bunn of the Project on Managing the Atom ("Securing the Bomb," Harvard University, May 2004). The CIA recognizes that there have surely been undetected cases of theft of fissile materials, in addition to nearly 20 documented (and intercepted) incidents. And as Albright and Corey Hinderstein reported in "The Centrifuge Connection," a nuclear black market--with possible state ties--can exist and thrive for years before detection. If terrorists are able to buy or steal plutonium or HEU, could they be clever enough to build a crude nuclear bomb? The answer, according to many experts, is yes. Provided they had enough fissile material, resourceful and determined terrorists could fabricate both gun-style and implosion design nuclear weapons. Of plutonium and highly enriched uranium, HEU is more attractive to terrorists--easier to handle and transport, it's more easily diverted. As M?rli and van Dassen write, many believe that eliminating Russia's stocks at a faster pace would contribute greatly to Europe's increased security. Dirty bombs If terrorists lack the skills to build a crude nuclear bomb, but are able to acquire fissile material, they could construct a dirty bomb--conventional explosives coupled with fissile or other radioactive material. "An improvised terrorist device using highly enriched uranium could be smuggled into this country in virtually undetectable segments, and then assembled in any one of 50 million suburban garages," wrote Christopher Paine in "The Party of Preemption." Detonated in a populated area, a dirty bomb would expose many people to radioactive particles dispersed by the explosion, but any immediate fatalities would be caused by the blast and not exposure to radioactivity (although exposure has the potential to cause eventual fatalities). Among the many types of damage would be economic; analysts at the University of Southern California's terrorism center predict that a dirty bomb exploded at the Los Angeles and Long Beach port complex could cost $34 billion. That's just a best guess; no one really knows for sure the kind of damage a dirty bomb would do because it would depend largely on unpredictable factors such as bomb design, detonation location, and weather. There has never been a dirty bomb attack. True, Jose Padilla was arrested in Chicago and accused of plotting, in the words of Attorney General John Ashcroft, "to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or 'dirty bomb,' in the United States." But as Lewis Z. Koch explained in "Dirty Bomber? Dirty Justice," the evidence against the ex-gang member was thin. Plus, Koch reported, "Although some materials from hospitals, research universities, and other facilities are radioactive enough to be lethal, it would be very difficult to deliver high doses to more than a few people." One way a terrorist might do more damage is by using the extremely radioactive spent fuel from a power plant, but "Putting aside the controversy surrounding security at U.S. nuclear power plants, a would-be dirty bomber faces a Herculean task." The spent fuel is heavy, hard to access, and dangerously radioactive, Koch noted. If would-be dirty bombers were to somehow access a spent fuel pool and remove rods to another location, they would have been exposed to "enough radiation to make them burnt toast." And the "ultimate dirty bombs" That nuclear power plants are ripe targets is nothing new. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) was forced to admit after 9/11 that U.S. nuclear power plants were not designed to withstand the force of a crashing jetliner, which some worry could cause either a core meltdown or a fire in spent fuel pools. "A single spent fuel pond holds more cesium 137 than was deposited by all atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in the Northern Hemisphere combined," Robert Alvarez reported for the Bulletin in 2002. The radioactivity released from a pool fire could render hundreds to thousands of square miles uninhabitable. "Spent fuel pools present the most severe consequences and vulnerability at nuclear power stations," Alvarez told the Los Angeles Times (September 16). "They are the ultimate dirty bomb." But the NRC has no plans to reinforce the plants. "The NRC has been in a state of denial," said Frank von Hippel (Los Angeles Times, September 16). Could intruders force their way into a reactor to wreak havoc? Past incidents have demonstrated that one need not have sophisticated plans or skills in order to gain some level of access to a nuclear plant. In 1993, a mentally ill man drove his mother's station wagon past the guarded entrance at Three Mile Island (TMI). Although he was driving at about 35 miles per hour, the surveillance cameras couldn't swivel fast enough to keep up with his car. The intruder drove through a fence, then a roll-up door, and into the turbine building, where he got out of his car and hid before he was arrested four hours later. Fortunately, his intentions were not malicious. Sure, that was more than 10 years ago, but at the time, the TMI plant had earned the NRC's highest security rating. In general, nuclear plant security teams have miserable reputations for failing to prevent even mock attacks for which they've been forewarned. After 9/11, it took the Energy Department nearly three years to revise its security standards--and the new standards fall short by many experts' measure, as Stephen Schwartz wrote in "A Slow Sort of Security." Should one worry, too, about insider nuclear sabotage? There are no reported cases of this, but it's another scary possibility. Before September 11, 2001, the NRC reported several cases of nuclear power plant workers who were inappropriately granted "unescorted access" to sensitive areas at some plants. Employees are supposed to undergo background checks, which are done by outside contractors. Several contractors had falsified or not completed the checks. How much damage could a terrorist group do by attacking a nuclear power plant? That's a big unknown. The accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986 give some shaky indication, although as Joseph Mangano reported in the Bulletin earlier this year, questions about the health effects of TMI remain unanswered. The figures for fatalities caused by the Chernobyl meltdown are controversial and range from as few as 30 to as many as tens of thousands. The psychological, environmental, and economic impacts of potential nuclear terrorism are impossible to quantify. Let's recap. Nuclear terrorism is not easy, but it is possible. It's likely that nuclear-bent terrorists would take the path of least resistance, which makes theft or purchase of an intact nuke or self-fabrication of fissile material very unlikely. A dirty bomb would be perhaps the easiest, and least harmful, "nuclear" attack. That the NRC has been inexplicably slow to improve security at nuclear power facilities is cause for concern. As long as nuclear power plants operate, they will be potential targets. To date, the scariest near-misses at U.S. plants involve human mistakes (such as allowing boric acid to eat almost all the way through the reactor lid at Davis-Besse in Ohio) and not malevolent actions. When it comes to nuclear facilities, perhaps both error and terror deserve equal amounts of worry. There are too many different ways in which terrorists could perpetrate some kind of nuclear attack to mention in this limited space. But keep this in mind: There have been zero cases of nuclear terrorism--neither nuclear nor radiological. There are no known cases of theft or purchase of an intact nuclear weapon, so a terrorist attack with one is more than unlikely. There has not been any documented theft of enough fissile material for a crude nuke--although there have been attempts. There has never been a dirty bomb attack. There has never been a case of nuclear plant sabotage. If there were, it would be awful--but not the end of humanity. The sum of all fears? So far these nuclear doomsday scenarios have focused on terrorism. But the most destructive of all nuclear threats is nuclear war. After all, eight nations have nuclear arsenals, but a terrorist group would have to work feverishly to get their hands on a single warhead, or enough material to make one. Is an incoming nuclear missile attack plausible? Yes, but unlikely. The Cold War is over, and the ballistic missile threat from nuclear-capable nations is extremely minor. In February 2001, the Defense Intelligence Agency listed Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as "countries of concern" that might someday field long-range, WMD-capable missiles, and Russia and China as nations expanding their long-range missile programs. One presumes Iraq is now off the list. As to Iran and North Korea, both nations have decent missile capabilities, but Iran cannot strike the United States, and most analysts believe the same about North Korea, despite its boasts. On the other hand, North Korea has nuclear material, and Iran is believed to be working toward a nuclear weapons capability. China has a whopping 20 Dong Feng missiles that can reach America. (The United States has close to 6,000 operational strategic nuclear weapons, as the Bulletin's May/June "Nuclear Notebook" reported.) Russia's capabilities are more comparable to America's, and Russia is expanding its capabilities, according to the July/August "Nuclear Notebook," but a planned attack from Moscow is extremely improbable. Boo-boo nukes What's more likely is an accidental nuclear attack. Both Russia and the United States still maintain nuclear-armed ICBMs on high alert and adhere to "launch-on-warning" policies, as Alan Phillips and Steven Starr wrote in the May/June Bulletin. Launch-on-warning means that if either Washington or Moscow thinks it is under attack from the other, it will launch a retaliatory strike before the supposed incoming missiles can do any damage. A false warning could mean the start of an accidental nuclear war. Keeping launch-on-warning policies alive is "inexcusably dangerous," Phillips and Starr wrote. "Launch-on-warning has exposed the world, for at least 30 years, to the danger of a nuclear war caused by nothing but a coincidence of radar, satellite sensor, or computer glitch, and a temporary human failure to appreciate that the message signaling attack is false." So far, there have been no false launches--but there have been many false warnings. Nuclear terrorism would be horrific, but nuclear war would be far worse. As Lynn Eden reported in "City on Fire," fire damage from nuclear explosions has been vastly and systematically underestimated--a move that allowed early U.S. war planners to demand a much larger nuclear arsenal. As Eden wrote, a single 300-kiloton nuclear weapon detonated above the Pentagon on a clear day would engulf the surrounding 65 square miles in firestorms that would "extinguish all life and destroy almost everything else." And that's a conservative estimate. Let's recap. An attack from a weapons state is highly unlikely; an accidental nuclear launch is far more worrisome. As remote as the possibility is, all-out nuclear war has the potential to end human life on the planet--still the true doomsday scenario. Linda Rothstein is editor, Catherine Auer managing editor, and Jonas Siegel assistant editor of the Bulletin. Sidebar: The "rethinking" reader January/February [16]"Nuclear Weapons: The Death of No-Dual-Use," by Kenneth Bergeron "Bush's Nuclear Hypocrisy," by Ronald E. Powaski [17]"City on Fire," by Lynn Eden [18]"Dirty Bomber? Dirty Justice," by Lewis Z. Koch "Nukes Without Borders," by Linda Rothstein [19]"Dismantling U.S. Nuclear Warheads," by Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen [20]"The Party of Preemption," by Christopher Paine March/April [21]"The Centrifuge Connection," by David Albright and Corey Hinderstein [22]"The Dew of Death," by Joel A. Vilensky and Pandy R. Sinish "Weapons Labs Good to Go," by Jonas Siegel [23]"The Protection Paradox," by Hans M. Kristensen, Matthew G. McKinzie, and Robert S. Norris May/June "Let's Go No-LOW," by Alan Phillips and Steven Starr [24]"Schooling Iran's Atom Squad," by Jack Boureston and Charles D. Ferguson [25]"An NPT for Non-Members," by Avner Cohen and Thomas Graham Jr. [26]"Defusing the Nuclear Middle East," by Bennett Ramberg [27]"Pakistan: It's D?j? Vu All Over Again," by Leonard Weiss "Fun and Games with the NPT," by Linda Rothstein "Robusterererer," by Jonas Siegel [28]"U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2004," by Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen July/August "A Slow Sort of Security," by Stephen I. Schwartz [29]"Nuclear Policy: France Stands Alone," by Bruno Tertrais "Disposal in the Doldrums," by Jonas Siegel [30]"Russian Nuclear Forces, 2004," by Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen September/October "Mini-Nukes: Boom or Bust?" by Andy Oppenheimer [31]"Nanotech: Is Small Scary?" by Margaret Kosal [32]"No Plans for New Nukes Here!" by Bret Lortie [33]"U.S. Nuclear Reductions," by Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen November/December "Europe, Carry Your Weight," by Morten Bremer M?rli and Lars van Dassen [34]"Fissile Material: Stockpiles Still Growing," by David Albright and Kimberly Kramer [35]"Iran: Countdown to Showdown," by David Albright and Corey Hinderstein [36]"Homegrown Terror," by Michael Reynolds [37]"Taking Biodefense Too Far," by Susan Wright [38]"U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Europe, 1954-2004," by Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen Sidebar: Child's play Preparing for a chemical, biological, or nuclear attack is fast becoming a national pastime (see "The New Bunker Mentality," page 42). And one of the best ways to be prepared for the coming doom, according to government officials and security experts, is to have an emergency plan and survival kit. On this front, there is no shortage of options. (Even mogul Steven Brill extols the virtue of emergency kits as part of his new organization, the America Prepared Campaign.) Most kits recommend similar goods--food, water, medical supplies, radio (and extra batteries), flashlight, can opener, and important documents--to help citizens survive disaster or attack. But the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) seems concerned with entertainment, too. FEMA suggests that children assemble a survival activity kit containing: A few favorite books Crayons, pencils, or marking pens and plenty of paper Scissors and glue Two favorite toys, such as a doll or action figure One or two board games A puzzle ("One with lots of pieces is good--it takes a long time to do!") Small figurines and play vehicles--an ambulance, fire truck, helicopter, dump truck, police car, or small boat--that kids can use to role play what is happening during the disaster Favorite stuffed animal or puppet Favorite blanket or pillow Pictures of the family and any pets A "keep safe" box with a few treasures that make them "feel special" Jonas Siegel Sidebar: (Not) following the leaders Government officials have told us time and again to be "ready" in case of a terrorist attack. But what if, in a terrorist attack, the government isn't ready for reality? A new study from the New York Academy of Medicine's Center for the Advancement of Collaborative Strategies in Health says that "current plans have been created in a 'top-down' style, telling people what to do in the event of an attack without considering all of the risks and concerns that drive people's actions." In other words, there's a planning gap between what officials want people to do and how people would actually react. The study found that only 40 percent of Americans would follow instructions to head to a public vaccination center if told to do so after terrorists caused a smallpox outbreak. If officials directed people to shelter-in-place in an undamaged building (not their home) after a nearby dirty bomb explosion, about 60 percent would. "It's not that the rest of the people want to be uncooperative," lead investigator Roz Lasker said in a press release. "The problem is that current plans unwittingly put them in extremely difficult decision-making predicaments." The problems stem from a difference between what emergency planners are trying to protect citizens from and what the citizens are seriously worried about. In a smallpox attack, planners want people to get vaccinated right away, but according to the study, more people would be concerned about the safety of the vaccine than about contracting smallpox. And in the event of a dirty bomb attack, when planners want people to stay in their workplaces, many people would rather leave to see to the safety of their kids or parents. The findings, write the investigators, "are cause for worry because they suggest that current plans to deal with smallpox and dirty bomb attacks will be far less effective than planners want or the public deserves." Sounds like the government should get ready. Catherine Auer References 16. http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=jf04bergeron 17. http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=jf04eden 18. http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=jf04koch 19. http://www.thebulletin.org/article_nn.php?art_ofn=jf04norris 20. http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=jf04paine 21. http://69.36.186.201/article.php?art_ofn=ma04albright 22. http://69.36.186.201/article.php?art_ofn=ma04vilensky 23. http://69.36.186.201/article.php?art_ofn=ma04kristensn 24. http://69.36.186.201/article.php?art_ofn=mj04boureston 25. http://69.36.186.201/article.php?art_ofn=mj04cohen 26. http://69.36.186.201/article.php?art_ofn=mj04ramberg 27. http://69.36.186.201/article.php?art_ofn=mj04weiss 28. http://69.36.186.201/article_nn.php?art_ofn=mj04norris 29. http://69.36.186.201/article.php?art_ofn=ja04tertrais 30. http://69.36.186.201/article_nn.php?art_ofn=ja04norris 31. http://69.36.186.201/article.php?art_ofn=so04kosal 32. http://69.36.186.201/article.php?art_ofn=so04lortie 33. http://69.36.186.201/article_nn.php?art_ofn=so04norris 34. http://69.36.186.201/article.php?art_ofn=nd04albright_016 35. http://69.36.186.201/article.php?art_ofn=nd04albright_037 36. http://69.36.186.201/article.php?art_ofn=nd04reynolds 37. http://69.36.186.201/article.php?art_ofn=nd04wright 38. http://69.36.186.201/article_nn.php?art_ofn=nd04norris From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 10 23:02:48 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 18:02:48 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: Storage Unit As Shelter Not Unique, Workers Say Message-ID: Storage Unit As Shelter Not Unique, Workers Say Girls Found in Md. Shed Spotlight Housing Woes http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8714-2004Nov23?language=printer [I'm always on the lookout for ways to keep down the cost of housing if and when Marshall Brain's dream of half the population becoming unemployable and has to be warehoused. My grandfathers on both sides lived for a while in sod houses in Kansas, without electricity or running water, so a modern storage unit would have been a major step up for them. [If decency requires coercive transfers from the employed to the unemployed beyond this, I should like to hear arguments beyond "this is how I want the world to be" and arguments that are data-driven, too boot.] By Susan Kinzie and Joshua Partlow Washington Post Staff Writers Wednesday, November 24, 2004; Page A01 In 20 years working in commercial storage, years when she has also had to work nights waitressing at the Golden Corral to help support her children, Robin Lawrence has seen lots of people living in storage sheds. "Sometimes they can fix them up really nice," said Lawrence, who works at Economy Storage in Waldorf. They might add insulation, carpet on the floor, a bed, a rack for their clothes, a television, a hot plate, maybe even a little grill out back. "It's just like a little efficiency, but without running water." The arrest of a 33-year-old woman last week for allegedly locking her 4- and 5-year-old daughters in a commercial storage shed for three nights has exposed a hidden corner of life. Yesterday, Reuben B. Collins, an attorney for Felicia M. Dorsey, cautioned reporters not to judge too harshly until all the facts emerge. "A mother's love for her children may not be rationally understood under every circumstance, especially as she and others struggle to survive," Collins said, declining to elaborate on what he called the "extraordinary circumstances" of his client's life. Social services officials have said that they want to confirm that Dorsey is the biological mother of the girls. Collins said Dorsey is willing to take a blood test to prove it. Although the allegations shocked many people, advocates for the homeless in Southern Maryland and other parts of the region said that, increasingly, families have been driven to find makeshift shelter -- in sheds, cars, unheated trailers and the woods. Sandy Washington, of the Ministers Alliance of Charles County, a religious group that posted bond for Dorsey, said that last year, the group helped six families that had been living in storage sheds, and she has heard of more. Dorsey rented a $65-a-month shed at Budget Self Storage in Waldorf, authorities said. Housing prices have risen so quickly in the Washington area, some advocates for the homeless say, that people are driven to find shelter in all sorts of places. "We were not completely shocked to hear about this. We've heard of adults living in storage sheds before," said Beth Flynn, program administrator for Catholic Charities Angel's Watch Regional Shelter in Hughesville. "We're always full, and it's only going to get worse in the winter. We're turning away five to 10 families a day." In Charles County, the median home price is $256,700, up 31 percent from last year. The median rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $1,218, too high for 54 percent of county renters, according to a Baltimore-based advocacy group, the Maryland Center for Community Development. And the rental vacancy rate is close to zero, housing officials said. The housing problem is reflected across the region. The shortage of affordable and available rental units in Maryland grew by 17 percent from 1990 to 2000, to 76,000 units, according to the state Department of Housing and Community Development. In the same period, Virginia's shortage grew by 22 percent to 90,700 units, and the District's rose by 15 percent to 22,500 units. Waiting lists for subsidized housing vouchers are long in many places. Charles County has more than 2,500 people on its waiting list, and officials estimate that it takes three to five years to move up. Some storage company managers said they could not believe that anyone would want to live on a cement floor with no plumbing -- or that anyone could, given how much security there is now at storage facilities. "That blows my mind," said Heather DuBois, manager of Potomac Self Storage in Lexington Park. But storage sheds are used to house all sorts of things, from old sofas to items that are against the rules, such as explosives. A newspaper in Indiana wrote about a man who chose to live in a unit for years and refused to leave even when people offered money. "I've often thought about that -- before I started working at one of these places -- that that would be a cheap way to live," said Shawn Wertz, who works at Guardian Self Storage in Chantilly. "Get a little climate-controlled unit. Get a membership at a health club" for showers. He said, however, that finding people living there "doesn't happen too often." Recently, his company discovered that an unrented unit in an Ashburn facility had a customer's lock on it. A longtime client, a man who owned a plumbing business and had fallen on hard times, had moved into a shed next to the one he filled with equipment. The man was sent to a shelter to spend the night, Wertz said. Living last year at Economy Storage in Waldorf, Lawrence said, were a young couple, the man in construction and the woman working odd jobs; an older couple, a minister and his wife; and a woman who owned a car and had a membership at a nearby gym. After what amounted to a neighborhood dispute took them to court, the judge asked the county to look into the situation. The people had to move out immediately, since living in a storage shed violates housing codes. "They just want a place to sleep at night where they're not wet, not cold," Lawrence said. Most people who stayed there went to work every morning and came home at night and didn't bother a soul, she added. Staff writer Arthur Santana contributed to this report. From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 11 18:54:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 13:54:02 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Farid Abdel-Nour: An International Ethics of Evil? Message-ID: An International Ethics of Evil? Farid Abdel-Nour, San Diego State University, California, USA International Relations Vol 18(4): 425-439 http://ire.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/18/4/425, converted by me. Summary from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.7 Actions must sometimes be called "evil," but that term should be invoked with care, says Farid Abdel-Nour, an associate professor of political science at San Diego State University. His essay is one of seven in an issue devoted to the concept of evil in international affairs. In discussing ethics, he says, the usual language of international norms is indispensable, but it lacks the "raw immediacy" of the vocabulary of evil. "To speak of genocide as a violation of norms or international law is to speak a language so cold and distant that it seems to inhabit another universe from the one in which the actions being named take place," he writes. The vocabulary of evil, however, "allows us to express the depth and magnitude of horrors." But Mr. Abdel-Nour cautions against the temptation to think of evil as something completely separate from the self, because that kind of rhetoric "helps to brand political opponents as foes for eradication rather than enemies to be checked." Evil is better thought of as the extreme manifestation of tendencies that are present in everyone, he says. "Barbarism and human depravity are not the sole property of 'evil' others," he writes. "They also characterize us and our cherub-faced sons and daughters, when we are at our worst." Abstract (from the article) Ethical debates in international relations tend to rely either on the vocabulary of norms or the vocabulary of evil. In an effort to conceive of a richer international ethics, this article explores the possibility of combining the two. Since the vocabulary of norms is indispensable, the question is how to supplement it. The most prevalent conception of evil turns out to be a dangerous and inappropriate supplement, for it posits evil as absolutely-not-self, and as an attribute of foes to be eradicated. The second conception of evil highlights the connections between evil and self. When applied to the international context, this conception encourages self-critical public debates about present and past injustices, helping societies to confront and heal ethnic, racial, and other political wounds. Thus a rich international ethics is best woven out of the vocabulary of norms and the conception of evil as connected-to-self. Keywords: evil, evil as absolutely-not-self, evil as connected-to-self, norms Debates about inter-societal ethics have moved beyond amoralism and pure skepticism focus not on the question whether ethics but, rather, what kind of ethics? In this article I examine the relative merits of the vocabulary of inter-societal norms and international law on the one hand, and the vocabulary of evil on the other, as alternative ways of thinking about ethical questions in the inter-societal arena. My goal is to clarify some of the stakes involved in drawing on each of these two vocabularies, and to disentangle salutary ethical conceptions and uses from dangerous ones. In the first section I deal with some of the relative attractions and shortcomings of the two vocabularies and argue that the vocabulary of norms, while indispensable, suffers from serious deficiencies that can potentially be addressed by supplementing it with the vocabulary of evil. In the second section, I focus on one particularly dangerous and widely used variant of the vocabulary of evil, and argue that the risks of relying on this conception of evil in inter-societal affairs are unacceptably high. In the third section I present an alternative, promising, conception of evil, and in the fourth I point briefly to a richer way of thinking about ethics in the inter-societal arena that can successfully combine norms with talk about evil. I. Norms or evil? General norms of conduct render stable human relations possible. They inject an element of predictability in a contingent and uncertain world. One of the lasting insights of modern Western political thought is that political stability requires the existence of institutions to apply and enforce social norms impartially. Otherwise, unchecked self-love, an inescapable feature of the human condition, would dispose human beings towards conflict. One need not suggest that human beings are self-interested individualists, separated from communities or lacking altruistic impulses, before one can recognize the ubiquity of the problem, and the attractions of the solution. All one needs to acknowledge is that human beings are finite, with limited capacities for love and affection, and that they cannot reasonably be expected to be completely free from self-interest (even if they are capable of overcoming it). It would, for example, be unreasonable to pretend that human beings would be recognizable without a magnified concern for the self and its future, and such partial interests and connections as family, friends, nation, or other particular group. Relations between such partial beings are what necessitate the establishment of norms of conduct, along with mechanisms for their impartial application and enforcement. If, in the inter-societal arena, stable and orderly relations are desirable, then the existence of institutionalized norms is indispensable. An ethical vocabulary of inter-societal norms and international law that accounts for this fact is thus unavoidable. The question here is whether such a vocabulary is sufficient. In what follows, I shall examine some of the shortcomings of this vocabulary in the inter-societal arena in order to identify the areas in which it needs to be supplemented. When we express our ethical judgments about inter-societal relations in terms of a vocabulary of legal and moral norms, we focus our attention on whether the actions in question conform to or violate recognized norms of conduct. By itself this simple mental exercise brings forth one shortcoming of the ethical vocabulary of norms. It is cold and detached, having a meager capacity to account for lived horrors. Consider, for example, that one of the important contributions of international law in the twentieth century was to identify the crime of 'genocide'. Yet to speak of genocide as a violation of norms or international law is to speak a language so cold and distant that it seems to inhabit another universe from the one in which the actions being named take place. The way that White House spokespersons and United Nations officials spoke about the events in Rwanda in 1994 is a case in point. As described by Michael Barnett, much was made of whether the events in question constituted genocide, or merely 'acts of genocide'.1 When we try to squeeze the horrors for which the term genocide was invented into the normative framework of criminality, we necessarily hesitate, haggle, and deliberate with detachment. There is a ghastly discrepancy between the mental and discursive operation of determining whether particular events constitute norm violations on the one hand, and the raw horrors on the ground, on the other. In this inheres an intuitive failure of the vocabulary of norms. It is cold, abstract, and distant in the face of massacre, carnage, and slaughter. It seems incapable of capturing the core features of such situations that move our moral imaginations and conscience. Another shortcoming of the vocabulary of norms is that it serves an obfuscating role when applied to inter-societal relations. The inter-societal political arena, while it is certainly not a condition of anarchy, is a condition on the edge of 'normal' politics. Speaking of the inter-societal context mainly within a (Kantian) framework of norms can easily obscure the special nature of that arena, which could otherwise help us intuit something about the bases of 'normal' political order. The inter-societal arena as it exists today, unlike the domestic political arenas defined and structured by organized states, has the potential of making the constitution of norms, the establishment of institutions, the conditions of stable political order present to us. The vocabulary of norms tends to obscure these conditions that underlie 'normal' politics, for it leaves room only for asking about degrees of conformity to standards. Tellingly, within Kant's normative framework, nothing about the political sphere, in its societal or inter-societal context, requires any consideration other than how to identify a set of standards and implement them. His original contract, the thought experiment with which political standards for state and interstate relations are to be devised, is simply an extension of the categorical imperative, which serves as the orienting device for individual action.2 To Kant, the imperatives of individual action, the political constitution of the state, and the constitution of the international order all line up from the perspective of Reason, in the form of a set of mutually consistent institutions and norms. Yet, as students of politics have long recognized, the world of politics can be far more complex. Whatever one thinks of the political theories of Machiavelli, Luther, Hobbes, Weber, Morgenthau, and Walzer, they all converge on one important insight, namely that conflicts of value and ethical compromises are part and parcel of the political arena and the human condition, and that they cannot be simply attributed to some corrigible human frailty. Unlike Kant's framework of norms within which we are urged to determine simply whether political actions and institutions measure up to justice, these other theorists' frameworks urge us to ponder the paradoxes, tragic choices, and profound conflicts of value that define the political sphere. As Michael Walzer reminds us in his discussion of the problem of dirty hands, politics necessitates compromises with ethics; what remains for us to do, in bringing ethical considerations to bear on inter-societal politics, is to be vigilant about the nature and scope of such compromises and always to assess and reassess them.3 Once we adopt the ethical compromise perspective, it ceases to suffice for us to know whether a particular norm has been violated. Rather it becomes necessary to consider which values have been furthered at the expense of which other values, and to take a position on that compromise. The vocabulary of inter-societal norms and international law leaves little room for such considerations. In assessing the utility of the ethical vocabulary of norms in inter-societal affairs, two additional factors ought to be considered. First, the worthiness of some of the most basic existing inter-societal norms is controversial. Second, the paucity and weakness of inter-societal institutions of norm application and enforcement can give norms an air of being empty standards. The ethical force of a norm of conduct, i.e. its worthiness to elicit obedience, depends primarily on the degree to which thenorm in question is freely acceptable to those whose actions are being judged.4 For example, much of the ethical force of human rights norms depends upon the assumption of their universal validity. Yet the Universal Declaration of Human Rights itself is far from being uncontroversial. The challenges that it has had to confront of late, such as the idea of 'Asian values', and the debates concerning political versus social and economic rights, are disputes that human rights norms have faced from their inception. Most famously, during the debates surrounding its adoption in 1948, the Saudi Ambassador to the UN argued that the Declaration embodied standards and values that are "at variance with the patterns of culture of Eastern States".5 What this means is that there is an important connection between the strength of human rights as moral and legal norms of conduct and the philosophical enterprise of justifying their universal validity. I have argued elsewhere that such philosophical justifications remain elusive.6 This makes it harder to dismiss the objections that are raised against the universal applicability of these norms. While universally valid philosophical justifications for some of the most basic inter-societal norms remain elusive, these norms confront an additional challenge. Even when they are codified in international law, they require institutionalized mechanisms, such as courts, that allow for their proper application to particular cases, ensuring that genuine violations are distinguished from merely apparent ones. And they require enforcement mechanisms to ensure that genuine violations are addressed. The existence of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court indicates that some rudimentary application mechanisms are beginning to take shape in the inter-societal context. However, enforcement mechanisms remain elusive. The lack of enforcement and the limitations of application mechanisms render the advocates of inter-societal norms vulnerable to Hegel's critique of Kant. For they must ultimately face the impotence of their 'ought' which, to quote Hegel, simply 'smash[es] up on the rock of hard reality'.7 This criticism would be less damaging if they could at least offer justifications of the universal validity of the norms in question. This much at least Kant could offer because he could believe that he had derived the universal moral law from the categories of the understanding. The problem is that our philosophical investigations keep pointing towards a possible pluralism of values in the world. Furthermore, historical investigations reveal how easy it is for parochial standards and values to masquerade as universals. Today, the advocates of the vocabulary of inter-societal norms can count on being haunted by the challenges of justification, application, and enforcement as well as by the coldness of their vocabulary and its obfuscating tendencies. The most obvious alternative to the ethical vocabulary of norms is the vocabulary of evil. Within the vocabulary of evil one can capture tragic choices and paradoxes. Ethical compromise theorists, for example, can speak of choosing the lesser of two evils (Morgenthau, Walzer), the trade-off between being a good political leader and a good human being (Machiavelli, Luther, Weber), and the like. The vocabulary of evil reminds us that norm-regulated, stable human existence is fragile, that its failure is always around the corner, and that dark forces structure the human condition. This vocabulary acknowledges that the fragile stability of norm-regulated human relations is always grabbed out of the jaws of barbarism, death, and destruction. Hobbes and Renan never tired of reminding us that violence and brutality are often the preconditions of stability and order, and Freud's discussion of the death instinct crystallizes this insight.8 The vocabulary of evil therefore avoids the obfuscations of the vocabulary of norms. Furthermore, it allows us to express the depth and magnitude of horrors. Consider the following two descriptions: (i) the attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) on September 11th, 2001 violated the international norm prohibiting the targeting of civilians; (ii) the attack on the WTC on September 11th, 2001 was an evil act. What the second statement lacks in analytical clarity, it compensates for in ethical clarity. Whereas the first explicates a justification of the judgment, the second statement is less explicit about the underpinnings of the judgment, but is far clearer about the extent and meaning of the act. Its attraction is that it does not merely capture the fact that 19 hijackers violated the rules, played dirty, defied a norm (as the first statement implies), but instead expresses the sense that there is something at play here that is far more sinister than simply the violation of even the most serious and important of rules. Those who call the events of September 11th 'evil' do not presume to do away with norms; they simply point to the inadequacy of the language of norms to express fully the moral reality of those events. In calling a deed evil, the issue of whether or not the deed violates a moral or legal norm is secondary or moot. When we use the vocabulary of evil we are saying that should it turn out, upon reflection, that the deed is not a violation of an accepted norm, we will take that fact to be more telling about the poverty of our arsenal of norms than about our moral reaction to the deed. To rely simply on the vocabulary of norms to judge the Holocaust, the deeds of the Khmer Rouge, or the Gulag, for example, is to commit some kind of moral sacrilege. It is as if we have relativized the horror by making it contingent upon the conclusion of some other mental exercise. The vocabulary of evil, on the other hand, has an immediacy that exhibits and affirms the speaker's moral vitality. Furthermore, the vocabulary of evil eliminates the problem of justification that plagues the vocabulary of norms in the inter-societal context. The very concept of a general norm, especially a universal inter-societal one, immediately evokes the question of the grounds and perspectives from which it can claim validity. The concept of evil, however, implies a horror that is absolute, deeply experienced, and felt, so that the question of the particularity or universality of the judgment does not even arise. Irrespective of whether those who use the vocabulary of evil try to offer universal justifications (they often do), their ethical vocabulary does not demand such a move. Thus they are not susceptible to a crisis of philosophical justification in the way that users of universal norms are. For all its visceral 'authenticity', however, the concept of evil defies definition, and ultimately when we use it we are unclear about the attributes that constitute an evil action or person, even as we are very clear about our reaction to the action or person. Evil is so completely dependent on how it is experienced, that it is difficult to determine whether such an experience in a particular case, and the consequent naming of something or somebody as evil, is warranted. This is in contrast with the vocabulary of norms. Norms, no matter how well or badly justified, call for a distinct step of application. The vocabulary of norms imposes a conceptual separation between the general norm and the particular case. The idea of the consistent and impartial application of norms serves as a guide for navigating this gulf. The vocabulary of evil, however, avoids precisely this gap. Its very ability to do so reveals its independence from the idea of impartiality. Impartiality, of course, is a difficult idea. It may in fact express an aspiration more than a genuine possibility. The conditions under which impartiality can genuinely be expected to prevail are usually described in counterfactual terms, as they are in Rawls's original position and Habermas's ideal discourse situation. Thus it might appear at this stage that the ability of the vocabulary of evil to avoid this difficult idea, and the abyss separating general norms from particular cases, is one more advantage that the vocabulary of evil has over the vocabulary of norms. To say this seriously, however, one would need to ignore the important political function played by the idea of impartiality and the genuine problem of political stability that it, together with the vocabulary of norms, emerged to address. In fact, the vocabulary of evil's independence from the idea of impartiality is one of its most troubling features, as will become evident in the following section. The ethical vocabulary of evil has many attractions. It has a raw immediacy as well as an ability to account for the complexity of politics, the conflicts of value that it entails, and the tragic choices it posits. However, this vocabulary suffers from a conceptual slipperiness and indeterminacy, further exacerbated by its susceptibility to the problems engendered by self-love. Its independence from impartiality means that it does not contain within it the resources with which to counteract self-love. That is why it cannot stand as an alternative to the vocabulary of norms, but only as a possible supplement. While the vocabulary of norms suffers from a number of shortcomings, it remains indispensable in ethical debates over inter-societal relations, precisely because it implicitly carries with it the aspiration towards impartiality. Furthermore, the ability of the vocabulary of evil to supplement and enrich ethical discourse in the inter-societal context depends upon the conceptual clarity that can be brought to it. In the following sections I will isolate two conceptions of evil, in an attempt to contribute to such clarity. II. Evil as absolutely-not-self: a dangerous conception A strong current in the history of the concept of evil (in the Christian tradition at least) tends to place evil squarely outside the self and to make it extrinsic and separable from the self. Evil becomes a category with which to create distance between one's actions and one's self, and with which to refer to others (usually without much concern for a similar distance). The consequences of relying on this conception of evil when thinking about inter-societal affairs can be quite serious, leading one to target one's adversaries for eradication, rather than simply for defeat. This conception of evil as 'not-self' is particularly well illustrated by John Milton's version of the Biblical fall narrative in Paradise Lost.9 In Milton's narrative Satan's pride, ambition, and his refusal to submit to God are the causes of his fall (Book IV). Similarly, Eve's rebelliousness and her refusal to accept her assigned place are also the causes of her disobedience and fall. Yet, despite the similarities, evil is only an attribute of Satan, not of Eve. Milton has Satan saying 'Evil be thou my good' (Book IV), thus rendering him into the personification of evil, whereas Eve is never associated with evil. In fact, to conceive of Eve as evil would be unthinkable. Eve, the mother of humankind with whom we are expected to identify, has violated a command and exhibited her fallibility, she has sinned and been tempted, but she is not evil. As it turns out, even sin itself is not autochthonous to her, but Satan's child (Book X). Milton's poem describes 'our' origins. It tells the story of 'our' ancestors Eve and Adam, who are the source of our selfhood. In that story Satan is the quintessential other. Even where at times evil appears to be internal to us, as in the case of original sin, it turns out that it can be ritually externalized. Sin can be purged and we can be saved precisely because evil is always simply an intrusion, a temptation, or a 'possession', remaining, in essence, not-self. In his description of his character Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne illuminates this conception further. Hawthorne presents Brown on his way to being inducted into the cult of the devil: 'the fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man'. Thus, even when Goodman Brown is on his way to join the devil and 'nothing [in the haunted forest is] more frightful than [his] figure', it is really 'the fiend' who 'rages in . . . [his] breast'.10 The closest that evil comes to self is in the form of a 'possession'. The decision to ascribe Goodman Brown's frightful hideousness to the fiend is of course vindicated in the story, for it turns out that the fiendish possession is temporary in the life of the protagonist. The fact that he lives the rest of his life suspicious of everyone he knows, seeing the fiend in them all, tells us that Goodman Brown had only one certainty in his life: the fiend is not-self. In this conception evil is not only not-self, but the nature of its separation from self is absolute. Nietzsche's discussion of the difference between good'bad morality and good'evil morality illuminates the nature of self 's separation from evil as he sees it in the Judeo-Christian tradition. For Nietzsche the separation of bad from good is relative. For the bad, weak, cowardly ones are simply pale shadows of the strong, noble, courageous ones. While the noble good ones in the good'bad mode of valuation could not imagine themselves being cowardly and while it would be laughable to expect them to exhibit the behaviors of the weak, it would be within their power to exhibit such behaviors. In contrast, however, in the good'evil mode of valuation, the separation of evil from good is absolute. For evil is what weak selves call the strong whom they fear and consequently hate. Thus evil is not only most decidedly not-self, it is what self cannot be. The weak, despite their selfdeceptions to the contrary, cannot by any stretch of the imagination choose to be strong. Rather, they develop their 'virtues' in order to adapt to their situation.11 One of Nietzsche's insights here is that evil marks an absolute distinction from self, whereas bad denotes only a relative distinction. So absolutely distinct is evil traditionally from self, that its adoption and wholehearted embrace as an inescapable part of natural authentic selfhood by people such as the Marquis de Sade and Baudelaire was not only positively shocking in their day, but does not promise to lose its shock value any time soon. Evil, therefore, whatever else it is, is traditionally radically other, extrinsic to self. Whatever one might say about oneself ' 'I am guilty', 'I have sinned', 'I made a mistake', 'I violated a norm', 'I was tempted', 'I was led astray' ' one does not say, 'I am evil'. When one does, the purpose is usually to shock, to say the unsayable, to evoke the unthinkable. However, 'X (defined as not-self) is evil' is a locution that comes easily. Reagan's 'Evil Empire', Khomeini's 'The Great Satan', G. W. Bush's 'Axis of Evil' all made their way into political discourse with relative ease, as descriptions of individuals or regimes as radically other, explicitly not-self. Evil colonizes, seduces, tempts, takes over, and misleads self. But then what are self's appropriate responses to be? What distinguishes the competitor, challenger, colonizer, tempter, and seducer, when understood as evil, from all other colonizers and challengers? A distinction derived by George Schwab from the work of Carl Schmitt helps to illuminate the matter at hand. It is well known that, according to Carl Schmitt, the concept of the political is premised on the friend'enemy distinction. However, according to Schwab, undergirding the friend'enemy distinction in Schmitt's work, is the enemy'foe distinction. The ordinary enemy, without whom there is no politics, is a differently conceived adversary from the foe whose eradication makes the politics of friend'enemy possible. Schwab traces the distinction between enemy and foe to the Biblical distinction between 'the private adversary. . . "soneh" and the public adversary. . . "ojeb"'.12 The wars of indiscriminate destruction described in the Bible and that characterize the crusades have in common the idea that the public adversary was the adversary of God, 'damned in advance', '. . . and no quarter should be given him'.13 According to Schwab, the aftermath of the wars of religion was characterized by the following conceptual shift in inter-societal affairs: by virtue of the fact that the public adversary was no longer considered a devil or an adversary fit for annihilation, war practices became circumscribed. As a result of this transformation of the public foe into a public enemy, wars, diabolical as it may sound, became, so to speak, clean.14 The vocabulary of evil in inter-societal affairs evokes the concept of the 'foe' rather than the 'enemy'. To speak of the 'Evil Empire' was to speak of that which required more than a strategy of containment. The same applies when one speaks of Great Satans and Axes of Evil and when one launches wars on terrorism. Evil adversaries must be destroyed. The ubiquitous figure of the evil terrorist who must be eradicated at all costs illustrates the strength of this connection in mainstream political discourse in the US. When confronted with an evil foe such as 'the terrorist', self's appropriate response ceases to be simply to defend itself, resist, or even defeat; but instead to stamp out, annihilate, and eradicate, in order to make normal 'friend' enemy' politics possible. In this section I have argued that the idea of evil is traditionally conceptualized as absolutely-not-self, and that as such it forms part of an ethical vocabulary that helps to brand political opponents as foes for eradication rather than enemies to be checked. This attribute of the conception of evil renders it particularly dangerous in ethical debates over inter-societal relations. III. Evil as connected-to-self: a promising conception Widespread as it is, the above conception of evil is not without a main challenger. In this section I explore a second, more politically salutary conception of evil rooted in Hannah Arendt's work. This latter conception, which highlights evil's connection to self, once developed further by Alessandro Ferrara, yields a promising formulation that allows the vocabulary of evil to serve as an enriching supplement to the vocabulary of norms in inter-societal affairs. Arendt's well-known diagnosis of Adolf Eichmann, that 'one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity' from him, is on some level gratifying.15 For it teaches us that Eichmann, unlike the intriguing characters of Milton's Satan or Goethe's Mephistopheles, is simply not interesting. Arendt's analysis leads us to think of Eichmann as boring and to conclude that we would never want to be like him. However, that is because we are already like him. Arendt's most shocking, and at the same time most insightful, contributions had to do with Eichmann's 'nor-malcy'.16 She noticed that he spoke in clich?s and stock phrases. Yet: clich?s, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention which all events and facts arouse by virtue of their existence. If we respond to this claim all the time, we would soon be exhausted; the difference in Eichmann was only that he clearly knew of no such claim at all.17 Eichmann did not exhibit special or unusual qualities. Instead, he simply allowed thoughtfulness, which most of us are guilty of suffocating in ourselves under the pressures of everyday life, to become completely extinguished in him. Rather than relying on clich?s as a way of saving his thinking attention for things that mattered, Eichmann simply left no space for anything to deserve his thinking attention. Evil then is not radically other. It is uncomfortably close. Its distance from ordinary life and ordinary vices is small. Distance certainly exists between ordinary persons and Eichmann, but that the difference can be captured by the relative concept of distance, and by such a small step at that, is what is most disturbing about Arendt's insight. As A. O. Rorty writes, 'Nothing is easier, nothing more natural than sliding down the slippery slope to corruption, and from there to the hardened heart that allows people to re-describe their wrongdoing so that they can accept it as reasonable and confirm it as justified'.18 Rorty tells the story of an academic, Cain, who through a series of small steps, all of which are within the realm of ordinary everyday behavior, undergoes a 'banal transformation from an ordinary, somewhat weak fellow to someone who is prepared to justify subjecting a colleague to attack'.19 Moral corruption, Rorty illustrates with this example, does not need unusual or extraordinary circumstances to blossom; we always live in its shadow. So far we have seen that in contrast to the conception of evil as absolutely-not-self, evil has been conceptualized by Arendt and Rorty as always lurking in the self, a potential possibility. The danger inherent in the political use of the first conception was that it could so easily be associated with the idea of a foe to be eradicated. The danger of this second conception is that it can foster pessimism about our ability to make clear ethical judgments. For it complicates our ability to reject evil wholeheartedly. How can we reject evil absolutely if we are so connected to it? I suspect that much of the controversy over Arendt's analysis of Eichmann emerges from an awareness of this danger. Alessandro Ferrara develops the conception of evil as closely connected to self in a way that avoids this serious danger. His argument is based on his theory of authenticity. He writes: As Plato reminds us in Protagoras, no one commits evil actions while thinking that they are evil. People commit evil actions while carried away by their misconceived views of the good . . . for what was done at Auschwitz was done in the name of the good for a certain community. . . . At the core of the Nazimoral vision was a biological understanding of the good as the furthering of the racial purity of a people. Racial purity, in turn, was deemed valuable as a way of increasing the chances of survival in a Darwinistically conceived process of evolution in which the human species, and the peoples or races that compose it, are always immersed.20 At this point, it would seem that Ferrara has made things worse. For if the evil we commit appears to us as a good, then the prospects for rejecting it become slim. It would seem that he is taking us down a slippery path towards complete moral skepticism and relativism, making this conception even more unattractive. However, it would be a mistake to draw such an implication from his argument. Ferrara appropriates Durkheim's conception of the sacred and adapts it to formulate his conception of evil. He writes: What is needed in order to turn something collectively prized into something sacred is a certain exemplariness of the sacred thing, namely its capacity to bring to expression some dimension of the group which at the same time is unique and is located at the symbolic center of the group's identity. . . . For Durkheim thesociety which we presuppose in our experience of the sacred is the actual society idealized ... namely a society which neither is taken 'as is' nor gets transfigured into some transcendental ideal no longer connected with who we are. It is our actual society as it could be if all of its positive potentials were to unfold. By extension: If the sacred is a projection of us at our best, and the world of the profane a representation of us as we actually are, . . . evil can be conceptualized as a projection of us at our worst, the worst that we can prove to be while still maintaining those characteristics that make us . . . us as a community, a society, or humanity . . . what we are.21 This conceptualization has the benefit of allowing us to reject evil absolutely while recognizing its connection to ourselves. One of Ferrara's many insights here is that, when having despaired of all philosophical attempts at grounding moral judgments philosophically and having had to resort to the depths of who we are as an anchor, we are reminded that who we are is not wholly worthy of orienting us in action, because evil is also part of who we are. We now ask, 'Us at our best, or us at our worst?' Such a question implies an absolute judgment of value that pierces through relativist arguments and ethnocentrism, and opens up a space for critical self-reflection. Within this framework, we can reject evil without externalizing it. Ferrara examines evil from the perspective of those who recognize that committing it is a possibility for them. For they are ones who have either committed evil, or would have committed it. By recognizing that they have done it, or almost done it, or could as easily have done it, the agents here reflect on who they are and who they wish to become. Ferrara writes, 'when something is recognized as evil, it means that we are already distancing ourselves from it, that the darkness of the night is over and a new dawn is beginning'.22 We can reject parts of ourselves absolutely. Taking the perspective of the agents, the evil-doers, or prospective evildoers, this conception of evil guards against the worst attributes of the conception of evil as absolutely-not-self, which adopts the observer's perspective. For as Trudy Govier reminds us, when we act as observers we can easily slip into adopting what she calls the 'Myth of Pure Evil', according to which 'evil is perpetrated by others, who are wicked characters. We ... need not fear that we would ever do evil deeds ourselves, because we, unlike the others, are ourselves fundamentally and fixedly innocent and good'.23 Ferrara's formulation, in contrast, by giving us a means of thinking about our connectedness with evil, while simultaneously distancing ourselves from it and rejecting it absolutely, captures the dialectic of evil. IV. Navigating ethical vocabularies in inter-societal affairs The question now is whether, and if so how, the vocabulary of evil is to be used in inter-societal affairs. Can it be used to substitute for the vocabulary of norms, given the latter's evident shortcomings? Or, can it at least be used to fill in the gaps where the other vocabulary is insufficiently developed and its institutions insufficiently extended? To use the vocabulary of evil as absolutely-not-self in inter-societal affairs is to tread down a very dangerous path indeed. For, without the check of the idea of impartiality, when our all too natural proclivity to justify and rationalize our own actions is given free rein, we are bound to be drawn into inter-societal conflicts of destruction and eradication. The temptations to try to put an end, once and for all, to the causes of human suffering ' to totalitarianism, barbarism, oppression, injustice, jahiliyya,24 terrorism ' become too great to resist. Trotting around the globe to smoke out the evil ones and eradicate them can easily become an obsession, even with the noblest of motives. For these reasons the vocabulary of evil as absolutely-not-self cannot be allowed to pose as a deeper, more vital and primordial ethical language that can shine through the lacunae of the ethical vocabulary of norms. Those who would justify violating inter-societal norms in the name of combating evil, or in order to prepare the conditions for developing and strengthening these norms, have precisely some such relationship between the two vocabularies in mind. But the relationship ought to be reversed, especially in the inter-societal context. That is, where the conception of evil as not-self is being used, i.e. where the attribute of evil is to be attached to the action or character of another, such a move should be contingent upon the fulfillment of a condition. The agent being judged must first have been found guilty by the impartial application of norms, and the place of the judgment of evil must be completely circumscribed by procedures that are tailored to respond simply to the judgment of moral or legal guilt. One way to conceive of this would be as analogous to the distinction between the determination-of-guilt phase of a criminal trial, and the sentencing phase, where the legitimate reliance on this vocabulary of evil can be relegated to the latter phase. As to the conception of evil as connected-to-self, I envisage two constructive roles in the inter-societal context. The first involves national discourses of historical self-reflection, and the second involves redirecting discourses about past and present horrors that use the absolutely-not-self vocabulary of evil in such a way as to reveal connections to self. One of the most promising uses of the self-connecting vocabulary of evil lies in its role in fostering debates about the national past, and the horrors to be found in it. For example, such a vocabulary of evil is useful in debates such as the Historikerstreit in Germany or the debates surrounding slavery and its relationship to the American founding in the US. In such contexts certain actions and institutions in a national group's past are identified as evil, but, because they form an integral part of a society's history, it is relatively easy for participants in such debates to make the case for the connection between those who are doing the reflecting and the evil deeds or institutions. In the Historikerstreit the Nazi past is raised as formative of who Germans are, in order to understand it as a part of themselves that they reject and wish to overcome, surely a meaning that explains the attractions of the term Vergangenheitsbew?ltigung.25 Such debates, while they are structured as the internal debates of a society, have far-reaching consequences for inter-societal relations. For they go to the heart of how members of national groups conceive of themselves and their place in relation to other groups. When internal national discourses take this shape, we can say that the vocabulary of evil enriches ethical reflection and deepens it far beyond anything that the vocabulary of norms can possibly achieve. For it helps mend ethnic, racial, and national rifts, and helps foster the desire among groups to live under common mutually respectful institutions and norms. Another context in which this conception of evil can be valuable in inter-societal relations is in redirecting and reframing debates that use the vocabulary of evil in its absolutely-not-self conception. For example, consider the debates surrounding Daniel Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners. In the US it would be easy for an argument like Goldhagen's simply to deepen Americans' sense that the Germans of the 1930s and 1940s are absolutely and quintessentially distinct from themselves. However, the debate around the book can be redirected so as to highlight the continuities between the anti-Semitism that Goldhagen took to be endemic in Germany and the anti-Semitism rampant in the US during the same time periods. Such a redirection of the debate has nothing to do with equivalence in the assignment of moral responsibility or blame. It simply highlights a 'but for the grace of God' moment. In so doing it enriches both Americans'understanding of the horrific events, and their ability to add to their collection of 'us at our worst' scenarios, so that from what remains of who they are, they can better construct 'us at our best' scenarios to guide them. Without this redirection of the discourse, very real connections between themselves and what they would self-righteously declare as the evil attributes of others would be missed. Debates concerning recent political radicalization in the Middle East are another example. Often the ghastly images of charred American bodies hanging from bridges, or of strewn Israeli body parts evoke the query, 'What is wrong with them?' It is not unfashionable for scholars to answer this query by pointing to what they unabashedly refer to as evil-inducing social and cultural 'ailments' of Arabs and Palestinians. Such debates lend themselves to being redirected, to ask not what is wrong with 'them', but instead to highlight the connections between such horrors and ones to which the questioners are themselves connected. The horrific images can, for example, be juxtaposed with the well-documented history of lynching in the US with its rituals of flesh burning and symbolic cannibalism.26 I am not suggesting that all talk about such topics be censored and confined to this mode. Rather, I am arguing that when public political debates start relying on the rhetoric of evil as absolutely-not-self, it becomes incumbent upon thoughtful participants in such debates to reframe that particular aspect of the debate and to do so in a manner that utilizes the second conception of evil, in order to avoid the dangers of invoking the conception of evil as not-self, and to remind us that barbarism and human depravity, as the images from Abu Ghraib attest, are not the sole property of 'evil' others. They also characterize us and our cherub-faced sons and daughters, when we are at our worst. Where in a particular context the vocabulary of evil is used and the relationship between evil and self is left unexplored, we have reason to be concerned and suspicious. We also have reason to intervene discursively and to search for ways of discovering latent, deeply buried connections between similar evils and ourselves. I conjecture that, sadly, if such a search is conducted faithfully, it will hardly ever fail to produce results. In ethical debates about inter-societal relations the conception of evil as con-nected-to-self can serve to buttress and further support the vocabulary of norms and the indispensable function that norms themselves serve. It has the potential for fostering deeper understanding between groups, and helping heal historical wounds. This in turn can render members of previously warring groups more willing to negotiate, construct, and live under common mutually respectful institutions and norms. For, in addition to all of the other challenges facing the possibility of a just and stable inter-societal order, our contemporary world also lacks a sufficient stock of solidarity in which to anchor such an order. If it is to be stable, a just inter-societal order must rely on the willingness and desire of all, including former enemies with a bloody past, to live under common institutions. At the very least this requires their willingness to renounce future revenge for past wrongs. One way to help bring about the conditions under which such a renunciation is more likely is to foster historical self-reflection within societies, and to redirect public debates away from identifying evil as absolutely-not-self and towards acknowledging evil as connected-to-self by considering 'us at our worst' moments. Notes 1 Michael Barnett, Eyewitness to a Genocide: the UN and Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). 2 This is best illustrated by the structure of Kant's argument in 'On the Common Saying: "This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice"', in H. S. Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 61'92. 3 Michael Walzer, 'Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands', in Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), The Many Faces of Evil (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 303'18. 4 In the liberal tradition of thought, the standard has been best articulated by T. M. Scanlon in terms of what 'no one could reasonably reject'. See his 'Contractualism and Utilitarianism' in Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (eds), Utilitarianism and Beyond (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 111. 5 David Little, John Kelsay, and Abdulaziz A. Sachedina, 'Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights', in Human Rights and the Conflict of Cultures: Western and Islamic Perspectives on Religious Liberty (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), p. 35. 6 See Farid Abdel-Nour, 'From Arm's Length to Intrusion: Rawls's "Law of Peoples" and the Challenge of Stability', Journal of Politics, 61(2), May 1999, pp. 313'30; and Farid Abdel-Nour, 'Farewell to Justification: Habermas, Human Rights, and Universalist Morality', Philosophy and Social Criticism, 30(1), 2004, pp. 73'96. 7 G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), p. 38. 8 Ernest Renan, 'What Is a Nation?', trans. Martin Thom, in Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 11. Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, 'Why Are There Wars?', in Rorty, The Many Faces of Evil, pp. 250'60. 9 John Milton, Paradise Lost, . 10 Nathaniel Hawthorne, 'Dreams of Evil', in Rorty, The Many Faces of Evil, p. 212. 11 Friedrich Nietzsche, 'First Essay "Good and Evil", "Good and Bad" ', in On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), pp. 24'56. 12 George Schwab, 'Enemy or Foe: A Conflict of Modern Politics', Telos, 72, Summer, 1987, pp. 194'201 at p. 194. 13 Schwab, 'Enemy or Foe', p. 197. 14 Schwab, 'Enemy or Foe', p. 199. 15 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1964, revised and enlarged edition), p. 288. 16 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 25'6. 17 Hannah Arendt, 'The Banality of Evil: Failing to Think', in Rorty, The Many Faces of Evil, pp. 265'6. 18 Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, 'How to Harden your Heart: Six Easy Ways to Become Corrupt', in Rorty, The Many Faces of Evil, p. 282. 19 Rorty, 'How to harden your heart', p. 284. 20 Alessandro Ferrara, 'The Evil That Men Do: A Meditation on Radical Evil from a Post-metaphysical Point of View', in Maria Pia Lara (ed.), Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 174'6. 21 Ferrara, 'The Evil That Men Do', pp. 184'6. The distinction between ordinary evil and radical evil is an important part of his argument and the book's general theme. For our purposes it is not particularly significant and distracts. Thus I have selected the quotes in a way that avoids this distinction. 22 Ferrara, 'The Evil That Men Do', p. 188. 23 Trudy Govier, Forgiveness and Revenge (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 126. 24 This term, which literally means ignorance in Arabic, and usually refers to the condition of pre-Islamic Arabia, was reinterpreted in the 1960s by Sayyed Qutb, the theoretical father of contemporary radical Islamist political currents, to refer to the ills of modern societies. 25 The term means literally to overcome the past, but has a stronger connotation that almost rings of overpowering the past. 26 See Orlando Patterson's blood-curdling descriptions, especially in the second section of his book Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (New York: Basic Books, 1998), pp. 171'232. From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 11 18:54:22 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 13:54:22 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Nicholas Hudson: 'Hottentots' and the evolution of European racism Message-ID: Nicholas Hudson: 'Hottentots' and the evolution of European racism University of British Columbia Journal of European Studies 34(4): 308-332 http://jes.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/34/4/308, converted by me to ASCII text. Summary from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.10: In 1497, when Europeans first encountered the Khoikhoi people, popularly known as "Hottentots," of present-day South Africa, an important chapter in the cultural history of racism began, says Nicholas Hudson, a professor of English at the University of British Columbia. European explorers initially were repulsed by the Hottentots, who had very different ideas about how to dress, cook, and conduct courtships than were current in Europe. The Hottentots, early reports indicated, smeared their light skin with dirt and oil to appear darker, preferred barely cooked tripe to animal muscle, and looped greasy cow intestines about their beloveds' shoulders to celebrate engagements. By the 18th century, "Hottentot" was a common insult in Europe for an ill-mannered, filthy, or otherwise uncivilized person. The Hottentots also became a popular subject for parodies of European customs. They "provided a classic example that beauty was in the eye of the beholder and that all fashions could seem preposterous from a different cultural perspective," Mr. Hudson writes. But thinking of customs and values as relative made many Europeans uncomfortable, and a "racial science" developed to combat that world-view. "From this ideological root," he says, "grew the distinctive language of modern racism." By attributing differences between themselves and other peoples to intrinsic characteristics rather than to cultural variations, he says, Europeans were able to retain their sense of superiority and to justify colonizing people they saw as inferiors in need of control and indoctrination. The article, "'Hottentots' and the Evolution of European Racism," is online for a limited time at http://jes.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/34/4/308 -------------------------- Springing from the argument in recent scholarship that 'race' is a doctrine that emerged only in the post-Enlightenment, this essay develops a theory concerning the ideological history of 'racism', understood in its modern Western sense. While it is impossible to examine all forms of Western racism, the author focuses on evolving reactions in European travel accounts, belles-lettres and anthropology to the Khoikhoi, popularly known as 'Hottentots', a people that became proverbial as the most wretched and degraded of all 'savages'. The question posed is why the Khoikhoi, a relatively peripheral and cooperative people, attracted this virulent hatred. Challenging the assumption of the small body of modern scholarship on the Khoikhoi, I maintain that this spite derived not simply from a sense of the Hottentots' 'Otherness', but more accurately from the awareness that this people upset models of ethnicity that supported the Western vision of the non-European world. Europeans needed to neutralize the ideological threat represented by the Khoikhoi, a programme that culminated in the development of the modern science of 'race'. 'Race', and its corresponding ideology of 'racism', I conclude, involves not merely the exclusion, but an approximation and appropriation of the 'Other' into Western systems of thought: the ultimate and fatal destiny of this highly distinct and independent culture. Keywords: Hottentot, Khoi, race, racism Before the rise of racial science, with the work of Buffon, Kant and Blumenbach in the late eighteenth century, Western hostility to non-European cultures necessarily took a different and less structured form. Indeed, 'racism' seems a deceptive term to describe prejudices that lacked justification in the theory that the human species is divided into five or six more or less static sub-groups, or that these 'races' can be ranked according to physical differences and innate capacities.1 This is not to deny that hatred of foreign groups existed before the invention of race. Yet racism, in a modern sense, is a more historically specific phenomenon than we are apt to imagine, for distrust or loathing of the Other has taken different forms in different eras in accordance with transforming philosophies, world-views and economic priorities. Racism, that is, has a cultural history. And in guarding against its insidious influence on human thinking and affairs, we have some reason to reflect on how that history has unfolded. We cannot, of course, examine every instance of Western hatred of the Other throughout history. But our investigation can begin to shed light on the evolution of racism by focusing on the development of attitudes towards a particular group that became, quite arguably, the most reviled people in European thought of the early modern era. These were the Khoikhoi, popularly known as 'Hottentots', a herding society that lived near the Cape of Good Hope when Vasco da Gama first touched there in 1497, and that developed a long and troubled cultural and economic relationship with Europeans over the next four hundred years. By the eighteenth century Hottentots had become proverbial as the most savage of all savage peoples, occupying a rung, according to many, elevated just above the beast. As Sir Joseph Banks commented after his visit to the Cape on Cook's Endeavour in 1771, Hottentots 'are generally represented as the outcasts of the human species, a race whose intellectual faculties are so little superior to those of beasts, that some have been inclined to suppose them more nearly related to baboons than to men' (Banks, 1896: 439).2 The very term 'Hottentot' became a familiar insult exchanged among Europeans themselves for any behaviour deemed uncivilized, filthy or ill-mannered. The question this hatred raises is 'why?' Why were the Khoikhoi, a relatively peripheral and cooperative people in colonial expansion, singled out from all other non-European peoples for this abuse? Relatively simple answers spring quickly to mind, such as those presented in Linda Merians' recent Envisioning the Worst: Representations of 'Hottentots' in Early Modern England. Focusing almost exclusively on accounts by English writers, Merians argues that the English needed to denigrate another people to prove their own superiority, suggesting later that they wished to 'vent their frustrations and inscribe their own nightmares' (Merians, 2001: 19-21 and 244). But these answers beg the question of why the distant Khoikhoi became the special target for this ideological exploitation. In presenting my own explanation of why the Khoikhoi were so despised, I will maintain what might appear, at first, a paradoxical position: the evolution of European attitudes towards the Khoikhoi from contact to the rise of nineteenth-century raciology is characterized not by increasing belief in their Otherness or beastliness but rather by the increasing insistence on the Hottentot's humanness and cultural banality. In the first phase of contact between this people and Portuguese, Spanish, French, English and Dutch travellers, reactions to the Khoikhoi generally reflect the fear and bewilderment of Europeans who, armed only with their insufficient paradigms of Eden, 'wild men' and monsters, found their conceptions about the human universe profoundly shaken. During the Enlightenment, similarly, it was the absolute Otherness of Hottentots that seemed most to preoccupy authors, although increasingly the Khoikhoi came to represent the relativity of all human values and to demonstrate the comparable absurdity of European claims to absolute truth. In the final phase of this evolving relationship, however, the Khoikhoi became increasingly encompassed and 'normalized' in the paradigms developed by Europeans to fit all peoples in their globalizing theory of 'human nature' - including, finally, the theory of race. The scientific notion of race involved a peculiar economy of Otherness and sameness, for the racial type was simultaneously accepted as 'human' while also subdivided as inherently (as opposed to culturally) peculiar. In short, contrary to the assumption embedded in much post-colonial scholarship about colonization and race, an intellectually respectable and systematic racism became possible only through a process of approximating the foreign Other to the European self. While this process can seem superficially sympathetic to peoples like the Khoikhoi, and often debunked earlier perceptions of monstrous difference or beastly estrangement, it was in fact perfectly compatible with the aims and practices of European racism and imperialism in the nineteenth century and afterwards. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century adventurers who first came to the Cape of Good Hope carried with them a range of ethnological preconceptions which heavily informed their experience of foreign peoples. The medieval myth of the wild man portrayed the uncivilized Other as a hairy, beast-like creature with little or no language, an unquenchable sexual drive and, very often, an appetite for human flesh (see Bartra, 1994). While the Khoikhoi lacked the hirsute appearance of the wild man, their virtual nakedness, feral lifestyle and unusual language, whose unique vocal 'clicks' sounded to European ears like 'turkeys clucking' or 'farting with their tongues',3 all seemed to conform roughly to the wild-man stereotype. It was easy to leap to judgements that lacked empirical evidence - for example, that this 'wild' people 'would not scruple' to 'eate mans fleshe', as one frightened English traveller recorded in 1608.4 This traveller's unsupported suspicion of Khoikhoi cannibalism derived, first, from the undoubted fearsomeness of the Hottentots when the Europeans offended them: fifty to sixty-five Spaniards were slaughtered during the voyage of Francisco d'Almeida in 1510, and thereafter pockets of Europeans were sometimes killed, often for reasons not easy to determine (see Raven-Hart, 1967: 9-11).5 Nor is there any reason to doubt that the almost universal astonishment of Europeans at the dietary habits of the Khoikhoi - they seemed to prefer tripe to animal muscle, making apparently minimal effort to clean and cook their food - had some foundation in real observations, however distant and imperfect. For Europeans, these habits confirmed the 'beastlike' nature of the Hottentots, especially at a time when cleanliness and strong dietary values had become the mark of 'civilized' life in the European middle ranks (see Vigarello, 1988). These 'wild men' also bore some resemblance to the strange visions of foreign peoples, especially in Africa, propagated in works such as the Travels ascribed to Sir John Mandeville, a name probably as fictional as his fantastical tales. Amidst his menagerie of humanoids who have eyes on each shoulder or who hiss like snakes, this mysterious fourteenth-century writer tells us of people in the Andaman Islands whose 'ears are so big that they hang down to their knees', and of other 'people who have feet like horses, and run so swiftly on them that they overtake wild beasts and kill them' (Mandeville, 1983: 137). Both these tales find echoes in early accounts of the Khoikhoi, though notably among travellers who seem to be relying mostly on hearsay.6 Nevertheless, even for those able to observe the Khoikhoi more closely, there seemed plenty in their aspect and lifestyle to support Mandeville's vision of the vast and sometimes monstrous variety of human-like beings. As Gijsbert Heeck exclaimed in 1655, the Khoikhoi were 'quite unbelievable' (Raven-Hart, 1971: 1, 38). Here was a people, it was insisted, who wore the raw and rotting guts of cattle as ornamentation; though white at birth, they smeared their bodies with darkened grease to Fig. 1. From Raven-Hart (1971). By permission of A. A. Balkema Press. make themselves look blacker; they used foul odours as perfumes; the men had one testicle removed at birth, which at least one traveller testified was actually a miniature crystal ball (Anon., 1732: 4, 774); the women possessed an extra membrane or 'apron' over their pudenda, as well as breasts so pendulous that they could feed children over their shoulders (another story recounted in Mandeville's Travels). Among the most copiously illustrated peoples of the seventeenth century, the Hottentots were inevitably portrayed in ways that highlighted their alleged strangeness. In the accompanying illustrations, for example (see Figures 1 and 2), they are displayed in their grotesque finery or fighting over a tangle of guts.7 Fig. 2. From Raven-Hart (1971). By permission of A. A. Balkema Press. Even such strangeness, however, would not be so disruptive to European preconceptions if the Khoikhoi did not display traits that Europeans recognized as undeniably human. Prolonged observation convinced many Europeans that these people, however bizarre or repellent to Western ideas, belonged to the same Adamic lineage as themselves. Even in the earliest accounts of the Khoikhoi, a significant minority of sympathetic observers exerted an important, and often underrated, tug on the evolution of Western attitudes. During Thomas Best's voyage of 1612, the crew recorded a variety of perspectives, from the most violent repugnance to the more sensitive portrait given by the ship's chaplain, Patrick Copeland: 'The people are loving, afraid at first, by reason of the unkindnesse of the Dutch, who came there to make traine Oyle, who killed and stole their Cattell; and at our returning more kind: of middle size, well limmed, very nimble and active' (Raven-Hart, 1967: 59). Copeland's blaming the Dutch for injustice against the Khoikhoi reflects, in fact, a very widespread tendency of European nations to claim that the dirt of colonial adventurism covered only the hands of other nations, a belief that demonstrated, at least, a European desire for clean hands: hence the self-justifying tone of the anonymous account that we have from the Dutch ship Remonstratie in 1649. In a curiously modern gesture, this writer brushed aside all previous accounts of the Khoikhoi as 'a sailor's yarn', arguing that any violence by Hottentots represented their reaction to European oppression, and promising that a new generation of Khoikhoi, under a 'good commander', would deal fairly and gladly speak Dutch (Raven-Hart, 1967: 177-8). Beneath their insalubrious appearance, that is, these people had many moral virtues. Though 'very dirty and stinking', as F.-T. De Choisy observed, 'they are good folk' (Raven-Hart, 1971: 2, 269). Early conventional assumptions that the Hottentots, like all 'savages', were sexually promiscuous gave way to the very widespread acknowledgement that husbands and wives were faithful to each other and that they even punished adultery with death.8 While the Khoikhoi are frequently accused of theft in the very earliest accounts (among the most conventional features of colonial narratives around the world), Dutch settlers seemed satisfied with their extensive business dealings with the Khoikhoi, trusting them around their goods and property. Similarly, if the Khoikhoi looked like the 'nasty, brutish' savages imagined by Hobbes, they were evidently not in a Hobbesian state of war. As Fran?ois Leguat observed, 'their Humanity towards one another, yields in nothing to that of the Chineses' (Raven-Hart, 1971: 2, 436). Early assumptions that they had no government or 'polity' gave way to abundant evidence of social cohesion and cooperation; the belief that they were a nation of 'atheists', though it remained part of traditional lore concerning the Hottentot, was in fact questioned very early on by travellers who observed their moonlit worship and rituals. In summary, for reasonably fair and thoughtful Europeans, prolonged relations with the Khoikhoi threw into doubt many of the assumptions that had informed European ethnography since Herodotus. How could one explain a people who seemed so 'brutish' in their dirt and squalor, yet who clearly possessed qualities of benevolence, honesty and chastity? Europeans were even willing to admire certain features of Hottentot culture, such as their sharp blades, herbal remedies and skill with cattle. The ready explanation for savage degeneracy was environmental, the hardness and isolation of life outside Europe usually being blamed for both darkened skin and degraded manners.9 Yet even the environmental explanation seemed problematic, given that the Cape region seemed virtually Edenic in the mildness of its climate, its fertility and its natural beauty. Surely such a paradise, as J. M. Coetzee remarks in White Writing, should contain beings of Adamic innocence and beauty - but instead it contained Hottentots, springing alarming puzzles about the very myth of an innocent garden (Coetzee, 1988: 2-3). Was it, in fact, even possible that living in the Garden of Eden presented inherent challenges to the purity prized by Europeans? As one traveller mused, perhaps the very luxury of this garden had precipitated the supposed sloth and dirtiness of its inhabitants, who (not unreasonably) laughed at the Dutch for working hard to obtain what was so easily gathered in this land of abundance.10 Another explanation was even more challenging and would set the agenda for discussion of the Hottentots during the Enlightenment: perhaps the Khoikhoi in fact embodied an alternative to European values and attitudes, showing the diversity and power of the 'custom' which ruled over all peoples, in Europe as well as elsewhere. Very early, travellers revealed their nervous amusement that Khoikhoi customs were, in fact, analogous to European customs, though strangely inverted. Though born 'white', it was said, they apparently preferred black, and painted themselves appropriately. Their filthiness and foul smell, thought travellers, arose not merely from an impoverished life, but was actually sought and cultivated as a beauty or dignity. It was the richest Khoikhoi, not the poorest, who were smeared most fulsomely with fat and dirt, a sign that they had cattle to spare for this decoration. Even the Khoikhoi taste for precious metals seemed a bizarre deviation from European ideas: the Khoikhoi valued not gold, but copper, which they purchased from the colonists at great expense of cattle and fashioned into elaborate ornamentation. Such details could hardly be related without drawing detailed comparisons between European and Hottentot culture, and early descriptions repeatedly portray Hottentots as a kind of parody of Europeans. Consider, for example, Georg Meister's observations in 1677 on the 'wonderful ceremonies' surrounding Hottentot courtship and marriage, which consistently draw from European customs as their frame of reference. 'The friends of the bridegroom come together', he tells us, 'and then [the groom] throws a thick, greasy cow-gut around the neck of his sweetheart instead of lovely pearls and golden chains, and this is the true bond of love, which is worn until it falls off of itself' (Raven-Hart, 1971: 1, 349). Elsewhere Meister paints a ludicrous picture of Hottentot men rising from a meal of barely cooked guts, bowing 'most humbly' to their hosts, and going off 'two-by-two in their leather coats like the merchants of the Exchange in Amsterdam or Hamburg in their silken ones' (Raven-Hart, 1971: 1, 203). Such descriptions were presumably intended to make the Khoikhoi seem laughable. Yet parody is a dangerously two-edged sword, threatening to suggest that the differences between Hottentot and European manners were not absolute at all, but merely relative. For what, indeed, made gold better than copper? Were not the richest European men also the ones with the most fat, though theirs was inside? Did not European women also smear their faces with grease and dangle shiny objects on their bodies? The fact that Europeans repeatedly suspected that they glimpsed their own visage in the unflattering mirror of Khoikhoi life helps to explain why this people so commonly served as currency of abuse among Europeans of the eighteenth century. To call someone a 'Hottentot' because they were ill-mannered or dirty or ignorant or atheistical was, implicitly, to acknowledge that inhabitants of England, France or Germany could act very like the natives of the Cape. This reaction, loosely speaking, represents a kind of 'racism' - but a racism unsupported by scientific theories of neatly boxed human varieties and innate degeneracy. The particular viciousness and obsessiveness of the European denigration of the Hottentots reveals something more complicated than a desire to feel superior; it suggests an awareness that the loathsome strangeness of Khoikhoi manners in fact derived from the common absurdity of all human beings. And it was precisely this anxiety that made the Khoikhoi a particularly tempting source of satiric commentary on European life and manners among leading satirists of the age. In 1711, for example, the English Tory controversist Charles Leslie portrayed his arch-adversary, the Whig bishop Benjamin Hoadly, losing an argument with a Hottentot 'chief' over the virtues of the new commercial England that the Whigs were in the process of building (see Leslie, 1711). As the chief demanded of his befuddled English adversary, was the Hottentot love of shiny metal or their vicious territorial wars really any more contemptible than English luxury or imperialism? Here were questions, as noted by a recent scholar, that may have inspired the Tory satirist Jonathan Swift in his creation of the Yahoos, a bestial yet disturbingly humanoid race that piles up shiny stones, has crude hierarchies and cruel wars, finally plunging Gulliver into a nightmare of self-loathing (see Eilon, 1983). Similarly, the Dutch-English social philosopher and satirist Bernard Mandeville wondered in The Fable of the Bees whether Hottentot 'Pride be more Savage than ours' (Mandeville, 1924: 1, 127). Perhaps the fullest use of Hottentots as a commentary on European life was an essay appearing in 1754 in the journal The Connoisseur, raising laughter of various kinds - self-indulgent, nervous, knowing - throughout Europe, especially Germany, where it became a locus classicus of relativist aesthetics. Probably composed by this journal's chief editor, Lord Chesterfield (the same who once called Samuel Johnson a 'respectable Hottentot'),11 this essay portrays the courtship of two Hottentot lovers with unpronounceable names, Tquassouw and Knonmquaiha. The strangeness of these names, like the clumps of consonants that abound in Swift's Gulliver's Travels, typifies eighteenth-century representations of Hottentots, underscoring, of course, their cultural alienation from Europe. At the same time, however, both the possession of language and the essay's theme of courtship confirm the Hottentots' basic humanity, and it is this interplay between alienation and proximity that generates this essay's unsettling ironies. For a literary critic, these ironies are marked by the essay's generic instability. Should we call this piece a racist and self-satisfied polemic against the Hottentots, an 'oriental tale', a parody of European culture, or even a work of serious anthropology? A superficial reading, apparently like that of Lessing in his Laoco?n, noticed only the ludicrous satire of the Hottentots: 'We know how the Hottentots are and how many things that awaken disgust and loathing in us are beautiful, comely, and sacred to them', wrote Lessing; 'think of all this expressed in the noble language of sincerity and admiration, and try to keep from laughing' (Lessing, 1989: 132-3). But a more careful reading found less justification in assuming that the joke was entirely on the side of Europeans. At one point, for example, we see how a Dutchman looks through the eyes of the Hottentots: Upon his skin the sun darted his scorching rays in vain, and the colour of it was as pale and wan as the watery beams of the moon. His hair, which he could put on and take off at pleasure, was white as the blossoms of the almond tree, and bushy as the fleece of the ram ... His lips and cheeks resembled the red oker, and his nose was sharpened like the beak of an eagle. His language, which was rough and inarticulate, was as the language of beasts; nor could TQUASSOUW discover his meaning, till an Hottentot ... interpreted between them. This interpreter informed the prince, that the stranger was sent from his countrymen to treat about the enlargement of their territories, and that he was called, among them, MYNHEER VAN SNICKERSNEE (The Connoisseur, 1754: 1, 165-6). For a line of German commentators - including Friedrich Riedel, Christoph Wieland and Marcus Herz - the Connoisseur essay pointed to the absence of any rational measure of beauty, a view that militated against the universalizing aesthetics of the Aufkl?rung, as formulated by Lessing and Mendelssohn (see Mielke, 1988). In Britain, similarly, the Hottentots provided a classic example that beauty was in the eye of the beholder and that all fashions could seem preposterous from a different cultural perspective. Lovably cantankerous spokesmen of the British middle orders, like Mr Wildgoose in Robert Graves' popular novel The Spiritual Quixote, found Hottentots a useful metaphor for the inanities of polite fashion: 'if an inhabitant of the Cape of Good Hope were to behold the stiff horse-hair buckles, or the tied wigs, of our Lawyers, Physicians, Tradesmen, or Divines, they would appear as barbarous and extraordinary to them, as sheep tripes and chitterlins about the neck of a Hottentot do for us' (Graves, 1773: 242). Thus, whereas early explorers to the Cape reacted variously with fear and loathing in the face of the Hottentots' apparent alienation from all that was called 'civilized' or even 'human', eighteenth-century authors became more willing to acknowledge their humanness, making possible the often self-reflective proposition that 'Otherness' lies mostly in cultural difference not in 'nature'. And this change made possible as well the foundation of a genuinely anthropological approach to the Khoikhoi, as pioneered by the German scientist, Peter Kolb. Kolb's Reise nach dem Vorgeb?rge der guten Hoffnung (1727), was quickly translated into several languages, including Guido Medley's abridged English translation of 1731, The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope. For some modern historians, such as Mary Louise Pratt in her well-known Imperial Eyes, Kolb had produced a quintessentially high-Enlightenment exercise in the subjection of an alien people to the restrictive categories of Western anthropology (Pratt, 1992: 41-9). Kolb, originally an astronomer who had come to the Cape to study the southern constellations, attempted to assess the Khoikhoi with the cold objectivity of a star-gazer, surveying their culture through the rational lens of religion, government, law, manners and so forth. While this method, as argued by Pratt, may well represent the conceptual colonization of a non-Western society by means of Western cultural categories, it also led Kolb to reject, again and again, the governing assumptions of the first travellers to the Cape - particularly their assumption that the dirt and squalor of the Hottentots represented a degeneration of humans to the level of 'beasts'. Rather, Kolb discerned complex patterns of social organization (see Figure 3): his Hottentots possessed a developed idea of government, sophisticated religious beliefs, and a deep veneration for ritual and tradition in every facet of their culture. Kolb even claimed Fig. 3. Hottentot trades. From Kolb (1731). that these traditional exemplars of grossness and filth actually possessed a real, though non-European, idea of manners and cleanliness, wrinkling their noses at Dutchmen who passed wind or alluded openly to fornication (see Kolb, 1731: 1, 163). There is, indeed, plenty of ludicrous mockery of Hottentots in Kolb's book. Nevertheless, as in some of the earlier travellers' accounts, this mockery is seldom far removed from the satire of Europeans. If Reise nach dem Vorgeb?rge der guten Hoffnung is a work of the Enlightenment in its attempt at rational objectivity, it also strongly anticipated and influenced later works that stressed the relativity of all social conventions and fashions, European and non-European. In their alien notions of beauty or propriety, exemplified by their penchant for grease and filth, the Hottentots showed Kolb 'the Force, the Witchcraft of Custom' (Kolb, 1731: 1, 316). For Europeans who wished to maintain their superiority or a belief in absolute standards, this was a threatening thesis. As the English Methodist leader John Wesley observed of the Hottentots in a sermon on 'The Imperfection of Human Knowledge', 'A late writer has taken much pains to represent them as a respectable people: But from what motive it is not easy to say' (Wesley, 1829: 6, 345). In Wesley's mind, there was no question of the essential degradation and immorality of the Hottentots: the very exemplification of what happens to people ignorant of the Bible and abandoned to original sin by God. Such was the attitude of many Europeans who continued to use the term 'Hottentot' as an epithet of ridicule or debasement. But there was another, more subtle way of rejecting Kolb's book and the cultural relativism it implied. And this rejection corresponded with the rise of racial science and the emergence of a genuinely modern form of 'racism'. It is an initially surprising, yet finally logical, characteristic of this phase in the evolution of European racism that it was bent, in important respects, on the normalization of colonized peoples. Although Kolb had insisted strongly on the need to subject all stories about the Khoikhoi to first-hand scrutiny, a procedure that led him to dismiss many legends as 'Excesses of the Imagination' (Kolb, 1731: 1, 37), he also confirmed many reports that marked their profound cultural and even physical difference from Europeans: he testified, for example, to witnessing the 'Hottentot apron', the excision of one testicle from the men, and the practice of spreading darkened grease over their bodies. Later travellers rejected even these claims, accusing Kolb of precisely that reliance on hearsay that he professed to disdain. In the words of Fran?ois Le Vaillant, writing in 1790, 'It is ... not to be questioned, but that after ten years residence ... [Kolb] thought it easier to associate with the good fellows of the colony, who, while they drunk his wine, laughed in their sleeves, and vied with each other in recounting those ridiculous anecdotes which compose the bulk of his memoirs' (Le Vaillant, 1790: 109).12 Taking his lead from Rousseau, who had grouped Hottentots with other noble savages (Rousseau, 1986: 147), Le Vaillant inveighed sentimentally against the supposed abuse of this people by Kolb and previous travellers: 'Worthy injured people! ... Peaceful Hottentots! behold with disdain those harsh invaders who first reduced to slavery, then basely traduced and placed ye on a level with the brutes' (Le Vaillant, 1790: 160-1). In sharp contrast with the depiction of Hottentots as haughtily independent, alone and proud in their alien customs, Le Vaillant portrayed 'Klaas', a noble-hearted guide who selflessly defends the French traveller from the hoofs of a charging elephant. 'Klaas pupil of nature!' exclaims Le Vaillant, 'artless soul, uncorrupted by the false tinsel of superficial politeness, continue to cherish the remembrance of that friendship to whom thy idea must ever be dear!' (Le Vaillant, 1790: 249-50). What high-mindedness, we might like to echo, to rescue the Khoikhoi from the guts and grease that filled previous accounts. Yet behind Le Vaillant's much more palatable and conventional portrait of the Hottentots may indeed lie the crushing of this people's unique culture under prolonged European influence. For the Khoikhoi were dying a slow cultural death. Its population thinned drastically by smallpox, its binding forms of social order mocked and humiliated, this nation of wandering herdsmen increasingly abandoned its traditional ways, donned Western livery, and entered European houses as domestics or guides. When Joseph Banks arrived in the Endeavour in 1771, he heard only rumours that Hottentots existed in an aboriginal state far beyond Table Mountain.13 The Khoikhoi he witnessed, as they tied his horse or brought his food, seemed so banal that he wondered why anyone thought they were extraordinary or particularly disgusting. Eager to witness cultural difference, he ordered Hottentots to dance for him. What he saw convinced him of the total falsehood of stories describing a people that, covered with grease, streaming in copper, and loosely clothed in animal skins, wildly danced as they shouted what Dutch witnesses heard as 'Hottentot! Hottentot!', the apparent origin of their European name. Instead, he watched dances 'as dull and spiritless as can be imagined', consisting 'entirely of beating the earth with one foot and then with the other' (Banks, 1896: 440). What Banks interpreted as the visible demonstration that the dance of Hottentot culture was unremarkable, and always had been, we might well reinterpret as a dance of cultural death. Others of this time, such as the popular travel writer William MacIntosh, similarly praised the Khoikhoi as a people of 'mild and tractable disposition' who had been 'very much misrepresented in Europe' (MacIntosh, 1782: 1, 217-18). But this praise came with a proviso aimed at Khoikhoi who insisting on remaining on the outskirts of European acculturation. Such 'wild Hottentots', as MacIntosh went on to insist, 'are untameable and unmanageable by any means that have yet been tried'. Indeed, MacIntosh's assertion that these uncooperative Khoikhoi 'scarcely deserve to be ranked among the human species' (1782: 1, 220) is, arguably, chilling in a way that the earlier accounts of Hottentot beastliness are not. For exclusion from the human race now meant, as never before, an unwillingness to submit to European authority, imposing a simultaneously geographical and ideological boundary between 'in' and 'out', 'human' and 'non-human'. In insidious ways, the ideological boundary has been reaffirmed even in the most 'politically correct' commentary on the Khoikhoi to the present day. Linda Merians, for example, congratulates the many commentators on the Khoikhoi in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who make Hottentots 'full members of the human family', praise that reflects her approval that these authors 'unambiguously articulate their awareness that the long-standing tradition of negative description of Hottentots was misleading or inaccurate' (Merians, 2001: 199 and 208). In fact, these late visitors to the Cape had no real basis to judge whether the previous accounts were accurate or not. And what Merians calls 'negative description' often indicates resistance to customs and forms of behaviour that merely differed from what Europeans considered meet, palatable and salubrious according to a certain evolving code of middle-class mores. To wash away all that had made Hottentots fearful and threatening to European values became, indeed, the preoccupying aim of accounts of this people in the late eighteenth century. Moreover, this tendency corresponded in significant ways with the inauguration of a science of race during precisely the same era. Buffon, who was instrumental in introducing the term 'race' into scientific discourse, acknowledged that the Hottentots were 'fort extraordinaires', but he dismissed most of the stories about these people as apocryphal, denying, for example, the existence of 'le tablier Hottentot', and insisting that 'ce peuple n'est pas si excessivement laid que la plupart des voyageurs veulent le faire croire' (Buffon, 1854: 4, 600-1). His departures from Kolb tended instead to make the Khoikhoi seem more like conventional 'savages' whose lives were brutal, nasty and short: they beat their wives, crawled in the dirt, and seldom lived past forty years old. In a different way, the goal of reintegrating Hottentots within the reigning paradigms of European thought was sought by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the most influential figure in the theorizing of race in the late eighteenth century. Blumenbach introduced the practice of bunching the Hottentots with all the neighbouring peoples of southern Africa (including, prominently, the 'Bushmen' and 'Caffres'), whom he classified together as 'woolly-haired African nations' differing in their somewhat lighter skin colour from the 'Negroes' further north (Blumenbach, 1865: 306 and 351-2). It was the light skin, predictably, that presented the greatest threat to the direct relation between skin colour and racial capacity that became a typical thesis of nineteenth-century ethnography.14 In innumerable works of anthropology from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, therefore, the Hottentots were interpreted as a hybrid of so-called 'Negro' and other racial traits, an anomalous touching of one stem on others to produce an errant, southward-pointing twig. In the words of A. L. Kroeber in a popular anthropological textbook first published in 1928, the Hottentots were a 'very specialized race' with some 'Caucasian or Mongoloid' features modifying their basic 'Negroid' stem (Kroeber, 1948: 769).15 Kroeber's relatively modern definition (similar, for example, to the definition of 'Hottentot' in the most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary)16 reveals the effort not to excise but to reattach Hottentots to the branching network of human development. Such efforts, however, needed to explain all that allegedly made Hottentots non-human and alien, such as the 'Hottentot apron' and the pendulous breasts noted by early travellers to the Cape. While these anomalies were not totally denied, nineteenth-century anthropologists tended increasingly to question their authenticity and to find natural explanations for what had previously seemed inexplicable and prodigious. Such was the self-consciously rational orientation of Sir William Lawrence's Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man (1822). Lawrence's presentation of the Cape 'tribes' before the Royal Society of Physicians was based heavily on the study of the Hottentot Venus, dubbed Saartje Baartman, whose naked body, minutely measured by teams of scientists, was carefully dissected, catalogued and displayed once she was dead. The stripping and bodily inspection of Baartman are strongly indicative of the new methodology of race science, for what was stripped away - the clothes and customs so fascinating to previous authors like Kolb - meant little to nineteenth-century professors except as showing the deficient mental capacities of 'savages'. Contrary to what might be thought, moreover, this scrutiny of Baartman's body was intended to diminish rather than intensify the sense of difference between the Hottentots and other peoples. Relying on scientific reports on the Hottentot Venus in the M?moires du Mus?e d'Histoire Naturelle, Lawrence pondered one by one each of the supposed physical monstrosities of 'the tribes in the south of Africa', drawing each within the ambit of observed phenomena in natural history. The 'Hottentot apron' was in fact only elongated nymphae or labiae minorae, present not only in certain Hottentot individuals but in 'Negroes, Moors, and Copts', as well as some European women. Reports of the pendulous breasts of Hottentot women bore 'an evident air of exaggeration' and were, in any event, common to many savage peoples. The protuberant buttocks of Hottentot women - steatopygia, a characteristic almost never reported before the nineteenth century - was only the kind of variation equally observed in 'fatbuttocked sheep'. Indeed, as Lawrence summarized, 'the development of the nymphae, and the other varieties enumerated in this chapter, are merely analogous to the variations observed in corresponding points among many domestic animals'. The repeated analogies between savages and animals, along with that peculiarly nineteenth-century fascination with the details of female genitalia and buttocks, should indeed alert us to a significant constellation of racist and sexist ideologies characteristic of Western raciology. Yet Lawrence was also being consciously high-minded, reflecting paternally on the need to rebut suggestions of the 'monstrous' difference between Hottentots and the rest of the human species: 'In proportion as distant regions become well known', he concluded, 'such monstrosities disappear, and the progress of natural knowledge will gradually consign all these marvellous tales to oblivion' (Lawrence, 1822: 360-72). In an insightful essay on monstrosity in eighteenth-century thought, Andrew Curran and Patrick Graille describe how the 'monster' loomed threateningly over efforts in the Enlightenment to build a coherent and all-inclusive grid of taxonomies (see Curran and Graille, 1997). Yet it was really in the nineteenth century that efforts to drive the monster from the precincts of natural history became the single-minded preoccupation of science. As we have seen, the Enlightenment anthropology of Kolb and those he influenced accepted and even endorsed many of the observations of previous travellers to the Cape with regard to the stark alterity of Khoikhoi culture. They ratified these stories even at the expense of destabilizing assurance in the universality of European norms, the 'enlightened' (and partly satirical) goal being to expose the tyrannical reign of arbitrary 'custom'. The racial science being developed from Buffon to Lawrence was designed precisely to halt this slide into relativity and self-mockery. And from this ideological root grew the distinctive language of modern racism. The library of a Victorian gentleman with an interest in raciology might well, for example, have contained J. S. Wood's heavy and Fig. 4. Nineteenth-century depiction of Hottentots. From Wood (1878). lavishly illustrated volume, The Uncivilized Races of the World (1878). In a substantial section on the Hottentots, Wood cited Le Vaillant's authority in dismissing Kolb as 'utterly unworthy of belief' (Wood, 1878: 218), following the French explorer in the intention of sanitizing the Khoikhoi into picturesquely banal 'savages', as reflected by the illustrations that accompany his description (Figure 4). Sans grease, sans guts, Wood's amused portrait of the Hottentots relies heavily on a more recent work, Francis Galton's Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa. This is significant, for Galton is remembered by us now as the scientist who coined the term 'eugenics' and did much to popularize the idea of controlling inheritance for the supposed good of humanity, the vision so infamously pursued by the Nazis. The anthropological thinking that led Galton to these theories began when he was a young man exploring the Cape region in 1851, employing and occasionally 'thrashing' Hottentot servants and guides. Like racial scientists whose views clearly oriented his observations, he disregarded previous stories of the supposed physical and cultural idiosyncrasies of the Hottentots and the neighbouring peoples of this area, whom he grouped together as a single biological group characterized by their particular shade of 'olive' skin colour and low state of social development. Since Hottentots and Bushmen, Namaqua or Oerlam, were all the same race, he wrote: when I say Oerlam, Hottentot, or Bushman, the identical same yellow, flat-nosed, woolly-haired, clicking individual must be conjured up before the mind of my kind reader, but differing in dirt, squalor, and nakedness, according to the actual term employed; the highest point of the scale being a creature who has means of dressing himself respectably on Sundays and gala-days, and who knows something of reading and writing; the lowest point, a regular savage (Galton, 1889: 42). Galton thus banalized the famously exotic dirtiness of Cape people into a mere sign of poverty and 'regular' savagery. And in other respects, as well, he viewed all south African 'tribes' through well-worn cultural stereotypes that relate solely to their degree of cooperation with or resistance to European occupation. On the one hand, there is the faithful noble savage, like 'Barmen', 'a respectable old gentleman, who spoke Dutch perfectly, and every now and then earned something by doing odd jobs for the missionaries' (1889: 50). At the other extreme is 'Jonker', the impudent and barbaric despot whom Galton variously flatters and cajoles into allowing him access to his territories. As suggested by the Europeanized names given to all these Khoikhoi - Jonker, Barmen, Captain Frederick, Johannis - Galton's aim is to absorb these people back into a universe that can be easily articulated by European tongues and minds. His Hottentots all behave in perfectly understandable but 'savage' ways, the point being that they are human beings of a sort familiar to Europeans, though of a lower 'scale', to borrow Galton's expression in the quote above. Galton's book, that is, develops a verbal adjustment between distance and approximation, a linguistic habit given literal and spatial form in his account's most famous episode. Galton shared the Victorian male's peculiar fetish for the 'Hottentot Venus', a fascination with enlarged buttocks barely disguised beneath shows of gentlemanly modesty and cold scientific calculation. Inflamed by a Cape woman whom he describes as 'a Venus among Hottentots', but too discreet to fulfil his desire of measuring her steatopygia with a pocket-ruler, Galton stands at a distance with his sextant, measuring her curves and then calculating their width and breadth by means of trigonometry (1889: 53-4). This episode makes obvious the tendency of nineteenth-century anthropologists to reduce non-European peoples to specimens for their strangely interrelated scientific and sexual projects. But Galton's lust also points explicitly to his recognition of this woman's conformity with European ideas of female beauty. As he writes, 'I gazed at ... that gift of bounteous nature to this favoured race, which no mantua-maker, with all her crinoline and stuffing, can do otherwise than humbly imitate'. This reference to the clothing fashions of women in Victorian England leads to other comparisons between Caucasian ladies and his Hottentot Venus, who 'was turning herself about to all points of the compass, as ladies who wish to be admired usually do' (1889: 54). Francis Galton thought that Hottentots were racially inferior, but he also wished to copulate with Hottentot women. This reaction surely marks an important difference between Europeans of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, for the sexual proclivities of these travellers themselves form a revealing social history. The sailors who first came to the Cape admitted, in the style of naughty boys, to paying Hottentot women with brandy and trinkets to obtain a fleeting, and dramatically repulsed, glimpse of the 'Hottentot apron'.17 Galton, on the contrary, portrays himself extending his sextant in the direction of a flirtatious Hottentot Venus in a winking display of colonial lust. The fact that Galton does not deny the humanity of a people he wished to colonize and abuse essentially underprops the logical economy of nineteenth-century imperialism and its supporting racist ideology. In an essay entitled 'Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse', Homi Bhabha observes that what the imperialist mentality really desired was 'a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite' (Bhabha, 1994: 86). That is, the very logic of imperialism, with its paternalistic attitude towards occupied peoples, required that Sambo or Gunga be perfectly 'human' in all their dark-eyed and dependent childishness, for it was that humanity which made them appropriate subjects of colonial control and indoctrination. Hence, the most notorious racists of the imperial era openly admitted, like Gobineau in The Inequality of Human Races (1853-4), that 'even the lowest tribes are not absolutely stupid'. It meant nothing at all, he insisted, that a particular Hottentot might be a 'good servant'. Indeed, he continued, I actually go further than my opponents, as I have no doubt that a fair number of negro chiefs are superior, in the wealth of their ideas, the synthetic power of their minds, and the strength of their capacity for actions, to the level usually reached by our peasants, or even by the average specimens of our half-educated middle classes (Gobineau, 1967: 180). Such an admission not only cost Gobineau nothing, it even contributed to his pose of 'scientific' accuracy and his dual goals of imperialism abroad and aristocratic hegemony at home. This history of evolving attitudes helps to answer the questions that opened this essay: why then did the Khoikhoi become so singularly notorious as a degraded or obnoxious people? And what does this reputation reveal about the nature of European racism? At an early stage, as we have considered, the Khoikhoi came closer than most peoples to materializing a European vision of humanoid strangeness at the borders of the world. Ultimately, however, it was how much the Hottentots were like Europeans that caused the deepest anxiety, along with a loathing that was simultaneously projected onto 'Hottentots' and reflected back onto Europeans themselves. It is important to keep in mind that the Khoikhoi were a highly sophisticated people of a form that Europeans soon recognized. Fiercely independent and self-sufficient, unsympathetic and even mocking towards Europeans, militarily formidable, culturally rich and complex, sharp though honest traders who drove a hard bargain for products the Europeans needed, Hottentots challenged at its roots European confidence in being the natural guardians of universal truth. At the same time, however, Europeans genuinely found the Khoikhoi deeply distressing, and to deny this fact of ethnographic history is simply to refuse to consider the evidence. Early travellers' accounts reflect a degree of disgust with the dress, customs and manners of the Khoikhoi that corresponds in no logical way with the needs of European egotism or colonialism. The disgust appears, indeed, to have been more or less mutual, revealing the extent to which Khoikhoi and European cultures had developed in conflicting ways. For Europeans, at least, the Khoikhoi presented a problem of categorization. They confused a European vision of the world and humanity, forcing the painful process of readjustment that lies behind virtually all the commentary - repulsed, satiric or scientific - that we have considered. At the end of this rather dismal rainbow lay the scientific concept of 'race', a powerful and lasting paradigm because it achieved the goal of both amalgamating and subordinating other cultures so efficiently. Backed by the authority of most of the eminent cultural leaders of the nineteenth century, racial science gave an apparent coherence and intellectual legitimacy to the scattered prejudices and fears that had existed before, creating what can be called a genuine modern racism. This racism, as I have maintained, involves a crucial approximation of the Other; its psychological seduction derives from its apparent ability to explain and to make what seems physically or culturally strange a 'normal' category in an overarching global outlook. The moral lesson of this ethnographic history may not be what we expect, for thwarting racism evidently involves more subtle guards than avoiding or condemning expressions of dislike or discomfort with respect to another group (which may in fact represent an ineluctable and even 'healthy' phase of cultural interaction). Racism may, in fact, find its most nourishing psychological sources in the consciously high-minded effort to reduce or erase the sense of difference. To be alarmed by the difference of cultural Others represents something close to a human norm; to deny the legitimacy of this cultural difference has been the peculiarly poisonous inclination of modern European ideology. Acknowledgements Many thanks to Titi Adepitan, Andrew Curran, Daniel O'Leary and Claude Rawson for their sensitive and learned comments on previous versions of this essay. Notes 1. On the evolution of 'race', see Hudson (1996), Stocking (1968), Popkin (1973), Banton (1977 and 1987), Honegger (1991), Todorov (1993) and Smedley (1993: 36-40). 2. Hottentots were widely believed to occupy a position between humans and apes in the Great Chain of Being. See Voltaire (1877-85: 22, 210), Long (1774: 2, 364), Smith (1788: 144). Linneaus (1758: 14) placed the Hottentots in the class 'homo monstrosus'. But 'homo monstrosus' differed from 'homo sapiens' by artificially induced rather than natural deformity. 3. Johan Jacob Saar (1662) and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1649), cited in Raven-Hart (1971: 1, 63 and 67). 4. John Jourdain (1608), cited in Raven-Hart (1967: 42). 5. See also the 1670 voyage of William Hore (Raven-Hart, 1967). The Icelandic traveller J?n Olofson assumed, without evidence, that these were cannibalistic attacks (Raven-Hart , 1967: 111). 6. See the 1610 account of Pyrard de Laval (1610), who relied entirely on hearsay, cited in Raven-Hart (1967: 47). 7. To what extent do these early accounts provide accurate information on the cultural practices of the Khoikhoi during this period? This question seems virtually unanswerable, as this culture is now extinct and later accounts portray them in a highly Europeanized form. Richard Elphick claims that many of the stories, like the wearing of guts, were at least partially accurate (1985: 194). He also maintains, however, that the Hottentots were found by the Europeans already in a state of severe cultural decline (1985: xvii). 8. See, for example, the account of Frederick Andersen Bolling (1670), in Raven-Hart, (1971: 1, 147). 9. On environmental theories of human modification, see Glacken (1967). 10. See, for example, the comments of Johann Wilhelm Vogel (1679) and Guy Tachard (1685) in Raven-Hart (1971: 1, 218 and 289). 11. See Chesterfield (1892: 1, 407), letter 160 (28 February 1751, OS). The editor of James Boswell's Life of Johnson, G. B. Hill, maintained that Chesterfield was actually referring to Lord Lyttleton, though the description seems far more applicable to the famously uncouth and uncleanly Johnson. See Boswell (1934-50: 1, 266-7). 12. Le Vaillant was not alone in romanticizing the Khoikhoi during the late eighteenth century. See also Raynal (1783: 309). 13. The virtual disappearance of 'wild' Hottentots in the vicinity of European settlement is widely confirmed by other travellers. See De Mist (1954: 28) and Barrow (1806: 98-100). 14. In 1813, for example, Pritchard (1973: 44) made a direct correlation between skin colour and level of civilization, yet felt obliged to admit that the Hottentots were both light-skinned and racially regressive. 15. Kroeber reviews the similar arguments of previous anthropologists (1948: 155 and 215). 16. Hottentots are defined as a people 'of mixed Bushman-Hamite descent, with some Bantu admixture'. 17. See, for example, the accounts of Wouter Shouter (1665), Georg Meister (1677) and David Tapen (1682) in Raven-Hart (1971: 1, 85, 204, and 238), respectively. References Anon. (1732) A Collection of Voyages and Travels, 4 vols. London. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Banks, Joseph (1896) Journal, ed. Sir Joseph D. Hooker. London: Macmillan. 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New York: Harper and Row. Smedley, Audrey (1993) Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview Press. Smith, Samuel Stanhope (1788) An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figuration in Human Species, 2nd edn. Edinburgh. Stocking, George W. Jr. (1968) Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. New York: The Free Press; London: Collier-Macmillan. Todorov, Tzetvan (1993) On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. Vigarello, Georges (1988) Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle-Ages, trans. Jena Birell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: ?ditions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme. Voltaire, Fran?ois-Marie Arouet de (1877-85) Trait? de m?taphysique, in vol. 22 of Oeuvres compl?tes, ed. L. Moland, 52 vols. Paris: Garnier Fr?res. Wesley, John (1829) Works, 14 vols., 3rd edn. London. Wood, J. S. (1878) The Uncivilized Races of the World. Hartford: J. B. Burr. Nicholas Hudson is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Address: Department of English, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z1, Canada [email: nhudson at interchange.ubc.ca] From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 11 18:55:05 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 13:55:05 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: The Secret Lives of Just About Everybody Message-ID: The Secret Lives of Just About Everybody NYT January 11, 2005 By BENEDICT CAREY One mislaid credit card bill or a single dangling e-mail message on the home computer would have ended everything: the marriage, the big-time career, the reputation for decency he had built over a lifetime. So for more than 10 years, he ruthlessly kept his two identities apart: one lived in a Westchester hamlet and worked in a New York office, and the other operated mainly in clubs, airport bars and brothels. One warmly greeted clients and waved to neighbors, sometimes only hours after the other had stumbled back from a "work" meeting with prostitutes or cocaine dealers. In the end, it was a harmless computer pop-up advertisement for security software, claiming that his online life was being "continually monitored," that sent this New York real estate developer into a panic and to a therapist. The man's double life is an extreme example of how mental anguish can cleave an identity into pieces, said his psychiatrist, Dr. Jay S. Kwawer, director of clinical education at the William Alanson White Institute in New York, who discussed the case at a recent conference. But psychologists say that most normal adults are well equipped to start a secret life, if not to sustain it. The ability to hold a secret is fundamental to healthy social development, they say, and the desire to sample other identities - to reinvent oneself, to pretend - can last well into adulthood. And in recent years researchers have found that some of the same psychological skills that help many people avoid mental distress can also put them at heightened risk for prolonging covert activities. "In a very deep sense, you don't have a self unless you have a secret, and we all have moments throughout our lives when we feel we're losing ourselves in our social group, or work or marriage, and it feels good to grab for a secret, or some subterfuge, to reassert our identity as somebody apart," said Dr. Daniel M. Wegner, a professor of psychology at Harvard. He added, "And we are now learning that some people are better at doing this than others." Although the best-known covert lives are the most spectacular - the architect Louis Kahn had three lives; Charles Lindbergh reportedly had two - these are exaggerated examples of a far more common and various behavior, psychologists say. Some people gamble on the sly, or sample drugs. Others try music lessons. Still others join a religious group. They keep mum for different reasons. And there are thousands of people - gay men and women who stay in heterosexual marriages, for example - whose shame over or denial of their elemental needs has set them up for secretive excursions into other worlds. Whether a secret life is ultimately destructive, experts find, depends both on the nature of the secret and on the psychological makeup of the individual. Psychologists have long considered the ability to keep secrets as central to healthy development. Children as young as 6 or 7 learn to stay quiet about their mother's birthday present. In adolescence and adulthood, a fluency with small social lies is associated with good mental health. And researchers have confirmed that secrecy can enhance attraction, or as Oscar Wilde put it, "The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it." In one study, men and women living in Texas reported that the past relationships they continued to think about were most often secret ones. In another, psychologists at Harvard found that they could increase the attraction between male and female strangers simply by encouraging them to play footsie as part of a lab experiment. The urge to act out an entirely different persona is widely shared across cultures as well, social scientists say, and may be motivated by curiosity, mischief or earnest soul-searching. Certainly, it is a familiar tug in the breast of almost anyone who has stepped out of his or her daily life for a time, whether for vacation, for business or to live in another country. "It used to be you'd go away for the summer and be someone else, go away to camp and be someone else, or maybe to Europe and be someone else" in a spirit of healthy experimentation, said Dr. Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now, she said, people regularly assume several aliases on the Internet, without ever leaving their armchair: the clerk next door might sign on as bill at aol.com but also cruise chat rooms as Armaniguy, Cool Breeze and Thunderboy. Most recently, Dr. Turkle has studied the use of online interactive games like Sims Online, where people set up families and communities. She has conducted detailed interviews with some 200 regular or occasional players, and says many people use the games as a way to set up families they wish they had, or at least play out alternative versions of their own lives. One 16-year-old girl who lives with an abusive father has simulated her relationship to him in Sims Online by changing herself, variously, into a 16-year-old boy, a bigger, stronger girl and a more assertive personality, among other identities. It was as a more forceful daughter, Dr. Turkle said, that the girl discovered she could forgive her father, if not change him. "I think what people are doing on the Internet now," she said, "has deep psychological meaning in terms of how they're using identities to express problems and potentially solve them in what is a relatively consequence-free zone." Yet out in the world, a consequence-rich zone, studies find that most people find it mentally exhausting to hold onto inflammatory secrets - much less lives - for long. The very act of trying to suppress the information creates a kind of rebound effect, causing thoughts of an affair, late-night excursions or an undisclosed debt to flood the consciousness, especially when a person who would be harmed by disclosure of the secret is nearby. Like a television set in a crowded bar, the concealed episode seems to play on in the mind, attracting attention despite conscious efforts to turn away. The suppressed thoughts even recur in dreams, according to a study published last summer. The strength of this effect undoubtedly varies from person to person, psychiatrists say. In rare cases, when people are pathologically remorseless, they do not care about or even perceive the potential impact of a secret on others, and therefore do not feel the tension of keeping it. And those who are paid to live secret lives, like intelligence agents, at least know what they have signed up for and have clear guidelines to tell them how much they can reveal to whom. But in a series of experiments over the past decade, psychologists have identified a larger group they call repressors, an estimated 10 to 15 percent of the population, who are adept at ignoring or suppressing information that is embarrassing to them and thus well equipped to keep secrets, some psychologists say. Repressors score low on questionnaires that measure anxiety and defensiveness - reporting, for example, that they are rarely resentful, worried about money, or troubled by nightmares and headaches. They think well of themselves and don't sweat the small stuff. Although little is known about the mental development of such people, some psychologists believe they have learned to block distressing thoughts by distracting themselves with good memories. Over time - with practice, in effect - this may become habitual, blunting their access to potentially humiliating or threatening memories and secrets. "This talent is likely to serve them well in the daily struggle to avoid unwanted thoughts of all kinds, including unwanted thoughts that arise from attempts to suppress secrets in the presence of others," Dr. Wegner, of Harvard, said in an e-mail message. The easier it is to silence those thoughts and the longer the covert activity can go on, the harder it may be to confess later on. In some cases, far stronger forces are at work in shaping secret lives. Many gay men and some lesbians marry heterosexual partners before working out their sexual identity, or in defiance of it. The aim is to please parents, to cover their own shame or to become more acceptable to themselves and society at large, said Dr. Richard A. Isay, a psychiatrist at Cornell University who has provided therapy to many closeted gay men. Very often, he said, these men struggle not to act on their desires, and they begin secret lives in desperation. This eventually forces agonizing decisions about how to live with, or separate from, families they love. "I know that I did not pursue the orientation that I have, and know that I have always been as I am now," one man wrote in a letter published in Dr. Isay's book "Becoming Gay." "I know that it becomes more difficult to live in the lonely shell that I do now, but can see no way out of it." When exposure of a secret life will destroy or forever poison the public one, people must either come clean and choose, or risk mental breakdown, many therapists say. Dr. Seth M. Aronson, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, has treated a pediatrician with a small child and a wife at home who was sneaking off at night to bars, visiting prostitutes and even fighting with some of the women's pimps. At one session, the man was so drunk he passed out; at another, he brought a prostitute with him. "It was one of those classic splits, where the wife was perfect and wonderful but he was demeaning these other women," and the two lives could not coexist for long, Dr. Aronson said. In a famous paper on the subject of double lives, published in 1960, the English analyst Dr. Donald W. Winnicott argued that a false self emerged in particular households where children are raised to be so exquisitely tuned to the expectations of others that they become deaf to their own longings and needs. "In effect, they bury a part of themselves alive," said Dr. Kwawer of the White Institute. The pediatrician treated by Dr. Aronson, for example, grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household in which his mother frequently and disapprovingly compared him to his uncle, who was a rogue and a drinker. Dr. Kwawer's patient, the real estate developer, had parents who frowned on almost any expression of appetite, and imprinted their son with a strong sense of upholding the family image. He married young, in part to please his parents. Both men are still getting psychotherapy but now live one life apiece, their therapists say. The pediatrician has curtailed his extracurricular activities, returned home mentally and confessed some of his troubles to his wife. The real estate developer has separated from his wife, but lives close by and helps with the children. The break caused a period of depression for everyone involved, Dr. Kwawer said, but the man now has renewed energy at work, and has reconnected with friends and his children. The secret trysts have stopped, as has the drug use, and he feels he has his life back. "Contrary to what many people assume," Dr. Kwawer said, "quite often a secret life can bring a more lively, more intimate, more energized part of themselves out of the dark." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/11/health/psychology/11secr.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 11 18:56:13 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 13:56:13 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Observatory: Eat or Be Eaten (but Eat Right) Message-ID: Observatory: Eat or Be Eaten (but Eat Right) NYT January 11, 2005 By HENRY FOUNTAIN If it is hard for many people to eat balanced diets, given the array of foods available, imagine what it must be like for carnivorous predators. They eat only what they catch, and what they catch is limited. The wild is no Las Vegas all-you-can-eat buffet. That is why scientists have theorized that for most carnivores to stay healthy the composition of their prey has to be nutritionally balanced. These carnivores do not select prey for nutritional content, but rather optimize the amount of prey they eat. Herbivores, by contrast, can pick a fatty nut over a starchy root. A researcher at the University of Oxford in Britain has found some carnivorous predators that can pick and choose nutrients. In experiments with three invertebrate species, a ground beetle and two spiders, the researcher, Dr. David Mayntz, and colleagues found that the predators actively balanced their diets. "All of them are trying to get the right nutrients, but in different ways," said Dr. Mayntz, whose study is published in the current issue of Science. The three species have quite different feeding behaviors, he said. The beetle is an active forager, hunting its food. One spider is semiactive. It sits and waits for prey, ambushing it as it ambles by, but can also move to another foraging spot as needed. The other spider builds a web and is totally dependent on whatever prey is caught in it. Specimens of all three species were fed an unbalanced diet, too rich in either fat or protein. Then they were watched as other foods were made available. In all three cases, the invertebrates opted for food that would make up what they were lacking. That is, if they had first been fed protein-rich food, they then consumed fat-rich food. "We've shown that they have priorities and try to get what they need," Dr. Mayntz said. The effect could be seen, he added, even if the specimens had been kept on an unbalanced diet only for a day. "When you're balancing macronutrients, these things are often short term," he said. Dr. Mayntz said he would not be surprised if other carnivorous predators, even large mammals, were someday shown to have the same ability to balance diets. Leopards might be selective about what parts of the prey, lean or fatty, they eat right after the kill. "I would guess that they would go for what they need first," he said. Life in the Salt, Salt Sea The environment around deep-ocean hydrothermal vents is among the most inhospitable anywhere, yet it is home to single-cell microbes, tube worms and other organisms that like their habitat hot and sulfurous. But vent zones aren't the only extreme neighborhood under the sea. In the eastern Mediterranean, for example, at depths of 10,000 feet or more, are basins that in addition to lacking light and oxygen are among the saltiest places on earth. And there, too, a European team of scientists report in Science, life exists. The scientists were part of Biodeep, a project sponsored by the European Community to explore these deep-sea basins in the Mediterranean between Greece and Libya. This is a region where the sea dried up more than 5.5 million years ago, leaving vast salt deposits that were since covered in sediment. When the sea returned, tectonic activity exposed the deposits in certain areas, creating a hyper-salty brine. In one of the basins, for example, the concentration of the salt magnesium chloride is the highest found in a marine environment. Yet the researchers found an active microbial community in the four basins they sampled with a robotic submersible. Previously unknown species of bacteria as well as archaea were discovered. The researchers say their work shows that some microbes are even more adaptable to salt than previously thought. And they suggest that the findings lend more support to the idea that life might exist elsewhere in the solar system. Jupiter's moon Europa, for instance, may have pockets of brine in its icy shell. Sludge-Eater's Genome It was discovered in lowly sludge from a sewage-treatment plant, but now it's at the top of the heap, genomically speaking. The genome of the bacteria Dehalococcoides ethenogenes has been decoded by scientists at the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Md. D. ethenogenes has the ability to naturally clean up polluting compounds like the dry-cleaning solvent tetrachloroethene (which is what it was doing when it was discovered at the treatment plant, in Ithaca, N.Y.). The genome for the bacteria (a variety called Strain 195) contains about 1.5 million base pairs, about one-third to one-fourth of the number of base pairs in strains of E. coli that have been sequenced. The sequence for D. ethenogenes, which was described in Science, includes genes for fixing nitrogen and parts of genes that fix carbon dioxide. This suggests the bug had an ancestor that was a bit more conventional. The work should help scientists learn how to better grow the bacteria (which are difficult to culture in the lab) and use them for environmental cleanup. Supermassive Outburst These are boom times for black holes. In recent years, astronomers have detected large outbursts of X-rays and high-energy particles from black holes, caused by the acceleration and extreme heating of gas clouds drawn to them by their enormous gravitational fields. Now, scientists using data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory have measured the most powerful explosion yet, from a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant cluster of galaxies. The outburst has produced two enormous cavities, measuring hundreds of thousands of light-years across, as the emissions displace and compress the gas in the cluster. The researchers, led by Dr. Brian McNamara of Ohio University, suggest that the energy required to create these cavities - 6 times 10 to the 61st ergs, for those keeping score - is nearly an order of magnitude greater than the next-largest outburst ever detected. The work was published in the journal Nature. All that energy would tend to keep the gas in the cluster from cooling down for several billion years, the researchers estimate. And since gas has to cool and coalesce to form new stars, the black hole would seem to be preventing this from happening. The finding adds to a growing body of evidence that may help explain why clusters like this do not make new stars. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/11/science/11obse.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 11 18:57:53 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 13:57:53 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Denis Dutton on art and sexual selection Message-ID: Denis Dutton on art and sexual selection http://denisdutton.com/miller_review.htm Art and Sexual Selection Philosophy and Literature 24(2000): 512-21. Denis Dutton Followers of evolutionary psychology have marveled in the last few years on the capacity of this discipline to throw new light on aspects of human life, both the obvious and the curious. The Swiss Army Knife metaphor of the mind as a multipurpose instrument fitted by evolution to solve Pleistocene problems with natural ease has great attractiveness. It offers a significantly more powerful way to view our specialized mental capacities than the older model that tries to see us as creatures with general abilities to learn whatever parents or society teach us. We're not usually as motivated to learn the calculus, or as adept at it, as we are in figuring out who's sleeping with whom in the neighborhood, and these differential interests and capacities are not socially constructed. Striking empirical findings, such as the statistic that a small child or infant is roughly a hundred times more likely to die at the hands of a stepfather than at the hands of a biological father, defy explanation in terms cultural imperatives but are consistent with evolutionary psychology and explained by it. And persistent average sex differences, like the superior detail noticing capacities of women and the better map-reading abilities of men, nicely fit with evolutionary psychology's account of Pleistocene adaptations. In developing their approach, evolutionary psychologists tend everywhere to see the hand of natural selection in features of the mind. Steven Pinker, for instance, argues that we are adapted "for causal and probabilistic reasoning about plants, animals, objects, and people." We had to be clever problem-solvers in the Pleistocene, dealing with the practical challenges thrown up by that environment. The mind on this view evolved in response to demands for survival. Even such apparently unproductive characteristics of homo sapiens as an interest in, say, imaginative story-telling, singing, or cave-painting, require that we posit some kind of survival advantage advanced by these behaviors. This is the Darwinism we all know, and while its central mechanism of natural selection has proven to be one of the most versatile and powerful explanatory ideas in all of science, there is another, lesser known side to Darwin, the central source for which is his last book, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, to give its complete title. In this monumental work, Darwin discusses the other great driving force of evolution, sexual selection. The most famous example of sexual selection is the peacock's tail. This huge display, far from enhancing survival in the wild, makes peacocks more prone to predation. The tails are heavy, and require lots of energy to grow and to drag around. And therein, oddly, lies nature's point: simply being able to manage with a tail like that functions as an advertisement to peahens: "Look at what a strong, healthy, fit peacock I am." For discriminating peahens, the tail is a fitness indicator, and they will choose to mate with peacocks who display the grandest tails. Fundamental to sexual selection in the animal kingdom is female choice, as the typical routine for most species has males displaying strength, cleverness, and general genetic fitness in order to invite female participation in producing the next generation. With the human animal, there is a greater mutuality of choice, although even with us it is often males who propose and females who dispose. This is one of the central ideas of The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, by Geoffrey Miller (Doubleday, $27.50). Miller holds that the source of the traits we tend to find the most endearingly human -- qualities of character, talent, and demeanor -- have come to be built into our character during a million years in which women and men chose sexual partners. We can see striking examples of human sexual selection at work even in recent, historic times. The Wodaabe of Nigeria and Niger are beloved by travel photographers because of their geere wol festivals, where young men make themselves up (in ways that look feminine to Europeans) and dance vigorously to display endurance and health. Women then choose their favorites, preferring the tallest men with the biggest eyes, whitest teeth, and straightest nose. Over generations, the Wodaabe have grown taller than neighboring tribes, with whiter teeth, straighter noses, etc. If we can observe this kind of change (and Darwin himself noted other examples in human populations) in a few centuries, imagine what human mate choice could do to remake or refine homo sapiens in thousands of generations. A slight choice bias over such long time periods could radically reform aspects of humanity, as in fact it has: we are not merely the creation of blind, dumb forces of natural selection in evolution. Along with the obvious end-products of natural selection -- an efficient immune system, acute binocular vision, an easily incited fear of animals with large fangs -- we also possess species features of personality and character that we have created for ourselves in our courtship choices. Isn't Miller here talking about the aspects of humanity that are determined by culture? While there is no denying the importance of culture in creating the character of modern homo sapiens, civilization, and with it modern culture, only goes back 10,000 years, to the invention of agriculture and the establishment of cities. That's less than one percent of our hunter-gatherer history as humans and near proto-human ancestors. To be sure, in this vast, barely recorded expanse of prehistoric time we were buffeted by changing climatic environments and predation both animal and humanoid. But that world of red teeth and claws wasn't the only factor affecting our evolution: while we were being made by our environment and natural conditions, our ancestors were also exercising their tastes for "warm, witty, creative, intelligent, generous companions" as mates, and this shows itself in the constitution of both our present tastes and traits. Miller argues that during human evolution, "sexual selection seems to have shifted its primary target from body to mind." It is sexual selection, therefore, that is responsible for the astonishingly large human brain, an organ whose peculiar capacities wildly exceed survival needs on the African savannahs. And beyond its sheer size, the human brain makes possible a mind that is uniquely good at a long list of features found in all cultures but which are difficult to explain in terms of survival benefits: "humor, story-telling, gossip, art, music, self-consciousness, ornate language, imaginative ideologies, religion, morality." Miller offers us a new model to understand the evolved mind. It's not Descartes's ghost, nor the mental hydraulic system of Freud, nor the computer chip of cognitive science. From the standpoint of sexual selection, the mind is best seen as a gaudy, over-powered home-entertainment system, devised in order that our stone-age ancestors could attract, amuse, and bed each other. Bed, however, was not the only object, since the qualities of mind chosen and thus evolved made for enduring pairings, the rearing of children, and the creation of robust social groups. As a minor but telling example of our self-chosen overabundance of mental capacity, consider vocabulary. Nonhuman primates have up to twenty distinct calls. The average human knows perhaps 60,000 words, learned at an average of ten to twenty a day up to age 18. Does survival require such a huge vocabulary? It's a fact that 98% of our speech uses only about 4000 words. I. A. Richard and C. K. Ogden's Basic English for international communication used only 850 words. Surely no more than a couple of thousand words at most would have sufficed in the Pleistocene. The excess vocabulary is explained by sexual selection theory as a fitness and general intelligence indicator. Miller points out that the correlation between body symmetry (a well-known fitness indicator) and intelligence is only about 20%. Vocabulary size, on the other hand, is more clearly correlated to intelligence, which is why it is still used both in scientific testing and more generally by people automatically to gauge how clever a person is. Such an indicator is especially telling in courtship contexts. Indeed, extravagant, poetic use of language is associated worldwide with love, being a kind of cognitive foreplay. But it is also, he points out, something that can "give a panoramic view of someone's personality, plans, hopes, fears, and ideals." Little wonder that it might have been a choice item in the inventory of mate-selection criteria. This choice for more sophisticated language use altered forever the nature of the choosing primate -- us. The centerpiece of Miller's argument is the making and appreciating of art. Miller's idea of art, as we might expect, is wide-ranging and popular, drawn more from everywhere in culture: dancing, body-decoration, clothing, jewellery, hair-styling, architecture, furniture, gardens, cars, images such as calendars and paintings, creative uses of language, popular entertainments from religious festivals to TV soaps, music of all kinds, and on and on. Miller's discussion is less focused on the high-art culture of modernism and postmodernism, since it anyway distinguishes itself against popular taste. Artistic expression in general, like vocabulary creation and display, has its origins for Miller in its role in our early history as a fitness indicator: "Applied to human art, this suggests that beauty equals difficulty and high cost. We find attractive those things that could have been produced only by people with attractive, high-fitness qualities such as health, energy, endurance, hand-eye coordination, fine motor control, intelligence, creativity, access to rare materials, the ability to learn difficult skills, and lots of free time." It's worth noting that this view accords with a persistent intuition about art that can be traced from the Greeks to Nietzsche and Freud: art is somehow about sex. The mistake in traditional art theorizing has been to imagine that there must be some coded or sublimated sexual content in art. But it's not the content that's sexual in its primal nature, it's the display element of producing and admiring artists and their art in the first place that touches Pleistocene sexuality. To the extent that art-making is a fitness indicator in the Pleistocene, it would have to be something that low-fitness artists would find hard to duplicate (were it easy to fake, then it would not be accurate as a gauge of fitness). The loading the Pleistocene mind puts into its concept of art therefore gives us a perspective, at least at a psychological level, on some of the modern problems of aesthetic philosophy. Consider virtuosity: if music is a series of sounds in a formal relation, why should it make any difference to us that the sounds of a Paganini caprice are also difficult to realize on a violin? From the standpoint of sexual selection theory, this is no issue: virtuosity, craftsmanship, and the skillful overcoming of difficulties are intrinsic to art as display. And difficulty isn't all: art also involves costliness. Miller quotes Thorstein Veblen: "The marks of expensiveness come to be accepted as beautiful features of the expensive articles." As much as this might go dead against the modernist devaluing of skill and cost as central to the concept of art, it is in line with persistent reactions to art as we can understand the record of them for the last 10,000 years, showing up in the popular liking of skillful realistic painting, musical virtuosity, and expensive architectural details. This may not justify the philistinism of asking how much a famous museum painting is worth, but it does explain it. Again, admiration for the ability to do something difficult is not unique to art: we admire athletes, inventors, skillful orators or jugglers. Miller is claiming that this is at least as much intrinsic to art as it is to any other field of human endeavor. He cites Ellen Dissanayake's much-discussed notion of "making special" as essential to the arts. But whereas she sees making special as something that tends to promote an intense communal sense in a hunter-gatherer group, he interprets the phenomenon as more connected with display: "Indicator theory suggests that making things special means making them hard to do, so that they reveal something special about the maker." It follows that almost anything can be made artistic by executing it in a manner that would be difficult to imitate. "Art" as an honorific therefore "connotes superiority, exclusiveness, and high achievement." Cooking as a mundane productive activity is one thing; elevate it to "the art of cooking" and you emphasize its potential to be practiced as a skill and achievement that could be a useful fitness indicator. Miller adds to this a mordant comment: it is because artistic activity is an important fitness display that people will argue so passionately about whether something is or is not a work of art. Thus might the whole philosophical sub-field of aesthetics be understood as an extension of courtship rituals. Miller is aware just how controversial these ideas are. He grants that these days artistic elites may prefer abstraction to representation, but it is in the history of the tastes of hoi polloi that we're going to find the keys to the origin of the arts. So the vulgar gallery comment, "My kid could paint better than that," is vindicated as valid from the standpoint of sexual selection, and can be expected to be heard in popular artistic contexts for the rest of human time: people are not going to "learn" from their culture that skill doesn't count (any more than they will learn that general body symmetry does not indicate fitness). Moreover, even with the elites it's really not so different: the skill-discriminations of elites are simply accomplished at a more rarefied level. Cy Twombly's blackboard scribbles, which look to many ordinary folk like, well, children's blackboard scribbles, are viewed by high-art critics such as Arthur Danto as demonstrating an extremely refined artistic skill. That the works do not obviously show skill to the uninitiated simply demonstrates that they are being produced at a level that the unsophisticated cannot grasp. The esoteric nature of art, and with it status and hierarchy, thus remains in place. A book such as this, if it is to be taken seriously, should be able to gain some traction in traditional philosophy of art. And so it does. How pleasant to read a work on the origins of art that has resonances with Aristotle (the human delight in skillful representation and story-telling), Kant (the idea of a sensus communis, a universal, hard-wire response to art), and Hume (works of art can have cross-cultural appeal, and pass the Test of Time by showing attractiveness to succeeding generations of art audiences). One curious connection I noticed concerns a classic of modern aesthetics, The Concept of Criticism, by Francis Sparshott (long out of print, but recently brought back by the Sparshott fans at the Internet publishing company [3]www.cybereditions.com). Sparshott's book contains an unusual but compelling thesis: that all art, and not just the so-called performing arts, is in some sense performance. Indeed, aesthetic criticism is also performance -- critical performance about artistic performance. He doesn't say it, but perhaps any art-appreciative display could be performance too. There is nothing cynical in the way Sparshott expresses this. The vast world of art contains many authentic pleasures, and they are not just the pleasures of showing off, or intimidating others with demonstrations, true or false, of erudition. What Sparshott is saying is that the world of art is shot through with the assessment and evaluation of human action at all levels: how good was that pianist? Isn't that one of Liszt's corniest pieces? Wasn't the audience cold and unresponsive? How could the Times's critic write something as silly as that? That was a terrific review -- it taught me a lot. For Sparshott, writing in complete innocence of sexual selection theory, the world of art is saturated with something that resonates strikingly with Miller's account of the way in which all manner of activities associated with art invite value judgments of one kind or another. However, Miller's way of approaching this thesis goes temporarily off the rails when he needlessly adopts the cynical reading of such art-related behavior. In fact, he begins at one point to sound rather surprisingly like an old-fashioned Marxist: high-art taste simply expresses and is used to enforce status distinctions (the Marxist would drop in the word "bourgeois" at this point). "With folk aesthetics," he says, "the focus is on the art-object as a display of the creator's craft." In the aesthetics of the educated elite, on the other hand, "the focus is on the viewer's response as social display." This is not an acceptable generalization about the essential nature of high-art discourse. Of course, we all know that people sometimes strain to appear knowledgeable and sophisticated at gallery openings and concert intermissions. We know too that bad critics can be more interested in flowery displays of verbal fluency than in the works they write about. But to imagine that such display is therefore the only function of educated appreciation and criticism is wrong. Example: Jane has to drive her rented car from Denver to Albuquerque. Out of range of radio stations, she finds a CD of the Pastoral Symphony in the glove compartment. Listening to it while she crosses an empty Western landscape, she's transported, experiencing the purest, most intense pleasure music can produce. How, pray, does sexual selection figure in explaining this? Is her pleasure something connected with an admiration of the composition-display of Beethoven? Seems implausible, as does an explanation that she is taking pleasure in the performance-display of the orchestra. It is one thing to say that our huge brains and tendencies to take an evaluative interest in artistic displays have sources in Pleistocene interests in the qualities of potential mates. It's another thing to reduce those present pleasures solely to such Pleistocene interests. High-art criticism and discourse, even taken as display, is about a real, substantive experience that people have, to greater or less intensity. It is about the pleasure of art. If you accept his line on this, you might as well argue that Geoffrey Miller himself wrote The Mating Mind for sexual display, thereby implying that the subject content of the book itself has no particular intrinsic fascination. (And what's the authentic "folk aesthetics" analogue to Miller's scholarly, elitist performance? Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus?) The problem is that Miller has at this point forgotten his own recommendation in his chapter on the virtues. There he argues, very persuasively, that such virtues as kindness, bravery, and generosity have also been sexually selected for. He is quick to point out that this does nothing to discredit the moral status or validity of these attributes. We possess such virtues, and have selected mates with them, because they have romantic appeal. But because they evolved as sexual ornaments does not mean that every time we exhibit them we are engaged in sexual display. Miller says that "we must remember that a sexual function is not a sexual motivation." Fine so far, but even this falls short of what should be claimed: the exercise of the virtues does not in normal, daily human life have a sexual function at all, let alone a sexual motivation. It at best has a social function, if it can be said to have a function at all. With courting couples, mutual kindness can serve a sexual display function (as can courting men leaving big tips on restaurant tables). But kindness, like the pleasures of art, is a big-ticket item in the inventory of human pleasure and interests. It cannot be reduced to a courtship behavior, even if courtship behavior might have established its prominent positions in the repertoire of human virtues in the first place. There is too much slippage of this sort in The Mating Mind. It is one thing to give a intriguing explanation of the origins of some proclivity, such as the human will to create synonyms to extravagant excess, in terms of Pleistocene sexual selection. From this, it's a mistake to suggest that everyone today who walks out of a bookshop with a guide to a bigger vocabulary is somehow on the make with a potential sexual partner (or even trying to ascend a career ladder with a display of verbal sophistication). Forget about sex for a minute: knowing what words mean in ever larger numbers makes it possible to read with greater comprehension and hence more enjoyment; that's a good in and of itself. Even if the origin of the propensity is sexual, it may well be that neither the motivation nor the function is sexual for the person who today tries to learn more words. Exercising this capacity presents itself as an intrinsic pleasure without the slightest present connection to sex, except in human prehistory. Miller's uncertainty on this issue is underscored by some light-hearted remarks he makes at the end of the book about the human attitude toward knowledge and science. We've evolved pretty good responses to the physical world, with a sound understanding of mass and momentum, an intuitive grasp of plants and animals, and fairly good inferential capacities. But take us out of the practical, everyday exigencies of life, and we become instant suckers for ideologies that are "entertaining, exaggerated, exciting, dramatic, pleasant, comforting, narratively coherent, aesthetically balanced, wittily comic, or nobly tragic." Thanks to sexual selection, we ended up with big brains that are hungry for news and gossip, religion, urban myths, political ideas, wishful thinking and pseudoscience. We like such information, but we're not very good at fact checking. This may be a fair description of a considerable slice of humanity, call it homo tabloidus, but what about legitimate science? How did it manage to carve such an important place for itself in this welter of flashy fiction and seductive superstition? Miller's peculiar answer is that science itself is a "set of social institutions for channeling our sexually selected instincts for ideological display in certain directions according to strict rules." Science concentrates on intellectual display (instead of sport, art, charity, and other displays), and even uses its forums for display to single young people (in undergrad teaching). It's jarring to hear the normally Freudian term "channeling" introduced here, but it is part of the hydraulic-system model of mind that has temporarily taken hold of Miller's argument at this point. In any event, these pages, like some of those on art, deny the reader any sense that doing science might somehow, at least for some people on some occasions, be purely its own reward. Still, as Miller rightly points out, nature has never felt under any obligation to explain to us why it has designed us the way we are. Ripe fruits taste sweet and pleasurable, while rotting meat repels us, for sound biological reasons. But there need be no directly intelligible connection between a felt pleasure or pain and its true evolutionary origins, no connection available to mere introspection. So we find great pleasure in pastimes such as art and music, in probing conversation with charming company, in displays of athletic prowess, in an inventive metaphor or a well-told story. These pleasures too require an explanation, and so far sexual selection theory provides one of the most plausible and refreshing accounts we have. Contemporary art theory cannot afford to turn its back on The Mating Mind. From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 11 18:58:39 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 13:58:39 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: You Paid How Much for That Haircut? Message-ID: You Paid How Much for That Haircut? NYT November 21, 2004 By ALEX KUCZYNSKI ON a recent weekday afternoon, Orlando Pita, hairdresser to celebrities like Jennifer Connelly, Naomi Campbell and Kirsten Dunst, received a client in his new salon, Orlo, on the third floor of a nondescript walkup on Gansevoort Street. Mr. Pita, 42, stood mesmerized behind the woman's brunet head, puzzling in a way that suggested he was examining a compelling piece of abstract art. He worked in monastic silence, his scissors venturing only the most tentative stabs. With each move, he stepped back, occasionally blowing the hair with a drier, watching the way it waved under the heat, his brow pressed in concentration. The entire process lasted about 80 minutes. And each minute cost about $10: Mr. Pita charges $800 for a haircut. If that seems like an extraordinary sum to charge, consider that New York has always been the hub of the outrageously expensive coiffure. But what's different now is that there seems to be a race for the stratosphere, as if a haircut were the new It luxury item, as fetishized as a Kelly bag or a pair of Jimmy Choos. As big-ticket hairdressers sprout all over Manhattan - with an especially dense concentration in the district formerly known for meatpacking - stylists, salon owners and customers are loudly debating exactly how much is too much. Mr. Pita defended his $800 price tag, a new high for the city, and a fee that is the equivalent of twice the annual income of the average citizen of Bangladesh. "Your hair is one of the first things people notice about you," he said. "You can spend a lot on clothes, but you wear your hair every day. The luxury market is not about needs, or `Is it worth it?' It's about `What can I spend?' " Michael Gordon, the founder and president of Bumble and Bumble, which opened a salon on West 13th Street in May that is a curling iron's throw from Orlo, said he didn't buy that. At 40,000 square feet, with the most expensive haircut going for $250 but most much less, the Bumble and Bumble salon is pure populism next to Orlo's exclusivity. "On the one hand, there is probably nothing you're going to buy that you're going to wear every day for six weeks," Mr. Gordon said. "On the other, it concerns me that some of the stuff is ego driven, bravado, a competition to see who can be more expensive. It's the hair version of who can get an appointment with Pat Wexler." (He was referring to Dr. Patricia Wexler, a New York dermatologist.) For years New York stylists have been commanding prices many times higher than those in, say, Nebraska. Fr?d?ric Fekkai raised eyebrows when he first started charging $300 a cut in the late 1990's. (Mr. Fekkai has been cutting hair less frequently in recent years. He entered into a joint venture with Chanel in 1996 and is now chief executive of Fr?d?ric Fekkai & Company, which generated approximately $36 million in 2003, according to a report earlier this year in Women's Wear Daily. When he does cut hair, he charges $400 but is planning to raise prices next year, he wrote in an e-mail message.) Robbin McClain, the editor in chief of American Salon, a trade magazine, said her antennae first perked up several years ago upon hearing that John Sahag, the onetime tonsorial minister to clients like Jennifer Lopez, was charging $400 for a cut. "At that time that seemed really outrageous," Ms. McClain said. In the last year several high-profile hairdressers have opened salons with big ambitions or big price tags. Leading the fray was Sally Hershberger, whose eponymous salon opened on West 14th Street last fall. Ms. Hershberger, who became famous for the shaggily demure style worn by Meg Ryan, charges $600. According to a report by American Salon, the average women's haircut in the United States costs about $21 for a cut in a salon with fewer than 6 chairs, up to $44 for a salon with more than 13 chairs. So what makes a haircut that costs 14 to 18 times the average high-priced salon haircut in the rest of the country worth it in New York? "Look, even $250 is expensive," Ms. Hershberger said over a high-protein breakfast at Pastis on Thursday, her hair scrunched in a style college students typically refer to as "bed head." "But you have to remember, hair is the first thing people notice. When you get a facelift, people say, `Hey, you look great, did you change your hair?' " At Orlo, Mr. Pita said, he had at first had misgivings about charging such a high price. "I toyed with it at first," he said, a spectral black-and-white portrait of Kate Moss in platinum-blond hair staring down from the freshly painted white wall behind him. "Eight hundred dollars is a lot of money, but so is five, six, seven hundred dollars." But he said his price was a practical one, in line with the fees he charges for his work in the fashion industry doing runway shows and magazine shoots for photographers like Steven Meisel and companies like Gucci. His explanation didn't wash with Ms. McClain of American Salon. "To me that honestly doesn't make that much sense," she said. A stylist on a shoot or a fashion show is paid by a corporate source, typically willing to spend the kind of money necessary to achieve perfection in an image that might reach millions of people. "When you're on a shoot, someone else is paying for it, but when someone is in the salon, they're paying for it themselves," Ms. McClain said. "I don't get it." Mr. Pita stood by his number. "I decided not to offend my friends in the fashion industry," he said. Kenneth Battelle, who runs the Kenneth salon in the Waldorf-Astoria and whose clients have included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Gloria Vanderbilt, Brooke Astor, Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe, said that charging $800 for a haircut was "an ego trip." "And anyone who pays that much money to go to the meatpacking district to have their hair done is a meathead," he added. (Mr. Battelle charges $155, and does not accept tips.) Certainly, having one's hair cut by one of the high-priced brigade means careful scheduling, and earns the kind of bragging rights New Yorkers love, like securing a table at Per Se or a private viewing of the Modern's galleries before the official reopening. In the case of Serge Normant, the new stylist at John Frieda on Madison Avenue, he is required by the terms of his contract to be in the salon just four days a month. His price: $500. (He said he tried to avoid tips.) Mr. Normant said that because he, like Mr. Pita, has spent the bulk of his career working on runway shows and shoots and is not yet well known to the civilian salon-going public, anything higher than $500 would be "pretentious." "But I'm not saying that next year I won't raise the price," he added with a wink. Clients are quick to defend the pricey hairdressers. Kelly Killoren Bensimon, a former model and the author of "American Style" (Assouline, 2004), has had her hair styled by both Mr. Normant and Mr. Pita and said that women should consider the expense worth it. "I know women who spend $400 on a pair of shoes they wear once," Ms. Bensimon said. "Why not spend $600 on a haircut that lasts for six months and turns a nobody into a somebody?" The notion that a nobody will become a celebrated somebody by virtue of a haircut bothers Dr. Dawn Esposito, the chairwoman of the sociology department and a professor of popular culture at St. John's University in Queens. "That sounds like it's about the cult of celebrity and living vicariously," Dr. Esposito said. " `Wow, if this person has done Naomi Campbell's hair or Sarah Jessica Parker's hair or Jennifer Aniston's hair, then maybe I can be more like that celebrity. Imagine whose hair they have touched.' " While the price undoubtedly lures a clientele that is mostly wealthy, "you're probably also seeing a fair number of middle-class women who are putting the charge on their credit cards," she said. "And that's just sad. It's obscene the things we do with our disposable income. And the disposable income we imagine we have." Penny Howell Jolly, a professor of art history at Skidmore College and the principal author of "Hair: Untangling a Social History" (Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, 2004), said that hair has been known throughout history to function as a billboard, advertising one's status, class and political or religious beliefs. "But I'm not sure an $800 haircut would be evident walking down the street in the way that an 18th-century French aristocrat would be noticeable with a powdered wig," she said. "So what is it for? Your own satisfaction knowing that you can spend $800 on a haircut and almost no one else in the world can? Or maybe it's something you talk about at cocktail parties, and everyone in your social circle knows that this person charges $800, and it becomes a social marker that way." At Bumble and Bumble, Mr. Gordon (who cuts hair very rarely) said that high prices often make for an eventually boring clientele. "When I started out, training in these blue-blood salons in London in the 70's, we got a very specific type of person," he said. "These were women who visited the salon once, twice, five times a week. They didn't even touch their own hair with a hairbrush. And that's not the kind of client we want here. I knew we didn't want that Park Avenue, Madison Avenue, just-wealthy types. They don't want change. We want the cool people to come. And they do." But the cool celebrities flock to the high-end stylists. Ms. Hershberger often styles Sarah Jessica Parker's hair, she said. But Mr. Normant also mentioned last week that he had an appointment with Ms. Parker. John Barrett, whose salon is in Bergdorf Goodman, has also done Ms. Parker. And so has Mr. Pita. Celebrities, by the very nature of the work they do, tend to flit from one hairdresser to the next, who tout their celebrity-friend affiliations like 8-year-olds with cool baseball cards. The reality is, Mr. Barrett said, that "if you're the right person, you won't be paying anyway." The famous actress or singer won't pay; the public relations firm or the production company or the magazine will. "The reality is Sarah Jessica Parker and Julia Roberts get their hair done on a daily basis," Mr. Barrett said. "And the person who will do their hair is determined by the photographer or the art director of the shoot. I hate claiming actors as my own because actors tend to be fickle, and they go, as they should, from one person to another because they don't want to look the same all the time. I've done everybody, but do I claim they are my loyal clients and best friends? No." He added: "Actors struggle and struggle and are penniless, until one day they become famous and rich and no one allows them to pay for a thing. It's kind of hilarious and sad at the same time. When you are making $104 million a film, no one will let you pay for a haircut or a dress." Mr. Barrett charges $400 for a haircut, a price he calls "bargain basement." Whenever a stylist is written up prominently in a fashion magazine, he or she will start to see a group of clients Mr. Barrett refers to as "the searchers," a group probably eagerly dialing Mr. Normant (the subject of a glowing profile in November Vogue) and Mr. Pita (scheduled for January Vogue) right about now. "This is the troupe of people who read every beauty story, and they come in and get a haircut, and then they read someone else's name in a magazine and move on," Mr. Barrett said. "They'll go from stylist to stylist, constantly looking for the magic thing. I don't know quite what they are looking for. Because I don't think they ever find the magic. And I don't think what they are looking for can be found in a pair of scissors." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/fashion/21HAIR.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 11 18:59:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 13:59:11 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Devastation, Now Salvage, Page by Page Message-ID: Devastation, Now Salvage, Page by Page NYT November 20, 2004 By ANDREAS TZORTZIS LEIPZIG, Germany - Bent over books once held by Goethe and Schiller, workers in white lab coats brush away ash and creeping mold, doing their best to salvage the centuries-old victims of a recent fire that devastated one of Germany's cultural treasures. About 2,000 books are stacked on tables behind the workers in a large room at the Center for Book Conservation here. The books are a small portion of the 62,000 heavily damaged in a fire at the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar in September. "I was pretty crushed, because I know the library," said Manfred Anders, the center's director and chief executive, as he thumbed through brittle pages. "I know what sorts of books are in there. The value of the collection is in front of your eyes." In the weeks since the Sept. 2 fire, Mr. Anders has served as a sort of nurse to the books rescued from the flames and water. About 10 percent of the library's collection of a million books has been irreparably damaged, library officials say. But the 600-piece Bible collection, including Martin Luther's 1534 copy, and the huge Faust and Shakespeare collections have been saved or only slightly damaged. And between 25,000 and 30,000 other rare books are presumed lost, listed like missing persons in a databank on the library's Web site. "The texts in Weimar were of a special nature in that they had their own history," said Michael Knoche, the library's director since 1991, emphasizing their personal connections with the greats of German literature. "They were used by Goethe, Schiller and Wieland. They wrote on the book covers, or margins." Geothe was himself administrator of the library, which was established in 1691. The fire, which the police blame on an electrical short in the 473-year-old building, started in the upper two floors and devastated the 18th-century Rococo salon built by the library's namesake, Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxony-Weimar. Before firefighters could control the flames, most of the duchess's personal musical collection, thousands of books from the 16th to 18th century and 33 oil paintings were gone. Those damaged by the fire and water were quickly shipped off to Mr. Anders's center, one of the largest in the world. In the last few weeks, specialists there have dried and "stabilized" them. Now, Mr. Anders and library officials are preparing for perhaps an even bigger challenge: holding the interest of the government and the public long enough to help finance the tens of millions it will cost to rebuild the damaged collection. "I am very worried about that," Mr Knoche said. He was among those in the human chain formed to pull books out of the library even as the roof continued to burn. "The reaction we received after the fire, it was overwhelming," he said, adding that he feared that in the three years it is estimated the building restoration will take, at a cost of more than $12 million (10 million euros), the public will have lost interest. And no one is ready to talk about how long it will take to restore the cultural treasures the building contained. In the week after the disaster, trucks filled with books arrived daily at the center, situated in a bland office complex on the outskirts of Leipzig. About 34,000 had suffered heavy water damage and another 28,000 both fire and water damage. It will be up to Mr. Anders, Mr. Knoche and a team of book restoration experts to determine just how great a blow the fire was to Europe's cultural legacy. Clearly, the scope of the disaster has not been lost on literary fans abroad, or on the residents of Weimar, many of whom seem to have almost a personal attachment to the city's treasures. More than $2 million has so far been donated to the library, either from benefit concerts or private donations. But the amount is not nearly enough, experts say. Complete restoration of a single book, depending on how great the damage, can cost between $491 and $3,194. With an estimated 62,000 books with various degrees of damage, the total could reach more than $73 million. A $4.9 million pledge from the state and federal governments will go to reconstructing and renovating the Baroque library. The $1.8 million devoted to book restoration is only intended for immediate first aid - brushing the books clear of debris and mold and forcing them back into their original shapes. That done, the books are wrapped in plastic bags and stacked in a large freezer at minus 68 degrees Fahrenheit. They are finally transferred to a gigantic freeze-drying machine that evaporates the ice into gas, so that the books don't suffer additional water damage. "First we dry them, and then the question is what is possible," said Mr. Anders, a chemist by training. "And that question is not necessarily dependent on the technology, but the financial possibilities." He said that when it comes to the country's cultural legacy, German public officials are more inclined to invest in building preservation than in the written treasures contained inside. Book restorers say their trade is a small but growing industry in Germany ultimately limited by how much spare cash individual donors, foundations or governments have. "Restoration is a preventative measure for the future," said Helmut Bansa, a retired professor and publisher of the trade publication Restaurator. "Like in other areas, it is often cut in order to save money, to the disadvantage of future generations." Following the floods along the Elbe River in Germany in 2002, book restorers saw a spike in interest in their work, but that curiosity ebbed. For the last several weeks, reporters and photographers have descended on Mr. Anders's center asking for interviews and filming portions of the 80 tons of soaked and blackened books being pulled out of boxes. Mr. Anders is grateful for every photo op, knowing that his business often depends on the free publicity. Spun off of the German National Library in 1998, the Center for Book Conservation has seen the number of contracts it receives sink in recent years, but it still has one from the Library of Congress in the United States - to work on 10,880 pages of American newspapers from the 1940's and 1950's to extend their lifespans. The Weimar state agency responsible for the library estimates that the first books will not be restored until the end of 2005 at the earliest. To raise money for this work, a number of events are planned, including an exhibition of the art saved from the fire. "At the moment, we have no other choice but to keep people talking about us," Mr. Knoche said. Thousands of books, stabilized for the time being by the center, have already made their way back to Weimar. The deliveries will continue at the rate of roughly 2,000 a week until the middle of 2005. The library already has an underground storage facility in which it had planned to hold the collection ahead of its move to a new building. It was five weeks before the move that the fire broke out. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/20/books/20pres.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 11 19:00:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 14:00:41 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] How the Jews Got the Ten Commandments Message-ID: How the Jews Got the Ten Commandments God went to the Arabs and said, I have Commandments for you that will make your lives better. And the Arabs asked, What are Commandments? And the Lord said, They are rules for living. Can you give us an example? Thou shalt not kill. Not kill? We're not interested. So he went to the Blacks and said, I have Commandments. And the Blacks wanted an example, and the Lord said, Honor thy Father and Mother. Father? We don't know who our fathers are. So He went to the Mexicans and said, I have Commandments. And the Mexicans wanted an example, and the Lord said, Thou shalt not steal. Not steal? We're not interested. He went to the French and said, I have Commandments. The French wanted an example and the Lord said, Thou shalt not commit adultery. Not commit adultery? We're not interested. So, he finally went to the Jews and said, I have commandments. Commandments? They said, How much are they? They're free. We'll take 10. From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 11 19:08:03 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 14:08:03 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Scientist: How zombie networks fuel cybercrime Message-ID: How zombie networks fuel cybercrime http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996616 20044.11.3 (note date) [What are the best sites for finding about the range of opinion on the threats of cyberterrorism? I note that the Department of Homeland Security did not make a position of Assistant Secretary for Cyberterrorism. Such a position would have meant this Asst. Sec'y would be second in line to see the President of the Central Gummint. As it is now, the chief for cyberterrorism is buried five layers deep. [We all know that our ports are almost completely insecure and that the power grid and water supply are only marginally less insecure. But cyberterrorism may be the biggest threat of all. I just don't have enough information to form an opinion. HELP!] In June, the websites of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft disappeared for hours when their servers were swamped with hundreds of thousands of simultaneous webpage requests that they could not possibly service. It sounds a tough attack to orchestrate, but executing it could not have been simpler. A hacker kicked off the assault by typing a simple command into an internet chat room. That command awakened dormant software "bots" that had been planted in tens of thousands of PCs around the world with the help of computer viruses. When the bots read the command in an internet chat room they were monitoring, they began firing a blizzard of page requests at the servers hosting the company sites. Result: the servers effectively got tongue-tied trying to service the requests, and had to go offline until the attack ceased. This modus operandi is fuelling a growing crime wave against e-commerce in which these networks of bots, dubbed botnets, are increasingly being offered for hire by hacking groups. Want to take down a commercial rival's website? Or how about spamming, perhaps sending out letters "phishing" for people's passwords and bank account details? And gambling sites that need a continuous web presence to make money are a favourite target for botnet-based blackmail. Disorganised crime The distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on Yahoo, Microsoft and Google was especially effective because it targeted one of their web-hosting companies, Akamai Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But Akamai is far from alone in falling prey to botnet sabotage. For instance, just last week, UK online betting firm Blue Square fell victim to a botnet-based blackmail attempt. And an executive at a satellite TV firm in Massachusetts has been charged with hiring several botnets to disrupt the websites of three rivals, costing one of their web-hosting firms $1 million. The case marks a watershed: "It's the first time we have prosecuted individuals for the mercenary use of botnets," says Frank Harrill of the FBI's cybercrime squad in Los Angeles. "But it won't be the last." While DDOS attacks are nothing new, they used to have a limited impact. A group of hackers would agree on a time to simultaneously contact the target web server manually, but they could rarely conscript enough attacking PCs to overwhelm every channel of a major-league website. But botnets make it a piece of cake to orchestrate distributed attacks from a vast ad hoc network. You could call it disorganised crime. Zombie PCs So how does an innocent PC become part of a botnet? First, a computer virus installs a "back door" program that leaves an internet port on a PC open. Both SoBig and MyDoom employed this tactic. The hacker then probes PCs connected to the net to look for open ports and, when they find one, they install a bot on its hard drive. Security experts call these bot-loaded PCs "zombies", since the hacker can wake them from the dead on command. Because bots can be placed on any number of PCs, and chat rooms provide a useful central location from which to control them, there is no technical limit to the size of a botnet, says Viki Navratilova, a systems administrator at the University of Chicago. And the Internet Relay Chat protocol that chat rooms run is a very convenient means of command and control, says David Dittrich, a systems administrator at the University of Washington in Seattle, because it allows the person who runs the chat room to communicate with all members (or bots) simultaneously. In January, attacking botnets typically comprised around 2000 innocent computers. But by May that had risen to more than 60,000, according to the latest research from e-security firm Symantec Antivirus. Fuelling this is the increase in always-on broadband connections, which makes it much more likely that a large number of zombies will be logged onto a chat room at any one time. Reliable income The botnet controllers are cashing in. Eavesdropped chat-room exchanges reveal that a DDOS attack appears to cost between $500 and $1500, with smaller botnet attacks priced between $1 and $40 per zombie harnessed. "It's such a reliable way to make money that hackers don't need day jobs," says Navratilova. From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 11 19:40:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 14:40:25 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Robert Nelson: Frank Knight and Original Sin Message-ID: Frank Knight and Original Sin http://independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_06_1_nelson.pdf Robert H. Nelson is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The Independent Review, v.VI, n.1, Summer 2001, ISSN 1086-1653, pp. 5-25. [This is certainly the best paper on the legendary teacher, Frank Knight, that I have ever read. Good teachers, I suppose, teach the subject in an organized fashion, and there are continual efforts afloat to assess teachers on how well they teach their subjects. But the best teachers do not teach the subject; they teach themselves. And so it was with James Buchanan (see below), a Knight student that was my dissertation director, and whose classes were more about his current thinking than anything else. He would honor mere graduate students, expecting us to evaluate his ideas and his research as though we were colleagues. [And so it was with Gordon Tullock, too, though I don't think he was ever a Knight pupil, who also taught himself. But the best example was a definite Knight pupil, Rutledge Vining, who taught the same thing no matter whether the course was in the concept of economic legislation or the spatial distribution of an economic system. What he taught--what he pounded in to all his students, none of whom he thought ever understood him--were three ideas, his own ideas. These ideas stuck. I can scarcely think of any problem without running them through Mr. Vining's three ideas. They were: 1. Find out exactly what is the problem being complained about; 2. Know the difference between the playing of the game and the rules of the game (and between the laws and the constitution); 3. Know the difference between (probability) outcome and (probability) process. [I met Knight only briefly toward the end of his life. I was memorable, since Jim spoke about him so often. (Knight was his dissertation director, thus making him my grand-director.) Knight was only moderately prolific, Vining scarcely at all, and neither could get published today. I don't think Vining's writings would be much appreciated by someone who did not know him, but Knight can be read with profit by all, letting his way of viewing the world, questioning the world seep in and without having to decide whether Knight is right or wrong. [Leo Strauss, the political philosopher and alleged godfather of neo-conservatism, is another legendary teacher, and he must be, for I can't discern from his writings what the fuss was about. In any case, the article below is another proof how religion and a religious upbringing can pervade one's thinking, no matter how violently one has rejected it.] ----------------- Many people would say that John Maynard Keynes made a greater impact on the history of the twentieth century than any other economist. Yet it would not be farfetched to suggest that Frank H. Knight deserves to be ranked with Keynes in this regard. The manner of their influence, to be sure, was altogether different. Besides writing The General Theory, Keynes circulated his policy advice at the highest levels of the British government and had a great ability to influence public opinion through his popular writings. In complete contrast, Knight made his great impact on the world as a teacher. Indeed, the history of the Chicago school of economics begins with Frank Knight. Without his teaching in the economics department at the University of Chicago, the Chicago school, which was destined to have such extraordinary influence on the world during the second half of the twentieth century, might never have come into existence. According to Melvin Reder, "the personal affection and mutual esteem in which Knight and his proteges held one another facilitated the collaborative efforts of the latter. The informal but very effective promotional aspect of the Chicago School sprang from the affinity group of Knight's students and proteges that formed in the middle 1930s. The principal members of this group were Milton and Rose Director Friedman, George Stigler, Allen Wallis, and Henry Simons." As a result, "the 'baton passer' of the initial Chicago group . . . was Knight" (1982, 6-7). Knight's greatness as a teacher manifested itself not in inspirational lecturing or in instilling a specific body of knowledge in the students and younger faculty who passed through the Chicago department. Indeed, beyond the common antagonism of most leading members of the Chicago school to plans for the scientific management of society by government, Knight's followers in the Chicago school would later reject many of his beliefs. Knight's greatest source of influence was the spirit of radical questioning that he inculcated. Almost in the manner of Socrates, Knight doubted every orthodoxy, often extending that attitude to his own arguments (Raines and Jung 1986). As George J. Stigler has commented, Knight was the original source of the Chicago tradition that "great reputation and high office deserve little respect." At Chicago, students were taught a "studied irreverence toward authority" that had a "special slant: contemporary ideas were to be treated even more skeptically than those of earlier periods" (1995, 98). Following Knight, Chicago economists such as Milton Friedman, Stigler, Ronald Coase, Gary Becker, and others would all show great independence of mind. Chicago economists have consistently exhibited the courage to advance ideas that at least initially might be offensive if not outrageous to many holders of conventional opinion, including in many cases those in the economic mainstream of American society. Yet much that was initially rejected is now the conventional wisdom. All in all, the impact of the Chicago school not only on American economics but on all American social science and on government policy has been nothing short of astonishing. Since 1975, thirteen winners of the Nobel Prize in economic science have had a close connection, either as a faculty member or as a recipient of the Ph.D. degree, with the University of Chicago. In the 1990s, seven of the seventeen Nobel Prize winners in economics (some years had multiple awards), including Coase (1991), Becker (1992), and Robert Lucas (1995), were past or (mostly) present faculty members at Chicago.1 Frank Knight and Chicago Knight came to the Chicago economics department in 1927 and remained an active member well past his retirement from full-time teaching in 1951 and until his death in 1972. Stigler wrote his Ph.D. thesis under Knight, and Milton Friedman was a Knight student in the 1930s, later describing him as "our great and revered teacher" (Friedman and Friedman 1981, 117). As the old saying went at Chicago, "there is no God, but Frank Knight is his prophet" (Buchanan 1982, xi; see also Buchanan 1991). Coase once related that he could conceive of himself matching the achievements of many of the leading members of the economics profession, but "I simply cannot imagine myself to be like Frank Knight. I guess that amounts to saying that Knight is a genius." In a reminiscence on his years as a graduate student taking Knight's courses in the 1940s, Don Patinkin commented that Knight frequently spoke in a "rambling and often obscure manner." Yet, because of the demands he made of his students and the range of his thought, he was still "a great teacher" whose lessons would continue to guide his students in their "thinking many years later" (1981, 25-26). James [1. Other present or past Chicago economists who won Nobel prizes in the 1990s were Merton Miller (1990), Robert Fogel (1993), Myron Scholes (1997), and Robert Mundell (1999). Chicago economist James Heckman won the prize in 2000.] Buchanan, who studied under Knight in the 1940s, would later observe that "I find myself confronted time and again with Knight's much earlier and more sophisticated statement of the same thing [that I said later]. It is as if on rereading Knight I am retracing the sources of my own thoughts, which themselves have somehow emerged without conscious recognition that they are derived from him" (1982, x). Knight did not consider himself a Christian-indeed, he was famous for his antagonism to traditional religion (Kern 1988). Yet, he joined a theologian to write a book (each author wrote separate sections) called The Economic Order and Religion (Knight and Merriam [1945] 1979). When the time came to deliver his presidential address to the American Economic Association in 1950, Knight self-consciously labeled it his "sermon" to the profession (Knight 1951). In teaching his economics courses, Knight was, as Patinkin observed, prone to engage in "long digressions on the nature of man and society-and God" (1981, 46). The core social and economic problem in Knight's view was one of "discovery and definition of values-a moral, not to say a religious, problem," which stood in great contrast to progressive aspirations to the "value-free" scientific management of society (Knight 1936, 52). Knight is best known to most economists today for his influential 1921 book Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, in which he undertook one of the first systematic explorations of a subject that has since become more central to economic theory: the impact of informational uncertainties as a determining factor in the organization of industry (Dewey 1990). However, Knight would soon move on to become more of a moral philosopher than a microeconomist (Sally 1997). Although current economists typically know little about Knight as moral philosopher, it was in that capacity that the key figures in the Chicago school of economics encountered him and in which he exerted his greatest influence on its future development. If the ethics of self-interest is the core moral/religious issue for economics, Knight's way of thinking about the place of self-interest in society contrasted starkly with his fellow economists' thoughts on the subject. Knight doubted the possibility of the scientific management of society through the manipulation of self-interest in the market or otherwise. Human reason, he believed, was a frail instrument, often corrupted by the baser elements in human nature. In contrast to the great majority of economists of his time, he thought that the economic problem in society was ultimately a religious problem. The defense of freedom-including the opportunity to express self-interest in the market-must rest not on a scientific demonstration but on an adequate moral/philosophical foundation. For Knight, that foundation lay in the central moral importance he ascribed to individual liberty. He had a strong libertarian strain, the source of a powerful libertarian influence that continues at Chicago to the present time. Yet he did not believe that individuals can exist independent of a grounding in some culture or society; human beings, he thought, are social by nature. Everyone has to be grounded in some cultural system, historically including religion as a main source of group identity. Nevertheless, given the inevitably wide range of religious views and the potential for strong disagreements, the market provides a place where people of different creeds can come together for voluntary exchange and mutual benefit, an alternative much preferable to the wars and other terrible conflicts of past human history, often at their most destructive when fought in the name of religion. If Knight's views were unusual for an economist of his time, they were less novel than it appeared to many of his professional contemporaries. Indeed, in a secular form, Knight was expressing a classic Christian view of fallen man, beset by original sin. In a long-standing Christian tradition (if not the only such tradition), the existence of private property and the marketplace has been seen as an unfortunate but necessary concession to the pervasive presence of evil in the world. In the past in the Garden of Eden and in the future in heaven, there will be no private property (or government). In the current world infected by sin, private property and the pursuit of profit are the best means of maintaining a semblance of order in society. As Richard Schlatter explains, a longstanding Christian view holds that "since the fall [in the Garden] the natures of men, all of them depraved, make necessary instruments of social domination. The division of property, which gives some men a power over the lives of others, is one such instrument" ([1951] 1973, 35). For Knight, even a priesthood-of economists or others-cannot be exempt from the general human condition; the professional experts will be sinners as well. Knight is the beginning of a fundamental break of the Chicago school with the economic mainstream of the time, a new assumption that self-interest will be expressed not only in the marketplace but in the actions of government and indeed perhaps in every area of society. It is a secular form of an old view, characteristic of Calvin and other Protestant reformers, that sin has fundamentally invaded every aspect of human existence. Although Roman Catholic theologians also recognized the centrality of sin in the world, they tended to express considerably greater faith in human reason and in the possibilities for rational striving toward improvement of the human condition. Deluded Progressives The key economist in the founding of the American Economic Association, Richard Ely, argued early in his career (he later would be more cautious in his rhetoric, although his core values would not change much) that the organizing principle of social behavior should be the biblical commandment that "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Thus, it was impossible to "serve God and mammon; for the ruling motive of the one service-egotism, selfishness-is the opposite of the ruling motive of the other-altruism, devotion to others, consecration of heart, soul and intellect to the service of others." For Ely in the Social Gospel phase of his life in the 1880s and 1890s the chief motivating force in the world, even in labor and business, must be "love" of fellow human beings rather than the "self-interest" that most economists had long favored (Ely 1889, 1, 6-7). Ely's attitudes in this respect were representative of those of many leading intellectuals of the American Progressive movement (commonly dated from 1890 to 1920), often associated with the Social Gospel movement (Hopkins 1940). For Knight, this outlook was just one example of how Progressive intellectuals had substituted "romantic" thinking for a realistic approach to the human condition.2 It is impossible, he said, to conceive of the application of "the 'love' doctrine" as a guiding economic principle "over, say, the population of a modern nation-and, of course, it must ultimately be over the world since, for a world religion [such as Christianity], national boundaries have no moral significance" (1939, 126-127, 129-131). Similarly, Knight strongly rejected the economic determinism characteristic of American Progressive thought and the resulting hopes for a radical improvement in the condition of the world (perhaps attaining a state of affairs in which "love" would in fact rule) if the economic problem could ever be finally solved. As he stated, "there is no reason to believe that if all properly economic problems were solved once for all through a fairy gift to every individual of the power to work physical miracles, the social struggle and strife would either be reduced in amount or intensity, or essentially changed in form, to say nothing of improvement-in the absence of some moral revolution which could by no means be assumed to follow in consequence of the change itself " (1939, 63). Thus, as Knight saw matters, a core assumption of the Progressive gospel-that economic events are the driving forces in history-was a serious misreading of the human condition. The presence of sin in the world cannot be abolished so easily as by the mere achievement of a state of great material abundance. As Knight once put the matter, The idea that the social problem is essentially or primarily economic, in the sense that social action may be concentrated on the economic aspect and other aspects left to take care of themselves, is a fallacy, and to outgrow this fallacy is one of the conditions of progress toward a real solution of the social problem as a whole, including the economic aspect itself. Examination will show that while many conflicts which seem to have a noneconomic character are "really" economic, it is just as true that what is called "economic" conflict is "really" rooted in other interests and other forms of rivalry, and that these would remain unabated after any conceivable change in the sphere of economics alone. (1939, 63-64) In the grand scheme of things, if one motive had to be emphasized, rather than "love," that motive for Knight would be power. The "solemn fact is that what people most commonly want for themselves is their 'own way,' as such, or especially power" [2. This kind of thinking was still widespread in Christian social reform circles even in the late twentieth century. Max Stackhouse and Dennis McCann comment that "all too many religious leaders still cling to the belief that capitalism is greedy, individualistic, exploitative and failing; that socialism is generous, community-affirming, equitable and coming; and that the transition from the one to the other is what God is doing in the world" (1991, 44).] (1939, 131). Knight sometimes chastised free-market economists, including his own Chicago colleagues, for putting too much emphasis on standard economic motives. In their thinking, "the main argument for laissez-faire was instrumental . . . it was intended to increase efficiency"-not so very different in this respect from the Progressive "gospel of efficiency." For Knight, freedom instead means a maximum of power for an individual to control his or her own actions, and this power must be "an end or value in itself," not something merely "instrumental to efficiency" (1939, 67). His view was closer to a libertarian than a mainstream economic way of thinking. Indeed, separating himself clearly from the economic mainstream of his time, Knight believed that "men actually prefer freedom to efficiency, within limits; and both our highest ideals and our laws and institutions recognize that they ought to do so if they do not." Knight was even prepared to argue that people "may even rightly be forced to be free" (1945, 100). To submit to power was for Knight to succumb to the temptations of a modern devil-to choose sin over salvation. No one should be allowed, any more in modern times than in days of old, to make that choice. For Knight-somewhat paradoxically in light of the obvious, powerful influence of Christianity on his own thinking-one of the main threats to freedom lay in the Christian religion (Kern 1988). Indeed, the "history of Christianity" shows that the role of its teachings "has been to sanction established morality, law, and authority, not reform, at least in any constructive or progressive sense." In the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church "became a theocracy" and demonstrated as much concern for preserving its own power as any kings or other secular authorities (Knight 1944, 332). Once in power, Christianity forgot all its core messages of love of fellow human beings and became a "violently intolerant" religion, given to episodes of fierce persecution of heresy and oppression of perceived enemies. Knight noted the "familiar fact" that for many centuries "the Church never condemned or officially opposed slavery" (1939, 125). Whereas the Progressive views of the mainstream of the economics profession followed in the natural-law tradition of emphasizing a rational world, Knight was particularly hostile to the ideas of natural law central to much of the development of Roman Catholic theology over the centuries. He never made any secret of his special dislike for the Roman Catholic Church. Natural-law concepts, he argued, had been "bandied about since the earliest beginnings of the European intellectual tradition," but they had mainly served "to beg the question in favor of any position which a particular writer or school happened to wish to defend or promote." At one time or another, leading theologians of the time had declared rigid social castes, rule by absolute authority, and various other forms of oppression to conform to the laws of nature. Knight concluded that "natural law has served as a defense for any existing order against any change and as an argument for change in any direction" (1944, 320). The whole concept of natural law, in short, was for Knight nothing short of an intellectual scandal- the perverting of reason rather than its reaching to the greatest heights. Scientific Oppression If the Christian religion had often been false to its own founding principles, in the modern age the Christian churches were no longer the greatest threat to human freedom. As Knight explained, even as Christianity has been much weakened in our own time, we now have to confront a new "milieu in which science as such is a religion" (1936, 53). Knight would write in 1947 that the newer forms of religion promoted a "gospel" that involved a kind of "salvation by science," following in the path of the old natural-law theories that promised a path to salvation by following God's laws. The Progressive follies of his day thus followed in a long tradition of religious pandering to power and oppression in the name of the human faculty of reason (Hammond 1991). The "plea of communism," Knight argued, with its claims to scientific authority, is much "like that of Christianity," both asserting unique access to final truth and in this way justifying "absolute authority, ignoring freedom" (1951, 277). Communism is only one of the modern totalitarianisms, each of which offers "a priesthood as the custodian of [scientific] Truth, 'conditioning' each generation in helpless infancy to unquestioning belief." These new modern forms of scientific authoritarianism drew on "an inheritance" from earlier Christian traditions of "conformity to a sacred law and obedience to consecrated authority, Holy Mother Church and Holy Father King" (1951, 275). Knight saw great danger in the tendency of most social scientists to believe that human behavior is rationally explainable in terms of behavioral laws and principles analogous to the laws discovered by the physical sciences (Knight 1924). This belief would serve merely to open the way to the expression of less-exalted motives: "Any attempt at use of the unqualified procedures of natural science in solving problems of human relations is just another name for a struggle for power, ultimately a completely lawless one" (1948, 299). Just as the construction of a dam to control a raging river depended on knowledge of physical science, the advocates of the "scientific management" of society sought to employ social science to bring human actions under similar control (Gonce 1972). Given the frailties of the political arrangements by which human beings governed themselves and the unruly character of human nature, the end of human freedom was likely to be among the consequences. The grand schemes of American Progressive economists, increasingly dominant in the mainstream of the profession in the years after World War II, rested on an assumption that the world is a rational place, but they were bound to fail in the face of "human nature being as irrational as it is" (Knight 1966, 166). Knight directed his barbs at, for example, a leading work of sociology published in 1947, one year before Paul Samuelson's introductory textbook Economics first appeared, and reflecting a value system similar to Samuelson's. Much as Samuelson throughout his career would seek to convert economics to the methods of physics, the author of this best-selling work of popular sociology, George Lundberg, believed that "the problems of personal life, social relations, and political and economic organization are of the same kind as the prediction and control of events in (non-human) nature and so will similarly yield gradually to the same mode of attack." In order to solve social problems, as Knight characterized Lundberg's views, all that is needed "is that intellectual leaders . . . be converted to the scientific point of view" in order that "the social problem will be solved by the application of scientific method" (Knight 1947b, 229, 235). Such thinking is, however, as Knight labeled it, mere rationalist and "scientistic propaganda" (1947b, 230). Indeed, the "fetish of 'scientific method' in the study of society is one of the two most pernicious forms of romantic folly that are current among the educated"-as bad as the natural-law follies of earlier Christian eras. The plain fact is that a fully rational "science of human behavior, in the literal sense, is impossible." Or again, a "natural or positive science of human conduct" is "an absurdity" (Knight 1951, 258, 260, 261). A key reason that a science of society is impossible is that the scientific analysis is not independent of the object under scrutiny. Social scientists' ideas themselves can change the conception of society and thus alter the very character of the object being studied. Moreover, even if a true science of society were possible, it would not be desirable (Knight 1925). An individual whose behavior is perfectly and scientifically predictable is not a real human being. It is the element of self-consciousness and the ability to choose-the existence of "free will" in the classic Christian formulation-that distinguishes us from the animal world. If everything is as determinate as in biology, what is to separate a man or woman in moral terms from a dog or an insect?3 It may well be, Knight commented, "the idiot" who has the greatest amount of "happiness" among human beings, but the pursuit of this kind of pleasurable sensation "is not what makes human life worth while" (1925, 279). Many centuries earlier, Martin Luther had similarly complained that the Roman Catholic Church had diminished its followers and endangered human freedom by encouraging the faithful to believe that life, even in such fundamental matters as the attainment of salvation in the hereafter, could follow mechanical rules established by the church hierarchy. Rather, even if a human being is a biological entity governed by laws of physical nature, "we must [finally] understand ourselves and each other and act intelligently in relation to both, in other terms altogether." Hence, the rational methods of science- yielding the legalistic decrees of any church, Roman, scientific, or otherwise-can hold "no clue to the answer to the essential problems of free society" and to the liv [3. Among contemporary economists, one finds the clearest echo of Knight's thinking in the writings of his former student James Buchanan. For example, Buchanan considers that a person who behaves strictly according to scientific laws "could not be concerned with choice at all." Indeed, it is "internally contradictory" to speak of individual "choice making under [scientific] certainty." If human dignity and freedom require the power to choose, if the ability to do either good or evil must be within the scope of individual decision making, then that human behavior, Buchanan believes, cannot be strictly determined by scientific rules. The scientific view of a human being as a mechanical instrument denies a person his or her basic humanity (Buchanan 1979).] ing of lives of genuine "spiritual freedom" (Knight 1948, 299). In opposition to Roman Catholic theology, the Protestant Reformation proclaimed that salvation is "by faith alone" and that faith is ultimately a mystery only God can fathom. Even in the modern age, a "free society" must act to "find norms somewhere outside the factual space-time world" with which the rational-scientific method is concerned. In these regards, Knight was following in the tradition of old-fashioned Protestant theology, so contrary to the rationalism of contemporary economics, that original sin would inevitably undermine any human efforts to impose systematic rationality on the world. One of Luther's favorite sayings was the message of St. Paul that "the flesh lusteth against the spirit and the spirit contrary to the flesh," and therefore "so that ye cannot do the things that ye would do" (Kent 1997, 101). Knight's thinking thus embraced a characteristic Protestant skepticism of a world of beneficial human "works." He was opposed to the core ideas of American Progressive thought, found in such influential works as Samuelson's textbook Economics and in the optimistic faith that the scientific management of society (a particular form of "works") is the path to a future perfection of human existence. Contrary to the rationalist theology of natural law or the mechanical prescriptions of science, no given set of rules will ever show the way to heaven, on earth or elsewhere. As seen by Ross Emmett, a leading contemporary interpreter of Knight's moral philosophy, Knight's thinking reflected an underlying theological view of the basic economic choices facing any society: In a society which has no recourse to the providential nature of a God who is present in human history, the provision of a justification for the way society works is a "theological" undertaking. Despite the fact that modern economists often forget it, their investigations of the universal problem of scarcity and its consequences for human behavior and social organization is [sic] a form of theological inquiry: in a world where there is no God, scarcity replaces moral evil as the central problem of theodicy, and the process of assigning value becomes the central problem of morality. Knight's (implicit) recognition of the theological nature of economic inquiry in this regard is one of the reasons for his rejection of positivism in economics and his insistence on the fundamentally normative and apologetic character of economics. In some sense, therefore, it is appropriate to say that Knight understood that his role in a society which did not or could not recognize the presence of God was similar to the role of a theologian in a society which explicitly acknowledged God's presence. As a student of society, he was obliged to contribute to society's discussion of the appropriate mechanisms for the coordination of individuals' actions, and to remind the members of society that their discussion could never be divorced from consideration of the type of society they wanted to create and the kind of people they wanted to become. (1994, 118-119) Rediscovering Original Sin In the modern era of the Western world, there have been three main competing visions of the origins of human nature. The first is the traditional Judeo-Christian view of human nature corrupted by original sin since the fall of man in the Garden of Eden, leading most men and women to lead lives of falsity, hatred, theft, and other forms of corruption of their truer and better natures. The second is the Darwinian view, in which human nature is determined by a genetic inheritance that is the product of many thousands (or millions) of years of biological evolution and in which human nature is a form of behavior that has developed to promote the long-run survival of the human species (any concepts of good and evil having no ultimate moral content, but serving as instruments in the workings of the evolutionary process). In the third main view, human nature is shaped by the current environment, predominantly the economic environment-hence creating the possibility that human beings might act on their own to abolish poverty and other causes of bad behavior and thereby eventually to perfect the conditions of existence on earth. A great iconoclast (in the spirit of Luther and Calvin, we might say "protester"), Knight seemingly rejected all of these explanations for the existence of evil, which were grounded in a particular view of human nature, yet he did not offer any explicit alternative of his own. One must read behind the lines to find Knight's views of the human condition. Indeed, despite all his outward hostility to Christianity, his own theology-mainly expressed in an implicit fashion-followed surprisingly closely in the Calvinist understanding of Christian faith.4 Although any notion of an actual fall in the Garden of Eden might be a myth, human beings in Knight's view are corrupt creatures whose actual behavior in the world corresponds closely to the biblical understanding of the consequences of original sin.5 Knight's system of thought is so far outside the assumptions of the economics mainstream that most economists have simply chosen to ignore his moral philosophy, concentrating on the technical arguments at which he was also skilled. His preaching is for many economists virtually incomprehensible, at times a seeming muddle of confused if not contradictory ideas, made all the more puzzling by the obvious fact of his central role in the development of the Chicago school of economics. This failure of so many economists to understand better the direction of Knight's thought is powerful evidence, if any be needed, of the secularization of American society and the present [4. John Calvin was born in 1509 and followed soon after Martin Luther as a leading figure of the Protestant Reformation. The Calvinists adopted a more radical version of Luther's complaints against the Roman Catholic Church. The Puritans in England were among the leading branches of Calvinism in Europe. A pivotal figure in the history of Western religion, Calvin died in 1564 (Bouwsma 1988).] [5. The Protestantism of the Reformation saw human behavior as especially corrupted by original sin, thus precluding any prospect of rationally directed action to achieve salvation. A typical Protestant view appears in the writings of Richard Hooker (1553-1600), who wrote of "the shame of our defiled natures," which would surely "shut us out from the kingdom of heaven" if not for the great mercy of God (qtd. in Kent 1997, 102).] day ignorance of old-fashioned Protestant theology. Once it is recognized that Knight's supposed antagonism to Christianity exists only on the surface, his thinking may be easily understood as a secular version of Protestant Christianity, grounded in a conception of the ever-present and powerful workings of sin in the world. His student and disciple James Buchanan comments: "Why was Knight so different from his peers? My hypothesis is that he can be explained, phenomenologically, only through recalling his roots in evangelical Christianity." Knight was "a product of middle America, of the agricultural economy of Illinois, of the late nineteenth century, of evangelical Christianity." Buchanan attributes Knight's "intense critical spirit" to his having been forced to wrestle in his youth with conflicts and doubts about Christianity (1991, 246-47; see also Buchanan 1987). Here, I think Buchanan goes wrong. A better explanation is that Knight's critical spirit was a direct manifestation, if now in a secular form, of a characteristic Protestant outlook on the world. The Calvinist and Puritan mentality in particular has been characterized by deep introspection and a harshly critical attitude toward all claims to authority in both worldly and spiritual domains. It is an outgrowth of the Calvinist conviction that all human beings are deeply infected by original sin and that our best efforts are not likely to be worth much, especially among those who make the grandest claims (Forrester 1981; Walzer 1974). Thus, one might say that Knight's real religion was a secular Calvinism, his own distinctive brand of "Calvinism minus God." For many leading intellectuals of the modern age, brilliant insights in many areas have been accompanied by a blindness with respect to the Judeo-Christian roots of the underlying value system being expressed. For example, like Calvin-and the English and American Puritans who followed in the tradition of Calvinist theology-Knight saw a "positive moral value of pain and suffering.. . . The need for this emphasis is indubitable; human nature proverbially appears finer in adversity than in prosperity" (Knight 1945, 39). Much as Puritan theology had preached that excessive wealth was a temptation to sin and thus a danger to one's eternal soul, Knight would remark on another occasion, "it is human nature to be more dissatisfied the better off one is." The motive for providing one's labor is often as much a pride of "workmanship" as any desire for more income to obtain greater consumption. Knight found that mankind was in general a "contrary critter" prone to present a "false exterior" (1951, 262, 269, 273). Knight was expressing in a secular fashion a set of attitudes common in American life in his formative years (Baltzell 1979). A study of rural life in upstate New York near the end of the nineteenth century finds a common belief that "virtue inhered in hard work." Work was not a burden but a source of "contentment," as Paula Baker writes. In this perspective, large "moral and economic benefits" accompanied the very act of labor itself. Indeed, it would be no overstatement to say that hard labor "provided the basis for virtue in the producer's republic" (1991, 14). Such attitudes were far removed from-virtually incompatible with-the narrow utilitarianism of mainstream economic thought, but were manifested themselves in Knight's thinking. As Knight argued as early as 1923, it was necessary to reject "the assumption that human wants are objective and measurable magnitudes and that the satisfaction of such wants is the essence and criterion of value, and . . . on the basis of this assumption to reduce ethics to a sort of glorified economics" (33). Paul Conkin, an American student of the Puritan influence on American history, finds that the Puritan view of the human condition as derived from Calvinist theology has had great staying power in American life. As he explains, Briefly characterized, the typical Puritan, in 1630 or 1930, reflected ideological assurance but was, at least in most areas and when at his best, open to new ideas. He was very much a moralist, a political activist.. . . He veneratedthe rule of objective laws or principles, but he just as insistently believed in congregation and local democracy. He usually reflected a sense of mission, even of a peculiar destiny, and an atmosphere of seriousness and self-importance. Yet he was, or wanted to be, pious, ever mindful of his dependence upon an overarching but never quite fathomable reality, which he loved even without full understanding. Although he sought redemption above all else, he had a wholesome respect for the instrumentality of both material goods and scientific knowledge, trying always to keep either from becoming usurping ends. He demanded a conscientious stewardship of all men and wanted all to have a useful and fulfilling calling or vocation. (1976, 3-4) Although Knight does not fit every aspect of this description, on the whole he matches it closely. In their own lives, he thought, few people are likely to achieve a goal of happiness. The utilitarian philosophy of life is empirically erroneous and metaphysically shallow. The modern Calvinist, too, must recognize the inevitability of pain and suffering-an outcome that, perversely, is likely to be aggravated by an excessive emphasis on the pursuit of happiness as the central goal in life. Indeed, an excess of utilitarianism is one of the devil's many snares. Since the fall in the Garden of Eden, the rational faculties of human beings have been undermined by their unruly emotions and their easy susceptibility to various hatreds, jealousies, biases, and other psychological maladies.6 Hence, as Luther and Calvin both preached and Knight also believed, projects of self-improvement are likely often to achieve consequences that are the very opposite of the intended effect, owing to the frailties of the human condition. Ascetic discipline [6. Speaking of Knight, Stigler says: "Economic theory prescribes the efficient ways of achieving given ends: this to Knight was a pathetically small part of human activity. The effects of acts often diverge grotesquely from the desires which led to them. Wants themselves are highly unstable, and it is their essential nature to change and grow. 'The Chief thing which the common-sense individual wants is not satisfactions for the wants he had, but more, and better wants.' So man is an explorer and experimenter, a seeker for unknown and perhaps unknowable truths, a creature better understood through the study of literature than by the scientific method" (1987, 58).] rather than a pursuit of happiness should guide human conduct. From his attendance of classroom lectures, Patinkin recalled "Knight's commenting that from the long-run viewpoint, . . . denial of wants was the only way that a definitive adjustment of wants to resources could be achieved; for history had shown that Western society created new wants just as fast (if not faster than!) it expanded the means of satisfying them" (1981, 34). In a recent commentary on Knight's economic philosophy, Richard Boyd notes that Knight's thinking has "much more in common with Augustine Christianity than it does with the [rationalism and utilitarianism of the] Enlightenment" (1997, 537). Martin Luther himself had been an Augustinian monk who despised Thomas Aquinas's rational and mechanical (as Luther saw it) theology of natural law, instead looking-and followed in this respect by many other Protestant reformers-to the earlier and more pessimistic (with respect to sinful life in this fallen world) Augustinian theology (Nelson 1991). As Boyd adds, Knight thus exhibited a fundamentally different worldview than Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman, all of whom believed more optimistically in the "benefits of progress, development and economic efficiency" (1997, 537). The Augustinian and Calvinist view contrasts greatly with the Progressive economic mainstream view of rational utilitarians choosing how to maximize their own happiness or with the view of a society acting through a rational process of scientific management to perfect the human condition on earth. In such matters and in coming down on the Calvinist rather than on the Progressive and rationalist side, Knight was a modern kind of Protestant fundamentalist, reacting against the thinking of virtually the entire economics profession of his time. Knight made his Calvinist proclivities clear in his unique manner of justifying a classical liberal outlook on the world (Knight 1923). He painted the following picture, so different from other economists' aspirations to the scientific management of society: "While effort is justified by good results, these are not expected ever to be satisfying. The experienced reward is more the joy of pursuit than of possession. It is recognized that the solution of any problem will raise more questions than it answers, so that man is committed-'doomed . . .'-to strive toward goals which recede more rapidly than he as an individual, or even society, advances towards them. Thus life is finally, if one chooses, or if one's temperament so dictates, a sort of labor of Sisyphus" (1945, 71). In the broadest view, one might say that, intellectually and theologically speaking, much of U.S. history has reflected a struggle between the pessimistic Puritan view of fallen, sinful man and the optimistic Enlightenment view of rational, utilitarian man. If the great majority of American economists have fallen on the Enlightenment and Progressive side of this divide, Knight was one of the rare exceptions. If economics were truly a value-neutral undertaking, one would expect that members of the economics profession would have developed a full body of economic thought, with a significant investment of resources and depth of technical analysis, based on Calvinist and Puritan assumptions. If economists had wanted to avoid taking any sides on fundamental value questions, they should have explored thoroughly the workings of Calvinist economic models of the world. An economics that conformed to Calvinist assumptions would have to be very different from mainstream economic models of individual behavior. Efficiency would not be the highest value because wealth would have to be treated not as a benefit but as a temptation to sin-and thus to depravity on this earth-and a danger to one's eternal soul. The benefits of work would lie not in the goods and services obtained for consumptive purposes; rather, in a true Calvinist economics, people would labor not for the benefit of the consumption obtained but for the disciplining, by hard work, of unruly minds and souls that are always in danger of succumbing to the temptations of the devil. Technically speaking, "utility" would be derived from the labor and other inputs. A potential excess of consumption resulting from such labor would be a constraint (a threat to one's eternal soul, potentially with disastrous consequences, if constant vigilance were not maintained), rather than a desired outcome in itself. The real economic problem would be to serve a calling, to work long and hard, without producing so much wealth in the process as to fall inevitably into temptation and sin. Furthermore, pain and suffering in Calvinist theology (and in a valid accompanying Calvinist economics) can often be benefits rather than costs, as Knight commented of his own thinking. All this would amount to almost a complete inversion of the foundational assumptions of mainstream economics. That is to say, Progressive benefits would systematically be Calvinist costs, and vice versa. To be sure, economics is not a value-neutral subject, and few microeconomists have ever shown any interest in developing the technical details of a "countermicroeconomics" grounded in Calvinist and Puritan assumptions. With respect specifically to American society, where the value grounds have always been fiercely contested, economists have never sought to conduct an empirical examination of the predictive capacities (or other usefulness) of economic models grounded in Calvinist and Knightian assumptions about the basic character of human motivation, as compared to the predictive powers of conventional economic models grounded in individualistic, rational, and utilitarian assumptions about human nature. Scientifically, all this is indefensible. Instead of being value neutral, the economics profession has actually been defending a strong value position. In building from only one view of human nature, mainstream economists have in effect been asserting that this view is the correct one. Communities of Believers For most mainstream economists, the issue of preference formation has been considered to lie outside the bounds of economic analysis. The structure of prefer- ences-the utility function-is simply assumed to exist, wherever it may have come from (and it could have come directly from God; it matters little). Knight, however, argued that it is a "fundamental error" to regard "the individual as given, and . . . the social problem as one of right relations between given individuals" (1932, 84). Rather, the problem of ordering society should be conceived as follows: "The social problem in the strict sense . . . is purely intellectual-moral. All physical activity involved in social-legal process is carried out by individuals who act as the agents of society, in so far as they are true to the trust confided to them. Social action, which is social decision, uses as data both facts and cause-and-effect relations, pertaining both to nature and to man. But the social problem is not one of fact-except as values are also facts-nor is it one of means and end. It is a problem of values" (1941, 134). Such views led Knight to embrace a democratic politics of widespread "discussion," a theme that appears over and over again in his writings. Calvin and other Protestant reformers had much earlier denounced the attempts of the Roman Catholic priesthood to impose authoritative and binding interpretations of faith on all the members of the church; instead, as the early Protestant reformers declared, each person must come to his own understanding of religious truth, worked out in discussion with fellow parishioners. Calvinism introduced a powerful commitment to local democracy in the church. For Knight as well, the citizenry will simply have to find a way to some common value basis for social actions through internal political processes of deliberation, however lengthy and cumbersome that social process of discussion may turn out to be. New communities of believers-perhaps nowadays often believers in secular religions-are no less needed today. Whether organized on a market or any other basis, "society depends upon-we may almost say that it is-moral like-mindedness" (Knight 1939, 55). For Knight, it was essential that this like-mindedness not be dictated by any modern equivalent of the Roman bureaucracy of old, in the current era most likely to be acting in the name of the authoritative decrees of science. The truths of modern religion as well must be reached from the bottom up, from the interactions of free citizens in a democratic polity (Raines and Jung 1986). A process of democratic discussion requires, to be sure, a whole host of intermediate institutions between the individual and the wider society. The process of discussion must yield "superindividual norms." It is no help in finding agreement on these norms to hear from each person the "mere expression of individual desires." Indeed, the carrying over of the individualism of the free market into the realm of democratic discussion would "intensify the problem" of bringing the discussion to any fruitful outcome (Knight 1951, 266). With rare exceptions, Knight found, individuals never exist independent of some surrounding institutional and cultural context from which they derive basic values and an identity. According to Knight, the term individual as used in economic theory should in fact be regarded as a shorthand for family.7 Mainstream economics has misconceived the social problem of American society because it has taken its individualistic and utilitarian models of human behavior too literally. We are all products of our time and place, Knight said. The idea of the lone individual creating (or obtaining in some manner) his own tastes and wants as an independent act is truly a heroic fiction. Instead, we all live within a specific "culture" that teaches common "taste and appreciation" that are "more important than means of gratification" in determining our sense of ourselves as persons and of our individual well-being (Knight 1948, 295). Hence, for Knight, discussion in society is not about bargaining from fixed individual preference positions to divide up the economic pie. Rather, the whole point of political discussion is to change minds; as a result of democratic deliberation, individual preferences should be constantly revised, leading to the necessary convergence ("likemindedness") of values in the community. If much of the theoretical apparatus of economics is of little use in a world of constantly shifting preference structures, so much for the mainstream economics grounded in the values of the American Progressive gospel. As a strong defender of market freedoms, Knight in part blamed the current advocates of the free market, including some of his own Chicago colleagues, for the erosion of market freedoms and the wholesale turn to European socialism and American Progressive principles that he saw taking place in his time. For a while in the nineteenth century, there had been a "religion of liberalism [that] had a positive social-moral content." But somehow the value foundation of free markets had been lost. "One of the main factors in the present crisis is that the public has lost faith, such faith as it ever had, in the moral validity of market values" (Knight 1939, 73). Or, as Knight similarly stated in another context, "the real breakdown of bourgeois society is only superficially economic; . . . it is rather political, since indisputably it is the business of the political system to make the economic system function; fundamentally, however, the breakdown is not structural at all, but moral." Classical liberalism had made a basic "intellectual mistake" in that it "failed to see that the social problem is not at bottom intellectual, but moral" (1934, 39-40). And no adequate moral defense of the free market was forthcoming at Chicago or among any other group of economists in the twentieth century. Knight argued that the typical economist's description of the market as a "competitive" system has been "calamitous for understanding" of the true merits of a market system.8 In his own thinking, the market is ultimately desirable not because com [7. Gary Becker follows closely in the tradition of Knight and the Chicago school in that he directs an attitude of radical questioning toward all the conventional values of society. However, if Knight still held to his many statements in his writings, he would have to be severely critical of Becker's recent economic approach to the study of the workings of family life as an arrangement among autonomous individuals, each acting within the family for his own benefit.] [8. According to Stigler, Knight had an explicitly normative vision of the case for the market, in contrast to most of his fellow economists: "For most present-day economists, the primary purpose of their study is to increase our knowledge of the workings of the enterprise and other economic systems. For Knight, the primary role of economic theory is rather different: it is to contribute to the understanding of how by consensus based upon rational discussion we can fashion liberal society in which individual freedom is preserved and a satisfactory economic performance achieved. This vast social undertaking allows only a small role for the economist, and that role requires only a correct understanding of the central core of value theory" (1987).] petition drives costs and prices down to the lowest feasible levels-which puts the case for the free market in conventional Progressive and instrumental terms of efficiency- but because the market provides the one practical mechanism for resolving in a more satisfactory way (a way that preserves individual freedom) the value tensions that permeate any large and diverse society. Knight argues that the advantages of the market should be understood in terms of promoting a "pattern of cooperation" among people who come together on a noncoercive basis for mutual advantage (1951, 265). In this way, even people in a pluralist society who have fundamentally different belief systems are able to work together without first having to reconcile their values to some common set of norms. Hence, as Knight put it, the market minimizes the role of power in human interactions because in a market "there are no power relations." The market enables each person "to be the judge of his own values and of the use of his own means to achieve them" (1951, 258). In grounding actions on mutual consent, the market leaves out any judgments of "selfishness" or other factors of "moral quality or artistic taste" in determining social interactions. A Christian can trade as easily in a market with a Muslim as with a fellow Christian; if they had first been required to agree on value-laden subjects such as religion, no exchanges might ever have taken place. Here again, Knight's views hark back to Christian origins. In Christian theology, the existence of private property-and the necessity of markets as well-is a product of original sin. In an ideal world, neither would exist. In the current fallen world, property and markets give outlets to human strivings for power and advantage. It may be an imperfect solution, but it is better than the alternatives. If Knight strongly favored the market over central state control, here again he was manifesting the Calvinist quality of his thinking. As compared to Roman Catholicism, Protestantism in its infancy was fundamentally an individualistic religion in making each of the Protestant faithful responsible for his relationship with God; salvation was a matter of individual "faith alone." This strong individualism eventually had profound social consequences outside the realm of theology. The religious beliefs of the English Puritans laid the basis for modern freedoms in the realms of both government (the democratic system) and the economy (the free market). As the distinguished German theologian Ernst Troeltsch would explain with respect to the great impact of the Puritans in shaping the basic values and social institutions of the modern age: The great ideas of the separation of Church and State, toleration of different Church societies alongside of one another, the principle of Voluntaryism in the formation of these Church-bodies, the (at first, no doubt, only relative) liberty of conviction and opinion in all matters of world-view and religion. Here are the roots of the old liberal theory of the inviolability of the inner personal life by the State, which was subsequently extended to more outward things; here is brought about the end of the medieval idea of civilisation, and coercive Church-and-State civilisation gives place to individual civilisation free of Church direction. The idea is at first religious. Later, it becomes secularized.. . . But its real foundations are laid in the English Puritan Revolution. The momentum of its religious impulse opened the way for modern freedom. (1912, 125-26) Conclusion The Boston Puritans were also capable of hanging Quakers in the village square for religious heresy, however. Even as Protestants were oppressed elsewhere in Europe, Calvin's Geneva put limits on the tolerance of diversity of religious expression. Protestantism encouraged each small sect to believe fervently that it had found the one true faith; dissenters were not only threats to civic harmony, but virtual (or actual) agents of the devil. Persecution of sinners proved easy to justify among the Protestant elect. The Protestant Reformation plunged Europe into many disastrous wars for 150 years, with individual freedom often a casualty. If Knight was ultimately unable to resolve fully the tension between individual rights and freedoms (including the pursuit of self-interest) and the claims to the common good of the community, it must be said that he has had a lot of company in Protestant theology over the centuries. Gradually, later members of the Chicago school would recast the Calvinist elements in Knight's economic thought in a more clearly libertarian direction. As one authority on Puritan thought comments, "the preponderance of modern libertarian theory-from French Huguenots, the Netherlands, Scotland and England-came from Calvinists" (Conkin 1976, 18). Libertarianism may not have all the answers- libertarians also experience a tension in resolving the claims of individualism and the demands of community-but in clearly and explicitly rejecting the orthodoxies of the American Progressive gospel and its prescription for the scientific management of society, contemporary libertarian thought opens the way to discussion of whole new governing philosophies. References Baker, Paula. 1991. The Moral Frameworks of Public Life: Gender, Politics, and the State in Rural New York, 1870-1930. New York: Oxford University Press. Baltzell, E. Digby. 1979. Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia: Two Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Class Authority and Leadership. New York: Free Press. Bouwsma, William. 1988. John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait. New York: Oxford University Press. Boyd, Richard. 1997. Frank H. Knight and Ethical Pluralism. Critical Review (fall): 519-36. Breit, William, and Roger W. Spencer, eds. 1995. Lives of the Laureates: Thirteen Nobel Economists. 3rd ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Buchanan, James M. 1979. What Should Economists Do? Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty. ---. 1982. Foreword to Freedom and Reform, by Frank Knight. 1947. Reprint. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty. ---. 1987. The Economizing Element in Knight's Ethical Critique of Capitalist Order. Ethics 98: 61-75. ---. 1991. Frank H. Knight. In Remembering the University of Chicago: Teachers, Scientists, and Scholars, edited by Edward Shils. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Conkin, Paul K. 1976. Puritans and Pragmatists: Eight Eminent American Thinkers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dewey, Donald. 1990. Frank Knight Before Cornell: Some Light on the Dark Years. In Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, vol. 8, edited by Warren Samuels. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI. Ely, Richard T. 1889. Social Aspects of Christianity and Other Essays. New York: Charles Y. Crowell. Emmett, Ross B. 1994. 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Acknowledgments: An earlier version of this article appeared as Working Paper #7/2000 of the International Centre for Economic Research, Turin, Italy. It is adapted from a chapter in my book Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond (Penn State University Press, 2001). From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Tue Jan 11 23:22:07 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 15:22:07 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] dying for beliefs In-Reply-To: <200501112149.j0BLnNK14781@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050111232207.88425.qmail@web13423.mail.yahoo.com> >>Why is considered such a virtue to "die for your beliefs?"<< --It's not so much the beliefs, it's that compromising them is felt as an intolerable shame, often because of some other hidden shame which would be triggered by the political loss of face. A surprising number of Jihaadists and Christian fundamentalists went through a "bad boy" phase in their youth, drinking and engaging in sexual behavior condemned by their religion. By blaming their own "sin" on the evil Western imperialists or on Hollywood "liberal elites", they are able to feel pure, and in the case of Islamic Jihaadists, must die rather than back down in order to maintain that feeling. Compromise with the enemy is felt as a kind of rape, and it wouldn't be too shocking to me if the most violent and uncompromising "holy warriors" were not sexually abused as children, re-enacting the psychological defenses they used to seal off identification with the abuser. Hard to prove, but it wouldn't shock me if that were the case. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - Get yours free! http://my.yahoo.com From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 12 15:17:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 10:17:21 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Complexity Digest 2005.02 Message-ID: Complexity Digest 2005.02 [This is a very good digest of science news, even though not much of it pertains to complexity theory as such. I invite y'all to subscribe to it. ----- Forwarded message from Complexity Digest ----- From: Complexity Digest Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 13:02:06 +0800 To: (Recipient list suppressed) Subject: Complexity Digest 2005.02 (text version -2) X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 6.0.1.1 Complexity Digest 2005.02 Archive: [1]http://www.comdig.org, European Mirror: [2]http://www.comdig.de [1] http://www.comdig.org/ [2] http://www.comdig.de/ Asian Mirror: [3]http://www.phil.pku.edu.cn/resguide/comdig/ (Chinese GB-Code) [3] http://www.phil.pku.edu.cn/resguide/comdig/ "I think the next century will be the century of complexity." Stephen Hawking, 2000 _________________________________________________________________ 01. God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap, NY Times 02. A Tale of 2 Systems, NY Times 02.01. Social Networks and Business Success: The Role Of Subcultures In An African Context, Ameri. J. Econ. Sociol. 02.02. King of the Island, Science NOW 02.03. Temples Of Boom: Ancient Hawaiians Took Fast Road To Statehood, Science News 03. Food Colorings, Science News 04. The Role Of Social Interaction In Bird Song Learning, Current Dir. Psycho. Sc. 04.01. Nutrient-Specific Foraging in Invertebrate Predators, Science 04.02. Policing Insect Societies, Science 05. A Genomic View of Animal Behavior, Science 05.01. Twinkle Toes: How Geckos' Sticky Feet Stay Clean, Science News 05.02. Environment: Early Ant Plagues In The New World, Nature 06. Laughing, Tickling, And The Evolution Of Speech And Self, Current Dir. Psycho. Sc. 07. HIV Impacts Human Genome, Science NOW 07.01. Frankenstein's Chips, Science News 08. Antibiotic Recipe Keeps Neurons Alive, Science NOW 08.01. Beat Generation: Genetically Modified Stem Cells Repair Heart, Science News 08.02. Magnetic Resonance Imaging Deconstructs Brain's Complex Network, EurekAlert 08.03. Scientists Find That The Human Nose Is More Complicated Than A Jumbo Jet, BBSRC Media Releases 09. Scents And Emotions Linked By Learning, ScienceDaily 09.01. Motherhood is a Drug, Science NOW 09.02. Brain Can Be Trained To Process Sound In Alternate Way, ScienceDaily 09.03. Parkinson's Symptoms Reversed in Monkey Study, NPR TOTN 10. Faces Must Be Seen To Be Recognized, ScienceDaily 10.01. Physiology: An End To Adolescence, Nature 11. Mapping Environments At Risk Under Different Global Climate Change Scenarios, Ecol. Lett. 11.01. Weighing the Tsunami's Environmental Impact, NPR TOTN 11.02. Triple Slip Of Tectonic Plates Caused Seafloor Surge, Nature News 11.03. Tsunami Disaster: Scientists Model The Big Quake And Its Consequences, Science News 11.04. A Divided World, Nature News 11.05. The Hydrogen Economy, Physics Today 11.06. As Hybrid Cars Multiply, So Do Carpooling Gripes, Washington Post 12. Deflecting Near-Earth Space Hazards, NPR TOTN 12.01. In Search Of Hidden Dimensions, Nature 12.02. The Long-Distance Thinker, Nature 12.03. Gorging Black Hole Makes Its Mark, Science NOW 13. Mmmmm, Toxicants, Science NOW 13.01. The Enigma of Prokaryotic Life in Deep Hypersaline Anoxic Basins, Science 13.02. Microbes Brave Briny Basins, Nature News 14. Bridging The Gap, Nature 14.01. Nanomotors Rev Up, Science Now 15. Advances towards a General-Purpose Societal-Scale Human-Collective Problem-Solving Engine, arXiv 15.01. Building a Smarter Search Engine, Business Week 15.02. Search Looks at the Big Picture, Wired 15.03. Computing Takes a Giant Leap, Pile Systems Press Release 15.04. The BlackBerry Brain Trust, Wired 16. Games Win For Blu-Ray DVD Format, BBC News 16.01. TiVo Adds Portability to the Mix, NY Times 16.02. DirecTV Machine Will Compete With TiVo, NY Times 17. Toyota Launches Robot Workforce, NEWS.com.au 18. Super-selection Rules Modulating Complexity: An Overview, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals 18.01. Power Laws, Pareto Distributions and Zipf's Law, arXiv 19. Complex Challenges: Global Terroist Networks 19.01. The Spy Who Billed Me 19.02. Detainee Seeking to Bar His Transfer, NY Times 19.03. Guant?namo - An Icon Of Lawlessness 20. Links & Snippets 20.01. Other Publications 20.02. Webcast Announcements 20.03. Conference & Call for Papers Announcements _________________________________________________________________ 01. God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap , NY Times Excerpts: What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" This was the question posed to scientists, futurists and other creative thinkers by John Brockman, a literary agent and publisher of Edge, a Web site devoted to science. The site asks a new question at the end of each year. (...) Richard Dawkins (...) I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all "design" anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. * [4] God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap, 05/01/04, NYTimes [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/science/04edgehed.html _________________________________________________________________ 02. A Tale of 2 Systems , NY Times Excerpts: Over the past 50 years, we've been having a big debate over two rival economic systems. Conservatives have tended to favor the American model, with smaller government and lower taxes, but less social support. Liberals have supported programs that lead to the European model, with bigger government, more generous support and less inequality. (...) In the next few decades both models are going to confront a big test: aging populations. The U.S. model is going to be challenged by this problem, but the European model is flat-out unsustainable. * [5] A Tale of 2 Systems, David Brooks, 05/01/04, NYTimes [5] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/opinion/04brooks.html _________________________________________________________________ 02.01. Social Networks and Business Success: The Role Of Subcultures In An African Context , Ameri. J. Econ. Sociol. Excerpt: The main objective of this paper is to illuminate social and cultural preconditions for networking and success in business in an African context. By in-depth studies of small-scale entrepreneurs in the wood business in Tanzania, we find that people belonging to an Asian subculture probably have a better standing for entering and thriving in business, due to group cohesion, mobility, and level of education. Through high-quality social networks, characterized by a high number and variety of relations, certain groups seem to be in a better position to enact their business environment (...). * [6] Social Networks and Business Success: The Role Of Subcultures In An African Context, [7] S. Kristiansen, Nov. 2004, Online 2004/12/08, DOI: 10.1111/j.1536-7150.2004.00339.x, American Journal of Economics and Sociology * Contributed by [8] Pritha Das [6] http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/j.1536-7150.2004.00339.x/abs/ [7] mailto:Stein.Kristiansen at hia.no [8] mailto:prithadas01 at yahoo.com _________________________________________________________________ 02.02. King of the Island , Science NOW Excerpts: Power base. Ruins on Maui suggest that the island's first king exerted control by quickly building temples, such as those seen elsewhere by Captain Cook (inset). Credit: : P.V. Kirich; (Inset) By Permission Of The National Library Of Australia Hawaiian legends say a ruler named Pi'ilani brought peace to Maui by routing rival chiefs, marrying a powerful queen, and setting himself up as absolute ruler. Indeed, religious states that emphasized divine kingship emerged on several Hawaiian islands. Now a preliminary study of temples on Maui, described in the 7 January issue of Science, suggests this may have happened within a single generation just as the stories suggest. The most sophisticated and stratified societies in the Pacific evolved on the Hawaiian Islands. * [9] King of the Island, Erik Stokstad, 05/01/06, ScienceNOW [9] http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2005/106/3?etoc _________________________________________________________________ 02.03. Temples Of Boom: Ancient Hawaiians Took Fast Road To Statehood , Science News Excerpts: A boom in temple construction on two Hawaiian islands around 400 years ago marked the surprisingly rapid formation of an early political state. * [10] Temples Of Boom: Ancient Hawaiians Took Fast Road To Statehood, 05/01/08, ScienceNews [10] http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050108/fob3ref.asp _________________________________________________________________ 03. Food Colorings , Science News Excerpts: Wheel Of Color. Orange carrots are a relatively new food, dating only from the 16th century. Scientists are adapting older red, blue, and yellow typesmost of them from Asiato U.S. soils, climate, and tastes. S. Ausmus/USDA Flavonoids include beta-carotene and related carotenoids, which are responsible for many of the yellows, oranges, reds, and greens in produce. Other reds and most of the blues, purples, and blackish tintsespecially in berries and potatoestrace to flavonoids called anthocyanins. These chemicals are considered antioxidants because they quash free radicals, naturally forming molecular fragments that have several damaging effects. (...) began developing new lines of crops explicitly for their intense antioxidant pigments.(...) Probably the most famous example is known as golden rice. * [11] Food Colorings, Janet Raloff, 05/01/08, ScienceNews [11] http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050108/bob9.asp _________________________________________________________________ 04. The Role Of Social Interaction In Bird Song Learning , Current Dir. Psycho. Sc. Excerpt: Bird song learning has become a powerful model system for studying learning because of its parallels with human speech learning, recent advances in understanding of its neurobiological basis, and the strong tradition of studying song learning in both the laboratory and the field. Most of the findings and concepts in the field derive from the tape-tutor experimental paradigm, in which the young bird is tutored by tape-recorded song delivered by a loudspeaker in an isolation chamber. This paradigm provides rigorous experimental control of auditory parameters, but strips song learning of any social context, (...). * [12] The Role Of Social Interaction In Bird Song Learning, [13] M. D. Beecher, J. M. Burt, Dec. 2004, Online 2004/11/24, DOI: 10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.00313.x, Current Directions in Psychological Science * Contributed by [14] Atin Das [12] http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.00313.x/abs/ [13] mailto:beecher at u.washington.edu [14] mailto:dasatin at yahoo.co.in _________________________________________________________________ 04.01. Nutrient-Specific Foraging in Invertebrate Predators , Science Summary: Picky Eaters It is widely assumed in foraging theory that predators cannot balance their nutrient intake, but instead maximize their energy intake subject to prey size, abundance, and time constraints. Mayntz et al. (p. 111) show that this is not the case, using three species of invertebrates (ground beetles, wolf spiders, and web spiders) with widely different feeding biology. When the diet of the predators was manipulated to render them either protein- or lipid-deficient, the animals adjusted their feeding to make good the specific deficit. Compensatory nutrient selection occurred either by selecting among foods of different nutritional composition, by adjusting consumption of a single prey type, or by extracting nutrients selectively from within individual prey items. * [15] Nutrient-Specific Foraging in Invertebrate Predators, David Mayntz, David Raubenheimer, Mor Salomon, S?ren Toft, Stephen J. Simpson, 04/01/07, Science : 111-113 [15] http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/307/5706/111 _________________________________________________________________ 04.02. Policing Insect Societies , Science Excerpts: Within both human and insect societies, conflicts arise because the interests of individuals differ. In insect societies, conflict revolves around reproduction. Reproducing individuals gain by being more closely related to the young males and queens reared in their colony. By reproducing, society members also exploit the colony and this can be costly. First, uncontrolled reproduction upsets the division of labor between queen and workers and results in a less efficient colony. Second, the offspring reared are often genetically less related and so are less valuable to other society members. * [16] Policing Insect Societies, Francis L. W. Ratnieks , Tom Wenseleers, 05/01/07, Science : 54-56 [16] http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/307/5706/54 _________________________________________________________________ 05. A Genomic View of Animal Behavior , Science Excerpts: (...) in one case, they transformed normally promiscuous rodents into faithful partners. (...) Instead of just probing the minutiae of how a gene works in one organism, scientists are increasingly investigating how a particular gene operates in multiple species. (...) gene influenced how likely nematodes were to explore their environment.(...) In the traditional approach, Hofmann would have tried to track individual genes involved in these transformations. Instead, he turned to microarrays and, in less than a year, has identified 100 genes that likely shape the male's social status. * [17] A Genomic View of Animal Behavior, Elizabeth Pennisi, 05/01/07, Science : 30-32 [17] http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/307/5706/30 _________________________________________________________________ 05.01. Twinkle Toes: How Geckos' Sticky Feet Stay Clean , Science News Excerpts: Toe Print. When the underside of a gecko toe (left) was dusted with microspheres and pressed onto glass, millions of sticky fibers in the thin, platelike structures shed microspheres onto the glass, leaving a print visible under laser light (right). Autumn To find out how gecko feet clean themselves, the team considered the van der Waals forces that a surface, such as a wall, exerts on a microsphere. They then compared that attraction with the hold on the particle by toe fibers. Using simplified geometric models that represent the ends of the fibers as shallow cups or flexible strips, the scientists calculated that from 26 to 59 of the fibers would have to cling to each microsphere to keep it from sticking to the wall as the gecko steps away. Yet in most cases, "when you look under an electron microscope, you don't observe that many [fibers] actually attached to a single dirt particle," Autumn notes. Hence, when the fibers and the surface compete for a dirt particle, the surface usually wins. * [18] Twinkle Toes: How Geckos' Sticky Feet Stay Clean, Peter Weiss, 05/01/08, ScienceNews [18] http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050108/fob6.asp _________________________________________________________________ 05.02. Environment: Early Ant Plagues In The New World , Nature Excerpts: Solenopsis geminata HORMIGA DE FUEGO (Fire ant) The Hispaniolan plague ant is easily characterized from the first-hand account of Las Casas. The ant he described was very aggressive; it had a painful sting; it occurred in dense populations in the root systems of shrubs and trees; it did not cut above-ground vegetation yet somehow damaged the root systems; and it was also a pest in houses and gardens. The only species also present in the modern West Indian ant fauna that has all these qualities is the tropical fire ant, Solenopsis geminata. * [19] Environment: Early Ant Plagues In The New World, Edward O. Wilson, 05/01/06, DOI: 10.1038/433032a, Nature 433, 32 [19] http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v433/n7021/full/433032a_fs.html _________________________________________________________________ 06. Laughing, Tickling, And The Evolution Of Speech And Self , Current Dir. Psycho. Sc. Excerpt: Laughter is an instinctive, contagious, stereotyped, unconsciously controlled, social play vocalization that is unusual in solitary settings. Laughter punctuates speech and is not typically humor related, speakers often laugh more often than their audience, and male speakers are the best laugh getters. Laughter evolved from the labored breathing of physical play, with the characteristic "pant-pant" laugh of chimpanzees and derivative "ha-ha" of humans signaling ("ritualizing") its rowdy origin. Laughter reveals that breath control is why humans can speak and chimpanzees cannot. (...) Because you cannot tickle yourself, tickle involves a neurological self/nonself discrimination, providing the most primitive social scenario. * [20] Laughing, Tickling, And The Evolution Of Speech And Self, [21] R. R. Provine, Dec. 2004, Online 2004/11/24, DOI: 10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.00311.x, Current Directions in Psychological Science * Contributed by [22] Atin Das [20] http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.00311.x/abs/ [21] mailto:provine at umbc.edu [22] mailto:dasatin at yahoo.co.in _________________________________________________________________ 07. HIV Impacts Human Genome , Science NOW Excerpts: No vacancy. When CCL3L1 (red) occupies the CCR5 receptor on CD4 cells, it blocks HIV's entry. Credit: K. Sutliff/Science People typically have two copies of each gene (one from each parent), but stretches of DNA sometimes appear repeatedly. Many of the known duplications include immunity genes, inspiring the notion that these so-called segmental duplications protect against invaders. Sunil Ahuja, (...), wondered whether HIV might be the target of such an evolutionary response. The researchers focused on one human gene, CCL3L1. The gene codes for a signalling chemical called a chemokine, and it docks onto the same white blood cell receptor grabbed by HIV when the virus infects cells. * [23] HIV Impacts Human Genome, Jon Cohen, 05/01/07, ScienceNOW [23] http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2005/107/1?etoc _________________________________________________________________ 07.01. Frankenstein's Chips , Science News Excerpts: As evidence mounts that drug-safety trials can miss dangerous effects, scientists are building living, miniature models of animals and people to enhance drug and chemical tests. * [24] Frankenstein's Chips, 05/01/08, ScienceNews [24] http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050108/bob8ref.asp _________________________________________________________________ 08. Antibiotic Recipe Keeps Neurons Alive , Science NOW Excerpts: People who develop ALS lose control of their muscles and usually die within 1 to 5 years. Previously, researchers have tried to correct two biochemical problems that kill neurons in ALS. A third had yet to be exploited successfully: Motor neurons die when their surfaces are overexposed to the neurotransmitter glutamate. ALS patients suffer from this because their neurons have trouble vacuuming glutamate back inside the cells, where it does no harm. (...) coax neurons to make more of this transporter protein, and whether that would protect the nerve cells from dying. * [25] Antibiotic Recipe Keeps Neurons Alive, Mary Beckman, 05/01/06, ScienceNOW [25] http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2005/106/1?etoc _________________________________________________________________ 08.01. Beat Generation: Genetically Modified Stem Cells Repair Heart , Science News Excerpts: Tissue engineers have for the first time used genetically modified human stem cells to repair damaged hearts in guinea pigs. * [26] Beat Generation: Genetically Modified Stem Cells Repair Heart, 05/01/08, ScienceNews [26] http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050108/fob2ref.asp _________________________________________________________________ 08.02. Magnetic Resonance Imaging Deconstructs Brain's Complex Network , EurekAlert Excerpts: Chialvo and colleagues described how fMRIs from healthy individuals showed that tens of thousands of discrete brain regions form a network that has the same qualitative features as other complex networks, such as the Internet (technological), friendships (social) and metabolic (biochemical) networks. The fMRI technology provided, in each recording session, hundreds of consecutive images of brain activity discretized in thousands of tiny cubes (voxels). The image intensity at each cube usually indicates the amount of brain activity at that site. * [27] Magnetic Resonance Imaging Deconstructs Brain's Complex Network, 05/01/04, EurekAlert [27] http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-01/nu-mri010405.php _________________________________________________________________ 08.03. Scientists Find That The Human Nose Is More Complicated Than A Jumbo Jet , BBSRC Media Releases Excerpts: Winter colds can give you a blocked up nose that stops you smelling chimney smoke, roasting chestnuts, warming winter puddings and the other seasonal scents. Now researchers (...) have not only discovered how air moves through the nose bringing you those smells but their work may lead to new ways of unblocking it and helping you to breathe more easily. They have even found that the airflow through the human nose is more complicated than that over a jumbo jet's wing. (...) The fluid dynamics of the nose is one of the most complex in the body, (...). * [28] Scientists Find That The Human Nose Is More Complicated Than A Jumbo Jet, 2005/01/06, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) * Contributed by [29] Atin Das [28] http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/media/pressreleases/05_05_01_06_nose.html [29] mailto:dasatin at yahoo.co.in _________________________________________________________________ 09. Scents And Emotions Linked By Learning , ScienceDaily Excerpts: Whether emotional responses to scent are a product of nature or nurture is a matter of scientific debate. But a Brown University study, (...) comes down on the nurturing side. In an experiment that involved computer games and custom-made scents, researchers found that responses to new odors depended on emotions experienced while the new odor was present. If participants had a good time playing the game, they were more likely to report liking the odor they smelled. If they had an unpleasant experience, they were more likely to dislike the scent. (...) * [30] Scents And Emotions Linked By Learning, Brown Study Shows, 2004/01/06, ScienceDaily & Brown University * Contributed by [31] Atin Das [30] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050106105622.htm [31] mailto:dasatin at yahoo.co.in _________________________________________________________________ 09.01. Motherhood is a Drug , Science NOW Excerpts: High on nursing. In rats, suckling stimulates the same reward centers in the brain as cocaine. Credit: Jack Novak/Superstock New research shows that brain scans of suckling moms are indistinguishable from those of virgin rats on cocaine, supporting the idea that nature rewards mothers for nurturing their pups. The work, described in 5 January issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, also sets the stage to better understand the mother-child bond in humans. When given the choice, rats with babies under 8 days of age will choose suckling their pups over cocaine. Researchers believe this strong motivation to nurse has evolved to help mothers bond with their offspring. * [32] Motherhood is a Drug, Mary Beckman, 05/01/04, ScienceNOW [32] http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2005/104/1?etoc _________________________________________________________________ 09.02. Brain Can Be Trained To Process Sound In Alternate Way , ScienceDaily Excerpts: UCSF scientists have found that the brains of rats can be trained to learn an alternate way of processing changes in the loudness of sound. The discovery, they say, has potential for the treatment of hearing loss, autism, and other sensory disabilities in humans. It also gives clues, they say, about the process of learning and the way we perceive the world. "We addressed a very fundamental question (...) When we notice a sound getting louder, what happens in our brain so that we know it's getting louder?" (...). * [33] Brain Can Be Trained To Process Sound In Alternate Way, 2004/01/03, ScienceDaily & University Of California - San Francisco * Contributed by [34] Atin Das [33] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/12/041219180618.htm [34] mailto:dasatin at yahoo.co.in _________________________________________________________________ 09.03. Parkinson's Symptoms Reversed in Monkey Study , NPR TOTN Excerpts: In studies with monkeys, researchers in Japan have reversed some of the degeneration seen in Parkinson's disease in monkeys using embryonic stem cell therapy, according to a report published this week in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. We discuss the findings. * [35] Parkinson's Symptoms Reversed in Monkey Study, 05/01/07, NPR TOTN [35] http://www.npr.org/rundowns/segment.php?wfId=4273768 _________________________________________________________________ 10. Faces Must Be Seen To Be Recognized , ScienceDaily Excerpt: Recognizing faces is an innate ability in primates; even the youngest infants respond to Mom's face. So, a fascinating and central question in neurobiology is where in the hierarchy of visual processing face recognition takes place. Through a series of precise experimental manipulations of perception in human subjects, Farshad Moradi and his colleagues have gained new insight into the process. They have found that identifying a face depends on actually seeing it, as opposed to merely having the image of the face fall on the retina. (...) * [36] Faces Must Be Seen To Be Recognized, 2004/01/07, ScienceDaily & Cell Press * Contributed by [37] Atin Das [36] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050106120038.htm [37] mailto:dasatin at yahoo.co.in _________________________________________________________________ 10.01. Physiology: An End To Adolescence , Nature Excerpts: 'Puberty' and 'adolescence' are not synonyms, although both terms describe that awkward age between childhood and adulthood. Puberty is defined as the period during which the reproductive system matures. It has a clearly defined marker for when it ends: when bone growth ceases. Adolescence, by contrast, is part physiological, part psychological, part social construct. Chronobiologists joke that people suffer adolescence twice once themselves, and again when their own children hit the teenage years. But, frustratingly, they have not been able to define precisely when it ends. * [38] Physiology: An End To Adolescence, Alison Abbott, 05/01/06, DOI: 10.1038/433027a, Nature 433, 27 [38] http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v433/n7021/full/433027a_fs.html _________________________________________________________________ 11. Mapping Environments At Risk Under Different Global Climate Change Scenarios , Ecol. Lett. Excerpts: All global circulation models (...) project profound changes, but there is no consensus on how to map their environmental consequences. Our multivariate representation of environmental space combines stable topographic and edaphic attributes with dynamic climatic attributes. We divide that environmental space into 500 unique domains and map their current locations (...). The environmental domains found across half the study area today disappear under the higher emissions scenario, but persist somewhere in it under the lower emissions scenario. Locations affected least and those affected most under each scenario are mapped. This provides an explicit framework for designing conservation networks (...). * [39] Mapping Environments At Risk Under Different Global Climate Change Scenarios, [40] E. Saxon, B. Baker , W. Hargrove , F. Hoffman , C. Zganjar, Jan. 2005, Online 2004/12/15, DOI: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2004.00694.x, Ecology Letters * Contributed by [41] Pritha Das [39] http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2004.00694.x/abs/ [40] mailto:esaxon at tnc.org [41] mailto:prithadas01 at yahoo.com _________________________________________________________________ 11.01. Weighing the Tsunami's Environmental Impact , NPR TOTN Excerpts: As the people of Southeast Asia struggle to recover from the Asian tsunami, we take a look at the environmental and ecological impacts of all that seawater. Plus, anecdotal reports suggest that most large mammals in the area escaped harm. We talk with a scientist about whether animals can sense an oncoming tsunami. * [42] Weighing the Tsunami's Environmental Impact, 05/01/07, NPR TOTN [42] http://www.npr.org/rundowns/segment.php?wfId=4273776 _________________________________________________________________ 11.02. Triple Slip Of Tectonic Plates Caused Seafloor Surge , Nature News Excerpts: The earthquake followed almost two centuries of tension during which the India plate pressed against the Burma microplate, (...). The plates move against one another at an average rate of about 6 centimetres a year, but this movement does not occur smoothly. There has not been a very large quake along this fault since 1833 ?a fact that may have contributed to the huge force of this one. The India plate's jarring slide released the tension on the Burma microplate, causing it to spring violently upwards. * [43] Triple Slip Of Tectonic Plates Caused Seafloor Surge, Michael Hopkin, 05/01/05, Nature News [43] http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050103/full/433003b.html _________________________________________________________________ 11.03. Tsunami Disaster: Scientists Model The Big Quake And Its Consequences , Science News Excerpts: Pumped Up. The sudden rise of seafloor during the magnitude 9.0 quake of Dec. 26, 2004 (epicenter at star), caused tsunamis that scoured coasts around the Indian Ocean. In all, slippage occurred along about 1,200 km of the interface between the tectonic plates(...). At some spots along the interface, one plate may have slid as much as 20 meters past the other, says Ji. In the most-affected region, a broad expanse of seafloorand thus the sea above it was abruptly thrust upward as much as 5 m. The waves spilling away from that sudden bump raced across the Indian Ocean at jetliner speeds, says Ji. The first tsunami may have been 15 m high when it slammed into Sumatran shores about 15 minutes after the quake. * [44] Tsunami Disaster: Scientists Model The Big Quake And Its Consequences, Sid Perkins, 05/01/08, ScienceNews [44] http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050108/fob1.asp _________________________________________________________________ 11.04. A Divided World , Nature News Excerpts: The most important component of such preparation is public education, so that local inhabitants are aware, for example, of the fact that a dramatic recession of the ocean is in itself a warning of an impending event. The next most important component is the construction of a simple network that will quickly convey warning information from the seismological stations to some central point (...) and back out again to local radio and television channels, perhaps using siren systems in regions that can afford them. * [45] A Divided World, 05/01/05, Nature News [45] http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050103/full/050103-4.html _________________________________________________________________ 11.05. The Hydrogen Economy , Physics Today Excerpts: If the fuel cell is to become the modern steam engine, basic research must provide breakthroughs in understanding, materials, and design to make a hydrogen-based energy system a vibrant and competitive force.(...) Hydrogen can be converted to electricity in fuel cells, but the production cost of prototype fuel cells remains high: $3000 per kilowatt of power produced for prototype fuel cells (mass production could reduce this cost by a factor of 10 or more), compared with $30 per kilowatt for gasoline engines. * [46] The Hydrogen Economy, George W. Crabtree, Mildred S. Dresselhaus, Michelle V. Buchanan, 04/12, Physics Today [46] http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-12/p39.html _________________________________________________________________ 11.06. As Hybrid Cars Multiply, So Do Carpooling Gripes , Washington Post Excerpts: "I'd say 95 percent of the people who buy a Prius say it's to get into HOV [High Occupancy Vehicle = more than one person in a car, Ed.]," (...). "They talk about the tax break and the HOV, and once in a while they say they prefer it for the gas mileage as well." (...) That year [2000, Ed.], there were 32 cars in all of Virginia with "clean fuel" tags (...). By April 2003, that number had grown to 2,500 in Northern Virginia, and by the end of 2004 the region had 6,800 hybrid vehicles registered with "clean special fuel" plates. * [47] As Hybrid Cars Multiply, So Do Carpooling Gripes, Steven Ginsberg, Carol Morello, 05/01/07, Washington Post [47] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54561-2005Jan6.html?referrer=email _________________________________________________________________ 12. Deflecting Near-Earth Space Hazards , NPR TOTN Excerpts: We look at a new NASA probe on a deliberate collision course with a comet, and at efforts to protect planet Earth against other space-borne threats. * [48] Deflecting Near-Earth Space Hazards, 05/01/07, NPR TOTN [48] http://www.npr.org/rundowns/segment.php?wfId=4273770 _________________________________________________________________ 12.01. In Search Of Hidden Dimensions , Nature Excerpts: (...) detect the extra dimensions predicted by the [string, Ed] theory (...) (...) some of these extra dimensions might be as large as a millimetre (...). But gravity, they think, might be able to seep into these extra dimensions. (...). (...) some of the energy created by particle collisions in the machine could escape into extra dimensions, carried off by leaking gravity, if those dimensions are large enough. The result would be an apparent violation of the conservation of energy ?a dramatic sign that string theorists are on the right track. * [49] In Search Of Hidden Dimensions, Geoff Brumfiel, 05/01/06, DOI: 10.1038/433010a, Nature 433, 10 [49] http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v433/n7021/full/433010a_fs.html _________________________________________________________________ 12.02. The Long-Distance Thinker , Nature Excerpts: [Loop quantum gravity, Ed] a framework in which physical laws do not break down at the Big Bang singularity (...). His results suggest that at extremely small scales, quantum gravitation can be repulsive, which prevents the collapse of space-time into a singularity. This effect, which would contradict general relativity, might be a consequence of the quantization of Einstein's equations, (...). Freed from the singularity, Bojowald can now look back to a time 'before' the Big Bang. He finds an inverted universe on the other side ?a mirror-image of ours ?expanding outwards as time runs backwards. * [50] The Long-Distance Thinker, Quirin Schiermeier, 05/01/06, DOI: 10.1038/433012a, Nature 433, 12 [50] http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v433/n7021/full/433012a_r.html _________________________________________________________________ 12.03. Gorging Black Hole Makes Its Mark , Science NOW Excerpts: Gaping holes. X-rays from hot gas in a cluster of galaxies (left) outline two "supercavities" cleared out by an eruption from a central black hole (artist's view, right). Credit: B. Mcnamara Et. Al. /Nasa/Cxc/Ohio University Gigantic "super-cavities" in galaxy cluster reveal the most powerful eruption ever seen (...) Radio images had revealed a classic double-sided jet of energy streaming away from this central galaxy. Astronomers assumed that a large black hole inside the galaxy gorged on infalling gas, spouting powerful jets into space from the superhot region close to the hole. (...) the black hole has driven the jets by devouring an average of three times the mass of our sun each year for the last 100 million years. * [51] Gorging Black Hole Makes Its Mark, 05/01/05, ScienceNOW * VIDEO - [52] Animations of MS 0735.6+7421 [51] http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2005/105/1?etoc [52] http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2005/ms0735/animations.html#bh_erupt _________________________________________________________________ 13. Mmmmm, Toxicants , Science NOW Excerpts: TCE-hungry. Dehalococcoides consumes dangerous pollutants. Credit: Steve Zinder, Cornell University. Genome sequence reveals how a bacterium breaks down toxic pollutants For just about every substance, there's a microbe that eats it. That's even true for man-made pollutants that didn't exist 60 years ago. Take Dehalococcoides ethenogenes. In 1997, microbiologist Steve Zinder of Cornell University isolated the microbe from sewage sludge contaminated with the chemical tetrachloroethene (PCE). The strain, it turned out, consumes PCE or its chemical cousin, the engine-degreasing chemical trichloroethene (TCE), as food. The chemicals are widely used by dry cleaners, electronics companies, and the military. * [53] Mmmmm, Toxicants, Dan Ferber, 05/01/07, ScienceNOW [53] http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2005/107/3?etoc _________________________________________________________________ 13.01. The Enigma of Prokaryotic Life in Deep Hypersaline Anoxic Basins , Science Summary: Salt Survivors Immense salt deposits beneath the Mediterranean floor are the legacy of its having evaporated to dryness about 6 million years ago. Van der Wielen et al. (p. 121) have explored the microbiology of deep hypersaline anoxic remnants. A picture emerges of whole microbial communities that are far from being biogeochemical dead-ends. Rather they are contributing to global cycles while thriving in some of the most saline environments known. * [54] The Enigma of Prokaryotic Life in Deep Hypersaline Anoxic Basins, Paul W. J. J. van der Wielen, Henk Bolhuis, Sara Borin, Daniele Daffonchio, Cesare Corselli, Laura Giuliano, Giuseppe D'Auria, Gert J. de Lange, Andreas Huebner, Sotirios P. Varnavas, John Thomson, Christian Tamburini, Danielle Marty, Terry J. McGenity, Kenneth N. Timmis, BioDeep Scientific Party, 05/01/07, Science : 121-12 [54] http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/307/5706/121 _________________________________________________________________ 13.02. Microbes Brave Briny Basins , Nature News Excerpts: Inspired by microbes such as the Haloferax mediteranei bacterium, which survive in briny lakes, scientists sought and found new microbes in even saltier waters. ? SPL A community of microorganisms has been discovered in one of the saltiest environments on Earth, ultra-saturated salt basins deep in the Mediterranean Sea. The salt solution there is so concentrated, microbiologists are mystified as to how the organisms are able to survive. About 6 million years ago, the Mediterranean had dried up, (...). Over time, sediment covered the salty deposits in the desolate basin. Now, places where these underwater salty deposits are exposed are exceptionally briny, containing up to 476 grams of magnesium chloride per litre. * [55] Microbes Brave Briny Basins, Roxanne Khamsi, 05/01/06, Nature News [55] http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050103/full/050103-7.html _________________________________________________________________ 14. Bridging The Gap , Nature Excerpts: By looking at evolving tissue as a complex biological system, mathematical models can provide just such a holistic understanding. The use of agent-based models to interpret stem-cell systems is beginning to show promise in offering new ways of thinking about tissue evolution. In these models, cells are considered as distinct entities (or agents) positioned on an appropriate lattice, and simple cellular behaviours are prescribed, (...). But on the global scale, structure is seen to emerge from long-range summation of these low-level behaviours. * [56] Bridging The Gap, Ben D. MacArthur, Richard O. C. Oreffo, 05/01/06, DOI: 10.1038/433019a, Nature 433, 19 [56] http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v433/n7021/full/433019a_r.html _________________________________________________________________ 14.01. Nanomotors Rev Up , Science Now Excerpts: They used the catalytic activity of platinum to propel tiny gold rods. In an aqueous solution, the platinum-tipped rods continuously converted hydrogen peroxide into oxygen and water. The oxygen-rich region lowered the surface tension between the tips of the rod and the liquid. Because the rest of the gold rod was attracted to the region of the low surface tension, the rod moved in that direction, generating more oxygen as it went. (...) So by simply moving a magnet, the researchers could steer their rods. * [57] Nanomotors Rev Up, Robert F. Service, 05/01/07, ScienceNOW [57] http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2005/107/2?etoc _________________________________________________________________ 15. Advances towards a General-Purpose Societal-Scale Human-Collective Problem-Solving Engine , arXiv Abstract: Human collective intelligence has proved itself as an important factor in a society's ability to accomplish large-scale behavioral feats. As societies have grown in population-size, individuals have seen a decrease in their ability to activeily participate in the problem-solving processes of the group. Representative decision-making structures have been used as a modern solution to society's inadequate information-processing infrastructure. With computer and network technologies being further embedded within the fabric of society, the implementation of a general-purpose societal-scale human-collective problem-solving engine is envisioned as a means of furthering the collective-intelligence potential of society. This paper provides both a novel framework for creating collective intelligence systems and a method for implementing a representative and expertise system based on social-network theory. * [58] Advances towards a General-Purpose Societal-Scale Human-Collective Problem-Solving Engine, Marko Rodriguez, 2005/01/03, DOI: cs.CY/0501004, arXiv * Contributed by [59] Carlos Gershenson [58] http://arXiv.org/abs/cs.CY/0501004 [59] http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/ _________________________________________________________________ 15.01. Building a Smarter Search Engine , Business Week Excerpts: Clusty also provides this laundry list of results. But on the left side of its results Web page, it provides folders entitled Navy, Music, and Harbor Seal. By clicking on any of these groups, individuals drill down into more topic-specific results. To pull together the results, Clusty uses metasearch technology, which means it searches the results of other search engines and indexes, (...). Then it applies the artificial intelligence to pick out the major themes found within the results for each search and organizes them into folders. * [60] Building a Smarter Search Engine, Heather Green, 05/01/04, Business Week [60] http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2005/tc2005014_2937.htm _________________________________________________________________ 15.02. Search Looks at the Big Picture , Wired Excerpts: (...) visualization software that can identify objects contained within one of the web's fastest-growing content categories -- video streams. The Marvel software identifies groups of objects within a frame to form concepts that can be easily searched, such as an airplane with a cloud and sky backdrop that would be categorized as travel, (...). Using people to scan video streams to label the content is too slow and costly, (...). The software can be trained to recognize images by providing it with a group of similar images, he said. * [61] Search Looks at the Big Picture, John Gartner, 05/01/06, Wired [61] http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,66185,00.html _________________________________________________________________ 15.03. Computing Takes a Giant Leap , Pile Systems Press Release Excerpts: Such a solution must cover two principal aspects: reduce exponential explosion of complication and thus computing resources in traditional mechanical structures (e.g. databases) to a linear growth. This could be called the problem of ?harnessing complexity? Enable scalable mapping of complex dynamic systems (e.g. social interactions, language, weather, foodwebs etc.) without exponential explosion of computing resources. This could be called the problem of ?harvesting complexity? (...) Pile implements a new, non-hierarchical ?architecture of logic?which the company refers to as ?polylogic? ?Pile is much closer to human thinking, which combines logic and synthetic operations and blends different logic domains? Polylogic computing will be easier and more intuitive, but requires a new understanding of data, representation and ordering, (...). * [62] Computing Takes a Giant Leap, 04/12/21, Pile Systems Press Release [62] http://www.pilesys.com/Computing%20Takes%20a%20Giant%20Leap.htm _________________________________________________________________ 15.04. The BlackBerry Brain Trust , Wired Excerpts: Perimeter is among the handful of places that, over the coming decade or two, have the best chance of unifying relativity and quantum mechanics, one of the biggest goals in physics. Among other things, researchers are also working on the fundamentals of quantum computing. Of course, like all efforts to advance physics, Perimeter runs the risk of abject failure. It is 100 years since Einstein published his papers on relativity, and we're still grappling with problems that stumped him. * [63] The BlackBerry Brain Trust, Duff McDonald, 05/01/, Wired [63] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/perimeter_pr.html _________________________________________________________________ 16. Games Win For Blu-Ray DVD Format , BBC News Excerpts: Blu-ray DVDs will hold much more data A Blu-ray disc will be able to store 50GB of high-quality data, while Toshiba's HD-DVD will hold 30GB. Mr Doherty added that it was making sure the discs could satisfy all high-definition needs, including the ability to record onto the DVDs and smaller discs to fit into camcorders. Both Toshiba and Blu-ray are hopeful that the emerging DVD format war, akin to the Betamax and VHS fight in the 1980s, can be resolved over the next year when next-generation DVD players start to come out. * [64] Games Win For Blu-Ray DVD Format, Jo Twist, 05/01/07, BBC News [64] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4153813.stm _________________________________________________________________ 16.01. TiVo Adds Portability to the Mix , NY Times Excerpts: The new technology, called TiVoToGo, is neither a product nor a service. It's a software feature that TiVo, in a phased rollout, is beaming into existing TiVo recorders. (...) TiVo, of course, is a digital video recorder - a box that records cable, satellite or antenna-based TV broadcasts onto a built-in hard drive. (...) TiVo effortlessly bends TV broadcasting to suit your schedule instead of the other way around, which explains why its customers tend to be wide-eyed TiVo boosters. * [65] TiVo Adds Portability to the Mix, David Pogue, 05/01/07, NYTimes [65] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/06/technology/circuits/06stat.html _________________________________________________________________ 16.02. DirecTV Machine Will Compete With TiVo , NY Times Excerpts: DirecTV subscribers using the new recorder will also be able to record several pay-per-view movies at a time (...). DirecTV also said that it would offer local high-definition TV broadcasts in 12 markets beginning later this year. To increase its channel capacity, the company will launch several satellites designed to carry HDTV programming. DirecTV will market a home media center by the end of this year that will permit customers to transmit programming stored on a digital recorder to any other television in the house. * [66] DirecTV Machine Will Compete With TiVo, Eric A. Taub, 05/01/07, NYTimes [66] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/07/technology/07tele.html _________________________________________________________________ 17. Toyota Launches Robot Workforce , NEWS.com.au Excerpts: The robots would be able to carry out multiple tasks simultaneously with their two arms, achieving efficiency unseen in human workers and matching the cheap wages of Chinese laborers, (...). Japan's top automaker currently uses 3000 to 4000 less-advanced robots at its domestic factories but their use has been confined mostly to welding, painting and other potentially hazardous tasks, (...). The new robots would also be used in finishing work, such as installation of seats and car interior fixtures, that have been too complex for conventional robots up to now, (...). * [67] Toyota Launches Robot Workforce, 05/01/05, NEWS.com.au [67] http://finance.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,11866894%255E14305,00.html _________________________________________________________________ 18. Super-selection Rules Modulating Complexity: An Overview , Chaos, Solitons & Fractals Abstract: Complex systems comprising a large number of elements are potentially capable of finding themselves in a huge variety of states arising by combining the states of their parts. If such a combinatorial explosion were indeed materializing, the observed behavior would resemble to random noise. It is therefore essential that physically relevant complex systems be capable of developing mechanisms for selecting a meaningful subset of states out of the large set of a priori available states. In this communication some generic mechanisms for reducing complexity are analyzed and illustrated on case studies. * [68] Super-selection Rules Modulating Complexity: An Overview, John S. Nicolis, 2004/12/23, DOI: 10.1016/j.chaos.2004.10.002, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Article in Press, Corrected Proof * Contributed by [69] Carlos Gershenson [68] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chaos.2004.10.002 [69] http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/ _________________________________________________________________ 18.01. Power Laws, Pareto Distributions and Zipf's Law , arXiv Abstract: When the probability of measuring a particular value of some quantity varies inversely as a power of that value, the quantity is said to follow a power law, also known variously as Zipf's law or the Pareto distribution. Power laws appear widely in physics, biology, earth and planetary sciences, economics and finance, computer science, demography and the social sciences. For instance, the distributions of the sizes of cities, earthquakes, forest fires, solar flares, moon craters and people's personal fortunes all appear to follow power laws. The origin of power-law behaviour has been a topic of debate in the scientific community for more than a century. Here we review some of the empirical evidence for the existence of power-law forms and the theories proposed to explain them. * [70] Power Laws, Pareto Distributions and Zipf's Law, M. E. J. Newman, 2004/12/01, DOI: cond-mat/0412004, arXiv * Contributed by [71] Carlos Gershenson [70] http://arXiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0412004 [71] http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/ _________________________________________________________________ 19. Complex Challenges: Global Terroist Networks _________________________________________________________________ 19.01. The Spy Who Billed Me Excerpts: In the post-9/11 rush to beef up intelligence, the government has outsourced everything from spy satellites to covert operations -- and well-connected companies are cashing in. (...) critics are beginning to question whether private companies should be in the business of handling some of the government?s most sensitive work. (...) the kind of military intelligence work (...) is particularly ripe for problems because intelligence agencies ?operate under unusual authority.?He adds: ?I don?t think the current oversight system is equipped to monitor the activities of contractors. That is one of the central lessons of the Abu Ghraib affair.? * [72] The Spy Who Billed Me, Tim Shorrock, 05/01-02, MotherJones.com [72] http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2005/01/12_400.html _________________________________________________________________ 19.02. Detainee Seeking to Bar His Transfer , NY Times Excerpts: A lawyer for one of the detainees at Guant?namo Bay, Cuba, has asked the federal district court here to block the Bush administration from sending the detainee to Egypt, asserting that he would be tortured there. The motion was filed in November on behalf of the detainee, Mamdouh Habib, and asserts that he was tortured in an Egyptian prison for nearly six months in 2001 before being transferred to Guant?namo. The filing, which was declassified and released on Wednesday, includes details of the alleged torture, (...). * [73] Detainee Seeking to Bar His Transfer, Neil A. Lewis, 05/01/06, NYTimes [73] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/06/politics/06gitmo.html _________________________________________________________________ 19.03. Guant?namo - An Icon Of Lawlessness Excerpts: Also in December, six months after the US Supreme Court's ruling, the government notified the detainees that they can file habeas corpus petitions in federal court. It even gave them the address of a US District Court in which to file them. In this Kafkaesque world of Guant?namo, however, the government has argued to that very same court that the detainees have no basis in constitutional or international law on which to challenge the lawfulness of their detentions. It maintains that review by the Combatant Status Review Tribunal and the Administrative Review Board is more than sufficient due process. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the detainees have still not had access to lawyers. * [74] Guantanamo - An Icon Of Lawlessness, 05/01/06, Amnesty International [74] http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/document.do?id=ECC6D058DBAB4C8C80256F80005829F3 _________________________________________________________________ 20. Links & Snippets _________________________________________________________________ 20.01. Other Publications - Essential Properties of Language from the Point of View of Autopoiesis, 2004/12/28, Cogprints - Hierarchical Characterization of Complex Networks, 2005/01/01, arXiv, DOI: cond-mat/0412761 - Pattern Formation in a Stochastic Model of Cancer Growth, 2004/09/21, arXiv, DOI: q-bio.CB/0501007 - Evolutionary Dynamics in Complex Networks of Competing Boolean Agents, 2004/11/26, arXiv, DOI: cond-mat/0411664 - Genetic Networks with Canalyzing Boolean Rules are Always Stable, 2004/11/30, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 101 (2004), 17102-17107 (Open Access), DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0407783101 - Complex Regulatory Control in Boolean Networks, 2004/12/17, arXiv, DOI: cond-mat/0412443 - The D?j?Vu Illusion, Dec. 2004, Online 2004/11/24, Current Directions in Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.00320.x - Relationships, Human Behavior, And Psychological Science, Dec. 2004, Online 2004/11/24, Current Directions in Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.00315.x - Stimulus Complexity Dependent Memory Impairment And Changes In Motor Performance After Deletion Of The Neuronal Gap Junction Protein Connexin36 In Mice, 2005/02/10, Online 2004/08/17, Behavioural Brain Research, DOI: 10.1016/j.bbr.2004.06.023 - Pigeons Shift Their Preference Toward Locations Of Food That Take More Effort To Obtain, 2004/11/30, online 2004/08/28, Behavioural Processes, DOI: 10.1016/j.beproc.2004.07.001 - On The Control Of Chaotic Systems Via Symbolic Time Series Analysis, Dec. 2004, online 2004/10/28, Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, DOI: 10.1063/1.1796071 - Estimation Of Initial Conditions And Parameters Of A Chaotic Evolution Process From A Short Time Series, Dec. 2004, online 2004/11/01, Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, DOI: 10.1063/1.1811548 - Musical Constructions Of Nationalism: A Comparative Study Of Bart?k And Stravinsky, Oct. 2004, online 2004/10/20, Nations and Nationalism, DOI: 10.1111/j.1354-5078.2004.00183.x - Stem Cells Could Reveal Secrets Of Illness In Later Life, 2005/01/06, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) - Exploring Ocean Life And Color On The Internet, 2004/01/03, ScienceDaily & National Aeronautic And Space Administration - Elegant Shape Of Eiffel Tower Solved Mathematically By University Of Colorado Professor, 2004/01/07, ScienceDaily & University Of Colorado - Why Environmental Scientists Are Becoming Bayesians, Jan. 2005, Online 2004/12/15, Ecology Letters, DOI: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2004.00702.x - The Spatial Spread Of Invasions: New Developments In Theory And Evidence, Jan. 2005, Online 2004/11/04, Ecology Letters, DOI: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2004.00687.x - Uncertainty About Uncertainty And Delay In Bargaining, Jan. 2005, Online 2004/12/03, Econometrica, DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0262.2005.00565.x - Facts, Fiction, And The Fourth Estate: The Washington Post And "Jimmy's World", Nov. 2004, Online 2004/12/08, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1536-7150.2004.00331.x - Tech Gadget Show Features Hottest Products, 05/01/04, NYTimes/AP - Election Results to Be Certified, With Little Fuss From Kerry, 05/01/06, NYTimes - Primordial Fungus, 05/01/06, Loopy. Fused filaments suggest that this fossil was an ancient fungus. Credit: N. J. Butterfield New fossils date back to long before the dawn of animals ScienceNOW - Coral 230Th Dating of the Imposition of a Ritual Control Hierarchy in Precontact Hawaii, 05/01/07, Science : 102-10 - Giant Eagle had Lilliputian Origins, 05/01/04, Fearsome predator. Haast's eagle evolved rapidly from a small ancestor, allowing it to attack even 200 kilogram moas. Credit: John Megahan ScienceNOW - CRP as Key as Cholesterol?, 05/01/07, NPR TOTN,A new study says that levels of a blood protein known as CRP may be as important as cholesterol levels in predicting the risk of heart disease. - Writer Crichton Questions Global Warming Fears, 05/01/07, NPR TOTN, In his new book State of Fear, Michael Crichton blends fact with fiction in a critical look at the science of global warming. The premise asks whether concerns about climate change are overblown. We speak with Crichton about his book and about the politics of the global warming debate. - N Korea Wages War On Long Hair, Men's Hairstyles Reflect Their 'Ideological Spirit', 05/01/08, BBC, North Korea has launched an intensive media assault on its latest arch enemy - the wrong haircut. - For Sale: One Biosphere, Gently Used, 05/01/09, NPR WE, NPR's Ted Robbins reports that the 3-acre terrarium known as Biosphere 2 is up for sale. Billionaire Ed Bass funded the facility, which contained several self-sufficient earth habitats within a sealed greenhouse-like structure. But infighting and financial problems resulted in the original experiment being abandoned. - Stopping the Bum's Rush, 05/01/04, NYTimes - Even Einstein Had His Off Days, 05/01/02, NYTimes, While we should laud Einstein's achievements, we may learn a more valuable lesson by investigating his greatest failure. - Gigantic Photoresponse in -Filled-Band Organic Salt (EDO-TTF)2PF6, 05/01/07, Science : 86-89. - Normalization of Tumor Vasculature: An Emerging Concept in Antiangiogenic Therapy, 05/01/07, Rakesh K. Jain Science : 58-62 In clinical trials, "anti-angiogenic" drugs, which are designed to destroy the blood vessels that feed tumors, have limited efficacy when administered as single agents. - A Comprehensive Survey of the Plasmodium Life Cycle by Genomic, Transcriptomic, and Proteomic Analyses, 05/01/07, Science : 82-86. (...) transcriptional profiling and proteomic analysis of several species of parasite has helped tease apart aspects of the little understood sexual cycle of these parasites. - Genome Sequence of the PCE-Dechlorinating Bacterium Dehalococcoides ethenogenes, 05/01/07, Science : 105-108 Dehalococcoides ethenogenes is the only bacterium known to reductively dechlorinate groundwater pollutants, tetrachloroethene (PCE) and trichloroethene (TCE), to ethylene. - Decoding Calcium Signaling, 05/01/07, Science : 56-57. - Spindle Multipolarity Is Prevented by Centrosomal Clustering, 05/01/07, Science : 127-129. - The Centromeric Protein Sgo1 Is Required to Sense Lack of Tension on Mitotic Chromosomes, 05/01/07, Science : 130-133. - Atom Collision-Induced Resistivity of Carbon Nanotubes, 05/01/07, Science: 89-93 - Disks Around Stars and the Growth of Planetary Systems, 05/01/07, Science : 68-71 - The Kuiper Belt and the Solar System's Comet Disk, 05/01/07, Science : 71-75 - Black Hole Accretion, 05/01/07, Science : 77-80 - Oldest Civilization in the Americas Revealed, 05/01/07, Science : 34-35 - Carbon Trading Grows Into New Year, 05/01/07, Nature News, Volume rises as price falls in first week of EU trading scheme. - Terror Shows Only In The Eyes, 05/01/05, Nature News, Knowing where to look is key to recognizing others' emotions. - Inadequate Warning System Left Asia At The Mercy Of Tsunami, 05/01/05, Nature News, Scientists and governments were caught unprepared. - Linguistic Perception: Neural Processing Of A Whistled Language, 05/01/06, Nature 433, 31 - 32 A rare surrogate of Spanish highlights the adaptability of the brain's language regions., DOI: 10.1038/433031a - A Mechanism For Impaired Fear Recognition After Amygdala Damage, 05/01/06, Nature 433, 68 - 72, DOI: 10.1038/nature03086 - Reflections On Insecticides: Mirror Forms Of Agrochemicals Set Risk, 05/01/08, ScienceNews, The toxicity of an insecticide or how long it persists in the environment depends on which mirror-image form of the chemical is present. - Bad Combo? Some Antidepressants May Hamper Breast Cancer Drug, 05/01/08, ScienceNews, Certain widely used antidepressants and a woman's own genes might diminish the effect of tamoxifen, a frontline breast cancer drug. - Ring Robber, Science News. Images taken by the Cassini spacecraft provide graphic evidence of Saturn's moon Prometheus stealing particles from the planet's narrow F ring. _________________________________________________________________ 20.02. Webcast Announcements [75] 1st European Conference on Complex Systems, Torino, Italy, 04/12/5-7 [76] Neurobiological Foundation For The Meaning Of Information, Kolkata, India, Conference Webcast, 04/11/22-25 [77] ALife 9: Ninth International Conference on Artificial Life, Boston, MA, 04/09/12-15 The 4th Intl Workshop on Meta-synthesis and Complex System, Beijing, China, 04/07/22-23 Intl Conf on Complex Networks: Structure, Function and Processes, Kolkata, India, 04/06/27-30 >From Autopoiesis to Neurophenomenology: A Tribute to Francisco Varela (1946-2001), Paris, France, 2004/06/18-20 ECC8 Experimental Chaos Conference, Florence, Italy, 04/06/14-17 Evolutionary Epistemology, Language, and Culture, Brussels, Belgium, 04/05/26-28 International Conference on Complex Systems 2004, Boston, 04/05/16-21 Life, a Nobel Story, Brussels, Belgium, 04/04/28 Nonlinear Dynamics and Statistical Mechanics Days, Brussels, Belgium, 04/04/26-27 Science Education Forum for Chinese Language Culture, Panel Discussion, Taipei, Taiwan, 04/05/01 Biologically Inspired Approaches to Advanced Information Technology, , Lausanne,Switzerland, 04/01/29-30 Nonlinear Dynamics And Chaos: Lab Demonstrations, Strogatz, Steven H., Internet-First University Press, 1994 [78] World Economic Forum 2004, Davos, Switzerland [79] Riding the Next Democratic Wave, Al-Thani, Khan, Vike-Freiberga, Wade, Soros, Zakaria, World Economic Forum, 04/01/25 [80] The Future of Global Interdependence, Kharrazi, Held, Owens, Shourie, Annan, Martin, Schwab, World Economic Forum, 04/01/25 [81] Why Victory Against Terrorism Demands Shared Values CODIS 2004, International Conference On Communications, Devices And Intelligent Systems, 2004 Calcutta, India, 04/01/09-10 EVOLVABILITY & INTERACTION: Evolutionary Substrates of Communication, Signaling, and Perception in the Dynamics of Social Complexity, London, UK, 03/10/08-10 The Semantic Web and Language Technology - Its Po tential and Practicalities, Bucharest, Romania, 03/07/28-08/08 ECAL 2003, 7th European Conference on Artificial Life, Dortmund, Germany, 03/09/14-17 New Santa Fe Institute President About His Vision for SFI's Future Role, (Video, Santa Fe, NM, 03/06/04) SPIE's 1st Intl Symp on Fluctuations and Noise, Santa Fe, NM, 2003/06/01-04 NAS Sackler Colloquium on Mapping Knowledge Domains, Video/Audio Report, 03/05/11 13th Ann Intl Conf, Soc f Chaos Theory in Psych & Life Sciences, Boston, MA, USA, 2003/08/08-10 CERN Webcast Service, Streamed videos of Archived Lectures and Live Events Dean LeBaron's Archive of Daily Video Commentary, Ongoing Since February 1998 Edge Videos [75] http://www.comdig2.de/Conf/ECCS04/Target=new [76] http://www.comdig2.de/Conf/ICONIP04/ Target=new [77] http://www.comdig2.de/Conf/ALife9 Target=new [78] http://www.worlductx.com/worldeconomicforum_annualmeeting2004/default.asp [79] http://www.worlductx.com/worldeconomicforum_annualmeeting2004/_S9958.asp [80] http://www.worlductx.com/worldeconomicforum_annualmeeting2004/_S10881.asp [81] http://www.worlductx.com/worldeconomicforum_annualmeeting2004/_S10895.asp _________________________________________________________________ 20.03. Conference & Call for Papers Announcements [82] Online Course on Genetic Programming, with Lee Altenberg, University of Hawaii Outreach College 2005/01/10 to 2005/05/13. Complex Systems and International Security, Washington, DC, 05/02/01 Kondratieff Waves, Warfare And World Security, NATO Advanced Research Workshop , Covilh? Portugal, 05/02/14-17 2005 Meeting Arbeitskreis Physik sozio-onomischer Systeme, AKSOE (Socio-Economic-Physics), Physik seit Einstein, Berlin, Germany, 05/03/04-09 2005 World Exposition " [83] Nature's Wisdom, Aichi, Japan, 05/03/25-09/25 FINCO 2005: Foundations Of Interactive Computation, Edinburgh, Scotland, 05/04/09 5th Creativity And Cognition Conference, London.UK, 05/04/12-15 Social Intelligence and Interaction in Animals, Robots and Agents, Hatfield, UK, 05/04/12-15 2005 NSTI Nanotechnology Conference and Trade Show Nanotech 2005, Anaheim, California, U.S.A., 05/05/08-12 2ndShanghai Intl Symposium on Nonlinear Science and Applications, Shanghai, 05/06/03-07 IEEE Swarm Intelligence Symposium Pasadena, California, USA, 05/06/08-10 Powders & Grains 2005, Stuttgart, Germany, 05/06/18-22 6th Intl Conf Symmetry in Nonlinear Mathematical Physics, Kiev, Ukraine, 05/06/20-26 Workshop on Complexity and Policy Analysis, Cork, Ireland, 05/06/22-24 2005 Genetic And Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2005), Washington, DC, USA, 05/06/25-29 5th Gathering on?Biosemiotics, Urbino, Italy, 05/07/22-24 ECAL 2005 - VIIIth European Conference on Artificial Life, Canterbury, Kent, UK, 05/09/05-09 Complexity, Science and Society Conf 2005, Liverpool, UK, 05/09/11-14 18th International Conference on Noise and Fluctuations (ICNF 2005), Salamanca, Spain, 05/09/19-23 CSDS-2005 Intl Conf on CONTROL AND SYNCHRONIZATION OF DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS , Leon, Guanajuato, MEXICO, 05/10/04-07 3rd International Complexity Science and Educational Research Conference, Robert, Louisiana, 05/11/20-22, see also: Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education, Inaugural issue - Free Online Access [82] http://dynamics.org/UH_ICS/691_GP/Announcement.html target=new [83] http://www.expo2005.com/expo_facts.htm Target=new _________________________________________________________________ [84]Complexity Digest is an independent publication available to organizations that may wish to repost [85]ComDig to their own mailing lists. [86]ComDig is published by [87]Dean LeBaron and edited by [88]Gottfried J. Mayer. To unsubscribe from this list, please send a note to [89]subscriptions at comdig.org. [84] http://www.comdig.org/ [85] http://www.comdig.org/ [86] http://www.comdig.org/ [87] http://www.deanlebaron.com/index.html [88] http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/g/x/gxm21/ [89] mailto:subscriptions at comdig.org From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 12 15:20:09 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 10:20:09 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Enterprise Security Today: Survey Predicts Devastating Internet Attack Message-ID: Enterprise Security Today (Online Security): NewsFactor Network - Viruses & Worms - Survey Predicts Devastating Internet Attack http://enterprise-security-today.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_title=Pew-Survey-Predicts-Devastating-Internet-Attack&story_id=29634 NewsFactor Network January 11, 2005 1:29PM The definition of 'devastating' used in the survey was vague, noted Pew Internet project director Lee Rainie. "Some people pushed back on our results and said that in some respects, there are significant attacks taking place now -- which may not involve loss of life but could still be considered 'devastating.'" Respondents to a survey by the [49]Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University gave an eyebrow-raising response to a question about Internet security: Some 66 percent said they expected at least one devastating attack would occur in the next ten years on the networked information infrastructure or the country's power grid. "That is a significant number, especially when stacked against other predictions in the survey," Pew Internet project director Lee Rainie tells NewsFactor. Not only was the number of respondents high, but it was the question that generated the least dispute. "It is a strong position held by the vast majority of people we surveyed," Rainie says. It is also a frightening one: Increasingly, the Internet has become solidly integrated into most business and public operations: a worst-case scenario could cause major economic disruption and even significant loss of life should power utilities or emergency care facilities become inoperable. Defining Devastating But, like all surveys, these findings have room for interpretation. Rainie himself notes that the definition used for 'devastating' was vague. "Some people pushed back on our results and said that in some respects, there are significant attacks taking place now -- which may not involve loss of life but could still be considered 'devastating.'" Other people took issue with the premise that anything that happened online could ever result in a significant loss of life, he added. "And then, some said the Internet community's defenses would always be changing in response to the changing nature of the threat," he noted. Map to Upheaval However, those were the views of the minority. Some sixty-six percent of respondents -- a group that included many government officials, notably some from the Department of Homeland Security -- said the Internet could be disrupted in one of the following ways: * A significant attack on the infrastructure in which key nodes or domain names were disabled, perhaps for a long time. * A narrower attack in which the Internet applications of a key provider -- such as bank or power grid -- was disrupted. * An especially virulent form of virus or worm -- more virulent than the current crop, that is -- that would cause massive disruption around the world. Underlying these fears is the obvious fact that the Internet has become key to most Americans' lives, according to the survey, which could lead to unexpected consequences. Still not that worried about a large-scale attack on the Internet? Well, consider another finding from the same survey: Some 59 percent of these experts agreed with a prediction that more government and business surveillance will occur as computing [51]Latest News about computing devices proliferate and become embedded in appliances, cars, phones and even clothes. References 49. http://www.pewinternet.org/ 50. http://bs.serving-sys.com/BurstingPipe/BannerRedirect.asp?FlightID=50681&Page=&PluID=0&Pos=4988 51. http://enterprise-security-today.newsfactor.com/search.xhtml?query=computing From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 12 15:23:06 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 10:23:06 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Robert Heilbroner, Writer and Economist, Dies at 85 Message-ID: Robert Heilbroner, Writer and Economist, Dies at 85 NYT January 12, 2005 By HOLCOMB B. NOBLE [He was hardly a conservative, seeing as how he endorsed bigger government at almost every turn.] Robert L. Heilbroner, an economist and writer of lively and provocative books that inspired generations of students with the drama of how the world earns, or fails to earn, its living - books that made him one of his profession's all-time best-selling authors - died on Jan. 4 in Manhattan. He was 85. His death, at New York Presbyterian Hospital, was announced Monday by the New School University, where he was professor emeritus on the graduate faculty of political and social science. The cause was a brain stem stroke after a three-year bout with Lewy body disease, a brain disease similar to Alzheimer's, his son David said. Dr. Heilbroner's first book, "The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers," written before he received his doctorate, is one of the most widely read economics books of all time. He was also a prominent lecturer as well as the author of 19 other books, which sold more than 10 million copies and, in many cases, became standard college textbooks. A witty writer, he called himself a "radical conservative," an oxymoron suggesting that, like Don Quixote, he wanted to rush rapidly forward, break the mold - and end up right where he was. But in that he was only half joking. He did indeed want to conserve the basic separation of the national economy from the national government, as suggested by Adam Smith in the 18th century. But he believed, too, that when the economy was hit with severe recessions or high unemployment or yawning income gaps, for example, government had to intervene with public spending that stimulated economic activity and generated jobs and the construction of public works that contributed to higher living standards. Although popular with students and the general reader, he was regarded by mainstream economists as a popularizer and historian whose insights made no great contribution to the study of the field. He, in turn, saw their reliance on mathematics and computer modeling as narrow in vision and as losing sight of the very purpose of economics - to help improve the well-being of people at work and of the society they work in. "The worldly philosophers," Dr. Heilbroner said in a 1999 interview, "thought their task was to model all the complexities of an economic system - the political, the sociological, the psychological, the moral, the historical. And modern economists, au contraire, do not want so complex a vision. They favor two-dimensional models that in trying to be scientific leave out too much and leave modern economists without a true understanding of how the system works." Dr. Heilbroner himself was the first to admit that he was not an economists' economist. He preferred writing to plotting the sale of widgets and calculating the effects of a heat wave on corn futures. And he was interested more in the history of economics and in what he considered its true dynamics than in working within the field itself. He liked to say that his chief accomplishment was in conning millions of students into thinking that the field was both interesting and in tune with their social ideas. "The Worldly Philosophers," published in 1953 (Simon & Schuster) and still in print, is widely regarded as one of the best texts for infusing clarity and excitement into the history of economic thought. John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist who, like Dr. Heilbroner, was often shunned as an outsider by mainstream economists, called the book a "brilliant achievement handled nearly to perfection." It went into its 10th edition in 1998 - 35 years after it was first published while Mr. Heilbroner was pursuing a doctorate at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. Mainstream economists, while critical of the way Professors Heilbroner and Galbraith practiced economics, nevertheless acknowledged the importance of several of their observations. Milton Friedman, the godfather of American conservative economists, who shared both assessments, said Professor Heilbroner was right on point, for example, with his attack in "The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought" (Cambridge University Press, 1996; written with William Milberg). By the end of the 20th century, the authors argued, economists had lost their concern for the social or political implications of their work, seeing themselves solely as sophisticated mathematical or statistical analysts. "He was correct," Mr. Friedman said. "There was an increasing tendency to move economics in highly specialized directions without any real view of its broader aspects." Robert Lewis Heilbroner was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on March 24, 1919, the third child and only son of Louis and Helen Heiler Heilbroner. His father was raised in a poor family in North Carolina but later prospered with a chain of men's clothing stores he founded in New York. He died when Robert was 5. The family business was sold, and he and his sisters were sent to private schools. The family chauffeur served as a surrogate father for 10 years, Dr. Heilbroner later said, playing a major role in shaping his thinking. As a student at Harvard, Dr. Heilbroner planned to major in writing but took a course in economics and, he said, "I took to it like a duck to water." After Harvard, he went to work in New York at the retail chain founded by his father and found that he hated the job. It took him 23 years after leaving Harvard to earn his doctorate in economics, however. Moving to Washington at the start of World War II, he worked with the Federal Office of Price Administration until he was drafted, assigned to Army intelligence and sent to the University of Michigan to learn Japanese. Over the course of the war, he interviewed some 2,000 enemy prisoners in the Pacific, gaining valuable information from voluble captives. The war taught him that he had a facility with language and words, and, after a brief term with a Wall Street commodities firm, he began writing freelance magazine articles on economics. He sold several to Harpers magazine, and caught the attention of editors at Simon & Schuster, who suggested that he write a book. He took their advice, quit business forever and from then on rarely stopped writing. In 1952, he married Joan Knapp, an author of children's books, and they had two children, Peter and David. His sons survive him, as does Ms. Knapp, from whom he was divorced in 1975, the year he married Shirley Eleanor Davis, who also survives him. Mr. Heilbroner completed his doctoral course requirements by 1952 and finished "The Worldly Philosophers" the next year. The book was an account that laymen could easily read about the lives and theories of the economic superstars of the past, among them Adam Smith, Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Alfred Marshall, Thorstein Veblen, John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. It was an immediate hit, and eventually sold millions of copies. But his Ph.D. took him 10 more years. He started and abandoned three dissertations. After "The Worldly Philosophers" was published his faculty advisers scolded him, saying the book would have filled the bill beautifully. So he submitted his next manuscript, "The Making of Economic Society," and was promptly awarded his doctorate. Later books included "The Limits of American Capitalism" (1966); "Between Capitalism and Socialism" (1970); "Marxism: For and Against" (1980), with Lester Thurow; "The Nature and Logic of Capitalism" (1985); and "Behind the Veil of Economics (1988). In "21st Century Capitalism," (W. W. Norton & Co., 1993), Dr. Heilbroner explained his radical conservatism with a bow to Adam Smith. Dr. Heilbroner agreed with Smith that the separation of the economy and the state was central to capitalism and a nation's economic health, and essential for political liberty. But he believed that from time to time the people's government had to wade in with major repairs. He said in an interview in 1998 that "feelings of dismay" penetrate the contemporary mind over unstable or depressed world economies and the widening income gap. He also noted capitalism's shortcomings in dealing with "externalities" - for example, "the higher laundry bills and health costs of people living in Pittsburgh before the pollution of the steel mills was brought under control." "Negative externalities," particularly the pollution of land, water and air by private enterprises intent on holding down costs cried out for government intervention, he said, whether in the form of taxes, subsidies, legislation or regulation. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/12/books/12heilbroner.html From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 12 15:23:57 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 10:23:57 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: A DNA Success Raises Bioterror Concern Message-ID: A DNA Success Raises Bioterror Concern NYT January 12, 2005 By NICHOLAS WADE Researchers have made an unexpectedly sudden advance in synthesizing long molecules of DNA, bringing them closer to the goal of redesigning genes and programming cells to make pharmaceuticals. But the success also puts within reach the manufacture of small genomes, such as those of viruses and perhaps certain bacteria. Some biologists fear that the technique might be used to make the genome of the smallpox virus, one of the few pathogens that cannot easily be collected from the wild. The advance, described in the Jan. 6 issue of the journal Nature by Dr. George M. Church of the Harvard Medical School and Dr. Xiaolian Gao of the University of Houston, involves the use of a new technique to synthesize a DNA molecule 14,500 chemical units in length. The molecule contained a string of 21 genes used by a harmless laboratory bacterium. The full power of the technique is still being explored, but genomes like that of the smallpox virus - 186,000 chemical units long - seem well within reach. Dr. Church has completed the first part of a plan to synthesize the 777,000-unit genome of a small bacterium known as Mycoplasma mobile. "This has the potential for a revolutionary impact in the ease of synthesis of large DNA molecules," said Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University with an interest in bioterrorism. "This will permit efficient and rapid synthesis of any select agent virus genome in very short order," he added, referring to the list of dangerous pathogens and toxins that possessors are required to register with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Ebright said any facility possessing the new DNA synthesis equipment should be assumed capable of making any virus on the select agent list. The genetic sequences of smallpox and many other dangerous pathogens are easily obtained because they were deposited in public databases as an aid to medical researchers at a time when synthesizing large DNA molecules seemed prohibitively expensive or impossible. Dr. Church is developing automated methods of DNA synthesis for a variety of research purposes including vaccines and pharmaceutical production. He has no interest in synthesizing dangerous pathogens but is aware of the technique's potential for misuse. Last year he proposed that the machines and ingredients for synthesizing DNA should be controlled, with manufacturers selling supplies only to facilities whose DNA machines had been registered. The manufacturers have expressed willingness to adopt the proposal, Dr. Church said in an e-mail message, "but it would be reassuring to get some official governmental support." Some experts say bioterrorists would find it much easier to collect pathogens in the wild than to synthesize the organisms' genetic material. But this is less of an option for smallpox, now officially held by only two laboratories in the world, and for the increasingly rare polio virus. In part to draw attention to the dangers of bioterrorism, Dr. Eckard Wimmer of the State University of New York at Stony Brook spent three years synthesizing DNA corresponding to the 7,500 units of polio virus, a feat he announced in July 2002. "It will be possible in 10 to 15 years to make smallpox," Dr. Wimmer told the Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News at the time. Dr. Wimmer said last week that the method described by Dr. Church and Dr. Gao was in technical terms "a tremendous step forward." But the technology would be impossible to control, he said, since any restraints that might be agreed to in the United States would not necessarily be followed by other countries. The only protection against harmful agents, in his view, is for the government to step up development of efficient vaccines. The genetic sequence of many pathogens has been determined and published by the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Md. Dr. Claire M. Fraser, the institute's president, said the new DNA synthesis method was a big advance in speed, cost and accuracy, but it was not yet clear if it would be possible to synthesize the genomes of large bacteria like anthrax. "I think we are going to see some point in the future when there will be a need for additional oversight on research," Dr. Fraser said. But scientists abroad, whose cooperation would be needed, seemed to her less concerned about the dangers. "We don't want to handicap science in the U.S." if others will not join in the effort, she said. Once scientists have synthesized the genome of an organism, it must then be "booted," or made to operate in a cell. Dr. Wimmer was able to reboot his polio virus genome so as to generate infectious particles, and a method for rebooting the cowpox genome, which is similar to that of smallpox, has already been reported. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/12/national/nationalspecial3/12gene.html From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 12 15:24:40 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 10:24:40 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: The Face of Nature Changes as Art and Science Evolve Message-ID: The Face of Nature Changes as Art and Science Evolve NYT November 23, 2004 By CARL ZIMMER Artists and scientists, so the story goes, glare at each other across a cultural divide. The scientist coldly hacks nature into pieces. The artist is unwilling to do the hard work necessary to understand how the world works. This story is mostly fiction, as the work of the printmaker Joseph Scheer makes abundantly clear. For the past six years, Mr. Scheer has made pictures of moths. He does not use paint or silk screens to make them. Instead, he has devised a method for placing real moths on a high-resolution digital scanner without crushing them flat. After correcting the colors on his computer, Mr. Scheer makes stunning prints, 3 feet by 4 feet, on soft Chinese paper. Mr. Scheer exhibited a selection of his moth prints at a conference this month by the Rhode Island School of Design and the Providence Athenaeum. At the conference, titled "Inspired by Nature: The Art of the Natural History Book," Mr. Scheer recounted how he wound up straddling art and science. "It's the way obsessions happen," he said. "It took over my life." It is easy to see how Mr. Scheer could lose himself in these images. His moths are almost hypnotic in their details. They are covered in a coat of hair as plush as mink fur. Their antennas look like crosses between ferns and radar dishes. Their wings seem to be assembled from a million dabs of a fine paint brush. This is art inseparable from science, whether that science is the latest development in digital reproduction or an esoteric corner of entomology. Mr. Scheer, the director of Alfred University's Institute for Electronic Arts, collects moths around his home in Allegany County, N.Y. He has also traveled to moth-dense parts of the world, like Costa Rica and Australia. He knows the life cycles of moths and their feeding habits. With the help of an international team of scientists, he has created an astonishing collection of roughly 20,000 images of moths. He is part of a long tradition. For centuries artists and scientists have been equally obsessed by the dream of a perfect vision of nature, preserved in a book of pictures. Together, they have seized on every innovation in printing technology, from wood blocks to digital scanners, in the quest for that perfection. They have traveled around the planet in search of specimens to illustrate, and have spent years creating some of the most elaborate books ever published. The notion of fixing nature to the page emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries, as modern Western science took shape. One image can sum up this urge. It comes from a book called "Worm's Museum" published in 1655. The book is a 400-page description of a museum built by the Danish physician Olaus Worm to teach students at the University of Copenhagen. The museum is long gone, but the frontispiece to "Worm's Museum" reveals a room packed with items like narwhal skulls, conch shells and stuffed lemurs. By immersing oneself in this room, Worm believed that a person could come to a true understanding of nature. "Let us take off the spectacles that show us the shadows of things instead of the things themselves," Worm wrote. To some extent, natural history books did take off the spectacles. Artists began to pay careful attention to animals and plants as they really were, not as they had been traditionally drawn. Albrecht D?rer, for example, brought astonishing biological realism to subjects as ordinary as a hare or a dandelion patch. But shadows still remained. Before the 18th century, European artists could rarely see a species that lived beyond their own continent. Even D?rer had to rely on third-hand stories when he drew a picture of a rhinoceros. Its armored skin wound up looking like a heap of shields. Better visions of nature emerged in the 1700's, as artists began to illustrate the discoveries of scientific expeditions. Opulent books were published, packed with pictures of the animals and plants native to North America and other new colonies of Europe. Exotic flowers began to fill the greenhouses of aristocrats, who commissioned lavishly illustrated books about their collections - ostensibly for the benefit of science but also to immortalize themselves. Their flowers might wilt, but their books would last forever. Natural history illustrators could not simply paint a single sumptuous picture that would hang on some museum wall. Their images had to be reproduced in hundreds or thousands of books. The first natural history books used relatively crude woodblock prints, and later publishers seized on every new technology that came along, like engraving and lithography, to make their images more realistic. The one great shortcoming of all these methods was that none could reproduce color. Color was important not just for aesthetics; it would also make scientific descriptions of animals or plants far more meaningful. The hunger for color drove publishers to all sorts of extremes, like having artists hand paint each engraving in a book after it was printed. A spectacular example of what this hunger for colorized nature could produce is the 1854 book "Victoria Regia" or "The Great Water Lily of America," which was exhibited at the Providence Athenaeum during the conference. In the mid-1800's, European explorers returned from the Amazon with stories of a fantastic water lily. Its disk-shaped leaves could support the weight of a grown man. It produced an endless supply of pinkish-white flowers, each reaching a foot across. Seeds were brought to Europe and the United States, and a few gardeners figured out how to cultivate them. One of the titanic flowers was presented to Queen Victoria, and botanists gave it her name. Americans were just as excited when the flowers were cultivated on this side of the Atlantic in 1851, and the book "Victoria Regia" was published in 1854 to take advantage of the water lily craze. To look at this book is an experience on a par with looking at Joseph Scheer's moths. It is 27 inches high and 21 inches wide, but only 17 pages long. Most of those pages are full-page illustrations of the flower by William Sharp. The flowers seem to be the size of the moon, surrounded by odd bristling fruits and leaves that look like green lakes. The startling colors of "Victoria Regia" were not painted by hand. "Victoria Regia" was the first American book to take advantage of a new printing method called chromolithography. For each illustration, Sharp used a greasy pen to draw four slightly different pictures on four polished slabs of limestone. Each slab was then rolled with a different color of ink, which was only absorbed by the pen marks. A sheet of paper was then pressed against each slab, combining the colors into a single image. It is staggering to imagine printers struggling with such big plates, lining up all four colors perfectly. But as awkward as it might seem, chromolithography was a huge leap forward for natural history books. They could be printed faster, with more consistent colors, and more cheaply than earlier books. In some ways, little has changed in 150 years since "Victoria Regia" was published. In 2003, Mr. Scheer put a number of his moth prints into a book called "Night Visions." As with "Victoria Regia" before it, "Night Visions" is both scientifically important and coffee-table eye candy. "Victoria Regia" took advantage of the then-new technology of chromolithography; "Night Visions" could not have existed before the invention of digital scanning. One book took 19th-century Americans to the Amazon; the other takes 21st-century Americans to the nocturnal world hidden in their own backyards. Yet none of these images, no matter how glorious, can capture the fullness of nature, as recent work of another artist makes poignantly clear. Rosamond Purcell, who also spoke at the conference, has spent more than 20 years exploring this gap between obsession and achievement. In 1986 she published "Illuminations," a grotesque bestiary of sorts that she compiled from museum specimens. A chameleon's skeleton glows pink with preserving fluids. A bat in a collection bottle seems to draw its wing over its face like a vampire. These museum specimens are supposed to typify nature, and yet in her photographs they wind up looking supremely unnatural. One of Ms. Purcell's latest creations brings us full circle back to the all-encompassing ambition of early natural history. In the 1980's she first came across the picture of Olaus Worm's museum, and she has spent hours gazing at every object in the room. Her artistic obsession has now grown to match Worm's scientific one: she has recreated the museum in three-dimensional detail. Real walls are now crowded with real turtle skulls, real ostrich eggs, real snake skins, a real oak tree that has grown around a real horse jaw. A real sturgeon and a real polar bear hang side by side from the ceiling. Ms. Purcell has created a perfect representation of what was supposed to be the perfect representation of nature. And yet, as with Mr. Scheer's moths, it can feel utterly unnatural. Gazing at Worm's museum resurrected at last, do we finally see things themselves, or do we remain surrounded by shadows? http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/23/science/23natu.html From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 12 15:26:20 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 10:26:20 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Scientist: Human Pacman hits real streets Message-ID: Human Pacman hits real streets http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996689 The classic arcade game PacMan has resurfaced on the streets of Singapore using augmented reality technology developed by military-backed scientists at the University of Singapore. While virtual reality immerses a user completely inside a computer-generated environment, augmented reality combines both real and virtual sensory information to produce a digitally-altered version of the real world. The original arcade game, released in 1980, involves using a joystick to move a tiny yellow character - PacMan - around a two dimensional mazelike grid on a video screen. Cookies are scattered throughout the grid and PacMans aim is to munch as many as possible while avoiding being caught by the Ghosts chasing him. The new game, called Human PacMan, superimposes a 3D PacMan world on top of the city's streets and architecture. Players enter the game by donning a wearable computer, headset and goggles before choosing to play the role of PacMan or one of the Ghosts. Players' movements are tracked using GPS receivers and motion sensors and they are linked back to a central computer system by wireless Local Area Network. The rules are the same as in the original, but the new game combines real and virtual elements. For example, the yellow cookies that PacMan eats to earn points are generated virtually and superimposed on the street ahead of a player via their goggles. But real sugar jars, fitted with Bluetooth radio transceivers, are dotted around the streets for players to collect. Outside contact Those inside the game can catch other characters by grabbing their shoulder. But they can also interact with people outside the game, who can watch their progress and send messages from computer terminals. Adrian Cheok, who developed Human PacMan with colleagues at the National University of Singapores Mixed Reality Lab, says the project has a serious purpose. "Human PacMan has its roots in serious research about humans interaction with their physical world," he writes on the project's homepage. The main challenge with augmented reality is integrating virtual and real information accurately, adds Andrei State at the University of Northern Carolina. "The computer needs to know where you are, what you are doing and what is in the real world," he told New Scientist. "Basically you need really good tracking." Some of the first applications of such technology, though on a much smaller physical scale, could be medical. Various research groups are already working on augmented reality systems that could assist surgeons performing complicated procedures, State says. Military use But augmented reality systems might also find application on the battlefield, where information could be superimposed across visual displays worn by soldiers, who could then also be tracked remotely by a central command. It could further be used in engineering, where it would enable users to see their plans implemented before construction work begins. However, computer games that combine virtual and real elements are already creeping into arcades. The Japanese dancing games Dance Dance Revolution and ParaParaParadise, for instance, require players to perform real dance moves, sensed on a dance mat, in order to gain points. Other research groups have also produced complex augmented reality games. A team at the University of South Australia has developed a version of the popular computer game Doom superimposed across a player's view of their university's campus. But Cheok believes that his game is the most advanced yet. "Human PacMan is pioneering a new form of gaming that anchors on physicality, mobility, social interaction, and ubiquitous computing," he adds. State agrees that augmented reality games have huge potential appeal. "I can imagine that, in a game like laser tag, it could add to the excitement and addictiveness," he says. From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 12 15:25:30 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 10:25:30 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Pudgy Pooches and Owners Can Shed Pounds Together Message-ID: Pudgy Pooches and Owners Can Shed Pounds Together NYT November 23, 2004 By ANAHAD O'CONNOR Couples who exercise together, experts have always said, are more likely to stick to a fitness plan than those who go it alone. But a new study, offering a twist on the old-fashioned buddy system, has found that people looking for a sidekick need look no further than their pets. In perhaps the first experiment of its kind, researchers showed that overweight owners and their pudgy pooches could lose weight and successfully stay trim by joining a diet and exercise program together. The owners shed as many pounds as a control group of people without pets, while the dogs fared even better, dropping a greater percentage of body weight. The findings of the study, financed by Hill's Pet Nutrition, a pet food company, were presented last week at the national obesity conference in Las Vegas. "We're always looking for creative ways to help people manage their weight so they find it fun and rewarding," said Dr. Robert Kushner, the medical director of the Wellness Institute at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and the lead author of the study. "We are facing a dual obesity epidemic in this country among people and their pets, and the idea came about to tackle both problems together." Multiple studies have shown that support from others can help people kick destructive habits and change behaviors. But scientists have never before examined whether dogs can provide the motivation for losing weight, and vice versa, Dr. Kushner said. In the new study, 82 people, 36 of them dog owners, attended counseling sessions on diet and fitness while eating no more than 1,400 calories a day. The subjects were mostly women, about 45 years old, and moderately obese. They were encouraged to walk daily. The dogs, all overweight, varied from pint-sized poodles and cocker spaniels to Huskies and Shetland sheepdogs. Many of the animals were couch potatoes, let out only when necessary. They were overfed and often given table scraps. Dr. Craig Prior, a veterinarian at Murphy Road Animal Hospital in Nashville, said he was not surprised that the animals packed on pounds. "Overweight people tend to have overweight pets," said Dr. Prior, who was not directly involved with the study. "We literally see a trickle-down effect with the animals. People will often sneak their dogs food from the table, give them snacks and feel sorry for them when the animal is supposed to be on a diet." As part of the yearlong study, the owners were told to take their pets on their daily walks. They were given a list of dog-friendly parks and encouraged to spend a total of 20 or 30 minutes a day playing fetch or another activity. The animals were put on a calorie-reduced diet designed to help them reach their target "doggie B.M.I.," or body mass index. On average, the humans shed about 11 pounds, or 5 percent of their body weight. The animals, on the other hand, did far better, losing an average of 15 percent of their weight. The most a person lost was 51 pounds; the most for a dog, 35 pounds. Kathleen O'Dekirk, 51, a lawyer in Chicago who signed up for the study with her Cavalier King Charles spaniel, named Winston, said she began to eat more healthfully and spend more time with her dog. She gave up bacon and eggs for veggie burgers and fruit, and now walks briskly with Winston for an hour and a half each day instead of 45 minutes a day. She said she shed a little over 10 pounds from her 5-foot-3, 150-pound frame, while Winston, who was overweight at 31 pounds, lost 7 pounds. "We weren't on a diet per se, it was just that we were getting better nutrition," said Ms. O'Dekirk, who dropped two pants sizes during the study. "We also walk a lot faster and a lot longer than we used to when we started the program. We used to stroll, now we really walk." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/23/health/nutrition/23dog.html From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 12 15:27:04 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 10:27:04 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Register (UK): Was Einstein a plagiarist? Message-ID: Was Einstein a plagiarist? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/15/einstein_relativity/print.html By [11]Lucy Sherriff Published Monday 15th November 2004 15:57 GMT A theoretical physicist at the University of Nevada has published a paper alleging that Einstein did not derive the gravitational field equations at the heart of the General Theory of Relativity, and might in fact have copied key equations from fellow physicist David Hilbert. The two scientists were working in the same area in 1915, and were developing their theories independently but concurrently. Each submitted papers for publication throughout November of that year. The two were also corresponding about their research, making it hard to unravel exactly who knew what, and when. As a consequence the question of which researcher can claim priority has been the subject of some debate. Prof. Friedwardt Winterberg says that contrary to the conclusions in a paper published in Science in 1997, Einstein did have the opportunity to plagiarise Hilbert's work. He claims that printer's proofs of Hilbert's paper have been tampered with, and that a key part of the derivation had been excised. In their 1997 paper, Corry, Renn and Stachel concluded that Hilbert altered his published paper to include the correct forms of the gravitation field equations after seeing Einstein's final paper. But Winterberg argues that this is impossible. Winterberg suggests that someone deliberately tampered with the document, specifically to support claims for Einstein's priority. He compares the 'mutilated' document with published papers, and notes that certain forms of Hilbert's notation were only used by Einstein at a later date. "My analysis of Hilbert's mutilated proofs therefore cannot prove that Einstein copied from Hilbert," he says. "It proves less, which is that it cannot be proved that Einstein could not have copied from Hilbert. But it proves that Hilbert had not copied from Einstein, as it has been insinuated following the paper by Corry, Renn and Stachel." Winterberg concludes that three people should be given credit for developing the general theory of relativity: Einstein, for recognising the shape of the problem, Grossmann for his insight that the contracted Riemann tensor was key to solving the problem, and Hilbert for completing the gravitational field theory equations. The full explanation can be found http://www.physics.unr.edu/faculty/winterberg/Hilbert-Einstein.pdf Brits bet on gravity wave discovery (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/01/gravity_waves/) ESA on mission to surf gravity's waves (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/24/gravity_waves/) Chocks away for NASA's Einstein test (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/21/gravity_iii/) References 11. http://forms.theregister.co.uk/mail_author/?story_url=/2004/11/15/einstein_relativity/ From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 12 15:29:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 10:29:27 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wikipedia: Minimum wage Message-ID: Wikipedia: Minimum wage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage The minimum wage is the minimum rate a [3]worker can legally be paid (usually per hour). Each country sets its own minimum wage laws and regulations, and many countries have no minimum wage. Contents [4]1 History [5]2 Consequences of minimum wage laws [6]2.1 Hypothetical costs and benefits [7]2.2 Debate [8]2.3 Theoretical arguments [9]2.4 Wage subsidies [10]3 Worldwide minimum wages [11]4 Minimum wage in the United States [12]5 Minimum wage in the United Kingdom [13]6 See also [14]7 External links [[15]edit] History Minimum wage laws were first introduced in New Zealand. The chronology of moves to legislate minimum wages is as follows: * New Zealand in [16]1894 * Australian state of Victoria in [17]1896 * United Kingdom in [18]1909 * United States, the state of Massachusetts in [19]1912 In the [20]United States and other countries, minimum wage laws were a common demand of [21]labor unions. [[22]edit] Consequences of minimum wage laws If the law is successfully enforced, and if they are high enough in [23]real terms (or relative to the average wage), minimum wage laws are alleged to have various benefits and costs. [[24]edit] Hypothetical costs and benefits Minimum wages may have the effect of: * Reducing [25]low-paid work, which may be viewed as [26]unfair and exploitative. * Reducing the dependency of the low-paid on [27]welfare-state benefits, which may in turn reduce [28]taxes or allow increases of other government outlays. * Stimulating economic growth by discouraging [29]labor-intensive industries, thereby encouraging more investment in capital and training. * Encouraging many of those who would normally take low-wage jobs to stay in (or return to) school and thus to accumulate [30]human capital. On the other hand, minimum wages may have the effect of: * Discouraging employment of low-wage earners, and generally increasing [31]unemployment. * Raising employment barriers for people with little or no work experience or formal education: if a worker's labor is not worth the minimum, he may not find employment at all. * Curbing economic growth by increasing the cost of labor. * Increasing the price of goods and services, since employers pass on employment costs in the form of higher prices. (Opponents of minimum wage often see a [32]negative income tax, e.g., as a way to support the lower-waged jobs, with the money coming from those who pay taxes, not those who pay for the products including the unemployed) * Decreasing incentive for some low-skilled workers to gain skills. * Where implemented locally, making labor more expensive than in other areas, which may discourage [33]inward investment and encourage local businesses to relocate their operations elsewhere. The effects of minimum wage laws, both positive and negative, may be increased by 'knock-on effects', with increased wages for workers already earning above the minimum wage. For example, some [34]labor union contracts are based on a fixed percentage or dollar amount above the minimum wage. Certain public grants or taxes are based on a multiple of the minimum wage. (For example, a worker may have an exemption if his earnings are below 2.5 minimum wages.) [[35]edit] Debate The costs and benefits arising from minimum wages are subject to considerable disagreement among [36]economists, though the consensus among economics textbooks is that minimum wage laws should be avoided whenever possible as the costs exceed the benefits. This unified view has been disputed by empirical research done by David Card and Alan Krueger. In their 1997 book Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage ([37]ISBN 0-691-04823-1), they found the negative employment effects of minimum-wage laws to be minimal if not non-existent (at least for the United States). For example, they look at the 1992 increase in New Jersey's minimum wage, the 1988 rise in California's minimum wage, and the 1990-91 increases in the federal minimum wage. In each case, Card and Kreuger present evidence ostensibly showing that increases in the minimum wage led to increases in pay, but no loss in jobs. That is, it appears that the demand for low-wage workers is [38]inelastic. Also, these authors reexamine the existing literature on the minimum wage and argue that it, too, lacks support for the claim that a higher minimum wage cuts the availability of jobs. Critics of this research, however, argue that their research was flawed.[39][1] (http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=3896),[40][2] (http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj15n1-8.html) For example, Card and Krueger gathered their data by telephoning employers in California and New Jersey, asking them whether they intended to increase, decrease, or or make no change in their employment. Subsequent attempts to verify the claims requested payroll cards from employers to verify employment, and ostensibly found that the minimum wage increases were followed by decreases in employment. On the other hand, data analysis by David Neumark and William Wascher, economists who are usually critical of minimum-wage increases, supported the Card/Krueger results.[41][3] (http://www.epinet.org/briefingpapers/minimumw_bp_1996.pdf) Some idea of the empirical problems of this debate can be seen by looking at recent trends in the United States. The minimum wage fell about 29% in [42]real terms between 1979 and 2003. This should have helped fight the problem of youth unemployment (since these workers are likely to have fewer skills than older workers). But young workers between the ages of 16 and 19 suffered from increased rates of unemployment (relative to those of workers 20 and older) than before this fall. Similarly, poverty rates in the United States ended their long-term decline after 1979. This suggests that critics of the minimum wage need to present a more complete theory of the origins of unemployment of young or poor people. [[43]edit] Theoretical arguments As is usual in serious social science, any empirical conclusion is subject to doubt and is simply the basis for further questions and research. One key question is the possible theoretical explanation of the different results. The traditional view that minimum wages have significant negative effects on employment typically assumes that labor markets for low-skill workers can be characterized as fitting the model of a [44]perfectly competitive market, where the only role of wages is as a cost. On the other hand, if Card and Krueger's empirical research is valid, it may be explained by the [45]efficiency wage hypothesis which states that higher wages may "pay for themselves" by increasing worker efficiency (i.e., labor productivity). Higher wages encourage a higher willingness of low-skill workers to stay with their current employers and to gain experience and skill, while the employers are more willing to train them. Alternatively, if [46]monopsony exists, then an increase in the minimum wage can raise employment. Alan Manning's 2003 book, Monopsony in Motion: Imperfect Competition in Labor Markets ([47]ISBN 0691113122) suggests that this kind of market is common if not ubiquitous in labor markets. Even if Card and Krueger's results are accurate, there may be a "[48]tipping point" above which their conclusions do not apply and the standard economic consensus does apply. The possible validity of their research may be the result of political forces: in the United States, business political pressure on legislatures and Congress may have kept the minimum wage so low that it has little negative employment effect. Further, the Federal minimum wage has moved away from the presumed tipping point, becoming less relevant. It has fallen from about 50 percent of the average hourly wage in manufacturing during the late 1960s to less than 40 percent. [[49]edit] Wage subsidies If they exist, it is clear that some of the adverse effects can only occur when minimum wages are implemented and successfully enforced by government fiat: either these effects are a consequence of the costs of regulation (the consensus) or they do not exist (Card, Krueger, and others). If, however, a floor on wages is implemented indirectly by providing wage subsidies, there would not be decreased employment. However, since this program is not a "free lunch", some other economic damage may be created instead, as with an [50]externality. On the other hand, it is possible that there are already externalities contributing to unemployment, and that subsidies at the right level would merely be [51]Pigovian solutions to these and would not actually cause any further harm after all. Research would need to be done to determine this. While straightforward [52]Pigovian subsidies would have funding problems, particularly when introducing them for the first time, there are other approaches. One was examined by Professor [53]Kim Swales of the [54]University of Strathclyde (See [55][4] (http://www.faxfn.org/03_jobs.htm)). This avoids funding problems by not having an actual subsidy but a virtual one -- the funds flow is always from employers to the government, being netted off by the virtual subsidy before funds ever change hands. This may also be analysed by means of [56]game theory (e.g "the [57]prisoner's dilemma" or "the [58]tragedy of the commons"). Alternatively, in the United States, many economists see the "earned income tax credit" (EITC, a wage subsidy) in the Federal income tax as providing the poverty-fighting benefits of the minimum wage without the non-budgetary costs, while being superior to most welfare state anti-poverty programs. One problem has been that many of the working poor (the target of this program) have a hard time with the tax forms needed to receive the EITC payment. There may also be long delays between when the money is needed and when the EITC payments are received. That is, a person might become eligible for the EITC in April but then get laid off for the rest of the year. But this person would not get help from the credit until nearly a year later (since Americans pay their taxes in April). Further, like with the minimum wage, those people working at home taking care of children and other loved ones do not receive any benefits; only those doing paid labor are rewarded. Finally, if these kinds of "complications" do not exist, it is possible that the benefit of the tax credit is received by the employer: assume that for low-skill workers the equilibrium market wage equals "X." Before the EITC is introduced, all of this wage is paid by their employers. After the EITC is instituted, the workers receive Y + Z, where Y is the new wage paid by employers and Z is the tax credit. If the labor market returns to the same equilibrium, then X = Y + Z. This means that the low-skill workers receive exactly the same amount as before the EITC was introduced and that the employer is paying less to the employees. This issue needs to examined further. [[59]edit] Worldwide minimum wages The list below gives the official minimum wage rates. Some countries are more effective than others at enforcing these laws, so that the effective minimum wage may be lower than the official one. * [60]Australia: [61]AUD 467.40 a week ([62]ACTU). * [63]Austria: none by law; it is instead set by an industrial collective agreement. * [64]Canada: set by each province; it varies from $5.90 per hour in [65]Alberta to $8.00 per hour in [66]British Columbia. * [67]Chile: 120,000 [68]Chilean pesos per month (about $200 [69]US dollars [70]as of October 2004) for those aged 18-65; 90,327 Chilean pesos (about $150 US dollars) for those younger than 18 and for those older than 65; and 78,050 Chilean pesos (about $130 US dollars) for honorary payments. * [71]Belgium: 1186.00 [72]euros per month for private sector employees aged 21 or over (Eurostat 2004). * [73]Bulgaria: 61.00 euros per month (Eurostat 2004). * [74]Denmark: none by law; it is instead set by an industrial collective agreement. * [75]Finland: none by law; it is instead set by an industrial collective agreement. * [76]France: 7.61 euros per hour. 1154.18 euros per month (35h/week, 151.67 hours per month). * [77]Germany: none by law; it is instead set by an industrial collective agreement. * [78]Greece: 605.00 euros per month (Eurostat 2004). * [79]Hong Kong: no minimum wage. * [80]Hungary: 209.00 euros per month (Eurostat 2004). * [81]Italy: none by law; it is instead set by an industrial collective agreement. * [82]Republic of Ireland: 7.00 euros per hour. * [83]Luxemburg: 1403.00 euros per month (Eurostat 2004). * [84]Netherlands: 1249.20 euros per month plus 8% holiday allowance, summing to 1349.14 euros (the amount is less for those 22 years old or younger). * [85]New Zealand: $[86]NZ 9.00 per hour for people 18 years old or older, and $NZ 7.20 per hour for those aged 16 or 17. * [87]Portugal: 356.60 euros per month. * [88]Poland: 180.00 euros per month (Eurostat 2004). * [89]Russia: 300 [90]rubles per month (slightly over $10 US dollars). * [91]Romania: 69.00 euros per month (Eurostat 2004). * [92]Spain: 451.20 euros per month. * [93]Sweden: none by law; it is instead set by an industrial collective agreement. * [94]Switzerland: none by law; it's normally 3000 CHF (~ 2000 euros) set by collective agreements. * [95]Turkey: 245.00 [96]euros per month (Eurostat 2004). * [97]United Kingdom: ?3.00 per hour for 16-to-17-year-olds who have finished compulsary education (except apprentices); ?4.10 per hour for 18-to-21-year-olds; ?4.85 per hour for 22-year-olds and above. * [98]United States: the federal minimum wage is $5.15 per hour, although workers under age 20 can be paid $4.25 an hour for their first 90 days. Some states also have minimum wage laws ranging from $2.00 in [99]Oklahoma (for some jobs not covered by the federal rate), to $7.16 an hour in [100]Washington. Some cities and counties have [101]living wage ordinances of up to $15.00 an hour although the groups of workers it applies to are often limited. (29 USC Sec. 206) (OK Statutes 40-197.5) (Revised Code of Washington Sec. 49.46.020) [102][5] (http://www.lni.wa.gov/WorkplaceRights/Wages/Minimum/default.asp) [[103]edit] Minimum wage in the United States During his presidency, [104]Bill Clinton gave states the power to set minimum wages above the federal. 12 states have already done so, and the 2004 November ballot could increase that number. Floridians for All, a coalition consisting of [105]ACORN, unions, and progressive business leaders, was successful in proposing a Florida minimum wage of $6.15 an hour, adjusted yearly by inflation. Florida voters passed this state constitutional amendment in the election of November 2nd, 2004. See [106]List of U.S. state minimum wages. [[107]edit] Minimum wage in the United Kingdom Municipal regulation of wage levels began in some towns in 1524. Later, the Trade Boards Act of 1918 made a large number of trades subject to minimum wages (which varied from trade to trade). These rules were repealed during the Thatcher era. A national minimum wage was introduced for the first time by Tony Blair's Labour government. See [108]National Minimum Wage Act. [[109]edit] See also * [110]Maximum wage * [111]Social wage * [112]Living wage * [113]Wage slave * [114]Labor market * [115]Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority [[116]edit] External links * [117]The Economic Policy Institute (http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/issueguides_minwage_minwage) * [118]Floridians for All (http://www.floridiansforall.org) * [119]AFL-CIO Guide to State Minimum Wages (http://www.aflcio.org/yourjobeconomy/minimumwage/staterates.cfm) * [120]UK Department of Trade and Industry (http://www.dti.gov.uk/er/nmw/) _________________________________________________________________ Minimum Wage is also the name of a 42-second song by the [121]alternative rock duo [122]They Might Be Giants. 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http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Booksources&isbn=0691048231 38. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticity 39. http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=3896 40. http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj15n1-8.html 41. http://www.epinet.org/briefingpapers/minimumw_bp_1996.pdf 42. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_vs._nominal_in_economics 43. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Minimum_wage&action=edit§ion=5 44. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition 45. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficiency_wage_hypothesis 46. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony 47. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Booksources&isbn=0691113122 48. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_point 49. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Minimum_wage&action=edit§ion=6 50. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality 51. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Cecil_Pigou 52. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Cecil_Pigou 53. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Swales 54. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Strathclyde 55. http://www.faxfn.org/03_jobs.htm 56. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory 57. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma 58. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons 59. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Minimum_wage&action=edit§ion=7 60. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia 61. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUD 62. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Council_of_Trade_Unions 63. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austria 64. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada 65. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta 66. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia 67. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chile 68. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilean_peso 69. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_dollar 70. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_of_October_2004 71. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium 72. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro 73. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgaria 74. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark 75. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland 76. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France 77. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany 78. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greece 79. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong 80. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungary 81. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy 82. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Ireland 83. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxemburg 84. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands 85. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand 86. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NZD 87. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portugal 88. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland 89. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia 90. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruble 91. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romania 92. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spain 93. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden 94. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland 95. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey 96. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro 97. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom 98. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States 99. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma 100. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington 101. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_wage 102. http://www.lni.wa.gov/WorkplaceRights/Wages/Minimum/default.asp 103. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Minimum_wage&action=edit§ion=8 104. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton 105. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACORN 106. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_minimum_wages 107. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Minimum_wage&action=edit§ion=9 108. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Wage_Act 109. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Minimum_wage&action=edit§ion=10 110. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_wage 111. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Social_wage&action=edit 112. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_wage 113. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slave 114. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_market 115. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garcia_v._San_Antonio_Metropolitan_Transit_Authority 116. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Minimum_wage&action=edit§ion=11 117. http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/issueguides_minwage_minwage 118. http://www.floridiansforall.org/ 119. http://www.aflcio.org/yourjobeconomy/minimumwage/staterates.cfm 120. http://www.dti.gov.uk/er/nmw/ 121. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_rock 122. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Might_Be_Giants From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Wed Jan 12 19:53:33 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 11:53:33 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Rocket Fuel Is Good for You! In-Reply-To: <200501121933.j0CJXGK02651@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050112195333.9436.qmail@web13423.mail.yahoo.com> Rocket Fuel Is Good for You! A National Academy of Sciences report says up to 20 parts per billion (ppb) of the rocket fuel chemical perchlorate in drinking water could be considered "safe." Perchlorate affects thyroid function, with children believed to be especially vulnerable. The Environmental Protection Agency previously set 1 ppb as the "safe" perchlorate level; the Defense Department suggested 200 ppb. The Natural Resources Defense Council says the NAS report was compromised by "a brazen campaign" by White House and Defense Department officials and defense contractors "to downplay the hazards" of perchlorate. Through the Freedom of Information Act, NRDC obtained documents suggesting politically-driven pressures on the scope of the NAS investigation, the composition of the NAS panel, and the report. http://www.prwatch.org/node/3179 ===== My blog: http://shallowreflections.blogspot.com/ Link to my website, including art, flash poetry and fledgling CafePress store (t-shirts, bumperstickers etc): http://www.soulaquarium.net We are stardust, we are golden, We are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden. - Joni Mitchell "We don't fear the unknown. We fear how the unknown might cause us to re-evaluate the known." - Unknown __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - What will yours do? http://my.yahoo.com From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Jan 12 20:30:42 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 12:30:42 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] The only WMD Message-ID: <01C4F8A2.8888BEB0.shovland@mindspring.com> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 102685 bytes Desc: not available URL: From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 12 23:23:14 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 18:23:14 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: Holy writ: It ain't necessarily so Message-ID: Holy writ: It ain't necessarily so http://www.economist.com/printedition/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3518521 Dec 29th 2004 Why people of the book have such trouble with language, truth and logic "AND it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son..." Whatever meaning this well-known version of the Christmas story may have, it does not seem to be very accurate history. Father Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, a distinguished biblical scholar, lists the difficulties he sees. First, it is said elsewhere in the New Testament--and this is central to the story--that Jesus was born in the last days of his would-be persecutor King Herod, who died in 4BC. (The Christian system for dating Christ's birth was established at least three centuries later, so an error of a few years is not surprising.) But according to Josephus, a secular historian, the big census around that time (and the start of Cyrenius's governorship) took place in what Christians would call the "year of our Lord" 6 or, as today's secular historians now prefer, 6CE (common era). The problems do not stop there. For example, when the Romans counted their people, they insisted that everyone had to stay put, so a last-minute dash from one city to another seems unlikely. And as a protectorate under Herod, Palestine would not automatically have been included in an imperial census. As a Dominican monk, whose views on some things, such as the virgin birth of Christ, are conservative, Father Jerome is unfazed by these contradictions. "The Gospels should be read spiritually, but with critical intelligence," he believes. Given that the two main accounts of Christ's birth--those of Matthew and Luke--are inconsistent, he prefers to rely mainly on the first, which moves from Christ's origins in Bethlehem to his upbringing, after an interlude in Egypt, in Nazareth. Moreover, in all the biblical material about Christ's beginnings, Father Jerome and other scholars see a deeper meaning: Christ is both a blue-blooded monarch from the royal city of Bethlehem, and a poor boy from the hardscrabble town of Nazareth from which nobody expected anything good. Even under the watchful eye of Pope John Paul II, who has reaffirmed the unchangeability of the truths maintained by the church, and the church's role as interpreter of the Bible, such bold readings of the New Testament are permissible. "What the church insists on is the spiritual message of the Bible, not its literal truth," says Father Jerome. If ordinary literal-minded worshippers said he was undermining their faith, he would conclude they were the victims of "bad preaching" and point out the impossibility of believing every word of an internally inconsistent text. By no means all Christians would subscribe to this approach. For the 70m or 80m people in the United States who call themselves evangelicals, the Bible is "the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative word of God", according to a definition by America's National Association of Evangelicals. So whenever the Bible seems inconsistent with beliefs held on other grounds, the instinct of an evangelical is to insist that the contradiction must be apparent, rather than real. Either secular historians are mistaken, or there has been some simple and easily rectifiable mistake--such as the mistranslation of a word--in the reading of scripture. Somehow the information received from holy writ and the evidence from other sources must be made to fit; and if that cannot be done, then the non-scriptural information must be dismissed. One product of such intellectual contortions is "creation science" and an insistence on the literal truth of the proposition that God took seven days to create the world, with the evidence from fossils as a kind of decorative, but confusing, extra. Even wackier, from the secular viewpoint, is America's "biblical astronomy" movement which insists, under the guidance of a Dutch-born astrophysicist, Gerardus Bouw, that the sun goes round the Earth. Even Jellicle cats? Not all the adherents of evangelicalism would go that far. But most would assert that one of the biggest mistakes of Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian teaching is their insistence on reading the Bible in the light of a sacred tradition, instead of going straight to the text. A Catholic or Orthodox Christian would retort that behind the evangelicals' approach lies a sort of muddled arrogance: it is not the Bible itself to which they are giving a virtually divine status, but their own, arbitrary interpretation of the text, which allows no debt to the spiritual labours of past generations. In some form or other, these inter-Christian quarrels sound familiar to everybody who treats a sacred text as the ultimate guide and inspiration for life, but also acknowledges other kinds of truth--the sort of truth based on empirical investigation, or everyday common sense. The problem arises in particularly acute form for the three faiths that profess belief in one God who made a covenant with Abraham, Moses and Noah. It is true that the great Asian religions, Hinduism, for example, have a deep attachment to their sacred writings. But they also seem to assert, rather freely and unself-consciously, that the events described in, say, the Bhagavad-Gita (one of India's great religious poems) were unfolding on a different plane from everyday, banal reality. While allowing that these two planes-- Earthly and divine--may intersect, adherents of Asia's faiths appear to negotiate more easily between different levels of reality. For the monotheistic religions, the status, origins and interpretation of scripture have always proved trickier. Why so? Perhaps because quite a lot of what these writings say is presented as historical fact, unfolding in a particular landscape. They speak of a God, ultimately beyond time and space, who nonetheless intervenes in human history at specific moments and places. They also tell of a God who spoke to man in words--words drawn from human language, but pointing to a reality transcending the human world. Directly or indirectly, the words of scripture are the word of God. What place for the profane? That leads to hard questions about where these scriptural words stand in relation to other kinds of words, and other kinds of truth. If believers insist on fencing off the words of scripture from all pronouncements in human language, then how can the words of scripture be discussed or interpreted? Is it possible to use "profane" or non-sacred words and methods to analyse, and understand better, a sacred text? And if it is not possible, how can a sacred text ever be understood? These are dilemmas that no follower of the Middle Eastern monotheisms can avoid. All the monotheistic faiths have traditions and liturgical practices that underline the radical difference between a sacred text and any other form of writing and language. Nowhere is that clearer than in Islam, which teaches that the words of the Koran were dictated by the angel Gabriel to Muhammad over 22 years, early in the seventh century. For any well-instructed Muslim, savouring the beauty of the Koran's classical Arabic is an overwhelming spiritual experience. A seminal moment in Islam's early days was the experience of Umar, who began life as a polytheist but later became caliph. On hearing the Arabic verses, he reported, "My heart was softened and I wept, and Islam entered into me." In some degree, this describes every Muslim believer's experience. For a faith that insists on the impossibility of seeing God or representing God, the words of the Koran are the nearest that most believers get to experiencing the divine. There is a corresponding reverence for any paper or manuscript on which the Koran is written. Devout Muslims kiss the Koran before praying and are offended by the careless treatment of a book or even a single sheet of paper on which holy words are written. Looking at the mosaics of Christ, and the Arabic calligraphy, in Istanbul's Haghia Sophia--by turns a church, a mosque and now a museum--you would think the difference between Christianity and Islam was simple: the former was a religion of pictures and the latter a religion of beautifully written words. Beliefs about the origins of scripture, and the right way to handle holy texts (literally and metaphorically), are also at the heart of the religion of ancient Israel. Orthodox Jews believe the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures, the Torah, were revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai. Another tradition holds that after the Jews returned from exile in Babylon, the scribe Ezra was enabled by divine inspiration to reconstruct the 24 holy books of the Hebrew scriptures, along with many other writings that were too sacred for most human beings to receive. In traditional Jewish practice, a manuscript of the Torah is too precious to touch. It lies under a kind of mantle when carried in procession, and is often topped by a crown and a sort of high-priest's breastplate. When words are as holy as that, you may ask, how can you even talk about them in ordinary language? Fortunately, perhaps, the Jewish tradition has its own answer: what Moses received was not merely the words of the Torah, but a body of oral law that provides guidance on how to understand and put into practice the truths of holy writ. For most Jews, this oral law set the basis for a creative legal tradition: it made it possible for rabbis in subsequent eras to interpret the Jewish revelation in practical ways, taking due account of circumstances. Where exactly the line should be drawn between "the Torah made in heaven" and "the Torah not in heaven"--human interpretation--is something Jews have always argued about. But their tradition at least offers a framework in which such arguments can take place. The hazards of secular scholarship Muslims insist that their tradition also makes full use of reason and intellectual rigour in the understanding of sacred texts. In the early Middle Ages, when Christianity and Islam were struggling to find ways to reconcile divine revelation with human reason and investigation, Islam often seemed to fare better. There is intellectual discipline, of a specialised kind, in the tradition of inquiry into the authenticity of the hadith, sayings attributed to the Prophet. But all this tradition is based on one central premise: the authenticity of God's revelation to the Prophet, and the accuracy of the Koran as a rendering of that revelation in language both human and divine. Can there be any meeting-point between those who believe in that book's divine origins and those who see it as a text like any other, to be analysed, deconstructed and set in historic context? And with due allowance for the failure of all translations, can there be any debate between Muslims and non-Muslims over what amounts to a relatively good rendering of the Koran into another tongue? For Muslims who also aspire to be scholars in the secular world, these are difficult issues. In many parts of the Muslim world, merely asking open questions about the origins of the Koran would guarantee the inquirer an abbreviated life. Yet secular scholars do study the Koran, though most keep their heads down or write under a pseudonym. Many of these academics come from Germany, where secular analysis of the Jewish and Christian scriptures was born in the 19th century. For example, scholars at Saarland University have been analysing evidence from a huge stack of mouldering Arabic documents, discovered in Yemen in 1972. These promise, in the scholars' view, to show the Koran as an evolving rather than a static work. One bold German-based academic, writing under the pen name of Christoph Luxenberg, believes he has discovered a hitherto unsuspected influence of the Aramaic language, and of the teaching of Syrian Christians, on the Koran. To say that the historically Muslim world is reluctant to examine the Koran and its origins in the spirit of secular academia would be putting it mildly. "Interrogating the text in this way is a very sensitive matter, and even if the interrogators are Muslim, there are significant red lines," says Suha Taji-Farouki, the editor of a new set of essays on the Koran. Still, the very fact such a work has been published by a Muslim institution--the Institute for Ismaili Studies (IIS)--in partnership with Britain's Oxford University Press is a sign of growing, if gingerly, Muslim interest in engaging with academia. The case of the grapes and virgins Mohammad Arkoun, of the University of Paris, has long thought that Islam should "assume the modern risks of scientific knowledge", arguing that Islamic tradition itself contains ample ground for a more open-minded approach to the Koran. His work is discussed in "Modern Muslim Intellectuals and the Qur'an", a new collection of essays, some of which look at Islam's holy writ in the arcane terms of literary theory. This book tests the outer limits of a critical approach to sacred text--at least for those who are not shy of jargon and can tell heuristics from hermeneutics. Some Muslim academics with a deep belief in the Koran as revealed truth have reservations about over-using secular tools. For them, using insights from, say, linguistics or sociology is legitimate as far as it goes--but may miss the point. Such tools can help define the form God's revelation assumed, but not in disclosing the content of the revelation, says Reza Shah-Kazemi, another IIS scholar, who will argue in a forthcoming book for the primacy of "spiritual exegesis" over other kinds. He takes the traditional view that only prayerful contemplation, and an ear for the inner as well as the outer meanings, can help discern the deeper significance of holy writ. Some Christian scholars make a similar point: reducing Bible study to literary criticism is about as sensible as studying a religious icon by analysing the chemical composition of its paint, or concentrating on the carpentry of a Stradivarius violin instead of enjoying the music. While untroubled, these days, by violence, the relationship between "faith and the academy" is not an easy one in the Christian world. In the theology departments of western universities there is a sullen truce at best between those whose aim is to deconstruct the Bible in the light of modern theories, from semiotics to feminism, and those who say that biblical studies should be of some value to those (such as the clergy) who will put them to professional use. In any event, the terms of western academia's truce between the secular and religious are different from anything in the Muslim world. Nobody in a western university would argue for the truth of a statement on the sole ground that the Bible, or church tradition, asserted it. That may be good; but the resulting climate leaves no middle ground between naive fundamentalism and a secularism that refuses to engage with religious experience. To which a secularist may ask, so what? Is there any reason why people who believe in none of the Abrahamic religions should follow their debates on how to read holy writ? In fact, there is. Take one example from Islam: Mr Luxenberg argues that the rewards the Koran promises to martyrs for their faith when they get to heaven is not "virgins" (72 of them) but a word that means "grapes" or "white fruit". In a world where suicide-bombers are urged on by delectable prizes, that is a translation that matters. Now a case from Christianity. Many evangelicals stress an apocalyptic verse in the second epistle of Peter which ends: "the Earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up." If it's all going to be consumed by fire, some evangelicals say, then why worry about pollution or climate change? But the oldest existing version of the New Testament, long preserved at St Catherine's monastery on Mount Sinai and now (most of it) in the British Library, has a different Greek verb for the Earth's fate: evretesetai, not katakaesetai. Instead of being burned up, the Earth will be uncovered, its true nature exposed. That, too, is a difference worth studying, for both believers and everyone else. From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Thu Jan 13 13:21:20 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 08:21:20 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] [Fwd: Monbiot / America's War with Itself / Jan 13] Message-ID: <41E675D0.6070402@uconn.edu> -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: ZNet Commentaries Subject: Monbiot / America's War with Itself / Jan 13 Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 16:16:19 -0800 (PST) Size: 10511 URL: From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 13 17:57:32 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 12:57:32 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Where Was God During the Tsunami?, Part 2 Message-ID: Where Was God During the Tsunami?, Part 2 1. An opinion piece by William Safire on the Book of Job. 2. The original of the Book of Job. 3. A warning about the spelling. 4. Theodicy from Wikipedia. A term usually used to mean accounting for God allowing evil in the world. 5. While we're onto the King James Bible, here's the "The Translators to the Readers," which is almost always omitted in reprintings, but it, too, follows a later spelling. 6. A defense of multiple translations, which ignores the fact that the Holy Ghost supervised the King James translation team, correcting errors in the extant Hebrew and Greek MSS. In high compatibility with the Mormon doctrine of continued revelation, the Holy Ghost left out at least one verse. It pertains to the legal professions and was in the original Book of Proverbs. It reads, "The large print giveth; the fine print taketh away." 7. A NYTimes article on how other faiths are dealing with the tsunami. Op-Ed Columnist: Where Was God? NYTimes January 10, 2005 By WILLIAM SAFIRE Washington In the aftermath of a cataclysm, with pictures of parents sobbing over dead infants driven into human consciousness around the globe, faith-shaking questions arise: Where was God? Why does a good and all-powerful deity permit such evil and grief to fall on so many thousands of innocents? What did these people do to deserve such suffering? After a similar natural disaster wiped out tens of thousands of lives in Lisbon in the 18th century, the philosopher Voltaire wrote "Candide," savagely satirizing optimists who still found comfort and hope in God. After last month's Indian Ocean tsunami, the same anguished questioning is in the minds of millions of religious believers. Turn to the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible. It was written some 2,500 years ago during what must have been a crisis of faith. The covenant with Abraham - worship the one God, and his people would be protected - didn't seem to be working. The good died young, the wicked prospered; where was the promised justice? The poet-priest who wrote this book began with a dialogue between God and the Satan, then a kind of prosecuting angel. When God pointed to "my servant Job" as most upright and devout, the Satan suggested Job worshipped God only because he had been given power and riches. On a bet that Job would stay faithful, God let the angel take the good man's possessions, kill his children and afflict him with loathsome boils. The first point the Book of Job made was that suffering is not evidence of sin. When Job's friends said that he must have done something awful to deserve such misery, the reader knows that is false. Job's suffering was a test of his faith: even as he grew angry with God for being unjust - wishing he could sue him in a court of law - he never abandoned his belief. And did this righteous Gentile get furious: "Damn the day that I was born!" Forget the so-called "patience of Job"; that legend is blown away by the shockingly irreverent biblical narrative. Job's famous expression of meek acceptance in the 1611 King James Version - "though he slay me, yet will I trust in him" - was a blatant misreading by nervous translators. Modern scholarship offers a much different translation: "He may slay me, I'll not quaver." The point of Job's gutsy defiance of God's injustice - right there in the Bible - is that it is not blasphemous to challenge the highest authority when it inflicts a moral wrong. (I titled a book on this "The First Dissident.") Indeed, Job's demand that his unseen adversary show up at a trial with a written indictment gets an unexpected reaction: in a thunderous theophany, God appears before the startled man with the longest and most beautifully poetic speech attributed directly to him in Scripture. Frankly, God's voice "out of the whirlwind" carries a message not all that satisfying to those wondering about moral mismanagement. Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal "I read the Book of Job last night - I don't think God comes well out of it." The powerful voice demands of puny Man: "Where were you when I laid the Earth's foundations?" Summoning an image of the mythic sea-monster symbolizing Chaos, God asks, "Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?" The poet-priest's point, I think, is that God is occupied bringing light to darkness, imposing physical order on chaos, and leaves his human creations free to work out moral justice on their own. Job's moral outrage caused God to appear, thereby demonstrating that the sufferer who believes is never alone. Job abruptly stops complaining, and - in a prosaic happy ending that strikes me as tacked on by other sages so as to get the troublesome book accepted in the Hebrew canon - he is rewarded. (Christianity promises to rectify earthly injustice in an afterlife.) Job's lessons for today: (1) Victims of this cataclysm in no way "deserved" a fate inflicted by the Leviathanic force of nature. (2) Questioning God's inscrutable ways has its exemplar in the Bible and need not undermine faith. (3) Humanity's obligation to ameliorate injustice on earth is being expressed in a surge of generosity that refutes Voltaire's cynicism. E-mail: safire at nytimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/10/opinion/10safire.html Safire's is just one interpretation, of course. Here's the original text itself, from what's probably the 1769 spelling: ---------------------- THE BOOK OF JOB CHAPTER 1 1 There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name [was] Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil. 2 And there were born unto him seven sons and three daughters. 3 His substance also was seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she asses, and a very great household; so that this man was the greatest of all the men of the east. 4 And his sons went and feasted [in their] houses, every one his day; and sent and called for their three sisters to eat and to drink with them. 5 And it was so, when the days of [their] feasting were gone about, that Job sent and sanctified them, and rose up early in the morning, and offered burnt offerings [according] to the number of them all: for Job said, It may be that my sons have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts. Thus did Job continually. 6 ? Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them. 7 And the LORD said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it. 8 And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that [there is] none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? 9 Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought? 10 Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land. 11 But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face. 12 And the LORD said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath [is] in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand. So Satan went forth from the presence of the LORD. 13 ? And there was a day when his sons and his daughters [were] eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house: 14 And there came a messenger unto Job, and said, The oxen were plowing, and the asses feeding beside them: 15 And the Sabeans fell [upon them], and took them away; yea, they have slain the servants with the edge of the sword; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee. 16 While he [was] yet speaking, there came also another, and said, The fire of God is fallen from heaven, and hath burned up the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee. 17 While he [was] yet speaking, there came also another, and said, The Chaldeans made out three bands, and fell upon the camels, and have carried them away, yea, and slain the servants with the edge of the sword; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee. 18 While he [was] yet speaking, there came also another, and said, Thy sons and thy daughters [were] eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house: 19 And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee. 20 Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped, 21 And said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD. 22 In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly. CHAPTER 2 1 Again there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them to present himself before the LORD. 2 And the LORD said unto Satan, From whence comest thou? And Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it. 3 And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that [there is] none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? and still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause. 4 And Satan answered the LORD, and said, Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life. 5 But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse thee to thy face. 6 And the LORD said unto Satan, Behold, he [is] in thine hand; but save his life. 7 ? So went Satan forth from the presence of the LORD, and smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown. 8 And he took him a potsherd to scrape himself withal; and he sat down among the ashes. 9 ? Then said his wife unto him, Dost thou still retain thine integrity? curse God, and die. 10 But he said unto her, Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? In all this did not Job sin with his lips. 11 ? Now when Job's three friends heard of all this evil that was come upon him, they came every one from his own place; Eliphaz the Temanite, and Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite: for they had made an appointment together to come to mourn with him and to comfort him. 12 And when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted up their voice, and wept; and they rent every one his mantle, and sprinkled dust upon their heads toward heaven. 13 So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that [his] grief was very great. CHAPTER 3 1 After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed his day. 2 And Job spake, and said, 3 Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night [in which] it was said, There is a man child conceived. 4 Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it. 5 Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it. 6 As [for] that night, let darkness seize upon it; let it not be joined unto the days of the year, let it not come into the number of the months. 7 Lo, let that night be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein. 8 Let them curse it that curse the day, who are ready to raise up their mourning. 9 Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark; let it look for light, but [have] none; neither let it see the dawning of the day: 10 Because it shut not up the doors of my [mother's] womb, nor hid sorrow from mine eyes. 11 Why died I not from the womb? [why] did I [not] give up the ghost when I came out of the belly? 12 Why did the knees prevent me? or why the breasts that I should suck? 13 For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest, 14 With kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves; 15 Or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver: 16 Or as an hidden untimely birth I had not been; as infants [which] never saw light. 17 There the wicked cease [from] troubling; and there the weary be at rest. 18 [There] the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor. 19 The small and great are there; and the servant [is] free from his master. 20 Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter [in] soul; 21 Which long for death, but it [cometh] not; and dig for it more than for hid treasures; 22 Which rejoice exceedingly, [and] are glad, when they can find the grave? 23 [Why is light given] to a man whose way is hid, and whom God hath hedged in? 24 For my sighing cometh before I eat, and my roarings are poured out like the waters. 25 For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me. 26 I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came. CHAPTER 4 1 Then Eliphaz the Temanite answered and said, 2 [If] we assay to commune with thee, wilt thou be grieved? but who can withhold himself from speaking? 3 Behold, thou hast instructed many, and thou hast strengthened the weak hands. 4 Thy words have upholden him that was falling, and thou hast strengthened the feeble knees. 5 But now it is come upon thee, and thou faintest; it toucheth thee, and thou art troubled. 6 [Is] not [this] thy fear, thy confidence, thy hope, and the uprightness of thy ways? 7 Remember, I pray thee, who [ever] perished, being innocent? or where were the righteous cut off? 8 Even as I have seen, they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same. 9 By the blast of God they perish, and by the breath of his nostrils are they consumed. 10 The roaring of the lion, and the voice of the fierce lion, and the teeth of the young lions, are broken. 11 The old lion perisheth for lack of prey, and the stout lion's whelps are scattered abroad. 12 Now a thing was secretly brought to me, and mine ear received a little thereof. 13 In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, 14 Fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. 15 Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up: 16 It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof: an image [was] before mine eyes, [there was] silence, and I heard a voice, [saying], 17 Shall mortal man be more just than God? shall a man be more pure than his maker? 18 Behold, he put no trust in his servants; and his angels he charged with folly: 19 How much less [in] them that dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation [is] in the dust, [which] are crushed before the moth? 20 They are destroyed from morning to evening: they perish for ever without any regarding [it]. 21 Doth not their excellency [which is] in them go away? they die, even without wisdom. CHAPTER 5 1 Call now, if there be any that will answer thee; and to which of the saints wilt thou turn? 2 For wrath killeth the foolish man, and envy slayeth the silly one. 3 I have seen the foolish taking root: but suddenly I cursed his habitation. 4 His children are far from safety, and they are crushed in the gate, neither [is there] any to deliver [them]. 5 Whose harvest the hungry eateth up, and taketh it even out of the thorns, and the robber swalloweth up their substance. 6 Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground; 7 Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward. 8 I would seek unto God, and unto God would I commit my cause: 9 Which doeth great things and unsearchable; marvellous things without number: 10 Who giveth rain upon the earth, and sendeth waters upon the fields: 11 To set up on high those that be low; that those which mourn may be exalted to safety. 12 He disappointeth the devices of the crafty, so that their hands cannot perform [their] enterprise. 13 He taketh the wise in their own craftiness: and the counsel of the froward is carried headlong. 14 They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night. 15 But he saveth the poor from the sword, from their mouth, and from the hand of the mighty. 16 So the poor hath hope, and iniquity stoppeth her mouth. 17 Behold, happy [is] the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty: 18 For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole. 19 He shall deliver thee in six troubles: yea, in seven there shall no evil touch thee. 20 In famine he shall redeem thee from death: and in war from the power of the sword. 21 Thou shalt be hid from the scourge of the tongue: neither shalt thou be afraid of destruction when it cometh. 22 At destruction and famine thou shalt laugh: neither shalt thou be afraid of the beasts of the earth. 23 For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field: and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee. 24 And thou shalt know that thy tabernacle [shall be] in peace; and thou shalt visit thy habitation, and shalt not sin. 25 Thou shalt know also that thy seed [shall be] great, and thine offspring as the grass of the earth. 26 Thou shalt come to [thy] grave in a full age, like as a shock of corn cometh in in his season. 27 Lo this, we have searched it, so it [is]; hear it, and know thou [it] for thy good. CHAPTER 6 1 But Job answered and said, 2 Oh that my grief were throughly weighed, and my calamity laid in the balances together! 3 For now it would be heavier than the sand of the sea: therefore my words are swallowed up. 4 For the arrows of the Almighty [are] within me, the poison whereof drinketh up my spirit: the terrors of God do set themselves in array against me. 5 Doth the wild ass bray when he hath grass? or loweth the ox over his fodder? 6 Can that which is unsavoury be eaten without salt? or is there [any] taste in the white of an egg? 7 The things [that] my soul refused to touch [are] as my sorrowful meat. 8 Oh that I might have my request; and that God would grant [me] the thing that I long for! 9 Even that it would please God to destroy me; that he would let loose his hand, and cut me off! 10 Then should I yet have comfort; yea, I would harden myself in sorrow: let him not spare; for I have not concealed the words of the Holy One. 11 What [is] my strength, that I should hope? and what [is] mine end, that I should prolong my life? 12 [Is] my strength the strength of stones? or [is] my flesh of brass? 13 [Is] not my help in me? and is wisdom driven quite from me? 14 To him that is afflicted pity [should be shewed] from his friend; but he forsaketh the fear of the Almighty. 15 My brethren have dealt deceitfully as a brook, [and] as the stream of brooks they pass away; 16 Which are blackish by reason of the ice, [and] wherein the snow is hid: 17 What time they wax warm, they vanish: when it is hot, they are consumed out of their place. 18 The paths of their way are turned aside; they go to nothing, and perish. 19 The troops of Tema looked, the companies of Sheba waited for them. 20 They were confounded because they had hoped; they came thither, and were ashamed. 21 For now ye are nothing; ye see [my] casting down, and are afraid. 22 Did I say, Bring unto me? or, Give a reward for me of your substance? 23 Or, Deliver me from the enemy's hand? or, Redeem me from the hand of the mighty? 24 Teach me, and I will hold my tongue: and cause me to understand wherein I have erred. 25 How forcible are right words! but what doth your arguing reprove? 26 Do ye imagine to reprove words, and the speeches of one that is desperate, [which are] as wind? 27 Yea, ye overwhelm the fatherless, and ye dig [a pit] for your friend. 28 Now therefore be content, look upon me; for [it is] evident unto you if I lie. 29 Return, I pray you, let it not be iniquity; yea, return again, my righteousness [is] in it. 30 Is there iniquity in my tongue? cannot my taste discern perverse things? CHAPTER 7 1 [Is there] not an appointed time to man upon earth? [are not] his days also like the days of an hireling? 2 As a servant earnestly desireth the shadow, and as an hireling looketh for [the reward of] his work: 3 So am I made to possess months of vanity, and wearisome nights are appointed to me. 4 When I lie down, I say, When shall I arise, and the night be gone? and I am full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day. 5 My flesh is clothed with worms and clods of dust; my skin is broken, and become loathsome. 6 My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and are spent without hope. 7 O remember that my life [is] wind: mine eye shall no more see good. 8 The eye of him that hath seen me shall see me no [more]: thine eyes [are] upon me, and I [am] not. 9 [As] the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away: so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no [more]. 10 He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more. 11 Therefore I will not refrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul. 12 [Am] I a sea, or a whale, that thou settest a watch over me? 13 When I say, My bed shall comfort me, my couch shall ease my complaint; 14 Then thou scarest me with dreams, and terrifiest me through visions: 15 So that my soul chooseth strangling, [and] death rather than my life. 16 I loathe [it]; I would not live alway: let me alone; for my days [are] vanity. 17 What [is] man, that thou shouldest magnify him? and that thou shouldest set thine heart upon him? 18 And [that] thou shouldest visit him every morning, [and] try him every moment? 19 How long wilt thou not depart from me, nor let me alone till I swallow down my spittle? 20 I have sinned; what shall I do unto thee, O thou preserver of men? why hast thou set me as a mark against thee, so that I am a burden to myself? 21 And why dost thou not pardon my transgression, and take away mine iniquity? for now shall I sleep in the dust; and thou shalt seek me in the morning, but I [shall] not [be]. CHAPTER 8 1 Then answered Bildad the Shuhite, and said, 2 How long wilt thou speak these [things]? and [how long shall] the words of thy mouth [be like] a strong wind? 3 Doth God pervert judgment? or doth the Almighty pervert justice? 4 If thy children have sinned against him, and he have cast them away for their transgression; 5 If thou wouldest seek unto God betimes, and make thy supplication to the Almighty; 6 If thou [wert] pure and upright; surely now he would awake for thee, and make the habitation of thy righteousness prosperous. 7 Though thy beginning was small, yet thy latter end should greatly increase. 8 For enquire, I pray thee, of the former age, and prepare thyself to the search of their fathers: 9 (For we [are but of] yesterday, and know nothing, because our days upon earth [are] a shadow:) 10 Shall not they teach thee, [and] tell thee, and utter words out of their heart? 11 Can the rush grow up without mire? can the flag grow without water? 12 Whilst it [is] yet in his greenness, [and] not cut down, it withereth before any [other] herb. 13 So [are] the paths of all that forget God; and the hypocrite's hope shall perish: 14 Whose hope shall be cut off, and whose trust [shall be] a spider's web. 15 He shall lean upon his house, but it shall not stand: he shall hold it fast, but it shall not endure. 16 He [is] green before the sun, and his branch shooteth forth in his garden. 17 His roots are wrapped about the heap, [and] seeth the place of stones. 18 If he destroy him from his place, then [it] shall deny him, [saying], I have not seen thee. 19 Behold, this [is] the joy of his way, and out of the earth shall others grow. 20 Behold, God will not cast away a perfect [man], neither will he help the evil doers: 21 Till he fill thy mouth with laughing, and thy lips with rejoicing. 22 They that hate thee shall be clothed with shame; and the dwelling place of the wicked shall come to nought. CHAPTER 9 1 Then Job answered and said, 2 I know [it is] so of a truth: but how should man be just with God? 3 If he will contend with him, he cannot answer him one of a thousand. 4 [He is] wise in heart, and mighty in strength: who hath hardened [himself] against him, and hath prospered? 5 Which removeth the mountains, and they know not: which overturneth them in his anger. 6 Which shaketh the earth out of her place, and the pillars thereof tremble. 7 Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not; and sealeth up the stars. 8 Which alone spreadeth out the heavens, and treadeth upon the waves of the sea. 9 Which maketh Arcturus, Orion, and Pleiades, and the chambers of the south. 10 Which doeth great things past finding out; yea, and wonders without number. 11 Lo, he goeth by me, and I see [him] not: he passeth on also, but I perceive him not. 12 Behold, he taketh away, who can hinder him? who will say unto him, What doest thou? 13 [If] God will not withdraw his anger, the proud helpers do stoop under him. 14 How much less shall I answer him, [and] choose out my words [to reason] with him? 15 Whom, though I were righteous, [yet] would I not answer, [but] I would make supplication to my judge. 16 If I had called, and he had answered me; [yet] would I not believe that he had hearkened unto my voice. 17 For he breaketh me with a tempest, and multiplieth my wounds without cause. 18 He will not suffer me to take my breath, but filleth me with bitterness. 19 If [I speak] of strength, lo, [he is] strong: and if of judgment, who shall set me a time [to plead]? 20 If I justify myself, mine own mouth shall condemn me: [if I say], I [am] perfect, it shall also prove me perverse. 21 [Though] I [were] perfect, [yet] would I not know my soul: I would despise my life. 22 This [is] one [thing], therefore I said [it], He destroyeth the perfect and the wicked. 23 If the scourge slay suddenly, he will laugh at the trial of the innocent. 24 The earth is given into the hand of the wicked: he covereth the faces of the judges thereof; if not, where, [and] who [is] he? 25 Now my days are swifter than a post: they flee away, they see no good. 26 They are passed away as the swift ships: as the eagle [that] hasteth to the prey. 27 If I say, I will forget my complaint, I will leave off my heaviness, and comfort [myself]: 28 I am afraid of all my sorrows, I know that thou wilt not hold me innocent. 29 [If] I be wicked, why then labour I in vain? 30 If I wash myself with snow water, and make my hands never so clean; 31 Yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me. 32 For [he is] not a man, as I [am, that] I should answer him, [and] we should come together in judgment. 33 Neither is there any daysman betwixt us, [that] might lay his hand upon us both. 34 Let him take his rod away from me, and let not his fear terrify me: 35 [Then] would I speak, and not fear him; but [it is] not so with me. CHAPTER 10 1 My soul is weary of my life; I will leave my complaint upon myself; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul. 2 I will say unto God, Do not condemn me; shew me wherefore thou contendest with me. 3 [Is it] good unto thee that thou shouldest oppress, that thou shouldest despise the work of thine hands, and shine upon the counsel of the wicked? 4 Hast thou eyes of flesh? or seest thou as man seeth? 5 [Are] thy days as the days of man? [are] thy years as man's days, 6 That thou enquirest after mine iniquity, and searchest after my sin? 7 Thou knowest that I am not wicked; and [there is] none that can deliver out of thine hand. 8 Thine hands have made me and fashioned me together round about; yet thou dost destroy me. 9 Remember, I beseech thee, that thou hast made me as the clay; and wilt thou bring me into dust again? 10 Hast thou not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese? 11 Thou hast clothed me with skin and flesh, and hast fenced me with bones and sinews. 12 Thou hast granted me life and favour, and thy visitation hath preserved my spirit. 13 And these [things] hast thou hid in thine heart: I know that this [is] with thee. 14 If I sin, then thou markest me, and thou wilt not acquit me from mine iniquity. 15 If I be wicked, woe unto me; and [if] I be righteous, [yet] will I not lift up my head. [I am] full of confusion; therefore see thou mine affliction; 16 For it increaseth. Thou huntest me as a fierce lion: and again thou shewest thyself marvellous upon me. 17 Thou renewest thy witnesses against me, and increasest thine indignation upon me; changes and war [are] against me. 18 Wherefore then hast thou brought me forth out of the womb? Oh that I had given up the ghost, and no eye had seen me! 19 I should have been as though I had not been; I should have been carried from the womb to the grave. 20 [Are] not my days few? cease [then, and] let me alone, that I may take comfort a little, 21 Before I go [whence] I shall not return, [even] to the land of darkness and the shadow of death; 22 A land of darkness, as darkness [itself; and] of the shadow of death, without any order, and [where] the light [is] as darkness. CHAPTER 11 1 Then answered Zophar the Naamathite, and said, 2 Should not the multitude of words be answered? and should a man full of talk be justified? 3 Should thy lies make men hold their peace? and when thou mockest, shall no man make thee ashamed? 4 For thou hast said, My doctrine [is] pure, and I am clean in thine eyes. 5 But oh that God would speak, and open his lips against thee; 6 And that he would shew thee the secrets of wisdom, that [they are] double to that which is! Know therefore that God exacteth of thee [less] than thine iniquity [deserveth]. 7 Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? 8 [It is] as high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know? 9 The measure thereof [is] longer than the earth, and broader than the sea. 10 If he cut off, and shut up, or gather together, then who can hinder him? 11 For he knoweth vain men: he seeth wickedness also; will he not then consider [it]? 12 For vain man would be wise, though man be born [like] a wild ass's colt. 13 If thou prepare thine heart, and stretch out thine hands toward him; 14 If iniquity [be] in thine hand, put it far away, and let not wickedness dwell in thy tabernacles. 15 For then shalt thou lift up thy face without spot; yea, thou shalt be stedfast, and shalt not fear: 16 Because thou shalt forget [thy] misery, [and] remember [it] as waters [that] pass away: 17 And [thine] age shall be clearer than the noonday; thou shalt shine forth, thou shalt be as the morning. 18 And thou shalt be secure, because there is hope; yea, thou shalt dig [about thee, and] thou shalt take thy rest in safety. 19 Also thou shalt lie down, and none shall make [thee] afraid; yea, many shall make suit unto thee. 20 But the eyes of the wicked shall fail, and they shall not escape, and their hope [shall be as] the giving up of the ghost. CHAPTER 12 1 And Job answered and said, 2 No doubt but ye [are] the people, and wisdom shall die with you. 3 But I have understanding as well as you; I [am] not inferior to you: yea, who knoweth not such things as these? 4 I am [as] one mocked of his neighbour, who calleth upon God, and he answereth him: the just upright [man is] laughed to scorn. 5 He that is ready to slip with [his] feet [is as] a lamp despised in the thought of him that is at ease. 6 The tabernacles of robbers prosper, and they that provoke God are secure; into whose hand God bringeth [abundantly]. 7 But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: 8 Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. 9 Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the LORD hath wrought this? 10 In whose hand [is] the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind. 11 Doth not the ear try words? and the mouth taste his meat? 12 With the ancient [is] wisdom; and in length of days understanding. 13 With him [is] wisdom and strength, he hath counsel and understanding. 14 Behold, he breaketh down, and it cannot be built again: he shutteth up a man, and there can be no opening. 15 Behold, he withholdeth the waters, and they dry up: also he sendeth them out, and they overturn the earth. 16 With him [is] strength and wisdom: the deceived and the deceiver [are] his. 17 He leadeth counsellors away spoiled, and maketh the judges fools. 18 He looseth the bond of kings, and girdeth their loins with a girdle. 19 He leadeth princes away spoiled, and overthroweth the mighty. 20 He removeth away the speech of the trusty, and taketh away the understanding of the aged. 21 He poureth contempt upon princes, and weakeneth the strength of the mighty. 22 He discovereth deep things out of darkness, and bringeth out to light the shadow of death. 23 He increaseth the nations, and destroyeth them: he enlargeth the nations, and straiteneth them [again]. 24 He taketh away the heart of the chief of the people of the earth, and causeth them to wander in a wilderness [where there is] no way. 25 They grope in the dark without light, and he maketh them to stagger like [a] drunken [man]. CHAPTER 13 1 Lo, mine eye hath seen all [this], mine ear hath heard and understood it. 2 What ye know, [the same] do I know also: I [am] not inferior unto you. 3 Surely I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to reason with God. 4 But ye [are] forgers of lies, ye [are] all physicians of no value. 5 O that ye would altogether hold your peace! and it should be your wisdom. 6 Hear now my reasoning, and hearken to the pleadings of my lips. 7 Will ye speak wickedly for God? and talk deceitfully for him? 8 Will ye accept his person? will ye contend for God? 9 Is it good that he should search you out? or as one man mocketh another, do ye [so] mock him? 10 He will surely reprove you, if ye do secretly accept persons. 11 Shall not his excellency make you afraid? and his dread fall upon you? 12 Your remembrances [are] like unto ashes, your bodies to bodies of clay. 13 Hold your peace, let me alone, that I may speak, and let come on me what [will]. 14 Wherefore do I take my flesh in my teeth, and put my life in mine hand? 15 Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him. 16 He also [shall be] my salvation: for an hypocrite shall not come before him. 17 Hear diligently my speech, and my declaration with your ears. 18 Behold now, I have ordered [my] cause; I know that I shall be justified. 19 Who [is] he [that] will plead with me? for now, if I hold my tongue, I shall give up the ghost. 20 Only do not two [things] unto me: then will I not hide myself from thee. 21 Withdraw thine hand far from me: and let not thy dread make me afraid. 22 Then call thou, and I will answer: or let me speak, and answer thou me. 23 How many [are] mine iniquities and sins? make me to know my transgression and my sin. 24 Wherefore hidest thou thy face, and holdest me for thine enemy? 25 Wilt thou break a leaf driven to and fro? and wilt thou pursue the dry stubble? 26 For thou writest bitter things against me, and makest me to possess the iniquities of my youth. 27 Thou puttest my feet also in the stocks, and lookest narrowly unto all my paths; thou settest a print upon the heels of my feet. 28 And he, as a rotten thing, consumeth, as a garment that is moth eaten. CHAPTER 14 1 Man [that is] born of a woman [is] of few days, and full of trouble. 2 He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not. 3 And dost thou open thine eyes upon such an one, and bringest me into judgment with thee? 4 Who can bring a clean [thing] out of an unclean? not one. 5 Seeing his days [are] determined, the number of his months [are] with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass; 6 Turn from him, that he may rest, till he shall accomplish, as an hireling, his day. 7 For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. 8 Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; 9 [Yet] through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant. 10 But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where [is] he? 11 [As] the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up: 12 So man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens [be] no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep. 13 O that thou wouldest hide me in the grave, that thou wouldest keep me secret, until thy wrath be past, that thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me! 14 If a man die, shall he live [again]? all the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come. 15 Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee: thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands. 16 For now thou numberest my steps: dost thou not watch over my sin? 17 My transgression [is] sealed up in a bag, and thou sewest up mine iniquity. 18 And surely the mountain falling cometh to nought, and the rock is removed out of his place. 19 The waters wear the stones: thou washest away the things which grow [out] of the dust of the earth; and thou destroyest the hope of man. 20 Thou prevailest for ever against him, and he passeth: thou changest his countenance, and sendest him away. 21 His sons come to honour, and he knoweth [it] not; and they are brought low, but he perceiveth [it] not of them. 22 But his flesh upon him shall have pain, and his soul within him shall mourn. CHAPTER 15 1 Then answered Eliphaz the Temanite, and said, 2 Should a wise man utter vain knowledge, and fill his belly with the east wind? 3 Should he reason with unprofitable talk? or with speeches wherewith he can do no good? 4 Yea, thou castest off fear, and restrainest prayer before God. 5 For thy mouth uttereth thine iniquity, and thou choosest the tongue of the crafty. 6 Thine own mouth condemneth thee, and not I: yea, thine own lips testify against thee. 7 [Art] thou the first man [that] was born? or wast thou made before the hills? 8 Hast thou heard the secret of God? and dost thou restrain wisdom to thyself? 9 What knowest thou, that we know not? [what] understandest thou, which [is] not in us? 10 With us [are] both the grayheaded and very aged men, much elder than thy father. 11 [Are] the consolations of God small with thee? is there any secret thing with thee? 12 Why doth thine heart carry thee away? and what do thy eyes wink at, 13 That thou turnest thy spirit against God, and lettest [such] words go out of thy mouth? 14 What [is] man, that he should be clean? and [he which is] born of a woman, that he should be righteous? 15 Behold, he putteth no trust in his saints; yea, the heavens are not clean in his sight. 16 How much more abominable and filthy [is] man, which drinketh iniquity like water? 17 I will shew thee, hear me; and that [which] I have seen I will declare; 18 Which wise men have told from their fathers, and have not hid [it]: 19 Unto whom alone the earth was given, and no stranger passed among them. 20 The wicked man travaileth with pain all [his] days, and the number of years is hidden to the oppressor. 21 A dreadful sound [is] in his ears: in prosperity the destroyer shall come upon him. 22 He believeth not that he shall return out of darkness, and he is waited for of the sword. 23 He wandereth abroad for bread, [saying], Where [is it]? he knoweth that the day of darkness is ready at his hand. 24 Trouble and anguish shall make him afraid; they shall prevail against him, as a king ready to the battle. 25 For he stretcheth out his hand against God, and strengtheneth himself against the Almighty. 26 He runneth upon him, [even] on [his] neck, upon the thick bosses of his bucklers: 27 Because he covereth his face with his fatness, and maketh collops of fat on [his] flanks. 28 And he dwelleth in desolate cities, [and] in houses which no man inhabiteth, which are ready to become heaps. 29 He shall not be rich, neither shall his substance continue, neither shall he prolong the perfection thereof upon the earth. 30 He shall not depart out of darkness; the flame shall dry up his branches, and by the breath of his mouth shall he go away. 31 Let not him that is deceived trust in vanity: for vanity shall be his recompence. 32 It shall be accomplished before his time, and his branch shall not be green. 33 He shall shake off his unripe grape as the vine, and shall cast off his flower as the olive. 34 For the congregation of hypocrites [shall be] desolate, and fire shall consume the tabernacles of bribery. 35 They conceive mischief, and bring forth vanity, and their belly prepareth deceit. CHAPTER 16 1 Then Job answered and said, 2 I have heard many such things: miserable comforters [are] ye all. 3 Shall vain words have an end? or what emboldeneth thee that thou answerest? 4 I also could speak as ye [do]: if your soul were in my soul's stead, I could heap up words against you, and shake mine head at you. 5 [But] I would strengthen you with my mouth, and the moving of my lips should asswage [your grief]. 6 Though I speak, my grief is not asswaged: and [though] I forbear, what am I eased? 7 But now he hath made me weary: thou hast made desolate all my company. 8 And thou hast filled me with wrinkles, [which] is a witness [against me]: and my leanness rising up in me beareth witness to my face. 9 He teareth [me] in his wrath, who hateth me: he gnasheth upon me with his teeth; mine enemy sharpeneth his eyes upon me. 10 They have gaped upon me with their mouth; they have smitten me upon the cheek reproachfully; they have gathered themselves together against me. 11 God hath delivered me to the ungodly, and turned me over into the hands of the wicked. 12 I was at ease, but he hath broken me asunder: he hath also taken [me] by my neck, and shaken me to pieces, and set me up for his mark. 13 His archers compass me round about, he cleaveth my reins asunder, and doth not spare; he poureth out my gall upon the ground. 14 He breaketh me with breach upon breach, he runneth upon me like a giant. 15 I have sewed sackcloth upon my skin, and defiled my horn in the dust. 16 My face is foul with weeping, and on my eyelids [is] the shadow of death; 17 Not for [any] injustice in mine hands: also my prayer [is] pure. 18 O earth, cover not thou my blood, and let my cry have no place. 19 Also now, behold, my witness [is] in heaven, and my record [is] on high. 20 My friends scorn me: [but] mine eye poureth out [tears] unto God. 21 O that one might plead for a man with God, as a man [pleadeth] for his neighbour! 22 When a few years are come, then I shall go the way [whence] I shall not return. CHAPTER 17 1 My breath is corrupt, my days are extinct, the graves [are ready] for me. 2 [Are there] not mockers with me? and doth not mine eye continue in their provocation? 3 Lay down now, put me in a surety with thee; who [is] he [that] will strike hands with me? 4 For thou hast hid their heart from understanding: therefore shalt thou not exalt [them]. 5 He that speaketh flattery to [his] friends, even the eyes of his children shall fail. 6 He hath made me also a byword of the people; and aforetime I was as a tabret. 7 Mine eye also is dim by reason of sorrow, and all my members [are] as a shadow. 8 Upright [men] shall be astonied at this, and the innocent shall stir up himself against the hypocrite. 9 The righteous also shall hold on his way, and he that hath clean hands shall be stronger and stronger. 10 But as for you all, do ye return, and come now: for I cannot find [one] wise [man] among you. 11 My days are past, my purposes are broken off, [even] the thoughts of my heart. 12 They change the night into day: the light [is] short because of darkness. 13 If I wait, the grave [is] mine house: I have made my bed in the darkness. 14 I have said to corruption, Thou [art] my father: to the worm, [Thou art] my mother, and my sister. 15 And where [is] now my hope? as for my hope, who shall see it? 16 They shall go down to the bars of the pit, when [our] rest together [is] in the dust. CHAPTER 18 1 Then answered Bildad the Shuhite, and said, 2 How long [will it be ere] ye make an end of words? mark, and afterwards we will speak. 3 Wherefore are we counted as beasts, [and] reputed vile in your sight? 4 He teareth himself in his anger: shall the earth be forsaken for thee? and shall the rock be removed out of his place? 5 Yea, the light of the wicked shall be put out, and the spark of his fire shall not shine. 6 The light shall be dark in his tabernacle, and his candle shall be put out with him. 7 The steps of his strength shall be straitened, and his own counsel shall cast him down. 8 For he is cast into a net by his own feet, and he walketh upon a snare. 9 The gin shall take [him] by the heel, [and] the robber shall prevail against him. 10 The snare [is] laid for him in the ground, and a trap for him in the way. 11 Terrors shall make him afraid on every side, and shall drive him to his feet. 12 His strength shall be hungerbitten, and destruction [shall be] ready at his side. 13 It shall devour the strength of his skin: [even] the firstborn of death shall devour his strength. 14 His confidence shall be rooted out of his tabernacle, and it shall bring him to the king of terrors. 15 It shall dwell in his tabernacle, because [it is] none of his: brimstone shall be scattered upon his habitation. 16 His roots shall be dried up beneath, and above shall his branch be cut off. 17 His remembrance shall perish from the earth, and he shall have no name in the street. 18 He shall be driven from light into darkness, and chased out of the world. 19 He shall neither have son nor nephew among his people, nor any remaining in his dwellings. 20 They that come after [him] shall be astonied at his day, as they that went before were affrighted. 21 Surely such [are] the dwellings of the wicked, and this [is] the place [of him that] knoweth not God. CHAPTER 19 1 Then Job answered and said, 2 How long will ye vex my soul, and break me in pieces with words? 3 These ten times have ye reproached me: ye are not ashamed [that] ye make yourselves strange to me. 4 And be it indeed [that] I have erred, mine error remaineth with myself. 5 If indeed ye will magnify [yourselves] against me, and plead against me my reproach: 6 Know now that God hath overthrown me, and hath compassed me with his net. 7 Behold, I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard: I cry aloud, but [there is] no judgment. 8 He hath fenced up my way that I cannot pass, and he hath set darkness in my paths. 9 He hath stripped me of my glory, and taken the crown [from] my head. 10 He hath destroyed me on every side, and I am gone: and mine hope hath he removed like a tree. 11 He hath also kindled his wrath against me, and he counteth me unto him as [one of] his enemies. 12 His troops come together, and raise up their way against me, and encamp round about my tabernacle. 13 He hath put my brethren far from me, and mine acquaintance are verily estranged from me. 14 My kinsfolk have failed, and my familiar friends have forgotten me. 15 They that dwell in mine house, and my maids, count me for a stranger: I am an alien in their sight. 16 I called my servant, and he gave [me] no answer; I intreated him with my mouth. 17 My breath is strange to my wife, though I intreated for the children's [sake] of mine own body. 18 Yea, young children despised me; I arose, and they spake against me. 19 All my inward friends abhorred me: and they whom I loved are turned against me. 20 My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth. 21 Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me. 22 Why do ye persecute me as God, and are not satisfied with my flesh? 23 Oh that my words were now written! oh that they were printed in a book! 24 That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever! 25 For I know [that] my redeemer liveth, and [that] he shall stand at the latter [day] upon the earth: 26 And [though] after my skin [worms] destroy this [body], yet in my flesh shall I see God: 27 Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; [though] my reins be consumed within me. 28 But ye should say, Why persecute we him, seeing the root of the matter is found in me? 29 Be ye afraid of the sword: for wrath [bringeth] the punishments of the sword, that ye may know [there is] a judgment. CHAPTER 20 1 Then answered Zophar the Naamathite, and said, 2 Therefore do my thoughts cause me to answer, and for [this] I make haste. 3 I have heard the check of my reproach, and the spirit of my understanding causeth me to answer. 4 Knowest thou [not] this of old, since man was placed upon earth, 5 That the triumphing of the wicked [is] short, and the joy of the hypocrite [but] for a moment? 6 Though his excellency mount up to the heavens, and his head reach unto the clouds; 7 [Yet] he shall perish for ever like his own dung: they which have seen him shall say, Where [is] he? 8 He shall fly away as a dream, and shall not be found: yea, he shall be chased away as a vision of the night. 9 The eye also [which] saw him shall [see him] no more; neither shall his place any more behold him. 10 His children shall seek to please the poor, and his hands shall restore their goods. 11 His bones are full [of the sin] of his youth, which shall lie down with him in the dust. 12 Though wickedness be sweet in his mouth, [though] he hide it under his tongue; 13 [Though] he spare it, and forsake it not; but keep it still within his mouth: 14 [Yet] his meat in his bowels is turned, [it is] the gall of asps within him. 15 He hath swallowed down riches, and he shall vomit them up again: God shall cast them out of his belly. 16 He shall suck the poison of asps: the viper's tongue shall slay him. 17 He shall not see the rivers, the floods, the brooks of honey and butter. 18 That which he laboured for shall he restore, and shall not swallow [it] down: according to [his] substance [shall] the restitution [be], and he shall not rejoice [therein]. 19 Because he hath oppressed [and] hath forsaken the poor; [because] he hath violently taken away an house which he builded not; 20 Surely he shall not feel quietness in his belly, he shall not save of that which he desired. 21 There shall none of his meat be left; therefore shall no man look for his goods. 22 In the fulness of his sufficiency he shall be in straits: every hand of the wicked shall come upon him. 23 [When] he is about to fill his belly, [God] shall cast the fury of his wrath upon him, and shall rain [it] upon him while he is eating. 24 He shall flee from the iron weapon, [and] the bow of steel shall strike him through. 25 It is drawn, and cometh out of the body; yea, the glittering sword cometh out of his gall: terrors [are] upon him. 26 All darkness [shall be] hid in his secret places: a fire not blown shall consume him; it shall go ill with him that is left in his tabernacle. 27 The heaven shall reveal his iniquity; and the earth shall rise up against him. 28 The increase of his house shall depart, [and his goods] shall flow away in the day of his wrath. 29 This [is] the portion of a wicked man from God, and the heritage appointed unto him by God. CHAPTER 21 1 But Job answered and said, 2 Hear diligently my speech, and let this be your consolations. 3 Suffer me that I may speak; and after that I have spoken, mock on. 4 As for me, [is] my complaint to man? and if [it were so], why should not my spirit be troubled? 5 Mark me, and be astonished, and lay [your] hand upon [your] mouth. 6 Even when I remember I am afraid, and trembling taketh hold on my flesh. 7 Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power? 8 Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their offspring before their eyes. 9 Their houses [are] safe from fear, neither [is] the rod of God upon them. 10 Their bull gendereth, and faileth not; their cow calveth, and casteth not her calf. 11 They send forth their little ones like a flock, and their children dance. 12 They take the timbrel and harp, and rejoice at the sound of the organ. 13 They spend their days in wealth, and in a moment go down to the grave. 14 Therefore they say unto God, Depart from us; for we desire not the knowledge of thy ways. 15 What [is] the Almighty, that we should serve him? and what profit should we have, if we pray unto him? 16 Lo, their good [is] not in their hand: the counsel of the wicked is far from me. 17 How oft is the candle of the wicked put out! and [how oft] cometh their destruction upon them! [God] distributeth sorrows in his anger. 18 They are as stubble before the wind, and as chaff that the storm carrieth away. 19 God layeth up his iniquity for his children: he rewardeth him, and he shall know [it]. 20 His eyes shall see his destruction, and he shall drink of the wrath of the Almighty. 21 For what pleasure [hath] he in his house after him, when the number of his months is cut off in the midst? 22 Shall [any] teach God knowledge? seeing he judgeth those that are high. 23 One dieth in his full strength, being wholly at ease and quiet. 24 His breasts are full of milk, and his bones are moistened with marrow. 25 And another dieth in the bitterness of his soul, and never eateth with pleasure. 26 They shall lie down alike in the dust, and the worms shall cover them. 27 Behold, I know your thoughts, and the devices [which] ye wrongfully imagine against me. 28 For ye say, Where [is] the house of the prince? and where [are] the dwelling places of the wicked? 29 Have ye not asked them that go by the way? and do ye not know their tokens, 30 That the wicked is reserved to the day of destruction? they shall be brought forth to the day of wrath. 31 Who shall declare his way to his face? and who shall repay him [what] he hath done? 32 Yet shall he be brought to the grave, and shall remain in the tomb. 33 The clods of the valley shall be sweet unto him, and every man shall draw after him, as [there are] innumerable before him. 34 How then comfort ye me in vain, seeing in your answers there remaineth falsehood? CHAPTER 22 1 Then Eliphaz the Temanite answered and said, 2 Can a man be profitable unto God, as he that is wise may be profitable unto himself? 3 [Is it] any pleasure to the Almighty, that thou art righteous? or [is it] gain [to him], that thou makest thy ways perfect? 4 Will he reprove thee for fear of thee? will he enter with thee into judgment? 5 [Is] not thy wickedness great? and thine iniquities infinite? 6 For thou hast taken a pledge from thy brother for nought, and stripped the naked of their clothing. 7 Thou hast not given water to the weary to drink, and thou hast withholden bread from the hungry. 8 But [as for] the mighty man, he had the earth; and the honourable man dwelt in it. 9 Thou hast sent widows away empty, and the arms of the fatherless have been broken. 10 Therefore snares [are] round about thee, and sudden fear troubleth thee; 11 Or darkness, [that] thou canst not see; and abundance of waters cover thee. 12 [Is] not God in the height of heaven? and behold the height of the stars, how high they are! 13 And thou sayest, How doth God know? can he judge through the dark cloud? 14 Thick clouds [are] a covering to him, that he seeth not; and he walketh in the circuit of heaven. 15 Hast thou marked the old way which wicked men have trodden? 16 Which were cut down out of time, whose foundation was overflown with a flood: 17 Which said unto God, Depart from us: and what can the Almighty do for them? 18 Yet he filled their houses with good [things]: but the counsel of the wicked is far from me. 19 The righteous see [it], and are glad: and the innocent laugh them to scorn. 20 Whereas our substance is not cut down, but the remnant of them the fire consumeth. 21 Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace: thereby good shall come unto thee. 22 Receive, I pray thee, the law from his mouth, and lay up his words in thine heart. 23 If thou return to the Almighty, thou shalt be built up, thou shalt put away iniquity far from thy tabernacles. 24 Then shalt thou lay up gold as dust, and the [gold] of Ophir as the stones of the brooks. 25 Yea, the Almighty shall be thy defence, and thou shalt have plenty of silver. 26 For then shalt thou have thy delight in the Almighty, and shalt lift up thy face unto God. 27 Thou shalt make thy prayer unto him, and he shall hear thee, and thou shalt pay thy vows. 28 Thou shalt also decree a thing, and it shall be established unto thee: and the light shall shine upon thy ways. 29 When [men] are cast down, then thou shalt say, [There is] lifting up; and he shall save the humble person. 30 He shall deliver the island of the innocent: and it is delivered by the pureness of thine hands. CHAPTER 23 1 Then Job answered and said, 2 Even to day [is] my complaint bitter: my stroke is heavier than my groaning. 3 Oh that I knew where I might find him! [that] I might come [even] to his seat! 4 I would order [my] cause before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. 5 I would know the words [which] he would answer me, and understand what he would say unto me. 6 Will he plead against me with [his] great power? No; but he would put [strength] in me. 7 There the righteous might dispute with him; so should I be delivered for ever from my judge. 8 Behold, I go forward, but he [is] not [there]; and backward, but I cannot perceive him: 9 On the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold [him]: he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see [him]: 10 But he knoweth the way that I take: [when] he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold. 11 My foot hath held his steps, his way have I kept, and not declined. 12 Neither have I gone back from the commandment of his lips; I have esteemed the words of his mouth more than my necessary [food]. 13 But he [is] in one [mind], and who can turn him? and [what] his soul desireth, even [that] he doeth. 14 For he performeth [the thing that is] appointed for me: and many such [things are] with him. 15 Therefore am I troubled at his presence: when I consider, I am afraid of him. 16 For God maketh my heart soft, and the Almighty troubleth me: 17 Because I was not cut off before the darkness, [neither] hath he covered the darkness from my face. CHAPTER 24 1 Why, seeing times are not hidden from the Almighty, do they that know him not see his days? 2 [Some] remove the landmarks; they violently take away flocks, and feed [thereof]. 3 They drive away the ass of the fatherless, they take the widow's ox for a pledge. 4 They turn the needy out of the way: the poor of the earth hide themselves together. 5 Behold, [as] wild asses in the desert, go they forth to their work; rising betimes for a prey: the wilderness [yieldeth] food for them [and] for [their] children. 6 They reap [every one] his corn in the field: and they gather the vintage of the wicked. 7 They cause the naked to lodge without clothing, that [they have] no covering in the cold. 8 They are wet with the showers of the mountains, and embrace the rock for want of a shelter. 9 They pluck the fatherless from the breast, and take a pledge of the poor. 10 They cause [him] to go naked without clothing, and they take away the sheaf [from] the hungry; 11 [Which] make oil within their walls, [and] tread [their] winepresses, and suffer thirst. 12 Men groan from out of the city, and the soul of the wounded crieth out: yet God layeth not folly [to them]. 13 They are of those that rebel against the light; they know not the ways thereof, nor abide in the paths thereof. 14 The murderer rising with the light killeth the poor and needy, and in the night is as a thief. 15 The eye also of the adulterer waiteth for the twilight, saying, No eye shall see me: and disguiseth [his] face. 16 In the dark they dig through houses, [which] they had marked for themselves in the daytime: they know not the light. 17 For the morning [is] to them even as the shadow of death: if [one] know [them, they are in] the terrors of the shadow of death. 18 He [is] swift as the waters; their portion is cursed in the earth: he beholdeth not the way of the vineyards. 19 Drought and heat consume the snow waters: [so doth] the grave [those which] have sinned. 20 The womb shall forget him; the worm shall feed sweetly on him; he shall be no more remembered; and wickedness shall be broken as a tree. 21 He evil entreateth the barren [that] beareth not: and doeth not good to the widow. 22 He draweth also the mighty with his power: he riseth up, and no [man] is sure of life. 23 [Though] it be given him [to be] in safety, whereon he resteth; yet his eyes [are] upon their ways. 24 They are exalted for a little while, but are gone and brought low; they are taken out of the way as all [other], and cut off as the tops of the ears of corn. 25 And if [it be] not [so] now, who will make me a liar, and make my speech nothing worth? CHAPTER 25 1 Then answered Bildad the Shuhite, and said, 2 Dominion and fear [are] with him, he maketh peace in his high places. 3 Is there any number of his armies? and upon whom doth not his light arise? 4 How then can man be justified with God? or how can he be clean [that is] born of a woman? 5 Behold even to the moon, and it shineth not; yea, the stars are not pure in his sight. 6 How much less man, [that is] a worm? and the son of man, [which is] a worm? CHAPTER 26 1 But Job answered and said, 2 How hast thou helped [him that is] without power? [how] savest thou the arm [that hath] no strength? 3 How hast thou counselled [him that hath] no wisdom? and [how] hast thou plentifully declared the thing as it is? 4 To whom hast thou uttered words? and whose spirit came from thee? 5 Dead [things] are formed from under the waters, and the inhabitants thereof. 6 Hell [is] naked before him, and destruction hath no covering. 7 He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, [and] hangeth the earth upon nothing. 8 He bindeth up the waters in his thick clouds; and the cloud is not rent under them. 9 He holdeth back the face of his throne, [and] spreadeth his cloud upon it. 10 He hath compassed the waters with bounds, until the day and night come to an end. 11 The pillars of heaven tremble and are astonished at his reproof. 12 He divideth the sea with his power, and by his understanding he smiteth through the proud. 13 By his spirit he hath garnished the heavens; his hand hath formed the crooked serpent. 14 Lo, these [are] parts of his ways: but how little a portion is heard of him? but the thunder of his power who can understand? CHAPTER 27 1 Moreover Job continued his parable, and said, 2 [As] God liveth, [who] hath taken away my judgment; and the Almighty, [who] hath vexed my soul; 3 All the while my breath [is] in me, and the spirit of God [is] in my nostrils; 4 My lips shall not speak wickedness, nor my tongue utter deceit. 5 God forbid that I should justify you: till I die I will not remove mine integrity from me. 6 My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go: my heart shall not reproach [me] so long as I live. 7 Let mine enemy be as the wicked, and he that riseth up against me as the unrighteous. 8 For what [is] the hope of the hypocrite, though he hath gained, when God taketh away his soul? 9 Will God hear his cry when trouble cometh upon him? 10 Will he delight himself in the Almighty? will he always call upon God? 11 I will teach you by the hand of God: [that] which [is] with the Almighty will I not conceal. 12 Behold, all ye yourselves have seen [it]; why then are ye thus altogether vain? 13 This [is] the portion of a wicked man with God, and the heritage of oppressors, [which] they shall receive of the Almighty. 14 If his children be multiplied, [it is] for the sword: and his offspring shall not be satisfied with bread. 15 Those that remain of him shall be buried in death: and his widows shall not weep. 16 Though he heap up silver as the dust, and prepare raiment as the clay; 17 He may prepare [it], but the just shall put [it] on, and the innocent shall divide the silver. 18 He buildeth his house as a moth, and as a booth [that] the keeper maketh. 19 The rich man shall lie down, but he shall not be gathered: he openeth his eyes, and he [is] not. 20 Terrors take hold on him as waters, a tempest stealeth him away in the night. 21 The east wind carrieth him away, and he departeth: and as a storm hurleth him out of his place. 22 For [God] shall cast upon him, and not spare: he would fain flee out of his hand. 23 [Men] shall clap their hands at him, and shall hiss him out of his place. CHAPTER 28 1 Surely there is a vein for the silver, and a place for gold [where] they fine [it]. 2 Iron is taken out of the earth, and brass [is] molten [out of] the stone. 3 He setteth an end to darkness, and searcheth out all perfection: the stones of darkness, and the shadow of death. 4 The flood breaketh out from the inhabitant; [even the waters] forgotten of the foot: they are dried up, they are gone away from men. 5 [As for] the earth, out of it cometh bread: and under it is turned up as it were fire. 6 The stones of it [are] the place of sapphires: and it hath dust of gold. 7 [There is] a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's eye hath not seen: 8 The lion's whelps have not trodden it, nor the fierce lion passed by it. 9 He putteth forth his hand upon the rock; he overturneth the mountains by the roots. 10 He cutteth out rivers among the rocks; and his eye seeth every precious thing. 11 He bindeth the floods from overflowing; and [the thing that is] hid bringeth he forth to light. 12 But where shall wisdom be found? and where [is] the place of understanding? 13 Man knoweth not the price thereof; neither is it found in the land of the living. 14 The depth saith, It [is] not in me: and the sea saith, [It is] not with me. 15 It cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed [for] the price thereof. 16 It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire. 17 The gold and the crystal cannot equal it: and the exchange of it [shall not be for] jewels of fine gold. 18 No mention shall be made of coral, or of pearls: for the price of wisdom [is] above rubies. 19 The topaz of Ethiopia shall not equal it, neither shall it be valued with pure gold. 20 Whence then cometh wisdom? and where [is] the place of understanding? 21 Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept close from the fowls of the air. 22 Destruction and death say, We have heard the fame thereof with our ears. 23 God understandeth the way thereof, and he knoweth the place thereof. 24 For he looketh to the ends of the earth, [and] seeth under the whole heaven; 25 To make the weight for the winds; and he weigheth the waters by measure. 26 When he made a decree for the rain, and a way for the lightning of the thunder: 27 Then did he see it, and declare it; he prepared it, yea, and searched it out. 28 And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that [is] wisdom; and to depart from evil [is] understanding. CHAPTER 29 1 Moreover Job continued his parable, and said, 2 Oh that I were as [in] months past, as [in] the days [when] God preserved me; 3 When his candle shined upon my head, [and when] by his light I walked [through] darkness; 4 As I was in the days of my youth, when the secret of God [was] upon my tabernacle; 5 When the Almighty [was] yet with me, [when] my children [were] about me; 6 When I washed my steps with butter, and the rock poured me out rivers of oil; 7 When I went out to the gate through the city, [when] I prepared my seat in the street! 8 The young men saw me, and hid themselves: and the aged arose, [and] stood up. 9 The princes refrained talking, and laid [their] hand on their mouth. 10 The nobles held their peace, and their tongue cleaved to the roof of their mouth. 11 When the ear heard [me], then it blessed me; and when the eye saw [me], it gave witness to me: 12 Because I delivered the poor that cried, and the fatherless, and [him that had] none to help him. 13 The blessing of him that was ready to perish came upon me: and I caused the widow's heart to sing for joy. 14 I put on righteousness, and it clothed me: my judgment [was] as a robe and a diadem. 15 I was eyes to the blind, and feet [was] I to the lame. 16 I [was] a father to the poor: and the cause [which] I knew not I searched out. 17 And I brake the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the spoil out of his teeth. 18 Then I said, I shall die in my nest, and I shall multiply [my] days as the sand. 19 My root [was] spread out by the waters, and the dew lay all night upon my branch. 20 My glory [was] fresh in me, and my bow was renewed in my hand. 21 Unto me [men] gave ear, and waited, and kept silence at my counsel. 22 After my words they spake not again; and my speech dropped upon them. 23 And they waited for me as for the rain; and they opened their mouth wide [as] for the latter rain. 24 [If] I laughed on them, they believed [it] not; and the light of my countenance they cast not down. 25 I chose out their way, and sat chief, and dwelt as a king in the army, as one [that] comforteth the mourners. CHAPTER 30 1 But now [they that are] younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock. 2 Yea, whereto [might] the strength of their hands [profit] me, in whom old age was perished? 3 For want and famine [they were] solitary; fleeing into the wilderness in former time desolate and waste. 4 Who cut up mallows by the bushes, and juniper roots [for] their meat. 5 They were driven forth from among [men], (they cried after them as [after] a thief;) 6 To dwell in the clifts of the valleys, [in] caves of the earth, and [in] the rocks. 7 Among the bushes they brayed; under the nettles they were gathered together. 8 [They were] children of fools, yea, children of base men: they were viler than the earth. 9 And now am I their song, yea, I am their byword. 10 They abhor me, they flee far from me, and spare not to spit in my face. 11 Because he hath loosed my cord, and afflicted me, they have also let loose the bridle before me. 12 Upon [my] right [hand] rise the youth; they push away my feet, and they raise up against me the ways of their destruction. 13 They mar my path, they set forward my calamity, they have no helper. 14 They came [upon me] as a wide breaking in [of waters]: in the desolation they rolled themselves [upon me]. 15 Terrors are turned upon me: they pursue my soul as the wind: and my welfare passeth away as a cloud. 16 And now my soul is poured out upon me; the days of affliction have taken hold upon me. 17 My bones are pierced in me in the night season: and my sinews take no rest. 18 By the great force [of my disease] is my garment changed: it bindeth me about as the collar of my coat. 19 He hath cast me into the mire, and I am become like dust and ashes. 20 I cry unto thee, and thou dost not hear me: I stand up, and thou regardest me [not]. 21 Thou art become cruel to me: with thy strong hand thou opposest thyself against me. 22 Thou liftest me up to the wind; thou causest me to ride [upon it], and dissolvest my substance. 23 For I know [that] thou wilt bring me [to] death, and [to] the house appointed for all living. 24 Howbeit he will not stretch out [his] hand to the grave, though they cry in his destruction. 25 Did not I weep for him that was in trouble? was [not] my soul grieved for the poor? 26 When I looked for good, then evil came [unto me]: and when I waited for light, there came darkness. 27 My bowels boiled, and rested not: the days of affliction prevented me. 28 I went mourning without the sun: I stood up, [and] I cried in the congregation. 29 I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls. 30 My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat. 31 My harp also is [turned] to mourning, and my organ into the voice of them that weep. CHAPTER 31 1 I made a covenant with mine eyes; why then should I think upon a maid? 2 For what portion of God [is there] from above? and [what] inheritance of the Almighty from on high? 3 [Is] not destruction to the wicked? and a strange [punishment] to the workers of iniquity? 4 Doth not he see my ways, and count all my steps? 5 If I have walked with vanity, or if my foot hath hasted to deceit; 6 Let me be weighed in an even balance, that God may know mine integrity. 7 If my step hath turned out of the way, and mine heart walked after mine eyes, and if any blot hath cleaved to mine hands; 8 [Then] let me sow, and let another eat; yea, let my offspring be rooted out. 9 If mine heart have been deceived by a woman, or [if] I have laid wait at my neighbour's door; 10 [Then] let my wife grind unto another, and let others bow down upon her. 11 For this [is] an heinous crime; yea, it [is] an iniquity [to be punished by] the judges. 12 For it [is] a fire [that] consumeth to destruction, and would root out all mine increase. 13 If I did despise the cause of my manservant or of my maidservant, when they contended with me; 14 What then shall I do when God riseth up? and when he visiteth, what shall I answer him? 15 Did not he that made me in the womb make him? and did not one fashion us in the womb? 16 If I have withheld the poor from [their] desire, or have caused the eyes of the widow to fail; 17 Or have eaten my morsel myself alone, and the fatherless hath not eaten thereof; 18 (For from my youth he was brought up with me, as [with] a father, and I have guided her from my mother's womb;) 19 If I have seen any perish for want of clothing, or any poor without covering; 20 If his loins have not blessed me, and [if] he were [not] warmed with the fleece of my sheep; 21 If I have lifted up my hand against the fatherless, when I saw my help in the gate: 22 [Then] let mine arm fall from my shoulder blade, and mine arm be broken from the bone. 23 For destruction [from] God [was] a terror to me, and by reason of his highness I could not endure. 24 If I have made gold my hope, or have said to the fine gold, [Thou art] my confidence; 25 If I rejoiced because my wealth [was] great, and because mine hand had gotten much; 26 If I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon walking [in] brightness; 27 And my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand: 28 This also [were] an iniquity [to be punished by] the judge: for I should have denied the God [that is] above. 29 If I rejoiced at the destruction of him that hated me, or lifted up myself when evil found him: 30 Neither have I suffered my mouth to sin by wishing a curse to his soul. 31 If the men of my tabernacle said not, Oh that we had of his flesh! we cannot be satisfied. 32 The stranger did not lodge in the street: [but] I opened my doors to the traveller. 33 If I covered my transgressions as Adam, by hiding mine iniquity in my bosom: 34 Did I fear a great multitude, or did the contempt of families terrify me, that I kept silence, [and] went not out of the door? 35 Oh that one would hear me! behold, my desire [is, that] the Almighty would answer me, and [that] mine adversary had written a book. 36 Surely I would take it upon my shoulder, [and] bind it [as] a crown to me. 37 I would declare unto him the number of my steps; as a prince would I go near unto him. 38 If my land cry against me, or that the furrows likewise thereof complain; 39 If I have eaten the fruits thereof without money, or have caused the owners thereof to lose their life: 40 Let thistles grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley. The words of Job are ended. CHAPTER 32 1 So these three men ceased to answer Job, because he [was] righteous in his own eyes. 2 Then was kindled the wrath of Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite, of the kindred of Ram: against Job was his wrath kindled, because he justified himself rather than God. 3 Also against his three friends was his wrath kindled, because they had found no answer, and [yet] had condemned Job. 4 Now Elihu had waited till Job had spoken, because they [were] elder than he. 5 When Elihu saw that [there was] no answer in the mouth of [these] three men, then his wrath was kindled. 6 And Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite answered and said, I [am] young, and ye [are] very old; wherefore I was afraid, and durst not shew you mine opinion. 7 I said, Days should speak, and multitude of years should teach wisdom. 8 But [there is] a spirit in man: and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding. 9 Great men are not [always] wise: neither do the aged understand judgment. 10 Therefore I said, Hearken to me; I also will shew mine opinion. 11 Behold, I waited for your words; I gave ear to your reasons, whilst ye searched out what to say. 12 Yea, I attended unto you, and, behold, [there was] none of you that convinced Job, [or] that answered his words: 13 Lest ye should say, We have found out wisdom: God thrusteth him down, not man. 14 Now he hath not directed [his] words against me: neither will I answer him with your speeches. 15 They were amazed, they answered no more: they left off speaking. 16 When I had waited, (for they spake not, but stood still, [and] answered no more;) 17 [I said], I will answer also my part, I also will shew mine opinion. 18 For I am full of matter, the spirit within me constraineth me. 19 Behold, my belly [is] as wine [which] hath no vent; it is ready to burst like new bottles. 20 I will speak, that I may be refreshed: I will open my lips and answer. 21 Let me not, I pray you, accept any man's person, neither let me give flattering titles unto man. 22 For I know not to give flattering titles; [in so doing] my maker would soon take me away. CHAPTER 33 1 Wherefore, Job, I pray thee, hear my speeches, and hearken to all my words. 2 Behold, now I have opened my mouth, my tongue hath spoken in my mouth. 3 My words [shall be of] the uprightness of my heart: and my lips shall utter knowledge clearly. 4 The Spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life. 5 If thou canst answer me, set [thy words] in order before me, stand up. 6 Behold, I [am] according to thy wish in God's stead: I also am formed out of the clay. 7 Behold, my terror shall not make thee afraid, neither shall my hand be heavy upon thee. 8 Surely thou hast spoken in mine hearing, and I have heard the voice of [thy] words, [saying], 9 I am clean without transgression, I [am] innocent; neither [is there] iniquity in me. 10 Behold, he findeth occasions against me, he counteth me for his enemy, 11 He putteth my feet in the stocks, he marketh all my paths. 12 Behold, [in] this thou art not just: I will answer thee, that God is greater than man. 13 Why dost thou strive against him? for he giveth not account of any of his matters. 14 For God speaketh once, yea twice, [yet man] perceiveth it not. 15 In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed; 16 Then he openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction, 17 That he may withdraw man [from his] purpose, and hide pride from man. 18 He keepeth back his soul from the pit, and his life from perishing by the sword. 19 He is chastened also with pain upon his bed, and the multitude of his bones with strong [pain]: 20 So that his life abhorreth bread, and his soul dainty meat. 21 His flesh is consumed away, that it cannot be seen; and his bones [that] were not seen stick out. 22 Yea, his soul draweth near unto the grave, and his life to the destroyers. 23 If there be a messenger with him, an interpreter, one among a thousand, to shew unto man his uprightness: 24 Then he is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit: I have found a ransom. 25 His flesh shall be fresher than a child's: he shall return to the days of his youth: 26 He shall pray unto God, and he will be favourable unto him: and he shall see his face with joy: for he will render unto man his righteousness. 27 He looketh upon men, and [if any] say, I have sinned, and perverted [that which was] right, and it profited me not; 28 He will deliver his soul from going into the pit, and his life shall see the light. 29 Lo, all these [things] worketh God oftentimes with man, 30 To bring back his soul from the pit, to be enlightened with the light of the living. 31 Mark well, O Job, hearken unto me: hold thy peace, and I will speak. 32 If thou hast any thing to say, answer me: speak, for I desire to justify thee. 33 If not, hearken unto me: hold thy peace, and I shall teach thee wisdom. CHAPTER 34 1 Furthermore Elihu answered and said, 2 Hear my words, O ye wise [men]; and give ear unto me, ye that have knowledge. 3 For the ear trieth words, as the mouth tasteth meat. 4 Let us choose to us judgment: let us know among ourselves what [is] good. 5 For Job hath said, I am righteous: and God hath taken away my judgment. 6 Should I lie against my right? my wound [is] incurable without transgression. 7 What man [is] like Job, [who] drinketh up scorning like water? 8 Which goeth in company with the workers of iniquity, and walketh with wicked men. 9 For he hath said, It profiteth a man nothing that he should delight himself with God. 10 Therefore hearken unto me, ye men of understanding: far be it from God, [that he should do] wickedness; and [from] the Almighty, [that he should commit] iniquity. 11 For the work of a man shall he render unto him, and cause every man to find according to [his] ways. 12 Yea, surely God will not do wickedly, neither will the Almighty pervert judgment. 13 Who hath given him a charge over the earth? or who hath disposed the whole world? 14 If he set his heart upon man, [if] he gather unto himself his spirit and his breath; 15 All flesh shall perish together, and man shall turn again unto dust. 16 If now [thou hast] understanding, hear this: hearken to the voice of my words. 17 Shall even he that hateth right govern? and wilt thou condemn him that is most just? 18 [Is it fit] to say to a king, [Thou art] wicked? [and] to princes, [Ye are] ungodly? 19 [How much less to him] that accepteth not the persons of princes, nor regardeth the rich more than the poor? for they all [are] the work of his hands. 20 In a moment shall they die, and the people shall be troubled at midnight, and pass away: and the mighty shall be taken away without hand. 21 For his eyes [are] upon the ways of man, and he seeth all his goings. 22 [There is] no darkness, nor shadow of death, where the workers of iniquity may hide themselves. 23 For he will not lay upon man more [than right]; that he should enter into judgment with God. 24 He shall break in pieces mighty men without number, and set others in their stead. 25 Therefore he knoweth their works, and he overturneth [them] in the night, so that they are destroyed. 26 He striketh them as wicked men in the open sight of others; 27 Because they turned back from him, and would not consider any of his ways: 28 So that they cause the cry of the poor to come unto him, and he heareth the cry of the afflicted. 29 When he giveth quietness, who then can make trouble? and when he hideth [his] face, who then can behold him? whether [it be done] against a nation, or against a man only: 30 That the hypocrite reign not, lest the people be ensnared. 31 Surely it is meet to be said unto God, I have borne [chastisement], I will not offend [any more]: 32 [That which] I see not teach thou me: if I have done iniquity, I will do no more. 33 [Should it be] according to thy mind? he will recompense it, whether thou refuse, or whether thou choose; and not I: therefore speak what thou knowest. 34 Let men of understanding tell me, and let a wise man hearken unto me. 35 Job hath spoken without knowledge, and his words [were] without wisdom. 36 My desire [is that] Job may be tried unto the end because of [his] answers for wicked men. 37 For he addeth rebellion unto his sin, he clappeth [his hands] among us, and multiplieth his words against God. CHAPTER 35 1 Elihu spake moreover, and said, 2 Thinkest thou this to be right, [that] thou saidst, My righteousness [is] more than God's? 3 For thou saidst, What advantage will it be unto thee? [and], What profit shall I have, [if I be cleansed] from my sin? 4 I will answer thee, and thy companions with thee. 5 Look unto the heavens, and see; and behold the clouds [which] are higher than thou. 6 If thou sinnest, what doest thou against him? or [if] thy transgressions be multiplied, what doest thou unto him? 7 If thou be righteous, what givest thou him? or what receiveth he of thine hand? 8 Thy wickedness [may hurt] a man as thou [art]; and thy righteousness [may profit] the son of man. 9 By reason of the multitude of oppressions they make [the oppressed] to cry: they cry out by reason of the arm of the mighty. 10 But none saith, Where [is] God my maker, who giveth songs in the night; 11 Who teacheth us more than the beasts of the earth, and maketh us wiser than the fowls of heaven? 12 There they cry, but none giveth answer, because of the pride of evil men. 13 Surely God will not hear vanity, neither will the Almighty regard it. 14 Although thou sayest thou shalt not see him, [yet] judgment [is] before him; therefore trust thou in him. 15 But now, because [it is] not [so], he hath visited in his anger; yet he knoweth [it] not in great extremity: 16 Therefore doth Job open his mouth in vain; he multiplieth words without knowledge. CHAPTER 36 1 Elihu also proceeded, and said, 2 Suffer me a little, and I will shew thee that [I have] yet to speak on God's behalf. 3 I will fetch my knowledge from afar, and will ascribe righteousness to my Maker. 4 For truly my words [shall] not [be] false: he that is perfect in knowledge [is] with thee. 5 Behold, God [is] mighty, and despiseth not [any: he is] mighty in strength [and] wisdom. 6 He preserveth not the life of the wicked: but giveth right to the poor. 7 He withdraweth not his eyes from the righteous: but with kings [are they] on the throne; yea, he doth establish them for ever, and they are exalted. 8 And if [they be] bound in fetters, [and] be holden in cords of affliction; 9 Then he sheweth them their work, and their transgressions that they have exceeded. 10 He openeth also their ear to discipline, and commandeth that they return from iniquity. 11 If they obey and serve [him], they shall spend their days in prosperity, and their years in pleasures. 12 But if they obey not, they shall perish by the sword, and they shall die without knowledge. 13 But the hypocrites in heart heap up wrath: they cry not when he bindeth them. 14 They die in youth, and their life [is] among the unclean. 15 He delivereth the poor in his affliction, and openeth their ears in oppression. 16 Even so would he have removed thee out of the strait [into] a broad place, where [there is] no straitness; and that which should be set on thy table [should be] full of fatness. 17 But thou hast fulfilled the judgment of the wicked: judgment and justice take hold [on thee]. 18 Because [there is] wrath, [beware] lest he take thee away with [his] stroke: then a great ransom cannot deliver thee. 19 Will he esteem thy riches? [no], not gold, nor all the forces of strength. 20 Desire not the night, when people are cut off in their place. 21 Take heed, regard not iniquity: for this hast thou chosen rather than affliction. 22 Behold, God exalteth by his power: who teacheth like him? 23 Who hath enjoined him his way? or who can say, Thou hast wrought iniquity? 24 Remember that thou magnify his work, which men behold. 25 Every man may see it; man may behold [it] afar off. 26 Behold, God [is] great, and we know [him] not, neither can the number of his years be searched out. 27 For he maketh small the drops of water: they pour down rain according to the vapour thereof: 28 Which the clouds do drop [and] distil upon man abundantly. 29 Also can [any] understand the spreadings of the clouds, [or] the noise of his tabernacle? 30 Behold, he spreadeth his light upon it, and covereth the bottom of the sea. 31 For by them judgeth he the people; he giveth meat in abundance. 32 With clouds he covereth the light; and commandeth it [not to shine] by [the cloud] that cometh betwixt. 33 The noise thereof sheweth concerning it, the cattle also concerning the vapour. CHAPTER 37 1 At this also my heart trembleth, and is moved out of his place. 2 Hear attentively the noise of his voice, and the sound [that] goeth out of his mouth. 3 He directeth it under the whole heaven, and his lightning unto the ends of the earth. 4 After it a voice roareth: he thundereth with the voice of his excellency; and he will not stay them when his voice is heard. 5 God thundereth marvellously with his voice; great things doeth he, which we cannot comprehend. 6 For he saith to the snow, Be thou [on] the earth; likewise to the small rain, and to the great rain of his strength. 7 He sealeth up the hand of every man; that all men may know his work. 8 Then the beasts go into dens, and remain in their places. 9 Out of the south cometh the whirlwind: and cold out of the north. 10 By the breath of God frost is given: and the breadth of the waters is straitened. 11 Also by watering he wearieth the thick cloud: he scattereth his bright cloud: 12 And it is turned round about by his counsels: that they may do whatsoever he commandeth them upon the face of the world in the earth. 13 He causeth it to come, whether for correction, or for his land, or for mercy. 14 Hearken unto this, O Job: stand still, and consider the wondrous works of God. 15 Dost thou know when God disposed them, and caused the light of his cloud to shine? 16 Dost thou know the balancings of the clouds, the wondrous works of him which is perfect in knowledge? 17 How thy garments [are] warm, when he quieteth the earth by the south [wind]? 18 Hast thou with him spread out the sky, [which is] strong, [and] as a molten looking glass? 19 Teach us what we shall say unto him; [for] we cannot order [our speech] by reason of darkness. 20 Shall it be told him that I speak? if a man speak, surely he shall be swallowed up. 21 And now [men] see not the bright light which [is] in the clouds: but the wind passeth, and cleanseth them. 22 Fair weather cometh out of the north: with God [is] terrible majesty. 23 [Touching] the Almighty, we cannot find him out: [he is] excellent in power, and in judgment, and in plenty of justice: he will not afflict. 24 Men do therefore fear him: he respecteth not any [that are] wise of heart. CHAPTER 38 1 Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, 2 Who [is] this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? 3 Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. 4 Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. 5 Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? 6 Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; 7 When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? 8 Or [who] shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, [as if] it had issued out of the womb? 9 When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddlingband for it, 10 And brake up for it my decreed [place], and set bars and doors, 11 And said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed? 12 Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; [and] caused the dayspring to know his place; 13 That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it? 14 It is turned as clay [to] the seal; and they stand as a garment. 15 And from the wicked their light is withholden, and the high arm shall be broken. 16 Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? or hast thou walked in the search of the depth? 17 Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death? 18 Hast thou perceived the breadth of the earth? declare if thou knowest it all. 19 Where [is] the way [where] light dwelleth? and [as for] darkness, where [is] the place thereof, 20 That thou shouldest take it to the bound thereof, and that thou shouldest know the paths [to] the house thereof? 21 Knowest thou [it], because thou wast then born? or [because] the number of thy days [is] great? 22 Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail, 23 Which I have reserved against the time of trouble, against the day of battle and war? 24 By what way is the light parted, [which] scattereth the east wind upon the earth? 25 Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters, or a way for the lightning of thunder; 26 To cause it to rain on the earth, [where] no man [is; on] the wilderness, wherein [there is] no man; 27 To satisfy the desolate and waste [ground]; and to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth? 28 Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew? 29 Out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it? 30 The waters are hid as [with] a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen. 31 Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? 32 Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons? 33 Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth? 34 Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover thee? 35 Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go, and say unto thee, Here we [are]? 36 Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts? or who hath given understanding to the heart? 37 Who can number the clouds in wisdom? or who can stay the bottles of heaven, 38 When the dust groweth into hardness, and the clods cleave fast together? 39 Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion? or fill the appetite of the young lions, 40 When they couch in [their] dens, [and] abide in the covert to lie in wait? 41 Who provideth for the raven his food? when his young ones cry unto God, they wander for lack of meat. CHAPTER 39 1 Knowest thou the time when the wild goats of the rock bring forth? [or] canst thou mark when the hinds do calve? 2 Canst thou number the months [that] they fulfil? or knowest thou the time when they bring forth? 3 They bow themselves, they bring forth their young ones, they cast out their sorrows. 4 Their young ones are in good liking, they grow up with corn; they go forth, and return not unto them. 5 Who hath sent out the wild ass free? or who hath loosed the bands of the wild ass? 6 Whose house I have made the wilderness, and the barren land his dwellings. 7 He scorneth the multitude of the city, neither regardeth he the crying of the driver. 8 The range of the mountains [is] his pasture, and he searcheth after every green thing. 9 Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? 10 Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? or will he harrow the valleys after thee? 11 Wilt thou trust him, because his strength [is] great? or wilt thou leave thy labour to him? 12 Wilt thou believe him, that he will bring home thy seed, and gather [it into] thy barn? 13 [Gavest thou] the goodly wings unto the peacocks? or wings and feathers unto the ostrich? 14 Which leaveth her eggs in the earth, and warmeth them in dust, 15 And forgetteth that the foot may crush them, or that the wild beast may break them. 16 She is hardened against her young ones, as though [they were] not hers: her labour is in vain without fear; 17 Because God hath deprived her of wisdom, neither hath he imparted to her understanding. 18 What time she lifteth up herself on high, she scorneth the horse and his rider. 19 Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? 20 Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? the glory of his nostrils [is] terrible. 21 He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in [his] strength: he goeth on to meet the armed men. 22 He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back from the sword. 23 The quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the shield. 24 He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage: neither believeth he that [it is] the sound of the trumpet. 25 He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting. 26 Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom, [and] stretch her wings toward the south? 27 Doth the eagle mount up at thy command, and make her nest on high? 28 She dwelleth and abideth on the rock, upon the crag of the rock, and the strong place. 29 From thence she seeketh the prey, [and] her eyes behold afar off. 30 Her young ones also suck up blood: and where the slain [are], there [is] she. CHAPTER 40 1 Moreover the LORD answered Job, and said, 2 Shall he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct [him]? he that reproveth God, let him answer it. 3 ? Then Job answered the LORD, and said, 4 Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth. 5 Once have I spoken; but I will not answer: yea, twice; but I will proceed no further. 6 ? Then answered the LORD unto Job out of the whirlwind, and said, 7 Gird up thy loins now like a man: I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me. 8 Wilt thou also disannul my judgment? wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous? 9 Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him? 10 Deck thyself now [with] majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty. 11 Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one [that is] proud, and abase him. 12 Look on every one [that is] proud, [and] bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place. 13 Hide them in the dust together; [and] bind their faces in secret. 14 Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee. 15 ? Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox. 16 Lo now, his strength [is] in his loins, and his force [is] in the navel of his belly. 17 He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together. 18 His bones [are as] strong pieces of brass; his bones [are] like bars of iron. 19 He [is] the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make his sword to approach [unto him]. 20 Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play. 21 He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens. 22 The shady trees cover him [with] their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him about. 23 Behold, he drinketh up a river, [and] hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth. 24 He taketh it with his eyes: [his] nose pierceth through snares. CHAPTER 41 1 Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord [which] thou lettest down? 2 Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn? 3 Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft [words] unto thee? 4 Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever? 5 Wilt thou play with him as [with] a bird? or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens? 6 Shall the companions make a banquet of him? shall they part him among the merchants? 7 Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears? 8 Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more. 9 Behold, the hope of him is in vain: shall not [one] be cast down even at the sight of him? 10 None [is so] fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me? 11 Who hath prevented me, that I should repay [him? whatsoever is] under the whole heaven is mine. 12 I will not conceal his parts, nor his power, nor his comely proportion. 13 Who can discover the face of his garment? [or] who can come [to him] with his double bridle? 14 Who can open the doors of his face? his teeth [are] terrible round about. 15 [His] scales [are his] pride, shut up together [as with] a close seal. 16 One is so near to another, that no air can come between them. 17 They are joined one to another, they stick together, that they cannot be sundered. 18 By his neesings a light doth shine, and his eyes [are] like the eyelids of the morning. 19 Out of his mouth go burning lamps, [and] sparks of fire leap out. 20 Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as [out] of a seething pot or caldron. 21 His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth. 22 In his neck remaineth strength, and sorrow is turned into joy before him. 23 The flakes of his flesh are joined together: they are firm in themselves; they cannot be moved. 24 His heart is as firm as a stone; yea, as hard as a piece of the nether [millstone]. 25 When he raiseth up himself, the mighty are afraid: by reason of breakings they purify themselves. 26 The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold: the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon. 27 He esteemeth iron as straw, [and] brass as rotten wood. 28 The arrow cannot make him flee: slingstones are turned with him into stubble. 29 Darts are counted as stubble: he laugheth at the shaking of a spear. 30 Sharp stones [are] under him: he spreadeth sharp pointed things upon the mire. 31 He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment. 32 He maketh a path to shine after him; [one] would think the deep [to be] hoary. 33 Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear. 34 He beholdeth all high [things]: he [is] a king over all the children of pride. CHAPTER 42 1 Then Job answered the LORD, and said, 2 I know that thou canst do every [thing], and [that] no thought can be withholden from thee. 3 Who [is] he that hideth counsel without knowledge? therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not. 4 Hear, I beseech thee, and I will speak: I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me. 5 I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. 6 Wherefore I abhor [myself], and repent in dust and ashes. 7 ? And it was [so], that after the LORD had spoken these words unto Job, the LORD said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me [the thing that is] right, as my servant Job [hath]. 8 Therefore take unto you now seven bullocks and seven rams, and go to my servant Job, and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering; and my servant Job shall pray for you: for him will I accept: lest I deal with you [after your] folly, in that ye have not spoken of me [the thing which is] right, like my servant Job. 9 So Eliphaz the Temanite and Bildad the Shuhite [and] Zophar the Naamathite went, and did according as the LORD commanded them: the LORD also accepted Job. 10 And the LORD turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his friends: also the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before. 11 Then came there unto him all his brethren, and all his sisters, and all they that had been of his acquaintance before, and did eat bread with him in his house: and they bemoaned him, and comforted him over all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him: every man also gave him a piece of money, and every one an earring of gold. 12 So the LORD blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning: for he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses. 13 He had also seven sons and three daughters. 14 And he called the name of the first, Jemima; and the name of the second, Kezia; and the name of the third, Keren-happuch. 15 And in all the land were no women found [so] fair as the daughters of Job: and their father gave them inheritance among their brethren. 16 After this lived Job an hundred and forty years, and saw his sons, and his sons' sons, [even] four generations. 17 So Job died, [being] old and full of days. -------------------- "Not One Jote or One Title.." -- A Plea for Original KJV Spelling http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/bookman1.htm by Sir JOHN BOOKMAN [a devout "KJV-Only Bible Believer"] Just days ago, I realized we have not gone far enough in insisting that the Bible be preserved unchanged "in the form God intended for us to have." Of course, I speak of the infallible, inerrant, verbally-inspired and unalterably preserved English Bible, the Authorized Version (AV 1611), "the only Bible God uses -- and Satan hates!" Sure, there are lots of zealous defenders who have shielded the KJV from the corruptions of such heinous "translations" as the NIV, the NASB, and that most sinister NKJV, and have kept us from returning to the now completely unnecessary, "original" Hebrew and Greek. But while they kept their watch on one front, the Enemy has come in unawares by another route and sown seeds of corruption that have, I fear, already yielded a corrupt harvest. What am I getting at ? Simply this -- we have insisted on the verbal inspiration of the English, that is, that the very English words were divinely chosen and given to the Learned Men [KJV Translators]. But simply insisting on the perfecting of the English words and preserving the words is not enough. A careful consideration of the true intent and meaning of the words of Matthew 5:18 is necessary -- "Till heuven and earth passe, one iote or one title, shall in no wise passe from the law, till all be fulfilled." [I have made no mistake in my spelling, as I shall shortly explain.] Notice how Jesus insisted on the verbal inspiration, not just of the words, but also of the very letters of the words of Scripture. And since this verse is a specific promise of the preservation of Scripture in our infallible English Bible, we must insist on following, not just the original KJV words but also their very spelling. What other meaning can we draw out of the words "one iote or one title?" Every letter -- the very spelling -- is certainly inspired, and to alter the spelling of a single word, to alter even a single letter in a single word, is to deny and reject the inspiration of the AV 1611. If God had wanted us to spell the words in the AV 1611 differently in today's revised KJV, He would have given them to us in that form originally! Modern spelling is as hideous and hateful a thing as modern translations. It's New Age corruption, pure and simple. No one was ever authorized to corrupt, to "modernize" the infallible original spelling. There are eight spelling corruptions in John 3:16 alone!! I'm sure some "liberal" apostate will say, "What difference does spelling make?" Argue it out with Jesus brother! Didn't He say that inspiration of the words included the very spelling, every iote, not just the words? Will you reject the teaching of Matthew 5:18 of letter/spelling inspiration of our preserved AV 1611? To stop at "word inspiration" and not insist on spelling inspiration is to be second cousin to mere "thought inspiration." It is creeping apostasy, through and through. Next someone will deny the inspiration of the chapter-and-verse numberings in the AV 1611. Where will it stop? And I think we must recognize that Jesus' infallible English word was "title" and not the now-corrupted "tittle." A tittle is part of the ornamentation of a Hebrew letter [at least that's what I've heard at Fellowship meetings, so I have assurance that it's right]. But a "title" is something else. I have complete confidence that this promise of Jesus was a specific reference to the preservation of the chapter and page headings, the titles found in the original AV 1611. Sadly, those infallible titles, attached by the Learned Men under divine inspiration at the top of each page and at the beginning of each chapter have been removed from our modern editions. Without them, we cannot claim that we have a perfectly preserved Bible, and by allowing them to be removed, we have called God a liar, and denied that He is able to preserve the inspired English Bible He has given us. It is not secret that none of the commonly used English Bibles published in our day have the original AV 1611 spelling, or punctuation (that, too, is part of our directly inspired, infallible English Bible) or titles of which Jesus spoke, so in reality, these Bibles, even though they say "King James Version" or "Authorized Version" are really not Bibles at all. Only the recent Thomas Nelson Publishers reprint of the original 1611 AV is a real Bible; all the other KJV's are sinister corruptions. And there is growing upon me the deep conviction, as deep as anything I've written in this article, that no English-speaking person can be saved if he was not saved by an original, unaltered AV 1611, with original spelling, original punctuation, and original chapter and page titles. This simply means that anyone who thought he was "saved" by reading a [3]Revised "KJV" [Oxford, Cambridge, old Scofield, etc.], or by hearing a sermon from such a "Bible," or by reading a Gospel tract that quoted the words in a revised spelling form, even if it was labelled "KJV," is not really saved, has never been saved, and never will be saved until he gets a true, fully-preserved AV 1611. That means that virtually all those who thought they were saved -- preachers, deacons and all -- will have to go back and get truly saved through a real AV 1611, then get rebaptized. Verbal inspiration of the English requires inspiration of the very spelling as well. Anything less is rank modernism. I will confess to one further worry -- original type-style. The real AV 1611 was printed in what printers call "black letter," a very ornate type-style much like Gothic script, which is still used many times for the banner at the top of newspapers. This original type-style was subtly replaced with Roman type sometime in the 18th century. Note that name -- Roman. I fear that once again, the Jesuits have conspired to corrupt the pure word in English. They have taken away the original Gothic [and as everyone knows, the Gothic Bible used the Textus Receptus for its foundation which proves with certainty that the Gothic was the correct script for a real Bible], and have substituted the corrupt Roman script. In a real sense, even the KJV has thus become a "Roman" Bible, since its modern editions use Roman script and not the original black letter. As further proof that Roman type is a corruption, notice that all these apostate Bibles -- the ERV, ASV, NASB, NIV, NKJV, and the rest, have always been printed in Roman type. That's proof enough to me that any Bible in Roman type is no "Bible" at all, and that only a Bible with the original script, the black letter given to us in the form we should have it by the [4]Learned Men, is a true Bible. Perhaps even those "saved" by the true original spelling KJV are not saved at all, and must locate a black-letter edition. The Roman script Thomas Nelson reprint may not be enough [it's just like those Bible corrupters at Thomas Nelson to pass off a "Roman script KJV" as though it were a real Bible!]. Fortunately for me, my brother has a facsimile in the original black-letter of the AV 1611, and I'm secure since I've studied out of it several times. It is a desperate situation! The shortage of black-letter, original-spelling AV 1611 Bibles is severe! There is truly a famine of the truly preserved word of God in the land. And all our efforts at preaching, teaching, Bible study, and soul winning are completely futile until we return to the real, unaltered, perfectly preserved bonafied AV 1611! Perhaps the best thing to do for the present is to send off and buy one of those pages from an "[5]original KJV," and if you can get a page that has a salvation verse, or part of the "Romans road," perhaps there will be enough of the Gospel in the true preserved English to rescue your soul. As a service to you readers, so that you can be saved through a real AV 1611, I quote John 3:16 below -- unfortunately, I have no capacity to reproduce the original black-letter script, so even believing the un-revised spelling may not be enough, but we can hope for the best -- "For God so loued ye world, that he gaue his only begotten Sonne: that whosoeur beleeueth in him, should not perish, but haue euerlasting life." written by Doug Kutilek former co-editor of Baptist Biblical Heritage published in THE PILGRIM Magazine (Issue #19, Vol 6, No. 1, Summer 1995) ------------------ Wikipedia: Theodicy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy Theodicy is a branch of [3]theology that studies how the existence of a [4]good or benevolent [5]God is reconciled with the existence of [6]evil. An attempt to reconcile the co-existence of evil and God is sometimes called "a theodicy". See the article on [7]the problem of evil for examples. Contents [8]1 Origin of the term [9]2 The problem of evil [10]3 The nature of God [11]4 Examples of theodicy [12]5 Analysis of these solutions [13]5.1 The free will theodicy [14]5.2 The Calvinistic theodicy [15]5.3 Relativity of goodness -- evil is not absolute [16]5.4 Human nature [17]5.5 God is not omnipotent or omniscient [18]5.6 Contemporary philosophy of religion [19]5.7 Holocaust theology [20]5.8 Hindu answers to the problem of evil [21]6 Against theodicy [22]7 Evidential arguments from evil [23]8 External links [[24]edit] Origin of the term The term theodicy comes from the Greek th?os (meaning "god") and dik? (meaning "right" or "just"), meaning literally "the justice of God". The term was coined in [25]1710 by the [26]German [27]philosopher [28]Gottfried Leibniz in a work entitled Essais de Th?odic?e sur la bont? de Dieu, la libert? de l'homme et l'origine du mal. The purpose of the essay was to show that the evil in the world does not conflict with the goodness of God, that, indeed, notwithstanding its many evils, the world is the best of all possible worlds (see [29]Panglossianism.) [[30]edit] The problem of evil The problem of evil has from earliest times engrossed the attention of [31]Western philosophers. In his Dictionnaire historique et critique, the well-known [32]sceptic [33]Pierre Bayle denied the goodness and omnipotence of God on account of the sufferings experienced in this earthly life. The Th?odic?e of Leibniz was directed mainly against Bayle. Imitating the example of Leibniz, other philosophers also called their treatises on the problem of evil theodicies. In a thorough treatment of the question, the proofs both of the existence and of the attributes of God could not be disregarded, and the knowledge of God was gradually brought within the domain of theodicy, and theodicy came to be synonymous with natural theology (theologia naturalis) that is, the department of [34]metaphysics which presents the positive proofs for the existence and attributes of God and solves the opposing difficulties. Theodicy, therefore, may be defined as an attempt to explain the nature of God through the exercise of [35]reason alone. This is in juxtaposition to theology, which attempts to explain the nature of God using [36]supernatural [37]revelation and [38]faith. Some have argued that the predetermined goal of theodicy (that of justifying the existence of God with the existence of evil) tarnishes any aspirations it might have to be a serious philosophical discipline, because an intellectual pursuit having a predefined goal and preassumed conclusions cannot be deemed in any reasonable way to be methodical, scientific, or rational. Would we respect an inquiry whose goal is not to find out the truth, but to prove by any means possible that a particular thing reasonably doubted (Bayle and all who follow him) is true? Would we accept similarly biased "analyses" from Flat Earth proponents, holocaust revisionists, etc.? Others argue that theodicy, like all of science and reason, begins with a hypothesis, and then tests the hypothesis to see if the hypothesis can be reconciled with experience and reason. They assert that just as the existence of God may be reasonably doubted, it may also be reasonably believed, because the existence or non-existence of God is, by its very nature, beyond the realm of observable and verifiable phenomena with which science concerns itself. Therefore, since it is reasonable to believe that God exists, theodicy is a reasonable attempt to reconcile the hypothesized existence of God with the perceived existence of evil. While theodicy cannot prove the existence of God, neither can [39]philosophical naturalism disprove the existence of God. Theodicy, however, can make belief in God reasonable, by showing that the existence of God is not necessarily incompatible with the existence of evil. [[40]edit] The nature of God Theodicy investigates the question of to God's nature and attributes. The latter are in part absolute (quiescentia) and in part relative (operativa). In the first class belong traits such as infinity, immutability, omnipresence, and eternity; to the second class the knowledge, volition, and action of God. The action of God includes the creation, maintenance, and government of the world, the co-operation of God with the activity of the creature, and the working of miracles. While many grant that all our cognition of God is incomplete, this branch of theodicy attempts to explain those traits of God which we have some understanding of. It includes, for instance, the classical problem of how God can be infinitely good and yet allow evil to occur. * [41]Calvinism asserts that all events are part of God's plan, and therefore, though they may appear to be evil to us, God intends them for a higher purpose that only he knows, and they are not evil in God's eyes. * [42]Open Theism asserts that although there is a basis for belief in God, there is no basis for belief in God's omnipotence, omniscience, or omnibenevolence; and that although God is the most powerful, most loving, and most knowing, he is not infinite. Evil therefore exists really, tangibly, and in direct conflict with God's will. * [43]Maltheism asserts that the "problem of evil" is not a problem at all--the initial question has a simple answer, there is no way that a benevolent omnipotent God would allow evil in the world. Therefore, they reason, God is either not benevolent or not omnipotent. * "modified Dualism", since the powers of good and evil are unequal, and the evil power is merely tolerated by the good power, who turns all the acts of the evil power into eventual good. Classical Christianity, i.e, from the Apostolic Fathers to Augustine, has been characterized as "modified Dualism". Sts. [44]Augustine and [45]Basil the Great both explicitly mention this idea. St. [46]John of Damascus proposed that God deliberately leaves some events "in our hands". In early modern times (1714) a modified Dualism was advocated by [47]St. John (Maximovitch) of Tobolsk. [[48]edit] Examples of theodicy Resolutions to the problem of evil generally entail one of the following: * What humans consider evil or suffering is an illusion or unimportant. + Events thought to be evil are not really so (such as deaths by natural disaster). * A perfect God is not only good but also evil, since perfection implies no lacking, including not lacking that which is evil. A lacking of evil would imply that there is something external to his all-encompassing perfection. This is related to [49]monistic philosophies such as [50]advaita, or [51]pantheism. * Evil is the consequence of God permitting humans to have [52]free will, or God may intend evil and suffering as a test for humanity. Without the possibility to choose to do good or evil acts humanity would be nothing but [53]robots. * Evil is the consequence, not cause, of people not observing God's revealed will. Universal reciprocated love would solve most of the problems that lead to the evils discussed here. * God's ultimate purpose is to glorify Himself (which, by definition, He alone is infinitely entitled to, without vanity). He allows evil to exist so that we will appreciate goodness all the more, in the same way that the blind man healed by Jesus appreciated his sight more so than those around him who had never experienced blindness. * God's divine plan is good. What we see as evil is not really evil; rather, it is part of a divine design that is actually good. Our limitations prevent us from seeing the big picture. * God created perfect angels and perfect humans with a free will. Some of his creations chose independence and lost their perfection: they began to sin, which resulted in evil doing and death. For a while God will allow this to continue, so that it can be proven that his creations can not be happy while independent from God because this was the challenge which caused the rebellion in the first place. In due time God will restore the people who choose to depend on God to perfection and so bring an end to sin and with it an end to evil. * God is a righteous judge; people get what they deserve. If someone suffers, that is because they committed a sin that merits such suffering. (This is also known as the [54]just world hypothesis). * Suffering is educational. It makes us better people. * Evil is one way that God tests humanity, to see if we are worthy of His grace. * Evil and pain exist in this world only. This world is only a prelude to the [55]afterlife, where no pain will exist. The scales of justice are balanced in the afterlife. * Absolute evil is not actually real. Rather, it is only a condition of not enough goodness. (See also mention of William Hatcher's explanation.) + Evil is relative to good; neither good nor evil could exist without both existing simultaneously. * [56]Karma: All good is balanced by evil, and it is only when we achieve proper balance that our [57]reincarnation ends. This explains why an infant may be born into misery, due to experiences they will have later in that life, or in previous or later lives. * One of the conflicting assumptions is wrong: Drop either the assumption that God is omniscient, or omnipotent, or perfectly good. See the [58]entry on the subject of God and omnipotence for more details on this point. * Religions such as [59]Gnosticism and [60]Manichaeism, and even some Christian groups, dispense with the issue by embracing various forms of [61]dualism, in which God is opposed by an evil counterpart, and is therefore not omnipotent. * [62]Maltheists go even further than the Gnostics, in a sense, by saying that God simply is evil himself. To them, the problem of evil is not a problem at all, and is neatly resolved by acknowledging that an omnipotent benevolent God would not create a world in which there was evil, concluding that God, assuming he exists, is either not omnipotent, not benevolent, or perhaps both. (They frequently add that if God is not omnipotent but claims that he is, he is thus lying, and consequently is also justifiably deemed evil in nature.) * Most [63]atheists believe that statements about God are meaningless. Some atheists believe that the problem of evil can be used to prove that God does not exist by the method of [64]reductio ad absurdum. However, as maltheists point out, this method does not prove that God does not exist, but rather that if he does exist he is not omnipotent or benevolent, as he and his followers might claim him to be. [[65]edit] Analysis of these solutions The following are detailed analyses of the above stated solutions. [[66]edit] The free will theodicy Assume that both God and Man possess ultimate [67]free will. Why should free will lead to evil? The traditional answer is that humans are corrupt at heart, and they consequently choose to harm their fellows, but that would assume a will that is evil rather than free. It is said to be true that, in order to be free, we must do evil, for God is traditionally said to be both free and morally perfect. Rather, as a matter of contingent fact, humans happen to choose evil by their exercise of freedom. And if God were to 'get involved' and start influencing human actions for the better, then the actions wouldn't be free any longer. Human freedom means that God cannot guarantee human perfection. (See [68]incompatible-properties arguments). Why should it be better for God to respect human freedom? What's so great about free will? The response is that free will is what makes us valuable moral agents, and that, if God were to deny us our freedom, human society would be like an assemblage of robots. Perhaps there would be some value in such a world, but it is said to be nothing compared to the free moral agency possessed by God and actual humans. All the cruelty that we humans freely perform is indeed regrettable, but it is a small price to pay for freedom. No matter how successful this response, it can only explain evil caused by human free will. It does not explain any catastrophic horror that has nothing to do with human choices. Think of earthquakes, floods, and disease--so-called 'natural evil' or 'acts of God'. We cannot confront a paralyzed, demented, and blind [69]Tay-Sachs child and his despondent parents and then chalk up the entire wretched scenario to free will. No one chose it. Healing that child wouldn't tread on anyone's freedom. At its best, the value of free will is relevant to, and can only excuse God for, a mere portion of the evil we find. Whether of not we call that 'evil', we must stick with the evil that we humans freely create--so-called 'moral evil'. But there is another, similar problem. Some instances of moral evil already involve violations of free will--e.g., rape. For God to step in and deny the violator his freedom would also be to protect the victim's freedom. In such cases, it all comes down to whose free will is more valuable--which instance of coercion would be worse? And it is morally implausible that the best thing to do is to respect a rapist's freedom to rape unhindered rather than protecting the victim's freedom. So, for a large category of moral evil--all moral evil involving coercion--it's automatically implausible that the value of free will can justify God's inaction. We must then narrow the domain of admissible evil yet again. With the candidate evil suitably restricted, we can ask: Is God off the hook? Many say no. Some deny the existence of free will, and so can dismiss the entire proposal as mere fiction. [70]Compatibilists sometimes attack the essential premise that God cannot influence our choices without thereby cancelling our freedom. After all, compatibilists believe that [71]determinism is consistent with human freedom. And if determinism can allow for freedom, perhaps so can appropriate divine meddling with our decisions. The upshot of these challenges is that, to absolve God, we need a reason to think that he really couldn't influence our choices without cancelling our freedom. The customary theistic appeal is to a libertarian conception of free will, but such a conception is under heavy fire from its rivals. Another challenge focuses on different ways to interfere with freedom. One way is to 'jump in' and take control of the agent, dictating its every movement and thought. This is the kind of [72]coercion we envision in mad scientist stories. But it might also be the kind of coercion that motivates our above intuition that if God got involved, we'd all be 'robots'. We should remember that there are other, softer kinds of coercion. Look to policemen and jailers. They don't take control of an agent's decisions. They just threaten the agent with physical force and restraint, and carry out their threats if necessary. Policemen and jailers restrict our freedom, but it is a restriction we're willing to accept, for our own protection and safety. Now, return to God. If he were to get involved as a Divine Policeman, making threats and enforcing them, then would we be 'robots'? Seemingly not. Instead, we'd be citizens of a divine nation-state, and a very safe and reliable nation-state at that. But then the moral claim is dubious--it's no longer clear that God should hold back. Taking total control of our decisions would be wrong, but laying down the law might be right. So why hasn't God done it? Several further challenges attack the idea that evil-eliminating divine interventions must cancel human freedom. These challenges suggest different ways for God to eliminate evil, all the while leaving our free will untouched--"innocent interventions". One proposal is for God to fortify humans as to render us less vulnerable to the sins of our fellows. We could be bullet-proof, invulnerable to poison, etc. That way, humans would retain the capacity for evil choices and activities; it's just that such evil behavior would be harmless to the 'victims' and futile for the evildoers. Another proposal is that God allow sinful acts, but stop their evil consequences. So if I fire a rifle at your head, God allows me to make the decision, but then makes the trigger stick, or the rifle misfire, or the bullet pop out of existence. Such interventions would, happily, divorce evil choices from the subsequent suffering. A common objection to this solution would be that without observing the evil consequences of our actions we would not truly be freely choosing between good and evil. In other words it is not only important for us to have freedom to choose our actions but also to have freedom to choose evil actions. Presumably, a world where guns only fired when aimed at just targets would not truly present us the option to choose evil since it would be apparent that no harm comes from our actions. Of course this requires a justification of why it is good or necessary to have situations which tempt us to evil. However, it might be claimed that the supposed conflict between the freedom to choose evil and suffering is merely a figment of our limited human imaginations. Presumably an omnipotent god could isolate each of us in a 'virtual' world where others appear to suffer but in reality are soulless, experience free imitations of life, i.e., each soul could inhabit its own matrix filled entirely with programs imitating human suffering but not actually experiencing it. Admittedly, nothing prevents one from believing this is actually the case and may present a way out of the dilemma for those who are merely committed to an omnipotent, omnibenevolent god. However, a theology which rests on the delibrate deception that our acts can do evil orchestrated by the supreme being is not a comfortable match for any religion dependent on revelation and hence implicitly the veracity of god. [[73]edit] The Calvinistic theodicy [74]John Calvin and other [75]Reformed Christians have held to a form of theological [76]determinism and [77]compatibilism, and thus have denied that man possesses [78]free will in the [79]libertarian sense. So for them the problem of evil could not find resolution in appeals to such freedom. For them, the issue had to be resolved within the very nature of the [80]compatibilistic relationship itself. For God to hold man morally accountable, yet to [81]predestine everything that man thinks or does, something other than the "freedom of contraries" must ground this accountability. Calvinists believe that this something is the capacity of man to choose and act according to his moral state of being, the "freedom of choice". But man's moral state of being is presently subject to sin, and this fact, itself, is part of the problem of evil. So one must inquire as to the cause of man's subjection to sin. Reformed theology places the cause of this condition in the first man, [82]Adam, whom they believe to be the legal representative of the entire human race. This doctrine, called [83]Federal Headship, is also present in the doctrine of [84]Substitutionary Atonement (and its corollary, [85]Justification by Faith). As a representative of the race, when he [86]sinned against God by eating the [87]forbidden fruit, the entire race fell under the curse of God with him. Various explanations of the exact relationship of Adam to his posterity have been offered, but what concerns us at present is only the doctrine of Adam's legal representation of the race. Here another question presents itself. How could Adam be held accountable (and with him the entire human race), if he was not free to do other than he did do--if God really intended for him to do exactly as he did? With this question we come to the heart of the Reformed Theodicy. The main points are, firstly, that no one has ever been held accountable for what they could have thought or done, only for what they have thought or done, and for their purposes in thinking or doing it; and, secondly, that though both Adam and God intended that evil should come about, their purposes were distinct, God's being ultimately good, Adam's being ultimately evil. The Reformed Theodicy boils down to the distinction of purposes between the primary agent (God) and the secondary agents (humans). While it is true that God intends to bring about evil, God's purpose is not, of itself, evil (cf. [88]Gen. 50:20). This idea can be expressed by analogy: Picture a man holding down a child while other men stick pieces of metal into the child's eye, all the while the child is screaming in pain, crying out for them to stop. On the surface it seems like a horrible, cruel thing these men are doing to the child. But if we add the information that the child is bleeding to death from the nasal cavity, that there is no time for anesthetic, that the man holding him down is his loving father, and that the men sticking the metal into his eye are doctors trying to save his life, then the problem of evil disappears. The evil doesn't disappear, it is still there (just ask the child!), but the problem of evil is no longer present, because the intention is good. In other words not all actions which bring about suffering or even evil acts are necessarily evil themselves. There is no problem of evil in the example with the father, and arguably no evil in the sense of moral failing, because his actions serve a greater good. Similarly one can serve a greater good even if you know that your choice will bring about some immoral action. In either case the Calvinist must still claim that God's choice to create a flawed man who would engage in sin or evil does serve a greater good. Thus it seems this position allows us no choice but to accept that some mysterious good is served by having a world filled with imperfect and sometimes evil men as opposed to a world where only those souls who will choose to be good and holy are born. Opponents of this position have argued that it endorses an "ends justifies the means" system of ethics, but this charge is suspect since Reformed Christians claim that the means, of themselves, are truly evil, and therefore subject to punishment, not justified by the ends to which God intends them. Proponents have argued that the Free Will Theodicy is actually, in principle, no different from the Reformed Theodicy, it simply places the bare possession of [89]libertarian [90]free will as the good that God intented to bring about by the existence of evil, and that the Reformed Theodicy does more justice to the Biblical account of God and man. [[91]edit] Relativity of goodness -- evil is not absolute A less well known approach has been that of the mathematical logician [92]William Hatcher (http://www.onecountry.org/e144/e14416as_Minimalism_Review.htm ). He has written about the problem of evil from a relational logic point of view. Hatcher has argued that the problem may be resolved with a minimum of theological assumptions. This is quite appealing because it does not tie the traditional problem to any particular brand of theology. It is part of an approach to traditional philosophical problems that Hatcher calls Minimalism (not to be confused with the use of the same term in art and pop culture). Briefly, Hatcher uses relational logic to show that very simple models of moral value that include a minimalist concept of "God" cannot be consistent with the premise of evil as an absolute, whereas goodness as an absolute is entirely consistent with the other postulates concerning moral value. In Hatcher's view one can only validly talk about an act A being "less good" than an act B, one cannot logically commit to saying that A is absolutely evil, unles one is prepared to abandon other more reasonable principles. [[93]edit] Human nature Another, more subtle proposal is for God to alter human nature for the better. Now, talk of improving our nature immediately strikes us as coercive -- surely, it would rob us our freedom as moral beings! But remember that we already have a nature, a bundle of tendencies that influences our choices. Now, the most ardent determinist must grant that human nature alone does not determine our choices. But the most ardent libertarian must in turn grant that our choices are significantly influenced by our natures. It is easier for a sociopath to kill a child than it is for the rest of us. It is easier for us to send money to help our children than to help complete strangers. This is true, even if ultimately we each have final say on our decisions. Now note that this human nature is flawed. We are disposed to be cruel and callous in many ways. The world might be a better place if humans shared a more virtuous and generous nature. But would it violate our freedom for God to have given us a better nature? Perhaps not. We might choose a kinder nature, if, for example, virtue came in pill form. We might wish it were easier for us to do good. This suggests that an improved nature may be in accordance with our free will, and not contrary to it. Moreover, if God exists, then surely he had a large hand in crafting human nature. As long as he's giving us some nature or another, why not shoot for a virtuous nature? If it's wrong to make humans virtuous, then why should it be less wrong to make humans corrupt? One salient theistic reply is that our corrupt nature is due to the [94]Original Sin of the first human couple. Their free choice changed us for the worse, and for God to change us for the better would be to disrespect their free choice. But this reply raises too many troubling issues of its own. First, the wholesale corruption of mankind was, for Adam and Eve anyway, an unforeseeable consequence of Original Sin; one can no more allege that they truly chose human corruption than that [95]Gavrilo Princip truly chose to plunge Europe into war. Big mistakes don't count as freely chosen outcomes. Second, even if Adam and Eve really did choose human nature for the rest of us, why should their choice count for so much? Don't the rest of us have a say? Invoking Original Sin only makes God look more and more morally confused. [[96]edit] God is not omnipotent or omniscient The problem of evil only exists when one simultaneously holds that God is omniscient (all knowing), omnipotent (all powerful) and omnibenevolent (all good). The problem of evil does not exist if one gives up any of these three beliefs. Some schools of the [97]Kabbalah (esoteric Jewish mysticism) argue that the creation of the universe required a self-limitation on the part of God, and that evil is a consequence of God's self-imposed exile from the universe He created. In some readings of this theology, God has deliberately created an imperfect world. The question then arises as to why God would create such a world, and the standard response is to maximize human freedom and free will. Other readings of the same Kabbalistic texts one can hold that this is the best world that God could possibly create, and that God is not omnipotent. Given this reading, the problem of evil does not exist. In [98]Unitarian Universalism, in much of [99]Conservative and [100]Reform Judaism, and in some liberal wings of [101]Protestant Christianity, God is said to be capable of acting in the world only through persuasion, and not by coercion. God makes Himself manifest in the world through inspiration and the [102]creation of [103]possibility, and not by [104]miracles or violations of [105]the laws of nature. God relinquishes his omnipotence, in order that humanity might have absolute [106]free will. In this view, the problem of evil does not exist. In Judaism the most popular works espousing this point are from Rabbi [107]Harold Kushner; many of his works have also become popular with Christians as well. The idea of a non-omnipotent God was developed by philosophers [108]Alfred North Whitehead and [109]Charles Hartshorne, in the theological system known as [110]process theology. In the [111]Evangelical movement of the [112]Protestant churches, [113]Open Theism (also called Free Will Theism), similarly asserts that God acts only cooperatively, and lacks [114]omniscience concerning the future. [[115]edit] Contemporary philosophy of religion [116]J. L. Mackie, in his now classic article "Evil and Omnipotence", argued that human freedom is consistent with human perfection, and that God should have opted for both. Mackie asserts that human misconduct is a contingent matter--we can choose to do good or evil, with both alternatives being possible. He then asks us to imagine a world in which everyone always chooses good and never chooses evil--a virtuous and sinless world. Finally, he notes that God could have chosen to bring about any possible world, from the one that is actual, to a world in which people choose more wickedly, to the good world Mackie just described. So why not go with the good world? The only reply can be that, in choosing to bring about that world, God would thereby deny humans their freedom. But that can't be true. For if it were, then God would have denied us our freedom by bringing about the actual world. Bringing about a world in which people make choices is not freedom-cancelling, and so God should have brought about a world in which people make better choices. This argument is the seed of contemporary discussions of the [117]logical argument from evil, which aims to show that theism and evil are logically incompatible. [118]Alvin Plantinga, in a response that has also achieved 'classic' status, rebuts Mackie. Plantinga's celebrated "free will defense" argues that evil is consistent with God's existence, because there are some possible worlds that God cannot bring about. This seems curious enough, if we assume that God is omnipotent. Shouldn't he be able to bring about any possible world he wants? But Plantinga reminds us that there are always trivial limits on omnipotence--God can't make 2 + 2 = 5 or create a married bachelor. Plantinga's trick is stretching these trivial limits to very non-trivial results. Step one: Plantinga proposes that there are logical truths--so-called "counterfactuals of freedom"--about our free choices in various possible situations, with one choice dictated for every situation. On Plantinga's example, where S is a situation in which Curley is free to take or refuse a bribe, it is either true that "If Curley were to be free in S, he would take the bribe" or "If Curley were to be free in S, he would refuse the bribe" (assume that exactly one can be true). These truths about what we would freely do in possible situations help make us what we are, and are timelessly and necessarily true--and so, crucially, out of God's hands. Consequently, if the first proposition is true (and Curley would take the bribe), then God cannot bring about the possible world in which Curley refuses the bribe. God can only bring about S and sadly watch Curley's freely chosen venality manifest itself, as timelessly reported by that unchangeable counterfactual of freedom. Step two: Plantinga argues for the possibility of a person who will sin at least once, no matter what situation God puts him in. Such a person suffers from so-called "transworld depravity". Though he can choose to do good in each situation, though it is possible that he does good in each situation, it is nevertheless true that he will choose to sin, a sad fact reported by his counterfactuals of freedom. And God can do nothing to bring about the sinless possible worlds--that's up to the sinner, who will, as a matter of fact, choose otherwise. We've arrived at the conclusion that perhaps even God cannot bring about Mackie's virtuous and sinless worlds. God may be omnipotent, but he can't change people's free decisions, and he can't change the fact that they will freely choose as they do. And if people will make nasty choices, then those possible worlds in which they choose good are beyond God's reach. Plantinga proposes that perhaps all persons suffer from transworld depravity, that perhaps the actual world, though not the best possible world, is the best one that God could bring about, if he is to respect the free choices of the creatures therein. Natural evil? Perhaps it's also the result of sinful actions--the actions of invisible, powerful moral agents like demons. And this scenario is one in which God's moral perfection is squared with having created a horrid world like our own. (Here another problem arises, related to God's claim (in many religions) that, after the end of the world, a paradise will be created where evil is defeated. The whole argument that God in his omnipotence could not create the "virtuous sinless world" described above seems to be contradicted by his own claim to plan to do this very thing! [119]Heaven is the promised paradise of infinite bounty that fully matches the criteria of this virtuous sinless world. If such a world is not possible, then God is lying about the promise of Heaven. If such a world is possible, and God plans to make one world that way, why wasn't our world also made this way?) One recent, friendly response to Plantinga is from [120]Daniel Howard-Snyder and [121]John O'Leary-Hawthorne. They claim that, to show the compatibility of theism and evil, Plantinga needs to support the possibility of his sketched scenario--it mustn't be reasonable to doubt its possibility. And they claim that the possibility of all persons being transworld depraved is unsupported. After all, there is another prima facie possibility, that all persons are in fact transworld sanctified (and so would do no wrong). Both 'possibilities' seem equally possible, and since they rule each other out, only one of them can be possible. Thus it is reasonable to doubt the possibility of either, and it is reasonable to doubt that Plantinga's scenario is possible; so it is reasonable to doubt that God really is consistent with evil. The two critics take to repairing Plantinga's argument, by replacing the "it is possible that" propositions with similar "for all we reasonably believe, it is possible that" propositions. The conclusion is then not that theism and evil are compatible, but that, for all we reasonably believe, theism and evil are compatible. The compatibility is not proven, but the incompatibility isn't reasonable, either. Mackie is still rebutted. Another, stronger challenge comes from [122]Richard Gale. In Plantinga's scenario, God's decisions cause human behavior and the psychological makeup whence that behavior stems; consequently, Gale maintains, human freedom gets cancelled by God's decisions. Ironically, then, Plantinga's "free will defense" story is a story without human freedom. Now, as Gale notes, Plantinga's God can't change peoples' counterfactuals of freedom; the truth of these propositions is up to the relevant people. But, by Plantinga, God does decide which possible persons get actualized, knowing full well their counterfactuals of freedom; it's up to God who gets to exist and then do their stuff. Moreover, God crafts his creatures' psychological makeup, which in turn exercises significant influence over their decisions. This is freedom-cancelling, even if our psychology doesn't determine our decisions, for it makes God like a mad scientist who implants a test subject with new dispositions and preferences to make her more agreeable. And to decide who gets instantiated is to be a sufficient cause of what decisions get made, even if the persons themselves are sufficient causes in their own right. The result is that Plantinga's God is in charge of too much, robbing humans of their freedom. Or so Gale avers. In his book [123]The Problem of Pain the literary critic and popular theologian [124]C. S. Lewis called pain "God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world". Yet another intriguing rebutal holds that there may not be any best possible worlds, i.e., given any possible world there is another possible world which is preferable. If we accept that our world is better than none we can't fault god for failing to create the best possible world, there is no such entity. As an analogy we might consider the following dilema: A magical genie appears and offers you the chance to improve the world, name any integer and the total world happiness (or whatever it is you think is good) will be increased by that amount. Clearly no matter what number you choose there was a better choice. If you choose to add n units of happiness n+1 would have been better. Yet surely you can't be said to be guilty of a moral fault for choosing some number. By analogy how can we say God is not omnibenevolent simply because he chose some world when no matter what choice he made a better one was availible. [[125]edit] Holocaust theology Main article: [126]Holocaust theology In light of the magnitude of evil seen in the [127]Holocaust, many people have re-examined the classical theological views on God's goodness and actions in the world. How can people still have any faith after the Holocaust? There is a separate entry which discusses the [128]theological responses that people have had in response to the Holocaust. [[129]edit] Hindu answers to the problem of evil * Hindu philosophers, especially those from the [130]Vedanta school have also attempted to craft solutions to the problem of evil. The whole notions of [131]karma and [132]reincarnation were possible explanations. [133]Shri Madhvacharya, with his beliefs of dualism, has crafted his own solutions to the problem of evil that persists in spite of an all-loving omnipotent supreme Being. [[134]edit] Against theodicy The late [135]Mennonite theologian, [136]John Howard Yoder, wrote an unfinished [137]essay (http://www.nd.edu/~theo/jhy/writings/philsystheo/THEODICY. htm) entitled "Trinity Versus Theodicy: Hebraic Realism And The Temptation To Judge God" (1996). Yoder argues that "if God be God" then theodicy is an [138]oxymoron and [139]idolatry. As is evident from the subtitle, Yoder is not opposed to attempts to reconcile the existence of a God with the existence of evil; rather, he is against a particular approach to the problem. He does not "deny that there are ways in which forms of discourse in the mode of theodicy may have a function, subject to the discipline of a wider setting." Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Yoder's life and work would realize that he was deeply concerned and engaged with [140]the problem of evil; specifically, the evil of [141]violence and [142]war and how we resist it. Yoder's "case [is] against garden variety 'theodicy' "--in particular, theodicy as a judgment or defense of God. Yoder asks: * a) Where do you get the criteria by which you evaluate God? Why are the criteria you use the right ones? * b) Why [do] you think you are qualified for the business of accrediting Gods? * c) If you think you are qualified for that business, how does the adjudication proceed? [W]hat are the lexical rules? Yoder's argument is against theodicy, strictly speaking. This is the narrow sense [143]Zachary Braiterman (http://www-hl.syr.edu/depts/religion/braiterman.html) mentions in [144](God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/6415.html) (1998). He [145]writes (http://pup.princeton.edu/chapters/s6415.html), "Theodicy is a familiar technical term, coined by the German philosopher [146]Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to mean 'the justification of God.' " In his book, Braiterman coins the term "antitheodicy" meaning "refusing to justify, explain, or accept" the relationship between "God (or some other form of ultimate reality), evil, and suffering." Braiterman uses the term "in order to account for a particular religious sensibility, based (in part) on fragments selectively culled from classical Jewish texts, that dominates post-Holocaust Jewish thought." Braiterman asserts, "Although it often borders on blasphemy, antitheodicy does not constitute atheism; it might even express stubborn love that human persons have for God. After all, the author of a genuine antitheodic statement must believe that an actual relationship subsists between God and evil in order to reject it; and they must love God in order to be offended by that relationship." (Though again, it must be recognized that there is a presumptive bent in this assertion: it is not God that such people would love in order to be thus offended, but rather good. The whole basis of theodicy, if it is to be regarded as a genuine intellectual pursuit and not a rationalizing source of pro-God cheerleading propaganda, is that God just might be distinguishable from good. As a discipline, theodicy by all means ought to logically demonstrate that there is such a distinction or there isn't, and to carefully explain why or why not. It is disappointing that historically it has done neither.) Two of the Jewish post-[147]Shoah thinkers that Braiterman cites as antitheodicists--[148]Emil Fackenheim and [149]Richard Rubinstein--are also cited by Yoder. Yoder describes their approach as "the Jewish complaint against God, dramatically updated (and philosophically unfolded) since Auschwitz ... The faithful under the pogrom proceed with their prayers, after denouncing JHWH/Adonai for what He has let happen." Yoder sees this as a valid form of discourse in the mode of theodicy but he claims it is "the opposite of theodicy." The conclusions of such so-called anti-theodicists can be summed up as follows: 1. The contradictions inherent in our universe preclude the possibility that an omnibenevolent God could exist. We can try to build towers of rationalization that "explain" the "real" reasons why bad things happen and assert vainly that our own perspective on what is good is unimportant, but these are not convincing arguments. Those who say plainly that, if God is omnipotent, then he cannot be deemed benevolent because of the evil present in the world, are thus correct. 2. With that in mind, a being or entity that fulfills the criteria established when asking "if God be God" cannot exist. 3. In conclusion, a being or entity claiming to have those characteristics is simply lying. 4. Assuming that lying is by definition not good, such an entity would not qualify as good. It seems we need to distinguish between two varieties of "antitheodicy": 1. one of which dismisses the very notion that humanity has any right to judge God (but not giving any reason for this assertion beyond "if God be God", which any freshman logic student recognizes as an act of assuming one's conclusion by declaring the nature of God as an a priori), 2. the other of which reaches a conclusion contrary to what the "pro-theodicists" desire to reach. Given that the nature of objective intellectual pursuit requires that those seeking answers must not have a desired conclusion already mapped out in advance, perhaps we need a new word to describe the objective discipline of determining God's associations (or lack thereof) with good. [[150]edit] Evidential arguments from evil Evidential arguments from evil seek to show that the existence of evil provides evidence for God's nonexistence, rather than implying the logical impossibility of God. Philosophers arguing from this point of view are less interested in whether the existence God is logically compatible or incompatible with the existence of evil, often thinking that the arguments about this are inconclusive, with some saying that such "logical arguments" are dead. They focus instead on whether evil provides evidence for or against the existence of God. Their line of argument is: the existence of God may be logically compatible with the existence of evil, but the logical possibility of his existence does not mean that we are justified in believing that He does in fact exist. For such a belief to be justified, evidence is needed, and in the balance of evidence for and against the existence of God, the facts about evil weigh heavily on the negative side of the scales. The classic proponent of this line of argument is William Rowe. [[151]edit] External links * [152]http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/ * [153]http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-evil/ References 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theology 4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God 6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_problem_of_evil 8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy#Origin_of_the_term 9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy#The_problem_of_evil 10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy#The_nature_of_God 11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy#Examples_of_theodicy 12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy#Analysis_of_these_solutions 13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy#The_free_will_theodicy 14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy#The_Calvinistic_theodicy 15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy#Relativity_of_goodness_.26mdash.3B _evil_is_not_absolute 16. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy#Human_nature 17. 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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics 35. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason 36. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernatural 37. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation 38. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith 39. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_naturalism 40. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodicy&action=edit§ion=3 41. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvinism 42. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Theism 43. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltheist 44. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine 45. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_the_Great 46. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Damascus 47. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John_%28Maximovitch%29_of_Tobolsk 48. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodicy&action=edit§ion=4 49. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monism 50. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita 51. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheism 52. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will 53. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot 54. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_world_hypothesis 55. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterlife 56. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma 57. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reincarnation 58. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnipotence 59. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism 60. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism 61. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism 62. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltheism 63. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism 64. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum 65. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodicy&action=edit§ion=5 66. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodicy&action=edit§ion=6 67. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will 68. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible-properties_arguments 69. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay-Sachs_disease 70. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism 71. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism 72. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coercion 73. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodicy&action=edit§ion=7 74. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Calvin 75. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvinism 76. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism 77. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism 78. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will 79. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism_%28philosophy%29 80. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism 81. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination 82. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam 83. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Federal_Headship&action=edit 84. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Substitutionary_Atonement&acti on=edit 85. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justification_by_Faith 86. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin 87. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_fruit 88. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis 89. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism_%28philosophy%29 90. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will 91. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodicy&action=edit§ion=8 92. http://www.onecountry.org/e144/e14416as_Minimalism_Review.htm 93. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodicy&action=edit§ion=9 94. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Sin 95. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavrilo_Princip 96. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodicy&action=edit§ion=1 0 97. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah 98. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Universalism 99. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Judaism 100. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Judaism 101. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism 102. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation 103. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possibility 104. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle 105. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics 106. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will 107. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Kushner 108. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead 109. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hartshorne 110. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_theology 111. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism 112. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant 113. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Theism 114. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omniscience 115. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodicy&action=edit§ion=1 1 116. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._L._Mackie 117. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_and_evidential_arguments_from_evil 118. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Plantinga 119. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven 120. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Daniel_Howard-Snyder&action=ed it 121. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_O%27Leary-Hawthorne&actio n=edit 122. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Gale 123. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Pain 124. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis 125. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodicy&action=edit§ion=1 2 126. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_theology 127. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust 128. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_theology 129. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodicy&action=edit§ion=1 3 130. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedanta 131. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma 132. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reincarnation 133. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shri_Madhvacharya 134. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodicy&action=edit§ion=1 4 135. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mennonite 136. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_H._Yoder 137. http://www.nd.edu/~theo/jhy/writings/philsystheo/THEODICY.htm 138. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxymoron 139. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idolatry 140. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_problem_of_evil 141. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence 142. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War 143. http://www-hl.syr.edu/depts/religion/braiterman.html 144. http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/6415.html 145. http://pup.princeton.edu/chapters/s6415.html 146. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Leibniz 147. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoah 148. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_theology#Emil_Fackenheim 149. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_theology#Richard_Rubinstein 150. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodicy&action=edit§ion=1 5 151. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodicy&action=edit§ion=1 6 152. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/ 153. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-evil/ --------------------- THE TRANSLATORS TO THE READER Preface to the King James Version 1611 THE BEST THINGS HAVE BEEN CALUMNIATED Zeal to promote the common good, whether it be by devising anything ourselves, or revising that which hath been laboured by others, deserveth certainly much respect and esteem, but yet findeth but cold entertainment in the world. It is welcomed with suspicion instead of love, and with emulation instead of thanks: and if there be any hole left for cavil to enter, (and cavil, if it do not find a hole, will make one) it is sure to be misconstrued, and in danger to be condemned. This will easily be granted by as many as know story, or have any experience. For, was there ever any-projected, that savoured any way of newness or renewing, but the same endured many a storm of gainsaying, or opposition? A man would think that Civility, wholesome Laws, learning and eloquence, Synods, and Church-maintenance, (that we speak of no more things of this kind) should be as safe as a Sanctuary, and out of shot, as they say, that no man would lift up the heel, no, nor dog move his tongue against the motioners of them. For by the first, we are distinguished from brute beasts lead with sensuality; By the second, we are bridled and restrained from outrageous behaviour, and from doing of injuries, whether by fraud or by violence; By the third, we are enabled to inform and reform others, by the light and feeling that we have attained unto ourselves; Briefly, by the fourth being brought together to a parley face to face, we sooner compose our differences than by writings which are endless; And lastly, that the Church be sufficiently provided for, is so agreeable to good reason and conscience, that those mothers are holden to be less cruel, that kill their children as soon as they are born, than those nursing fathers and mothers (wheresoever they be) that withdraw from them who hang upon their breasts (and upon whose breasts again themselves do hang to receive the Spiritual and sincere milk of the word) livelihood and support fit for their estates. Thus it is apparent, that these things which we speak of, are of most necessary use, and therefore, that none, either without absurdity can speak against them, or without note of wickedness can spurn against them. Yet for all that, the learned know that certain worthy men [Anacharsis with others] have been brought to untimely death for none other fault, but for seeking to reduce their Countrymen to god order and discipline; and that in some Commonwealths [e.g. Locri] it was made a capital crime, once to motion the making of a new Law for the abrogating of an old, though the same were most pernicious; And that certain [Cato the elder], which would be counted pillars of the State, and patterns of Virtue and Prudence, could not be brought for a long time to give way to good Letters and refined speech, but bare themselves as averse from them, as from rocks or boxes of poison; And fourthly, that he was no babe, but a great clerk [Gregory the Divine], that gave forth (and in writing to remain to posterity) in passion peradventure, but yet he gave forth, that he had not seen any profit to come by any Synod, or meeting of the Clergy, but rather the contrary; And lastly, against Church-maintenance and allowance, in such sort, as the Ambassadors and messengers of the great King of Kings should be furnished, it is not unknown what a fiction or fable (so it is esteemed, and for no better by the reporter himself [Nauclerus], though superstitious) was devised; Namely, that at such a time as the professors and teachers of Christianity in the Church of Rome, then a true Church, were liberally endowed, a voice forsooth was heard from heaven, saying: Now is poison poured down into the Church, etc. Thus not only as oft as we speak, as one saith, but also as oft as we do anything of note or consequence, we subject ourselves to everyone's censure, and happy is he that is least tossed upon tongues; for utterly to escape the snatch of them it is impossible. If any man conceit, that this is the lot and portion of the meaner sort only, and that Princes are privileged by their high estate, he is deceived. "As the sword devoureth as well one as the other," as it is in Samuel [2 Sam 11:25], nay as the great Commander charged his soldiers in a certain battle, to strike at no part of the enemy, but at the face; And as the King of Syria commanded his chief Captains to "fight neither with small nor great, save only against the King of Israel:" [1 Kings 22:31] so it is too true, that Envy striketh most spitefully at the fairest, and at the chiefest. David was a worthy Prince, and no man to be compared to him for his first deeds, and yet for as worthy as act as ever he did (even for bringing back the Ark of God in solemnity) he was scorned and scoffed at by his own wife [2 Sam 6:16]. Solomon was greater than David, though not in virtue, yet in power: and by his power and wisdom he built a Temple to the Lord, such a one as was the glory of the land of Israel, and the wonder of the whole world. But was that his magnificence liked of by all? We doubt it. Otherwise, why do they lay it in his son's dish, and call unto him for easing the burden, "Make", say they, "the grievous servitude of thy father, and his sore yoke, lighter?" [1 Kings 12:4] Belike he had charged them with some levies, and troubled them with some carriages; Hereupon they raise up a tragedy, and wish in their heart the Temple had never been built. So hard a thing it is to please all, even when we please God best, and do seek to approve ourselves to every ones conscience. If we will descend to later times, we shall find many the like examples of such kind, or rather unkind acceptance. The first Roman Emperor [C. Caesar. Plutarch] did never do a more pleasing deed to the learned, nor more profitable to posterity, for conserving the record of times in true supputation; than when he corrected the Calendar, and ordered the year according to the course of the Sun; and yet this was imputed to him for novelty, and arrogance, and procured to him great obloguy. So the first Christened Emperor [Constantine] (at the leastwise that openly professed the faith himself, and allowed others to do the like) for strengthening the Empire at his great charges, and providing for the Church, as he did, got for his labour the name Pupillus, as who would say, a wasteful Prince, that had need of a Guardian or overseer [Aurel. Victor]. So the best Christened Emperor [Theodosius], for the love that he bare unto peace, thereby to enrich both himself and his subjects, and because he did not see war but find it, was judged to be no man at arms [Zosimus], (though indeed he excelled in feats of chivalry, and showed so much when he was provoked) and condemned for giving himself to his ease, and to his pleasure. To be short, the most learned Emperor of former times [Justinian], (at the least, the greatest politician) what thanks had he for cutting off the superfluities of the laws, and digesting them into some order and method? This, that he had been blotted by some to be an Epitomist, that is, one that extinguishes worthy whole volumes, to bring his abridgments into request. This is the measure that hath been rendered to excellent Princes in former times, even, Cum bene facerent, male audire, For their good deeds to be evil spoken of. Neither is there any likelihood, that envy and malignity died, and were buried with the ancient. No, no, the reproof of Moses taketh hold of most ages; "You are risen up in your fathers' stead, and increase of sinful men." [Num 32:14] "What is that that hath been done? that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the Sun," saith the wiseman: [Ecc 1:9] and S. Stephen, "As your fathers did, so do you." [Acts 7:51] HIS MAJESTY'S CONSTANCY, NOTWITHSTANDING CULMINATION, FOR THE SURVEY OF THE ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS This, and more to this purpose, His Majesty that now reigneth (and long, and long may he reign, and his offspring forever, "Himself and children, and children's always) knew full well, according to the singular wisdom given unto him by God, and the rare learning and experience that he hath attained unto; namely that whosoever attempteth anything for the public (especially if it pertain to Religion, and to the opening and clearing of the word of God) the same setteth himself upon a stage to be gloated upon by every evil eye, yea, he casteth himself headlong upon pikes, to be gored by every sharp tongue. For he that medleth with men's Religion in any part, medleth with their custom, nay, with their freehold; and though they find no content in that which they have, yet they cannot abide to hear of altering. Notwithstanding his Royal heart was not daunted or discouraged for this that colour, but stood resolute, "as a statue immovable, and an anvil not easy to be beaten into plates," as one [Suidas] saith; he knew who had chosen him to be a Soldier, or rather a Captain, and being assured that the course which he intended made for the glory of God, and the building up of his Church, he would not suffer it to be broken off for whatsoever speeches or practices. It doth certainly belong unto Kings, yea, it doth specially belong unto them, to have care of Religion, yea, it doth specially belong unto them, to have care of Religion, yea, to know it aright, yea, to profess it zealously, yea to promote it to the uttermost of their power. This is their glory before all nations which mean well, and this will bring unto them a far most excellent weight of glory in the day of the Lord Jesus. For the Scripture saith not in vain, "Them that honor me, I will honor," [1 Sam 2:30] neither was it a vain word that Eusebius delivered long ago, that piety towards God was the weapon and the only weapon, that both preserved Constantine's person, and avenged him of his enemies [Eusebius lib 10 cap 8]. THE PRAISE OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES But now what piety without truth? what truth (what saving truth) without the word of God? What word of God (whereof we may be sure) without the Scripture? The Scriptures we are commanded to search. John 5:39. Isa 8:20. They are commended that searched and studied them. Acts 17:11 and 8:28,29. They are reproved that were unskilful in them, or slow to believe them. Matt 22:29. Luke 24:25. They can make us wise unto salvation. 2 Tim 3:15. If we be ignorant, they will instruct us; if out of the way, they will bring us home; if out of order, they will reform us; if in heaviness, comfort us; if dull, quicken us; if cold, inflame us. Tolle, lege; Tolle, lege, Take up and read, take up and read the Scriptures [S. August. confess. lib 8 cap 12], (for unto them was the direction) it was said unto S. Augustine by a supernatural voice. "Whatsoever is in the Scriptures, believe me," saith the same S. Augustine, "is high and divine; there is verily truth, and a doctrine most fit for the refreshing of men's minds, and truly so tempered, that everyone may draw from thence that which is sufficient for him, if he come to draw with a devout and pious mind, as true Religion requireth." [S. August. de utilit. credendi cap. 6] Thus S. Augustine. and S. Jerome: "Ama scripturas, et amabit te sapientia etc." [S. Jerome. ad Demetriad] Love the Scriptures, and wisdom will love thee. And S. Cyril against Julian; "Even boys that are bred up in the Scriptures, become most religious, etc." [S. Cyril. 7 contra Iulianum] But what mention we three or four uses of the Scripture, whereas whatsoever is to be believed or practiced, or hoped for, is contained in them? or three or four sentences of the Fathers, since whosoever is worthy the name of a Father, from Christ's time downward, hath likewise written not only of the riches, but also of the perfection of the Scripture? "I adore the fulness of the Scripture," saith Tertullian against Hermogenes. [Tertul. advers. Hermo.] And again, to Apelles an heretic of the like stamp, he saith; "I do not admit that which thou bringest in (or concludest) of thine own (head or store, de tuo) without Scripture." [Tertul. de carne Christi.] So Saint Justin Martyr before him; "We must know by all means," saith he, "that it is not lawful (or possible) to learn (anything) of God or of right piety, save only out of the Prophets, who teach us by divine inspiration." So Saint Basil after Tertullian, "It is a manifest falling way from the Faith, and a fault of presumption, either to reject any of those things that are written, or to bring in (upon the head of them) any of those things that are not written. We omit to cite to the same effect, S. Cyril B. of Jerusalem in his 4::Cataches., Saint Jerome against Helvidius, Saint Augustine in his 3::book against the letters of Petilian, and in very many other places of his works. Also we forebear to descend to later Fathers, because we will not weary the reader. The Scriptures then being acknowledged to be so full and so perfect, how can we excuse ourselves of negligence, if we do not study them, of curiosity, if we be not content with them? Men talk much of [an olive bow wrapped about with wood, whereupon did hang figs, and bread, honey in a pot, and oil], how many sweet and goodly things it had hanging on it; of the Philosopher's stone, that it turned copper into gold; of Cornu-copia, that it had all things necessary for food in it, of Panaces the herb, that it was good for diseases, of Catholicon the drug, that it is instead of all purges; of Vulcan's armor, that it was an armor of proof against all thrusts, and all blows, etc. Well, that which they falsely or vainly attributed to these things for bodily god, we may justly and with full measure ascribe unto the Scripture, for spiritual. It is not only an armor, but also a whole armory of weapons, both offensive and defensive; whereby we may save ourselves and put the enemy to flight. It is not an herb, but a tree, or rather a whole paradise of trees of life, which bring forth fruit every month, and the fruit thereof is for meat, and the leaves for medicine. It is not a pot of Manna, or a cruse of oil, which were for memory only, or for a meal's meat or two, but as it were a shower of heavenly bread sufficient for a whole host, be it never so great; and as it were a whole cellar full of oil vessels; whereby all our necessities may be provided for, and our debts discharged. In a word, it is a Panary of wholesome food, against fenowed traditions; a Physician's shop (Saint Basil called it) [S. Basil in Psal. primum.] of preservatives against poisoned heresies; a Pandect of profitable laws, against rebellious spirits; a treasury of most costly jewels, against beggarly rudiments; finally a fountain of most pure water springing up unto everlasting life. And what marvel? The original thereof being from heaven, not from earth; the author being God, not man; the inditer, the holy spirit, not the wit of the Apostles or Prophets; the Penmen such as were sanctified from the womb, and endued with a principal portion of God's spirit; the matter, verity, piety, purity, uprightness; the form, God's word, God's testimony, God's oracles, the word of truth, the word of salvation, etc.; the effects, light of understanding, stableness of persuasion, repentance from dead works, newness of life, holiness, peace, joy in the holy Ghost; lastly, the end and reward of the study thereof, fellowship with the Saints, participation of the heavenly nature, fruition of an inheritance immortal, undefiled, and that never shall fade away: Happy is the man that delighted in the Scripture, and thrice happy that meditateth in it day and night. TRANSLATION NECESSARY But how shall men meditate in that, which they cannot understand? How shall they understand that which is kept close in an unknown tongue? as it is written, "Except I know the power of the voice, I shall be tohim that speaketh, a Barbarian, and he that speaketh, shall be a Barbarian to me." [1 Cor 14] The Apostle excepteth no tongue; not Hebrew the ancientest, not Greek the most copious, not Latin the finest. Nature taught a natural man to confess, that all of us in those tongues which we do not understand, are plainly deaf; we may turn the deaf ear unto them. The Scythian counted the Athenian, whom he did not understand, barbarous; [Clem. Alex. 1 Strom.] so the Roman did the Syrian, and the Jew (even S. Jerome himself called the Hebrew tongue barbarous, belike because it was strange to so many) [S. Jerome. Damaso.] so the Emperor of Constantinople [Michael, Theophili fil.] calleth the Latin tongue, barbarous, though Pope Nicolas do storm at it: [2::Tom. Concil. ex edit. Petri Crab] so the Jews long before Christ called all other nations, Lognazim, which islittle better than barbarous. Therefore as one complaineth, that always in the Senate of Rome, there was one or other that called for an interpreter: [Cicero 5::de finibus.] so lest the Church be driven to the like exigent, it is necessary to have translations in a readiness. Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most Holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water, even as Jacob rolled away thestone from the mouth of the well, by which means the flocks of Laban were watered [Gen 29:10]. Indeed without translation into the vulgar tongue, the unlearned are but like children at Jacob's well (which is deep) [John 4:11] without a bucket or something to draw with; or as that person mentioned by Isaiah, to whom when a sealed book was delivered, with this motion, "Read this, I pray thee," he was fain to make this answer, "I cannot, for it is sealed." [Isa 29:11] THE TRANSLATION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT OUT OF THE HEBREW INTO GREEK While God would be known only in Jacob, and have his Name great in Israel, and in none other place, while the dew lay on Gideon's fleece only, and all the earth besides was dry; then for one and the same people, which spake all of them the language of Canaan, that is, Hebrew, one and the same original in Hebrew was sufficient. [S. August. lib 12 contra Faust c32] But, when the fulness of time drew near, that the Sun of righteousness, the Son of God should come into the world, whom God ordained to be a reconciliation through faith in his blood, not of the Jew only, but also of the Greek, yea, of all them that were scattered abroad; then lo, it pleased the Lord to stir up the spirit of a Greek Prince (Greek for descent and language) even of Ptolemy Philadelph King of Egypt, to procure the translating of the Book of God out of Hebrew into Greek. This is the translation of the Seventy Interpreters, commonly so called, which prepared the way for our Saviour among the Gentiles by written preaching, as Saint John Baptist did among the Jews by vocal. For the Grecians being desirous of learning, were not wont to suffer books of worth to lie moulding in Kings' libraries, but had many of their servants, ready scribes, to copy them out, and so they were dispersed and made common. Again, the Greek tongue was well known and made familiar to most inhabitants in Asia, by reason of the conquest that there the Grecians had made, as also by the Colonies, which thither they had sent. For the same causes also it was well understood in many places of Europe, yea, and of Africa too. Therefore the word of God being set forth in Greek, becometh hereby like a candle set upon a candlestick, which giveth light to all that are in the house, or like a proclamation sounded forth in the market place, which most men presently take knowledge of; and therefore that language was fittest to contain the Scriptures, both for the first Preachers of the Gospel to appeal unto for witness, and for the learners also of those times to make search and trial by. It is certain, that that Translation was not so sound and so perfect, but it needed in many places correction; and who had been so sufficient for this work as the Apostles or Apostolic men? Yet it seemed good to the holy Ghost and to them, to take that which they found, (the same being for the greatest part true and sufficient) rather than making a new, in that new world and green age of the Church, to expose themselves to many exceptions and cavillations, as though they made a Translations to serve their own turn, and therefore bearing a witness to themselves, their witness not to be regarded. This may be supposed to be some cause, why the Translation of the Seventy was allowed to pass for current. Notwithstanding, though it was commended generally, yet it did not fully content the learned, no not of the Jews. For not long after Christ, Aquila fell in hand with a new Translation, and after him Theodotion, and after him Symmachus; yea, there was a fifth and a sixth edition, the Authors whereof were not known. [Epiphan. de mensur. et ponderibus.] These with the Seventy made up the Hexapla and were worthily and to great purpose compiled together by Origen. Howbeit the Edition of the Seventy went away with the credit, and therefore not only was placed in the midst by Origen (for the worth and excellency thereof above the rest, as Epiphanius gathered) but also was used by the Greek fathers for the ground and foundation of their Commentaries. Yea, Epiphanius above named doeth attribute so much unto it, that he holdeth the Authors thereof not only for Interpreters, but also for Prophets in some respect [S. August. 2::de dectrin. Christian c. 15]; and Justinian the Emperor enjoining the Jews his subjects to use especially the Translation of the Seventy, rendreth this reason thereof, because they were as it were enlightened with prophetical grace. Yet for all that, as the Egyptians are said of the Prophet to be men and not God, and their horses flesh and not spirit [Isa 31:3]; so it is evident, (and Saint Jerome affirmeth as much) [S. Jerome. de optimo genere interpret.] that the Seventy were Interpreters, they were not Prophets; they did many things well, as learned men; but yet as men they stumbled and fell, one while through oversight, another while through ignorance, yea, sometimes they may be noted to add to the Original, and sometimes to take from it; which made the Apostles to leave them many times, when they left the Hebrew, and to deliver the sense thereof according to the truth of the word, as the spirit gave them utterance. This may suffice touching the Greek Translations of the Old Testament. TRANSLATION OUT OF HEBREW AND GREEK INTO LATIN There were also within a few hundred years after CHRIST, translations many into the Latin tongue: for this tongue also was very fit to convey the Law and the Gospel by, because in those times very many Countries of the West, yea of the South, East and North, spake or understood Latin, being made Provinces to the Romans. But now the Latin Translations were too many to be all good, for they were infinite (Latini Interprets nullo modo numerari possunt, saith S. Augustine.) [S. Augustin. de doctr. Christ. lib 2 cap II]. Again they were not out of the Hebrew fountain (we speak of the Latin Translations of the Old Testament) but out of the Greek stream, therefore the Greek being not altogether clear, the Latin derived from it must needs be muddy. This moved S. Jerome a most learned father, and the best linguist without controversy, of his age, or of any that went before him, to undertake the translating of the Old Testament, out of the very fountain with that evidence of great learning, judgment, industry, and faithfulness, that he had forever bound the Church unto him, in a debt of special remembrance and thankfulness. THE TRANSLATING OF THE SCRIPTURE INTO THE VULGAR TONGUES Now through the Church were thus furnished with Greek and Latin Translations, even before the faith of CHRIST was generally embraced in the Empire; (for the learned know that even in S. Jerome's time, the Consul of Rome and his wife were both Ethnics, and about the same time the greatest part of the Senate also) [S. Jerome. Marcell.Zosim] yet for all that the godly-learned were not content to have the Scriptures in the Language which they themselves understood, Greek and Latin, (as the good Lepers were not content to fare well themselves, but acquainted their neighbors with the store that God had sent, that they also might provide for themselves) [2 Kings 7:9] but also for the behoof andedifying of the unlearned which hungered and thirsted after righteousness, and had souls to be saved as well as they, they provided Translations into the vulgar for their Countrymen, insomuch that most nations under heaven did shortly after their conversion, hear CHRIST speaking unto them in their mother tongue, not by the voice of their Minister only, but also by the written word translated. If any doubt hereof, he may be satisfied by examples enough, if enough will serve the turn. First S. Jerome saith, Multarum gentium linguis Scriptura ante translata, docet falsa esse quae addita sunt, etc. i.e. "The Scripture being translated before in the languages of many Nations, doth show that those things that were added (by Lucian and Hesychius) are false." [S. Jerome. praef. in 4::Evangel.] So S. Jerome in that place. The same Jerome elsewhere affirmeth that he, the time was, had set forth the translation of the Seventy suae linguae hominibus, i.e., for his countrymen of Dalmatia [S. Jerome. Sophronio.] Which words not only Erasmus doth understand to purport, that S. Jerome translated the Scripture into the Dalmatian tongue, but also Sixtus Senensis [Six. Sen. lib 4], and Alphonsus a` Castro [Alphon. lb 1 ca 23] (that we speak of no more) men not to be excepted against by them of Rome, do ingenuously confess as much. So, S. Chrysostom that lived in S. Jerome's time, giveth evidence with him: "The doctrine of S. John [saith he] did not in such sort [as the Philosophers' did] vanish away: but the Syrians, Egyptians, Indians, Persians, Ethiopians, and infinite other nations being barbarous people translated it into their [mother] tongue, and have learned to be [true] Philosophers," he meaneth Christians. [S. Chrysost. in Johan. cap.I. hom.I.] To this may be added Theodoret, as next unto him, both for antiquity, and for learning. His words be these, "Every Country that is under the Sun, is full of these words (of the Apostles and Prophets) and the Hebrew tongue [he meaneth the Scriptures in the Hebrew tongue] is turned not only into the Language of the Grecians, but also of the Romans, and Egyptians, and Persians, and Indians, and Armenians, and Scythians, and Sauromatians, and briefly into all the Languages that any Nation useth. [Theodor. 5. Therapeut.] So he. In like manner, Ulfilas is reported by Paulus Diaconus and Isidor (and before them by Sozomen) to have translated the Scriptures into the Gothic tongue: [P. Diacon. li. 12.] John Bishop of Sevil by Vasseus, to have turned them into Arabic, about the year of our Lord 717; [Vaseus in Chron. Hispan.] Bede by Cistertiensis, to have turned a great part of them into Saxon: Efnard by Trithemius, to have abridged the French Psalter, as Beded had done the Hebrew, about the year 800: King Alfred by the said Cistertiensis, to have turned the Psalter into Saxon: [Polydor. Virg. 5 histor.] Methodius by Aventinus (printed at Ingolstadt) to have turned the Scriptures into Slavonian: [Aventin. lib. 4.] Valdo, Bishop of Frising by Beatus Rhenanus, to have caused about that time, the Gospels to be translated into Dutch rhythm, yet extant in the Library of Corbinian: [Circa annum 900. B. Rhenan. rerum German. lib 2.] Valdus, by divers to have turned them himself into French, about the year 1160: Charles the Fifth of that name, surnamed the Wise, to have caused them to be turned into French, about 200 years after Valdus his time, of which translation there be many copies yet extant, as witnesseth Beroaldus. Much about that time, even in our King Richard the second's days, John Trevisa translated them into English, and many English Bibles in written hand are yet to be seen with divers, translated as it is very probable, in that age. So the Syrian translation of the New Testament is in most learned men's Libraries, of Widminstadius his setting forth, and the Psalter in Arabic is with many, of Augustinus Nebiensis' setting forth. So Postel affirmeth, that in his travel he saw the Gospels in the Ethiopian tongue; And Ambrose Thesius allegeth the Pslater of the Indians, which he testifieth to have been set forth by Potken in Syrian characters. So that, to have the Scriptures in the mother tongue is not a quaint conceit lately taken up, either by the Lord Cromwell in England, [Thuan.] or by the Lord Radevile in Polony, or by the Lord Ungnadius in the Emperor's dominion, but hath been thought upon, and put in practice of old, even from the first times of the conversion of any Nation; no doubt, because it was esteemed most profitable, to cause faith to grow in men's hearts the sooner, and to make them to be able to say with the words of the Psalms, "As we have heard, so we have seen." [Ps 48:8] THE UNWILLINGNESS OF OUR CHIEF ADVERSARIES, THAT THE SCRIPTURES SHOULD BE DIVULGED IN THE MOTHER TONGUE, ETC. Now the Church of Rome would seem at the length to bear a motherly affection towards her children, and to allow them the Scriptures in their mother tongue: but indeed it is a gift, not deserving to be called a gift, an unprofitable gift: [Sophecles] they must first get a licence in writing before they may use them, and to get that, they must approve themselves to their Confessor, that is, to be such as are, if not frozen in the dregs, yet soured with the leaven of their superstition. Howbeit, it seemed too much to Clement the Eighth that there should be any Licence granted to have them in the vulgar tongue, and therefore he overruleth and frustrateth the grant of Pius the Fourth. [See the observation (set forth by Clemen. his authority) upon the 4. rule of Pius the 4. his making in the index, lib. prohib. pag. 15. ver. 5.] So much are they afraid of the light of the Scripture, (Lucifugae Scripturarum, as Tertulian speaketh) that they will not trust the people with it, no not as it is set forth by their own sworn men, no not with the Licence of their own Bishops and Inquisitors. Yea, so unwilling they are to communicate the Scriptures to the people's understanding in any sort, that theyare not ashamed to confess, that we forced them to translate it into English against their wills. This seemeth to argue a bad cause, or a bad conscience, or both. Sure we are, that it is not he that hath good gold, that is afraid to bring it to the touchstone, but he that hath the counterfeit; [Tertul. de resur. carnis.] neither is it the true man that shunneth the light, but the malefactor, lest his deeds should be reproved [John 3:20]: neither is it the plaindealing Merchant that is unwilling to have the weights, or the meteyard brought in place, but he that useth deceit. But we will let them alone for this fault, and return to translation. THE SPEECHES AND REASONS, BOTH OF OUR BRETHREN, AND OF OUR ADVERSARIES AGAINST THIS WORK Many men's mouths have been open a good while (and yet are not stopped) with speeches about the Translation so long in hand, or rather perusals of Translations made before: and ask what may be the reason, what the necessity of the employment: Hath the Church been deceived, say they, all this while? Hath her sweet bread been mingled with leaven, here silver with dross, her wine with water, her milk with lime? (Lacte gypsum male miscetur, saith S. Ireney,) [S. Iren. 3. lib. cap. 19.] We hoped that we had been in the right way, that we had the Oracles of God delivered unto us, and that though all the world had cause to be offended and to complain, yet that we had none. Hath the nurse holden out the breast, and nothing but wind in it? Hath the bread been delivered by the fathers of the Church, and the same proved to be lapidosus, as Seneca speaketh? What is it to handle the word of God deceitfully, if this be not? Thus certain brethren. Also the adversaries of Judah and Jerusalem, like Sanballat in Nehemiah, mock, as we hear, both the work and the workmen, saying; "What do these weak Jews, etc. will they make the stones whole again out of the heaps of dust which are burnt? although they build, yet if a fox go up, he shall even break down their stony wall." [Neh 4:3] Was their Translation good before? Why do they now mend it? Was it not good? Why then was it obtruded to the people? Yea, why did the Catholics (meaning Popish Romanists) always go in jeopardy, for refusing to go to hear it? Nay, if it must be translated into English, Catholics are fittest to do it. They have learning, and they know when a thing is well, they can manum de tabula. We will answer them both briefly: and the former, being brethren, thus, with S. Jerome, "Damnamus veteres? Mineme, sed post priorum studia in domo Domini quod possums laboramus." [S. Jerome. Apolog. advers. Ruffin.] That is, "Do we condemn the ancient? In no case: but after the endeavors of them that were before us, we take the best pains we can in the house of God." As if he said, Being provoked by the example of the learned men that lived before my time, I have thought it my duty, to assay whether my talent in the knowledge of the tongues, may be profitable in any measure to God's Church, lest I should seem to laboured in them in vain, and lest I should be thought to glory in men, (although ancient,) above that which was in them. Thus S. Jerome may be thought to speak. A SATISFACTION TO OUR BRETHREN And to the same effect say we, that we are so far off from condemning any of their labors that travailed before us in this kind, either in this land or beyond sea, either in King Henry's time, or King Edward's (if there were any translation, or correction of a translation in his time) or Queen Elizabeth's of ever renowned memory, that we acknowledge them to have been raised up of God, for the building and furnishing of his Church, and that they deserve to be had of us and of posterity in everlasting remembrance. The judgment of Aristotle is worthy and well known: "If Timotheus had not been, we had not had much sweet music; but if Phrynis [Timotheus his master] had not been, we had not had Timotheus." Therefore blessed be they, and most honoured be their name, that break the ice, and giveth onset upon that which helpeth forward to the saving of souls. Now what can be more available thereto, than to deliver God's book unto God's people in a tongue which they understand? Since of a hidden treasure, and of a fountain that is sealed, there is no profit, as Ptolemy Philadelph wrote to the Rabbins or masters of the Jews, as witnesseth Epiphanius: [S. Epiphan. loco ante citato.] and as S. Augustine saith; "A man had rather be with his dog than with a stranger (whose tongue is strange unto him)." [S. Augustin. lib. 19. de civil. Dei. c. 7.] Yet for all that, as nothing is begun and perfected at the same time, and the later thoughts are thought to be the wiser: so, if we building upon their foundation that went before us, and being holpen by their labours, do endeavor to make that better which they left so good; no man, we are sure, hath cause to mislike us; they, we persuade ourselves, if they were alive, would thank us. The vintage of Abienzer, that strake the stroke: yet the gleaning of grapes of Ephraim was not to be despised. See Judges 8:2. Joash the king of Israel did not satisfy himself, till he had smitten the ground three times; and yet he offended the Prophet, for giving over then. [2 Kings 13:18-19] Aquila, of whom we spake before, translated the Bible as carefully, and as skilfully as he could; and yet he thought good to go over it again, and then it got the credit with the Jews, to be called accurately done, as Saint Jerome witnesseth. [S. Jerome. in Ezech. cap. 3.] How many books of profane learning have been gone over again and again, by the same translators, by others? Of one and the same book of Aristotle's Ethics, there are extant not so few as six or seven several translations. Now if this cost may be bestowed upon the gourd, which affordeth us a little shade, and which today flourisheth, but tomorrow is cut down; what may we bestow, nay what ought we not to bestow upon the Vine, the fruit whereof maketh glad the conscience of man, and the stem whereof abideth forever? And this is the word of God, which we translate. "What is the chaff to the wheat, saith the Lord?" [Jer 23:28] Tanti vitreum, quanti verum margaritum (saith Tertullian,) [Tertul. ad Martyr.] if a toy of glass be of that reckoning with us, how ought we to value the true pearl? [Jerome. ad Salvin.] Therefore let no man's eye be evil, because his Majesty's is good; neither let any be grieved, that we have a Prince that seeketh the increase of the spiritual wealth of Israel (let Sanballats and Tobiahs do so, which therefore do bear their just reproof) but let us rather bless God from the ground of our heart, for working this religious care in him, to have the translations of the Bible maturely considered of and examined. For by this means it cometh to pass, that whatsoever is sound already (and all is sound for substance, in one or other of our editions, and the worst of ours far better than their authentic vulgar) the same will shine as gold more brightly, being rubbed and polished; also, if anything be halting, or superfluous, or not so agreeable to the original, the same may be corrected, and the truth set in place. And what can the King command to be done, that will bring him more true honour than this? and wherein could they that have been set a work, approve their duty to the King, yea their obedience to God, and love to his Saints more, than by yielding their service, and all that is within them, for the furnishing of the work? But besides all this, they were the principal motives of it, and therefore ought least toquarrel it: for the very Historical truth is, that upon the importunate petitions of the Puritans, at his Majesty's coming to this Crown, the Conference at Hampton Court having been appointed for hearing their complaints: when by force of reason they were put from other grounds, they had recourse at the last, to this shift, that they could not with good conscience subscribe to the Communion book, since it maintained the Bible as it was there translated, which was as they said, a most corrupted translation. And although this was judged to be but a very poor and empty shift; yet even hereupon did his Majesty begin to bethink himself of the good that might ensue by a new translation, and presently after gave order for this Translation which is now presented unto thee. Thus much to satisfy our scrupulous Brethren. AN ANSWER TO THE IMPUTATIONS OF OUR ADVERSARIES Now to the latter we answer; that we do not deny, nay we affirm and avow, that the very meanest translation of the Bible in English, set forth by men of our profession, (for we have seen none of theirs of the whole Bible as yet) containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God. As the King's speech, which he uttereth in Parliament, being translated into French, Dutch, Italian, and Latin, is still the King's speech, though it be not interpreted by every Translator with the like grace, nor peradventure so fitly for phrase, nor so expressly for sense, everywhere. For it is confessed, that things are to take their denomination of the greater part; and a natural man could say, Verum ubi multa nitent in carmine, non ego paucis offendor maculis, etc. [Horace.] A man may be counted a virtuous man, though he have made many slips in his life, (else, there were none virtuous, for in many things we offend all) [James 3:2] also a comely man and lovely, though he have some warts upon his hand, yea, not only freckles upon his face, but also scars. No cause therefore why the word translated should be denied to be the word, or forbidden to be current, notwithstanding that some imperfections and blemishes may be noted in the setting forth of it. For whatever was perfect under the Sun, where Apostles or Apostolic men, that is, men endued with an extraordinary measure of God's spirit, and privileged with the privilege of infallibility, had not their hand? The Romanists therefore in refusing to hear, and daring to burn the Word translated, did no less than despite the spirit of grace, from whom originally it proceeded, and whose sense and meaning, as well as man's weakness would enable, it did express. Judge by an example or two. Plutarch writeth, that after that Rome had been burnt by the Gauls, they fell soon to build it again: but doing it in haste, they did not cast the streets, nor proportion the houses in such comely fashion, as had been most slightly and convenient; [Plutarch in Camillo.] was Catiline therefore an honest man, or a good patriot, that sought to bring it to a combustion? or Nero a good Prince, that did indeed set it on fire? So, by the story of Ezra, and the prophecy of Haggai it may be gathered, that the Temple built by Zerubbabel after the return from Babylon, was by no means to be compared to the former built by Solomon (for they that remembered the former, wept when they considered the latter) [Ezra 3:12] notwithstanding, might this latter either have been abhorred and forsaken by the Jews, or profaned by the Greeks? The like we are to think of Translations. The translation of the Seventy dissenteth from the Original in many places, neither doth it come near it, for perspicuity, gravity, majesty; yet which of the Apostles did condemn it? Condemn it? Nay, they used it, (as it is apparent, and as Saint Jerome and most learned men do confess) which they would not have done, nor by their example of using it, so grace and commend it to the Church, if it had been unworthy of the appellation and name of the word of God. And whereas they urge for their second defence of their vilifying and abusing of the English Bibles, or some pieces thereof, which they meet with, for that heretics (forsooth) were the Authors of the translations, (heretics they call us by the same right that they call themselves Catholics, both being wrong) we marvel what divinity taught them so. We are sure Tertullian was of another mind: Ex personis probamus fidem, an ex fide personas? [Tertul. de praescript. contra haereses.] Do we try men's faith by their persons? we should try their persons by their faith. Also S. Augustine was of another mind: for he lighting upon certain rules made by Tychonius a Donatist, for the better understanding of the word, was not ashamed to make use of them, yea, to insert them into his own book, with giving commendation to them so far forth as they were worthy to be commended, as is to be seen in S. Augustine's third book De doctrina Christiana. [S. August. 3. de doct. Christ. cap. 30.] To be short, Origen, and the whole Church of God for certain hundred years, were of another mind: for they were so far from treading under foot, (much more from burning) the Translation of Aquila a Proselyte, that is, one that had turned Jew; of Symmachus, and Theodotion, both Ebionites, that is, most vile heretics, that they joined together with the Hebrew Original, and the Translation of the Seventy (as hath been before signified out of Epiphanius) and set them forth openly to be considered of and perused by all. But we weary the unlearned, who need not know so much, and trouble the learned, who know it already. Yet before we end, we must answer a third cavil and objection of theirs against us, for altering and amending our Translations so oft; wherein truly they deal hardly, and strangely with us. For to whomever was it imputed for a fault (by such as were wise) to go over that which he had done, and to amend it where he saw cause? Saint Augustine was not afraid to exhort S. Jerome to a Palinodia or recantation; [S. Aug. Epist. 9.] and doth even glory that he seeth his infirmities. [S. Aug. Epist. 8.] If we be sons of the Truth, we must consider what it speaketh, and trample upon our own credit, yea, and upon other men's too, if either be any way an hindrance to it. This to the cause: then to the persons we say, that of all men they ought to be most silent in this case. For what varieties have they, and what alterations have they made, not only of their Service books, Portesses and Breviaries, but also of their Latin Translation? The Service book supposed to be made by S. Ambrose (Officium Ambrosianum) was a great while in special use and request; but Pope Hadrian calling a Council with the aid of Charles the Emperor, abolished it, yea, burnt it, and commanded the Service book of Saint Gregory universally to be used. [Durand. lib. 5. cap. 2.] Well, Officium Gregorianum gets by this means to be in credit, but doth it continue without change or altering? No, the very Roman Service was of two fashions, the New fashion, and the Old, (the one used in one Church, the other in another) as is to be seen in Pamelius a Romanist, his Preface, before Micrologus. the same Pamelius reporteth out Radulphus de Rivo, that about the year of our Lord, 1277, Pope Nicolas the Third removed out of the Churches of Rome, the more ancient books (of Service) and brought into use the Missals of the Friers Minorites, and commanded them to be observed there; insomuch that about an hundred years after, when the above name Radulphus happened to be at Rome, he found all the books to be new, (of the new stamp). Neither were there this chopping and changing in the more ancient times only, but also of late: Pius Quintus himself confesseth, that every Bishopric almost had a peculiar kind of service, most unlike to that which others had: which moved him to abolish all other Breviaries, though never so ancient, and privileged and published by Bishops in their Dioceses, and to establish and ratify that only which was of his own setting forth, in the year 1568. Now when the father of their Church, who gladly would heal the sore of the daughter of his people softly and slightly, and make the best of it, findeth so great fault with them for their odds and jarring; we hope the children have no great cause to vaunt of their uniformity. But the difference that appeareth between our Translations, and our often correcting of them, is the thing that we are specially charged with; let us see therefore whether they themselves be without fault this way, (if it be to be counted a fault, to correct) and whether they be fit men to throw stones at us: O tandem maior parcas insane minori: they that are less sound themselves, out not to object infirmities to others. [Horat.] If we should tell them that Valla, Stapulensis, Erasmus, and Vives found fault with their vulgar Translation, and consequently wished the same to be mended, or a new one to be made, they would answer peradventure, that we produced their enemies for witnesses against them; albeit, they were in no other sort enemies, than as S. Paul was to the Galatians, for telling them the truth [Gal 4:16]: and it were to be wished, that they had dared to tell it them plainlier and oftener. But what will they say to this, that Pope Leo the Tenth allowed Erasmus' Translation of the New Testament, so much different from the vulgar, by his Apostolic Letter and Bull; that the same Leo exhorted Pagnine to translate the whole Bible, and bare whatsoever charges was necessary for the work? [Sixtus Senens.] Surely, as the Apostle reasoneth to the Hebrews, that if the former Law and Testament had been sufficient, there had been no need of the latter: [Heb 7:11 and 8:7] so we may say, that if the old vulgar had been at all points allowable, to small purpose had labour and charges been undergone, about framing of a new. If they say, it was one Pope's private opinion, and that he consulted only himself; then we are able to go further with them, and to aver, that more of their chief men of all sorts, even their own Trent champions Paiva and Vega, and their own Inquisitors, Hieronymus ab Oleastro, and their own Bishop Isidorus Clarius, and their own Cardinal Thomas a Vio Caietan, do either make new Translations themselves, or follow new ones of other men's making, or note the vulgar Interpreter for halting; none of them fear to dissent from him, nor yet to except against him. And call they this an uniform tenor of text and judgment about the text, so many of their Worthies disclaiming the now received conceit? Nay, we will yet come nearer the quick: doth not their Paris edition differ from the Lovaine, and Hentenius his from them both, and yet all of them allowed by authority? Nay, doth not Sixtus Quintus confess, that certain Catholics (he meaneth certain of his own side) were in such an humor of translating the Scriptures into Latin, that Satan taking occasion by them, though they thought of no such matter, did strive what he could, out of so uncertain and manifold a variety of Translations, so to mingle all things, that nothing might seem to be left certain and firm in them, etc.? [Sixtus 5. praefat. fixa Bibliis.] Nay, further, did not the same Sixtus ordain by an inviolable decree, and that with the counsel and consent of his Cardinals, that the Latin edition of the old and new Testament, which the Council of Trent would have to be authentic, is the same without controversy which he then set forth, being diligently corrected and printed in the Printing-house of Vatican? Thus Sixtus in his Preface before his Bible. And yet Clement the Eighth his immediate successor, published another edition of the Bible, containing in it infinite differences from that of Sixtus, (and many of them weighty and material) and yet this must be authentic by all means. What is to have the faith of our glorious Lord JESUS CHRIST with Yea or Nay, if this be not? Again, what is sweet harmony and consent, if this be? Therefore, as Demaratus of Corinth advised a great King, before he talked of the dissensions of the Grecians, to compose his domestic broils (for at that time his Queen and his son and heir were at deadly feud with him) so all the while that our adversaries do make so many and so various editions themselves, and do jar so much about the worth and authority of them, they can with no show of equity challenge us for changing and correcting. THE PURPOSE OF THE TRANSLATORS, WITH THEIR NUMBER, FURNITURE, CARE, ETC. But it is high time to leave them, and to show in brief what we proposed to ourselves, and what course we held in this our perusal and survey of the Bible. Truly (good Christian Reader) we never thought from the beginning, that we should need to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one, (for then the imputation of Sixtus had been true in some sort, that our people had been fed with gall of Dragons instead of wine, with whey instead of milk:) but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one, not justly to be excepted against; that hath been our endeavor, that our mark. To that purpose there were many chosen, that were greater in other men's eyes than in their own, and that sought the truth rather than their own praise. Again, they came or were thought to come to the work, not exercendi causa (as one saith) but exercitati, that is, learned, not to learn: For the chief overseer and [NOTE: Greek letters omitted] under his Majesty, to whom not only we, but also our whole Church was much bound, knew by his wisdom, which thing also Nazianzen taught so long ago, that it is a preposterous order to teach first and to learn after, yea that [NOTE: Greek letters omitted] to learn and practice together, is neither commendable for the workman, nor safe for the work. [Idem in Apologet.] Therefore such were thought upon, as could say modestly with Saint Jerome, Et Hebreaeum Sermonem ex parte didicimus, et in Latino pene ab ipsis incunabulis etc. detriti sumus. "Both we have learned the Hebrew tongue in part, and in the Latin we have been exercised almost from our very cradle." S. Jerome maketh no mention of the Greek tongue, wherein yet he did excel, because he translated not the old Testament out of Greek, but out of Hebrew. And in what sort did these assemble? In the trust of their own knowledge, or of their sharpness of wit, or deepness of judgment, as it were in an arm of flesh? At no hand. They trusted in him that hath the key of David, opening and no man shutting; they prayed to the Lord the Father of our Lord, to the effect that S. Augustine did; "O let thy Scriptures be my pure delight, let me not be deceived in them, neither let me deceive by them." [S. Aug. lib. II. Confess. cap. 2.] In this confidence, and with this devotion did they assemble together; not too many, lest one should trouble another; and yet many, lest many things haply might escape them. If you ask what they had before them, truly it was the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, the Greek of the New. These are the two golden pipes, or rather conduits, where-through the olive branches empty themselves into the gold. Saint Augustine calleth them precedent, or original tongues; [S. August. 3. de doctr. c. 3. etc.] Saint Jerome, fountains. [S. Jerome. ad Suniam et Fretel.] The same Saint Jerome affirmeth, [S. Jerome. ad Lucinium, Dist. 9 ut veterum.] and Gratian hath not spared to put it into his Decree, That "as the credit of the old Books" (he meaneth of the Old Testament) "is to be tried by the Hebrew Volumes, so of the New by the Greek tongue," he meaneth by the original Greek. If truth be tried by these tongues, then whence should a Translation be made, but out of them? These tongues therefore, the Scriptures we say in those tongues, we set before us to translate, being the tongues wherein God was pleased to speak to his Church by the Prophets and Apostles. Neither did we run over the work with that posting haste that the Septuagint did, if that be true which is reported of them, that they finished it in 72 days; [Joseph. Antiq. lib. 12.] neither were we barred or hindered from going over it again, having once done it, like S. Jerome, if that be true which himself reporteth, that he could no sooner write anything, but presently it was caught from him, and published, and he could not have leave to mend it: [S. Jerome. ad Pammac. pro libr. advers. Iovinian.] neither, to be short, were we the first that fell in hand with translating the Scripture into English, and consequently destitute of former helps, as it is written of Origen, that he was the first in a manner, that put his hand to write Commentaries upon the Scriptures, [Sophoc. in Elect.] and therefore no marvel, if he overshot himself many times. None of these things: the work hath not been huddled up in 72 days, but hath cost the workmen, as light as it seemeth, the pains of twice seven times seventy two days and more: matters of such weight and consequence are to be speeded with maturity: for in a business of movement a man feareth not the blame of convenient slackness. [S. Chrysost. in II. Thess. cap. 2.] Neither did we think much to consult the Translators or Commentators, Chaldee, Hebrew, Syrian, Greek or Latin, no nor the Spanish, French, Italian, or Dutch; neither did we disdain to revise that which we had done, and to bring back to the anvil that which we had hammered: but having and using as great helps as were needful, and fearing no reproach for slowness, nor coveting praise for expedition, we have at length, through the good hand of the Lord upon us, brought the work to that pass that you see. REASONS MOVING US TO SET DIVERSITY OF SENSES IN THE MARGIN, WHERE THERE IS GREAT PROBABILITY FOR EACH Some peradventure would have no variety of senses to be set in the margin, lest the authority of the Scriptures for deciding of controversies by that show of uncertainty, should somewhat be shaken. But we hold their judgment not to be sound in this point. For though, "whatsoever things are necessary are manifest," as S. Chrysostom saith, [S. Chrysost. in II. Thess. cap. 2.] and as S. Augustine, "In those things that are plainly set down in the Scriptures, all such matters are found that concern Faith, Hope, and Charity." [S. Aug. 2. de doctr. Christ. cap. 9.] Yet for all that it cannot be dissembled, that partly to exercise and whet our wits, partly to wean the curious from the loathing of them for their every-where plainness, partly also to stir up our devotion to crave the assistance of God's spirit by prayer, and lastly, that we might be forward to seek aid of our brethren by conference, and never scorn those that be not in all respects so complete as they should be, being to seek in many things ourselves, it hath pleased God in his divine providence, here and there to scatter words and sentences of that difficulty and doubtfulness, not in doctrinal points that concern salvation, (for in such it hath been vouched that the Scriptures are plain) but in matters of less moment, that fearfulness would better beseem us than confidence, and if we will resolve upon modesty with S. Augustine, (though not in this same case altogether, yet upon the same ground) Melius est debitare de occultis, quam litigare de incertis, [S. Aug li. S. de Genes. ad liter. cap. 5.] "it is better to make doubt of those things which are secret, than to strive about those things that are uncertain." There be many words in the Scriptures, which be never found there but once, (having neither brother or neighbor, as the Hebrews speak) so that we cannot be holpen by conference of places. Again, there be many rare names of certain birds, beasts and precious stones, etc. concerning the Hebrews themselves are so divided among themselves for judgment, that they may seem to have defined this or that, rather because they would say something, than because they were sure of that which they said, as S. Jerome somewhere saith of the Septuagint. Now in such a case, doth not a margin do well to admonish the Reader to seek further, and not to conclude or dogmatize upon this or that peremptorily? For as it is a fault of incredulity, to doubt of those things that are evident: so to determine of such things as the Spirit of God hath left (even in the judgment of the judicious) questionable, can be no less than presumption. Therefore as S. Augustine saith, that variety of Translations is profitable for the finding out of the sense of the Scriptures: [S. Aug. 2. de doctr. Christian. cap. 14.] so diversity of signification and sense in the margin, where the text is no so clear, must needs do good, yea, is necessary, as we are persuaded. We know that Sixtus Quintus expressly forbiddeth, that any variety of readings of their vulgar edition, should be put in the margin, [Sixtus 5. praef. Bibliae.] (which though it be not altogether the same thing to that we have in hand, yet it looketh that way) but we think he hath not all of his own side his favorers, for this conceit. They that are wise, had rather have their judgments at liberty in differences of readings, than to be captivated to one, when it may be the other. If they were sure that their high Priest had all laws shut up in his breast, as Paul the Second bragged, [Plat. in Paulo secundo.] and that he were as free from error by special privilege, as the Dictators of Rome were made by law inviolable, it were another matter; then his word were an Oracle, his opinion a decision. But the eyes of the world are now open, God be thanked, and have been a great while, they find that he is subject to the same affections and infirmities that others be, that his skin is penetrable, and therefore so much as he proveth, not as much as he claimeth, they grant and embrace. REASONS INDUCING US NOT TO STAND CURIOUSLY UPON AN IDENTITY OF PHRASING Another things we think good to admonish thee of (gentle Reader) that we have not tied ourselves to an uniformity of phrasing, or to an identity of words, as some peradventure would wish that we had done, because they observe, that some learned men somewhere, have been as exact as they could that way. Truly, that we might not vary from the sense of that which we had translated before, if the word signified that same in both places (for there be some words that be not the same sense everywhere) we were especially careful, and made a conscience, according to our duty. But, that we should express the same notion in the same particular word; as for example, if we translate the Hebrew or Greek word once by PURPOSE, never to call it INTENT; if one where JOURNEYING, never TRAVELING; if one where THINK, never SUPPOSE; if one where PAIN, never ACHE; if one where JOY, never GLADNESS, etc. Thus to mince the matter, we thought to savour more of curiosity than wisdom, and that rather it would breed scorn in the Atheist, than bring profit to the godly Reader. For is the kingdom of God to become words or syllables? why should we be in bondage to them if we may be free, use one precisely when we may use another no less fit, as commodiously? A godly Father in the Primitive time showed himself greatly moved, that one of newfangledness called [NOTE: Greek omitted but was a dispute over the word for "a bed"] [Niceph. Calist. lib.8. cap.42.] though the difference be little or none; and another reporteth that he was much abused for turning "Cucurbita" (to which reading the people had been used) into "Hedera". [S. Jerome in 4. Ionae. See S. Aug: epist. 10.] Now if this happens in better times, and upon so small occasions, we might justly fear hard censure, if generally we should make verbal and unnecessary changings. We might also be charged (by scoffers) with some unequal dealing towards a great number of good English words. For as it is written of a certain great Philosopher, that he should say , that those logs were happy that were made images to be worshipped; for their fellows, as good as they, lay for blocks behind the fire: so if we should say, as it were, unto certain words, Stand up higher, have a place in the Bible always, and to others of like quality, Get ye hence, be banished forever, we might be taxed peradventure with S. James his words, namely, "To be partial in ourselves and judges of evil thoughts." Add hereunto, that niceness in words was always counted the next step to trifling, and so was to be curious about names too: also that we cannot follow a better pattern for elocution than God himself; therefore he using divers words, in his holy writ, and indifferently for one thing in nature: [see Euseb. li. 12. ex Platon.] we, if we will not be superstitious, may use the same liberty in our English versions out of Hebrew and Greek, for that copy or store that he hath given us. Lastly, we have on the one side avoided the scrupulosity of the Puritans, who leave the old Ecclesiastical words, and betake them to other, as when they put WASHING for BAPTISM, and CONGREGATION instead of CHURCH: as also on the other side we have shunned the obscurity of the Papists, in their AZIMES, TUNIKE, RATIONAL, HOLOCAUSTS, PRAEPUCE, PASCHE, and a number of such like, whereof their late Translation is full, and that of purpose to darken the sense, that since they must needs translate the Bible, yet by the language thereof, it may be kept from being understood. But we desire that the Scripture may speak like itself, as in the language of Canaan, that it may be understood even of the very vulgar. Many other things we might give thee warning of (gentle Reader) if we had not exceeded the measure of a Preface already. It remaineth, that we commend thee to God, and to the Spirit of his grace, which is able to build further than we can ask or think. He removeth the scales from our eyes, the vail from our hearts, opening our wits that we may understand his word, enlarging our hearts, yea correcting our affections, that we may love it to the end. Ye are brought unto fountains of living water which ye digged not; do not cast earth into them with the Philistines, neither prefer broken pits before them with the wicked Jews. [Gen 26:15. Jer 2:13.] Others have laboured, and you may enter into their labours; O receive not so great things in vain, O despise not so great salvation! Be not like swine to tread under foot so precious things, neither yet like dogs to tear and abuse holy things. Say not to our Saviour with the Gergesites, Depart out of our coast [Matt 8:34]; neither yet with Esau sell your birthright for a mess of pottage [Heb 12:16]. If light be come into the world, love not darkness more than light; if food, if clothing be offered, go not naked, starve not yourselves. Remember the advice of Nazianzene, "It is a grievous thing" (or dangerous) "to neglect a great fair, and to seek to make markets afterwards:" also the encouragement of S. Chrysostom, "It is altogether impossible, that he that is sober" (and watchful) "should at any time be neglected:" [S. Chrysost. in epist. ad Rom. cap. 14. oral. 26.] Lastly, the admonition and menacing of S. Augustine, "They that despise God's will inviting them, shall feel God's will taking vengeance of them." [S. August. ad artic. sibi falso object. Artic. 16.] It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God; [Heb 10:31] but a blessed thing it is, and will bring us to everlasting blessedness in the end, when God speaketh unto us, to hearken; when he setteth his word before us, to read it; when he stretcheth out his hand and calleth, to answer, Here am I, here we are to do thy will, O God. The Lord work a care and conscience in us to know him and serve him, that we may be acknowledged of him at the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom with the holy Ghost, be all praise and thanksgiving. Amen. -------------------- A DEFENSE of the K.J.V. BIBLE @ Pilgrim Publications http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/defenskj.htm DON'T BLAME the KJV for "KING JAMES ONLYISM" !! by BOB L. ROSS I have often been upset by reading or hearing someone in the news media refer to what the "Christians" did to the Jews in Germany during World War II. For example, a religious magazine published a speech by a U. S. Senator entitled, "How Could Christians Have Done This?" -- as if to say that Hitler and his henchmen were indeed authentic Christians simply because they may have identified with some "branch" of professed "Christendom". Years ago, in the time of one of our "cussin'" presidents, I often winced when I would read the foul language of the "Baptist" who occupied the White House. It made me a little ashamed to be a Baptist when he humiliated us before the rest of the nation. When I first moved to Pasadena, Texas, you would know you were close to "home" when you could smell the stenchy odors which occasionally defiled the air, rising from some of the Houston-based industries along the nearby Houston ship channel. To tell people in Houston that you lived in "Pasadena" would often draw a little grin and a remark about "Stinkadena" where "the air is greener". A "Jehovah's Witness" is not necessarily a witness for Jehovah. And a "Christian Scientist" is not necessarily either a Christian or a scientist. A member of the group called "People for the American Way" is not necessarily traditional American for advocates of the traditional American way. Likewise, "King James Version-Onlyism" is just as much a misnomer as the foregoing names and the vain use of those names. I am a reader and user of the KJV, yet I am as much an opponent of the heresy of "KJV Onlyism" as I am an opponent of the cult which is called "Church of Christ", and that is because of the heresies of both. The KJV itself, its Translators, and its teachings -- are NOT responsible for the modern wolf-in-sheep's clothing which parades as "KJV Only." I will use the [4]Translators to the Readers preface to the 1611 King James Version [the 1611 KJV is no longer in use, but was recently reprinted by Thomas Nelson Publishers/Nashville TN] to expose a few of the [5]Fallacies of the modern day "KJV-Only" cult. The translators were NOT "KJV-Onlyites". Do you suppose, in your wildest imagination... that John Rainolds, Lancelot Andrewes, Miles Smith and the other scholars who were chosen to work on the English translation, would appreciate the "defense" of their creation by the likes of Benjamin Wilkinson, J. J. Ray, David Otis Fuller, Peter S. Ruckman, Gail Riplinger, Jack Hyles, Jack Chick, Texe Marrs, D. A. Waite, Sam Gipp, William Grady, Larry Vance, The Flaming Torch [6]and their cadre? I rather suspect that these "defenders" of the KJV would more likely receive the type of reaction which Paul made to the woman who commended the Apostle [Acts 16:17-18]. | 1 | The KJV Translators had respect for and recommended OTHER TRANSLATIONS. Far from being "KJV Onlyism", the men who translated the King James Version respected the validity and usefulness of other translations. In the preface of the 1611 KJV, we read: "...we affirm and avow, that the very meanest [poorest or least esteemed] translation of the Bible in English, set forth by men of our profession... contains the Word of God, nay, IS THE WORD OF GOD". They said that "though it be not interpreted by every Translator with like grace", the King's speech is "still the King's speech"; thus, "No cause therefore why the Word translated should be denied to be the Word, or forbidden to be currant [used], notwithstanding that some imperfections and blemishes may be noted in the setting forth [translating] of it." This is completely opposite to the modern cultism of "KJV-Onlyism!" This statement would be immediately deprecated as "apostasy" and "New Ageism" by so many "KJV Onlyites" such as Ruckman, Riplinger, Hyles, Gipp, Grady, etc., etc. | 2 | The KJV Translators believed in the validity of the SEPTUAGINT TRANSLATION. One of the modern notions of some "KJV-Onlyites" is to deprecate the Septuagint, the ancient Greek Old Testament used in the time of Jesus and the Apostles. The KJV translators, however, refer to the Septuagint as being used by the Apostles and as being the "Word of God". The modern writers of fiction, in the "KJV Only" camp, contrarily spin-off the "tale" that Origen is responsible for the Septuagint and that it is a "post-apostolic creation". | 3 | The KJV Translators defended the practice of "amending" ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS of the Bible. One of the "cavils and objection" against the KJV to which the translators replied was the idea that there was no need for any alternation of the current translation in common use. They summon the history of Bible revisions to demonstrate the fact that such an objection is contrary to the perpetuity of the Bible from the past to the present. The Bible, at any given time, is what it is as a result of the translating and revision of the Hebrew and Greek scholars across time. From Jerome to Wycliff to Erasmus to Tyndale and on to our present time, arriving at the most authentic translation of the "Originals", has been sought by such men as the Translators of the KJV. This was their attitude in contradiction to modern "KJV-Onlyism". | 4 | The King James Translators believed that OTHER VARIOUS TRANSLATIONS were helpful. "Therefore", they say, "as St. Augustine saith, that variety of translations is profitable for the finding out of the sense of the Scriptures: so diversity of signification and sense in the margin, where the text is not so clear, must needs do good, yea, is necessary, as we are persuaded." The KJV translators placed hundreds of notations & alternative readings in the margins of the 1611 translation. They made use of other translations, not only in English, but other languages, past and current to arrive at what appeared to them to be most accurate! | 5 | KJV Translators were NOT, in any form, "KJV-ONLYites." Even though they diligently sought to set forth an accurate translation, the King James translators did NOT believe in translation-bias "final authority", nor claim to have produced a "final" Bible free of any further alternation. They say that "if anything be halting, or superfluous, or not so agreeable to the original, the same may be corrected, and the truer set in place." And, indeed, subsequent [7]Revisions of the KJV were made, with the 1769 edition best representing the KJV used today, 6 times revised since the "[8]Original 1611" KJV. Most would find the English of 1611 cumbersome and difficult to read, since spelling has changed so much. Even the meaning of some English words of the 17th century have significantly changed, necessitating clarification in certain passages. Many "KJV Onlyites" say our language has degenerated & we need to go "back" to the 17th century English! Fortunately, sanity is still dominant as opposed to such "looney-toons". Some word changes in today's KJV [1850 revision] are erroneous, while others are mainly incidental; ** yet most "KJV Onlyites" (thinking they have an "infallible" 1611 edition in their hands) state it is "perfect", including the added italicized words! The KJV translators certainly did NOT think so as they added hundreds of alternate readings (translations) in the 1611's margin. With today's "KJV Only" mindset, these additional word comparisons would be considered rank heresy! ** [see "[9]KJV Revision is No 'Myth'!" by Gary Hudson -- Proof of actual word changes in the KJV revisions which sometimes, but not always, affect the sense of passages] -- examples: 1 John 5:12 1611 KJV--"he that hath not the Son, hath not life" || Current KJV--"he that hath not the Son of God hath not life" ~~ or Matthew 16:16 1611 KJV--"Thou art Christ" || Current KJV--"Thou art the Christ." It must be a shock to "KJV Onlyites" that the 1611 KJV is different than the current KJV since they affirm that the "1611 KJV is God's perfectly preserved words:" but yet, even with the different words, the actual meaning here is the SAME for both KJV editions. This is the ongoing goal of bible translating, using different, various, easier words to arrive at the same meaning of the original Hebrew / Greek / Aramaic words; and we all have the ability to study languages and compare translations. All translations in all languages PRESERVE the Word of God everywhere they properly translate the original languages. >>> But wait ! What does the KJV-Onlyite say about this word change: Jeremiah 34:16 (Cambridge KJV's) -- "...whom YE had set at liberty..." || or || (Oxford KJV's & most other publishers' KJV's) -- "...whom HE had set at liberty..." Which KJV is "perfect?" Which one do YOU have? Is yours INFALLIBLE and INERRANT? Are you sure that your KJV is THE "perfect" one? There is quite a difference between whether you are addressing a "ye" or speaking about a "he". Well, the original 1611 KJV reads "whom ye", but this cannot be the decisive reference because the original 1611 contained numerous variations, including "he" instead of "she" at Ruth 3:15 ("she went into the city"). The context of Jeremiah 34:16 seems to support "whom ye", but the HEBREW MASORETIC OLD TESTAMENT settles the matter, reading in the second person ("whom ye"). It is the HEBREW TEXT that reveals the correct reading. God tells us whether He said "whom ye" or "whom he", just as He tells us whether He said "he went" or "she went." [It is to be understood here that not all Nelson and World KJV's follow the Oxford tradition, yet, ONLY KJV's following the Cambridge printing are correct!] Dr. F. H. A. Scrivener, perhaps the greatest authority on the history of the Authorized Version, aptly said concerning these word changes that "much of the greater part of them are deliberate changes, introduced silently and without authority by men whose very names are often unknown." [The Authorized Edition of the English Bible, 1611--Its Subsequent Reprints and Modern Representatives, Cambridge, 1884, pg. 3] Also, Dr. Benjamin Blayney, whose 1769 edition best represents the current KJV, said concerning his KJV revision that, "many errors that were found in former editions have been corrected, and the text reformed to such a standard of purity, as, it is presumed, is not to be met with in any other edition hitherto extant" (Scrivener, pg. 238, emphasis ours). Most importantly, however, is a key reason for many of Blayney's 1769 "corrections" when he says, "Frequent recourse has been made to the Hebrew and Greek Originals." -- "[10]KJV Revision is No 'Myth'!" available from Pilgrim. Now, what we have written above is NOT an "attack on the KJV", but an attack on ERROR. We are not "fault finding" our King James Bibles, only revealing the logical inconsistency of those who so boldly expound the theory of "KJV-inerrancy". And it is indeed a MAN-MADE teaching not supported ANYWHERE in Scripture! One variant in our KJV's (such as with Jeremiah 34:16) demolishes Ruckman's entire theory of "KJV-inerrancy and exact versionism". That, and that alone has been our purpose in presenting the above material. | 6 | "KJV-ONLYism," -- a form of [11] ROMANISM . When one reads the preface to the 1611 King James Bible, he discovers that many of the objections offered today against "[12]modern" bible translations were some of the very same objections offered against the KJV [of course, some objections today -- Riplinger, etc. -- are simply ridiculous and ignorant.] "Why a new translation? Wasn't the former translation not a good one? Has the church been deceived all this time?" In fact, due to the overwhelming use and popularity of the Geneva Bible (first produced under John Calvin and John Knox in the 1560s), it took 50 years after 1611 for the KJV to surpass it in readership and distribution [a feat that the New International Version/NIV equaled in less than 20 years -- since 1991, among all English translations in print, it is now the most popular Bible sold]. The chief opponent of Bible translating has been the Roman church which venerated its Latin Vulgate as the "one-and-only authentic Word of God." The KJV translators, members of the Church of England, a "split" off the Roman Church, were criticized for the fact that their translation would further denigrate the Latin Vulgate. In the 20th century, that same attitude is prevalent in KJV-Only "theories": every new English translation is an "attack upon the KJV" -- "only done for $$" -- "promoting the 'New Age'" -- "blah, blah, blah..." To the many "KJV-Onlyites", the KJV is their "Latin Vulgate" ...it and it alone [!] is the "one-and-only perfectly, preserved" Word of God. But, the KJV Translators were NOT OF THAT MIND. And "KJV Onlyism" is NOT a product of the translators NOR the King James Bible. One does NOT endorse "KJV Onlyism" by using the KJV, and one is NOT an apostate by using other translations. "KJV Onlyism" is a cultic philosophy and has victimized the KJV by deceiving people so as to reap various benefits from the victims -- namely, their devotion and dollars. It is basically the Romanist mentality of the Dark Ages. written by [13] Bob L. Ross Contact us for a [14] FREE CATALOG and Sample [15] SPURGEON SERMONS [16] E-Mail: Pilgrimpub at aol.com (1st) [emailbox.gif] [17] E-Mail: Pilgrimp at swbell.net (2nd) | Join our company: "The Lord gave the WORD: great was the COMPANY of those that PUBLISHED it." [Psalm 68:11] -- Please, Copy this article, pass it on, and mail to others. Permission granted by Bob L. Ross -- No Copyright | "THE TRANSLATORS WERE UNINSPIRED MEN, AND CONSEQUENTLY LIABLE TO MISTAKES; THE TRANSLATION IS 'INSPIRED', SO FAR AS IT EXACTLY GIVES THE ORIGINAL ...SO FAR, NO MORE" | JOHN GIRARDEAU | "VARIETY OF TRANSLATIONS IS PROFITABLE FOR FINDING OUT OF THE SENSE OF THE SCRIPTURES." | the TRANSLATORS of the KING JAMES VERSION to the READERS | "THERE IS EVEN NOW, WITH SOME IGNORANT PERSONS, AN ASSUMPTION OF THE INFALLIBILITY AND EQUALITY WITH THE ORIGINAL, OF SOME PARTICULAR TRANSLATION--AS TO THE VULGATE, OR KING JAMES, OR LUTHER'S" | Basil Manley | Visit this developing site for more excellent material on... [19] http://www.tegart.com/brian/bible/kjvonly/index.html NOTES OF INTEREST by Bob L. Ross "CORRUPT" MANUSCRIPTS ? Many times I hear KJV-Onlyites mention manuscripts other than the textus receptus as "corrupt". Well, since there are no "originals" or exact copies of them in existence, & since no two existing manuscripts are exactly alike, IF one uses the term "corrupt" to include any manuscript which is NOT exactly as the "originals" -- then you have to say that ALL of them are "corrupt!" There is no single manuscript in existence which can be placed side-by-side with ANY translation to exactly parallel it. Beza put together a text in the 16th century that most KJV-Onlyites hold up as being "essentially" the original New Testament. Yet the KJV does NOT exactly parallel that text. The Trinitarian Bible Society publishes a "TR" which was put together by F. H. A. Scrivener to "match" the current KJV, but that was not available in "one" until the last century. The "Majority Text" does not match the KJV, either. According to most KJV-Only "scholars", they admit there is only a small percentage of difference between the "TR" family of manuscripts and the other "family". They also admit that there is not a single important or major difference between them in their vital teachings. No doctrine is "corrupted" by either "family" of manuscripts. Even in the translations, KJV-Onlys admit that the all-important truth of Salvation is in them so that a person could be saved. God HAS preserved His Word in both "families" of manuscripts, despite any "omissions" or "additions" that copyists have made in those manuscripts. A good book on this subject is Norman Pickering's The Identity of the New Testament Text [Thomas Nelson, 1977, 1980]. To my knowledge, Pickering does NOT affirm that any particular manuscript or "family" of manuscripts is exactly reproduced by a translation, not even the KJV Bible. He was one of the Consulting Editors on the "Majority Text", and it omits, for example, the disputed words of 1 John 5:7--used in the KJV but controversial as to its textual reliability. [[20] A History of the Debate Over 1 John 5:7-8 - see Michael Maynard's book for a study on this scripture. Also, one of the most thorough articles I have read in regard to the controversy about this passage was published in "Olde Paths and Ancient Landmarks" magazine of October 1993. If you would like a copy, write to Editor Glen Conjurske, 3540 Hwy 47 N, Rhinelander WI 54501 -- enclosed $ 1.00 to cover cost] In a letter published in our magazine first's issue (1990), Mr. Pickering said: "The nature of language does not permit a 'perfect' translation -- the semantic area of words differs between languages so that there is seldom complete overlap. A 'perfect' translation of John 3:16 from Greek into English is impossible, for we have no perfect equivalent for "agapao" [translated "loved" in Jn. 3:16]." He says that IF the KJV is the only "infallible" Bible, "then no one who lived before that date had access to it -- & with the 6 subsequent revisions of the original 1611 KJV, containing hundreds of word changes, this would mean God's "infallible translation" is... NOT infallible! -- those "infallibly translated words" -- have CHANGED. This is just another KJV-Only theory I refer to as PURE [21]HOKEY! No one even uses a "[22]1611 KJV" today! Do you know a single cult which originally developed from the use of a version other than the KJV? Even the "Jehovah Witnesses" originally used the KJV. The only "cult" I know that has developed in relation to a translation is... the "KJV-Only" cult itself! "KJV-Onlyism" is simply a "hobby-horse" promoted to sell books, videos, magazines, pamphlets, trinkets, and all types of other merchandise to people who are misled to think such stuff is vital to the "defense of the faith". While we oppose the type of "KJV-Onlyism" which is of the cultic variety mentioned above and elsewhere in our articles, I want to make it clear that we are not doing either of the following: 1) "repudiating" the KJV, and 2) "promoting" other versions. What we are DOING is defending the very same "rights" assumed by the KJV Translators when they made their translation. We have as much "right" as they did to study Greek and Hebrew texts and manuscripts, past and present Bible translations, lexicons, etc and expound what appears to us to be Scripture and its teaching. The 57 translators who worked on the KJV are not the "Final Authority", as inferred by Gail Riplinger in her "Nite Line" video wherein she repudiates the study of the same and similar sources as used by the translators. We repudiate making authoritarian "elitists" out of the KJV translators (which they themselves did NOT do), just as we repudiate the Romanist "elitists" who claim "authority" via "apostolic succession". Neither Rome nor the "KJV-Onlyites" will tell us what we can and cannot do. Who appointed Ruckman, Sam Gipp, Riplinger, Fuller, Hyles, Waite, etc. etc., over the Lord's vineyard? Through no fault of the KJV or its translators, the KJV has been unjustly victimized by modern professed "defenders" who in some instances [23]actually believe very little of the doctrine that it teaches. While some of our comments are "facetious" and "satirical", we are simply "answering a fool according to his folly" [Proverbs 26:5]. We don't cast pearls before "swine" [Matthew 7:6]. We are not "gifted" in the category of slobbering about "love" and "gentleness" when dealing with Pharisees and Sadducees [Matthew 23] and others who are to be "rebuked sharply" [1 Timothy 5:20]. If you don't approve and you think we are wrong, just charge it to our less-than-perfect human nature [James 3:2]. Replying to false teachers is not the most pleasant nor the easiest thing to do, but for the sake of the Truth it is necessary [Jude 3]. "If the history of the Textus Receptus itself is a history of revision, why is it beyond revision today?" [ROBERT MARTIN, Accuracy of Translation and the NIV pg. 76] [27]ACCURACY OF TRANSLATION for the "English Speaking People" Why [28]DEAN BURGON Would NOT Join the "Dean Burgon Society" "KING JAMES ONLY [29]HOKEY" What IS "[30]KING JAMES ONLYISM ?" [31]KJV REVISION is NO "MYTH" ! The KJV IS A [32]COPYRIGHTED TRANSLATION ! Are MODERN English Bible Translations [33]IRREVERENT? "[34]NEW AGE BIBLE VERSIONS" -- A Critical Review "[35]Not One Jote or One Title..." -- A Plea for "Original KJV" Spelling "Original 1611" KJV [36]FOREVER LOST ! [37]QUESTIONS for the KJV-ONLY CULT QUOTES on [38]BIBLE TRANSLATIONS IS [39]REVISION of a Bible Translation Always Wrong? Does the [40]TEXTUS RECEPTUS "ATTACK" the Fundamentals? "Through his Blood" of [41]COLOSSIANS 1:14 & "KJV-Onlyism" [42]UNLEARNED MEN -- True Genealogy & Genesis of "KJV-Onlyism" [43]WESTCOTT & HORT -- Were They Members of a "Ghost Society ?" BIOGRAPHY PAGE [ball_gr.gif] The Pilgrim MAGAZINE [46][ball_re.gif] [47] PILGRIM PUBLICATIONSMAIN PAGE [48] CHS WORKS! ON BOARD [49] [pilg1.gif] [50][ball2_ye.gif] [51] PILGRIM PUBLICATIONSCATALOG [52] page address -- http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/defenskj.htm Suggested [53] Book Dealers & [54] BANNER LINKS for Consideration PAGE UPDATED September 21 - 1998 References 1. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/pilgrmtt.htm 2. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/pilgrim.htm 3. http://www.tegart.com/brian/bible/kjvonly/1611pref.html 4. http://www.tegart.com/brian/bible/kjvonly/1611pref.html 5. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/defenskj.htm#_Manuscripts 6. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/unlearnd.htm 7. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/revision.htm 8. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/1611lost.htm 9. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/revision.htm 10. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/revision.htm 11. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/geese.htm 12. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/defenskj.htm#_Manuscripts 13. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/writings.htm 14. mailto:pilgrimpub at aol.com 15. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/ssermons.htm 16. mailto:pilgrimpub at aol.com 17. mailto:pilgrimp at swbell.net 18. http://www.tegart.com/brian/bible/kjvonly/index.html 19. http://www.tegart.com/brian/bible/kjvonly/index.html 20. http://www.AbacusNet.net/comma 21. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/kjvhokey.htm 22. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/1611lost.htm 23. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/whatkjvo.htm 24. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/defenskj.htm#_TOP_OF_PAGE 25. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/defenskj.htm#_TOP_OF_PAGE 26. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/articles.htm#_ALL_ABOARD! 27. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/accuracy.htm 28. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/burgon.htm 29. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/kjvhokey.htm 30. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/whatkjvo.htm 31. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/revision.htm 32. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/kjvcopy.htm 33. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/moderntr.htm 34. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/newagebv.htm 35. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/bookman1.htm 36. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/1611lost.htm 37. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/questkjv.htm 38. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/quotesbt.htm 39. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/trattack.htm#_REVISION 40. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/trattack.htm 41. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/hisblood.htm 42. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/unlearnd.htm 43. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/whghost.htm 44. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/spurgeon.htm 45. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/pilgrim.htm 46. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/mainpage.htm 47. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/mainpage.htm 48. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/mainpage.htm 49. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/chsworks.htm 50. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/catalog.htm 51. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/catalog.htm 52. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/catalog.htm 53. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/dealers.htm 54. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/publinks.htm 55. http://www.spurgeon.org/ 56. http://www.gty.org/~phil/hall.htm 57. http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/homepage.htm -------------------------- Religions: Faith Divides the Survivors and It Unites Them, Too NYTimes January 12, 2005 By AMY WALDMAN HAMBANTOTA, Sri Lanka - Next door to four houses flattened by the tsunami, three rooms of Poorima Jayaratne's home still stood intact. She had a ready explanation for that anomaly, and her entire family's survival: she was a Buddhist, and her neighbors were not. "Most of the people who lost relatives were Muslim," said Ms. Jayaratne, 30, adding for good measure that two Christians were also missing. As proof, she pointed to the poster of Lord Buddha that still clung to the standing portion of her house. The earthquake and tsunami that killed at least 150,000 people reached from Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim majority nation, to India, the world's largest Hindu one. It hit Thailand's Buddhist majority and Muslim minority, and this tiny island country, which is mostly Buddhist but has sizable Hindu, Muslim and Christian populations. Across nations and religions there has been a search for explanations of not only why the tsunami came but why it killed some and not others - and a vibrant, sometimes virulent cottage industry is supplying them. Some discern a lesson that humanity should unite, citing the bodies of people of all religions tumbling together into mass graves, while others see affirmations of the rightness of their own path. Amid sympathy, there is judgment; beneath public compassion, a private moralizing. The tsunami may also deepen religious and ethnic divisions, perhaps dangerously. In Sri Lanka in recent years, dozens of churches have been attacked by militant Buddhists. It is the Christians, some Buddhists say, who are to blame for the tsunami. Din Syamsuddin, a cleric and deputy chief of Muhammadiyah, one of Indonesia's largest Muslim organizations, said the people of the Aceh region near the epicenter had calmly accepted the tragedy as a sign of God's disapproval and a divine examination to test their faith. Natural disasters are an indication that man has strayed from the path of God, he said: "We believe it is an examination, and we face it with passion and submission." Because a physical tragedy is only a test, Acehnese Muslims believe, the real punishment may come later, he said. According to Islamic doctrine, only after critical self-evaluation and positive deeds can people begin to repair their relationship with God. Rebuilding after the tsunami really means "returning to the center of life, which is God," Mr. Syamsuddin said. In mostly Hindu India, some see a divine reaction to a society whose changing economy is feeding corruption and greed. Muthuvel, 55, a fisherman in Nagappattinam whose wife is missing, said, "Fishermen are becoming greedy and jealous of other richer colleagues." Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, a guru in India who has built a huge following among the country's growing and stressed middle class, said: "If you forget nature, this is the way nature reminds you. Crime and stress punish nature." Here in Sri Lanka, four religions - Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity - coexist. Their followers' explanations often exhibit a commonness of belief, reflecting the primal reasons the religions evolve and the ways they have influenced one another over time. Most of the population follows the Theravada school of Buddhism, in which understanding dukkha, or suffering, is a central concept, as is accepting the inability to control it. The Venerable Battapola Nanda, a priest near Galle whose temple has become a relief camp, said the tsunami reinforced a central Buddhist tenet: "If you think something will happen, it never will," he said. "If you think it never will happen, it will." A similar sense of the limits of man and the greatness of God informed the words of Nasir Mohammad, a Muslim textile shop owner in Hambantota. It is not for humans to explain why so many children died, but to accept it, he said. "God makes the world," he said. "He can give, he can take. Sometimes he gives more. Sometimes he takes." Always, there is a search for signs, as in the conviction of Rose Jayasuriya, 59, that her older sister Patricia, 74, still missing, died blessed because she had just taken communion when the sea invaded their church. Sri Lankan Buddhists believe that rebirth follows death, and that sin and good deeds determine one's future in this life and the next. Many Buddhists said they suspected that those who had lost children had done something wrong in a previous life. M. Vilmot, 49, a baker whose 14 family members survived, was sure that those who had lost loved ones were being punished for some sin. "We earn money the correct way," he said. "That's why it didn't happen to us." His bakery, perhaps 30 feet from the sea, was damaged but not destroyed. He said he followed the five Theravada Buddhist precepts of not lying, stealing, drinking, philandering or killing animals, while others only gave money to temples and then misbehaved. G. H. Bandusile, 44, a fisherman's wife in Koggala, was certain that punishment was being meted out to the survivors, not the dead. "The good people are gone," said Ms. Bandusile, who lost her mother. "The bad people must stay and suffer." On a back road in the village of Nagurasa in the Galle district, T. G. David, a Buddhist farmer and strict vegetarian whose beard gave him the look of a prophet, said the fishermen devastated by the tsunami had paid the price for their work. "Fishermen are taking life," said Mr. David, who is 72. "Farmers have no problems." Sri Lankans of all religions tried to link the ferocity of nature to the fallibility of man. At the Sri Kathiresan Temple in Galle, a Hindu temple, A. P. Sethuraman, the trustee, blamed activities like drinking and drug use by foreigners in particular. "Many bad things happen along the seaside," he said. It was a lesson sent by Lord Shiva, he said: "You must live the right way." His proof was the local shrine to Vishnu and Kanda, two Hindu gods. It survived where the buildings all around it did not. Ramzy Mohammad, 32, a Muslim businessman, said many Sri Lankan Muslims believed God was angry about dissension in families, growing drug use and rape. "He got angry and washed up the water," said Mr. Mohammad, who lost 11 family members. The Rev. Charles Hewawasam, a Roman Catholic priest who lost a nun and 18 members of his congregation in Matara, Sri Lanka, saw the tsunami as a reaction to ethnic and religious tensions. "Nature is saying: 'You may have your powers, your fighting. I can destroy within a second the whole thing,' " he said. The dead, he added, "have sacrificed their lives for us to teach a lesson: be together, treat one another as human beings." But for some the kind of divisions he cited seem to have only been deepened by the disaster. At the Buddhist temple in Kalatura, Sri Lanka, Nimal Ranjit Perera blamed an apocryphal Christian who had made a cake in the shape of Lord Buddha and then cut it with a knife. Indonesia, he added as an aside, was struck because Indonesians had been manufacturing and wearing underwear with the image of Lord Buddha. At the same temple, Thenahandy Asha, 26, blamed carnivorous Christians who had "killed many animals" on Christmas, the day before the tsunami. "God was angry," she said, so on the next day poya, or full moon day, holy in Buddhism, he delivered his punishment. Samantha Silva, 24, agreed: God was angry that so many people had eaten meat, and consumed alcohol, on Christmas. But he could not explain why so many Buddhists had died, or so many children - his own girl and boy, ages 5 and 2, among them. His brain was too upset to puzzle that out, he said. All he could do was leave flowers and light lamps at the temple, and pray that his children's next lives would be good ones. Evelyn Rusli contributed reporting from Indonesia for this article, and Hari Kumar from India. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/12/international/worldspecial4/12religion.html From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 13 17:58:34 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 12:58:34 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: College Degree Still Pays, but It's Leveling Off Message-ID: College Degree Still Pays, but It's Leveling Off NYT January 13, 2005 By LOUIS UCHITELLE Ever so gradually, the big payoff in wages from a college education is losing its steam, which calls into question the emphasis that the White House, under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, has placed on a bachelor's degree as a sure-fire avenue to constantly rising incomes. Men and women with four years of college earn nearly 45 percent more on average than those with only a high school diploma, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The spread is as high as it has ever been, but it has been stuck in the 45 percent range since the late 1990's, and through the 1990's it rose much more slowly than in the 1980's. Although the payoff from a college education is leveling off, income inequality continues to grow. That suggested to some economists at the annual meeting last weekend of the American Economic Association that employers are making wage decisions on criteria that have little to do with the supply of and demand for educated workers. The leveling off of the wage premium for a four-year college degree has lasted long enough to suggest that it is not just a pause in an otherwise constantly rising payoff for those with bachelor's degrees, but another significant shift in labor market dynamics. The payoff for a college education fell in the 1970's only to reverse course, rising sharply in the 1980's and then leveling off in the 1990's, even showing signs of beginning to fall in the current decade. "We always knew that the return in wages to a college education fluctuates, but we forgot," said Cecilia E. Rouse, a Princeton University labor economist, "and now we are being forced to remember." The 1980's experience gave birth to the skills-mismatch thesis - the view that millions of workers lacked the college training required for the increasingly high-tech jobs that the new economy generated. Out of that thinking came stepped-up federal spending on college scholarships, tuition tax credits and the like. That put the burden on individuals to get the necessary education, with the government playing a supporting role as financier. The portion of the population with bachelor's degrees today is about 30 percent, not much above where it was in the 1980's. That limited supply of baccalaureates would suggest strong demand for them and a continual increase in the spread between what college graduates earn and what the much more numerous high school graduates earn. The dynamics, however, do not work that way. For one thing, the wage spread between high school and college graduates is determined by what happens to each side of the equation. During the 1980's, high-school-educated blue-collar workers lost well-paying jobs by the hundreds of thousands as domestic manufacturers increasingly lost out to foreign competitors. As their incomes fell, the spread widened rapidly. The wages of the high school educated did not begin to increase again until the late 1990's, when tight labor markets increased the demand for their services. Now, the incomes of the high school educated are rising almost as quickly as the incomes of the college educated, according to an analysis of wage data by the Economic Policy Institute. That brings into question how much value a college education adds. "The obsession with education has become a mantra to avoid tough political choices," said Harley Shaiken, a labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley. While education is essential, Mr. Shaiken and other economists argue, it is not enough. They would put more of the burden on government to close the wage gap, through such additional steps as raising the minimum wage and strengthening the laws governing collective bargaining. That argument may undervalue the advances that are being made in high school education, says Richard Murnane, a specialist in the economics of education at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard. He notes that many states now require high school seniors to pass "exit exams" to get their diplomas. Because these exams require considerable proficiency in reading and mathematics, "employers are beginning to see that high school graduates have more skills than they used to have," Mr. Murnane said. If college graduates ask for too much money, he said, employers may hire these high school graduates instead. Another dynamic also undermines the value of a college degree, says David H. Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While the college premium appears to be leveling off, the spread between the incomes of the highest-earning Americans and those in the middle expanded almost as fast in the 1990's as it did in the 1980's. "If I may speak somewhat loosely, there continues to be rising demand for people who have very strong cognitive, managerial and communications skills," Mr. Autor said. "The vast middle, whether they are college educated or not, are not in that upper category of cognitive elite. The elite is college educated, but not all the college educated are those people." The leveling off of the college premium came up in various panel presentations at the American Economic Association meeting in Philadelphia and in interviews with economists. One panel explored what Richard B. Freeman, a Harvard labor economist, described as the seemingly inexhaustible supply of immigrants with advanced college degrees who hold or seek jobs in America, depressing the demand for and the wages of all well-educated job seekers, immigrants and native Americans alike. Another study, presented by Robert G. Valletta, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, found that wage increases associated with computer use at work were "relatively constant across educational categories" from 1984 through 2003, favoring the college educated only from 1997 to 2001, the era of the dot-com boom. A third study, presented by Ms. Rouse and Lisa Barrow of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, found that the payoff from schooling was roughly the same across ethnic and racial groups - rising in tandem in the 1980's and tending to level off in the 1990's. Their study, they said, knocked down the view, held by some economists, that the return to education was higher "in individuals who come from more advantaged families." The study also added to the documentation that the income return for schooling rose in the 1980's, adding roughly 10 percent to a worker's wage in 1990 for each year of education, up from 7 percent in 1980. Since 1990, however, the added value has remained at 10 percent. That puts Mr. Freeman of Harvard on the spot. He first made his name as a labor economist with the publication in 1976 of a book entitled "The Overeducated American," which argued that the college wage premium, which was then falling, would continue to fall. His reasoning was that the demand for college-educated workers was being suppressed by the large number of educated baby boomers taking jobs, while the growth in exports was sustaining the demand for high-school-educated factory workers. All too soon, Mr. Freeman turned out to be dead wrong. "The only reason the payoff for a college degree went up in the 1980's was that there was a wonderful relative shift in the demand for educated workers," he said. "But there is no rule of law that says demand for educated labor will always rise faster than the supply. It could go the other way." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/13/business/13pay.html From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 13 17:59:15 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 12:59:15 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: How the Mac was born, and other tales Message-ID: How the Mac was born, and other tales NYT January 11, 2005 Scott Ard, Staff Writer, CNET News.com Steve Jobs will be the star attraction when the Macworld Conference and Expo opens to the public Tuesday, but many Mac fans might be just as interested in hearing from one of the original Mac's creators. Andy Hertzfeld will be signing copies of his book, "Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac was Made" on the conference floor. Actually, the book's title is a bit misleading -- rather than a story, it's a collection of dozens of short stories that provide a unique behind-the-scenes look at the birth of the Mac. Hertzfeld was a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley in 1978 when he spent $1,300 for an Apple II. While digging under its hood, Hertzfeld became so obsessed and appreciative of the work that went into creating one of the first personal computers that he dropped out of school and joined Apple Computer in the summer of 1979. Another 18 months or so later and he was among the handful of people creating the Mac. >From 1981 until 1984, Hertzfeld worked alongside Mac legends like Bill Atkinson (considered the Mac's software genius) and Burrell Smith (the hardware guru). And, of course, Steve Wozniak and Jobs, who continually reminded the Mac team that they were going to change the world with a powerful but affordable computer sporting a graphical user interface ordinary people could use. Soon after the Mac's release, much of the original team dispersed, and Hertzfeld was no exception, taking his leave two months after the airing of the famous Super Bowl "1984" ad. He went on to co-found three companies -- Radius, General Magic and Eazel -- but it was his tales of working on the Mac that continued to enthrall friends and colleagues. He first published many of the stories privately on the Web and asked his former colleagues to vet the stories for accuracy or to submit their own tales. He later opened the site to the public and has now published the stories, and many early photographs, in book form. Hertzfeld recently spoke with CNET News.com about his work on the Mac, his reasons for documenting it and the reaction from his former co-workers. Displaying the same enthusiasm that drove him to log long days at Apple more than 20 years ago, Hertzfeld was not only quick to recount his experiences but also to also give his thoughts on a range of current topics, including the rise of open source, Microsoft's "crushing" of innovation, the music industry's vain fight against file-sharing and Apple's decision to keep the iPod closed. He also mentioned that he may start publishing more stories about Apple before and after the Mac. Have you heard the one about Jobs, Wozniak, handicapped parking spaces and the Cupertino police? Q: How did you get involved with Apple? A: I bought an Apple II and it fascinated me. It sucked up my life -- first my free time and then my not free time. I became obsessed with the Apple II to the point where I had to go work at Apple. How did you get on the Mac project? I became friends with Burrell Smith, the hardware designer of the Mac. I started helping him out in various ways and then on -- I can say the exact date, even though it happened 24 years ago -- Feb. 25, 1981, (there was a) management shake-up in the Apple II part of Apple, where I was working, where they fired all the bosses on the same day. I was pretty upset that they fired my partner on my project and I told someone I was thinking of leaving. They thought I was a good guy and didn't want me to leave so they said, "Well, what can we do to get you to stay?" And I said, "Well, how about working on the Mac?" And the next day I was working on the Mac. Was there a lot of buzz already within Apple about the development of the Mac? It was mixed. For the whole first year I was working on it there was buzz, but it was not necessarily positive. The Macintosh was the price of an Apple II but had the features of a Lisa, so it managed to get at odds with all the big teams at Apple. And it was considered a Skunk Works project. It wasn't the future of the company; the future of the company was the Lisa and the Apple III, and we were more like a little scruffy research project. It was certainly that way, almost insignificant, when Jef (Raskin) was running it. When Steve (Jobs) took over, that got a lot of attention. But even in those days Steve was thought of as a loose cannon more than, you know, the admiral or anything. Steve was never the CEO of Apple until the late '90s. He was a VP and he became the chairman of the board in 1981, but he didn't really have that much organizational authority. They thought we were way overambitious, and we were also a much smaller team than the big teams. To do a major project really takes at least 50 people. We were like five people. But then as we made progress, gradually Apple became aware that this is going to be a bigger thing. By the time the Mac shipped, the entire company was pretty excited about it. Was there a lot of politics at that time? A lot of politics. In the book, I have a number of stories that address some of the tensions, especially with the Lisa team. I have a story in there called "And Another Thing." That's the name of the story where Larry Tesler, who was the manager of the Lisa applications team, asked Burrell and myself to give a demo to the Lisa team. One of the main Lisa guys, Rich Page, kind of wasn't invited to the demo, but he stormed in and started screaming at us during the demo about how the Macintosh was going to destroy the Lisa and destroy Apple. He was like raving -- really, really emotional, almost crying -- and then he kind of said his piece. Everyone was shocked and stunned, and he stepped out of the room and he slammed the door. I can still remember how the door reverberated in the stunned silence after that. Larry Tesler was very embarrassed that (Rich) did that, so he's trying to figure out what to say. But as he's trying to figure out what to say, Rich stormed into the room again and started ranting a second time. Isn't there some truth, though, to what he said -- that the Mac was a threat to the Lisa? It was going to have similar features and cost a lot less but was not slated to reach the market for a couple more years, thus dampening Lisa sales. Yeah, definitely. Certainly there's a complex nest of issues there with the relationship between the Lisa and the Mac. But hindsight tells us that the Mac was on the right path. If we hadn't developed the Mac, I don't think there'd be an Apple. Why write a book about Apple and the creation of the Mac? There's been many books about Apple, and typically they're extremely self-serving. They end up promoting the person that wrote the book. (Former Apple CEO John) Scully's book is a great example, but the quintessential example is Gil Amelio's book, in terms of being self-serving. It was almost like an apology. Are there any other books on the birth of the Mac? No. Nobody else who was on the team I think has written a book. Did you take a lot of notes during the creation of the Mac, recording the development? Yeah, I had my notebooks. When we started doing publicity for the Mac in the fall of 1983, I wrote a little history of what had happened, just like three pages worth of notes at that time, and I hung on to those. I first had the idea to do the Folklore project in 1996, right after General Magic. At that time, I did a prototype Web site and I wrote down the titles of a hundred stories, so it was a little fresher in my mind because that was eight years ago. But I never pursued it until 2003. What's been the reaction from people like Bill Atkinson and Burrell Smith? Have you had a chance to talk with Burrell since it came out? I gave him a copy of the book, but I haven't been able to talk to him. Burrell's really shy these days and is hard to get ahold of. I left it on his doorstep, so I'm not sure what Burrell thinks about it. I am a little worried because Burrell is so private that, even though I'm very complimentary to him and I don't think he'd disagree with anything, he just doesn't want to have his face paraded in front of the world. Bill cooperated with me enormously during the book. I'm good friends with Bill; I see him regularly...I couldn't convince him to write a story because he just doesn't like writing. He loves photographing -- he's more visually oriented than verbally. But I talked with him for dozens of hours about lots of the details and went over stuff with him. How about Jef Raskin? Jef Raskin is the single individual who disagrees with the way I'm telling the story, and he was unhappy with the book when he first found out about it, and I suspect he's still unhappy now. Jef does claim he invented certain key concepts when no one else thinks he did. Jef actually was not around for almost the entire time the Mac was developed. He left the day before I started (in 1981). Jef's a tremendous individual and he deserves enormous credit for having the original vision for the Macintosh, starting the project and putting together a dynamite, small team. But then he got at odds with the team and left. Jef had a lot of ideas about how the Macintosh should be, but they're not in the Macintosh. If you're interested: Jef, because he left early, by 1985 he had already designed and licensed a computer that does embody all his ideas -- it's called the Canon Cat. Then who would you consider the father of the Macintosh? Steve Jobs is who I would call the father of the Mac. In second place I'd put Burrell Smith and in third place I'd put Bill Atkinson. What's your response when people say the Mac engineers stole everything from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center? I just say, well, someone doesn't know what they're talking about. Maybe in the very broadest sense we were inspired by Xerox. But literally no code was taken, I mean not a single line of code. Didn't a lot of people join Apple from Xerox? Just one person on the Mac team, more on the Lisa team -- four or five. Many of the ones who came from PARC came after the Mac shipped. Alan Kay, who was the visionary and driving force behind Xerox PARC, came to work at Apple just about the time I was leaving, in March 1984. Once he came there, about 10 PARC people came. What was the attraction, that Apple could get the technology into the market? Yeah, sure. The people developing the stuff at Xerox PARC were different types of people. Some were professorial and academic, and they didn't really care if their stuff was used by people. They just wanted to explore new ideas. They were happy there. But the people who wanted to make an impact on the world and improve the lives of their friends and stuff like that, they were very frustrated -- nothing ever came out. So they saw Apple come out with something that embodied all of their ideals, but their kid brother could afford it. They were very attracted to that. They came to Apple to make a difference. How strong was the feeling at the time that you were changing the world? We had Steve Jobs drumming that into us constantly. You can say it, but a lot of times such a thing could be hype. In fact, most of the time, to say, "You're going to change the world; you're going to make a momentous difference," well, you know... The Mac engineers were smart and a bit cynical of being manipulated by Steve. Once you get manipulated seven times, the eighth time you're a little wary. But we believed it to a large degree. There were moments when I thought we wouldn't pull it off. But I used to work late at night and I remember, like in 1982, walking out late at night, say 11 p.m., looking up at the sky and thinking, "Boy, I'm right in the middle of doing something that's going to really matter." We loved the romance of personal computers. Many of us were Apple II fanatics, and we saw what was missing in the Apple II was the usability for ordinary people. So we thought we could combine the affordability of the Apple II with something really, really usable for ordinary people, and then (to) make it joyous and fun to boot, we'd really have something that was special. Was it hard to shoehorn all the software ambitions into the Mac? You bet. Rod Holt, who was the original engineering manager, has a sort of pungent phrase: fitting 10 pounds of s -- t in a 9-pound bag. We were always on the verge of running out of memory. We didn't have enough memory to do what we wanted to and so we had to be ingenious, but even so we were right on the edge. What's an example of something you had to sacrifice? Various features in the Toolbox had to be pared back. We had to move some code from ROM to disk. The disks weren't that capacious, so it ate up another 10 percent of everyone's disk if you wanted a bootable disk. In fact, the Macintosh that was used to demo at the Mac intro was a 512k Mac. We knew we had to just hang on there and get the platform established and we had the 512k (coming out later), which had plenty of memory. What made the Mac successful over the Lisa? What I like to think is (that) the Macintosh was tapped back into the original spirit and vision of Apple, where both the Lisa and the Apple III were more like Apple trying to be a grown-up company. Apple had a fantastic, amazing set of people, but they weren't necessarily the type of people who would work at large corporations. It was a lot of rebel spirit, and Apple maturing was hiring all those more mature, seasoned managers (and) developing big projects -- the Lisa had hundreds of people working on it. By the time the Lisa shipped, there were over 300 people in the Lisa division. The Mac was more like a back-to-the-roots thing. Really the reason the Mac succeeded was the people were passionate and brilliant and motivated and devoted their lives to it. Whereas, the Lisa maybe had a little bit of that, but it was much more corporate, and a job, as opposed to a passion. When you look at the last 20 years of PC development, are you surprised at how much has changed, or how little? Both. On the hardware side, how much. Moore's Law predicted it, but then to actually see it play out in such a stunning fashion. I mean now the computer I'm using every day has literally 8,000 times the memory that the original Mac had. The hardware is so capable compared to that, it's almost like a dream. Whereas the software is where it's disappointing. The basic software since the Macintosh has evolved at a snail's pace and in some ways it's even gone backwards in usability. The metaphor of the interface has hardly changed at all. That's right. That's not because of a lack of possibilities. It has to do with the business dynamics of the industry -- essentially Microsoft getting the monopoly and being anti-innovation and establishing an environment where innovation was crushed rather than rewarded. That's the PC industry the last 10 years. Was it a mistake to not license the Mac OS? Definitely, but on the other hand it's just one of those things that you'll never know. It's so much in the genetics of Apple to control, to not be an open thing. And if the Mac was open like that, it would have just been so different that you can't ever say what really would have happened. But I err to the side of openness. People say the Mac was closed... at some levels it was closed, like you couldn't stick a new circuit board in it. But it was conceived to be very open from the very beginning in the software sense. It encouraged open APIs. It wasn't open source, but we considered it to be an open system. But it wasn't open in the sense that we could license it and build a software business... at the time Apple just didn't see the value equation. Even at any given point along, once they did really see that it was the right thing to do, the transition was treacherous. It would have been really, really hard for Apple. I would say a bigger mistake...would be charging the premium price for so long. That really hampered the platform and contributed to the troubles they eventually got in. In 1984, $2,500 was a pretty steep price for the Mac. Yeah. I have a story in (the book) called "Price Fight" about how the engineers the whole time we were developing the Mac thought it would cost $1,500, and we felt rather betrayed. How do you feel about the iPod being closed now? The same way. I think Apple is making a blunder not licensing FairPlay. Ultimately, when you boil it down, it comes to respect for your customer. I think Apple is showing disrespect to the customers by locking them in. Do you think they'll change? Hard to say. I've had discussions with Steve Jobs about that exact topic. He doesn't see it. What it will take is a really strong competitor. Microsoft? No, it's not Microsoft. Microsoft's business model is licensing the software, and that's what they've done in the Media Player range to a variety of different companies. It's maybe the combination of Microsoft and someone making exquisite hardware with them -- but it just can't be exquisite because of that divide, it's not the same thing. Apple's great strength is doing the hardware and the software at the same time. Mac fans are often described as fanatic. What is the "cult of Mac"? The cult of Mac, I think what it is...is essentially passion. It starts with the designers and the people in the company being passionate about what they're doing. It starts with the designers making something that they want for themselves more than anything else in the world, that's the single secret. As soon as you're making something you want more than anything else, you don't have to do research about the customers. You just look inside yourself. You run the risk of being wrong about it, but at least you make something that has integrity. Maybe even a better word is love. You fill the product with love and then people will love it. Do you still see that passion today? Definitely. Steve Jobs -- he only has one gear. What about in the industry in general? Definitely, again look at open source. Those people mostly aren't doing it for money. Eric Raymond has the phrase "scratching an itch," which is a similar type thing. You show me a great program and I'll show you a passionate individual somewhere behind it. What do you think the challenges are for the PC industry? The biggest, most important challenge is renormalizing after the nightmare of Windows. You can see the handwriting on the wall -- the Wintel thing hasn't run its course yet, but it's run enough of its course that we're on the downhill side and you can kind of see the end of it. So I'm hoping a much fairer, freer, more robust software industry emerges. The big challenge is where will the lock-ins and the values be? You consistently see the value move up and up the chain, from the hardware -- and Microsoft commoditized the hardware -- and now the operating system has been commoditized. That's happened, it's just a question of how it plays out. How Microsoft reacts, that's going to be fascinating to see. Already you can feel the hold slipping, but they can really influence it a lot. Will they embrace the new paradigm or fight it? I have no idea. But that's going to be the story of the next, say, two years. There's every indication that they're going to try to use digital rights management and security to establish lock-in at a different level. Will people fall into the trap? I don't know. Getting the free software to be the basis of the shared infrastructure, that's the big change that will be happening. The challenge for everyone is doing it in a way that is great for the customers, developers and the companies. Another challenge is furthering the network revolution. The ubiquitous connectivity profoundly influences how we use our computers. We're 10 years down the road -- we're just in the middle of the transition. Essentially the hegemony of the PC is over. Now the center of every user's world will be in a network repository projected into many different devices. How those ecologies interact and work out, that's the story of the next five, 10 years. Apple chose a unique position regarding open source -- they took FreeBSD and layered their proprietary OS on top of it to get some of the benefits of open source. Do you think they should have chosen Linux? And what would that have meant? I think they still could choose Linux. The key decision was NeXT choosing Unix back in 1986. They're already Unix based -- that's good. Taking the commodity part where they're not really adding value and open-sourcing it, that's a great strategy -- Darwin and all that. (But) it's not enough. Apple is a closed platform -- they just opened the part they don't care about. I'd like to see them contribute a lot more, and I think there could be tremendous business gains. I've talked with Steve Jobs about this too, and he doesn't really see it. I had a talk with him about a year ago where I was telling him, "Hey, there's this huge opportunity, things are shifting." And he kind of said, "No, they're not. Windows is going to be dominant for at least the next 10 years." I said something like, "Is it going to be the rest of our lives?" He said, "Depends on how long you live." How would things be different for Apple if they switched to Linux from FreeBSD? Technically that doesn't make much of a difference at all. Commercially...The more free software on the system, the more alliances it would allow them to make with companies like IBM, and some of the other open-source systems. IBM survived the nightmare of this Microsoft hegemony, the last thing they want to do is put Steve Jobs on Bill Gates' throne. By having the system be fundamentally open at various levels -- you know you have the right to fork, so you don't have that control and you can have competitors cooperate. We saw that in the Eazel days. We had a big announcement with Sun and HP, both supporting the same open thing -- arch enemies, but they're able to work together on the same piece of software because neither of them has proprietary rights. Doesn't that create a world in which the oligarchy would benefit? Sun and HP can say, "Let's use common open platforms and none of you small guys can rise up because we've got the money and the people." No, because they're open to innovation. Let's say I have a brilliant idea, that if I can make it happen users will love it and it'll make a difference. In a closed platform...I'm shut out just because I don't have the source code; I can't modify it. Whereas when it's open, any kid can come in there, do their thing. Making money is a different story -- it's complicated and very dependent on the details. But I believe you can have a much healthier environment. What do you see for the future of intellectual property on this stuff? That's one of the great questions, I think, for the next 10 to 20 years. Not just code but the entertainment bits, music and video. I think eventually it will work itself out like all technological changes in the past. Essentially the record companies will be happy (that) people are file sharing 10 years from now because it means people are listening to their music. Of course, what a record company is, is going to undergo a redefinition. My values are simple, the greatest value for the greatest number. Free music flowing -- it's like a boon for mankind; it makes everyone's lives better. I don't think it necessarily has to undermine people's businesses. It's certainly better for the artists -- I think you maybe get better music on a system where the artists rather than the executives are getting the lion's share of compensation. I'm a big BitTorrent user and chagrined that they shut down SuprNova two days ago -- where the SuprNova guys decided to punt because of various legal pressures. Clearly a mistake on behalf of the music companies, because here you have this site that could help them get a handle on it. By putting it out of business all it will do is make the stealth systems stealthier. There's obvious things you could do to BitTorrent where you wouldn't need the central site -- that's just going to happen sooner. Suing your customers is not a winning strategy. The contradictions are amazing. For the last 40-some years they've been paying radio stations to broadcast their music for free. It's really hard for me to see the big difference between that and file sharing. What's the next business or process to be disrupted by technology the way the music and movie industries have been? Politics, and we've seen the stirrings of that in the last election cycle. Eventually the fact that everyone can be connected to each other through this open system with all the information at their fingertips should have a profound effect on our political system, hopefully repairing it. I look at the last election result and I think, "Something's broken." The Net is going to impact every single business you can think of -- it already has to some degree. It's sort of at a midpoint, maybe. It's ready for its bar mitzvah, not for its marriage. Blogging is changing the way people communicate. Are you a blogger? No. I think people overrate blogging. I think the overall phenomenon to me is Web pages. Blogs are just Web pages, a certain stylized form of Web page. Much of the blogging is driven by egotism. I'm down on podcasts. I think that's ridiculous. Suddenly you're taking the information and making it completely inaccessible. You can't read it, and besides a podcast is nothing. It's streaming MP3s that's good, but no one can take credit for inventing a new term because streaming MP3s is simple and has been around for a while. Doing it through RSS enclosures is basically bad -- to automatically download big files before hearing them. The whole thing about audio is that it has small enough bandwidth that you can stream. You just can't stream from an iPod because it doesn't have a network connection, yet. I'm excited about getting an iPod with 802.11 so I can stream to my AirPort Express without carrying my Mac around. Back to the Mac. What's the coolest piece of memorabilia you have from your days of working on it? I'd say my wire-wrap prototype. I have the third wire-wrap board. If you've ever seen a wire-wrap you know why I'd say it's fascinating. It's got thousands of wires wrapped around pins in the back. It was the third Mac prototype ever made. I had two of them and one of them I donated to the Computer Museum. Burrell has one; there's two others. I have this great letter from Bill Gates that's on my Folklore site but they wouldn't let me put it in the book...about my Switcher program. The story in the book is how I had a negotiation with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at separate times for selling them the same program. I tried to write it in such a way that really contrasted their world views. Bill Gates -- to try to get me to sell him Switcher at a low price -- used an extremely logical and analytical approach. Steve Jobs used an extremely intuitive approach -- no reasoning behind his number at all. But just, "I'm right!" What's next for you? If the book does really well, I'd like to do a sequel-prequel type thing of all the early Apple stories, mainly starring Steve Wozniak. I have a great set of stories that have never been written up in that time frame. Give us an example of a Steve Wozniak story. Here's a really quick one that follows off a story that is in the book, about Steve Jobs parking in the handicapped spaces -- he always parked in the handicapped spaces. One day in October 1983 I got a phone call at my desk at Apple from the Cupertino police saying something like, "You reported that car parked in the handicapped space. Well, we can't really tow it away because the handicapped space is not properly marked." I said, "What?" Well, it turned out that Woz called up the Cupertino police reporting Steve Jobs' car illegally parked in a handicapped space and told them the person reporting it was Andy Hertzfeld and gave them my phone number. So that was a prank on both me and Steve Jobs; it just didn't quite come off, thank God. I could have just imagined Steve having to go check out his car and finding out that Andy Hertzfeld had reported it. http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_2100-1082_3-5521058.html From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 13 18:00:06 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 13:00:06 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: A Censorship Story Goes Up in Smoke Message-ID: A Censorship Story Goes Up in Smoke NYT January 13, 2005 By SARAH LYALL LONDON, Jan. 12 - The story has been around so long that it has acquired the patina of truth: how the prudish Victorian critic John Ruskin was so horrified by the erotic drawings left behind by the artist J. M. W. Turner that, like some 19th-century Savonarola, he burned them on a bonfire after Turner's death. But like the similarly titillating tale that attributes Ruskin's failure to consummate his marriage to his revulsion at the sight of his bride's pubic hair, the story might not be true. Ian Warrell, a Turner expert and curator at the Tate Britain, says that a painstaking trawl through Turner's work has led him to conclude that most, if not all, the erotic art still remains in the collection and that the bonfire, said to have occurred in 1858, almost certainly never happened. "Ruskin appears to have been tried and convicted by the standard version of his involvement with the Turner bequest, which characterizes him as the man who destroyed any surviving evidence of his hero's sex life," Mr. Warrell wrote in an essay. Although the bonfire incident "has passed into the popular imagination as one of the defining landmarks of Victorian censorship," Mr. Warrell wrote, "what evidence there is to support this version of events is surprisingly slight." Mr. Warrell's essay first appeared in the British Art Journal in 2003, but received scant attention beyond the scholarly world. An article about its conclusions appeared recently in The Guardian here. The erotic work, part of the enormous cache of Turner material at the Tate Britain, comprises dozens of sketches of naked women and nudes of both sexes in erotic entanglements, and was most likely inspired by Turner's trips to brothels and other places of ill repute. "They show him to be open to all visual impulses and to be able to express even more aspects of human life," said James Hamilton, the university curator at the University of Birmingham and the author of "Turner" (Random House, 2003). "And so they increase his genius, in my view, because they're very beautiful." But Ruskin, whose "Modern Painters" series and other works established him as the premier cultural critic of his time, and who had long been Turner's greatest champion, was horrified by the sketches. He discovered them after Turner's death, when he was cataloguing the artist's work for the National Gallery, to which Turner had left his vast collection. (The Tate, an offshoot of the National Gallery, opened in 1897 and took over most of the Turner material.) With his intimate knowledge of Turner's work, Ruskin was singularly well suited to the job. But he was shaken and disgusted by the erotica, which militated against everything pure and classical that he cherished and which he was convinced would tarnish Turner's artistic standing if made public. Stephen Wildman, a Ruskin scholar and curator of the Ruskin Library at Lancaster University, said he agreed with Ruskin's assessment of the work. "They're little scrappy drawings of people in intimate congress, and they're all part of an artist's observation of nature, you could say," Mr. Wildman said. "But to Ruskin's mind they would have been distasteful and not very interesting." The story of the bonfire is based on several published accounts. But significantly, the accounts all appeared years after the fact and came from people, including Ruskin, with self-interested reasons for spreading the tale. The most compelling argument for the bonfire's existence came from Ruskin, in a letter he wrote in 1862 to Ralph Nicholson Wornum, the keeper of the National Gallery and his supposed collaborator in the destruction of the Turner sketches four years earlier. "I am satisfied that you had no other course than to burn them, both for the sake of Turner's reputation (they having been assuredly drawn under a certain condition of insanity) and for your own peace," Ruskin wrote. "And I am glad to be able to bear witness to their destruction; and I hereby declare that the parcel of them was undone by me, and all the obscene drawings it contained burnt in my presence in the month of December, 1858." But Mr. Warrell argues that Ruskin's letter might have been motivated by recent passage of the Obscene Publications Act, which made it illegal to possess pornographic pictures, and was an effort to protect Wornum and himself. In addition, with the recent publication of a scandalous Turner biography, with which Ruskin had initially cooperated, it was perhaps to his advantage to appear as if he had been trying to protect Turner's reputation by eradicating the erotica. The matter came up again in 1869, in an entry in the diary of William Michael Rossetti describing a gathering in Chelsea of pre-Raphaelite luminaries, including Ford Madox Brown and William Morris. "Among the Turners left to the National Gallery were a large number of a great degree of indecency," the entry reads in part. "These were burned by Wornum and Ruskin, at the time when the latter was arranging the bequest at the National Gallery." But, Mr. Warrell points out, the source for the story was Charles Augustus Howell, Ruskin's indiscreet and unreliable private secretary, who had his own motives for spreading interesting gossip. In any case, there is no physical evidence that any of the pictures were destroyed, and Wornum, who kept a diary, never mentioned meeting Ruskin, or burning any pictures, on the relevant dates in 1858, Mr. Warrell says. With about 30,000 works on paper by Turner in the Tate collection and with various methods of counting individual works used over the years, it is impossible to tell if every drawing still exists. But Mr. Warrell says he can account for almost every page torn out of the dozens of notebooks that Turner left behind. It seems that rather than destroying the works he found distasteful, Ruskin concealed them, in some cases gathering and tucking them away (one of the folders containing erotica was marked "kept as evidence of a failure of mind only") and in other cases folding pages over to cover the racy bits. Mr. Wildman, the Ruskin scholar, said he hoped the new information would help put to rest the bonfire story and educate people about the great service Ruskin did for Turner. "Without Ruskin, we wouldn't have the Turner bequest as it exists today," he said. "He cataloged it, he put it on its first public exhibition and he did an enormous amount to champion Turner." As for Ruskin and his marital life, Mr. Wildman said that the critic's marriage, to Effie Gray, was indeed never consummated. Ruskin admitted it himself when his wife sought a dissolution of the marriage in 1854 to marry the painter John Everett Millais, whom she had met when he was painting her husband's portrait. (Happily for her, that marriage was consummated; the couple had eight children.) But Mr. Wildman called the story about Ruskin's being upset by Effie's pubic hair, supposedly because he had previously seen only classical depictions of nudes, "another piece of nonsense." "He went to Oxford as an undergraduate, and it was almost certain that he would have been exposed to the things students normally get up to," Mr. Wildman said. "There would have been no difficulty in either seeing the real thing, or the equivalent of modern pornography." Mr. Hamilton, the Turner scholar, said that Mr. Warrell's research had helped correct Ruskin's reputation as a hysterical scold. "The man has been maligned as a sort of Victorian prude with personal problems," Mr. Hamilton said. "Whatever the case, this is not borne out by the way he actually cared for the future of Turner's bequest. Whatever his personal views, and in spite of the Obscene Publications Act, he worked very hard to protect them. So he's a hero, really." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/13/arts/design/13rusk.html From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 13 18:06:18 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 13:06:18 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: American values: The triumph of the religious right Message-ID: American values: The triumph of the religious right http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3375543 Nov 11th 2004 | WASHINGTON,DC It may look like that, but liberals should think again before despairing IN A novel, set in the 1960s, by John Kennedy Toole, "A Confederacy of Dunces", the hero, Ignatius Reilly, goes to a gay party to drum up political support. In the centre of another knot [of guests] stood a lout in a black leather jacket who was teaching judo holds, to the great delight of his epicene students. "Oh, do teach me that," someone near the wrestler screamed after an elegant guest had been twisted into an obscene position and then thrown to the floor to land with a crash of cuff-links and other, assorted jewelry. "Good gracious," Ignatius spluttered. "I can see that we're going to have a great deal of trouble capturing the conservative rural red-neck Calvinist vote." Now, it seems, the conservative rural red-neck Calvinist vote has captured America. A plurality of voters, emerging from poll booths, said that the most important issue in the campaign had been "moral values". It was not, it seemed, Iraq or the economy. And eight out of ten of these moralists voted for George Bush. The thought that the anti-gay, anti-abortion Christian right had decided the election dismayed left-wing Americans. Garry Wills in the New York Times suggested that a fundamentalist Christian revival was in revolt against the traditions of the Enlightenment, on which the country is based. "I hope we all realise that, as of November 2nd, gay rights are officially dead. And that from here on we are going to be led even closer to the guillotine," said Larry Kramer, a playwright and AIDS activist. Secular Europeans wondered whether they and the Americans were now on different planets. The week before the election, Rocco Buttiglione had been forced to withdraw his nomination as a European Union commissioner because he had said that homosexuality was a sin, and that marriage exists for children and the protection of women. In America, he would probably have won Ohio. Der Spiegel, Germany's most popular newsweekly, put the statue of liberty on its cover, blindfolded by an American flag. Britain's Daily Mirror asked, "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" And a contributor to Pravda, that bastion of religious expertise, claimed that "the Christian fundamentalists of America are the mirror image of the Taliban, both of which insult and deny their Gods." Hang on a moment. It is perfectly true that one of America's most overtly religious presidents of recent times has been re-elected with an increased majority. It is also true that 13 states this year passed state referendums banning gay marriage--in most cases by larger majorities than Mr Bush managed--and that a plurality of American voters put "moral values" at the top of their list of concerns. A moral majority? Not really But they hardly formed a moral majority. Look at the figures: the moralists' share of the electorate was only 22%, just two points more than the share of those who cited the economy, and three points more than those who nominated terrorism as the top priority. A few points difference (and the exit polls are, after all, not entirely reliable) and everyone would have been saying the election was about jobs or Iraq. Moreover, that 22% share is much lower than it was in the two previous presidential elections, in 2000 and 1996. Then, 35% and 40%, respectively, put moral or ethical issues top, and a further 14% and 9% put abortion first, an option that was not given in 2004. Thus, in those two elections, about half the electorate said they voted on moral matters; this time, only a fifth did. Of course, in those previous elections there was no war on terrorism, nor had there just been a recession. So one could argue that it was remarkable that even a fifth of voters were still concerned about moral matters when so many other big issues were at stake. Maybe, but all that this means is that the war on terrorism has not fundamentally altered, or made irrelevant, the cultural, moral and religious divisions that have polarised America for so long. A church-going land It is also important to judge the religious-moral vote against the background of American religiosity in general. America is traditionally much more religious than any European country, with 80% of Americans saying they believe in God and 60% agreeing that "religion plays an important part in my life". What may be changing is that the country is getting a little more intense in its religious beliefs. Also, and this could be more important, it is becoming more willing to tolerate religious involvement in the public sphere. A study by the Pew Research Centre reported that the number of those who "agree strongly" with core items of Christian dogma rose substantially between 1965 and 2003. So did the number of those who believe that there are clear guidelines about good and evil, and that these guidelines apply regardless of circumstances. Gallup polls in the 1960s found that over half of all Americans thought that churches should not be involved in politics. Now, over half think that they can be. At the same time, alongside all these signs of more intense religiosity, there are indications of mellowing and tolerance. Support for interracial dating has virtually doubled since 1987; discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS has become socially unacceptable; tolerance for gays in public life has risen by half--though gay marriage is still seen as a totally different matter. Americans may be holding tenaciously to a strict view of personal morality, but they say that they do not want to impose their views on others (abortion seems to be the big exception). The fact that there was a substantial religious-moral vote is not by itself evidence of a political breakthrough by religious conservatives. Nor is it necessarily a sign of growing intolerance. The real question is whether there was anything new about what happened last week that might pave the way for such things to happen in the future. The answer is yes, though not quite in the way you might expect. In 2000, 15m evangelical Protestants voted. They accounted for 23% of the electorate, and 71% of them voted for Mr Bush. This time, estimates Luis Lugo, the director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, they again accounted for about 23% of the electorate--which means that evangelicals did not increase their share of the vote. But overall turnout was much higher, and 78% of the evangelicals who voted, voted for Mr Bush. That works out at roughly 3.5m extra votes for him. Mr Bush's total vote rose by 9m (from 50.5m in 2000 to 59.5m), so evangelical Protestants alone accounted for more than a third of his increased vote. In close association Thus, the election revealed that though the evangelical share of the electorate has not increased, evangelicals have become much more important to the Republican Party. According to a study for the Pew Forum by John Green of the University of Akron, Ohio, the proportion of evangelicals calling themselves Republicans has risen from 48% to 56% over the past 12 years, making them among the most solid segments of the party's base. This close association between party and evangelicals took a lock-step forward during the campaign. Mr Bush's chief policy adviser and campaign chairman held weekly telephone conversations with prominent evangelical Christians, such as Jim Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family, and the Rev Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention. Ralph Reed, formerly the executive director of the Christian Coalition, became the campaign's regional co-ordinator for the south-east--a move that encapsulates the integration of evangelical voters into the party. Hitherto, evangelical Protestants have been the objects of Republican outreach. This time, they took the initiative themselves, asking for and distributing voter registration cards and collecting the signatures required to put anti-gay-marriage initiatives on the ballot. As the church organisers tell it, the Republican Party was left playing catch-up. A leaderless lot The campaign also revealed how decentralised the evangelical movement is. There are respected figures, of course, such as Mr Dobson, and there are self-appointed prophets, such as Pat Robertson. But these people have no official institutional standing, and only limited moral authority. The evangelical involvement in politics was largely the product of grass-roots organising and bottom-up effort. As we will see, this could have implications for how much of their agenda is adopted in practice. Remember, too, that the religious right and religious America are far from being the same things; Mr Bush's moral majority depended on the votes of other religious groups as well. Catholics, with 27% of voters, are more numerous than evangelicals, and, unusually this year, the Republican candidate won a majority of the Catholic vote (52% against 47%). Though Mr Bush did especially well among white Catholics and those who attended Mass regularly, he also increased his share of the Hispanic Catholic vote from 31% in 2000 to 42%. This alone accounts for the inroads he made into the Hispanic vote, which has traditionally gone to Democrats by two to one. In all, calculates Mr Lugo, 3.5m more Catholics voted for Mr Bush in 2004 than in 2000. Thus, they were as important to his increased majority as evangelical Protestants were. This points to another new development. The election seems to have consolidated the tendency of the most observant members of any church, regardless of denomination, to vote Republican. During the campaign, a debate erupted among Catholics over John Kerry's support for abortion rights. Orthodox Catholics condemned his stance and one bishop even said he would deny the candidate communion (as a Catholic himself, Mr Kerry opposed abortion, but did not back anti-abortion laws). "Progressive" Catholics defended him, but the election returns suggest that the orthodox position won out. That seems characteristic of all denominations. Mr Green subdivides each church into three groups (see table): traditionalists, centrists and modernists, according to the intensity of belief. Traditionalists believe in church doctrine and go to church once a week or more; modernists are more relaxed. The three most Republican groups are traditionalist evangelicals, traditionalist mainline Protestants and traditionalist Catholics. Modernists lean towards the Democrats. The election returns are consistent with this: people who go to church once a week or more voted for Mr Bush by nearly two to one. This seems to supersede the historical pattern, whereby evangelicals have tended to vote Republican, Catholics Democratic and mainline Protestants (Lutherans, Methodists) have split their vote. The implication of these findings is that Mr Bush's moral majority is not, as is often thought, just a bunch of right-wing evangelical Christians. Rather, it consists of traditionalist and observant church-goers of every kind: Catholic and mainline Protestant, as well as evangelicals, Mormons, Sign Followers, you name it. Meanwhile, modernist evangelicals (yes, there are a few) tend to be Democratic. What happens next? The big question for the next four years is what the traditionalist constituency will demand of Mr Bush, and whether he will give it what it wants. Already, self-appointed church leaders are queuing up to claim credit for the election victory and to insist on a bigger role in government. Mr Dobson told ABC's "This Week" programme that "this president has two years, or more broadly the Republican Party has two years, to implement those policies, or certainly four, or I believe they'll pay a price in the next election." There is no shortage of politicians, holding some of the more extreme views of the Christian right, who can be counted on to back the church leaders to the hilt. Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma, has called not just for outlawing abortion but for the death penalty for doctors who break such a law. Another new senator, John Thune of South Dakota, is a creationist. A third, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, has said single mothers should not teach in schools. Evangelicals are already bringing test cases to ensure that school textbooks include creationism and censor gay marriage. Such local efforts have been common for years. What now matter are the country-wide political views of Mr Bush's traditionalist constituency. On the face of it, these Bush-leaning traditionalists come from central casting: conservative politically, rigid religiously, willing to mix up church and state. According to Mr Green's survey, nine out of ten of them say that the president should have strong religious beliefs, and two-thirds of them also believe that religious groups should involve themselves in politics. Yet the picture is more complicated than this makes it sound. For instance, in all the religious groups substantial majorities agree that the disadvantaged need government help "to obtain their rightful place in America". All favour increasing anti-poverty programmes, even if it means higher taxes. All support stricter environmental regulation. Large majorities say that America should give a high priority to fighting HIV/AIDS abroad. Religious conservatives have been among the strongest backers of intervening in Sudan and increasing AIDS spending in poor countries. If the Bush administration wanted to, it could find plenty of religious support for increased welfare programmes, tougher environmental standards and more foreign aid. The differences between the religious groups are equally striking. The Protestant traditionalists favour less government spending. But all the Catholics--traditionalist, mainline and modernist alike--favour more. Traditionalist evangelicals are usually the odd men out. Fully 81% of them say that religion is important to their political thinking--far more than any other group. They are the only ones to rate cultural issues as more important than economic or foreign-policy ones. They are the most opposed to abortion (though 52% say it should be legal in some circumstances) and the most opposed to gay marriage (though 36% say they support gay rights). They also hold highly distinctive foreign-policy views: seven in ten say America has a special role in the world and two-thirds think America should support Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians. He need not be trapped Will the new importance of the traditionalist evangelical vote succeed in driving the president in the direction that many of these voters want? Not necessarily. The variety of conservative religious opinion means that Mr Bush need not be trapped by one important wing of his religious base, even if he will certainly not want to neglect it. For example, the evangelicals' Zionist views are offset by the more even-handed positions of Catholics and mainline Protestants, implying that the president could try to restart the Middle East peace process without risking the wrath of his whole religious constituency. And because the evangelical churches are decentralised, and somewhat leaderless at the national level, it will be hard for any populist to mobilise them against a president they like and respect. Attempts to ram conservative social policies into law look inevitable. They include the federal amendment banning gay marriage, though this is an uphill struggle that failed by 19 votes in the Senate last time round. Moreover, on the eve of the election, Mr Bush came out in favour of civil unions, which more than half the population, including many religious conservatives, favour. They also include extending a ban on "partial-birth abortion" to cover all third-trimester abortions, and, most important, appointing conservative judges to any Supreme Court vacancies. This week there was a sign of what may be to come when Republicans threatened to strip Senator Arlen Specter of the chairmanship of the committee that oversees Supreme Court nominations after he said that staunch opponents of abortion were unlikely to be confirmed. For opponents of Mr Bush, and also for many socially liberal Republicans, the election results and the trumpeted evangelical ambitions point to a big reversal: the victory of aggressive social conservatism over the small-government tradition in which morality is not legislated. It could, indeed, turn out to be something like this, but it need not. The wide variety of different opinions held by Mr Bush's religious supporters give the president, and his new administration, a lot of leeway, if they choose to look for it. From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 13 18:07:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 13:07:12 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: Churches and politics: The religious left Message-ID: Churches and politics: The religious left http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3403305 Nov 18th 2004 | CHICAGO AND MINNEAPOLIS Well, it does exist--but not in an organised way THE next time you are in Minneapolis, you may like to visit St Joan of Arc church. Its weekend masses are packed; the congregation has doubled to 4,000 households in the past 12 years; the median age of its members is much lower than that of most other churches. It sends do-gooders to a sister parish in Guatemala, and professional musicians often stop by to jam at mass. This liberal Roman Catholic church hit a bump recently when conservative critics complained to Rome about some of its practices, including an open door for homosexuals. The bishop tried to intervene, but met a wall of protest from parishioners. St Joan's pastor, Father George Wertin, says that he is mindful of the church's teaching, but remains committed to inclusiveness and social justice. There has been much hand-wringing among liberals about the growing influence of conservative Christians, particularly since so many voters cited moral values as a key reason for re-electing George Bush on November 2nd. But there is a religious left in America, too; and some of its leading members want a louder voice. "We intend to be as articulate and aggressive as our evangelical counterparts," says Bob Edgar, a former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania who leads the National Council of Churches (NCC). The country's largest ecumenical group, representing 36 Protestant, Episcopalian and Orthodox denominations with a total of about 50m members, the NCC was a force for change in the 1960s and 1970s, but has seen its influence wane since then. Now Mr Edgar, himself a minister, says that it seeks a renewed discussion of "public values" like poverty and war, not just the "private piety" of abortion and homosexual marriage. "When Jesus met the woman at the well, he didn't ask her sexual orientation. He loved her." Not everyone is convinced of this approach. Jean Bethke Elshtain, of the University of Chicago's divinity school argues that focusing on "nitty-gritty" issues like poverty and war is a hard sell. "No one wants poverty, but there are so many proposals to deal with these intractable social problems." She worries that the clergy is more liberal than its parishioners are. First breed, then retain Numbers are on the conservatives' side. Data compiled by the NCC show that at least half of Americans go to religious services once a week or more. Within that number, the Roman Catholic church, reinforced by immigrants, has seen its numbers rise. So have the generally conservative evangelical, Pentecostal and Mormon churches. The more moderate Episcopalians and "mainline" Protestant groups such as Methodists and Presbyterians, continue their long decline, albeit more slowly in recent years. Few churches are undivided in their ideas: consider the Episcopalians' ructions about the appointment of an openly homosexual bishop. But the trend has been to the right. A survey several years ago of more than 1,200 congregations in America reported that nearly 60% of the clergy described their congregations as theologically conservative, compared with 29% moderate and 11% liberal. The congregations of most of the new megachurches that have sprung up across the suburbs in the west and South are conservative. Slower-growing New England had the largest proportion of liberal churches. Mike Hout, a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley, points to two things favouring conservative churches: demography and "retention". The softer sort of Protestants have not been breeding as prodigiously as evangelicals have. Moreover, conservative churchgoers are more likely to keep their children in the flock: as many as 85% of the children of evangelicals become adult members of similar churches, whereas liberal Christians are a good deal more likely to lose their children to secularism. The Presbyterians, good for them, have now "closed the retention gap". What passes for the religious left still patently lacks the organisation of the right. Divinity students at the University of Chicago launched a website ([3]thereligiousleft.blogspot.com) days after the election, and gathered for their first meeting this week. Protestants for the Common Good, formed in 1995 to counter the impact of the religious right, has an overtly leftish agenda. Larry Greenfield, an ordained Baptist minister who works with the group, sees growing "re-engagement" that he hopes will match the civil-rights and Vietnam-war struggles of the 1960s. Mixing religion and politics, of course, can be a nasty business. Safety precautions had to be taken at Presbyterian churches across America this week after a threat that churches would be burned if an "anti-Israel" policy was not reversed--an apparent reference to the church's decision some months ago to divest itself of companies doing business in Israel. From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 13 18:09:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 13:09:47 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Violet Books: Marie Corelli's Occult Tales Message-ID: Marie Corelli's Occult Tales http://violetbooks.com/corelli.html [I read elsewhere that she was Queen Victoria's favorite novelist.] Marie Corelli & her Occult Tales by Jessica Amanda Salmonson Marie Corelli Time was, Marie Corelli was the most widely read author England possessed. Journalistic slurs against her talents & person rarely harmed sales, & usually increased them, so that the press additionally castigated her public for its bad taste. Perhaps, instead, the public should have been commended for not falling for the press's self-congratulating maltreatment of an author who couldn't have been all that bad or they would have ignored her altogether. She was quick to feel slighted but just as quick to assume herself cherished. Many did cherish her, of course, for her delightful traits were easy to embrace by many who actually visited her, as opposed to slandering journalists who judged her from afar. Arthur H. Lawrence, who met with Marie & Bertha on multiple occasions to craft an 1898 interview for The Strand thought her "sweetness itself," & was disarmed by her "veracity, the personal charm & sincerity, the real feminine grace of her every movement." Among those who took delight in her friendship we may count Sir Henry Irving, Lily Langtree, Ellen Terry, Sarah Bernhardt, Beerbohm Tree, Alice Meynall, George Meredith, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Frank Harris, Robert Hichens, Alfred Noyes, Algernon Swinburne & his companion Theodore Watts, & those inveterate ghost story writing brothers A. C. Benson & R. H. ("Hugh") Benson. Gladstone, eager to see for himself who it was that "could write so courageously & well," thought it not untoward to visit her unannounced. Lord Randolph Churchill likewise stood among her champions, while Winston Churchill sent her a note regarding her oratory powers, after she had debated in opposition to him at the White Friars Club. Queen Victoria collected her books, as did King Edward VII & Queen Alexandra. She was well liked by the Prince of Wales (afterwards King George V) & Marie long boasted of her invitation to dine with him. Royals of many other nations admitted interest in her works. She did have an unfortunate ability to alienate, at times, even those who valued her. Hugh Benson loved to hang out at Mason Croft, often bringing a boyfriend with whom to sport throughout her five-acres of gardens. Yet writing of her much later, he had plainly accumulated some ill will along the way. He had been an Anglican priest but converted to Catholicism. Though there were a few who found Marie "wisely tolerant of all creeds," she was in general offensively anti-Catholic. As for those who disliked her at first sight, she was never far from providing new fodder to enhance their reasons to be churlish. Those whom she regarded as enemies, apart from critics as a class, included Hall Caine who tripped himself up lying to her; Grant Allen who called her, in The Spectator, "a woman of deplorable talent who imagined that she was a genius, & was accepted as a genius by a public to whose commonplace sentimentalities & prejudices she gave a glamorous setting;" James Agate who represented her as combining "the imagination of a Poe with the style of a Ouida & the mentality of a nursemaid;" & the spiteful & horrid Edmund Gosse who made evil jests at her expense. There was usually something specific underlying Marie's sense of outrage, & she always felt she had sound enough cause; only, in most cases, anyone else would have saved their energies for more important battles. For instance, her grudge against Hall Caine began before her career was off the ground. He had been first-reader of A Romance of Two Worlds when this, her first novel, was submitted for publication. He rejected it out of hand. When George Bentley saw the negative report, he instinctively suspected commercial possibilities, & wrote Marie to get the manuscript back. When Caine eventually met Marie, she had become something of a leading light, so he lyingly claimed to have been her advocate with Bentley. Had she been a more political animal, she would have permitted him his lie, & gained by his belated support. Instead, she castigated him in public & private forums, solidifying a long-term mutual enmity. Marie was homosexual. It must be said as bluntly as that because of the poor way in which gay & lesbian history has been reported, & the commonality, in the past, of biographers' efforts to submerge & deny this history. She ofttimes affected to be an actual man-hater, having avowed "such hatred & disgust for the male portion of our species that if a man only touches her by accident she feels a sense of outrage for days." A wag noted that Beethoven was the only man she could have loved," because he has the advantage of being dead." Thus inspired to write the love poem "To a Vision," she speaks of sexual desire as secretive, with gentle footsteps approaching "in the darkness of the night," bringing dewy kisses, flowery fragrance, & caressing hands -- all without any gender reference except for a closing allusion to a motherly breast. An earlier poem, woven into A Romance of Two Worlds speaks of the bitterness of her beloved's queenly disdain, concluding with the dramatic "I love thee! I dare to love thee!" The "thee" she dared to love was Bertha Vyver, who had known Marie from youth, & was witness to every success & heartbreak of Marie's career. They began to live together in 1878 when Ber was 24 & Marie a year younger. To Bertha, Marie was always "the wee one" or "my wee pet," later "the world's wee author." Despite their mutual plumpness, Ber thought of her wee one as a small angelic child who needed constant affection. Marie called Bertha "Mamasita" in the early days at Fern Dell, then at Longridge Road, Kensington, & forever afterward she was "my darling Ber" & "dearest Ber," whom Reverend William Stuart Scott described as "a big comfortable cushion Marie could lay her head upon." Scott, who knew both women exceedingly well, is the only commentator to state frankly, & uncritically, that their love was "surely in the Damon & Pythias, the David & Jonathan class." Marie was sometimes faulted for her opinions on marriage, for the question "why did she never marry?" was often addressed in her wonderfully inimical style. Yet if one looks between the lines, her seeming castigation of the typical heterosexual marriage can be seen to uphold her own lifelong liaison as sacred. She said, "Marriage is not the Church, the ritual, the blessing of clergymen, or the ratifying & approving presence of one's friends & relations. Nothing can make marriage an absolutely sacred thing except the great love." It is unfortunate that Marie was to no extent a supporter of the homosexual rights movement that counted bluestocking & ghost story writer [1]Vernon Lee & theorist Edward Carpenter in its legion. Indeed, in an essay for Lady's Realm she listed her "pet dislikes" & included "The 'new poet' who curls his hair with the tongs," alluding to the dandies who flourished from the 1890s until the first world war (wherein many of these sissy poets died heroically), & "Women bicyclists & he-females generally," which may only mean she preferred her women matronly & soft, like Bertha. It could be interpreted as a typically closeted "protest too much" stance, or as a heartfelt belief that homosexuality should be, like her own, wholeheartedly discreet & gender-appropriate. She regarded it as unbecoming for gay men to curl their hair instead of pursuing athletics, as it was unbecoming for gay women to pursue physical exercise rather than curl their hair. [masoncroft.jpg] Marie & "darling Ber" purchased Mason Croft, a rundown Tudor mansion, restoring it to its former glory. In their music studio Marie hired built a fireplace with a large stone over the mantle into which was engraved Bertha Vyver's & her own initials elaborately intertwined. It was a pure expression of their love. It could not have been any more obvious a proud confession if they had carved their initials in a heart on a tree in Kensington Park. Yet Eileen Bigland in Marie Corelli: The Woman & the Legend goes out of her way to deny that the love between Marie & Bertha was even real, let alone erotic, while yet implying a much more alarming romantic attraction between Marie & her brother Eric. For this charge there is no sensible basis beyond a spiteful jest perpetrated by Edmund Gosse, who hated Marie for having an ego as inflated as his own. Marie's Tower There remains to this day no serious book-length study of her works, as opposed to biographies mostly with a condemnatory tone. Writing out her manuscripts by hand, frequently from the little tower amidst her gardens, she intended to leave the world something of genuine if eerie beauty. A very few critics, notably Rebecca West & Leonard Woolf, have defended her work for its own sake. Henry Miller called her work "extraordinary," "captivating," & regarded her an author of "tremendous courage & imagination," pleading for a serious reassessment of her imaginative storytelling prowess: "She had a gift for portraiture, scenic descriptions, wonderful characterizations & an ability to hold the reader in perpetual suspense. Though it is customary to speak of her contemptuously & derisively, I myself find her work to be always fascinating & gripping." In that Theosophic era when people of reasonable education & social standing believed the damnedest things, when the smallest town held Psychical Research Society meetings or boasted a Swedenborgian church chapter, Corelli's occult novels adhered to no popular system. She had her own wacky ideas & stuck to them, which was probably to the good, since we thereby gain access to her own fancies & do not have to suffer the promulgation of soon-to-be-outmoded movements & fantastical religious fads. Corelli's novels were genuinely eccentric even within that eccentric atmosphere. Theosophic romancers were a dime a dozen in those days, but not a half-dozen possessed Corelli's peculiar fascination. She is the only author of her type, after Bulwer Lytton, who retains anything resembling a broad modern audience. Her style & philosophy were alike Decadent & florid, though in some regards the moral strictures in her books are in direct opposition to the moral deconstructions of High Decadence in the Yellow Nineties. Marie would take uplifting theories of the Soul -- as sentimentally twaddlish as any theosophical love story -- then add ingredients that were brutally cynical & heretical even within the context of occult belief, let alone the Christian context she so boldly revised. Her revisionary fantasy of the Crucifixion, Barabbas, sufficiently alarmed her publisher, Mr. Bentley, that he rejected it with the excuse, "I fear the effect on the public mind." Marie quite rightly took the book to a new publisher & Barabbas became one of her largest international successes, the first of a trilogy that reformed the whole history of Christianity, & of the devil, to suit her own phantasmagorical faith. In The Sorrows of Satan, the first sequel to Barabbas, there is an underlying mystical strength to her glorification of Satan as a misunderstood adventurer in the modern world. Sorrows broke all previous records in Britain's publishing history, making her England's best selling author up to that time. The story bothered critics even more than their usual wont, for many felt Corelli expended too much sympathy for the fiend. The Master-Christian was the capper of the trilogy. Its portrait of the Baby Jesus as a time-travelling street urchin disappointed in the Victorian world is a more successful book than the premise immediately implies, humorous without losing the mysterious quality that contemporary readers of Sorrows of Satan were assuredly seeking. At her best, the oddness & passion of her works made her, like William Beckford of Vathek fame, a thoroughly original writer. Her weirdest & most baroque novel, Ardath, was called by George Bentley "a magnificent dream," & was a major influence on Lord Dunsany's imaginary-world vignettes. The hero, in love with a supernal angel but not yet worthy of union with her, travels back in time 7,000 years to a sweepingly fantastic world, undergoing transformative adventures. It was immediately compared to Vathek, a keystone of arabesque fantasy. Corelli herself liked Ardath more than most of her books, but admitted it sold fewer copies, & Mr. Bentley said he thought it might have been above the heads of the public. Hardly less baroque was her premiere novel, A Romance of Two Worlds, to which Ardath serves as a sequel. The story featured dream-magic, mesmerism, many & varied opium-induced occult powers. The world-weary & emotionally crumbling heroine, electrically rejuvenated by the Chaldean master Heliobas, sets out on a quest for the meaning of life, resulting in a cosmic journey by means of astral projection with an angelic guide, embodying a trip to utopian Saturn, to technologically bizarre Jupiter, & to the center of the universe, the place of creation, where God dwells in electrical form. Combining weird science & spiritualism, it was probably the most influential occult novel from that period, after H. Rider Haggard's She. The Soul of Lilith concluded the "Heliobas trilogy" that began with A Romance of Two Worlds & Ardath. It is a good reprise of the Faust theme, with elements of Pygmalion (if not Frankenstein) as the sorcerer binds the soul of a dying girl to her body, obtaining thereby a female familiar with whom he cannot help, despite prohibitive warnings from the great & wise Heliobas, falling in love. Corelli had been hung with the sobriquet "the female Haggard," & it is probably true that young women (predominantly) sought out her novels to achieve much the same sort of thrill boys sought in King Solomon's Mine. It is an intriguing coincidence that Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur T. Quiller-Couch, Arthur Conan Doyle & Marie Corelli all had their first successes on or near Victoria's jubilee, 1887, & were uniformly fantasists. Marie was most especially fond of Haggard's novels. She incorporated Rider's favorite theme -- the "Lost Race"motif -- into one of her later romances, The Secret Power, in the form of a hidden city of immortals discovered by the intrepid heroine in the Egyptian desert; while bits of Ziska parallel the reincarnation romances of Allan Quatermain & She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. Marie periodically sent letters to Rider, hoping he would one day visit her at Mason Croft, while he, for his part, upon reading Ardath, told her her "imaginative gifts were rare indeed." Her other romances hold varying degrees of interest. Her first publisher, Mr. Bentley, compared her second novel Vendetta! to Bulwer Lytton, the greatest of the Victorian occult romancers; & George Augustus Sala praised its narrative strength & brutal gothicism, depicting a premature burial in cholera-ridden Naples of 1884, with a gut-wrenching climax of revenge. Wormwood, like Vendetta!, is gothic rather than supernatural, though spiced with drug-induced visions. As a Temperance novel, Wormwood slandered absinthe-drinking bohemian circles in Paris. It roused Temperance leaders throughout Europe, resulting in particularly harsh anti-drinking laws in Switzerland. Among her best fantasies is the novella Ziska, a fine tale of erotic horrors, transmigration of the soul, & reincarnations from ancient Egypt, with a breathtaking climax in a secret underground chamber of a pyramid. She developed the theme of eternal youth in a weird scientific femme fatale adventure, the comparatively scarce The Young Diana, reworking themes from Frankenstein when youth regeneration results in monstrous, soulless immortality. The Life Everlasting is another tale of immortality, visions, & numerous reincarnations. Marie regarded it as a continuation of A Romance of Two Worlds, extending her occult theories of electricity to radium & radioactivity. Marie often threw elements of science fiction into the mix, notably in Romance of Two Worlds, The Young Diana and The Secret Power. Much as it became proverbial that Jules Verne predicted actual future inventions, it was felt by many that A Romance of Two Worlds foretold wireless telegraphy & X-rays; & in the early days of television, even with Corelli some years dead but well remembered, the "telly" became known in Cockney slang as "the Marie" because it seemed the ultimate proof that her imagination had indeed been prophetic. [christmas.gif] Her plot lines in the novels were so convoluted they required considerable length to unfold. But in some of her short stories she strives for a degree of restraint. "The Lady with the Carnations," the best of several supernatural stories included in Cameos, is a perfect ghost story devoid of the author's usual excesses. Among her heretically religious fantasies, "The Devil's Motor," which Brian Stableford called "feverishly eccentric," can still charm the reader. It was included in A Christmas Greeting, an elegantly bound, rather scarce collection of Marie's poems, essays, stories, & even a song. Some years later "Motor" was reissued separately as a slim, forty-five-page, attractively illustrated gift-book, in an edition of 5,000 copies, & today very rare. "The Ghost in the Sedan-Chair," one of several other fantasies in A Christmas Greeting, is a lighthearted holiday ghost story. Another Christmas novelette was issued as a small, marvelously illustrated book, The Strange Visitation of Josiah McNason, initially as a special 1904 Christmas supplement to The Strand Magazine. It is quite imaginative if the reader can overlook the fact that it is too close an imitation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Delicia & Other Stories reprinted "The Ghost in the Sedan-Chair" plus added a new allegory, "The Despised Angel." Her final collection was The Love of Long Ago, containing, among other supernatural pieces, one of her best short stories, "The Sculpture's Angel." With its mystic sculptor & atmosphere of decaying Bohemian elegance, this is an ideal example of the Decadent weird tale both in style & theme, & almost serves as a coda to A Romance of Two Worlds which has a mystic painter rather than sculptor. On April 21, 1924, Marie Corelli died. She'd had a sudden presentiment that the end was near, & asked her nurse to send for Bertha. It was late; the nurse did not believe Marie was so near death's door as that, & demurred of waking anyone. Bertha lamented: "Marie would not be consoled. Sitting upright in her chair all night, she implored, with tears in her eyes, that I might be sent for; but the nurse, not realising how close was our sympathy, would not humour her. Next morning she passed away without again seeing me or feeling the touch of my hand." Marie in Gondola Bertha died some while later, in 1942, & was buried alongside her "beloved wee pet," Marie Corelli, in the Stratford cemetery on the Evesham Road. Mason Croft, for all Bertha's heroic efforts to preserve the shrine Marie had wanted, had insufficient funds for such a purpose, & was sold. Vulturish antique dealers, & sincere readers seeking some small memento of the author, crowded before an auctioneer. Marie's adored pony-cart, which she had often ridden into town, went to a theatrical producer for use in a London pantomime. Her gondola, "The Dream," fetched 57 guineas. Henry Miller, noting several of Marie Corelli's novels remained in print in modern editions, suspected there would one day be a fullblown resurgence of interest in her books. He noted, "If there is a revival of her work be assured that she will be as much reviled & condemned now as she was in her lifetime. Marie Corelli makes of you either an addict or a sworn enemy." I would hazard only that any serious library or core collection of supernatural literature should include at least A Romance of Two Worlds, Ardath, The Soul of Lilith, The Sorrows of Satan, Ziska, & her short stories. These taken together represent Marie Corelli sufficiently, & at her best. Excerpted from a monograph that will serve as an introduction to a forthcoming limited edition of Corelli's collected supernatural short stories, Dark Angels, Pale Ghosts. The illustration of Marie in her gondola is a detail from a post card distributed without her permission to tourists who lurked about Mason Croft. See also [2]The Gothic & Supernatural Works of Marie Corelli: An Alphabetical Bibliography of First Editions. Violet Books stocks first & early editions of Marie Corelli's works, as well as works by similar occult romancers, & books by many other lights of the Yellow Nineties. Check the on-line [3]Weird Fiction Catalog or take this short cut direct to [4]Marie Corelli Stock. References 1. http://www.violetbooks.com/REVIEWS/rockhill-vernonlee2.html 2. http://violetbooks.com/corelli-bib.html 3. http://violetbooks.com/CATALOGS/catalogfrontpage.html From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 13 18:10:49 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 13:10:49 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Billy James Hargis, 79, Pastor and Anticommunist Crusader, Dies Message-ID: Billy James Hargis, 79, Pastor and Anticommunist Crusader, Dies NYT November 29, 2004 By ROBERT D. McFADDEN [I, as we all do, wish Mr. Mencken could have written about him.] The Rev. Billy James Hargis, a fiery evangelist and anticommunist preacher who founded the Christian Crusade and reached millions in an international ministry that used radio, television, books, pamphlets and personal appearances, died on Saturday at a nursing home in Tulsa, Okla. He was 79. Mr. Hargis, who had Alzheimer's disease, died at St. Simeon's Episcopal Home, where he had lived since last July, said his daughter, Becky Jean Frank. No cause of death was listed, Ms. Frank said. At the height of his popularity in the 1960's and 1970's, Mr. Hargis - a shouting, arm-waving, 270-pound elemental force whom Oklahomans called a "bawl and jump" preacher - broadcast sermons daily or weekly on 500 radio stations and 250 television stations, mainly in the South, and in other countries. He traveled almost constantly to deliver his Christian and anticommunist messages, wrote 100 books and thousands of articles and pamphlets, and published a monthly newspaper. Mr. Hargis, who began preaching as a teenager and later abandoned life as a pastor to engage in what became a lifelong crusade against communism, first gained international prominence in 1953, when he went to West Germany and sent aloft thousands of balloons bearing Biblical passages in hopes of reaching the people of Eastern Europe. Throughout the 1950's and 1960's, he organized and spoke at rallies across America, allying himself with the Rev. Carl McIntire, retired Gen. Edwin A. Walker and other anticommunist crusaders. In 1966, he established the David Livingston Missionary Foundation, which ran medical clinics and orphanages in Asia and Africa, and in 1970 he founded and became president of the American Christian Crusade College in Tulsa. Mr. Hargis appeared to be on his way to rivaling the Rev. Billy Graham and other major evangelists of his time. But his ministry and his following began to diminish after a series of reverses, including a long fight with the Internal Revenue Service that led in 1964 to the cancellation of tax-exempt status for his $1 million-a-year anticommunist Christian Crusade, for "political activities." Another case produced a landmark court decision and sharply cut Mr. Hargis's broadcasting empire. He was accused by Fred J. Cook, a journalist, of unfairly maligning him in a radio broadcast. Mr. Cook sought free air time to reply under the Federal Communications Commission's fairness doctrine. A radio station in Red Lion, Pa., sued, saying its First Amendment rights would be violated. But the Supreme Court in 1969 upheld the constitutionality of the fairness doctrine, and many stations thereafter were less inclined to broadcast controversial programs. In 1974, after Mr. Hargis was accused of having sexual relations with students of both sexes, he resigned as president of the college he had founded. He denied the accusations at the time and in a 1986 autobiography, "My Great Mistake," which was published by the Christian Crusade. Billy James Hargis was born on Aug. 3, 1925, in Texarkana, Tex., and was adopted by Jimmie Earsel Hargis and Laura Lucille Hargis. He graduated from Texarkana High School and attended the Ozark Bible College in Bentonville, Ark., but dropped out to become a preacher. At 18, he was ordained a minister in the Disciples of Christ denomination, and became a pastor at several churches in Oklahoma and Missouri. But in the early 1950's, he gave that up to become a radio preacher, and soon developed a passion for anticommunism that blended easily with his Christian sermons. As his charges of harboring communists widened to include government, business, labor, entertainment, cultural and charitable institutions and religious organizations, the Disciples of Christ dropped him as an accredited minister in 1957. By then, however, his crusade had grown into print and television media and was thriving. While his audience later faded, his message essentially remained unchanged. He continued to serve as the director of the Christian Crusade Ministries until last summer, when his son, Billy James Hargis II, took over. Besides his son, a Houston resident, and his daughter, Becky, of Tulsa, Mr. Hargis is survived by his wife, Betty Jane, whom he married in 1951; two daughters, Bonnie Jane Choisnard and Brenda Jo Epperley, both of Tulsa; 11 grandchildren; and 4 great-grandchildren. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/29/obituaries/29hargis.html From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 13 18:11:32 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 13:11:32 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Denis Dutton on Literary Darwinism Message-ID: Denis Dutton on Literary Darwinism http://denisdutton.com/carroll_review.htm The Pleasures of Fiction Philosophy and Literature 28 (2004): 453-66. by Denis Dutton Human beings expend staggering amounts of time and resources on creating and experiencing art and entertainment music, dancing, and static visual arts. Of all of the arts, however, it is the category of fictional story-telling that across the globe today is the most intense focus of what amounts to a virtual human addiction. A recent government study in Britain showed that if you add together annual attendances in plays and cinema with hours watching television drama, the average Briton spends roughly 6% of all waking life watching dramatic performances. And that figure does not even include books and magazines: further vast numbers of hours spent reading short stories, bodice-rippers, mysteries, and thrillers, as well as so-called serious fictions, old and new. The origins of this obsession with comic and dramatic fictions are lost in remote prehistory, as lost as the origins of language itself. But like language, we know the obsession with fiction is universal: stories told, read, and dramatically or poetically performed are independently invented in all known cultures, literate or not, having advanced technologies or not. Wherever printing arrives, it is used to reproduce fictions. Whenever television appears in the world, soap operas soon show up on the schedule. Both the forms that fiction takes and the ideas, types of characters, and kinds of conflict that make up its content can be shown to be strikingly similar across cultures. It has specialist practitioners rhapsodes, novelists, playwrights, actors and is governed both informally with stylistic conventions and sometimes formally for example, by censorship laws. A love of fiction is as universal as governance, marriage, jokes, religion, and the incest taboo. The question for any general aesthetics is: Why? Joseph Carroll is a literary theorist who has applied his probing mind over the last decade to the origins, nature, and functions of literary experience. His new collection of essays and reviews, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (Routledge, $85.00 boards, $23.95 paper) looks at literature and literary theory through the lens of evolutionary psychology. At the same time, Carroll's eye is that of an extremely perceptive literary critic. In fact, I would judge him to be one of the most acute and knowledgeable readers of fiction I've ever encountered. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that he is sometimes dubious, or even scathing, about evolutionary explanations of literature that have been offered up by writers whose grasp of psychology exceeds, in his opinion, their command of high literature. His complaints, however, are not about the fundamental notion that evolution by natural and sexual selection have made human beings into the story-loving animals they have become: his adjustments are intended to increase the accuracy and usefulness of Darwin's revolution. However critical he is of evolutionary psychologists, Carroll remains a Darwinian through and through. Carroll holds that the only way to attain a general theory of literature is through an account of human nature that builds from the ground up, from the most basic conditions for the evolution of the human species. A Darwinian literary theory first needs a Darwinian psychology. Once we have a basic Darwinian psychology in place, we can see that the narrative proclivities of human beings, far from being an incidental by-product of the evolved mind, are central to some of its most human functions. The structures of basic motives and dispositions are what would be appropriate for a species, as Carroll describes it, that "is highly social and mildly polygynous, that displays concealed ovulation, continuous female receptivity, and postmenopausal life expectancy corresponding to a uniquely extended period of childhood development, that has extraordinary aptitudes for technology, that has developed language and the capacity for peering into the minds of its conspecifics, and that displays a unique disposition for fabricating and consuming aesthetic and imaginative artifacts." Such a list alone, he contends, would make it impossible to imagine a blank-slate view of the mind, in which the mind evolves in a vacuum, goes onto produce culture, which then gives back to the mind all content and structure. Some of the mental processes that grow from this ground are universally predictable for individuals, for example such capacities as the acquisition of language and color vocabularies. Other processes, Carroll says, are characterized by a "combinatorial fluidity" of a sort that we prefer to call "creative" or "inventive." But in all cases, cultural artifacts, "no matter how complex or seemingly arbitrary, are constrained by the limitations of physical nature and are both prompted and constrained by an evolved human psychology." The best way to understand these prompts and constraints for Carroll is in terms of a hierarchical structure of what he terms "behavioral systems," which he explicates with a diagram that goes back to the concept of inclusive fitness as a first mover for all adaptations. The achievement of inclusive fitness requires that human life be organized along lines which Carroll specifies in terms of seven behavioral systems. These systems are saturated by basic human emotions that form the general framework for motivations. These coexisting systems realms of affect, interest, and constraint make up the fabric of human life from the Pleistocene to the present. They are the basis for human reproductive success and survival as a social species. Listed along with a few examples of their prehistoric manifestations, the behavior systems are: (1) Survival: avoid predators, obtain food, seek shelter, defeat enemies. (2) Technology: shape cutters and pounders, use levers, attach objects, use fire. (3) Mating: Assess and attract sexual partners, overcome competitors, avoid incest. (4) Parenting: nurse, protect, provide, nurture, teach. (5) Kin: distinguish kin, favor kin, maintain a kin network. (6) Social: build coalitions, achieve status, monitor reciprocity. (7) Cognition: tell stories, paint pictures, form beliefs, acquire knowledge. This schema locates imaginative artifact manufacture and story-telling alongside other normal human pursuits. This is surely a valid move, given the sheer quantity of attention human beings devote to fictions and other aesthetically imaginative activities. These cognitive pursuits are not a special, rarified useless realm, but are in different ways mutually implicated with the other specified behavioral systems in particular, we might imagine, technology, mating, parenting, and general social life. The seven behavioral systems are the foundation for most of what might be regarded as the social constructions of human life: national politics, specific languages, law, local customs and belief structures. But the seven systems are not themselves social constructions: their existence is not arbitrary and contingent but present today in all human cultures because of the operation of Darwinian mechanisms: ancestors who favored these propensities and strategies survived; their survival over times made such propensities innate. The systems are intrinsically regulated by emotions of pleasure and aversion: Carroll relies on Paul Eckman's basic psychological typology: fear, joy, sadness, anger, disgust, contempt, and surprise. (These emotions of course subdivide indefinitely into the likes of shame, chagrin, embarrassment, affection, regret, and so forth, depending on local emphasis and traditions: but once again, basic emotions such as joy and sadness are not themselves social constructions, they are the universal conditions for having an emotional life at all.) These emotions saturate behavioral systems, constituting the motivational mainsprings for their relevant attitudes and behavior. Carroll's behavioral systems form discriminable contexts for the operation of cognitive modules, the individual blades and pop-up tools of the Swiss Army knife metaphor of mind: "For instance, the cognitive module of vision edge and motion detection, color, depth, etc. would be activated within the technological behavioral system and survival system. . . . `Face recognition' modules would be activated within all interpersonal behavioral systems (mating, parenting, kin, social interaction)." He also thinks it likely that the brain has specific modules "geared to the construction of narratives and the recognition of aesthetically pleasing verbal patterns," and that these modules would be intrinsic to the cognitive behavioral system. In addition to this active mental apparatus, Carroll believes that experience, certainly including the experience of fictional narratives, is conditioned by life-history categories: our life is divided into phases of birth, growth, mating, parenting, and death. Evolutionary psychology has typically over-emphasized mating (and courtship) as the focus of attention, and indeed fictional narrative universally deals with the trials of love. But Carroll thinks that all these life-period patterns must be kept in mind when discussing fiction. He does not accept that maximizing human reproductive potential is so vastly important in the scheme of human history. Sultans who sire hundreds of children, he remarks, are not typical of the human race. Much of what has taken human attention in evolutionary history is directed at bodily survival and at social maintenance: keeping yourself and your family well-fed and healthy, defending family and tribe, and making the tribe a stronger, more fit social unit. Inclusive fitness toward successful reproduction is the ultimate goal, but the lived fabric of daily human life brings many other purposes and ideas into play. Issues of social dissonance and cohesion, death and its meaning, as well as the challenges and adventures of youth that do not involve courtship, can also be expected to figure into the cognitive content of stories and art. I imagine most evolutionary aestheticians would welcome Carroll's outline of a Darwinian psychology. However, this account so far leaves open the question of how fiction functions as an adaptation. Fictional narrative supplies us with pleasure, but what does it do for us adaptively? Steven Pinker, writing from the standpoint of empirical psychology, supplies one answer to this question. Joseph Carroll, literary connoisseur and theorist, thinks on the other hand that Pinker's answer shows he does not know what literature is in the first place. It's instructive to trace out the implications of their dispute. The universal fascination with fictions is a curious thing. If human beings were attracted only to true narratives, factual reports that describe the real world, the attraction could be attributed to utility. We might imagine that just as early homo sapiens needed to hew sharp adzes and know the ways of game animals, so they needed to employ language accurately to describe themselves and their environment and to communicate truths to each other. Were that the case, there would be no "problem of fiction," because there would be no fiction: the only alternatives to desirable truth would be unintentional mistakes or intentional lies. Such Pleistocene Gradgrinds would be about as eager to waste linguistic effort creating fables and fictions as they would be to waste their manual skills laboring to produce dull adzes. We can speculate even that the enjoyment of fictions might have put them at an adaptive disadvantage against more Gradgrindish neighboring tribes: homo sapiens would in such a circumstance have evolved to react to untrue, made-up stories much as it reacts to the smell of rotting meat. Now as it happens, this speculation does not accord with facts: the human reaction to fictions, at least when they are properly understood to be fictions, is not aversion, but runs anywhere from boredom to amusement to intense pleasure. At this point we reach a fork in theory's road. There are two issues to be distinguished. First, there is the adaptive usefulness of fiction, its functional benefits, from Pleistocene campfire stories to modern novels and movies. Second, there is the pleasure and perhaps related felt satisfactions that are not well described as immediate pleasure which the experience of fiction evokes. On the first topic, the functional uses of fiction, Carroll, Pinker, and other evolutionary aestheticians agree. There is an enormous potential survival value for a species in being able to hypothesize non-obtaining states of affairs imagining, contrary to known facts, what it would be for the neighboring tribe to attack the camp when the men are out hunting, or what it would be to travel in an area where water is scarce. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides talk about the advantages of "decoupled" imaginative acts, Michelle Sugiyama writes of fictions as a kind of imaginative preparation for dealing with real-world problems, and Pinker himself uses a games analogy in How the Mind Works (1997): "Life is like chess, and plots [in fiction] are like those books of famous chess games that serious players study so they will be prepared if they ever find themselves in similar straits." In life as in chess, "there are too many possible sequences of moves and countermoves for all of them to be played out in one's mind." Familiarity with fictional plots obviates the need always in to learn things in first-hand life experience; it can aid in the development of mental flexibility and adaptability to new social problems and expanded physical environments. On the other, Pinker and Carroll starkly diverge on how to regard the pleasure produced by fiction. Pinker treats the intense pleasures of art, including fiction, essentially as by-products. The arts are a means by which we identify "pleasure-giving patterns" in the brain. For him, the arts "purify" these patterns, "concentrate them," allowing the brain to "stimulate itself without the messiness of electrodes or drugs . . . [to] give itself intense artificial doses of the sights and sounds and smells that ordinarily are given off by healthful environments." Pinker explains this process with a culinary analogy: "We enjoy strawberry cheesecake, but not because we evolved a taste for it. We evolved circuits that gave us trickles of enjoyment from the sweet taste of ripe fruit, the creamy mouth feel of fats and oils from nuts and meat, and the coolness of fresh water. Cheesecake packs a sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it is a brew of megadoses of agreeable stimuli which we concocted for the express purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons. Pornography is another pleasure technology." For Pinker, the arts are yet another. On this account, the arts seek out and find the pleasure centers associated with meeting adaptive challenges ones which increased fitness in the Pleistocene and stimulate those centers without going through the risks and toil of actually undertaking the challenging activities. In the creation and experience of art, our minds rise to "a biologically pointless challenge: figuring out how to get at the pleasure circuits of the brain and deliver little jolts of enjoyment without the inconvenience of wringing bona fide fitness increments from the harsh world." The arts are pleasure short-cuts, variously likened by Pinker to puzzles and games, alcohol and drugs, and sweet, rich desserts things that also give us little jolts of enjoyment. Pinker's view of pleasure in the experience of music, literature, and art brings to my mind one of the most enduring arguments in aesthetics. It was first raised not in connection with literature, but as a move in the musical aesthetics formulated in the nineteenth century by Eduard Hanslick (1825-1904). Even though Hanslick only applied his argument to music, it has application to other arts, including fiction, where I think it can be used to resist Pinker's position. Hanslick was the champion of Brahms against Wagner, for which Wagner pilloried him as Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger. In his 1854 tract, Vom Musikalisch-Sch?nen (On the Musically Beautiful), he attacked the idea that the purpose of music was to excite emotions a common opinion then as now. While he granted that sometimes incidental emotions can be produced by music (parades, church music, dance music, nostalgic music, perhaps), there was no reliable connection between the emotions in music and those putatively produced in listeners "no invariable and inevitable nexus between musical works and certain states of mind," as he put it. The beauties of music are peculiar to it, and can be perceived in music even when perhaps little or no emotion is felt by a sensitive and perceptive listener. (A fine discussion of Hanslick is found in Geoffrey Payzant's 2002 monograph, Hanslick on the Musically Beautiful). Hanslick's essential meaning can be captured with a thought experiment: suppose you are listening with pleasure to a particular piece of music, say, the achingly melancholy first movement of the Brahms 4th Symphony. You have a strong sense of its emotions, a sense of its atmosphere. Is the transaction between the music and you properly described as those emotions being produced in you? That is the model Pinker describes art produces, causes, emotions in us, pushes our pleasure buttons. "Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology," he says, "a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once." Now let us imagine that some clever neurophysiologist invents a drug or technology that can give you the emotion of the Brahms movement directly, without having to sit through the music itself. This might involve taking a pill, or attaching little wired pads to your temples. The Hanslickian claim is that such a procedure is unintelligible. It makes no sense because the intense emotional tone of the Brahms 4th is not something in your brain externally caused by the music, and therefore extrinsic to the music. The emotion is known only in experiencing that very piece of music, in the minutes that you experience it. The emotion is both individual and intrinsic to the experience of that individual musical work itself. Hanslick called such moments the experience of The Musically Beautiful, and his rather Kantian point is that we have them only in contemplating music. For Hanslick, as for a Kantian, music is not an aesthetic form that has an emotional content which might be delivered by some alternative, non-musical means. In the Vom Musikalisch-Sch?nen, Hanslick contrasts two aspects of music that resonate with the dispute between Pinker and Carroll on the nature of aesthetic pleasure. Few people respond adequately to beauty in music, Hanslick says. They do not listen actively, intellectually, but as passive recipients of emotion. Hanslick likens this to eating, getting drunk, or taking opium. It's important to realize that Hanslick is not denying that music has what he calls this pathological aspect. He only wants to argue that as a high and lasting art, music must be listened to in a manner of active, informed contemplation. This is a kind of listening that requires cultivation; it addresses the mind and not just the emotions. The effects of such listening on the mind are not evanescent, Hanslick furthermore argues, but permanent. In this respect, we can only imagine Hanslick's response to a remark Pinker makes about music: "Compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged" (How the Mind Works, p. 528). Carroll, for his part, regards Pinker's outlook as fundamentally misguided. He writes, "Despite the concession to the utility of fiction as a model for moves in the game of life, Pinker's wider exposition makes it apparent that like Freud he regards literary representation as largely a matter of pleasurable fantasy. It is different from pornography only in that the pleasure buttons it presses are not those literally and concretely of sexual activity." So what does art and literature give us? Carroll does not deny that literature gives us simulations that can act for models of behavior, game plans in Pinker's sense. But art goes further: "It helps us to regulate our complex psychological organization, and it helps us cultivate our socially adaptive capacity for entering mentally into the experience of other people." This is not quite the same thing as imaginatively encountering a dangerous elephant in a story. It is rather a matter of entering empathically into the minds of our fellows. It may come to us as entertainment, but fiction has profound effects on making us what we are. Carroll elaborates this claim by referring to Dickens's persistent attention to the role fiction plays in the lives of abused and neglected children. There are many such in Dickens: the Smallweed children in Bleak House little Judy, who "never owned a doll, never heard of Cinderella, never played any game," as the family had "discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books, fairy tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever." The Smallweed children are grotesques. Little Tom and Louisa Gradgrind in Hard Times are more tragic figures. Deprived of art and literature by their father, a utilitarian ideologue, they grow up emotionally and morally impaired. Esther Summerson, the protagonist of Bleak House, grows up in a world, as Carroll says, "devoid of affection." She survives by creating a imaginative world of her own, a private, imaginary place where she talks with her doll and engages normal human affection, keeping her emotional nature alive, till the plot turns in her favor and she moves to a better environment: "The conversations she has with her doll are not fantasies of pleasure; they are desperate and effective measures of personal salvation." Carroll also mentions the abused David Copperfield, who discovered next to his bedroom dusty, forgotten books that had belonged to his dead father: Tom Jones, Humphrey Clinker, Don Quixote, and Robinson Crusoe. Carroll argues his case thus: What David gets from these books is not just a bit of mental cheesecake, a chance for a transient fantasy in which all his own wishes are fulfilled. What he gets is lively and powerful images of human life suffused with the feeling and understanding of the astonishingly capable and complete human beings who wrote them. It is through this kind of contact with a sense of human possibility that he is enabled to escape from the degrading limitations of his own local environment. He is not escaping from reality; he is escaping from an impoverished reality into the larger world of healthy human possibility. By nurturing and cultivating his own individual identity through his literary imagination, he enables himself to adapt successfully to this world. He directly enhances his own fitness as a human being, and in doing so he demonstrates the kind of adaptive advantage that can be conferred by literature. This account is some distance from pleasure buttons. It is intended by Carroll to support his central contention that literature is an "important means by which we cultivate and regulate the complex cognitive machinery on which our more highly developed functions depend." Carroll accuses Pinker of failing to grasp the importance of such cultivation, as evidenced by his claim that the human race could do away with music and be basically unchanged, and that music can be analogized to recreational drugs. "Drugs," Carroll says, "are disorienting and demoralizing. If young people use them habitually, they become incapable of adapting to the demands of a complex environment. Music has no such deleterious effect. More importantly, it seems very likely that people raised with no exposure to music, art, or literature would be psychologically and emotionally stunted, that they would be only marginally capable of developing in normal ways." The notion of a recreational-drug shortcut to achieve a Darwinian fitness reward is a delusion. Nor, it would seem, is the pleasure value of art an end to which the art itself is a mere shortcut. Working through and understanding in experience a work of art is an achievement, and an intrinsic value. Carroll argues that literature is a means by which people learn to understand their own emotions and the feelings of others. Fiction provides us with templates for a normal emotional life. "For these mental maps or models to be effective in providing behavioral directives," he says, they must be "emotionally saturated, imaginatively vivid. Art and cultural artifacts like religion and ideology meet this demand." They help us "make sense of human needs and motives," simulating life experience, allowing us to grasp "social relations, evoke sexual and social interactions, depict the intimate relations of kin, and locate the whole complex and interactive array of human behavioral systems within models of the total world order. Humans have a universal and irrepressible need to fabricate this sort of order, and satisfying that need provides a distinct form of pleasure and fulfillment." The mention of David Copperfield's discovery of his dead father's books also suggests another idea central to understanding literature. The meaning of a literary work, Carroll says, is not in the events it recounts. It is how events are interpreted that makes meaning. Interpretation, in turn, involves necessary reference to a point of view. This is defined as "the locus of consciousness or experience within which any meaning takes place." Following M.H. Abrams, Carroll argues that an interpretive point of view is constituted by three elements: the author, the represented character, and the audience. These elements come together, in the experience of the reader, as situated in the mind of the author. That is why part of the significance for David Copperfield in discovering the books is that he is being introduced, as Carroll says, to "the astonishingly capable and complete human beings who wrote them." The importance of fiction depends on a sense of a communicative transaction between reader and author understood as a real, not an implied or postulated author. Authors are actual persons who negotiate between the various points of view of fictional persons (the characters), the author's own point of view, and the point of view of the audience. Carroll insists that these three elements are present in every literary experience and that they exhaust the list of operative elements: "There are always three components. There are only three components." This isn't to deny that the components overlap, that audiences change (hence our interest in recovering the meanings and values of the original audiences of historic works), and that authors contrive even to hide themselves. Nevertheless, the author is trying to control the show the interpretation of characters, their actions and the events that befall them. Authors attempt this by persuading, manipulating, wheedling, and so forth: whatever will appeal to the reader and create a convincing interpretation, including ambiguous interpretations of polysemic events. This then is how Carroll's evolutionary substructure underpins a general theory of literature. "Authors are people talking to people about people." Behind the talk lies an evolved structure of behavioral systems, a Darwinian psychology, and the emotions that characterize it. Literary forms are analyzed and understood in terms the complex relations between authors, characters, and audiences. As I understand Carroll's view, this makes the experience of a work of literature inescapably social, and not just about an imaginary social life. The author is always a palpable presence, which would explain why intentionalism has never died in criticism or literary theory. Literary Darwinism contains many passages analyzing literature to good effect. His discussion of Pride and Prejudice is especially useful to illustrate the kind of analysis for which his literary theory calls. For example, he cites the episode in which Mr. Collins introduces himself to the Bennet household in a letter that is read by the family. This letter is, as Carroll nicely describes it, "an absolute marvel of fatuity and of pompous self-importance," and much is revealed in how mother, father, and the Bennet sisters react to it. The excessively sweet-tempered older sister, Jane, is puzzled by it, though she credits Mr. Collins with good intentions. The dull middle sister, Mary, says she rather likes Mr. Collins's style. The mother, in her typical manner, only reacts to it opportunistically, in terms of a potential advantage in the situation. It is up to Elizabeth and her father to see clearly what a clownish performance the letter represents: their understanding marks an affinity of temperament and a quality perceptiveness the others lack. But what Carroll's analysis makes clear is that there are two more people not fictional characters, but actual human beings who are in on the agreement between Mr. Bennet and his second daughter. These two further individuals are also members of their "circle of wit and judgment." First, there is Jane Austen, the author of Pride and Prejudice. And second, there is you, the reader of Pride and Prejudice. The creation and experience of the novel brings about a uniting of points of view, a sense of shared sensibility not open to everyone, and a broadening of perspectives. It is no small enjoyment for the reader to be included in this exclusive group. Which brings us back to pleasure and its place in literary theory. Carroll claims in the spirit of scientific neutrality that Darwinian literary theory ought to be applicable to any literary specimen, just as DNA analysis should apply equally to human beings or to flatworms. This may be so, but it seems to me that Carroll's approach is most congenial to classic fictions of the sort we read from Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dickens, George Eliot, or Jane Austen. If we set Carroll against Pinker, we find, as so often in the history of aesthetics, that the two theoretical outlooks look better or worse depending on the choice of examples adduced to back them up. Does everything Carroll says in applying his evolutionary theory of fiction work as well with a Harlequin Romance as it does with Daniel Defoe? I think not. Carroll dislikes Pinker's characterization of literature in terms of fantasy, escapism, and ephemeral entertainment values, and provides powerful arguments for seeing fiction in a different, more cultivated and informed way. But he has not so much refuted Pinker as shown that literature can do more than Pinker seems to suppose. Hanslick distinguishes the "ideal" aspect of music from its "elemental" aspect: attention to the former is the smart way to understand music. Those who know only the latter aspect possess only a passive, dumbed-down way to listen. Hanslick does, however, allow that music itself does, whether we like it or not, have both of these aspects: there are Sousa marches and there are Bartok quartets. We ought to make ourselves, he thought, into informed, cultivated listeners in order to appreciate all music has to offer. If we listen to it as shallow entertainment, so much the worse for us. Literature offers a parallel distinction. There is no doubt, we might similarly argue, that just as Robinson Crusoe helped make a man of the fictional David Copperfield, so George Eliot's and Charles Dickens's fictions have helped real readers develop and mature. But evolutionary aesthetics has also to account for the fact that Eliot and Dickens were not the most popular novelists of Victorian England. That honor belonged to the nearly forgotten Maria Corelli, Queen Victoria's favorite novelist, whose metaphysical twaddle may more clearly accord with Pinker's than Carroll's characterization of literary experience. In any event, the drugs, porn, and cheesecake analogues certainly seem more plausibly applied to aspects of contemporary popular fiction and movies than to Middlemarch. And even if we grant the important ways serious literature can provide audiences today with Carroll's templates, his cognitive maps and models, why should we not allow that Mills and Boon readers today are also provided with cognitive maps and templates by their literature? By Carroll's own admission such templates might include religious ideologies and mythologies, as well as fictions from Gilgamesh to V.S. Naipaul. So why not movies, which, a cynic might insist, provide relatively unsophisticated life-advice for relatively unsophisticated people? If there is adaptive survival value in ancient, Stone-Age storytelling, it ought to extend to our own time and explain somehow the pleasure we get from fictions. It strikes me that Carroll and Pinker are both correct to some extent about all fiction, with each more correct than the other about different subclasses. Pinker is most right about popular, effects-driven blockbuster movies, TV, and cheap thrillers. Carroll is most right about high art, the classics whose values endure across generations, the "best that is known and thought in the world." This is not a surprise: Joseph Carroll brings to his Darwinian position a sensitive aesthetic and critical sense. He writes beautifully about deep, rich works of art. This gives a wholly earned air of importance to the essays in Literary Darwinism. For the last decade, I've heard it said that evolutionary aesthetics is a field of great potential. Read his extended analysis of Pride and Prejudice and you can see how Carroll goes beyond the promises into the payoff. He is able to demonstrate how a knowledge of Darwinian mechanisms shines light on some of the most cherished aesthetic emotions and experiences we are capable of feeling and he does it without impoverished reductionisms, without making the endlessly complex seem stupidly simple. His Literary Darwinism is a book to reckon with. University of Canterbury, New Zealand [5]denis.dutton at canterbury.ac.nz From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 13 18:13:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 13:13:25 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Sigma Xi: The Man Who Invented the Chromosome: A Life of Cyril Darlington Message-ID: The Man Who Invented the Chromosome: A Life of Cyril Darlington http://www.rednova.com/modules/news/tools.php?tool=print&id=99616 The Man Who Invented the Chromosome: A Life of Cyril Darlington Forgotten Prophet of Genetics The Man Who Invented the Chromosome: A Life of Cyril Darlington. Oren S. Harman. xii + 329 pp. Harvard University Press, 2004. Cyril Darlington was an impressive figure: Well over six feet tall with a frame to match his height, handsome and debonair, a fresh rose in his jacket lapel, Oxford's Sherardian Professor of Botany looked the part. Although he was, in his day, one of the foremost cytologists in the world, he was also an enthusiastic student of history and a devoted gardener. He learned to garden as a child and subsequently expressed this enthusiasm in the genetic garden he created at the University of Oxford and in the historic Botanic Garden there; he also planned two arboreta (both achieved). His passion to account for history in genetic terms led him to write a mammoth book, The Evolution of Man and Society (1969). The son of a Lancashire schoolmaster, Darlington graduated from Wye College with a London University degree and found unpaid work at the John Innes Horticultural Institute, which was directed at that time by William Bateson, an "apostle" of Mendelism. Sixteen years later Darlington became director. By the time he left in 1953 (after 30 years) to assume the chair of botany at Oxford, he had built for himself and the institute an international reputation. Like Darwin, Darlington was systematic in preserving documents pertaining to his life and work. His papers are a treasure trove for the biographer. Oren Solomon Harman has made full use of them in The Man Who Invented the Chromosome, supplementing them with interviews of surviving colleagues. The book has four main sections, devoted to Darlington's early career, his major creative period in cytology at the John Innes Horticultural Institute, his response to Marxism and to Lysenkoism (which in the 1930s resulted in some Soviet geneticists being declared "enemies of the people" and shot), and his public statements about his genetic view of man and society. Harman encompasses this agenda in an evenhanded manner, avoiding as far as possible making personal judgments about his subject. This cannot have been easy, because Darlington's strong hereditarian and racist pronouncements, many of them laced with derision and ridicule, invite challenge. But no matter how objectionable Darlington's utterances on race, class, intelligence, culture and history, Harman keeps his cool. Instead of fulminating, he lets his sources mete out the judgments. At the end he muses on the story he has told: "No one can remain indifferent" to it, he opines, or to "the lessons it offers about the interplay of ideas and the way we express and act on them." For Harman, "the passionate expression and vigorous challenge of new ideas, and their application to society, is where the future of mankind lies." The title of the book signals the disputed status of the chromosome in the 1920s and points toward the imaginative and creative synthesis of the subject that Darlington achieved. By the time he entered the field in 1923, a consensus had developed regarding how chromosomes assemble at the onset of cell division and then split in two, with each daughter chromosome traveling to opposite poles of the cell. But the division process leading to the formation of the sperm and egg was disputed territory. Here, like chromosomes (paternal and maternal) associate in pairs. Do they associate end-to-end or side-by-side? Using plants, Darlington established that it is the latter. He went on to sort out the puzzling case of the association of chromosomes in rings in the evening primrose, and as a theorist he both clarified and unified chromosome behavior across the board in his book Recent Advances in Cytology (1932), a tour de force. But his method, although it drew upon a wealth of data, was conjectural, involving a degree of speculation that empirically inclined biologists were reluctant to accept. Harman brings out clearly the central feature of Darlington's conception of cytology: his view that the chromosome is a dynamic unit-a vital part of "the genetic systems" that organize and suppress to varying degrees the indeterminacy of mutation and recombination. Control of cell division, control of the degree of inbreeding or outbreeding, and control of sterility or fertility are genetically based, he thought, and the genetics of these systems is itself subject to selection, just as are the genes that determine other traits. With such a view, Darlington could not but deplore the naivete of the population geneticists' equations, which to all intents and purposes treat the gene as an independent unit in heredity. Yet, like the population geneticists, he wanted to approach the genetic system from an evolutionary point of view. These ideas he first aired in a chapter of Recent Advances in Cytology, but in 1939 he expanded on them in The Evolution of Genetic Systems. Genetic systems, he explained, "rest on a basis of chromosomes and are related to one another by processes of natural selection." This combination of "the material basis with the evolutionary framework," he declared, "provides the only means of making sense of biology as a whole." The greatest strength of Harman's book lies in the exposition and analysis he provides of Darlington's views on the evolution and history of man and society. It is, of course, a starkly hereditarian view, but Harman shows its organic relation with Darlington's biological conception of genetic systems. The fact that until now there has been no full-length biography of Darlington underlines the extent to which he has been forgotten. The molecular revolution left him behind, and the political climate rendered his views on man and society increasingly unacceptable. Harman's biography is therefore especially welcome. It is a valuable source for the student of the biology of the first half of the 20th century, and Harman's discussion of Darlington's genetic approach to the historical and social realms is penetrating. No biography of a cytologist is likely to make an easy read. Cytogenetics is a very visual science. Those unfamiliar with its jargon and visual content will need more assistance than Harman has provided. Without helpful photographs of the stages in meiosis as seen through the microscope, it is difficult for the uninitiated to grasp why interpreting them proved so difficult. Also, Harman would have been wise to focus more strictly on the relation between Mendelian heredity and the chromosomes rather than including the Mendelian-biometric debate and much else. That said, he has provided a scholarly, powerful and at times devastating, but also subtle, analysis of his subject.-Robert Olby, History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh Control of cell division, control of the degree of inbreeding or out-breeding, and control of sterility or fertility are genetically based, Darlington thought, and the genetics of these systems is itself subject to selection. Robert Olby, History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh Story from REDNOVA NEWS: http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=99616 Published: 2004/11/02 03:00:14 CST From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Fri Jan 14 00:14:26 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 16:14:26 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] fundamentalism In-Reply-To: <200501131826.j0DIQeK26860@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050114001426.26212.qmail@web13423.mail.yahoo.com> >>Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma, has called not just for outlawing abortion but for the death penalty for doctors who break such a law.<< --What they don't seem to realize with the "abortion equals murder" argument is that the woman would have to be treated identically to someone who hires an assassin. I don't know if people who hire hitmen get the death penalty, or in what states, but that's where the logic goes. And once a group accepts an axiom and believes it is heresy to turn back, the group is capable of taking logic to extremes. Most Americans would not, if asked, support the death penalty for women who have abortions. But starting with the axiom "abortion is child-murder", how do you turn back from the logical consequences? This is how fundamentalist bullies work, they induce a group to accept an axiom, and then push it, step by step, to the logical extreme, which tends to violate all human sense of feeling and context. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Jan 14 03:33:16 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 19:33:16 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] fundamentalism Message-ID: <01C4F9A6.BB9FDCC0.shovland@mindspring.com> Abort a Conservative Save the World Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2005 4:14 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] fundamentalism >>Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma, has called not just for outlawing abortion but for the death penalty for doctors who break such a law.<< --What they don't seem to realize with the "abortion equals murder" argument is that the woman would have to be treated identically to someone who hires an assassin. I don't know if people who hire hitmen get the death penalty, or in what states, but that's where the logic goes. And once a group accepts an axiom and believes it is heresy to turn back, the group is capable of taking logic to extremes. Most Americans would not, if asked, support the death penalty for women who have abortions. But starting with the axiom "abortion is child-murder", how do you turn back from the logical consequences? This is how fundamentalist bullies work, they induce a group to accept an axiom, and then push it, step by step, to the logical extreme, which tends to violate all human sense of feeling and context. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Fri Jan 14 04:01:25 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 21:01:25 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] fundamentalism In-Reply-To: <01C4F9A6.BB9FDCC0.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4F9A6.BB9FDCC0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <41E74415.5020704@solution-consulting.com> Michael, this is a questionable report. I just did a Yahoo News search for the terms: Tom Coburn Oklahoma abortion capital punishment No returns. I did find several pieces on Coburn as an abortion opponent, but Michael, the man is a physician, and it seems unlikely he would say such a thing. I think you may have been suckered. Please cite a source. Failing that, I think you should retract. BTW, Steve, hate speech calling for preemptive murder based on presumptive political beliefs makes me proud I don't share your 'liberal' ideology. Seems rather fundamentalist to me. Lynn Steve Hovland wrote: >Abort a Conservative >Save the World > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] >Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2005 4:14 PM >To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >Subject: [Paleopsych] fundamentalism > > > > >>>Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma, has >>> >>> >called not just for outlawing abortion but for the >death penalty for doctors who break such a law.<< > >--What they don't seem to realize with the "abortion >equals murder" argument is that the woman would have >to be treated identically to someone who hires an >assassin. I don't know if people who hire hitmen get >the death penalty, or in what states, but that's where >the logic goes. And once a group accepts an axiom and >believes it is heresy to turn back, the group is >capable of taking logic to extremes. Most Americans >would not, if asked, support the death penalty for >women who have abortions. But starting with the axiom >"abortion is child-murder", how do you turn back from >the logical consequences? This is how fundamentalist >bullies work, they induce a group to accept an axiom, >and then push it, step by step, to the logical >extreme, which tends to violate all human sense of >feeling and context. > >Michael > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. >http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Jan 14 04:55:28 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 20:55:28 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] fundamentalism Message-ID: <01C4F9B2.36D65E90.shovland@mindspring.com> Now that you've had your emotional reaction, you may find it useful to evaluate my slogan as a learning cycle for your wetnet. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2005 8:01 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] fundamentalism Michael, this is a questionable report. I just did a Yahoo News search for the terms: Tom Coburn Oklahoma abortion capital punishment No returns. I did find several pieces on Coburn as an abortion opponent, but Michael, the man is a physician, and it seems unlikely he would say such a thing. I think you may have been suckered. Please cite a source. Failing that, I think you should retract. BTW, Steve, hate speech calling for preemptive murder based on presumptive political beliefs makes me proud I don't share your 'liberal' ideology. Seems rather fundamentalist to me. Lynn Steve Hovland wrote: >Abort a Conservative >Save the World > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] >Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2005 4:14 PM >To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >Subject: [Paleopsych] fundamentalism > > > > >>>Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma, has >>> >>> >called not just for outlawing abortion but for the >death penalty for doctors who break such a law.<< > >--What they don't seem to realize with the "abortion >equals murder" argument is that the woman would have >to be treated identically to someone who hires an >assassin. I don't know if people who hire hitmen get >the death penalty, or in what states, but that's where >the logic goes. And once a group accepts an axiom and >believes it is heresy to turn back, the group is >capable of taking logic to extremes. Most Americans >would not, if asked, support the death penalty for >women who have abortions. But starting with the axiom >"abortion is child-murder", how do you turn back from >the logical consequences? This is how fundamentalist >bullies work, they induce a group to accept an axiom, >and then push it, step by step, to the logical >extreme, which tends to violate all human sense of >feeling and context. > >Michael > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. >http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > << File: ATT00000.html >> << File: ATT00001.txt >> From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Fri Jan 14 05:07:43 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 22:07:43 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: An Evolutionary Mind... In-Reply-To: <01e401c4f9aa$2af48140$1af9ae44@CallaStudios> References: <01e401c4f9aa$2af48140$1af9ae44@CallaStudios> Message-ID: <41E7539F.4070305@solution-consulting.com> Alice, Wonderful! I am glad for you. It is always worthwhile to share something you clearly worked hard on. I also read the Dembski review in the same issue, and had fun with that. You said, The feminist academic psychologist also asked me if it was not dangerous to our students to teach that "motherhood is innate and that the only way to be happy is to be a mother." You have identified the problem I have with feminists, namely that they ignore data that contradicts their theory, and they believe that only ideas that support their theory should be taught. At another level, you have identified a classic difference between modern conservatism and modern liberalism. The conservative believes that people cannot be perfected by society, the liberal believes that, given the right society, people can be perfected. Every contrary example is explained away. And I liked your description of your reaction to the dutch treat date where the man wanted to kiss you, even though you were raised not to have just that reaction. Sounds innate! So I think your article was a thought-provoking one and I hope it is widely read. I will forward it to the paleo list and encourage people to look it up. Lynn Alice Andrews wrote: > Hi Lynn, > > remember that piece you read some of....re me and the economist, > etc. "An Evolutionary Mind,"?...well it's a lot longer (i'm afraid) > but published! > http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/index.asp > Thanks again for your encouraging words...they definitely inspired me > to continue on writing! > All best! > Alice > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Jan 14 14:27:59 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 06:27:59 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: An Evolutionary Mind... Message-ID: <01C4FA02.320678A0.shovland@mindspring.com> As a card carrying liberal, I do not think that people can be perfected if we have the right kind of society. I have no idea where you get this formulation. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2005 9:08 PM To: Alice Andrews; paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: An Evolutionary Mind... Alice, Wonderful! I am glad for you. It is always worthwhile to share something you clearly worked hard on. I also read the Dembski review in the same issue, and had fun with that. You said, The feminist academic psychologist also asked me if it was not dangerous to our students to teach that "motherhood is innate and that the only way to be happy is to be a mother." You have identified the problem I have with feminists, namely that they ignore data that contradicts their theory, and they believe that only ideas that support their theory should be taught. At another level, you have identified a classic difference between modern conservatism and modern liberalism. The conservative believes that people cannot be perfected by society, the liberal believes that, given the right society, people can be perfected. Every contrary example is explained away. And I liked your description of your reaction to the dutch treat date where the man wanted to kiss you, even though you were raised not to have just that reaction. Sounds innate! So I think your article was a thought-provoking one and I hope it is widely read. I will forward it to the paleo list and encourage people to look it up. Lynn Alice Andrews wrote: > Hi Lynn, > > remember that piece you read some of....re me and the economist, > etc. "An Evolutionary Mind,"?...well it's a lot longer (i'm afraid) > but published! > http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/index.asp > Thanks again for your encouraging words...they definitely inspired me > to continue on writing! > All best! > Alice > << File: ATT00000.html >> << File: ATT00001.txt >> From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 14 14:59:07 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 09:59:07 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Historically Speaking, 4.9-10 (Vol. 6, No. 1) Message-ID: Historically Speaking,4.9-10 (Vol. 6, No. 1) http://www.bu.edu/historic/hs/septemberoctober04.html [Many short articles below, besides the series on the professionalization of history. There is a Sage Sighting!] News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.14 A glance at the current issue of Historically Speaking: The professionalization of history The field of history suffers from "mass professionalization," Bruce Kuklick, a professor of American history at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in the lead essay in "The American Historical Profession in the 21st Century: an Exchange," a section based on papers presented at the Historical Society's 2004 conference. Too many people have doctorates in history, and there are not enough jobs in higher education to accommodate them, Mr. Kuklick says. The result is "a growing helot class of non-standing faculty, exploited and underpaid." Publication has traditionally been the way for scholars to distinguish themselves from the pack, he writes, but the staggering number of journals and books being published now makes it "more difficult for scholars to publish their way 'out' or 'up.'" There is too much material for most scholars to keep track of what is out there, he says, much less evaluate what is especially good. "In the old days," he argues, "standards may have been narrow and determined by a group of old white males who successfully passed on their rigidities. But at least one knew who to read, and the number of historians was limited enough so that supply did not so entirely exceed one's ability to consume." In a response to Mr. Kuklick's essay, Marc Trachtenberg, a professor of political science at the University of California at Los Angeles, is less troubled by the volume of publications available. "The more basic problem," he says, "is that I would not want to read much of it, no matter how much time I had." And in another response, Leo P. Ribuffo, a professor of history at George Washington University, says: "Ain't it awful? You bet. It always is." The essays are online at http://www.bu.edu/historic/hs/septemberoctober04.html#profession --Kellie Bartlett -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joseph S. Lucas and Donald A. Yerxa, Editors Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society September/October 2004 Volume VI, Number 1 Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs, "Re-Bunking the Pilgrims" Joseph Morrison Skelly, "Here We Stand, in Baquba" Thomas Fleming, "Illusions and Realities in World War I" Bruce J. Evensen, "D.L. Mooody and the Mass Media Revival" THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL PROFESSION IN THE 21ST CENTURY: AN EXCHANGE --Bruce Kuklick, "The Future of the Profession" --Leo P. Ribuffo, "Ain't It Awful? You Bet, It Always Is" --Marc Trachtenberg, "Comment on Kuklick" An Interview with John Ferling CATHOLICISM AND AMERICAN FREEDOM: A FORUM --John T. McGreevy, "Catholicism and American Freedom" --Leo P. Ribuffo, "The American Catholic Church and Ordered Liberty" --Eugene McCarraher, "Remarks on John McGreevy's Catholicism and American Freedom" --Christopher Shannon, "Comments on Catholicism and American Freedom" --John T. McGreevy, "Response to Ribuffo, McCarraher, and Shannon" Thomas Schoonover, "Uncle Sam's War of 1898 and Globalization George Huppert, "Notes on the Boothbay Harbor Conference" -------------------------------------------------------------------------- RE-BUNKING THE PILGRIMS Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs In grade school in the 1950s, I learned that the Pilgrims were the most important and influential of England's American colonists. Seeking religious freedom, the heroic Pilgrims set sail for distant shores. En route to America, these poor, purehearted souls invented democracy with the famed Mayflower Compact. After struggling through the initial hardships of life on unfamiliar soil, they invented the classic American holiday of Thanksgiving, which they celebrated with their friends the Indians. More virtuous than the rapacious Virginians who preceded them, the Pilgrims were the first true Americans. Those inspiring Pilgrims of my youth have taken a beating! According to today's historians, the Pilgrims were among the least significant of England's American colonists. Their tiny Plymouth Colony was soon absorbed by the larger and more prosperous Massachussets Bay. The Pilgrims were no friendlier to Indians than other Europeans in the Americas-which is to say, they were greedy, duplicitous purveyors of genocide. Nor did they invent democracy: the Mayflower Compact was just an expedient means of maintaining order in a new environment. And their first "Thanksgiving" was nothing more than a replica of a traditional, secular English harvest feast. The Pilgrims didn't even call themselves Pilgrims, a term coined by the 19th-century Americans who invented these virtuous forbears out of thin air in an effort to grace the relatively new United States with a glorious past. Indeed, about the only aspect of my schoolboy Pilgrims that has survived this assault is their poverty. The truth about the Pilgrims-and yes, I do still call them Pilgrims-is perhaps closer to the "myth" than to what we can learn from today's textbooks . . . . Formerly curator of the Leiden Pilgrim Documents Center (1980-1985), chief curator of Plimoth Plantation (1986-1991), visiting curator of Manuscripts, Pilgrim Hall Museum (1992-1996), Jeremy Bangs (Ph.D. Leiden, 1976) is director of the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum. His extensive publications on 16th- and 17th-century Dutch and colonial cultural history include The 17th-Century Town Records of Scituate, Massachusetts (New England Historical and Genealogical Society, 3 vols., 1997, 1999, 2001); Indian Deeds, Land Transactions in Plymouth Colony, 1620-1691 (New England Historical and Genealogical Society, 2002), containing an extensive critique of Jennings's "invasion" metaphor; Pilgrim Edward Winslow: New England's First International Diplomat (New England Historical and Genealogical Society, 2004); and Letters on Toleration, Dutch Aid to Persecuted Swiss and Palatine Mennonites, 1615-1699 (Picton, 2004). He is currently editing the remaining twelve volumes of Plymouth Colony records for integral publication on CD-ROM and writing a book to be called Leiden and the Pilgrims. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- HERE WE STAND, IN BAQUBA Joseph Morrison Skelly On the morning of Saturday, September 25th, I arrived in Baquba, my final destination in a year-long deployment to Iraq with the United States Army Reserve. The city lies forty miles northeast of Baghdad, in Diyala province, on the eastern edge of the Sunni Triangle. Its population of 280,000 is a mixture of Sunnis, Shiites, and even some Kurds who have drifted down from the northern part of the province. It has been a volatile place at times over the past six months, the scene of major battles in April and June. These flare-ups were sparked by a small, disgruntled minority-an angry assortment of ex-Baathists, Al Qaeda operatives, foreign agents, and some local opportunists who cast their lot with the insurgency. This motley crew made a fatal mistake. The 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Infantry Division ("The Big Red One" of Sicily, Normandy, and the Bulge), quickly put down both uprisings. Known as the "Dukes of Diyala," the 3rd BCT controls the city and its hinterlands, and has made great progress in stabilizing the province since its arrival in February of 2004. In fact, beneath the radar screen of cable news networks and twenty-four hour news cycles, normal life has returned to many parts of Baquba. The vast majority of its people are decent, hardworking citizens who are glad to have the Americans here, ecstatic to be rid of Saddam Hussein, and eager to turn their country around. Many are supporting the reconstruction efforts of the United States and its Coalition partners. Some do so publicly, others privately. Several personal conversations over the past weeks have unequivocally confirmed these sentiments. So, too, have the actions of numerous men, women, and children that I have witnessed firsthand. That said, the insurgents, as reported in the press, sometimes target Iraqis who work with the Coalition. These Iraqis remain undaunted. Their courage is inspiring. Yet the full telling of their tale may have to await the final defeat of the insurgency. Perhaps historians will one day reveal the complete truth. My duty station in Baquba is at a location called the CMOC, the Civil-Military Operations Center. It is a joint headquarters. The Army personnel at this center work closely with the local and provincial governments, the State Department, and some NGOs, under the command of the Army leadership at brigade and division levels. Army officers and enlisted troops, working closely with Iraqi experts and administrators, tackle a variety of projects, all geared towards stabilizing the province. These missions include restoring public works, upgrading the transportation system, streamlining the energy distribution network, reconnecting communications links, improving public education facilities, and enhancing civil-military relations. These essential activities constitute an integral part of full spectrum warfare on the 21st-century battlefield. In the coming months, my duties will focus on higher education (including the reconstruction of one of the local universities, which was damaged in the June uprising when insurgents commandeered a nearby stadium), government relations, and other projects that may arise. The CMOC is a compound of several buildings situated on approximately one city block. It has a high-visibility presence in the city. It is accessible. These features are necessary to attract locals and to build trust in the community. They also mean that the installation is sometimes a target of the insurgents. Occasional mortar rounds, echoes of improvised explosive devices, and sporadic AK-47 fire punctuate the days and nights. Indeed, the CMOC was attacked in early October, when three Russian-made rockets slammed into the neighborhood, with two near misses and one direct hit on the compound. There were no American casualties, but several innocent Iraqi civilians were injured, which was of no concern to the guerillas, of course. The next three nights the CMOC and the nearby offices of the Iraqi National Guard and Iraqi police were mortared, without any reported damage. On the night of October 12 insurgents fired several RPGs at the seat of the provincial government several blocks away, known locally as the Blue Dome. These attempts at intimidation failed. The American troops stationed at the CMOC remained rock solid throughout this brief test, passing it with flying colors. They are determined to hold this ground. Down the street, the Blue Dome opened for business as usual on the morning of October 13. In a nutshell, this city is one of the cockpits of this war. The next several months will be critical. The soldiers at this post will not waver. To paraphrase Martin Luther, "Here we stand, in Baquba." Joseph Morrison Skelly is assistant professor of history at the College of Mount Saint Vincent. He is the author of Irish Diplomacy at the United Nations, 1945-1965: National Interests and the International Order (Irish Academic Press, 1997). He is currently serving with the 411th Civil Affairs Battalion, in support of the 1st Infantry Division, in Operation Iraqi Freedom. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ILLUSIONS AND REALITIES IN WORLD WAR I Thomas Fleming Two years ago, when I decided to write a book on the American experience in World War I, I thought I had discovered the best opening for a historical narrative I had seen in forty years of writing books. On the night of April 1, 1917, only hours before Woodrow Wilson was scheduled to go before Congress and ask for a declaration of war, the president sent for Frank I. Cobb, editor of the New York World, a stalwart supporter of him and the Democratic Party. As Cobb told the story, he rushed to Washington, arriving at the White House at 1:00 a.m. He and Wilson talked into the dawn. Wilson told Cobb he had "considered every loophole" to escape going to war but each time Germany blocked it with some "new outrage." Then Wilson began to talk about the impact the war would have on America. "Once lead this people into war," the president said, "and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be ruthless and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street." "He thought the Constitution would not survive it," Cobb said. "That free speech and the right of assembly would go. He said a nation couldn't put its strength into a war and keep its head level; it had never been done." "If there's any alternative, for God's sake let's take it," Wilson exclaimed. "Well I couldn't see any, and I told him so," Cobb concluded. This touching scene coincided with another episode I discovered in the memoir of Woodrow Wilson's secretary, Joseph Tumulty, a man whose name was often spoken with respect in my boyhood home in Jersey City. Tumulty was born not too many blocks from my house. Tumulty told how he and Wilson returned to the White House on that April evening after the president's speech to Congress, calling on America to fight a war without hate, a war to make the world safe for democracy. The soaring rhetoric had been received with near hysterical applause. Tumulty accompanied Wilson to the cabinet room, where the president broke down. "My message today was a message of death for our young men," Wilson said. "How strange it seems to applaud that." The president launched into an emotional monologue, defending his long struggle to keep America neutral. Finally, Tumulty said, "he wiped away great tears [and] laying his head on the table, sobbed as if he was a child." Here, it would seem, was a double dose of heartbreak combined with globe-girdling drama. I could almost hear the sympathetic sobs as readers turned the opening pages. Alas, additional research led to another variety of heartbreak: the literary kind. These two scenes, which are in numerous biographies of Woodrow Wilson and histories of World War I, never happened. According to the White House logs, Frank Cobb did not set foot in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on the night of April 1, 1917. Nor did Joe Tumulty return to the White House to witness Wilson's supposed breakdown after his speech. What was going on here? It took a lot more research to find the answer . . . . Thomas Fleming is the author of more than forty books, including The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I (Basic Books, 2004). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- D.L. MOODY AND THE MASS MEDIA REVIVAL Bruce J. Evensen I am a child of revival. In 1962 I was one of 704,900 who attended Billy Graham's meetings on Chicago's lakefront and one of 16,597 who came forward to express a personal need for a savior. Today, Graham's reach is far wider. On Christmas Eve in 1996, speaking from a small sports stadium in Puerto Rico, Graham preached to a targeted one billion people across the planet. Satellite technology created this communication community. It reportedly reached a man in Sierra Leone, who borrowed money to repair an antenna so that "twenty two of my friends and neighbors could watch the Gospel on television." At that very hour, 2,000 Ugandan churches opened their doors to television parties that showed the same program. Churches in the Philippines conducted immediate baptismal services for those who had "come to Christ." Pastors in Saltillo, Mexico said 20,000 saw Graham's "A Season for Peace" and reported many were curious about the condition of their souls. In Italy, event organizers reported 20,000 "decisions for Christ" following the worldwide television special. The romance between mass media and popular religion, practiced as an evangelistic art by Graham, was a development one of Graham's mentors, D.L. Moody, would have easily appreciated. During the late Gilded Age the former shoe salesman with a fourth grade education conducted urban revivals across the Anglo-American landscape, appropriating, as Graham later would, all available means in doing so. That meant the active courting of the press as an important instrument in reaching the unchurched with the gospel message. Moody's success resulted in the creation of mass media revivals that relied on the twin pillars of prayer and publicity in constructing citywide spectacles as extraordinary as any editor or reader had ever seen. Moody was a little known Chicago layman when he arrived in Liverpool on June 17, 1873. When the revivalist left the same city two years and two months later after preaching all over England, Scotland, and Ireland, he was heralded as the greatest evangelist in the English-speaking world . . . . Bruce J. Evensen is professor of communications at DePaul University. He is the author of God's Man for the Gilded Age: D.L. Moody and the Rise of Modern Mass Evangelism (Oxford University Press, 2003). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL PROFESSION IN THE 21ST CENTURY: AN EXCHANGE One of the many highlights of the Historical Society's 2004 conference, "Reflections on the Current State of Historical Inquiry," was a lively session on "The American Historical Profession in the 21st Century." Bruce Kuklick launched the session with his paper, after which Leo Ribuffo and Marc Trachtenberg offered their responses. The exchange was provocative, candid, and frequently hilarious. Below are slightly revised drafts of the speakers' papers. THE FUTURE OF THE PROFESSION Bruce Kuklick There are several reasons why I was a bad choice to make this presentation. I have an ambivalent connection to the profession, disliking meetings and networking and thereby losing sustained intellectual contact with peers. In many ways I am barely professionally active. My interests lie in two peripheral fields, intellectual and diplomatic history, that are usually counted as retrograde. Moreover, although I am convinced (unlike many of my colleagues) that we know at least a little bit about the past, I also believe that we know very little about the future, and should not get into the game of being futurologists. I am under an illusion that I read widely but when, in preparation for the talk, I looked at the Journal of American History's recent symposium on the topic, I noted that there were many "seminal," "pathbreaking," and "paradigm"-shattering or -creating books, not just that I had not read but that I had not heard of. Thus, readers are encouraged-as were the commentators -to be very critical of my views. Readers are also reminded that for the most part, I am noting what I think are trends, and not endorsing them. What will shape the future of the profession is a phenomenon that I call "mass professionalization"-a very large number of people trained to be professional historians, to publish in ever more specialized journals, to try to avoid undergraduate research agendas. This phenomenon has diverse consequences. In our era, the large number is too high-too many people trained with a Ph.D. degree to be historians, so that even in the enormous system of higher education, there are too few jobs for these individuals. This may be an issue of under demand rather than oversupply, but the consequences are the same, especially in the fields of American history that I know best. The first significant problem of mass professionalization is that there is a growing helot class of non-standing faculty, exploited and underpaid. To presume that the tenure-track job at a major university represents the norm is like presuming that Ozzie and Harriet represent the typical American family. But the power of the tenure system to distort market forces is extraordinary. In ordinary circumstances, with such an enormous supply of faculty in comparison to a relative small demand, one would draw the inference that faculty with jobs would be teaching more and being paid less; but for standing faculty the reverse actually often occurs. Thus, two likely results of mass professionalization in the 21st century are, on the one hand, increasing attacks on tenure and, on the other, increasing pressure for unionization. Both the attacks and the pressure me that we ought to try to maintain the older dignified notion of a profession, and I don't like the idea of unions for graduate students. But I have a hard time coming up with good reasons to fight unions, and I can't think of many to retain the tenure system. I would settle for a system of the old crafts union, like carpenters but not like autoworkers. We will probably get the latter. Even for those on the lowest rungs of the professional ladder, the ideology of graduate school professors, which emphasizes publication, more than usually holds sway. Even schools that have long served certain regional, vocational, or ethno-cultural needs have often given in to this ideology. This means that most of us value scholarship, and promote it, more than we promote teaching or service to an institution. A second significant problem of mass professionalization stems from this scholarly emphasis-the exponential growth of publications. Some of these publications are products of the proliferation of academic historical societies, each valorizing one aspect of the past-of the Soviet Union, the early American republic, the history of public policy, secondary education in Asia, Byzantium, the history of the book-you name it. Along with a society usually goes a journal and scholarly essays. Books are a more important publishing endeavor in the profession than articles. I am told that even the prestigious academic presses cannot much longer afford to print dissertations and, as they put it, serve as vetting agents in tenure decisions. The average sale of a history book is 600-800 copies, and in many cases, the most frequent request made on presses is to give their readers' reports to tenure committees. It is easy to infer from this that no one wants to read many of these books, but I actually believe that perhaps unlike other disciplines, there are useful facts in most first books by professional historians, and it is not so terrible to have them available in a form that will now last for 500 years. The problem here is that almost none of us is able to sort out what is worth reading (as opposed to what is worth consulting if someone wants to get some information). We can no longer monitor with any reliability the publications that define the contours of historical knowledge at any time, the scholarly structure that is supposed to define the profession. This may not be an overarching concern in some recherch? areas of inquiry, but it certainly is in the main line of American history. There is a third related problem of mass professionalization. While there is useful information in most of these volumes, whether or not they are good history is a different question. The increase of historians, specialties, and publications has joined its force to another social fact: a growing university system that even at its bottom end has many perquisites. Together these facts make it more difficult for scholars to publish their way "out" or "up," for there are so many people writing that it is almost impossible for all of us jointly to discern what is meritorious. What is crucially important is one's first place of employment. Thus it seems to me there is more justified ressentiment on the part of faculty at non-elite schools, for many talented historians there may rightly feel that their work is not appreciated the way it should be. There is a flipside to this. There are a great many ordinary historians who by luck, backslapping, and a bit of diligent effort are now regarded as premier scholars in their fields. They can marshal journals, societies, a constellation of university departments, and even funding agencies in their support. This problem of mass professionalization means that we have fewer efficient means at our disposal for authoritatively evaluating historical work. In the old days standards may have been narrow and determined by a group of old white males who successfully passed on their rigidities. But at least one knew who to read, and the number of historians was limited enough so that supply did not so entirely exceed one's ability to consume. When I discussed my presentation with friends, a number of them expressed the hope that I would denounce cultural history and falling standards, and speak up in some fashion for the history of ideas or of international politics. The attentive reader will find a bit of this kind of response in the comments of Professors Ribuffo and Trachtenberg to this short paper. But my concern is not that many professional historians emphasize things that don't interest me much, or have political views I disparage. I am not alarmed at the cultural presuppositions that some see as constraints on the profession or as leading it in the wrong direction. There may be a left-liberal set of predispositions in history that sets a certain agenda, but that is not what I find troubling. Rather than operating with blinders, the profession, I believe, has a 1000 flowers blooming; history is a big tent. My fear is the number of flowers and the size of the tent. There is so much out there, and so many of us are struggling to get recognition for whatever it is that we do that we have little sense of what the outlines of even large fields are and of what is worth reading. We don't have much of a handle on what we do, or how we are doing it, and I don't see much of a chance that this will change. A fourth significant problem of mass professionalization is the trade's connection to the role of history in American society. All cultures have some sense of an immemorial past, and in some ways professional historians partly serve the same function as tribal elders. That is, part of our role is that we collectively maintain a social sense of the past. One way we do this is through popular history writing, the History Channel, and historical movies and documentaries. But there is an enormous gap between what intrigues the profession as a whole and the obsession of the greater public with Great Men and Big Battles. I am not entirely opposed to this obsession, but I do think that the public would be better served if there were a better match between its concerns and our priorities and standards. As matters stand now, there seem to me to be two diverging tracks, the popular and the professional, and I do not believe that is healthy. It may also be pretty conventional, but it does strike me that the effusion of historical specialties has increased the divide between the popular and the professional. In the old days, the commitment of the profession to past politics was pretty much synchronized with public tastes. Another aspect of this problem is the history text, at both the high school and college level. And here I have a different concern from the one evinced in the controversy over the History Standards. The textbooks are legion, although the ones that I know best are in American history, which I have recently taught in AP American history courses. The texts exhibit the troubles I have talked about and give some weight to every subfield and every dimension of the study of the United States that will make a text "comprehensive." Again, these books reflect the diversity and complexity of the profession, and not at all the needs of our undergraduate charges. I would trade all of these texts in for just two old books: James Henry Breastead's Ancient Times and Charles and Mary Beard's Rise of American Civilization. Just as the claims of popular history reflect the gap between what the public needs and what we are able to provide, the texts illustrate the gap between what students in our democracy require and what we are able to give them. Let me, in conclusion, turn away from the problems to a connected matter: where I would like us to direct our efforts in the future. I would like to see far more of an accent on undergraduate teaching. We need a more coherent history curriculum, with more stress on a series of basic courses that offer a broad introduction to the national and international historical setting of our lives. We need fewer seminars on narrow topics for undergraduates. We need more discussion courses and a graded writing program that would increase in difficulty with an increase in the level of courses. We need more faculty willing to teach freshperson seminars. We need more seasoned faculty to teach survey courses. We need more faculty to recognize that the "reproduction" of the professoriate, as it has been described to me, is not the most holy task. We need fewer graduate students competing with undergraduates for time with faculty, and fewer graduate students substituting for faculty in classrooms. That is, we need to do more to train our students to be educated citizens. Bruce Kuklick is Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. His latest book is A History of Philosophy in America, 1720-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2002). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- AIN'T IT AWFUL? YOU BET. IT ALWAYS IS Leo P. Ribuffo Bruce Kuklick has been one of my best friends for more than three decades. Thus I say with candor and affection that this article does not represent Kuklick at his best. It reflects an educational background and academic career spent entirely at elite universities. It contains too many self-righteous ex cathedra assertions that even Kuklick does not believe when pressed to think about them. Just as every person is his or her own historian, every person is his or her own futurologist. In some dumb sense, to appropriate Carl Becker's phrase, Kuklick as an everyman futurologist made predictions about the future when he acquired mortgages and decided to raise four children. And I suspect he attempted to make those decisions with minimum stupidity. So why should not the rest of us, acting in our capacities as what William Appleman Williams called "citizen historians," engage more broadly in futurology about something as insignificant as our own craft, business, profession, trade, and- sometimes-racket? Kuklick claims to detest the history business (what in calmer moments he has described as an honorable "practice") because it is too much of a racket. Yet, as Kuklick has also admitted in less oracular moments, he has spent much of his career studying intellectual businesses and rackets. Perhaps when pressed Kuklick might admit that our trade deserves the same serious attention he has elsewhere lavished on churchmen, philosophers, archaeologists, and even shortstops. We get no such respect from him here.1 Kuklick's central argument is that historians suffer from "mass professionalization." Simply put, there are more historians than the market can absorb, and this oversupply derives from the propensity of academic stars, some of whom are also academic racketeers, to build their egos and empires while avoiding undergraduates. This argument is true as far as it goes, but Kuklick oversimplifies the situation, in the process showing an unmerited enthusiasm for market forces absent elsewhere in his work. There seem to be roughly 5,000 academic historians in the United States. Is this too many? The number is no larger than the number of big-time professional athletes-a frivolous occupational cohort Kuklick likes more than historians. Certainly Americans have the right to cast their dollar votes, to recall an old image from Economics 101, on shortstops rather than professors, but this is not necessarily a good idea. Kuklick forgets that mass professionalization has been an inescapable byproduct of mass education, a development that has enormously benefited the United States in general and many of us academics in particular. If university education had remained as limited and insular in the 1960s as in the 1930s, Kuklick and I might be hammering nails and sweeping floors as our fathers did rather than enjoying what he recognizes as one of the most pleasant jobs in the world. Indeed, the very pleasantness of our job means that supply will exceed demand most of the time. What are the intellectual consequences of mass professionalization? Kuklick reduces them to a nostalgic assertion that it is now "almost impossible" for people "to discern what is meritorious." I think this is no more true now than in 1966, when I entered graduate school, even though, now as then, I disagree with most of our trade's elite about what is interesting, important, original and, ideally, both original and pretty much true. As a William Jamesian, Niebuhrian, Cold War revisionist, social democratic professor out of sync with the elite of our trade in 2004, I am a noncombatant in the grandiosely misnamed "culture wars" at least partly because I remember, within human limits, what it was like to be a Jamesian, Niebuhrian, Cold War revisionist, social democratic graduate student during what Kuklick calls the "old days," when scholarship was dominated by pluralist social theory and consensus (or counterprogressive) historiography.2 In recent years my admiration has grown for Richard Hofstadter, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, and other leading members of this intellectual cohort because they got right one big thing now often forgotten-that the U. S. is a relatively homogeneous and conservative country. Even so, their plentiful errors look as absurd as anything currently published. Among these errors, my favorites (a friendly term I can use in tenured late middle age) are that religion was dying out, that cultural politics was illegitimate and avoidable, that mentally healthy people clustered in the vital center, that anyone beyond that sacred segment suffered from status anxiety at minimum if not a full-fledged paranoid style, and that American anti-Semitism was only marginally related to Christianity. Since Kuklick passes on the opportunity, I will address some of the intellectual trends in American history. Although what follows is necessarily impressionistic, it is based on the usual interaction with our trade: teaching, service on search committees, and the reading of professional journals (with greatest attention to the book reviews). There is certainly an orthodoxy of sorts, though that term may be too pompous and rigid to describe the perennial situation that some topics, questions, methods, and moral judgments are hot while others are not. As I am hardly the first to observe, professional organizations create orthodoxies; indeed, that is what they are intended to do. In a nutshell, the "orthodoxy" that has become dominant in the past two decades is a kind of mushy leftism descended from the Popular Front of the 1930s by way of the 1960s. As Doug Rossinow, one of the best historians of the 1960s, commented more than a decade ago, the historical profession is "filled with liberals who think they are radicals."3 The extent to which non-elite historians, especially graduate students, actually believe in the orthodoxy is a tougher call. Undoubtedly, as in all such circumstances, there is more backsliding and latent rebellion in the pews than in the pulpits, let alone at the bishops' residences. Although men and women make their own historiography they do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing. Two circumstances seem particularly compelling now. First, given the problem of oversupply (Kuklick's formulation) or under demand (mine), there is an especially strong inclination to stick with the tried and (I hope) true topics, questions, methods, and moral judgments honored by our trade's establishment. Opportunities to do so are abundant. Starting in the 1960s, for example, historians rediscovered women, African-Americans, and Native Americans. Their stories do need to be told. Since few historians favor slavery, segregation, patriarchy, or mass murder, most of these stories can be told with minimal professional risk and, therefore, minimal reflection. Second, as the American electorate has (sort of) moved rightward and the Right has made the academy a special target in the socalled culture wars, most liberal and radical historians have unsurprisingly conducted a reflexive defense of their now orthodox methods, moral judgments, and favorite hot topics. Evidence of rethinking, ecumenicalism, and serious argument (by which I mean something very different from sweetsy "dialogue") is hard to find in the major associations and journals. In less polarized times, for instance, more historians might agree with my colleague William H. Becker that practitioners of labor history and practitioners of business history have much to teach each other. Worst of all, the so-called culture wars have energized a compulsory cloying moralism that afflicts historians across the ideological spectrum. To a greater degree than is usually acknowledged, rethinking, intellectual ecumenicalism, and serious argument can be found at the grassroots, perhaps especially in non-elite colleges and universities. Indeed, Kuklick to the contrary, this is the best reason why non-elite Ph.D. programs should not close up shop. From the vantage point of one of those universities, let me offer several nonsweetsy observations and suggestions about our trade's intellectual trends. The vogue of postmodernism is less significant, for good or ill, than the hoopla surrounding it suggests. It is a good idea for historians to think about what they are doing, especially about what is usually called the problem of relativism. With few exceptions, such concerns were dormant among practicing historians during the golden age of counterprogressive historiography. By the 1980s the old questions reappeared in an unfamiliar (and thus especially seductive) European vocabulary-a familiar phenomenon in American intellectual life-via literature departments. As philosopher Richard Rorty recently observed, the same issues could have surfaced again through a rediscovery of William James and John Dewey (and, he might have added for our trade, Carl Becker and Charles Beard). But, as Rorty put it, American pragmatists were thought to "lack pizzazz" compared to Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.4 Accordingly, insofar as our trade is methodologically chic, we address perennial problems in a new idiom. When I was in graduate school, under the influence of the "new criticism," we read a bunch of words on a page and perhaps discerned therein the theme of rebellion. Now graduate students deconstruct a text and perhaps discern therein the trope of transgressiveness. In practice, the difference is largely a matter of jargon, as is often the case with linguistic twists and turns. We sound savvy by "powering down" our computers, as the manuals instruct, even though we stop the flow of electricity just as effectively when (following an older discourse from our frugal parents) we merely "turn off" the lights. Despite the hoopla, there are few thoroughgoing postmodernists among practicing historians, let alone a horde of amoralists pushing students down a slippery slope to nihilism. Rather, there is a ritualistic inclination to talk the talk even if the meaning is murky. Indeed, the talk sometimes seems intended to intimidate those who admit that the meaning is murky. The main perils of high theory are, first, that new words may be confused with new and better ideas, and second, that current theories may yield less understanding than earlier frames of reference. This danger is hardly new, however. The pluralists and counterprogressives used Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Sigmund Freud to concoct an interpretation of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s which is inferior to the best workaday journalism of the 1920s. Much more influential than the postmodern rediscovery of relativism-and much less appealing to my taste-is the pervasiveness of small-scale social histories that purport to illuminate the lives of ordinary men and women, "the people." This vogue has many sources. The resurrected intellectual Popular Front of the 1960s made "history from the bottom up" an attractive field for baby boomer historians. But a far from leftist Zeitgeist also energizes this specialty. We live, after all, in the era of People magazine. Then, too, local social history meets market needs. Compared to other countries, there are a great many historians in the United States and relatively little American history, and graduate students have to write dissertations about something. Although small-scale social history has never been to my taste, I would be more likely to acknowledge the field's virtues (primarily, that "useful facts" are made available, as Kuklick notes) if authors of these studies wrote better and claimed less. A book focusing on one city, neighborhood, union local, or Ku Klux Klan klavern can be fascinating. In fact, these tend to be clunky and boring. At their worst, the main characters reveal less temperamental and moral complexity than characters in a good television disaster-of-theweek movie. Mixed motives and ambiguous feelings are particularly absent in accounts of the oppressed who (contrary to the views of some Historical Society members) did and still do exist. H. L. Mencken joked long ago that historians were failed novelists. Would that it were so! In our day, they are less likely to be good storytellers than second-string social theorists who problematize questions that need not be problems, let alone major problems. Did artisans in Hartford, Connecticut differ from their counterparts in Bridgeport, Connecticut? Believe it or not, they did if you look closely enough. Do "the people" blindly yield to capitalist hegemony or do they sometimes think and act for themselves? Do they have "agency?" Guess what? The answer is "Yes!" Even if every practitioner of local social history wrote as well as William Faulkner or Sherwood Anderson, the prevalence of this genre would present problems. Of necessity, the authors magnify small differences. This approach, combined with the assumption that there should be no "master narrative" (even provisionally for the purpose of addressing large questions), undermines broader frames of reference and obscures larger realities. For instance, American historians ritualistically repeat that the United States is one of the most diverse nations in the world. On the contrary, and especially if we count for this large question only the native born population, the United States is not even one of the most diverse countries in the Western Hemisphere. To a large degree academic political history has become a wholly owned subsidiary of social history, especially small-scale social history. Consider the historiography of the 1930s. During the past two decades there have been countless studies of labor unions, cities, and neighborhoods in which the local actors are (with varying skill) related to national developments. At the same time, there is no solid, comprehensive account of the Works Progress Administration or the Civilian Conservation Corps. In short, though studies of politics, variously defined, are available, historians for more than a generation have shown remarkably little interest in how government, especially the federal government, actually functioned or functions in domestic affairs. Americanists who study government actions in the world are often thought peripheral and perhaps retrograde. Indeed, distraught diplomatic historians have recently begun to sex up their field's vocabulary in order to sound like social or cultural historians. In their general disregard of government, historians, regardless of their political persuasions, stand shoulder to shoulder with their fellow citizens. Yet most of their fellow citizens do not notice the historians by their side. Kuklick joins the throng, pondering our trade's most frequently asked question about the market. Given the popularity of historical novels, period-piece films, Civil War reenactments, celebrations of the "greatest generation" and so forth, why don't people pay more attention to us? Whatever their ideological and methodological differences, leaders of the American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, and the Historical Society join in the common lament that historians fail to reach a general audience. As a mere matter of intellect, this lament lacks merit. Consider the prototypical "practice": medicine. Physicians whose research appears in the New England Journal of Medicine usually do not expect their findings to reach the New Yorker. Moving beyond mere matters of intellect to the level of status anxiety and market rewards, I too regret that I am not as rich and famous as I would like to be. In an attempt to ameliorate this devastating situation, I have even appeared twice on the History Channel (known to detractors as the Hitler Channel). The last time I addressed the popularization question, in 1992, I offered to appear on "The Tonight Show" whenever Jay Leno wants to banter about William James or the Cold War. My offer remains open, and I hope that if Leno sees the light he will seat me next to Ashley Judd rather than Mel Gibson. I am not holding my breath, however, and neither should any readers hoping for a similar invitation. But neither am I wringing my hands. Historians with an inclination to popularize what they know can and should do so as well as their skills and circumstances allow. Yet circumstances are not promising. Indeed, there is an unavoidable roadblock that cannot be cleared even with sound bytes and makeup. Every person is his or her own historian, but most people are not very good historians. Moreover, most people do not care that they are mediocre or bad historians (or physicists or sociologists or theologians). A reliable understanding of the past beyond their own memories does not seem essential to their lives-which, by and large, it is not. Acting as their own physicians, everyman or everywoman would probably choose to be treated by a doctor who published original research in the New England Journal of Medicine rather than by the author of medical popularizations in the New Yorker. Since an accurate understanding of diseased bodies is much more consequential than an accurate understanding of Thomas Jefferson, it makes sense as a futurologist of personal health to bet on professional standing rather than popularity or accessibility. My generalization about everyman and everywoman's limited capacity as a historian certainly applies to journalists and documentary filmmakers. Indeed, following their professional standards, they typically crave gimmicks and profess to believe that grand events turn on quirks of personality. Kuklick writes with some justice that the questions academic historians ask and the answers we give are not intellectually imposing. Yet they rank up there with oncology when compared to the simplistic history favored by policy makers and pundits-even in cases where a thoughtful and reliable understanding of the past might affect matters of life and death. This essay has been primarily an "internalist" analysis of the history business. Yet the major changes in American intellectual life have derived less from internal inconsistencies in orthodox belief systems or from the imperatives of careerism than from external shocks originating in the wider world. Indeed, without the Vietnam War and the capital S Sixties, the basic premises of pluralist social theory and counterprogressive history would probably still dominate the academy, as they still dominate national politics and mainstream journalism. I am not a good enough futurologist to predict the next world historical shock. In the meantime, to describe the situation in a favored jargon (popularized by Kuklick in his transgressive youth), we will proceed with "normal" historical investigation rather than face a "paradigm shift."5 Boredom, opportunism, and curiosity will continue to inspire slight modifications in the mushy leftist orthodoxy-modifications usually framed as revelations and still leavened with compulsory cloying moralism. For instance, the historical establishment has rediscovered that industrial workers spent time in churches as well as factories and, guess what, one venue affected the other. Similarly, tight-knit communities under stress produced conservative activists as well as heroic radicals and, guess what, lots of the conservatives were women. But there is hope for something beyond caution and quibbling. You do not have to be a demographer or futurologist, only a regular at faculty meetings, to notice that the long predicted wave of retirements will finally start to occur within a decade. Then, briefly, demand for academic historians will once again exceed supply for roughly a decade. Another forty-year job crisis will undoubtedly follow. During this interlude, however, free spirits among Generation X-ers and the "millennial" generation that follows may feel sufficiently secure to problematize questions that are significantly problematic. In the meantime, ain't it awful? You bet. It always is. Leo P. Ribuffo is Society of the Cincinnati George Washington Distinguished Professor of History at George Washington University. He is the author of "Confessions of an Accidental (or Perhaps Overdetermined) Historian," in Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, eds., Reconstructing History: The Emergence of a New Historical Society (Routledge, 1999), 143-163. 1 Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930 (Yale University Press, 1977); Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (Yale University Press, 1985); Puritans in Babylon: The Ancient Near East and American Intellectual Life, 1880-1930 (Princeton University Press, 1996); To Every Time A Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia 1909-1976 (Princeton University Press, 1991); and "Writing the History of Practice: The Humanities and Baseball, with a Nod to Wrestling," in Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, eds., Reconstructing History: The Emergence of a New Historical Society (Routledge, 1999), 176-88. 2 Almost all of the leaders of our trade during the quarter century after World War II affirmed the political, sociological, and psychological "vital center" (to recall Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s famous phrase), but they did not necessarily discern or affirm an American consensus. Accordingly, following Gene Wise, I prefer to call them counterprogressive historians. See Wise, American Historical Explanations: A Strategy for Grounded Inquiry (Dorsey, 1977). 3 In conversation over a beer. 4 Richard Rorty, "Philosophical Convictions," Nation, June 14, 2004, 54. 5 Bruce Kuklick, "History as a Way of Learning," American Quarterly 22 (1970): 609-628. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMENT ON KUKLICK Marc Trachtenberg What is going to determine the future of the American historical profession? For Bruce Kuklick, sheer numbers are of fundamental importance. The profession, he thinks, has become so large that it no longer has, or indeed can have, a clear sense of what it is about. In the old days you knew what the important works were. You could see which works defined "the contours of historical knowledge" at any particular point in time. But today there are so many historians and there is so much pressure to publish that no one can hope to develop a sense for what, in scholarly terms, pulls the community of historians together. Indeed-to draw out what for me is one of the key implications of Kuklick's argument -there is not much that makes our occupational group a real profession, with a distinct identity and a broadly accepted set of standards for "authoritatively evaluating" scholarly work. Instead, what we have is a mass of people laboring in particular subfields. The work they produce is rarely of interest to scholars working in other subfields. People write for very narrow audiences, producing books and articles that, as a general rule, almost no one reads. What passes for the profession is really a congeries of specialized groups with highly parochial interests-groups, moreover, of privileged individuals, shielded by the tenure system, turned in on themselves, cut off from the larger society, incapable, by and large, of even giving their undergraduate students the sort of instruction they need. The problem, according to Kuklick, is rooted in what he calls "mass professionalization," although perhaps (if we bear in mind what a profession is supposed to be) "mass deprofessionalization" might be a better term. There are just so many people trained to be historians, and so much work that has to be published, that things more or less had to develop along these lines. It is not a pretty picture, but in his view there is not much we can do about it. The source of the problem is structural; the basic structures he has identified will certainly remain intact; so we will have no choice, he thinks, but to live with the situation as he has described it. What is to be made of that argument? I have no real quarrel with his description of the way things are today. There is obviously not much today that holds us together as a profession. Even to refer to history today as a "discipline" strikes me as inappropriate. It is clear, as Kuklick says, that as a profession "we don't have much of a handle on what we do, or how we are doing it." And he is obviously also right about how the interests of historians have diverged from those of the public at large, and indeed from those of the undergraduates they are supposed to teach. So he has accurately identified a whole complex of problems, but if we are to face those problems intelligently, we need to grapple with the question of what gave rise to them in the first place. What are we to make of his argument in this area? Is it just a question of numbers? I do not think that the growth in the size of the profession is nearly as important in this context as he makes out. There are other professions, medicine, for example, and many hard sciences, which have expanded enormously in size but have retained a strong sense of the sort of work that is of fundamental importance and the kinds of standards to be used in evaluating the work that is produced. So if the problem we historians face is not a result of sheer numbers, what then is it rooted in? I think values are a good deal more important than Kuklick is prepared to admit. When I look at what is being produced nowadays, the problem, at least for me, is not that there is so much being published that I just do not have the time to read much of it. The more basic problem is that I would not want to read much of it, no matter how much time I had. The amount of work published is not a fundamental problem. In principle, the subfields can always identify their best work, and we can always find the time to read the most interesting books produced by people working in all sorts of different areas, especially books that speak to the broader concerns of people throughout the profession. Or to put the point more precisely: we at least have as much time today to do that kind of reading as we had thirty or forty years ago. But the key point here is that those books have to be worth reading, and the problem today is that what can be identified as prominent works in many areas of history are often not worth spending much time on. I would love it if a thousand flowers were in fact blooming. But as I look around me, I don't see a garden of that sort. I see some flowers blooming but many more being choked out by weeds-indeed, weeds that people fawn over and treat as though they were more beautiful and more fragrant than the flowers themselves. What does this imply about the future? Kuklick does not see much of a chance that the problems he has identified will go away. And of course if numbers were the heart of the problem, the situation would not be likely to change for the better. But if the problem were rooted in values-and by that I mean not the political values of the practitioners, but rather their sense of what history should be and how it should be done-then change is very likely. The reason is that culture is always in flux. Values are always changing. I have no idea what the historical profession, if one can still call it that, will be like twenty or thirty years from now, but I think it is almost bound to be very different from what it is today. The present situation, in fact, is not rock solid. Society allows us, as members of a profession, to enjoy certain prerogatives. But it does this not because it loves the color of our eyes. It does this because at some level it counts on getting something in return, something of value to society as a whole. Professional autonomy is not a simple gift, bestowed for all eternity with no questions asked. Professions are relatively free from social control, but in exchange they are supposed to feel a certain sense of obligation-a sense of responsibility to the society as a whole, a responsibility for maintaining standards and for doing work of real value. There is an implicit bargain, and a profession cannot expect to renege on its part of the bargain without, in the long run, paying a real price. The long run, of course, may be very long. The profession is now shielded from social pressure by the sorts of institutional structures Kuklick talks about. We all know how strong those structures are and how weak the mechanisms of social accountability are, especially if we are thinking primarily in terms of immediate and short-term effects. But in the long run, social forces-including especially market forces-have a way of making themselves felt, no matter what institutional frameworks exist. A profession, for example, that insists on offering courses that the students are not interested in may well, sooner or later, pay a price for that kind of behavior, especially if neighboring disciplines move in to meet unfilled student demand. No one knows what the future holds in store for us. But it is hard to believe that things will go on as they have forever. And if you believe that things are bound to change in the long run, then you have to feel that it is very important right now not to throw in the towel. As we move through what may be a very long night, it is important to keep at least some fires burning: it is important to keep alive a certain sense of what history is. Marc Trachtenberg is professor of political science at UCLA. His A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963 (Princeton University Press, 1999) was awarded the American Historical Association's Paul Birdsall and George Louis Beer prizes in 2000. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN FERLING Conducted by Joseph S. Lucas JOHN FERLING, professor emeritus of history at the State University of West Georgia (he retired in May 2004), has written extensively on the political and military history of early America. Among his works are A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2003); A Wilderness of Miseries: War and Warriors in Early America (Greenwood Press, 1980); and Struggle for a Continent: The Wars of Early America (Harlan Davidson, 1993). An accomplished biographer, Ferling has written lives of George Washington, John Adams, and the Pennsylvania Loyalist Joseph Galloway, as well as Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, Jefferson and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2000). His most recent work is the just published Adams Vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, part of Oxford University Press's Pivotal Moments in American History series. Joseph Lucas had the privilege of interviewing this prolific student of early American history in April of 2004. Ferling reveals that his predilection for writing about war, politics, and great leaders stemmed partly from expediency. Yet Ferling also passionately believes that these classic subjects continue to matter, and their histories have much to teach us today. Joseph Lucas: During your long and productive career you have bucked several of the trends that have defined your generation of historians. You have focused on elite leaders rather than marginalized masses. Your primary concerns are political and military history rather than social and cultural history. And you see the past not as a foreign country but as intimately connected to the present. Indeed, you argue that the past, particularly with regard to political and military leadership, holds important lessons for us today. How do you account for your iconoclastic views? And how do you see your work in relation to that of your peers and colleagues? John Ferling: Well, for many years I had a poster over my desk, and it contained a quote from Thoreau about marching to a different drummer. So maybe I am iconoclastic. But I don't think so. I think I've wound up doing what I've done out of necessity because of where I teach. It just seems the pragmatic thing to do. I don't teach at a major research university, and I don't have a research library at my disposal. So I've chosen to work with the resources available to me on a daily basis. We have things like the modern editions of the Washington papers, Franklin papers, Hamilton papers, Adams papers, and so forth. That was the direction that I went simply because the material was there and available to me. As a result, I think, most of my work has been on political and military history. When I was finishing graduate school, I had a one-year appointment at a school just outside of Philadelphia in Chester County. I was very much interested in abolitionism, and there was a wonderful library of abolitionist materials in Chester County, maybe five minutes from where I was living. If that had materialized into permanent, tenuretrack employment, I would have probably worked on the history of antislavery. I do think there are lessons from the past: political lessons and military lessons as well. I'm struck by the fact, for example, that Jefferson wrote a letter to John Adams in 1813 stating that all through history, in every society at every time, one party existed that favored the many while another party existed that favored the few, and political battles tended to revolve around that struggle between the many and the few. And that's how I see American politics. I see that struggle going on in the Revolution. I see that struggle going on between the Federalists and the Democratic Republican Party in the 1790s and the early days of the republic. I see it through most of the 19th and 20th centuries in America's political history as well. Lucas: Are there other important lessons from the era of the American Revolution and the early republic? Ferling: I think there are. The American Revolution, for example, can tell us a great deal about the limits of military power. Look at the relative strength of Great Britain and the colonies in 1775-it seemed as if there was no way that the colonists could win that war and that they were mad to go to war. And yet they wound up winning it. There were limits to British military power. In Vietnam the United States wound up making some of the same mistakes that the British had made in the 1770s, thinking they could do whatever they wished. I hope we haven't made that same mistake again with our recent policies. The American Revolution says something about the cost of imperial power as well. The British found themselves caught up in four intercolonial wars between 1689 and the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, and they were driven deeply in debt as a result. They tried to extricate themselves from their indebtedness with policies that brought on the Anglo-American crisis and war. I'm struck by the fact, too, in reading Gordon Wood's Radicalism of the American Revolution and Joyce Appleby's Inheriting the Revolution, that both of those historians develop the idea of how different America had become by 1826. Almost no one could have dreamed in 1776 of how the Revolution was going to play out and the changes that it would bring. I'm not sure I agree entirely with Wood, who argues that people like Jefferson were ultimately disenchanted by what happened. I wouldn't go that far. But it reinforces the lesson that you just never know what's going to happen in history. You undertake something, and you think you know where you're going, but it always leads to things you can't foresee. (In my survey classes I emphasize how World War II was a crucial factor in bringing on the modern civil rights revolution in the 1950s and 1960s and may have had a hand in bringing on the women's liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s-certainly no one foresaw these developments when the U.S. went into war.) In the 1790s one of the things that really fascinates me is how Washington and Adams coped with great crises. In 1794 there was a hue and cry to go to war with Great Britain, and instead of going to war Washington opted to seek peace. He sent John Jay to London and eventually accepted a treaty that had many shortcomings. But the great virtue of the treaty was that it prevented a war that Washington thought would have been disastrous for the union. By the same token, Adams's entire presidency was taken up by the Quasi-War crisis with France. He was under enormous pressure, especially from the right wing of his party, to take a bellicose policy. He, too, resisted that and sought peace, even though he knew that his actions might wreck his chances for reelection in 1800. I think that both presidents ultimately acted more like statesmen than as politicians. There is a lesson there for subsequent leaders. What seems to be the best thing to do from a political standpoint may not be the best thing to do in the long-term interests of the nation, or the historical reputation of the leader. Lucas: Your first book was a study of Joseph Galloway, a Loyalist, and his ideas. Yet the several books that you wrote after that work have focused primarily on Revolutionary leaders. Why the shift? How did your initial work on Loyalism during the Revolution inform your subsequent work on the revolutionaries themselves? Ferling: When I was starting out, actually still working on my Masters degree, I found myself fascinated with dissenters. I was interested in the Copperheads in the Civil War and Loyalists in the Revolution. When I decided to specialize in the American Revolution era, I focused on the Loyalists. By the time I got to Joseph Galloway it was 1969, and I was active in the anti-war protests. Galloway was a protester. It was a very different kind of thing; he was a conservative protester, and the anti-war protests I participated in were at the opposite end of the spectrum. As I worked on Galloway, I found myself drawn to areas that I hadn't imagined I would go into-I tell my graduate students that this is a benefit of doing biography. Galloway was speaker of the house of the Pennsylvania Assembly for about twenty years, so I had to learn a good bit about Pennsylvania politics. His political ally was Benjamin Franklin, and so I had to learn something about him. And then during the war, after proclaiming his neutrality initially, Galloway opportunistically joined the British when he thought they were about to win the war in 1776. The British used him as a military intelligence official, and so I had to learn something about military history. When I came along-and it may still be like this in graduate school today-if you were taking a course on the American Revolution, the professor would usually just skip over all of the military aspects and say, "We'll leave that to armchair generals." So I hadn't really learned anything about military history in school. Further, Galloway wrote about twenty-five pamphlets or so during the Revolution, and I had to understand something about the ideology of the Revolution in order to sort out what Galloway was saying in contrast to what the Whigs were saying. More than anything, however, working on Galloway peaked my interest in military history. When I finished the Galloway book, I decided to do a book on colonial warfare. I was particularly influenced at that time by Richard Kohn's "The Social History of the American Soldier: A Review and Prospectus for Research," American Historical Review 86 (1981): 553-567. Kohn talked about a new military history, and it was new in the sense that military historians now were trying to look not only at how war affected society, but also at how society affected war. The book I wrote was called A Wilderness of Miseries. As I researched that book, I grew interested in George Washington. At that time no one had done a one-volume biography of Washington for about fifty years. Because we did have source materials here, at that time it was the Fitzpatrick edition of Washington's writings, I was able to do a biography of Washington and still later a biography of Adams. I was probably able to do about 95% of my research for both books here in Carrollton, Georgia-getting books and microfilm on interlibrary loan and using the modern editorial versions of my subjects' papers. So it was a matter both of interest and expediency. Lucas: What inspired you to become a historian, writer, and biographer? Ferling: When I was an undergraduate I had to take two courses in American history during my freshman year and two in Western Civ in my sophomore year, but neither turned me on to history. They were mostly just memorization courses, and I didn't like them. I had had some interest in history before I started college, but those courses pretty much turned me off. I got to the last semester of my sophomore year and I had to declare a major. Fortunately for me, the guy who was teaching Western Civ fell ill and had to go in the hospital. In the time honored tradition of academe the low man on the totem pole in the history department got rushed in to teach the remainder of the course. He was a young historian right out of graduate school named William Painter, and he threw out the original syllabus. He had us read several paperbacks. I don't remember all of them, but one of them was Marcus Cunliffe's George Washington: Man and Monument. I remember being completely fascinated. Instead of listening to lectures, we read and discussed the books. I found myself really getting turned on and going to the library and wanting to read more about Washington. One of the other books was Alan Bullock's Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. So at least two of the books were biographies. That may well be the source of my interest in biography. But there was also something else that was crucial. In the 1960s during the student protests many of the schools began to abandon the requirement that students had to take both halves of Western Civ and both halves of U.S. history. They went over to a cafeteria approach, and you had to take a set number of courses in social science. And you could take history, or you could elect not to take any history at all. One of the things that historians quickly discovered was that if the students were given a choice, they wouldn't take history. This aroused concern in the profession, and I remember reading a couple of presidential addresses delivered to historical associations. The thrust of these was to encourage historians to write narrative history, to try to write something that could reach the general public. That really resonated with me. I wanted to reach out to the general public as well. I felt that writing biographies would be a way to do that. And all through my career in fact I've tried not only to publish in scholarly journals, but to write articles for popular magazines such as American History and the Smithsonian Magazine as a way of reaching out to the general public. One of the things that disturbs me today about the profession is that almost everything that's being done is in social history, and it doesn't appear that very much of that is being read by the general public. There have been some academic historians who have been able to reach the general public. Joseph Ellis and David Hackett Fischer come to mind. But they are not writing social history, they are writing political or military history. I wish more professional historians could succeed in reaching the general public as popular writers such as David McCullough and Walter Isaacson have succeeded in doing. Their success suggests to me that the general public is interested primarily in biography and political history. Lucas: Did you have literary ambitions prior to becoming a historian? Ferling: When I was an undergraduate I had no idea what I was going to do. My dad worked for a large chemical company, but he didn't have much of a formal education. He had the misfortune of graduating from high school just as the stock market crashed in 1929, so he wasn't able to go forward with college. He worked for Union Carbide where he was surrounded by engineers, and he very badly wanted me to be an engineer. But I didn't have the inclination and certainly didn't have the talent in math for that. What I really wanted to do was be a sportswriter. I worked on the newspaper in high school and wrote some sports for that. One of the things that got me interested in history was a movie I saw in high school (I've seen it since, and it's pretty awful, but at the age of sixteen I thought it was wonderful). It was a documentary called The Twisted Cross on the rise and fall of Hitler. That sent me to the library, and I started reading some things on history. And a lot of what I read was written by popular writers. I remember being very much taken by William L. Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which I read when I was an undergraduate. And I remember thinking that I would like to do something like that. And when I took that Western Civ course with Professor Painter, I went to his office and said, "How do you get to do something like this? Do you have to be wealthy, a man of means, to write these things?" His response was something like, "Hell no. You teach history in college." And I knew at that point what I wanted to do. Lucas: Two of your contemporaries, Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood, have focused on the ideas that they believe shaped America in the late 18th and early 19th century. An earlier generation of historians, the one that included Charles Beard, stressed the role of economic interest as an agent of historical change. Where do you stand? Ferling: Actually, I straddle the fence, although I lean more toward the idea of economics playing the principal role in determining what happens in history. I certainly don't think ideas are unimportant. Look, for example, at abolitionism in the 19th century: many people wind up in the abolitionist movement because of Christianity and Christian thought-the notion that I am my brother's keeper. At the opposite end of the spectrum, in the 20th century racist ideas helped create Nazis. But by and large I tend to see economics as the determining role in history. I look at the Constitutional Convention, for example, and if I had to put my money on why the Constitution wound up being written as the founders wrote it, it would be more because of economics than ideology. I wouldn't rule out ideology. The founders certainly had read extensively in the political science of their day and tried to structure government so that one branch didn't become more powerful than another. But by and large I see something like the Constitutional Convention as composed of delegates who represented the economic interests of their states. It's telling that the Southerners who come to the Constitutional Convention almost to a man were interested in protecting slavery and devising a document that could protect slavery. Northern delegates from urban areas were interested in furthering the commercial interests of New York or Philadelphia or Boston. So I tend to see economics as the driving force there and, for the most part, throughout history. Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution came out in 1967, and I started work on my dissertation on Galloway in 1969. I was really very much influenced by Bailyn. His book threw open a window to me that had been closed. Most of my work to that point had been involved with looking at what Progressive historians had written in the 1920s and 1930s. They were dismissive of ideas, which they saw as tools that leaders used for propaganda purposes. Bailyn obviously took ideas extremely seriously, and he saw ideas as shaping action. I was very much taken with Bailyn and still frequently use Ideological Origins as a required text in my American Revolution class. More than any other book, it shaped the way I approached Galloway. But now, I have come full circle. To tell you the truth, if I was to go back and write another book on Galloway today, I would probably see him as tied to Philadelphia's mercantile community and its fear of change for economic reasons and develop that concept far more than I did thirty years ago. Lucas: Your book A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic appeared in the summer of 2003. What is the theme of the book? Ferling: A Leap in the Dark looks at the era of the American Revolution, the half-century between the Albany Conference in 1754 and Jefferson's inauguration as president in 1801. In the first half of the study I am concerned with explaining why the Revolution occurred. I emphasize economic factors and the personal opportunities that many sensed would result from independence. Workers and some merchants, especially those in New England, came to see that breaking away from Britain's restrictive mercantile legislation was in their best interests. Similarly, many who had invested-or hoped to invest-in land in the trans-Appalachian West, came to see that they would be better off if Americans called the shots with regard to opening that vast region. In addition, many ambitious colonists despaired of accomplishing what they believed they were capable of achieving because of the limitations imposed by what Jefferson referred to as their "colonial subservience." Many years after the Revolution, John Adams wrote that all he had been able to hope for as a British colonist was to be a militia officer, sit in the colonial assembly, and achieve a comfortable standard of living. That was insufficient for him, and for many others. In the second half of the book I look at what the Revolution meant to that generation. Until 1776 the focus of the protest was entirely on resisting British policy. Other than Tories, few appeared to think about what post-Independence America would be like, and most who gave it some thought shrank from divulging their thoughts publicly. Then in 1776 Thomas Paine spoke of Independence as the birthday of a new world and an opportunity to begin the world anew. I believe that he captured what some had been quietly thinking, while others, who were stirred by the Declaration of Independence, began to envision change after 1776. Of course, the most conservative revolutionaries never imagined radical social and political change, and many were appalled by the changes that occurred during the last years of the war and the first years of peace. This portion of the book deals with how these two sides coalesced and the struggle that they waged between the end of the war in 1783 and the election of 1800. In many ways it is a return to the Progressive interpretation, but I think I am more charitable than they were to the Federalists. The nationalists, or consolidationists, not only harbored legitimate concerns about national security, but through Hamiltonianism they created a modern and diversified economy. Lucas: What do you make of the recent and current scholarship that looks favorably and seriously at post-1760 British policy in North America? It strikes me that there's a feeling in the air among a lot of historians of early America that the continuation of the British Empire might not have been such a bad thing, maybe in some ways even preferable to American independence, especially with regard to slavery and the fate of American Indians. Ferling: I don't agree with that. I see the Revolution as a great, liberating moment. I see it in Jeffersonian terms, and I see the election of 1800 as a revolution of 1800- a revolution in the sense that it made possible the fulfillment of the ideas that people like Thomas Paine had given voice to and that I think many Americans embraced. Paine talks about the Revolution as a chance to start the world anew. It's the first day of a new world, he says in Common Sense. And I think a great many Americans came to see that as the case. I think what makes the American Revolution at once frustrating and really interesting is that all of the focus- until you get into the war in 1775 and 1776-is on resisting British policy, and it's unlike any other modern revolution. There's no sense of domestic change by and large in that time period. And it's only when they start thinking seriously in 1775 and 1776 of declaring independence that some people like Paine do begin talking openly about change. The Americans fielded a citizens' army basically, and a lot of those people come out of the war thinking that "we want to make some really seminal changes here; this is going to be the payback for all of the sacrifice that we've gone through." If the crisis had been resolved peacefully and Britain had been in control, maybe eventually, toward the end of the 19th century as happened in England, there would have been a broadening of suffrage rights and whatever. But enormous change was unleashed, particularly, as Joyce Appleby makes clear in Inheriting the Revolution, between 1800 and the 50th anniversary of independence in 1826. The window was thrown open, and the possibility for change was brought about, with Jefferson's victory in 1800. Lucas: Is liberation the theme of your forthcoming book, Adams Vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800? Ferling: It has two themes. One is that 18thcentury politics and politicians were decidedly modern. There were differences between the politics of the 1790s and the early 21st century, but what I found most striking was how many similarities existed. The parties were better organized by 1800 than I had expected them to be. They already employed what we now call "negative campaigning": they adroitly used the technology at their disposal to get out their message; they utilized every conceivable artifice to out-hustle their adversaries; and the presidential candidates, including President Adams, were actively involved-though in a surreptitious manner-in the presidential campaign. The second theme is that the election of 1800 resulted in a "revolution of 1800." At first blush, the results of the election appear to be extremely close. There was little difference in the electoral totals between the two parties, and in the states where I was able to flesh out the voting results, the parties more often than not were rather evenly balanced. Yet I also found evidence of significant change. In the congressional elections as a whole, there were striking signs that the Federalists had been repudiated. In part, that was payback for their high taxes, the Alien and Sedition Acts, and what many believed had been a contrived war scare with France. But it also represented the hope of many that the promise of truly sweeping change that Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson had enunciated in 1776-change that would bring an end forever to many of the social and political limitations that had existed in colonial Anglo-America before 1776- would at long last be fulfilled. Lucas: I'm struck by the way you evoke the rhythms of daily life in the early 19th-century U.S. in your biography of John Adams. Have you learned a lot from the works of social and cultural history written by your Americanist colleagues, or did you get that from the Adams papers? Ferling: Well, I think it was from both. I've always been interested in social history. In fact for many years as part of my regular teaching load I taught two courses in social history: U.S. social history to and since the Civil War. And I've always incorporated a great deal of social history in my survey classes. I teach two survey courses and one upper level course every semester. My two survey courses are mostly social history courses, and I probably incorporate far more than my students would like about farm life. I am really intrigued by farm life because I grew up in a more urban environment around Houston. But my mother was the daughter of a farmer who lived not too far from Pittsburgh, and we used to go back up there on vacations every summer. So I'd spend several days on my grandfather's farm, and I suppose it led me to become intrigued with what life was like for those who had lived on farms in earlier generations. My dad was a bluecollar worker, a hardhat, so I was also interested in the industrial workplace and have stressed that as well in my classes. Most of my readings in the survey courses-outside readings-were on things like birthing practices or marriage habits or diets or medicine and longevity and that sort of thing. So I have always been interested in social history. But I do think one of the problems with social history is trying to tie things together into a bigger, meaningful whole. I think with political history you can, for example, develop a theme around the growth of capitalism or the growth of democracy. But if you're dealing with what life was like for coalminers or mill hands, it's fascinating and I think you want to try to understand how our ancestors lived, but I have some difficulty in tying it all together into something that's really meaningful. I can do that better from a political angle. Political history broadens your understanding of the general time period that you're working in, and I think that's one of its advantages. Biography is the same. As you mentioned, it does force you-if you're looking at John Adams, for example-not only to look at the political side, but also to try to come to grips with his private life. What was it like to be a lawyer in mid-18th-century Massachusetts? What was family life like? What was he like as a parent? What kind of houses did he live in? What books did he read, and why? How did he travel? Lucas: You've spent a lot of time with the founders, particularly Adams, Jefferson, and Washington. How do you assess their respective personalities? Ferling: Jefferson is a great contradiction. He's a racist, and you would want more from a guy who appears to be so enlightened. He's a slave owner, and unlike Washington who liberates his slaves in his will, Jefferson only liberates a handful of slaves. And they're all from the Hemings family. People find that side of Jefferson distasteful. But on the other side, here's this guy who sees the danger posed by the route that the Federalists are taking. He takes the lead in resisting the Alien and Sedition Acts and more than any other person he was responsible, starting about 1790, for piecing together a movement to oppose Hamiltonianism. Ultimately, the 19th century, as it unfolded politically at any rate, was Jefferson's century. So there's a real dichotomy there in looking at Jefferson, and it makes him extremely fascinating. I think almost everybody who looks at Washington comes away with pretty positive ideas. People look at Washington trying to find evidence of corruption on his part, and just can't find it. He doesn't misuse power. He's not a great general, but he's not a bad general either. And I think the country was extremely fortunate to have Washington as its first president. I don't agree with everything that he did. As I said, I'm probably more of a Jeffersonian, and Washington wound up leaning clearly toward the Federalists in his presidency. But I do think that the country was fortunate to have him. When he was faced with that crisis with Great Britain in 1794 he didn't opt for war, he opted for peace. I think that if he'd opted for war, there is a real possibility that the United States wouldn't have survived that early period. The country was so divided between Anglophiles and Francophiles that it might have been pulled completely apart if it had been a long, tough war. He did have a kind of Olympian manner about him. He was an unapproachable individual. He doesn't appear to be a very warm person at all. I've often thought, for example, that if somehow or other I could spend an evening-go to dinner and have a couple of drinks-with one of these people, who would I probably prefer it to be? And certainly Washington would be the one I would be least interested in spending an evening with, because he is so unapproachable. I'd probably opt for John Adams. If nothing else he'd probably gossip, and I'd probably learn more from him than the others. Lucas: You've been extraordinarily prolific throughout your entire career, even while teaching three courses per semester. I wonder about your work habits. Do you write daily? Ferling: Actually, the three courses a semester are about one-third of what I taught for more than my first twenty years at West Georgia. We were on a quarter system, and we taught three courses a quarter. So I taught nine courses a year, and we met each class five days a week. So I was in the classroom for three hours every day. In some respects, maybe that was good, because it disciplined me to come to work five days a week. Most of my colleagues currently teach a two-day a week schedule, but I still opt to teach a five-day a week schedule, so that I come up to the office every single day. All through my career I have tried to work out a teaching schedule with a long block of time in order to write. And it's meant doing some things that I didn't particularly want to do. I taught an awful lot of night classes when we were teaching the three courses a quarter. Now I teach my classes in the afternoon, and I come to work at 8:00 AM and try to work in the library for up to four hours. I don't look at a stopwatch or anything, and on days when I'm just spinning my wheels, I pack it up and wait for a better day tomorrow. But generally I try to go to the library and work there for several hours every day, five days a week. Lucas: So that's where you do your writing as well as your research-in the library? Ferling: Right, in the library. But then I come back, and, of course, I have the computer in my office. But I still compose in longhand. When I started my career, I worked with a typewriter, and I wasn't a good enough typist to think about typing and think about writing simultaneously. So I got in the habit of writing in longhand, and I still do that. After I revise what I write in longhand, then I come back and put it on the computer and do all of my revisions. I once had an office mate who used to say that he loved research, but he hated writing. He thought that writing was just an exercise and sort of a necessary evil. I always saw writing as an art form and loved writing every bit as much as doing the research. I spend at least 50% of the time that goes into every book writing and rewriting and rewriting. Lucas: What do you have in the works now, after the Adams Vs. Jefferson book? Ferling: Well, Oxford is going to publish that book some time in late September or early October. They've put it on the fast track, and they're hoping to get it out in the midst of this presidential election-they hope it will get a little bit more attention that way. Since submitting the manuscript for the election of 1800 book, I've begun working on a book on the War of Independence. I've always veered between biography or political history and military history. One of the writers I most admire is John Keegan, the British military historian. I absolutely loved his single-volume histories of World War I and World War II, which I think are useful for both a scholarly audience and a popular audience, and I'm writing a book on the War of Independence that is modeled on Keegan's template. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- CATHOLICISM AND AMERICAN FREEDOM: A FORUM IN THE LAST ISSUE of Historically Speaking, we featured a forum on Jonathan Edwards's place in the American history narrative. In this issue we turn the spotlight to the largest American denomination, Roman Catholicism, in an effort to explore its impact on the nation's political and intellectual life. As with the forum on Jonathan Edwards, we again debate whether the standard narrative of American history adequately encompasses religious experience and thought. And we also touch on the more controversial notion of rewriting American history from distinctive religious perspectives. Our guide will be University of Notre Dame historian John T. McGreevy, whose Catholicism and American Freedom was published last year by W.W. Norton. On May 7, 2004, the Historical Society and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute co-hosted a forum on McGreevy's book at ISI's headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware. McGreevy opened with a brief synopsis of Catholicism and American Freedom, after which Leo Ribuffo, Christopher Shannon, and Eugene McGarraher provided commentary and then McGreevy responded. Edited versions of the participants' comments appear below. CATHOLICISM AND AMERICAN FREEDOM John T. McGreevy Catholicism and American Freedom [CAAF] sketches the interplay between Catholic and American ideas of freedom, beginning in the 1840s when an unprecedented wave of European immigrants made Catholicism the single largest religious denomination in the United States. Many of these immigrants helped create what historians now describe as the 19th-century Catholic revival.1 The revival affected large regions of France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy, and swept across Ireland and into the United States, Canada, parts of Latin America, and Australia. Mass attendance became more regular, and religious vocations (especially among young women) grew steadily. Ultramontanism, the term most associated with the revival, is shorthand for a cluster of shifts that included a Vatican-fostered move to Thomistic philosophy, a more intense experiential piety centered on miracles and Vatican-approved devotions such as the Sacred Heart, an international outlook suspicious of national variations within Catholicism, and a heightened respect for church authorities ranging from the pope to parish priests. All this was nurtured in the world of Catholic parishes, schools, and associations, whose members often understood themselves as arrayed against the wider society. 2 What this revival and its intellectual legacy meant for the history of the United States is my subject . . . . John T. McGreevy is professor of history and department chair at the University of Notre Dame. In addition to Catholicism and American Freedom (Norton, 2003), he wrote Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the 20th-Century Urban North (University of Chicago Press, 1996). 1 Raymond Grew terms the conflict between Catholicism and liberalism a "central theme" of 19th-century European history. See Grew, "Liberty and the Catholic Church in 19th-Century Europe," in Richard Helmstadter, ed., Freedom and Religion in the 19th Century (Stanford University Press, 1997), 197; Margaret Lavinia Anderson, "The Limits of Secularization: On the Problem of the Catholic Revival in 19th-Century Germany," Historical Journal 38 (1995) 647-670; and Austin Iverveigh, ed., The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival: Studies in 19th-Century Europe and Latin America (Institute of Latin American Studies, 2000). 2 Joseph A. Komonchak, "Modernity and the Construction of Roman Catholicism," Cristianesimo nella storia 18 (1997): 353-385. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC CHURCH AND ORDERED LIBERTY Leo P. Ribuffo For more than two centuries, harsh nativists, relatively benign critics, and reflexive Protestant celebrationists have called the Roman Catholic Church an un- American institution. While dispensing with the loaded term "un-American," we need to take the issue seriously. In several respects, some obvious and some harder to discern, the Catholic Church as an institution has stood apart from prevailing American attitudes. First, and most obviously, as George Marsden has observed in The Soul of the American University (1994), the United States is the "only modern nation" whose "dominant culture was substantially shaped by low-church Protestantism." Some Scots, Swiss, and Canadians might dispute the "only," but Marsden's general point is sound. Second, and less obviously at a time when scholars exaggerate American diversity past and present, the United States was conceived by leaders with an extraordinary sense of national mission. This sense of mission, which derived both from Reformation Protestantism and from Enlightenment republicanism, sometimes involved changing the rest of the world by example and sometimes involved changing the rest of the world by force of arms. Indeed, despite notable internal divisions, this sense of mission energized Americans to conquer a continent within a half century of independence, a conquest that in turn further energized nationalist sentiment. In this patriotic, even chauvinist climate, the Catholic Church was-and still is-an international organization headed by a foreigner. Not surprisingly, the Vatican classified the United States as a mission field until 1908, well after it had become the foremost economy on earth. Third, since roughly the 1840s, the United States has been a democracy. Political democracy, though limited almost entirely to white men at the outset, nonetheless went far beyond what was available in Europe. An expandable ethos of equality was at least as important, and the results quickly could be seen within Protestantism. In the 18th century Jonathan Edwards would have agreed with all of the popes that the true faith could not be defined by every Tom, Dick, or Hezekiah who happened to read Scripture. In the 19th century Barton Stone, Charles Grandison Finney, and Joseph Smith had no such qualms. The Catholic Church was not-and is not-a democracy. Indeed, as McGreevy stresses, while Americans on the whole became increasingly democratic and enthusiastic about individual autonomy, the Vatican and elements of the American Church became less so. Throughout much of his book, perhaps most of it, McGreevy in theory seems to prefer this more restrained definition of freedom, which might be called, with a bow to traditionalist conservatives, ordered liberty . . . . Leo P. Ribuffo is Society of the Cincinnati George Washington Distinguished Professor of History at George Washington University. He is the author of Right, Center, Left: Essays in American History (Rutgers University Press, 1992) and is working on a book titled The Limits of Moderation: Jimmy Carter and the Ironies of American Liberalism. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- REMARKS ON JOHN MCGREEVY'S CATHOLICISM AND AMERICAN FREEDOM Eugene McCarraher In his conclusion to What I Saw in America G. K. Chesterton reflected with a splendid and rueful uncertainty about the future of American democracy. Having already dubbed America the "nation with the soul of a church," Chesterton wondered if that soul-baptized, he knew, in the font of Protestantism-would be able to withstand the corrupting influences of modern science and capitalism. Indeed, the growing cultural authority of business and science alerted Chesterton to the need to root democracy in religious not secular ground. Against John Dewey, H. L. Mencken, and other acolytes of a post-Christian order, Chesterton argued that the most insidious enemy of democracy was not religion but secularism, and especially the scientific, instrumentalist rationality to which more intellectuals were pinning their hopes. Chesterton reasoned that because secular reason could demonstrate wide variations in intelligence, skill, and merit, it undermined belief in equality and buttressed the leadership of elites, and thus could not provide an impeccable basis for a democratic culture. However, because it asserted the divine parentage and likeness of men and women, "the dogmatic type of Christianity, [and] especially the Catholic type of Christianity" could, in Chesterton's view, assure democratic citizens that "its indestructible minimum of democracy really is indestructible." Democracy had no reliable foundation, he concluded, but in "a dogma about the divine origin of man." Any secular groundwork was "a sentimental confusion, full of merely verbal echoes of the older creeds." Bored by secular liberals and socialists, Chesterton made clear that his brief for orthodoxy should give no comfort to conservatives: earlier in the book, he had confessed the "attraction of the red cap as well as the red cross, of the Marseillaise as well as the Magnificat," and now declared that "the idealism of the leveler could be put in the form of an appeal to Scripture, and could not be put in the form of an appeal to Science." Echoing Augustine and anticipating the libertarian pessimism of postmodernists, Chesterton hoped that Americans would remember that "there is no meaning in democracy if there is no meaning in anything; and that there is no meaning in anything if the universe has not a centre of significance and an authority that is the author of our rights." "So far as that democracy becomes or remains Catholic and Christian, that democracy will remain democratic," he concluded. "In so far it does not, it will become wildly and wickedly undemocratic." Except among Chesterton aficionados, What I Saw in America remains virtually unknown among American intellectuals. That's a pity, I think, because it's the finest Catholic, or even foreign, reflection on American democracy ever written, far superior to Tocqueville's Democracy in America in points of literary style, intellectual prowess, and critical acuity. Tocqueville, of course, thought that American Catholics, far from being frightened into submission by clerics, would in fact provide the strongest ballast for democratic equality. So it's certainly not surprising that American Catholic intellectuals, especially those maturing or born after the Second World War, have routinely appealed to Tocqueville when arguing for an affinity between Catholicism and liberal capitalist democracy. One of the many small merits of John McGreevy's book is that it features only two brief and unconnected lines about Tocqueville. And while it doesn't mention either Chesterton or his record of American travels, the great merit of McGreevy's study is that it demonstrates the wisdom and durability of Chesterton's ambivalence . . . . Eugene McCarraher is assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University. He is the author of Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Cornell University Press, 2000). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMENTS ON CATHOLICISM AND AMERICAN FREEDOM Christopher Shannon John McGreevy is the Jay Dolan of his generation. I mean this not only in the sense of his being the leading practitioner of American Catholic history today, but also in his default capacity as ambassador from this subfield to the larger profession. Dolan burst on to the professional scene with his 1975 monograph The Immigrant Church. Scholars not particularly interested in church history were drawn to the work as a study of immigrants, and Dolan's use of then cutting-edge techniques of social history placed his book at the vanguard of the academic history of its day. Twenty or so years later, McGreevy burst on to the scene with his Parish Boundaries (1996). Here the innovation was less in method than subject matter: the book examined the role of urban Catholics in the resistance to integrated housing during the civil rights era. Race, an issue relatively neglected by Dolan, had become the single most burning passion of American historians following the end of the Cold War. Non-Catholic historians praised Parish Boundaries for its sensitivity to religion as a "factor" in race relations; Catholic historians praised it for being praised by non-Catholics. Parish Boundaries appealed to those within the field as a model of yet another "new" American Catholic history that would finally realize the long dreamed of integration into the mainstream of the profession-precisely the hope for Dolan's Immigrant Church some twenty years earlier. I raise these connections less out of concern for professional genealogies than as a symptom of a logic of revision that afflicts the profession as a whole. For reasons that I believe are in the book itself, I doubt that Catholicism and American Freedom will succeed where Dolan's work failed. It does stand, however, as a ringing endorsement of the professional standards to which post-Dolan American Catholic historians still aspire. As we are at a meeting of a professional association forged in battles over the status of those standards, I think it is appropriate to evaluate the book at a level that can unfortunately best be identified as meta-history. . . . Christopher Shannon is assistant professor of history at Christendom College. His most recent book is A World Made Safe for Differences (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- RESPONSE TO RIBUFFO, MCCARRAHER,AND SHANNON John T. McGreevy Leo Ribuffo challenges me to more fully integrate Catholic politicians and political activists into my account. Fair enough. In part my explanation for the modest attention devoted to John Kennedy, Al Smith, and Joseph McCarthy is that I wrote an intellectual history not a political one, and I do discuss how Catholic and non-Catholic intellectuals understood the Smith campaign in 1928 and Kennedy's handling of the religious issue in 1960. What does seem notable by its absence in CAAF, in retrospect, is a thorough treatment of religion and politics at the local level, where the parallels between the neighborhood- based, male-dominated parish structure and the neighborhood-based, male-dominated ward structure deserve much closer attention. Ribuffo adds that more sustained treatment of figures such as Phyllis Schlafly (or, I might add, William F. Buckley) would have widened the scope of a narrative too concerned with Catholic responses to American liberals at the expense of Catholic influence on the modern conservative movement. Again, a reasonable point. Still, fine books on the relationship between Catholics and modern conservatives do exist.1 And within the 100,000 words bequeathed me by W.W. Norton I thought it more important to focus on the dominant Catholic intellectual tradition -suspicious of liberalism, certainly, but dismissive (at least until the 1980s) of National Review-style free market economics. Ribuffo also makes a broader claim: that I place too great an emphasis on "words" or more particularly "clergy and leading theologians" at the expense of studying the behavior of lay Catholics. Certainly I do not intend to argue that all lay Catholics reflexively obeyed priests and bishops. (And some of the figures discussed at length in the book, including Orestes Brownson, James McMaster, and Jacques Maritain, were not priests.) Or that all "Catholic" immigrants to the United States from Italy, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, or anywhere else were Catholic in a meaningful sense. What I can do is point to a subculture of remarkable density and scope and ask what ideas and practices sustained it. That all Catholics did not agree upon or even care about the contours of those ideas and practices is unremarkable, and we should avoid placing upon Catholics a burden of coherence not impressed upon, say, followers of John Dewey. . . . 1 Patrick Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950-1985 (Cornell University Press, 1993). Also see Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Hill and Wang, 2001). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- UNCLE SAM'S WAR OF 1898 AND GLOBALIZATION Thomas Schoonover Most Americans have considered the Spanish-American War (a better term is the War of 1898) as a conflict that took place in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines and as a dispute between the United States and Spain. The conventional emphasis upon Cuba and Puerto Rico has made it easy to think of this war primarily in domestic terms. This viewpoint seemed patently misleading to me while in graduate school. The War of 1898 incorporated permanent global engagements into U.S. foreign relations. The War of 1898 and its aftermath formalized the transfer of leadership-unwillingly on the part of Spain, most of Europe, and Japan-in the ongoing quest for access to wealth in Asia and the Pacific. This passage of power to the United States occurred within the context of its competitive relationship with other states in the North Atlantic region and in the Caribbean and Pacific basins. Since the 17th century, Protestant North Americans considered the Catholic colonies to the south and west and all the non-Christian areas of the Pacific basin as a challenge to their religion, security, commercial activity, and culture. U.S. growth and transformation across the continent pointed to the resilient tradition of British colonial expansion. In the 1780s U.S. vessels hunted whales and seals, and other ships traded in Pacific and East Asian waters. Soon, missionaries undertook to "civilize" the Pacific islanders and East Asians (and U.S. sailors), while U.S. warships departed to explore the Pacific, protect U.S. interests, and tutor those Pacific basin dwellers who failed to adopt U.S. civilizing and material instructions. At times, these ships were used to protect U.S. objectives from the Chinese, Japanese, and Europeans who proposed alternative visions for the Pacific basin. These expansive impulses generated tensions and conflict in both the Caribbean and Pacific basins in the course of the century-and-a-half after 1776 . . . . Thomas Schoonover, Sagrera Professor of History, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, is the author of The French in Central America: Culture and Commerce, 1820-1930 (Scholarly Resources, 2000), Germany in Central America: Competitive Imperialism, 1821-1929 (Scholarly Resources, 1999), and, with Lester Langley, The Banana Men: American Mercenaries & Entrepreneurs in Central America, 1880-1930 (University Press of Kentucky, 1995). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTES ON THE BOOTHBAY HARBOR CONFERENCE George Huppert The 2004 conference of our Society took place in an unusual setting. We met in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, from June 3-6. Our host was the Spruce Point Inn, an exquisite seaside resort hidden amid woods and surrounded by the ocean. Some of our participants may have harbored doubts about setting out to meet in this distant rendezvous, but their doubts were dispelled on arrival. Others signed up for the conference, coming from as far away as Berkeley or London, precisely because of the setting's powerful appeal. For three days we were able to talk to each other under ideal circumstances, mostly outdoors. The weather was perfect. Our plenary sessions were held in the beautiful conference center finished only hours before our arrival. We broke with tradition by avoiding corporate hotels in big cities. We also departed from conventional ways by having papers precirculated and asking presenters to speak informally instead of reading prepared texts. These measures went a long way toward erasing the distinction between panel and audience. In most sessions this resulted in lively and fruitful exchanges among all those present. We continued our discussions under the tent adjacent to the conference center, where breakfast and lunch buffets were served by the inn's fine staff. Some of us still had enough energy in reserve to go on talking into the night. Some of us brought our children who could be heard squealing and splashing in the swimming pool while the imposing figure of Donald Yerxa floated past them. Meanwhile serious work was going on in the conference rooms where we found ourselves adventuring way beyond the confines of our fields of expertise. It is not often that specialists in Renaissance studies or labor history join discussions of South Indian historiography, Russian church history, Jeffersonian democracy, or Holocaust memoirs. We did not wander too far from the theme of the conference, which was defined as a reflection on the current state of the discipline. Roundtables on world history and global identity were among the broadest topics addressed. Elsewhere we discussed the state of the art in Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Latin American historiography, as well as new developments in the study of medieval Poland, modern Islam, and Black nationalism. Among the sessions that provoked a good deal of argument were the Christopher Lasch Lecture delivered by Sean Wilentz and Sanjay Subrahmanyam's discussion of world history. Bruce Kuklick, Leo Ribuffo, and Marc Trachtenberg offered their critical summary of the current state of the American historical profession in an atmosphere of rising hilarity, beginning with Kuklick's dissection of the foibles of our profession and rising to storms of laughter in response to Ribuffo's practiced comedy routines. As is to be expected, much of importance happened outside of the formal sessions. The relaxed setting-more like a retreat than a business meeting-allowed us to avoid the usual distractions. Communication with the outside world was severed. No cell phones ringing, no e-mail. The sense of having happily stepped out of our ordinary activities permeated the entire meeting. Instead of arranging job interviews, we arranged a concert offered to us by Deborah Coclanis and her friends. Our experiment with new ways of interacting is likely to influence our next meeting. We may want to pre-circulate papers again-we may even go so far as to read them carefully before the meeting-and we may try to retain the informality we achieved in Boothbay at our next meeting, in 2006, when we will descend on the Chapel Hill campus at the invitation of our president, Peter Coclanis. George Huppert, past president of the Historical Society, is the author of several books and articles on early modern European history. In 1989 he was decorated as Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes Academiques by the French government. From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 14 15:00:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 10:00:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: For President and Close Friend, Forget the Politics Message-ID: For President and Close Friend, Forget the Politics NYT January 14, 2005 By ELISABETH BUMILLER [I've been staying away from politics, but this one is about friendship. Does anyone remember Bebe Rebozo, Nixon's confidant?] When people ask Roland Betts how a New York Democrat can be such a good friend of President Bush, he whips out a ready answer. "Which would you prefer: my being close to him, or some right-wing zealot being close to him?" Mr. Betts said in a recent interview. "Who do you want to have his ear? So it's not a bad thing. Maybe I give him a little balance." It was Mr. Betts, after all, who persuaded Mr. Bush to hold the Republican National Convention last summer in the heart of Democratic America, the West Side of Manhattan, and it was Mr. Betts who stuck to that decision under incoming fire from the president. "I had an anxious year, to tell you the truth," said Mr. Betts, recalling that as the threat of protests grew, Mr. Bush took to tormenting him with comments like: "You're ruining me politically. Why did you make me come to New York?" Mr. Betts chuckled. "It was all good-natured," he said, "but I was thinking, 'Oh my God, there's probably a grain of truth in there. Should he have gone to Tampa?' " Roland W. Betts and George W. Bush have been needling each other for more than 40 years, ever since the day they met as remarkably similar freshmen at Yale. Mr. Bush was the eldest child of a blue-blooded Republican transplanted in Texas and Mr. Betts the son of a man who managed money for Vincent Astor. Both came from families that stretched generations back into the aristocratic precincts of the East Coast, both had sharp senses of humor, both loved sports and jocks. Most important, both were rebels in their own fashion. Today Mr. Betts - a founder of the Chelsea Piers sports and entertainment complex in Manhattan, a force behind the rebuilding of ground zero, a former public school teacher in Harlem and the financier of films like "Beauty and the Beast" and "Gandhi" - is one of the president's closest and most unusual confidants. To no one's surprise, he will be seated near the Bush family when the president takes the oath of office next week. Mr. Betts's relationship with the president is a window into Mr. Bush, who for the past four years has relied more than ever on his old Yale classmate as a safe harbor, a sounding board and an adviser. Friends say the two are like brothers, but without the familial complications. Over long weekends at Camp David, at the president's Texas ranch or at Mr. Betts's vacation homes in Santa Fe, N.M., and Jackson Hole, Wyo., Mr. Betts and Mr. Bush talk about cabinet appointments, the war in Iraq, Social Security, tax cuts, politics, architecture, sports and family. "Roland is a guy with a big appetite for life, and the president likes all that," said Tom A. Bernstein, Mr. Betts's business partner at Chelsea Piers and a friend of Mr. Bush. "They talk about absolutely everything." New Yorkers who work with Mr. Betts note that his friendship with the president has benefited him by raising his profile and making him a bigger force in the city. Mr. Bush made Mr. Betts his personal representative in negotiations between Major League Baseball and the players' union to institute a drug-testing policy, and city officials know that he operates as the president's eyes and ears in the development of ground zero. Friends say Mr. Betts does not boast about his relationship with the president, although the friendship is hard to miss in his office, which is filled with photographs of himself and Mr. Bush spanning four decades. But Mr. Betts, who claims no political ambitions of his own, insisted that the friendship cuts both ways. "Living in New York, it's an irritant to some people and it helps me with other people," he said. "It's a mixed bag." Mr. Bush declined to comment for this article, as did his aides. As in other first-friend presidential relationships - Jimmy Carter and Charles H. Kirbo, George H. W. Bush and James A. Baker III, Bill Clinton and Vernon E. Jordan Jr. - Mr. Betts operates outside the range of White House advisers, and the extent of his influence is difficult to gauge. But there is no question that Mr. Bush depends on him to bring stability and some perspective to his life. "The president said to me when he was elected something to the effect that, 'Laura and I are smart enough to know that when you're president of the United States, you don't make new friends,' meaning anybody who purports to be a new friend wants something," Mr. Betts said in a long conversation in his Chelsea Piers office overlooking the Hudson River. "And therefore, his comfort level with people who have known him his whole life is higher. He can truly relax, and not worry about people positioning him on something." Not that Mr. Betts doesn't try. In early 2003, he called Mr. Bush and asked him not to denounce outright the University of Michigan's race-conscious admissions policies, a position the president was considering for a brief the administration was to file in an affirmative action case before the Supreme Court. "I said, 'Look, I can't sit still for this,' " said Mr. Betts, whose wife of 32 years, Lois, is African-American. "And he said, 'Well, actually your timing's perfect, because there's a big debate about that within the office,' " Mr. Betts recalled that Mr. Bush said. The administration's brief ended up denouncing the specifics of Michigan's system, but left open the prospect that race could be considered under narrow circumstances in college admissions. "I don't know if I persuade him on anything," Mr. Betts said. "I'm not looking for credit. I just like to get my 2 cents in." Mr. Betts is circumspect about many of his conversations with Mr. Bush, so it is hard to know how much he debates the president politically. He will say that he has disagreed with the president's position limiting stem cell research to a handful of existing colonies- "he listens," he said - but Mr. Betts refuses to answer questions about any conversations he has had with Mr. Bush about a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, legislation the president supported during the campaign. "I don't think he's as conservative a person as the media generally characterizes him as," Mr. Betts said. What is indisputable is that Mr. Betts, a burly former Yale hockey player who goes to work in golf clothes, has helped Mr. Bush at important moments in the president's life. In 1989, he was the single-largest investor in a group that bought the Texas Rangers baseball team and set up Mr. Bush as a general partner, a deal that eventually made Mr. Bush a multimillionaire and kicked off his political career. Mr. Betts also put Mr. Bush on the board of Silver Screen Management, which financed more than 75 Disney movies, including "The Little Mermaid" and "Pretty Woman." "Our business was fundamentally a marriage of Wall Street and Hollywood, so you would say to yourself, 'Well, Bush didn't come from either of those worlds, why would he be valuable?' " Mr. Betts said. His friend, he said, had a common sense that he brought to board debates about the company's relationship with Disney. "His advice was sort of 'don't stretch the rubber band too thin,' " Mr. Betts said, recalling that Mr. Bush used to counsel him that "when you compare the $10 million you're fighting over against the hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars you're involved with, they're not material." Clearly, Mr. Betts is not the person to go to for an unvarnished view of the president, and he invariably describes a more thoughtful and curious chief executive than Mr. Bush's public image suggests. "He asks me a lot of questions," Mr. Betts said. "As we're going for walks, he wants to know, 'Well, who do you think would be good here, and what should I do here?' " Before the war with Iraq, Mr. Betts said Mr. Bush frequently asked him, "As a citizen, what do you think here? Do you think the case is adequately made?" Mr. Betts said that he often responded no, but that by the eve of the invasion he had said yes. At the same time, Mr. Betts describes a president more concerned than he lets on about the perception among some critics that Vice President Dick Cheney is running the country. When Mr. Bush spoke to the commission investigating the attacks of Sept. 11, Mr. Betts said that the president took along Mr. Cheney not to present a consistent story but to show the panel that Mr. Bush was in charge. "What he told me was that he wanted people to see how deeply he understood all this," Mr. Betts said, "and how he was calling all the shots." Mr. Betts was born six weeks before Mr. Bush, on May 25, 1946, and grew up in the hamlet of Laurel Hollow near Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., an upper-crust enclave on the North Shore of Long Island. Like the president, he was dispatched in due course to boarding school, St. Paul's. At Yale he joined Mr. Bush in Delta Kappa Epsilon, or Deke, the jock house, where Mr. Bush was the fraternity's president and Mr. Betts was his rush chairman. Both Mr. Betts and Mr. Bush were known as enthusiastic partiers, but some classmates noticed that Mr. Betts worked hard on the sly. (He is now the senior fellow of the Yale Corporation, the university's title for chairman of the board.) Once out of Yale, Mr. Betts became a math and history teacher in Harlem at what was then Intermediate School 201, and spent the next decade as an instructor, substitute and administrator in the New York and New Jersey public schools. He said he was drawn to teaching through a thesis he wrote about the community-school movement, but also as a way to avoid the draft during Vietnam. In 1972, he married a fellow teacher, the former Lois Phifer, who had passed muster with Mr. Bush. "I wanted her to meet George; I wanted George to meet her," Mr. Betts said. "An interracial marriage in 1972 was a very uncommon thing." Mr. Bush approved, and by the time Mrs. Betts was in the hospital after the birth of the first of the couple's two children, in 1975, the still-single Mr. Bush came to keep his old fraternity brother company at Mr. Betts's town house on West 102nd Street, where the Bettses still live. Next week, Mr. Betts will be in Washington to celebrate Mr. Bush's inauguration, but he is cagey about where he will stay and what he will do. It is a safe bet, however, that at some point he will be needled by the president of the United States. "I'm going to be happy for my friend," Mr. Betts said. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/14/politics/14betts.html From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 14 15:06:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 10:06:58 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: @Times: 10 Most Popular Articles of 2004 Message-ID: @Times: 10 Most Popular Articles of 2004 Which stories piqued our readers' interests last year? Here are the 10 Most Viewed NYTimes.com articles from 2004. 1. Magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/25SEXTRAFFIC.html The Girls Next Door By PETER LANDESMAN, Published January 25, 2004 The sex-trafficking trade may begin in Eastern Europe and wend its way through Mexico, but it lands in the suburbs and cities of America, where perhaps tens of thousands are held captive and pimped out for forced sex. 2. Magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.htm Without a Doubt By RON SUSKIND, Published October 17, 2004 What makes Bush's presidency so radical - even to some Republicans - is his preternatural, faith-infused certainty in uncertain times. 3. Friendly http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/20/politics/campaign/20swift.html Fire: The Birth of an Anti-Kerry Ad By KATE ZERNIKE and JIM RUTENBERG, Published August 20, 2004 An ad questioning John Kerry's war record sprang from an alliance between Texas Republicans and veterans angry about Mr. Kerry's criticism of the Vietnam War. 4. Movie http://movies2.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/movies/23FAHR.html Review | 'Fahrenheit 9/11': Unruly Scorn Leaves Room for Restraint, but Not a Lot By A. O. SCOTT, Published June 23, 2004 While Michael Moore's documentary about the Bush administration has been likened to an op-ed column, it might more accurately be said to resemble an editorial cartoon. 5. Frank http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/arts/14rich.html Rich: On 'Moral Values,' It's Blue in a Landslide Published November 14, 2004 There's only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. It is fiction. 6. Iraq http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/12/international/middleeast/12TAPE.html Videotape Shows the Decapitation of an American By DEXTER FILKINS, Published May 12, 2004 The killers called the decapitation revenge for the American mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. 7. How http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/international/middleeast/03tube.html the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence By DAVID BARSTOW, WILLIAM J. BROAD and JEFF GERTH, Published October 3, 2004 The Bush administration was made aware as early as 2001 that the aluminum tubes used as critical evidence against Iraq were most likely not for nuclear weapons. 8. Huge http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/international/middleeast/25bomb.html Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq By JAMES GLANZ, WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER, Published October 25, 2004 The Iraqi interim government has warned that nearly 380 tons of the world's most powerful conventional explosives are missing from a former military installation. 9. Editorial: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/opinion/17sun1.html John Kerry for President Published October 17, 2004 John Kerry has qualities that could be the basis for a great chief executive and we enthusiastically endorse him for president. 10. How http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/international/worldspecial4/31wave.html Scientists and Victims Watched Helplessly By ANDREW C. REVKIN, Published December 31, 2004 The magnitude of the tsunami that killed tens of thousands and remade the coasts of the Asian subcontinent was slowly gauged across the world. 2004: The Year in Pictures http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/photo/20041227_YIP_FEATURE/blocker.html Last year's most memorable images capture the war in Iraq, the U.S. presidential campaigns, the Summer Olympic Games in Athens and more. From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 14 15:08:34 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 10:08:34 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Insight Seeing: Cultural Tourism Across Disciplinary Divides Message-ID: Insight Seeing: Cultural Tourism Across Disciplinary Divides The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.14 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i19/19b01301.htm By JULIA M. KLEIN In Cologne, the bus was waiting as the last stragglers sprinted across the street. Our German bus driver, unaware that his fetish for punctuality was verging on caricature, was once again tapping his watch and preparing to admonish the latecomers. The rest of us braced ourselves -- for yet another day devoted to grappling with German culture both high and low. Participants in a three-week Fulbright German Studies Seminar, we traversed the country last June in search of its "visual culture," defined as a mix of film, television, video art, and Internet sites. Our group of academics, video artists, filmmakers, and journalists heard lectures, watched movies, and visited studios, schools, regulatory agencies, and museums. Interacting with our German hosts, we felt sometimes like schoolchildren, other times like tourists. By the end, we were questioning the seminar's concept of visual culture. (Why, for example, video art but not painting? Film but not theater?) But we were also remarking on the surprisingly rich film legacy of East Germany, the lingering institutional schism between East and West, and the declining quality of German television. We devoted much less reflection to the ambiguities of our own role as both observers and participants -- including the ways in which our seminar offerings and sightseeing excursions overlapped, and diverged from, more conventional itineraries. The topic would have been a provocative one for our mixed group of academics and practitioners. These days, tourism has become a lively object of study, transcending traditional disciplinary divides. And the old sociological model that saw tourism as just another aspect of neocolonialism is gradually ceding to more nuanced approaches. Edward M. Bruner's Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel (University of Chicago Press, 2004) is a bracing compendium of anthropological essays decoding specific tourist sites. Harvey A. Levenstein's We'll Always Have Paris: American Tourists in France Since 1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2004) serves as an excellent example of the social historian's art. And Michael Gorra's The Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany (Princeton University Press, 2004) filters contemporary and historical German realities through a literary prism -- a promising approach that is perhaps too coolly cerebral in the end. Bruner, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is one of the pioneers of ethnographic tourism studies, along with Dean MacCannell (The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, Schocken Books, 1976) and John Urry (The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies, Sage Publications, 1990), among others. Bruner's emphasis is on complexity and process; he declines to disparage tourists as a class or to assume that local residents are objects of exploitation. He sees multiple, competing meanings in individual sites, contrasting meanings in different sites in the same country, and changes in the meaning of sites over time. Bruner relishes ambiguities, including those involving his own role. In 1987, he says in his introduction, he signed on as a guide for a deluxe tour of Indonesia in order to study tourism from the inside. "I was an anthropologist," he writes, "but, also, in effect, one of the tourists." But Bruner's boss, who accompanied the group, was not amused by his photographing of tourists as they photographed Indonesians, nor his attempt to explain that a folk ballet at a princess's home was a performance constructed specifically for tourists. Instead of making his fellow tourists more self-aware, as he'd intended, he got himself fired. The episode underlined for him the contrast between a "master tourist tale" that sees tourist performances as "representations of an authentic culture" and his view -- that they are "contemporary rituals offered in a particular political and touristic context." Bruner's often fascinating book also whirls through Africa, the Middle East, and the United States, delineating what he calls "touristic border-zones" -- real places where tourists encounter locals in performance. Tourism, for Bruner, is "improvisational theater ... where both tourists and locals are actors." Sometimes, of course, the performance goes awry -- or the context changes. One chapter, "Maasai on the Lawn: Tourist Realism in East Africa," written with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, of New York University, describes Mayers Ranch, where for years tourists enjoyed Maasai tribal dancing followed by an elegant tea on the Mayers' lawn. This juxtaposition of the (constructed) primitive with the retro-colonial eventually proved offensive to the Kenyan government and was shut down. Closer to home, Bruner examines New Salem, Ill., a popular reconstruction of the town where Abraham Lincoln spent his young adulthood. Bruner brilliantly dissects contending messages at this "pioneer" village, including tensions and overlaps between historical and mythic versions of Lincoln. The importance of New Salem as a tourist attraction has arguably inflated the significance of those years in Lincoln biographies, and so, he writes, "may have distorted the discourse of professional historians." This, he adds, "reminds us that tourism and scholarship are not as independent as might be assumed." Similarly, in a comparatively dense chapter, "Dialogic Narration and the Paradoxes of Masada," written with Phyllis Gorfain, of Oberlin, he explains how different stories told about Masada -- the mountain fortress that was the site of Jewish opposition to Rome and, in AD 73, of mass suicide -- interact with one another, and with the larger themes of Israeli history. While the establishment narrative emphasizes heroic resistance and the rightness of the Jewish cause, a leftist challenge views Masada -- and, by analogy, contemporary Israel -- as a fortress state, making "absolutist and isolationist choices" that are dooming it to destruction. Levenstein's Paris seems like a prime example of a "touristic borderzone," where the continuing drama is the turbulent love-hate relationship between the resident French and the invading Americans. In the preface to a preceding volume, Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age (University of Chicago Press, 1998), Levenstein, professor emeritus of history at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, cites MacCannell and other writers on tourism. But the themes Levenstein pursues are the gradual democratization of travel, the changing balance between cultural and leisure travel, the association of France with sexual license, the (usually better) treatment of African-American tourists, and continuing tensions in the tourist-host relationship. In place of ethnographic observation and interviews, Levenstein leans on an array of written primary sources, encompassing the experiences of celebrities, intellectuals, and also the soldiers, students, and middle-class masses who (even today) whiz through the Louvre, seek out hamburgers, and generally disdain the very culture whose allure presumably inspired their visit. Along with diaries and other first-person accounts, Levenstein draws on contemporary guidebooks, women's magazines, films, and other products of popular culture to trace changing attitudes and mores. If the second volume grows repetitive, it's because many of the complaints remain the same: The French are surly and price-gouging, the Americans boorish and ignorant. France's very dependence on foreign, particularly American, tourism is a harness that Parisians, in particular, don't wear lightly. Every so often, despairing French tourism officials launch themselves into the fray. It's amusing to read of such efforts as a mid-1960s National Campaign of Welcome and Friendliness, including the distribution of "smile checks" given to tourists "to hand out as rewards for cheerful service." The 50 French workers who received the most checks were awarded prizes such as a car or a vacation in Tahiti. "But the French reputation for surliness was too well established among Americans to be dissipated so easily," Levenstein writes. Two decades later the industry tried again, setting up "welcome offices," training language students as interpreters, and mounting a "sensitivity" campaign that stressed the importance of hospitality. "It is impossible to tell what effect these measures had on the French," Levenstein comments dryly, "but once again they hardly dented the persisting negative image of the French among Americans." Still, Paris -- Levenstein barely touches on other French locales -- continued to exercise its enchantments. It would be hard to contemplate Germans -- even Bavarians -- cottoning to a smile-check campaign. And yet what European country has a greater image problem? Six decades after the war, sites of political repression and mass murder remain among Germany's most popular tourist draws. Buchenwald will soon be selling souvenirs. The Nazis attract us now, as much as they repel us. Michael Gorra, professor of English at Smith College, argues that Germany is a tough subject for conventional travel narratives. In fact, he says, "nobody in the Anglo-American world writes travel books about contemporary Germany." He intends The Bells in Their Silence as almost an anti-narrative, a deconstruction of the genre, and compares it to what James E. Young has called the "countermonuments" to the Holocaust scattered across the German landscape. But Gorra's idiosyncratic tour of Germany, undertaken during his wife's sabbatical year in Hamburg and filled with references to writers such as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, W.G. Sebald, and Thomas Mann, is annoyingly digressive and emotionally distancing. Despite his considerable erudition, he also displays a surprising na?vet?. Surely, he doesn't imagine himself the first tourist or travel writer to marvel grimly at the chasm between the literary heritage of Weimar, with its monuments to Goethe and Schiller, and the horrors of Buchenwald just half an hour away. One larger concern he raises, about the "shards and fragments" -- the gaps -- in Germany's recounting of its own recent history, does ring true, even today. In contrast to three decades -- a generation -- ago, the Holocaust is a subject encountered regularly on German television, in museums, in bookstores. And yet, on a personal level, reticence still prevails. During our Fulbright-sponsored tour of Germany, we were invariably too polite to ask family histories, to probe too far into the miasma of wartime memory. As highly educated cultural tourists, we did possess what Bruner refers to as a "questioning gaze" -- within limits. But we were also invited guests, and unlike the worst of the Americans profiled in Levenstein's books, we kept our most skeptical observations and mordant humor -- about obsessively punctual bus drivers and far more troubling matters -- to ourselves. Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia. http://chronicle.com From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 14 15:09:28 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 10:09:28 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: The City Shall Rise Again: Urban Resilience in the Wake of Disaster Message-ID: The City Shall Rise Again: Urban Resilience in the Wake of Disaster The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.14 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i19/19b00601.htm By LAWRENCE J. VALE and THOMAS J. CAMPANELLA On December 26 -- exactly one year after an earthquake crumbled the Iranian city of Bam and killed more than 30,000 people -- an earthquake-powered tsunami flattened the Indonesian city of Banda Aceh on Sumatra, and spread death and devastation across more than a dozen countries from Thailand to Somalia. Countless small villages face an uncertain future after such disasters. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is the larger urban areas that are almost certain to rebound, just as Lisbon did after the famous tsunami of 1755. Whoever penned the Latin maxim Sic transit Gloria mundi, or "thus passes the glory of the world," was probably not an urbanist. Although cities have been destroyed throughout history -- sacked, shaken, burned, bombed, flooded, starved, irradiated, and poisoned -- they have, in almost every case, risen again like the mythic phoenix. There have been some exceptions. In 1902 the eruption of Mount Pel?e buried St. Pierre, Martinique -- once known as "the Paris of the Antilles" -- under pyroclastic lava flows. Nearly 30,000 residents and visitors perished; only one man survived, a prisoner in solitary confinement. Yet one is hard-pressed to think of other cities in recent centuries that have not recovered. Atlanta, Columbia, and Richmond all survived the devastation wrought by the American Civil War and remain state capitals today. Chicago emerged stronger than ever following the 1871 fire, as did San Francisco from the earthquake and fires of 1906. We still have Hiroshima and Nagasaki, despite the horrors of nuclear attack. Warsaw lost 61 percent of its 1.3 million residents during World War II, yet surpassed its prewar population by 1967. Does anyone doubt that Kabul and Kandahar, or Baghdad and Basra, will also re-emerge once protracted fighting finally comes to a close -- or that even Bam and Banda Aceh will ultimately be revived? And while contemporary places rebuild following devastation, many of the places destroyed in more distant eras -- Roman cities like Pompeii or the pre-Columbian settlements of the Americas -- persist in a different mode. Such "lost cities" are recovered as sites for tourism, education, remembrance, or myth. Even St. Pierre survives as a town of 5,000 persons, a tourable set of ruins, and a volcano museum. Cities are among humankind's most durable artifacts. Just why this should be so, especially as the mechanisms for destruction have multiplied, is not entirely obvious. Why do cities get rebuilt? How do modern cities recover from disaster? Urban disaster, like urban resilience, takes many forms, and can be categorized in many ways. First, there is the scale of destruction, which may range from a small single precinct to an entire city or an even larger area -- like the recent devastation, which affected countries from Southeast Asia all the way to East Africa. Second, such disasters can be viewed in terms of their human toll, as measured by deaths and disruption of lives. Third, these destructive acts can be evaluated according to their presumed cause. Some result from largely uncontrollable forces of nature, like earthquakes and tsunamis; others from combinations of natural forces and human action, like fires; still others result from deliberate human will, like the actions of a lone terrorist. Finally, there are economic disasters -- triggered by demographic change, a major accident, or an industrial or commercial crisis -- that may contribute to massive population flight, diminishing investment in infrastructure and buildings, and perhaps even large-scale abandonment. Although we have many case studies of post-disaster reconstruction in individual cities, until very recently few scholars have attempted cross-cultural comparisons, and even fewer have attempted to compare urban resilience in the face of natural disasters, for instance, with resilience following human-inflicted catastrophes. By studying historical examples, however, we can learn the pressing questions that have been asked in the past as cities and their residents struggled to rebuild. One of the most important questions to consider is that of recovery. What does it mean for a city to recover? The broad cultural question of recovery is more than a problem of "disaster management," however daunting and important that may be. Are there common themes that can help us understand the processes of physical, political, social, economic, and cultural renewal and rebirth? What is urban resilience? Many disasters may follow a predictable pattern of rescue, restoration, rebuilding, and remembrance, yet we can only truly evaluate a recovery based on the specific circumstances. It matters, for instance, that the Chinese central government viewed the devastation of the earthquake in Tangshan in 1976 as a threat to national industrial development, and that the contending governments of postwar Berlin viewed the re-emergent city as an ideological battleground. Jerusalem, traumatized more than perhaps any other city in history, has undergone repeated cycles of destruction and renewal, but each time the process of reconstruction and remembrance has been carried out in profoundly different ways. Thus, it is no simple task to extract common messages, let alone lessons, from the wide-ranging stories of urban resilience. Yet several themes stand out: Narratives of resilience are a political necessity. The ubiquity of urban rebuilding after a disaster results from, among other things, a political need to demonstrate resilience. In that sense, resilience is primarily a rhetorical device intended to enhance or restore the legitimacy of whatever government was in charge at the time the disaster occurred. Regardless of its other effects, the destruction of a city usually reflects poorly on whomever is in power. If the chief function of government is to protect citizens from harm, the destruction of densely inhabited places presents the greatest possible challenge to its competence and authority. Cultivation of a sense of recovery and progress therefore remains a priority for governments. Of course, governments conduct rescue operations and channel emergency funds as humanitarian gestures first and foremost, but they also do so as a means of saving face and retaining public office. Disasters reveal the resilience of governments. In the aftermath of disaster, the very legitimacy of government is at stake. Citizens have the opportunity to observe how their leaders respond to an acute crisis and, if they are not satisfied, such events can be significant catalysts for political change. Even something as minor as a snowstorm can threaten or destroy the re-election chances of a mayor who is too slow in getting the plows out. After the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, residents saw that the existing bureaucracy lacked the flexibility and the will to place the needs of homeless citizens first. By criticizing the government's overriding interest in calming international financial markets, grass-roots social movements gained new primacy. At an equally basic level, a sudden disaster causes governments to exercise power quite directly. In postwar Warsaw, for instance, both the reconstruction of the Old Town and the creation of modernist housing estates in adjacent areas depended on the power and flexibility assumed by a strong central government. Rebuilding is often economically necessary to jump-start employment and spending, and thereby casts in bold relief the values and priorities of government. Narratives of resilience are always contested. The rhetoric of resilience is never free from politics, self-interest, or contention. Narratives focused on promises of progress are often bankrolled by those who control capital or the means of production and are manipulated by media pundits, politicians, and other voices that carry the greatest influence. There is never a single, monolithic vox populi that uniformly affirms the adopted resilience narrative in the wake of disaster. Instead, key figures in the dominant culture claim (or are accorded) authorship, while marginalized groups or peoples are often ignored. No one polled homeless people in Manhattan about how we should think about September 11. Local resilience is linked to national renewal. A major traumatic event in a particular city often projects itself into the national arena. Recovery becomes linked to questions of national prestige and to the need to re-establish standing in the community of nations. In that sense, resilience takes on a wider ideological significance that extends well beyond the boundaries of the affected city. A capital city or a city that is host to many national institutions is swiftly equated with the nation-state as a whole. When a Mexico City, a Beirut, a Warsaw, or a Tokyo suffers, all of Mexico, Lebanon, Poland, or Japan feels the consequences. Resilience is underwritten by outsiders. Increasingly, the resilience of cities depends on political and financial influences exercised from well outside the city limits. Usually, in a federal system, urban resilience depends on the emergency allocation of outside support from higher levels of government. In the United States, that holds true for every federally designated "disaster area" -- whether caused by a hurricane, snowstorm, heat wave, power outage, earthquake, flood, or terrorist act. Sometimes, where recovery is costly and local resources are meager, support comes from international-aid sources (often with strings attached, in the form of political agendas of one sort or another). Chinese leaders recognized this potential in 1976 and refused to let international-aid organizations get involved in the rebuilding of Tangshan -- a decision that may well have cost many lives. In contrast, the reconstruction of Europe after World War II under the Marshall Plan was generally well received. The global influx of humanitarian aid to assist the Iranian city of Bam after the 2003 earthquake entailed far more than reconstruction of a vast mud-brick citadel; it also carried implications for rebuilding international relations with Iran. Urban rebuilding symbolizes human resilience. Whatever our politics, we rebuild cities to reassure ourselves about the future. The demands of major rebuilding efforts offer a kind of succor in that they provide productive distraction from loss and suffering and may help survivors to overcome trauma-induced depression. To shore up the scattered and shattered lives of survivors, post-disaster urbanism operates through a series of symbolic acts, emphasizing staged ceremonies -- like the removal of the last load of debris from Ground Zero -- and newly constructed edifices and memorials. Such symbols link the continuing psychological recovery process to tangible, visible signs of progress and momentum. In the past, many significant urban disasters went largely unmarked. Survivors of the great fires of London (1666), Boston (1872), Seattle (1889), Baltimore (1904), and Toronto (1904) devoted little or no land to memorials, although each fire significantly altered the architectural fabric of its city. Hiroshima, on the other hand, built its Peace Park memorial -- an island of open space in what quickly became again a dense industrial city -- with the full support of the American occupation forces. Resilience benefits from the inertia of prior investment. In most cases, even substantial devastation of urban areas has not led to visionary new city plans aimed at correcting long-endured deficiencies or limiting the risk of future destruction in the event of a recurrence. After London's Great Fire of 1666, architectsincluding Christopher Wren, John Evelyn, and othersproposed bold new plans for the city's street network. Yet, as the urban planner and author Kevin Lynch has written, the most ambitious plans were thwarted by entrenched property interests and "a complicated system of freeholds, leases, and subleases with many intermixed ownerships." In New York City, reconstruction of the World Trade Center has involved scores of powerful players in state and local government as well as community and professional organizations. The large number of "chiefs" has resulted in a contentious planning and design process. Whatever ultimately gets built will need to accommodate public demands for open space and memorials as well as private demands to restore huge amounts of office space and retail facilities -- demands driven as much by insurance provisions as by market conditions. Resilience exploits the power of place. Mere cost accounting, however, fails to calculate the most vital social and psychological losses -- and the resultant political engagement -- that are so often tied to the reclamation of particular places. No place better illustrates this than Jerusalem. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, there is simply no replacing Jerusalem: "Men always pray at the same sites," the religion scholar Ernest Renan observed of the city. "Only the rationale for their sanctity changes from generation to generation and from one faith to another." Rebuilding cities fundamentally entails reconnecting severed familial, social, and religious networks of survivors. Urban recovery occurs network by network, district by district, not just building by building; it is about reconstructing the myriad social relations embedded in schools, workplaces, childcare arrangements, shops, places of worship, and places of play and recreation. Surely that is at the heart of the reclaiming of downtown Mexico City after the earthquake, the struggles over Martyrs' Square in postwar Beirut, and the hard-fought campaign to retain Washington, D.C., as the national capital after its destruction in 1814. The selective reconstruction of Warsaw's Old Town also perfectly captures the twin impulses of nostalgia and opportunism; its planners found a way to recall past glories and also reduce traffic congestion by building an underground highway tunnel. Resilience casts opportunism as opportunity. A fine line runs between capitalizing on an unexpected traumatic disruption as an opportunity to pursue some much-needed improvements and the more dubious practice of using devastation as a cover for more opportunistic agendas yielding less obvious public benefits. The dual reconstruction of Chicago after the 1871 Great Fire illustrates the problem perfectly: The razed city was rebuilt once in a shoddy form and then, in reaction to that, rebuilt again with the grand and innovative skyscrapers that gave the resurrected city a bold new image and lasting fame. The annals of urban recovery are replete with such examples where rebuilding yielded improvements over the pre-disaster built environment. San Francisco officials exploited the damage done to the Embarcadero Freeway by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake as the opportunity to demolish this eyesore and enhance the public amenities of 1.5 miles of downtown waterfront by creating a music pavilion, a new plaza, an extended trolley line, a revitalized historic ferry building and farmers' market, and enhanced ferry service. Shortly after a massive IRA bomb devastated parts of the city center in Manchester, England, in 1996, government officials established a public-private task force charged not only with the immediate recovery but also with longer-term regeneration. The redevelopment included new office, retail, and entertainment facilities, as well as a multilevel pedestrian plaza and a new museum highlighting urban life around the world. Most recently, debate about how to rebuild Ground Zero in New York has focused in part on improving the area as a regional transportation hub. Of course, disaster-triggered opportunism can just as easily work against the best interests of the affected city. Following the September 11 attacks, many downtown firms either fled New York City or established secondary operations in the suburbs -- a process of decentralization that brought new growth to a number of communities at the city's expense. Resilience, like disaster, is site-specific. When speaking of traumatized cities, there is an understandable temptation to speak as if the city as a whole were a victim. September 11 was an "attack on New York"; the truck bomb that destroyed the Murrah Building was the "Oklahoma City bombing"; all of London faced the Blitz. Yet all disasters, not only earthquakes, have epicenters. Those who are victimized by traumatic episodes experience resilience differently, based on their distances from those epicenters. Even in the largest experiences with devastation -- like the Tangshan earthquake -- it was significant that the quake leveled vast residential and commercial areas but spared some industrial facilities, as this forced the government to consider vast new schemes for housing workers. In Berlin, especially once the postwar city was divided into zones of occupation, it mattered mightily which parts of the city had been destroyed and which regime thereby inherited the debate over how to proceed with each particular reconstruction challenge. The site-specificity of resilience will increasingly follow a different trajectory, given the global flow of electronic data and information, which can all too easily be obstructed by a disruption at some key point in the network. When such a node is destroyed -- as in the case of the Mexico City telephone and electrical substations during the 1985 earthquake -- an entire country may suffer the consequences. Alternatively, the very nature of an electronic network provides redundancies and "work-arounds" that guard against a catastrophic breakdown of the system. The digital era offers tempting new targets for mayhem but also affords new possibilities for resilience. Resilience entails more than rebuilding. The process of rebuilding is a necessary but, by itself, insufficient condition for enabling recovery and resilience. We can see this most acutely in Gernika, where the trauma inflicted on the Basque town and its people by Hitler's bombers -- and Franco's will -- remained painful for decades, even after the town was physically rebuilt. Only with a regime change 40 years after the attack did citizens feel free to express the full measure of their emotional sorrow, or attempt to re-establish the Basque cultural symbols that had been so ruthlessly destroyed. In addition, American cities have experienced major population and housing losses, sustained over a period of decades, that are comparable with the declines usually associated with some sudden disaster. Once vibrant North Carolina cities like Durham and Burlington have suffered mightily as their major industries -- textile manufacturing, railroads, and tobacco processing -- went into decline. Industrial Detroit has lost nearly a million people since 1950. But we are not willing to let cities disappear, even if their economic relevance has been seriously questioned. National governments provide special programs like urban renewal or empowerment zones to assist particular cities, refusing to let them sink on their own. Although the effectiveness of such programs is often questioned, the will to rescue cities and spur additional economic development remains real. In Durham and Detroit, most growth has been at the regional scale -- in the burgeoning suburbs -- while the cities themselves have struggled for decades. Yet recently repopulation and rebuilding have commenced in earnest. In Durham, sprawling old tobacco warehouses are being transformed into chic condo complexes, while in Detroit new lower-density subdivisions, suburban in image, have risen on the bone piles of old, dense row housing. Clearly, even those much-battered cities have gained from resilient citizens, ambitious developers, and a dogged insistence that recovery will still take place. The various axioms that we've described can hardly cover every facet of urban resilience. We have said relatively little, for instance, about efforts to plan in advance for the possibility of disasters. Nearly every city and country makes some attempt at pre-disaster planning; civil-defense agencies prepare plans to protect civilians from floods, nuclear fallout, the effects of chemical or biological weapons, and many other circumstances. Inevitably, many such plans prove to be of limited value and have often been subject to ridicule. Basement bomb shelters, lined with cans of Campbell's soup, or the infamous "duck-and-cover" films of the cold war era are still routinely parodied, and the more-recent national run on duct tape and plastic sheeting prompted by ill-considered advice from the Department of Homeland Security fueled a legion of jokes on late-night television. Whatever the merits, pre-disaster planning often exposes official priorities to provide disproportionate assistance to certain kinds of people and places, and is very revealing about the relationship between the government and the governed. Flood-control projects often pass the problem downriver; dictators often provide bomb shelters for "essential personnel" but not for average civilians; costly "earthquake-proof" buildings are normally not used for low-income housing -- and the list goes on. Despite the shortcomings, however, any full measure of urban resilience must take account of such efforts to mitigate disaster. Ultimately, the resilient city is a constructed phenomenon, not just in the literal sense that cities get reconstructed brick by brick, but in a broader cultural sense. Urban resilience is an interpretive framework that local and national leaders propose and shape and citizens accept in the wake of disaster. However equitable or unjust, efficient, or untenable, that framework serves as the foundation upon which the society builds anew. "The cities rise again," wrote Kipling, not due to a mysterious spontaneous force, but because people believe in them. Cities are not only the places in which we live and work and play, but also a demonstration of our ultimate faith in the human project, and in each other. Lawrence J. Vale is a professor of urban studies and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thomas J. Campanella is an assistant professor of city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They are the editors of The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster, published this month by Oxford University Press and from which this essay is adapted. From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 14 15:10:22 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 10:10:22 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: An Inspired Collection Honors a Founder of the Indie Movement Message-ID: An Inspired Collection Honors a Founder of the Indie Movement The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.14 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i19/19b01501.htm By DAVID STERRITT After a 1974 press screening of A Woman Under the Influence, an audience member asked the writer-director John Cassavetes if any parts of the movie were scripted, not improvised. Cassavetes looked puzzled for a second, then answered, "I guess if someone walked across a room we didn't script every step. But yeah, I wrote the picture." While the questioner's premise was wrong, the mistake was understandable. "Cassavetes worked hard for [his] artless effects," as the critic Stuart Klawans writes in an essay for John Cassavetes: Five Films, a recently released boxed set of eight DVD's that stands out even by the Criterion Collection's high standard. In a program-booklet interview, Cassavetes acknowledges filming some scenes of Woman as many as 12 to 14 times, and that's probably an understatement. Take the great spaghetti-breakfast sequence, in which the title character, Mabel Longhetti, serves a morning pasta meal to her husband's working-class buddies, most of whom can't figure out what to make of her ebullient quirkiness. Scholarship suggests that Cassavetes shot parts of the scene about 40 times. Cassavetes carefully crafted the freewheeling, rough-and-ready look of his best movies to highlight the aspect of cinema he valued most: acting. In turn, acting played a specific role in his technique -- the generation of raw, unmodulated feelings, as mercurial and sometimes inexplicable as those of life itself. "The emotion was improvisation. The lines were written," he told a 1970 interviewer about Husbands. Before his 1989 death from liver disease, Cassavetes was generally a hard sell to critics and audiences. Ray Carney of Boston University, the leading scholar on Cassavetes's life and work, has collated scathing notices from high-powered reviewers. Parts of Faces (1968) were "so dumb, so crudely conceived, and so badly performed," wrote The New Yorker pundit Pauline Kael, while John Simon deemed Woman a "muddle-headed, pretentious, and interminable" work. Such attacks came frequently. But there were exceptions, and current critics -- including smart ones like Kent Jones and Phillip Lopate in the Criterion booklet -- are misleading when they suggest the reviews were almost always bad. I wrote rapturously on Woman, about a mentally unstable homemaker, and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), about a nightclub owner pressured into committing a crime, and no less a Cassavetes skeptic than Kael deemed Shadows a "very fine experimental ... film" and granted that Faces had "the unified style of an agonizing honesty." Woman even caught on with audiences, becoming the only Cassavetes picture one might reasonably call a hit. Still, it's unquestionable that Cassavetes was overlooked and undervalued as a writer and director -- although not as an actor, with memorable movies like Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Dirty Dozen (1967) among his credits. Born in 1929 to Greek-American parents, Cassavetes grew up in the New York City area, attended Mohawk Valley Community College and Colgate University and then the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He played small stage and television roles until 1954, when he started to land more-substantial parts and married actress Gena Rowlands, who remained his loyal spouse and favorite star to the end of his life. Increasingly successful, Cassavetes was also increasingly displeased with what he saw as the simplistic, formulaic content of the stories he was appearing in. His first filmmaking effort was sparked by a 1957 radio appearance promoting Martin Ritt's film Edge of the City. He asked listeners to contribute money for a movie of his own that didn't yet have a story, a cast, or even a subject. The result was Shadows (1959), about African-American siblings caught up in racial tensions. It is identified as "an improvisation" in the credits even though Cassavetes disliked the first, spontaneously acted version so much that he remade most of it from a script based on the improvisation. After straining against TV's artistic limitations as the title character of the short-lived Johnny Staccato series, about a jazz-playing detective, Cassavetes made two unhappy efforts at directing Hollywood movies in the early 1960s -- the jazzy Too Late Blues (1961), cramped by a rushed shooting schedule and less music than Cassavetes wanted, and A Child Is Waiting (1963), where he wanted to portray mentally retarded children as creative and happy, the opposite of producer Stanley Kramer's agenda. He decided the only route to artistic independence lay in working completely outside the studio system. That led to Faces, a drama about a marriage on the rocks, and Cassavetes's emergence as the most important founder of the modern independent-film movement. His passion and precision paid great artistic dividends, but often made him a hard director to work with, as even his strongest supporters have acknowledged. Citing the filmmaker's wife and other sources, Carney has reported Cassavetes's frequent indulgence in childish, self-defeating words and behavior. A friend said that Cassavetes, when directing, would live on scotch and cigarettes. He'd roll around the floor giggling, or mock-wrestle with a colleague on a TV talk show. Actors said the half-crazy antics sometimes loosened them up, but other times simply struck them as weird and self-involved. Carney sees the conduct as a defense against the potential humiliation Cassavetes dreaded in all interactions he couldn't control or dominate. Along with the nine films he acknowledged as truly his own, from Shadows to Love Streams (1984), the inauguration of the indie scene is Cassavetes's most important legacy. Many young filmmakers have followed his lead. Steven Soderbergh stresses deeply personal screenwriting and the primacy of acting as a vehicle for cinematic creativity, especially in Full Frontal (2002) and the idiosyncratic Schizopolis (1996). Sean Penn's films as writer and director -- particularly The Indian Runner (1991), about two brothers with incompatible outlooks on life, and The Crossing Guard (1995), about a businessman consumed by grief and vengefulness -- are Cassavetes-like to their bones. Consider David Morse's deeply felt performance in the former and Jack Nicholson's in the latter, and the pictures' reliance on words and gestures rooted more in fleeting emotion than in dry narrative logic. Cassavetes's most noteworthy artistic heir is Martin Scorsese, who briefly worked for him as a sound editor on Minnie and Moskowitz (1971) and enjoys quoting his words of wisdom, some of which are included in "My Mentor," an article in the Criterion booklet. Scorsese showed a rough cut of his early feature Boxcar Bertha (1972) to Cassavetes and listened breathlessly as the master unexpectedly said, "Marty, you've just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit." Then he added, "It's a good movie, but don't get hooked into that [commercial] stuff -- just try to do something personal." Scorsese took the advice seriously, as many of his subsequent films have shown with their individualistic themes and offbeat approaches to mood, atmosphere, and performance. Ironically, one subsequent filmmaker who has not appeared to learn from Cassavetes's style is Nick Cassavetes, his son. Even such movies as Unhook the Stars (1996) and The Notebook (2004), which star the prodigiously gifted Rowlands (his mother), and She's So Lovely (1997), made from a screenplay by his father, have a cautious, stilted quality that flies in the face of everything John Cassavetes stood for as an artist. The younger Cassavetes said he tweaked the She's So Lovely screenplay by taking out the parts he didn't understand -- which are, I suspect, exactly the elements that might have made the movie sing if John Cassavetes had directed in his own intuitive, free-flowing manner. I don't buy Criterion's promotional claim that Cassavetes can now be called "an audience's director," since the challenges he poses for his viewers -- mercurial shifts of feeling, out-of-the-blue plot twists, characters hard to understand because they don't understand themselves -- are leagues away from the neatly tied, emotionally safe packages Hollywood has trained us to expect. Watching his movies requires the same degrees of attention, empathy, and compassion that Cassavetes put into them. Criterion's boxed set allows audiences to take on those challenges more easily than ever before. Providing the original 135-minute version of Bookie is a major service in itself, and pairing it with the later 108-minute cut -- which Cassavetes also regarded as authentically his own -- is downright inspired. Equally exciting are definitive DVD transfers of Shadows, Faces, Woman, and Opening Night (1977), not to mention rarities like an alternative opening for Faces, silent clips of the Shadows improv group, a 2000 documentary on his work, and plenty more. My only quarrel with the set is its accompanying booklet, whose commentators take a repetitive "here's the really important thing" approach in which worthwhile interpretation often gives way to self-congratulatory connoisseurship. Kent Jones is on the right track when he admonishes some Cassavetes sympathizers for reducing his films to a simple "actor's cinema" aesthetic; but it's a flat-out fact that Cassavetes counted performance as a prime conveyor -- probably the prime conveyor -- of emotional truths on film. Calling that "hogwash" is, well, hogwash. In one of our many conversations, I asked Cassavetes if he wielded a strong hand on the set -- if he directed his movies a lot. "I can't say I don't do it," he answered, "but I never do it well. ... Actors don't need direction, they need attention. I'll step in as a director -- I'm laden with an ego, like everyone else -- but whenever I have to open my mouth, I know I'm probably wrong. ... I'm a sucker for actors. ... I like them." What he liked them for most were the moods and emotions they were willing to reveal and explore. "It's one of the surest bets in town that people have feelings," he told me. "If you don't believe that, you haven't experienced anything in life." Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg once dubbed his friend and colleague Jack Kerouac "the great rememberer," referring to Kerouac's knack for keeping a mental hold on every event in which he saw significance, however small or ephemeral. I'd call Cassavetes, who had much in common with the Beat sensibility, "the great experiencer." He fought like crazy to capture the experiences that grabbed him -- those he'd had, those he'd witnessed, those he'd dreamed up in his raging imagination -- and the lukewarm receptions he received were among the hardest of those experiences to swallow. But those notwithstanding, he never stopped fighting, feeling, and filming until failing health forced him to. In a 1980 interview, I suggested that Opening Night, a drama about three generations of theater people, may have failed to find distribution three years earlier because it was ahead of its time, and perhaps he should put it on the market again. "Those fucking distributors," he said with a grim smile. "They had their chance. If any museum wants a copy of that film, I'll give it to 'em, for free. Any university that wants a copy, I'll give it to 'em, for free. But those distributors can offer me anything they want, and 'fuck 'em' is what I say. They had their chance, and it's too goddamn late." It took almost a decade for him to change his mind, but he allowed the New York Film Festival to show Opening Night at Lincoln Center in 1988, after which it made its way to theaters at last. I'm a little surprised he allowed that to happen even at the tail end of his life. But Cassavetes knew what he wanted -- and on celluloid, at least, he usually got it. David Sterritt, film critic of The Christian Science Monitor, is a film professor on the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University and at Columbia University, and the author, most recently, of Screening the Beats: Media Culture and the Beat Sensibility (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004). From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 14 15:13:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 10:13:47 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Dowd: Men Just Want Mommy Message-ID: Men Just Want Mommy Liberties column by Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, 5.1.13 WASHINGTON A few years ago at a White House Correspondents' dinner, I met a very beautiful actress. Within moments, she blurted out: "I can't believe I'm 46 and not married. Men only want to marry their personal assistants or P.R. women." I'd been noticing a trend along these lines, as famous and powerful men took up with the young women whose job it was to tend to them and care for them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers. Women in staff support are the new sirens because, as a guy I know put it, they look upon the men they work for as "the moon, the sun and the stars." It's all about orbiting, serving and salaaming their Sun Gods. In all those great Tracy/Hepburn movies more than a half-century ago, it was the snap and crackle of a romance between equals that was so exciting. Moviemakers these days seem far more interested in the soothing aura of romances between unequals. In James Brooks's "Spanglish," Adam Sandler, as a Los Angeles chef, falls for his hot Mexican maid. The maid, who cleans up after Mr. Sandler without being able to speak English, is presented as the ideal woman. The wife, played by T?a Leoni, is repellent: a jangly, yakking, overachieving, overexercised, unfaithful, shallow she-monster who has just lost her job with a commercial design firm. Picture Faye Dunaway in "Network" if she'd had to stay home, or Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" without the charm. The same attraction of unequals animated Richard Curtis's "Love Actually," a 2003 holiday hit. The witty and sophisticated British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, falls for the chubby girl who wheels the tea and scones into his office. A businessman married to the substantial Emma Thompson falls for his sultry secretary. A writer falls for his maid, who speaks only Portuguese. (I wonder if the trend in making maids who don't speak English heroines is related to the trend of guys who like to watch Kelly Ripa in the morning with the sound turned off?) Art is imitating life, turning women who seek equality into selfish narcissists and objects of rejection, rather than affection. As John Schwartz of The New York Times wrote recently, "Men would rather marry their secretaries than their bosses, and evolution may be to blame." A new study by psychology researchers at the University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggests that men going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors. As Dr. Stephanie Brown, the lead author of the study, summed it up for reporters: "Powerful women are at a disadvantage in the marriage market because men may prefer to marry less-accomplished women." Men think that women with important jobs are more likely to cheat on them. "The hypothesis," Dr. Brown said, "is that there are evolutionary pressures on males to take steps to minimize the risk of raising offspring that are not their own." Women, by contrast, did not show a marked difference in their attraction to men who might work above or below them. And men did not show a preference when it came to one-night stands. A second study, which was by researchers at four British universities and reported last week, suggested that smart men with demanding jobs would rather have old-fashioned wives, like their mums, than equals. The study found that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to get married, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise. So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? The more women achieve, the less desirable they are? Women want to be in a relationship with guys they can seriously talk to - unfortunately, a lot of those guys want to be in relationships with women they don't have to talk to. I asked the actress and writer Carrie Fisher, on the East Coast to promote her novel "The Best Awful," who confirmed that women who challenge men are in trouble. "I haven't dated in 12 million years," she said drily. "I gave up on dating powerful men because they wanted to date women in the service professions. So I decided to date guys in the service professions. But then I found out that kings want to be treated like kings, and consorts want to be treated like kings, too." E-mail: liberties at nytimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/13/opinion/13dowd.html From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Jan 14 15:15:26 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 07:15:26 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] A core liberal belief Message-ID: <01C4FA08.D296FF50.shovland@mindspring.com> I would say that one core value for liberals is the belief that cooperation is just as important as competition. This notion arises from the limbic brain, even as the notion of competition arises from the reptilian brain. For liberals, family values extend beyond the boundaries of the biological family. In practical terms, this results in all of those programs that form the social safety net. The effort to abolish all of these programs is regressive, since it goes against the empathic tendencies of the newer parts of the brain. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 14 15:16:39 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 10:16:39 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Modern World: Garcia Marquez - Nobel Prize Message-ID: Garcia Marquez - Nobel Prize http://themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_nobel.html Nobel Prize The Solitude of Latin America Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez Nobel Prize Lecture, 8 December 1982 (A somewhat flawed Spanish version exists [26]here.) Antonio Pigafetta, a Florentine navigator who went with Magellan on the first voyage around the world, wrote, upon his passage through our southern lands of America, a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy. In it he recorded that he had seen hogs with navels on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like spoons. He wrote of having seen a misbegotten creature with the head and ears of a mule, a camel's body, the legs of a deer and the whinny of a horse. He described how the first native encountered in Patagonia was confronted with a mirror, whereupon that impassioned giant lost his senses to the terror of his own image. [cleardot.GIF] This short and fascinating book, which even then contained the seeds of our present-day novels, is by no means the most staggering account of our reality in that age. The Chronicles of the Indies left us countless others. Eldorado, our so avidly sought and illusory land, appeared on numerous maps for many a long year, shifting its place and form to suit the fantasy of cartographers. In his search for the fountain of eternal youth, the mythical Alvar N??ez Cabeza de Vaca explored the north of Mexico for eight years, in a deluded expedition whose members devoured each other and only five of whom returned, of the six hundred who had undertaken it. One of the many unfathomed mysteries of that age is that of the eleven thousand mules, each loaded with one hundred pounds of gold, that left Cuzco one day to pay the ransom of Atahualpa and never reached their destination. Subsequently, in colonial times, hens were sold in Cartagena de Indias, that had been raised on alluvial land and whose gizzards contained tiny lumps of gold. One founder's lust for gold beset us until recently. As late as the last century, a German mission appointed to study the construction of an interoceanic railroad across the Isthmus of Panama concluded that the project was feasible on one condition: that the rails not be made of iron, which was scarce in the region, but of gold. [cleardot.GIF] Our independence from Spanish domination did not put us beyond the reach of madness. General Antonio L?pez de Santana, three times dictator of Mexico, held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War. General Gabriel Garc?a Moreno ruled Ecuador for sixteen years as an absolute monarch; at his wake, the corpse was seated on the presidential chair, decked out in full-dress uniform and a protective layer of medals. General Maximiliano Hern?ndez Mart?nez, the theosophical despot of El Salvador who had thirty thousand peasants slaughtered in a savage massacre, invented a pendulum to detect poison in his food, and had streetlamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarlet fever. The statue to General Francisco Moraz?n erected in the main square of Tegucigalpa is actually one of Marshal Ney, purchased at a Paris warehouse of second-hand sculptures. [cleardot.GIF] Eleven years ago, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, one of the outstanding poets of our time, enlightened this audience with his word. Since then, the Europeans of good will -- and sometimes those of bad, as well -- have been struck, with ever greater force, by the unearthly tidings of Latin America, that boundless realm of haunted men and historic women, whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend. We have not had a moment's rest. A promethean president, entrenched in his burning palace, died fighting an entire army, alone; and two suspicious airplane accidents, yet to be explained, cut short the life of another great-hearted president and that of a democratic soldier who had revived the dignity of his people. There have been five wars and seventeen military coups; there emerged a diabolic dictator who is carrying out, in God's name, the first Latin American ethnocide of our time. In the meantime, twenty million Latin American children died before the age of one -- more than have been born in Europe since 1970. Those missing because of repression number nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, which is as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala. Numerous women arrested while pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the whereabouts and identity of their children who were furtively adopted or sent to an orphanage by order of the military authorities. Because they tried to change this state of things, nearly two hundred thousand men and women have died throughout the continent, and over one hundred thousand have lost their lives in three small and ill-fated countries of Central America: Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. If this had happened in the United States, the corresponding figure would be that of one million six hundred thousand violent deaths in four years. [cleardot.GIF] One million people have fled Chile, a country with a tradition of hospitality -- that is, ten per cent of its population. Uruguay, a tiny nation of two and a half million inhabitants which considered itself the continent's most civilized country, has lost to exile one out of every five citizens. Since 1979, the civil war in El Salvador has produced almost one refugee every twenty minutes. The country that could be formed of all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway. [cleardot.GIF] I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude. [cleardot.GIF] And if these difficulties, whose essence we share, hinder us, it is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should have found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. Venerable Europe would perhaps be more perceptive if it tried to see us in its own past. If only it recalled that London took three hundred years to build its first city wall, and three hundred years more to acquire a bishop; that Rome labored in a gloom of uncertainty for twenty centuries, until an Etruscan King anchored it in history; and that the peaceful Swiss of today, who feast us with their mild cheeses and apathetic watches, bloodied Europe as soldiers of fortune, as late as the Sixteenth Century. Even at the height of the Renaissance, twelve thousand lansquenets in the pay of the imperial armies sacked and devastated Rome and put eight thousand of its inhabitants to the sword. [cleardot.GIF] I do not mean to embody the illusions of Tonio Kr?ger, whose dreams of uniting a chaste north to a passionate south were exalted here, fifty-three years ago, by Thomas Mann. But I do believe that those clear-sighted Europeans who struggle, here as well, for a more just and humane homeland, could help us far better if they reconsidered their way of seeing us. Solidarity with our dreams will not make us feel less alone, as long as it is not translated into concrete acts of legitimate support for all the peoples that assume the illusion of having a life of their own in the distribution of the world. [cleardot.GIF] Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration. However, the navigational advances that have narrowed such distances between our Americas and Europe seem, conversely, to have accentuated our cultural remoteness. Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change? Why think that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions? No: the immeasurable violence and pain of our history are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home. But many European leaders and thinkers have thought so, with the childishness of old-timers who have forgotten the fruitful excess of their youth as if it were impossible to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, my friends, is the very scale of our solitude. [cleardot.GIF] In spite of this, to oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death. An advantage that grows and quickens: every year, there are seventy-four million more births than deaths, a sufficient number of new lives to multiply, each year, the population of New York sevenfold. Most of these births occur in the countries of least resources -- including, of course, those of Latin America. Conversely, the most prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune. [cleardot.GIF] On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man." I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possiblity. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth. Official Press Release Swedish Academy of Letters The Permanent Secretary Press Release: The Nobel Prize for Literature 1982 Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez [cleardot.GIF] With this year's Nobel Prize in Literature to the Colombian writer, Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez, the Swedish Academy cannot be said to bring forward an unknown writer. [cleardot.GIF] Garc?a M?rquez achieved unusual international success as a writer with his novel in 1967 (One Hundred Years of Solitude). The novel has been translated into a large number of languages and has sold millions of copies. It is still being reprinted and read with undiminished interest by new readers. Such a success with a single book could be fatal for a writer with less resources than those possessed by Garc?a M?rquez. He has, however, gradually confirmed his position as a rare storyteller, richly endowed with a material from imagination and experience which seems inexhaustible. In breadth and epic richness, for instance, the novel, El onto?o del patriarca, 1975, (The Autumn of the Patriarch) compares favourably with the first-mentioned work. Short novels such as El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, 1961 (No One Writes to the Colonel ), La mala hora, 1962 (In Evil Hour ), or last year's Cr?nica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold), complement the picture of a writer who combines the copious, almost overwhelming narrative talent with the mastery of the conscious, disciplined and widely read artist of language. A large number of short stories, published in several collections or in magazines, give further proof of the great versatility of Garc?a M?rquez's narrative gift. His international successes have continued. Each new work of his is received by expectant critics and readers as an event of world importance, translated into many languages and published as quickly as possible in large editions. [cleardot.GIF] Nor can it be said that any unknown literary continent or province is brought to light with the prize to Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez. For a long time, Latin American literature has shown a vigour as in few other literary spheres, having won acclaim in the cultural life of today. Many impulses and traditions cross each other. Folk culture, including oral storytelling, reminiscences from old Indian culture, currents from Spanish baroque in different epochs, influences from European surrealism and other modernism are blended into a spiced and life-giving brew from which Garc?a M?rquez and other Spanish-American writers derive material and inspiration. The violent conflicts of a political nature -- social and economic -- raise the temperature of the intellectual climate. Like most of the other important writers in the Latin American world, Garc?a M?rquez is strongly committed, politically, on the side of the poor and the weak against domestic oppression and foreign economic exploitation. Apart from his fictional production, he has been very active as a journalist, his writings being many-sided, inventive, often, provocative, and by no means limited to political subjects. [cleardot.GIF] The great novels remind one of William Faulkner. Garc?a M?rquez has created a world of his own around the imaginary town of Macondo. Since the end of the 1940s his novels and short stories have led us into this peculiar place where the miraculous and the real converge -- the extravagant flight of his own fantasy, traditional folk tales and facts, literary allusions, tangible, at times, obtrusively graphic, descriptions approaching the matter-of-factness of reportage. As with Faulkner, or why not Balzac, the same chief characters and minor persons crop up in different stories, brought forward into the light in various ways -- sometimes in dramatically revealing situations, sometimes in comic and grotesque complications of a kind that only the wildest imagination or shameless reality itself can achieve. Manias and passions harass them. Absurdities of war let courage change shape with craziness, infamy with chivalry, cunning with madness. Death is perhaps the most important director behind the scenes in Garc?a M?rquez's invented and discovered world. Often his stories revolve around a dead person -- someone who has died, is dying or will die. A tragic sense of life characterizes Garc?a M?rquez's books -- a sense of the incorruptible superiority of fate and the inhuman, inexorable ravages of history. But this awareness of death and tragic sense of life is broken by the narrative's apparently unlimited, ingenious vitality which, in its turn, is a representative of the at once frightening and edifying vital force of reality and life itself. The comedy and grotesqueness in Garc?a M?rquez can be cruel, but can also glide over into a conciliating humour. [cleardot.GIF] With his stories, Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez has created a world of his own which is a microcosmos. In its tumultuous, bewildering, yet, graphically convincing authenticity, it reflects a continent and its human riches and poverty. [cleardot.GIF] Perhaps more than that: a cosmos in which the human heart and the combined forces of history, time and again, burst the bounds of chaos -- killing and procreation. [cleardot.GIF] A Special Thank You: [cleardot.GIF] To the Nobel Foundation, for providing the text of the speech and the press release. Both are copyrighted by the Nobel Foundation, 1997 & 1999. --Allen B. Ruch 2 June 2003 _________________________________________________________________ [27]His fervour for the written word was an interweaving of solemn respect and gossipy irreverence -- Send email to the Great Quail -- comments, suggestions, corrections, criticisms, submissions . . . all are welcome! [28]Spiral-Bound -- Click here for information about Spiral-Bound, The Modern Word's monthly electronic newsletter. From this page you can read about Spiral-Bound, browse archived past editions, sign up for the Spiral-Bound e-group, and subscribe to the newsletter itself. _________________________________________________________________ References 26. http://www.lehigh.edu/~jcf2/gabo.html 27. mailto:quail at libyrinth.com 28. http://themodernword.com/spiral-bound.html From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 14 15:18:32 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 10:18:32 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] PLoS Biology: Nicotine as Therapy Message-ID: PLoS Biology: Nicotine as Therapy http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020404 Volume 2 | Issue 11 | November 2004 Tabitha M. Powledge^ Abbreviations: ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; nAChR, nicotinic acetylcholine receptor Tabitha M. Powledge is a freelance science writer who specializes in neuroscience, genomics, and science policy. E-mail: [12]tam at nasw.org Published November 16, 2004 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020404 Citation: Powledge TM (2004) Nicotine as Therapy. PLoS Biol 2(11): e404. There's a cheap, common, and mostly safe drug, in daily use for centuries by hundreds of millions of people, that only lately has been investigated for its therapeutic potential for a long list of common ills. The list includes Alzheimer disease, Parkinson disease, depression and anxiety, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and even pain and obesity. Why has interest in this potential cure-all been slow to develop? One reason: in its current forms the drug offers pharmaceutical companies no possibility of substantial profit. Another, perhaps more important: the drug is reviled as the world's most addictive. The drug, of course, is nicotine. Nicotine is an alkaloid in the tobacco plant Nicotiana tabacum, which was smoked or chewed in the Americas for thousands of years before European invaders also succumbed to its pleasures and shipped it back to the Old World. Nicotine has always been regarded as medicinal and enjoyable at its usual low doses. Native Americans chewed tobacco to treat intestinal symptoms, and in 1560, Jean Nicot de Villemain sent tobacco seeds to the French court, claiming tobacco had medicinal properties and describing it as a panacea for many ailments. Higher doses are toxic, even lethal--which is why nicotine is used around the world as an insecticide. Yet few of the horrendous health effects of smoking are traceable to nicotine itself--cigarettes contain nearly 4,000 other compounds that play a role. Until recently, nicotine research has been driven primarily by nicotine's unparalleled power to keep people smoking, rather than its potential therapeutic uses. Nicotine locks on to one group of receptors that are normally targeted by the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) are ion channels threaded through cell membranes. When activated, either by acetylcholine or by nicotine, they allow selected ions to flow across the cell membrane. In vertebrates nAChRs are all over the autonomic and central nervous sytems and the neuromuscular junction. A nAChR is composed of five polypeptide subunits ([13]Figure 1), but there are many nAChR subtypes made of different subunit combinations, a diversity that helps explain why nicotine can have so many different physiological and cognitive effects. [14]Figure 1. Schematic Illustration of an Acetylcholine Receptor (Illustration: Giovanni Maki) It is now conventional wisdom that acetylcholine and nicotine act at these receptors to alter electrochemical properties at a variety of synapses, which can in turn affect the release of several other neurotransmitters. This wisdom exists thanks in part to work by Lorna Role and her colleagues at Columbia University in New York City. "In 1995, we turned people's attention to how nicotine works as a modulator, tuning synapses and increasing the gain on transmitter release," Role recalls. Although all nAChRs are activated by nicotine, other drugs could be found or designed that affect only a subset of these receptor types. "If you can dissect out the important players with respect to which nicotine receptors are tuning [a] particular set of synapses, then that provides another way to potentially target the therapeutics." Nicotine and the Brain People with depressive-spectrum disorders, schizophrenia, and adult ADHD tend to smoke heavily, which suggested to researchers that nicotine may soothe their symptoms. Common to all these disorders is a failure of attention, an inability to concentrate on particular stimuli and screen out the rest. Nicotine helps. Researchers at the National Institute on Drug Abuse have shown via functional magnetic resonance imaging that nicotine activates specific brain areas during tasks that demand attention ([15]Box 1). This may be because of its effects, shared with many other addictive drugs, on the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. "Schizophrenia is a disorder largely of the dopamine system," says John Dani of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Dopamine signals in the brain occur in two modes--a kind of background trickle, punctuated by brief bursts. "It's thought that schizophrenics have a hard time separating that background information from important bursts. We've shown that nicotine helps to normalize that signaling by depressing the background but letting the bursts through well," he says. "I'll be surprised if there's not a co-therapy [to help schizophrenics] that takes advantage of nicotine systems in less than a decade." Nicotine may be the link between two genes that appear to figure in schizophrenia. Sherry Leonard and Robert Freedman of the University of Colorado in Denver, Colorado, have shown that expression of the gene for the alpha 7 neuronal nicotinic receptor is reduced in schizophrenics, and have argued that alpha 7 abnormalities lead to attention problems. Researchers in Iceland and elsewhere have shown that a different gene, for the growth factor neuregulin, also appears to figure in the disease. Neuregulin, Role and her colleagues have shown, governs the expression of nAChRs in neurons and helps to stabilize the synapses where they are found. The researchers are currently studying interactions between neuregulin and alpha 7, which Role thinks will prove important. Smokers also have lower rates of neurodegenerative disorders, and nicotine improves cognitive and motor functioning in people with Alzheimer disease and Parkinson disease. The prevailing hypothesis is that nicotine increases release of neurotransmitters depleted in those diseases. Dani and his colleagues have recently shown that acetylcholinesterase inhibitors--which block the degradation of acetylcholine and hence prolong its action--used to treat Alzheimer disease also stimulate dopamine release. They suspect that malfunctioning of the dopamine system may be affecting noncognitive aspects of dementia such as depressed mood, and that this might be alleviated by nicotine. Paul Newhouse and his colleagues at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont, are studying nicotine drugs as potential therapeutic agents for cognitive dysfunction. Newhouse, a long-time nicotine researcher, is heading the first study ever to examine the efficacy and safety of nicotine patches for treating mild cognitive impairment, thought to be a precursor of Alzheimer disease. The researchers hope to see a positive effect on attention and learning. Newhouse also heads two studies of nicotinic stimulation in ADHD, using the patch, nicotine blockers, and some novel drugs that activate nicotine receptors. Nicotine and Pain Nicotine's salutary effects in patients with neurodegenerative and mental disorders have been studied a lot and are fairly well known. Two much newer topics of academic research are nicotine's potential for pain relief and for treating obesity.Nicotine itself has provided modest pain relief in animal studies. Although the analgesic effect of drugs that mimic acetylcholine were originally attributed to a different class of receptors, it is now clear that nAChRs play an important role in the control of pain. For instance, epibatidine, a drug that is extracted from the skin of an Ecuadorian frog and that acts at nAChRs, has been shown to be 200 times more potent than morphine at blocking pain in animals. Current animal research is aimed at discovering just where, how, and which classes of nAChRs work against pain, with the aim of developing more selective drugs. Meanwhile, nicotine is also being investigated as an analgesic in humans. For example, Pamela Flood, an anesthesiologist at Columbia, is investigating nicotine's future as a postoperative analgesic. She recently completed a pilot study of 20 women undergoing gynecological surgery. All the women had access to unlimited morphine and also got either a single 3-mg dose of nicotine nasal spray or a placebo. The placebo group had peak pain scores of eight out of a possible ten in the first hour after surgery. Women who got nicotine averaged a pain score of five. Despite the small sample size, Flood says, the results were highly significant. "As far as I know this is the first clinical study to use nicotine for analgesia, and it was much more successful than I ever would have imagined." "The nice thing about nicotine and drugs like nicotine is that they have opposite side effects to anesthetics. Instead of being respiratory depressants, they are respiratory stimulants. Instead of being sedating, they increase alertness. So theoretically this class of drugs is actually the perfect thing to add to an opioid regimen. The fact that they're synergistic was a fortuitous thing that we had never looked at, and neither had anybody else." Nicotine and Weight Gain Nicotine may be the most effective drug around for weight control. As ex-smokers know, to their rue, one of the worst things about quitting cigarettes is putting on pounds--as much as 10% of body weight. "Something about being addicted to nicotine and then going off it causes massive increase in weight," Role points out. Young-Hwan Jo in Role's lab is looking at a particular brain circuit involved in motivational behavior, especially feeding behavior. It is lodged primarily in the lateral hypothalamus but has projections all over the cortex, especially the nucleus accumbens, which is the center of reinforcement. "This is where information that has come in to the thalamus and the hypothalamus is relayed to cortical areas with some sense of salience or remembrance. It presumably is involved in changing perception and motivation for eating. It's not, `I have to eat this,' it's, `I want to eat this,'" says Role. Jo has been comparing the synaptic effects of nicotine, which reduces appetite, to those of cannabinoids, which stimulate it. "Control of these projection neurons seems to be oppositely regulated by these two," Role notes. "It doesn't necessarily mean we've found the root of the munchies, but it at least points to pathways that these things have in common." Jo is also examining how nicotine and cannabinoids modulate these pathways in genetically obese mice, and also their interactions with leptins. Role says tuning these pathways up or down might be a reasonable aim. "If that could be done in a selective fashion, maybe that could be introduced in appetite control. Certainly I see...antagonism of some of these pathways that nicotine activates or the complementary activation of the cannabinoid pathways as very important targets for therapeutics with respect to the anorexia that's associated with chemotherapy." Ming Li and his colleagues at the University of Texas in San Antonio, Texas, are studying nicotine's effects on weight and on expression of genes that nicotine upregulates orexin and neuropeptide Y and, more recently, that it also regulates leptin signaling. All three molecules regulate feeding behavior controlled by the hypothalamus. In the weight study, nicotine-treated rats not only lost weight, they lost about 20% of their body fat compared to saline-treated controls. The researchers suggest that, among its other effects, nicotine alters fat storage. The University of Texas researchers have scoured the literature for genes related to nicotine, and they are developing microarrays to study the expression of these genes ([16]Figure 3). While nicotine seems to affect all the molecules known to influence weight, Li says it's clear the story is even more complex. "That's the reason we keep looking at different molecules, to find key targets involved in this regulation." The ultimate hope is to develop new drug applications. [17]Figure 3. Microarray Showing Patterns of Gene Expression Influenced by Nicotine (Image: Ming Li, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio) Dani predicts that weight control is likely to be one of the earliest nicotine-based therapies. "There's a very good chance that the first drug is unlikely to be...nicotine itself, but will take advantage of nicotinic receptors in the therapy," he says. "I know there are drugs now being tested by drug companies just for that purpose." Nicotine's Future Developing new drugs that selectively target specific subtypes of nicotine receptors is an expensive, albeit potentially lucrative, proposition. And therein lies a question. Will nicotine-based therapy consist mostly of costly new drugs from the pharmaceutical industry? Or can less expensive nicotine products like the patch, chewing gum, and nasal spray--which are generally intended for smoking cessation but widely available, usually without prescription--find their way into the world's medicine cabinets? "It's a little early to call whether nicotine will be used itself as a therapeutic agent or whether these more specific drugs that are being produced or maybe even used in combination with other drugs may be the most important way to go," says Dani. But he doesn't see the medicinal use of plain nicotine as very likely. Dani points out that the body's own agent, acetylcholine, acts over milliseconds to activate nicotinic receptors, whereas nicotine itself stimulates these receptors for hours. That lengthy action means that, although nicotine activates the receptors, it then often turns particular receptor subtypes off again, a process called desensitization. "It's hard to predict inside of a body what you're getting. Am I getting an activation or am I turning the receptors off?" Yet much of the work to date showing nicotine's effectiveness on a huge range of disorders has involved products available at any drugstore and intended to help people quit smoking. Newhouse is using patches for mild cognitive impairment. Flood has demonstrated pain relief with nasal spray and will use patches in her next study. And Role feels that gum hasn't been adequately explored for its therapeutic potential. Nicotine gum, she notes, is a better imitator of smoking than the patch because it delivers brief hits rather than a steady supply. She's also uncertain whether natural nicotine has been studied enough. But Role also points out that nicotine has its serious problems--addictive potential, cardiovascular damage, and (especially when delivered through the mucosa) cancer. Dani says, "People are probably going to have to find creative ways to understand which subtypes of nicotinic receptors they're turning on and which ones they're desensitizing. Maybe drug delivery methods will matter. Maybe subtype specificity will matter. It's less than a decade that we've known how important nicotinic receptors are. Now we have to move forward from there." "We've made an enormous amount of progress on understanding the biology of these receptor systems and how to target them. What has been trickier has been to develop an appropriate pharmacology that allows one to selectively target agents for particular therapeutic purposes with an adequate safety index," Newhouse says. "But some of the drugs that are coming on in human trials now are very promising. So I'm cautiously optimistic that we're on the road to developing some useful nicotinic therapies." Further Reading Flood P, Sonner JM, Gong D, Coates KM (2002) Isoflurane hyperalgesia is modulated by nicotinic inhibition. Anesthesiology 97: 192-198. [18]Find this article online Freedman R, Adams CE, Adler LE, Bickford PC, Gault J, et al. (2000) Inhibitory neurophysiological deficit as a phenotype for genetic investigation of schizophrenia. Am J Med Genet 97: 58-64. [19]Find this article online Li MD, Kane JK (2003) Effect of nicotine on the expression of leptin and forebrain leptin receptors in the rat. Brain Res 991: 222-231. [20]Find this article online McGehee DS, Heath MJ, Gelber S, Devay P, Role LW (1995) Nicotine enhancement of fast excitatory synaptic transmission in CNS by presynaptic receptors. Science 269: 1692-1696. [21]Find this article online Newhouse PA, Potter A, Singh A (2004) Effects of nicotinic stimulation on cognitive performance. Curr Opin Pharmacol 4: 36-46. [22]Find this article online Yang X, Kuo Y, Devay P, Yu C, Role L (1998) A cysteine-rich isoform of neuregulin controls the level of expression of neuronal nicotinic receptor channels during synaptogenesis. Neuron 20: 255-270. [23]Find this article online Zhang L, Zhou FM, Dani JA (2004) Cholinergic drugs for Alzheimer's disease enhance in vitro dopamine release. Mol Pharmacol 66: 538-544. [24]Find this article online Box 1. Nicotine's Effect on Attention Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, scientists at the National Institute on Drug Abuse provided the first evidence that nicotine-induced enhancement of parietal cortex activation is associated with improved attention. They compared brain activity during a task demanding sustained attention--rapid visual information processing (RVIP)--with that during an undemanding sensorimotor control task ([25]Figure 2). Group results from 15 smokers (right) illustrate the effects of nicotine and placebo patches in left and right parietal cortex (1 and 2) and left and right occipital cortex (3 and 4). Nicotine significantly increased activation in occipital cortex during both the control and rapid visual information processing tasks, suggesting a general modulation of attention. In contrast, nicotine increased activity in the parietal cortex only during rapid visual information processing, suggesting a specific modulation on task performance. [26]Figure 2. The Brain on Nicotine (Image: Elliot Stein, National Institute on Drug Abuse) View this article by: [27]Figures [28][pdf.gif] [29]Print PDF (897K) [30][pdf.gif] [31]Screen PDF (192K) References 12. mailto:tam at nasw.org 13. http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020404#journal-pbio-0020404-g001 14. http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=slideshow&type=figure&sici=journal-pbio-0020404-g001 15. http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020404#BOX1 16. http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020404#journal-pbio-0020404-g003 17. http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=slideshow&type=figure&sici=journal-pbio-0020404-g003 18. http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-citation-links&doi=0003-3022(2002)097%3C0192:IHIMBN%3E2.0.CO%3B2&id=JOURNAL-PBIO-0020404-FLOOD1&sitename=PLOSONLINE 19. http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-citation-links&doi=0148-7299(2000)097%3C0058:INDAAP%3E2.0.CO%3B2&id=JOURNAL-PBIO-0020404-FREEDMAN1&sitename=PLOSONLINE 20. http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-citation-links&doi=0006-8993(2003)991%3C0222:EONOTE%3E2.0.CO%3B2&id=JOURNAL-PBIO-0020404-LI1&sitename=PLOSONLINE 21. http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-citation-links&doi=0193-4511(1995)269%3C1692:NEOFES%3E2.0.CO%3B2&id=JOURNAL-PBIO-0020404-MCGEHEE1&sitename=PLOSONLINE 22. http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-citation-links&doi=1471-4892(2004)004%3C0036:EONSOC%3E2.0.CO%3B2&id=JOURNAL-PBIO-0020404-NEWHOUSE1&sitename=PLOSONLINE 23. http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-citation-links&doi=0896-6273(1998)020%3C0255:ACIONC%3E2.0.CO%3B2&id=JOURNAL-PBIO-0020404-YANG1&sitename=PLOSONLINE 24. http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-citation-links&doi=0026-895X(2004)066%3C0538:CDFADE%3E2.0.CO%3B2&id=JOURNAL-PBIO-0020404-ZHANG1&sitename=PLOSONLINE 25. http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020404#journal-pbio-0020404-g002 26. http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=slideshow&type=figure&sici=journal-pbio-0020404-g002 27. http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=slideshow&type=figure&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0020404 28. http://www.plosbiology.org/archive/1545-7885/2/11/pdf/10.1371_journal.pbio.0020404-L.pdf 29. http://www.plosbiology.org/archive/1545-7885/2/11/pdf/10.1371_journal.pbio.0020404-L.pdf 30. http://www.plosbiology.org/archive/1545-7885/2/11/pdf/10.1371_journal.pbio.0020404-S.pdf From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Fri Jan 14 15:30:42 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 08:30:42 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: An Evolutionary Mind... In-Reply-To: <01C4FA02.320678A0.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4FA02.320678A0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <41E7E5A2.5050706@solution-consulting.com> Steve, You asked me to reflect on your hate speech. Fair enough. I feel: - sadness: You are a talented person who engages in reckless talk that cheapens dialog. I am obligated to oppose hate speech. Deontological obligation. Never again Jewish gas chambers, never again Cambodian killing fields, never again Saddam's mass executions. Every person is obligated to oppose hate speech from whatever source. Buddha said: Thoughts become speech; speech becomes actions, actions become habit, habit becomes character. Take care therefore for your thoughts. So I speak against hate, and in favor of thoughtful and compassionate dialog. About the perfection angle: Read "Radical Son" by Horowitz, where he discusses that. That notion is also behind the infamous 'politically correct dialog' that feminists and constructivists championed about 20 years ago. It is also behind the attempts to end poverty, as Johnson's great failure, the "War on Poverty." It is also behind Stalin's embrace of Lysenko. The idea is that by changing society we can fundamentally change people. So there is a substantial body of evidence for that as an implicit idea, perhaps not espoused but more a theory-in-action. Steve Hovland wrote: >As a card carrying liberal, I do not think that >people can be perfected if we have the right >kind of society. I have no idea where you >get this formulation. > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2005 9:08 PM >To: Alice Andrews; paleopsych at paleopsych.org >Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: An Evolutionary Mind... > >Alice, >Wonderful! I am glad for you. It is always worthwhile to share something >you clearly worked hard on. I also read the Dembski review in the same >issue, and had fun with that. > > You said, The feminist academic psychologist also asked me if it was >not dangerous to our students to teach that "motherhood is innate and >that the only way to be happy is to be a mother." > You have identified the problem I have with feminists, namely that >they ignore data that contradicts their theory, and they believe that >only ideas that support their theory should be taught. > At another level, you have identified a classic difference between >modern conservatism and modern liberalism. The conservative believes >that people cannot be perfected by society, the liberal believes that, >given the right society, people can be perfected. Every contrary example >is explained away. > And I liked your description of your reaction to the dutch treat >date where the man wanted to kiss you, even though you were raised not >to have just that reaction. Sounds innate! So I think your article was a >thought-provoking one and I hope it is widely read. I will forward it to >the paleo list and encourage people to look it up. > >Lynn > >Alice Andrews wrote: > > > >>Hi Lynn, >> >>remember that piece you read some of....re me and the economist, >>etc. "An Evolutionary Mind,"?...well it's a lot longer (i'm afraid) >>but published! >>http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/index.asp >>Thanks again for your encouraging words...they definitely inspired me >>to continue on writing! >>All best! >>Alice >> >> >> > > << File: ATT00000.html >> << File: ATT00001.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Jan 14 18:42:46 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 10:42:46 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: An Evolutionary Mind... Message-ID: <01C4FA25.C9BA72F0.shovland@mindspring.com> The problem is that when I listen to right wing radio I hear nothing but hate speech all day long. If they will stop, then I will stop returning fire. But we on the left will no longer just stand there and take it. I also think that you are missing the significance of my references to neural net models. I think your view that liberals believe that social structure can perfect humans is an interpretation. I do not agree with that interpretation. I do not think that humans are perfectable, and if others on the left say the same thing, then the generalization is not valid. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Friday, January 14, 2005 7:31 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: An Evolutionary Mind... Steve, You asked me to reflect on your hate speech. Fair enough. I feel: - sadness: You are a talented person who engages in reckless talk that cheapens dialog. I am obligated to oppose hate speech. Deontological obligation. Never again Jewish gas chambers, never again Cambodian killing fields, never again Saddam's mass executions. Every person is obligated to oppose hate speech from whatever source. Buddha said: Thoughts become speech; speech becomes actions, actions become habit, habit becomes character. Take care therefore for your thoughts. So I speak against hate, and in favor of thoughtful and compassionate dialog. About the perfection angle: Read "Radical Son" by Horowitz, where he discusses that. That notion is also behind the infamous 'politically correct dialog' that feminists and constructivists championed about 20 years ago. It is also behind the attempts to end poverty, as Johnson's great failure, the "War on Poverty." It is also behind Stalin's embrace of Lysenko. The idea is that by changing society we can fundamentally change people. So there is a substantial body of evidence for that as an implicit idea, perhaps not espoused but more a theory-in-action. Steve Hovland wrote: >As a card carrying liberal, I do not think that >people can be perfected if we have the right >kind of society. I have no idea where you >get this formulation. > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2005 9:08 PM >To: Alice Andrews; paleopsych at paleopsych.org >Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: An Evolutionary Mind... > >Alice, >Wonderful! I am glad for you. It is always worthwhile to share something >you clearly worked hard on. I also read the Dembski review in the same >issue, and had fun with that. > > You said, The feminist academic psychologist also asked me if it was >not dangerous to our students to teach that "motherhood is innate and >that the only way to be happy is to be a mother." > You have identified the problem I have with feminists, namely that >they ignore data that contradicts their theory, and they believe that >only ideas that support their theory should be taught. > At another level, you have identified a classic difference between >modern conservatism and modern liberalism. The conservative believes >that people cannot be perfected by society, the liberal believes that, >given the right society, people can be perfected. Every contrary example >is explained away. > And I liked your description of your reaction to the dutch treat >date where the man wanted to kiss you, even though you were raised not >to have just that reaction. Sounds innate! So I think your article was a >thought-provoking one and I hope it is widely read. I will forward it to >the paleo list and encourage people to look it up. > >Lynn > >Alice Andrews wrote: > > > >>Hi Lynn, >> >>remember that piece you read some of....re me and the economist, >>etc. "An Evolutionary Mind,"?...well it's a lot longer (i'm afraid) >>but published! >>http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/index.asp >>Thanks again for your encouraging words...they definitely inspired me >>to continue on writing! >>All best! >>Alice >> >> >> > > << File: ATT00000.html >> << File: ATT00001.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > << File: ATT00011.html >> << File: ATT00012.txt >> From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Fri Jan 14 20:38:16 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 12:38:16 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion In-Reply-To: <200501141936.j0EJagM20362@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050114203816.38656.qmail@web13425.mail.yahoo.com> >>Michael, this is a questionable report. I just did a Yahoo News search for the terms: Tom Coburn Oklahoma abortion capital punishment No returns.<< --Try Google (lots of matches). I'd give you a source, but you'd have to tell me which sources you'd trust first, so I don't waste my time only to hear "Well, that's a liberal source, so I don't trust it". I've learned to ask that question first, to avoid the typical response. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? All your favorites on one personal page ? Try My Yahoo! http://my.yahoo.com From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Jan 15 00:56:46 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 16:56:46 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion Message-ID: <01C4FA5A.08F48620.shovland@mindspring.com> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Tom+Coburn+Oklahoma+abortion+capital+punishment Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Friday, January 14, 2005 12:38 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion >>Michael, this is a questionable report. I just did a Yahoo News search for the terms: Tom Coburn Oklahoma abortion capital punishment No returns.<< --Try Google (lots of matches). I'd give you a source, but you'd have to tell me which sources you'd trust first, so I don't waste my time only to hear "Well, that's a liberal source, so I don't trust it". I've learned to ask that question first, to avoid the typical response. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? All your favorites on one personal page - Try My Yahoo! http://my.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Jan 15 01:48:29 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 17:48:29 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] The powerful give up on Iraq Message-ID: <01C4FA61.4247A5E0.shovland@mindspring.com> When someone as well-connected as James Baker says we need to set a schedule for withdrawing troops from Iraq, it means something. I think it means that the most powerful people in this country have been running the numbers on this misadventure and can plainly see that it's going downhill. If we don't get out the $4.5 billion per month cost will go on indefinitely, doing ever more damage to our faltering domestic economy. This is a far cry from the self-financing war that Rumsfeld promised. And there is certainly no way we can ever recover our investment in money and blood. I think we can expect a growing chorus of Republican politicians and corporate media types to call for an end to the madness. They can see that the other parts of their agenda are being damaged by this item. If any corporate CEO blew $150 billion on something that didn't work he'd be marched out of his office with a security guard on each arm. And they would tell him he could sue for his severance package. I doubt that people like Baker really care about the human cost of this, but it has been horrendous. If a deposed George Bush ever set foot in Europe he would be arrested and tried for war crimes. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sat Jan 15 14:25:14 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 07:25:14 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion In-Reply-To: <20050114203816.38656.qmail@web13425.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20050114203816.38656.qmail@web13425.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <41E927CA.8040001@solution-consulting.com> Michael, You are correct. I tried www.news.google.com (I use news.google because I want actual news stories and not internet rumors) and I found one story from Oklahoma (Fox news) where they reported that. I did find a lot of secondary sources with the term "death penalty" but only that one primary source. Ironically he did perform two abortions himself in his medical career: http://www.fox23.com/news/state/story.aspx?content_id=BF956298-934E-4B30-B9D3-DC274E134AF4 I agree with you. His position is thoughtless. Such violent speech must be opposed. I am personally repelled by abortion, but the right way to deal with that is education and persuasion about better alternatives. Violence is never the way. I plan to write to him and ask him to moderate his views - using persuasion and reason again. I was doubtful because his profession - physician - should have taught him to do no harm. But that is certainly no guarantee of reason. Lynn Michael Christopher wrote: >>>Michael, this is a questionable report. I just >>> >>> >did a Yahoo News search for the terms: >Tom Coburn Oklahoma abortion capital punishment >No returns.<< > >--Try Google (lots of matches). I'd give you a source, >but you'd have to tell me which sources you'd trust >first, so I don't waste my time only to hear "Well, >that's a liberal source, so I don't trust it". I've >learned to ask that question first, to avoid the >typical response. > >Michael > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >All your favorites on one personal page - Try My Yahoo! >http://my.yahoo.com >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Jan 15 16:36:23 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 08:36:23 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion Message-ID: <01C4FADD.4C405F20.shovland@mindspring.com> A lot of us on the left don't think abortion is a good idea. Anyone who knows a woman who has had an abortion knows that she pays an emotional price for it. But we also know that women do make that decision, and we don't think it is moral for them to be forced to go to dangerous back-alley abortionists when they do make that decision. The right needs to get in touch with reality about the actual sexual behavior of people from the age of 12 and up, and stop opposing the science-based sex education that would help prevent unwanted pregnancies.. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2005 6:25 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion Michael, You are correct. I tried www.news.google.com (I use news.google because I want actual news stories and not internet rumors) and I found one story from Oklahoma (Fox news) where they reported that. I did find a lot of secondary sources with the term "death penalty" but only that one primary source. Ironically he did perform two abortions himself in his medical career: http://www.fox23.com/news/state/story.aspx?content_id=BF956298-934E-4B30-B9D3-DC274E134AF4 I agree with you. His position is thoughtless. Such violent speech must be opposed. I am personally repelled by abortion, but the right way to deal with that is education and persuasion about better alternatives. Violence is never the way. I plan to write to him and ask him to moderate his views - using persuasion and reason again. I was doubtful because his profession - physician - should have taught him to do no harm. But that is certainly no guarantee of reason. Lynn Michael Christopher wrote: >>>Michael, this is a questionable report. I just >>> >>> >did a Yahoo News search for the terms: >Tom Coburn Oklahoma abortion capital punishment >No returns.<< > >--Try Google (lots of matches). I'd give you a source, >but you'd have to tell me which sources you'd trust >first, so I don't waste my time only to hear "Well, >that's a liberal source, so I don't trust it". I've >learned to ask that question first, to avoid the >typical response. > >Michael > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >All your favorites on one personal page - Try My Yahoo! >http://my.yahoo.com >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > << File: ATT00013.html >> << File: ATT00014.txt >> From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sat Jan 15 17:17:06 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 10:17:06 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion In-Reply-To: <01C4FADD.4C405F20.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4FADD.4C405F20.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <41E95012.2000408@solution-consulting.com> Good c omments, Steve, except for the last paragraph. There is no study I am aware of that suggests that 'science based sex education' will prevent unwanted pregnancies. Can you find one? What evidence I am aware of suggests that values-based education - "indoctrination" - does help substantially. Look at Uganda's experience for an example, when the ABC model did appear to reduce AIDS. Programs without the AB part seem to have a track record of failure (there are informal AB components going on in Brasil & Jamaica if those are your counter examples). If you can find an actual study to the contrary, I am open. We might conclude that both Right and Left have substantial blind spots when it comes to abortion. While the Right may balk at the C component, liberals I am personally acquainted with seem horrified by the AB components. LJ Steve Hovland wrote: >A lot of us on the left don't think abortion is >a good idea. > >Anyone who knows a woman who has had >an abortion knows that she pays an emotional >price for it. > >But we also know that women do make that >decision, and we don't think it is moral for >them to be forced to go to dangerous >back-alley abortionists when they do make >that decision. > >The right needs to get in touch with reality >about the actual sexual behavior of people >from the age of 12 and up, and stop >opposing the science-based sex education >that would help prevent unwanted pregnancies.. > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2005 6:25 AM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion > >Michael, >You are correct. I tried www.news.google.com (I use news.google because >I want actual news stories and not internet rumors) and I found one >story from Oklahoma (Fox news) where they reported that. I did find a >lot of secondary sources with the term "death penalty" but only that one >primary source. Ironically he did perform two abortions himself in his >medical career: >http://www.fox23.com/news/state/story.aspx?content_id=BF956298-934E-4B30-B9D3-DC274E134AF4 > >I agree with you. His position is thoughtless. Such violent speech must >be opposed. I am personally repelled by abortion, but the right way to >deal with that is education and persuasion about better alternatives. >Violence is never the way. I plan to write to him and ask him to >moderate his views - using persuasion and reason again. > >I was doubtful because his profession - physician - should have taught >him to do no harm. But that is certainly no guarantee of reason. >Lynn > >Michael Christopher wrote: > > > >>>>Michael, this is a questionable report. I just >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>did a Yahoo News search for the terms: >>Tom Coburn Oklahoma abortion capital punishment >>No returns.<< >> >>--Try Google (lots of matches). I'd give you a source, >>but you'd have to tell me which sources you'd trust >>first, so I don't waste my time only to hear "Well, >>that's a liberal source, so I don't trust it". I've >>learned to ask that question first, to avoid the >>typical response. >> >>Michael >> >> >> >>__________________________________ >>Do you Yahoo!? >>All your favorites on one personal page - Try My Yahoo! >>http://my.yahoo.com >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> >> >> > << File: ATT00013.html >> << File: ATT00014.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Jan 15 17:36:18 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 09:36:18 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion Message-ID: <01C4FAE5.AAAFA8B0.shovland@mindspring.com> Whether science-based or not, the most visible people in right-wing sex education tend to promote abstinence, which is totally unrealistic. I'm not comfortable with the fact that pre-teens may be commonly engaging in oral sex, but it I have heard from my wife, who teaches pre-high-schoolers, that it does go on and there is a lot of concern because the kids seem to think that there is no disease danger involved. It may be that parents need to be involved when the issue is abortion, but perhaps kids should be able to get contraceptives on their own initiative without their parents being involved. I know this flies in the face of the beliefs of a lot of people, but the fact is, when the kids decide to have sex, they are going to have it with our without contraceptives. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2005 9:17 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion Good c omments, Steve, except for the last paragraph. There is no study I am aware of that suggests that 'science based sex education' will prevent unwanted pregnancies. Can you find one? What evidence I am aware of suggests that values-based education - "indoctrination" - does help substantially. Look at Uganda's experience for an example, when the ABC model did appear to reduce AIDS. Programs without the AB part seem to have a track record of failure (there are informal AB components going on in Brasil & Jamaica if those are your counter examples). If you can find an actual study to the contrary, I am open. We might conclude that both Right and Left have substantial blind spots when it comes to abortion. While the Right may balk at the C component, liberals I am personally acquainted with seem horrified by the AB components. LJ Steve Hovland wrote: >A lot of us on the left don't think abortion is >a good idea. > >Anyone who knows a woman who has had >an abortion knows that she pays an emotional >price for it. > >But we also know that women do make that >decision, and we don't think it is moral for >them to be forced to go to dangerous >back-alley abortionists when they do make >that decision. > >The right needs to get in touch with reality >about the actual sexual behavior of people >from the age of 12 and up, and stop >opposing the science-based sex education >that would help prevent unwanted pregnancies.. > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2005 6:25 AM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion > >Michael, >You are correct. I tried www.news.google.com (I use news.google because >I want actual news stories and not internet rumors) and I found one >story from Oklahoma (Fox news) where they reported that. I did find a >lot of secondary sources with the term "death penalty" but only that one >primary source. Ironically he did perform two abortions himself in his >medical career: >http://www.fox23.com/news/state/story.aspx?content_id=BF956298-934E-4B30-B9D3-DC274E134AF4 > >I agree with you. His position is thoughtless. Such violent speech must >be opposed. I am personally repelled by abortion, but the right way to >deal with that is education and persuasion about better alternatives. >Violence is never the way. I plan to write to him and ask him to >moderate his views - using persuasion and reason again. > >I was doubtful because his profession - physician - should have taught >him to do no harm. But that is certainly no guarantee of reason. >Lynn > >Michael Christopher wrote: > > > >>>>Michael, this is a questionable report. I just >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>did a Yahoo News search for the terms: >>Tom Coburn Oklahoma abortion capital punishment >>No returns.<< >> >>--Try Google (lots of matches). I'd give you a source, >>but you'd have to tell me which sources you'd trust >>first, so I don't waste my time only to hear "Well, >>that's a liberal source, so I don't trust it". I've >>learned to ask that question first, to avoid the >>typical response. >> >>Michael >> >> >> >>__________________________________ >>Do you Yahoo!? >>All your favorites on one personal page - Try My Yahoo! >>http://my.yahoo.com >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> >> >> > << File: ATT00013.html >> << File: ATT00014.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > << File: ATT00019.html >> << File: ATT00020.txt >> From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Jan 15 17:48:56 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 09:48:56 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion Message-ID: <01C4FAE7.6E9D52D0.shovland@mindspring.com> So are you willing to accept free access to condoms for 12 year olds, and access to abortion if the condoms fail? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2005 9:17 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion Good c omments, Steve, except for the last paragraph. There is no study I am aware of that suggests that 'science based sex education' will prevent unwanted pregnancies. Can you find one? What evidence I am aware of suggests that values-based education - "indoctrination" - does help substantially. Look at Uganda's experience for an example, when the ABC model did appear to reduce AIDS. Programs without the AB part seem to have a track record of failure (there are informal AB components going on in Brasil & Jamaica if those are your counter examples). If you can find an actual study to the contrary, I am open. We might conclude that both Right and Left have substantial blind spots when it comes to abortion. While the Right may balk at the C component, liberals I am personally acquainted with seem horrified by the AB components. LJ Steve Hovland wrote: >A lot of us on the left don't think abortion is >a good idea. > >Anyone who knows a woman who has had >an abortion knows that she pays an emotional >price for it. > >But we also know that women do make that >decision, and we don't think it is moral for >them to be forced to go to dangerous >back-alley abortionists when they do make >that decision. > >The right needs to get in touch with reality >about the actual sexual behavior of people >from the age of 12 and up, and stop >opposing the science-based sex education >that would help prevent unwanted pregnancies.. > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2005 6:25 AM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion > >Michael, >You are correct. I tried www.news.google.com (I use news.google because >I want actual news stories and not internet rumors) and I found one >story from Oklahoma (Fox news) where they reported that. I did find a >lot of secondary sources with the term "death penalty" but only that one >primary source. Ironically he did perform two abortions himself in his >medical career: >http://www.fox23.com/news/state/story.aspx?content_id=BF956298-934E-4B30-B9D3-DC274E134AF4 > >I agree with you. His position is thoughtless. Such violent speech must >be opposed. I am personally repelled by abortion, but the right way to >deal with that is education and persuasion about better alternatives. >Violence is never the way. I plan to write to him and ask him to >moderate his views - using persuasion and reason again. > >I was doubtful because his profession - physician - should have taught >him to do no harm. But that is certainly no guarantee of reason. >Lynn > >Michael Christopher wrote: > > > >>>>Michael, this is a questionable report. I just >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>did a Yahoo News search for the terms: >>Tom Coburn Oklahoma abortion capital punishment >>No returns.<< >> >>--Try Google (lots of matches). I'd give you a source, >>but you'd have to tell me which sources you'd trust >>first, so I don't waste my time only to hear "Well, >>that's a liberal source, so I don't trust it". I've >>learned to ask that question first, to avoid the >>typical response. >> >>Michael >> >> >> >>__________________________________ >>Do you Yahoo!? >>All your favorites on one personal page - Try My Yahoo! >>http://my.yahoo.com >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> >> >> > << File: ATT00013.html >> << File: ATT00014.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > << File: ATT00019.html >> << File: ATT00020.txt >> From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Jan 15 17:53:15 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 09:53:15 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion Message-ID: <01C4FAE8.09568BC0.shovland@mindspring.com> Tom Coburn is an example of what I would call the Reptlian mindset, that is, limbic-impaired. The science behind this is the work of John Bowlby and his successors on attachment. Senator Frist is another example. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2005 9:17 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion Good c omments, Steve, except for the last paragraph. There is no study I am aware of that suggests that 'science based sex education' will prevent unwanted pregnancies. Can you find one? What evidence I am aware of suggests that values-based education - "indoctrination" - does help substantially. Look at Uganda's experience for an example, when the ABC model did appear to reduce AIDS. Programs without the AB part seem to have a track record of failure (there are informal AB components going on in Brasil & Jamaica if those are your counter examples). If you can find an actual study to the contrary, I am open. We might conclude that both Right and Left have substantial blind spots when it comes to abortion. While the Right may balk at the C component, liberals I am personally acquainted with seem horrified by the AB components. LJ Steve Hovland wrote: >A lot of us on the left don't think abortion is >a good idea. > >Anyone who knows a woman who has had >an abortion knows that she pays an emotional >price for it. > >But we also know that women do make that >decision, and we don't think it is moral for >them to be forced to go to dangerous >back-alley abortionists when they do make >that decision. > >The right needs to get in touch with reality >about the actual sexual behavior of people >from the age of 12 and up, and stop >opposing the science-based sex education >that would help prevent unwanted pregnancies.. > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2005 6:25 AM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion > >Michael, >You are correct. I tried www.news.google.com (I use news.google because >I want actual news stories and not internet rumors) and I found one >story from Oklahoma (Fox news) where they reported that. I did find a >lot of secondary sources with the term "death penalty" but only that one >primary source. Ironically he did perform two abortions himself in his >medical career: >http://www.fox23.com/news/state/story.aspx?content_id=BF956298-934E-4B30-B9D3-DC274E134AF4 > >I agree with you. His position is thoughtless. Such violent speech must >be opposed. I am personally repelled by abortion, but the right way to >deal with that is education and persuasion about better alternatives. >Violence is never the way. I plan to write to him and ask him to >moderate his views - using persuasion and reason again. > >I was doubtful because his profession - physician - should have taught >him to do no harm. But that is certainly no guarantee of reason. >Lynn > >Michael Christopher wrote: > > > >>>>Michael, this is a questionable report. I just >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>did a Yahoo News search for the terms: >>Tom Coburn Oklahoma abortion capital punishment >>No returns.<< >> >>--Try Google (lots of matches). I'd give you a source, >>but you'd have to tell me which sources you'd trust >>first, so I don't waste my time only to hear "Well, >>that's a liberal source, so I don't trust it". I've >>learned to ask that question first, to avoid the >>typical response. >> >>Michael >> >> >> >>__________________________________ >>Do you Yahoo!? >>All your favorites on one personal page - Try My Yahoo! >>http://my.yahoo.com >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> >> >> > << File: ATT00013.html >> << File: ATT00014.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > << File: ATT00019.html >> << File: ATT00020.txt >> From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Jan 15 18:00:26 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 10:00:26 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion Message-ID: <01C4FAE9.09E65330.shovland@mindspring.com> Actually, as a liberal I don't have any problems with any of the components of ABC. If you are not going to be responsible, you should abstain. In this day and age, you are crazy if you are not faithful. If nothing else is available, you should use a condom. But all this has to be based on objective studies of the actual behavior of people, and not on our values about how they should act. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2005 9:17 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion Good c omments, Steve, except for the last paragraph. There is no study I am aware of that suggests that 'science based sex education' will prevent unwanted pregnancies. Can you find one? What evidence I am aware of suggests that values-based education - "indoctrination" - does help substantially. Look at Uganda's experience for an example, when the ABC model did appear to reduce AIDS. Programs without the AB part seem to have a track record of failure (there are informal AB components going on in Brasil & Jamaica if those are your counter examples). If you can find an actual study to the contrary, I am open. We might conclude that both Right and Left have substantial blind spots when it comes to abortion. While the Right may balk at the C component, liberals I am personally acquainted with seem horrified by the AB components. LJ Steve Hovland wrote: >A lot of us on the left don't think abortion is >a good idea. > >Anyone who knows a woman who has had >an abortion knows that she pays an emotional >price for it. > >But we also know that women do make that >decision, and we don't think it is moral for >them to be forced to go to dangerous >back-alley abortionists when they do make >that decision. > >The right needs to get in touch with reality >about the actual sexual behavior of people >from the age of 12 and up, and stop >opposing the science-based sex education >that would help prevent unwanted pregnancies.. > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2005 6:25 AM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion > >Michael, >You are correct. I tried www.news.google.com (I use news.google because >I want actual news stories and not internet rumors) and I found one >story from Oklahoma (Fox news) where they reported that. I did find a >lot of secondary sources with the term "death penalty" but only that one >primary source. Ironically he did perform two abortions himself in his >medical career: >http://www.fox23.com/news/state/story.aspx?content_id=BF956298-934E-4B30-B9D3-DC274E134AF4 > >I agree with you. His position is thoughtless. Such violent speech must >be opposed. I am personally repelled by abortion, but the right way to >deal with that is education and persuasion about better alternatives. >Violence is never the way. I plan to write to him and ask him to >moderate his views - using persuasion and reason again. > >I was doubtful because his profession - physician - should have taught >him to do no harm. But that is certainly no guarantee of reason. >Lynn > >Michael Christopher wrote: > > > >>>>Michael, this is a questionable report. I just >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>did a Yahoo News search for the terms: >>Tom Coburn Oklahoma abortion capital punishment >>No returns.<< >> >>--Try Google (lots of matches). I'd give you a source, >>but you'd have to tell me which sources you'd trust >>first, so I don't waste my time only to hear "Well, >>that's a liberal source, so I don't trust it". I've >>learned to ask that question first, to avoid the >>typical response. >> >>Michael >> >> >> >>__________________________________ >>Do you Yahoo!? >>All your favorites on one personal page - Try My Yahoo! >>http://my.yahoo.com >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> >> >> > << File: ATT00013.html >> << File: ATT00014.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > << File: ATT00019.html >> << File: ATT00020.txt >> From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sat Jan 15 22:25:41 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 15:25:41 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion In-Reply-To: <01C4FAE7.6E9D52D0.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4FAE7.6E9D52D0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <41E99865.7040905@solution-consulting.com> No Steve Hovland wrote: >So are you willing to accept free access >to condoms for 12 year olds, and access >to abortion if the condoms fail? > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2005 9:17 AM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion > >Good c omments, Steve, except for the last paragraph. There is no study >I am aware of that suggests that 'science based sex education' will >prevent unwanted pregnancies. Can you find one? > >What evidence I am aware of suggests that values-based education - >"indoctrination" - does help substantially. Look at Uganda's experience >for an example, when the ABC model did appear to reduce AIDS. Programs >without the AB part seem to have a track record of failure (there are >informal AB components going on in Brasil & Jamaica if those are your >counter examples). If you can find an actual study to the contrary, I am >open. > >We might conclude that both Right and Left have substantial blind spots >when it comes to abortion. While the Right may balk at the C component, >liberals I am personally acquainted with seem horrified by the AB >components. >LJ > >Steve Hovland wrote: > > > >>A lot of us on the left don't think abortion is >>a good idea. >> >>Anyone who knows a woman who has had >>an abortion knows that she pays an emotional >>price for it. >> >>But we also know that women do make that >>decision, and we don't think it is moral for >>them to be forced to go to dangerous >>back-alley abortionists when they do make >>that decision. >> >>The right needs to get in touch with reality >>about the actual sexual behavior of people >> >> >>from the age of 12 and up, and stop > > >>opposing the science-based sex education >>that would help prevent unwanted pregnancies.. >> >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >> >>-----Original Message----- >>From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >>Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2005 6:25 AM >>To: The new improved paleopsych list >>Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion >> >>Michael, >>You are correct. I tried www.news.google.com (I use news.google because >>I want actual news stories and not internet rumors) and I found one >>story from Oklahoma (Fox news) where they reported that. I did find a >>lot of secondary sources with the term "death penalty" but only that one >>primary source. Ironically he did perform two abortions himself in his >>medical career: >>http://www.fox23.com/news/state/story.aspx?content_id=BF956298-934E-4B30-B9D3-DC274E134AF4 >> >>I agree with you. His position is thoughtless. Such violent speech must >>be opposed. I am personally repelled by abortion, but the right way to >>deal with that is education and persuasion about better alternatives. >>Violence is never the way. I plan to write to him and ask him to >>moderate his views - using persuasion and reason again. >> >>I was doubtful because his profession - physician - should have taught >>him to do no harm. But that is certainly no guarantee of reason. >>Lynn >> >>Michael Christopher wrote: >> >> >> >> >> >>>>>Michael, this is a questionable report. I just >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>did a Yahoo News search for the terms: >>>Tom Coburn Oklahoma abortion capital punishment >>>No returns.<< >>> >>>--Try Google (lots of matches). I'd give you a source, >>>but you'd have to tell me which sources you'd trust >>>first, so I don't waste my time only to hear "Well, >>>that's a liberal source, so I don't trust it". I've >>>learned to ask that question first, to avoid the >>>typical response. >>> >>>Michael >>> >>> >>> >>>__________________________________ >>>Do you Yahoo!? >>>All your favorites on one personal page - Try My Yahoo! >>>http://my.yahoo.com >>>_______________________________________________ >>>paleopsych mailing list >>>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >><< File: ATT00013.html >> << File: ATT00014.txt >> >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> >> >> > << File: ATT00019.html >> << File: ATT00020.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Jan 15 23:38:34 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 15:38:34 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion Message-ID: <01C4FB18.46A74250.shovland@mindspring.com> So are you saying that beliefs or values trump facts in this case? I don't believe that 12 year olds should be having sex, but if in fact they are, then I think they should have the same responsibilities and resources as other sexually active humans. This may be a blind spot in our culture which others do not share. We may pass laws that say that kids shouldn't be sexually aware until we think they are, but some people have said they were sexy when they were quite young. And it is a problem in the real world when 10 year old boys make passes at other 10 year old boys. This is really happening these days. Not often, but schools are confronting these episodes. One reason for this is that girls are developing earlier due to estrogen-like chemicals in our food supply. I don't know that there are testosterone equivalents that are waking up boys, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was. It's a real mess, but I don't think that we should ignore facts in favor of beliefs in this or any other situation. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2005 2:26 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion No Steve Hovland wrote: >So are you willing to accept free access >to condoms for 12 year olds, and access >to abortion if the condoms fail? > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2005 9:17 AM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion > >Good c omments, Steve, except for the last paragraph. There is no study >I am aware of that suggests that 'science based sex education' will >prevent unwanted pregnancies. Can you find one? > >What evidence I am aware of suggests that values-based education - >"indoctrination" - does help substantially. Look at Uganda's experience >for an example, when the ABC model did appear to reduce AIDS. Programs >without the AB part seem to have a track record of failure (there are >informal AB components going on in Brasil & Jamaica if those are your >counter examples). If you can find an actual study to the contrary, I am >open. > >We might conclude that both Right and Left have substantial blind spots >when it comes to abortion. While the Right may balk at the C component, >liberals I am personally acquainted with seem horrified by the AB >components. >LJ > >Steve Hovland wrote: > > > >>A lot of us on the left don't think abortion is >>a good idea. >> >>Anyone who knows a woman who has had >>an abortion knows that she pays an emotional >>price for it. >> >>But we also know that women do make that >>decision, and we don't think it is moral for >>them to be forced to go to dangerous >>back-alley abortionists when they do make >>that decision. >> >>The right needs to get in touch with reality >>about the actual sexual behavior of people >> >> >>from the age of 12 and up, and stop > > >>opposing the science-based sex education >>that would help prevent unwanted pregnancies.. >> >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >> >>-----Original Message----- >>From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >>Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2005 6:25 AM >>To: The new improved paleopsych list >>Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Tom Coburn on abortion >> >>Michael, >>You are correct. I tried www.news.google.com (I use news.google because >>I want actual news stories and not internet rumors) and I found one >>story from Oklahoma (Fox news) where they reported that. I did find a >>lot of secondary sources with the term "death penalty" but only that one >>primary source. Ironically he did perform two abortions himself in his >>medical career: >>http://www.fox23.com/news/state/story.aspx?content_id=BF956298-934E-4B30-B9D3-DC274E134AF4 >> >>I agree with you. His position is thoughtless. Such violent speech must >>be opposed. I am personally repelled by abortion, but the right way to >>deal with that is education and persuasion about better alternatives. >>Violence is never the way. I plan to write to him and ask him to >>moderate his views - using persuasion and reason again. >> >>I was doubtful because his profession - physician - should have taught >>him to do no harm. But that is certainly no guarantee of reason. >>Lynn >> >>Michael Christopher wrote: >> >> >> >> >> >>>>>Michael, this is a questionable report. I just >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>did a Yahoo News search for the terms: >>>Tom Coburn Oklahoma abortion capital punishment >>>No returns.<< >>> >>>--Try Google (lots of matches). I'd give you a source, >>>but you'd have to tell me which sources you'd trust >>>first, so I don't waste my time only to hear "Well, >>>that's a liberal source, so I don't trust it". I've >>>learned to ask that question first, to avoid the >>>typical response. >>> >>>Michael >>> >>> >>> >>>__________________________________ >>>Do you Yahoo!? >>>All your favorites on one personal page - Try My Yahoo! >>>http://my.yahoo.com >>>_______________________________________________ >>>paleopsych mailing list >>>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >><< File: ATT00013.html >> << File: ATT00014.txt >> >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> >> >> > << File: ATT00019.html >> << File: ATT00020.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > << File: ATT00001.html >> << File: ATT00002.txt >> From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sun Jan 16 17:27:32 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2005 09:27:32 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox news In-Reply-To: <200501151918.j0FJIIM27187@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050116172732.57387.qmail@web13424.mail.yahoo.com> >>You are correct. I tried www.news.google.com (I use news.google because I want actual news stories and not internet rumors) and I found one story from Oklahoma (Fox news) where they reported that.<< --LOL... "I want actual news stories and not internet rumors so I went to Fox news." Just teasing... I wonder how many conservatives ignore serious problems in the Republican party simply because they dismiss all liberal criticisms as "internet rumors"? Scary if that's the case. Of course, I've seen the same thing on the Left when good points made by conservatives are dismissed as party propaganda. Blind spots seem to come in pairs. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Easier than ever with enhanced search. Learn more. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sun Jan 16 18:26:05 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2005 11:26:05 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox news In-Reply-To: <20050116172732.57387.qmail@web13424.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20050116172732.57387.qmail@web13424.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <41EAB1BD.6050709@solution-consulting.com> Good tease, Michael, and taken as such. I also thought it ironic that your point was ratified by Fox. I am skeptical of 'news' originating from blogs, partisan websites, and so on. Yet in a sense, those very blogs form a rapidly self-correcting system, like the genius behind wikipedia or the Rathergate that has damaged CBS. Left or right, your comment about the symmetry of blind spots "come in pairs" as you say, is a nicely turned phrase. Lynn Michael Christopher wrote: >>>You are correct. I tried www.news.google.com (I >>> >>> >use news.google because I want actual news stories and >not internet rumors) and I found one story from >Oklahoma (Fox news) where they reported that.<< > >--LOL... "I want actual news stories and not internet >rumors so I went to Fox news." > >Just teasing... I wonder how many conservatives ignore >serious problems in the Republican party simply >because they dismiss all liberal criticisms as >"internet rumors"? Scary if that's the case. Of >course, I've seen the same thing on the Left when good >points made by conservatives are dismissed as party >propaganda. Blind spots seem to come in pairs. > >Michael > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Yahoo! Mail - Easier than ever with enhanced search. Learn more. >http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Jan 16 18:43:44 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2005 10:43:44 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox news Message-ID: <01C4FBB8.41107B90.shovland@mindspring.com> I forget the idiom they used, but I once read that during the days of the old Soviet Union, the most accurate news that most people got came through the rumor mill. The truth about fraud in the last election is on the web, not on the nightly news. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2005 9:28 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox news >>You are correct. I tried www.news.google.com (I use news.google because I want actual news stories and not internet rumors) and I found one story from Oklahoma (Fox news) where they reported that.<< --LOL... "I want actual news stories and not internet rumors so I went to Fox news." Just teasing... I wonder how many conservatives ignore serious problems in the Republican party simply because they dismiss all liberal criticisms as "internet rumors"? Scary if that's the case. Of course, I've seen the same thing on the Left when good points made by conservatives are dismissed as party propaganda. Blind spots seem to come in pairs. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Easier than ever with enhanced search. Learn more. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Jan 16 19:01:18 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2005 11:01:18 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox news Message-ID: <01C4FBBA.B57DDCF0.shovland@mindspring.com> I think it's safer to assume there are no objective sources, and that we are well-served by checking out a variety of sources, especially those we don't agree with. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2005 10:26 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox news Good tease, Michael, and taken as such. I also thought it ironic that your point was ratified by Fox. I am skeptical of 'news' originating from blogs, partisan websites, and so on. Yet in a sense, those very blogs form a rapidly self-correcting system, like the genius behind wikipedia or the Rathergate that has damaged CBS. Left or right, your comment about the symmetry of blind spots "come in pairs" as you say, is a nicely turned phrase. Lynn Michael Christopher wrote: >>>You are correct. I tried www.news.google.com (I >>> >>> >use news.google because I want actual news stories and >not internet rumors) and I found one story from >Oklahoma (Fox news) where they reported that.<< > >--LOL... "I want actual news stories and not internet >rumors so I went to Fox news." > >Just teasing... I wonder how many conservatives ignore >serious problems in the Republican party simply >because they dismiss all liberal criticisms as >"internet rumors"? Scary if that's the case. Of >course, I've seen the same thing on the Left when good >points made by conservatives are dismissed as party >propaganda. Blind spots seem to come in pairs. > >Michael > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Yahoo! Mail - Easier than ever with enhanced search. Learn more. >http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > << File: ATT00002.html >> << File: ATT00003.txt >> From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Mon Jan 17 02:29:50 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2005 18:29:50 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] polarity and feedback In-Reply-To: <200501161924.j0GJOIM13556@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050117022950.21088.qmail@web13421.mail.yahoo.com> >>I am skeptical of 'news' originating from blogs, partisan websites, and so on. Yet in a sense, those very blogs form a rapidly self-correcting system, like the genius behind wikipedia or the Rathergate that has damaged CBS.<< --An intriguing thought... internet seems to have introduced a number of surprising variables into the global system. >>Left or right, your comment about the symmetry of blind spots "come in pairs" as you say, is a nicely turned phrase.<< --And something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Along with that concept comes this one: groups which do not interact socially may vote against one another's interests, not realizing the damage done. Since they get no realtime feedback from the other groups, they are able to vote into power people who are transparently ideological to the other groups, but not to the groups whose interests are being championed (at least rhetorically, if not in action). Those who stand between groups, who have continuing friendships with, say, conservative Christians and liberal atheists (not to perpetuate a stereotypical dichotomy) at the same time, will better understand how each group perceives the overall political climate and be more likely to vote for people who are similarly situated between groups and better able to understand the needs of a plurality rather than a few special interests. Being able to see what's happening "on the street" seems crucial to making decisions that are good for the system as a whole. Isolate yourself in a bubble, and you can vote for someone who sees himself the way you see yourself, not realizing that other groups see something very different. michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Mon Jan 17 12:58:20 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh (from webmail)) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 07:58:20 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: An Evolutionary Mind... In-Reply-To: <41E7E5A2.5050706@solution-consulting.com> References: <01C4FA02.320678A0.shovland@mindspring.com> <41E7E5A2.5050706@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <1105966700.41ebb66ccd195@rauh.net> Lynn and Steve, If man cannot be "perfected" by changes in the environment, it follows that it cannot be "imperfected" by changes. If you assume the above then you shouldn?t bother with how society is structured at all. However, both of you have your takes on how things OUGHT to be so that men (individually or socially) are BETTER (more perfect). Christian Quoting "Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D." : > Steve, > You asked me to reflect on your hate speech. Fair enough. I feel: > - sadness: You are a talented person who engages in reckless talk > that cheapens dialog. > I am obligated to oppose hate speech. Deontological obligation. Never > again Jewish gas chambers, never again Cambodian killing fields, never > again Saddam's mass executions. Every person is obligated to oppose hate > speech from whatever source. > Buddha said: Thoughts become speech; speech becomes actions, actions > become habit, habit becomes character. Take care therefore for your > thoughts. > So I speak against hate, and in favor of thoughtful and > compassionate dialog. > > About the perfection angle: Read "Radical Son" by Horowitz, where he > discusses that. That notion is also behind the infamous 'politically > correct dialog' that feminists and constructivists championed about 20 > years ago. It is also behind the attempts to end poverty, as Johnson's > great failure, the "War on Poverty." It is also behind Stalin's embrace > of Lysenko. The idea is that by changing society we can fundamentally > change people. So there is a substantial body of evidence for that as an > implicit idea, perhaps not espoused but more a theory-in-action. > > Steve Hovland wrote: > > >As a card carrying liberal, I do not think that > >people can be perfected if we have the right > >kind of society. I have no idea where you > >get this formulation. > > > >Steve Hovland > >www.stevehovland.net > > > > > >-----Original Message----- > >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] > >Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2005 9:08 PM > >To: Alice Andrews; paleopsych at paleopsych.org > >Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: An Evolutionary Mind... > > > >Alice, > >Wonderful! I am glad for you. It is always worthwhile to share something > >you clearly worked hard on. I also read the Dembski review in the same > >issue, and had fun with that. > > > > You said, The feminist academic psychologist also asked me if it was > >not dangerous to our students to teach that "motherhood is innate and > >that the only way to be happy is to be a mother." > > You have identified the problem I have with feminists, namely that > >they ignore data that contradicts their theory, and they believe that > >only ideas that support their theory should be taught. > > At another level, you have identified a classic difference between > >modern conservatism and modern liberalism. The conservative believes > >that people cannot be perfected by society, the liberal believes that, > >given the right society, people can be perfected. Every contrary example > >is explained away. > > And I liked your description of your reaction to the dutch treat > >date where the man wanted to kiss you, even though you were raised not > >to have just that reaction. Sounds innate! So I think your article was a > >thought-provoking one and I hope it is widely read. I will forward it to > >the paleo list and encourage people to look it up. > > > >Lynn > > > >Alice Andrews wrote: > > > > > > > >>Hi Lynn, > >> > >>remember that piece you read some of....re me and the economist, > >>etc. "An Evolutionary Mind,"?...well it's a lot longer (i'm afraid) > >>but published! > >>http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/index.asp > >>Thanks again for your encouraging words...they definitely inspired me > >>to continue on writing! > >>All best! > >>Alice > >> > >> > >> > > > > << File: ATT00000.html >> << File: ATT00001.txt >> > >_______________________________________________ > >paleopsych mailing list > >paleopsych at paleopsych.org > >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > > > > > > From he at psychology.su.se Mon Jan 17 13:41:07 2005 From: he at psychology.su.se (Hannes Eisler) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 14:41:07 +0100 Subject: [Paleopsych] Man and society Message-ID: The discussion seems somewhat odd to me. One has to distinguish between man's, let's say, inborn, dispositions, and man's behavior. The first hardly can be changed by environmental (or political) influence (here we have marxism's big mistake), but the latter can. A society works with rewards (reinforcement) and punishment to achieve its aims, whatever they may be. Also sensitivity to reinforcement is inborn; more complicated is to establish what is working as a reinforcer for whom. -- ------------------------------------- Prof. Hannes Eisler Department of Psychology Stockholm University S-106 91 Stockholm Sweden e-mail: he at psychology.su.se fax : +46-8-15 93 42 phone : +46-8-163967 (university) +46-8-6409982 (home) internet: http://www.psychology.su.se/staff/he From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Jan 17 14:32:00 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 06:32:00 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] polarity and feedback Message-ID: <01C4FC5E.40BCB1D0.shovland@mindspring.com> I prefer to think of the political spectrum as many shades of gray. The extremes may not communicate very much, but messages may travel between them through the range of less extreme values. The margin of victory in the last election was not much bigger than the margin of error for typical polls. A small shift in the Matrix can produce a different outcome. Based on the article about beliefs I sent out awhile back, I would assume that both extremes are subject to adjustment by large external events, such as losing a war. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2005 6:30 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] polarity and feedback >>I am skeptical of 'news' originating from blogs, partisan websites, and so on. Yet in a sense, those very blogs form a rapidly self-correcting system, like the genius behind wikipedia or the Rathergate that has damaged CBS.<< --An intriguing thought... internet seems to have introduced a number of surprising variables into the global system. >>Left or right, your comment about the symmetry of blind spots "come in pairs" as you say, is a nicely turned phrase.<< --And something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Along with that concept comes this one: groups which do not interact socially may vote against one another's interests, not realizing the damage done. Since they get no realtime feedback from the other groups, they are able to vote into power people who are transparently ideological to the other groups, but not to the groups whose interests are being championed (at least rhetorically, if not in action). Those who stand between groups, who have continuing friendships with, say, conservative Christians and liberal atheists (not to perpetuate a stereotypical dichotomy) at the same time, will better understand how each group perceives the overall political climate and be more likely to vote for people who are similarly situated between groups and better able to understand the needs of a plurality rather than a few special interests. Being able to see what's happening "on the street" seems crucial to making decisions that are good for the system as a whole. Isolate yourself in a bubble, and you can vote for someone who sees himself the way you see yourself, not realizing that other groups see something very different. michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Jan 17 14:33:12 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 06:33:12 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: An Evolutionary Mind... Message-ID: <01C4FC5E.6BD87610.shovland@mindspring.com> Actually, I have no interested in perfecting humans. We all seem to have a capability for making new mistakes :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Christian Rauh (from webmail) [SMTP:christian.rauh at uconn.edu] Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 4:58 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: An Evolutionary Mind... Lynn and Steve, If man cannot be "perfected" by changes in the environment, it follows that it cannot be "imperfected" by changes. If you assume the above then you shouldn?t bother with how society is structured at all. However, both of you have your takes on how things OUGHT to be so that men (individually or socially) are BETTER (more perfect). Christian Quoting "Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D." : > Steve, > You asked me to reflect on your hate speech. Fair enough. I feel: > - sadness: You are a talented person who engages in reckless talk > that cheapens dialog. > I am obligated to oppose hate speech. Deontological obligation. Never > again Jewish gas chambers, never again Cambodian killing fields, never > again Saddam's mass executions. Every person is obligated to oppose hate > speech from whatever source. > Buddha said: Thoughts become speech; speech becomes actions, actions > become habit, habit becomes character. Take care therefore for your > thoughts. > So I speak against hate, and in favor of thoughtful and > compassionate dialog. > > About the perfection angle: Read "Radical Son" by Horowitz, where he > discusses that. That notion is also behind the infamous 'politically > correct dialog' that feminists and constructivists championed about 20 > years ago. It is also behind the attempts to end poverty, as Johnson's > great failure, the "War on Poverty." It is also behind Stalin's embrace > of Lysenko. The idea is that by changing society we can fundamentally > change people. So there is a substantial body of evidence for that as an > implicit idea, perhaps not espoused but more a theory-in-action. > > Steve Hovland wrote: > > >As a card carrying liberal, I do not think that > >people can be perfected if we have the right > >kind of society. I have no idea where you > >get this formulation. > > > >Steve Hovland > >www.stevehovland.net > > > > > >-----Original Message----- > >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] > >Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2005 9:08 PM > >To: Alice Andrews; paleopsych at paleopsych.org > >Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: An Evolutionary Mind... > > > >Alice, > >Wonderful! I am glad for you. It is always worthwhile to share something > >you clearly worked hard on. I also read the Dembski review in the same > >issue, and had fun with that. > > > > You said, The feminist academic psychologist also asked me if it was > >not dangerous to our students to teach that "motherhood is innate and > >that the only way to be happy is to be a mother." > > You have identified the problem I have with feminists, namely that > >they ignore data that contradicts their theory, and they believe that > >only ideas that support their theory should be taught. > > At another level, you have identified a classic difference between > >modern conservatism and modern liberalism. The conservative believes > >that people cannot be perfected by society, the liberal believes that, > >given the right society, people can be perfected. Every contrary example > >is explained away. > > And I liked your description of your reaction to the dutch treat > >date where the man wanted to kiss you, even though you were raised not > >to have just that reaction. Sounds innate! So I think your article was a > >thought-provoking one and I hope it is widely read. I will forward it to > >the paleo list and encourage people to look it up. > > > >Lynn > > > >Alice Andrews wrote: > > > > > > > >>Hi Lynn, > >> > >>remember that piece you read some of....re me and the economist, > >>etc. "An Evolutionary Mind,"?...well it's a lot longer (i'm afraid) > >>but published! > >>http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/index.asp > >>Thanks again for your encouraging words...they definitely inspired me > >>to continue on writing! > >>All best! > >>Alice > >> > >> > >> > > > > << File: ATT00000.html >> << File: ATT00001.txt >> > >_______________________________________________ > >paleopsych mailing list > >paleopsych at paleopsych.org > >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Mon Jan 17 16:11:37 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 09:11:37 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: An Evolutionary Mind... In-Reply-To: <1105966700.41ebb66ccd195@rauh.net> References: <01C4FA02.320678A0.shovland@mindspring.com> <41E7E5A2.5050706@solution-consulting.com> <1105966700.41ebb66ccd195@rauh.net> Message-ID: <41EBE3B9.8000808@solution-consulting.com> Hannes & Christian: The view I am working from is somewhat like Alice Andrews: It appears that around 50% of our behavior is from gene expression, which can be modulated by environmental triggers. The other part is probably quite modifiable. The dilemma as I see it is unforeseen consequences of attempts to modify behavior, a common phenomenon. I.e.: Children rewarded for reading lose interest in the reading because they focus on the reinforcers. Because of the unintended consequences it appears that socialism and welfare state economics are very tricky and difficult to impliment. So some prefer to have a lower level of social welfare programs because they often backfire. Arguably Bush's policies contain many of these. Bush put barriers up for steel imports, saving steel industry jobs but costing many more jobs because of the ripple effect of raising steel prices. Bush passed a Medicare drug benefit that now appears to vastly accelerate the social security crisis. Bush passed "no child left behind" and may have harmed education by costing school districts new resources because of the burden of complying with this program. So it appears government can help or harm, but often harms because we aren't smart enough to view the consequences of our actions. Bentham is wrong, because we cannot know what is the greatest good for the greatest number. In my humble opinion, Lynn Christian Rauh (from webmail) wrote: >Lynn and Steve, > >If man cannot be "perfected" by changes in the environment, it follows that it >cannot be "imperfected" by changes. > >If you assume the above then you shouldn?t bother with how society is structured >at all. > >However, both of you have your takes on how things OUGHT to be so that men >(individually or socially) are BETTER (more perfect). > >Christian > > > >Quoting "Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D." : > > > >>Steve, >>You asked me to reflect on your hate speech. Fair enough. I feel: >> - sadness: You are a talented person who engages in reckless talk >>that cheapens dialog. >>I am obligated to oppose hate speech. Deontological obligation. Never >>again Jewish gas chambers, never again Cambodian killing fields, never >>again Saddam's mass executions. Every person is obligated to oppose hate >>speech from whatever source. >> Buddha said: Thoughts become speech; speech becomes actions, actions >>become habit, habit becomes character. Take care therefore for your >>thoughts. >> So I speak against hate, and in favor of thoughtful and >>compassionate dialog. >> >> About the perfection angle: Read "Radical Son" by Horowitz, where he >>discusses that. That notion is also behind the infamous 'politically >>correct dialog' that feminists and constructivists championed about 20 >>years ago. It is also behind the attempts to end poverty, as Johnson's >>great failure, the "War on Poverty." It is also behind Stalin's embrace >>of Lysenko. The idea is that by changing society we can fundamentally >>change people. So there is a substantial body of evidence for that as an >>implicit idea, perhaps not espoused but more a theory-in-action. >> >>Steve Hovland wrote: >> >> >> >>>As a card carrying liberal, I do not think that >>>people can be perfected if we have the right >>>kind of society. I have no idea where you >>>get this formulation. >>> >>>Steve Hovland >>>www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>>-----Original Message----- >>>From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >>>Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2005 9:08 PM >>>To: Alice Andrews; paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: An Evolutionary Mind... >>> >>>Alice, >>>Wonderful! I am glad for you. It is always worthwhile to share something >>>you clearly worked hard on. I also read the Dembski review in the same >>>issue, and had fun with that. >>> >>> You said, The feminist academic psychologist also asked me if it was >>>not dangerous to our students to teach that "motherhood is innate and >>>that the only way to be happy is to be a mother." >>> You have identified the problem I have with feminists, namely that >>>they ignore data that contradicts their theory, and they believe that >>>only ideas that support their theory should be taught. >>> At another level, you have identified a classic difference between >>>modern conservatism and modern liberalism. The conservative believes >>>that people cannot be perfected by society, the liberal believes that, >>>given the right society, people can be perfected. Every contrary example >>>is explained away. >>> And I liked your description of your reaction to the dutch treat >>>date where the man wanted to kiss you, even though you were raised not >>>to have just that reaction. Sounds innate! So I think your article was a >>>thought-provoking one and I hope it is widely read. I will forward it to >>>the paleo list and encourage people to look it up. >>> >>>Lynn >>> >>>Alice Andrews wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>>>Hi Lynn, >>>> >>>>remember that piece you read some of....re me and the economist, >>>>etc. "An Evolutionary Mind,"?...well it's a lot longer (i'm afraid) >>>>but published! >>>>http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/index.asp >>>>Thanks again for your encouraging words...they definitely inspired me >>>>to continue on writing! >>>>All best! >>>>Alice >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>><< File: ATT00000.html >> << File: ATT00001.txt >> >>>_______________________________________________ >>>paleopsych mailing list >>>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> > > > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 17 16:20:14 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 11:20:14 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Scientists Find DNA Region That Affects Europeans' Fertility Message-ID: Scientists Find DNA Region That Affects Europeans' Fertility NYT January 17, 2005 By NICHOLAS WADE [Panix.com's domain name was hijacked and as now been returned. Investigations in the U.S. and at least four other countries are underway. If someone would go to http://www.panix.com and then explain to me what this means, I'd appreciate it.] Researchers in Iceland have discovered a region in the human genome that, among Europeans, appears to promote fertility, and maybe longevity as well. Though the region, a stretch of DNA on the 17th chromosome, occurs in people of all countries, it is much more common in Europeans, as if its effect is set off by something in the European environment. A further unusual property is that the genetic region has a much more ancient lineage than most human genes, and the researchers suggest, as one possible explanation, that it could have entered the human genome through interbreeding with one of the archaic human lineages that developed in parallel with that of modern humans. The genetic region was discovered by scientists at DeCode Genetics, a biotechnology company in Reykjavik, Iceland, which has made the Icelandic population, with its comprehensive genealogy and medical records, a prime hunting ground for the genetic roots of common diseases. Their finding is published in today's issue of Nature Genetics in a report by Dr. Kari Stefansson, Dr. Augustine Kong, Dr. Hreinn Stefansson and other DeCode scientists. The report seems likely to receive considerable attention, even though it raises as many questions as it answers. "I thought it was one of the most interesting papers in population genetics I have ever read," said Dr. Nick Patterson, a mathematician at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., who advised DeCode on the article but has no other connection with the company. The region came to light during the search for a schizophrenia-causing gene, which turned out not to be there. But the DeCode researchers noticed that the DNA sequences they had examined did not seem to agree with those in the standard human genome sequence, said Dr. Kari Stefansson, DeCode's chief executive. The lack of agreement turned out to be caused by the fact that the region exists in two forms in the Icelandic population. The region is not a single gene but a vast section of DNA, some 900,000 units in length, situated in the 17th of the 23 pairs of human chromosomes. In some Icelanders, the DeCode team found, the section runs in the standard direction but in others it is flipped. Looking for any physical consequence, the DeCode researchers found that women carrying the flipped, or inverted, section tended to have slightly more children. The section carries several known genes, not one of which has any obvious connection with fertility. It is not clear why inverting the section should have any effect on the number of children, Dr. Stefansson said. But the inversion does increase the rate of recombination, the shuffling of genes between generations that is a major source of genetic novelty. That could account for some of the increase in fertility. The DeCode scientists found that the chromosome 17 inversion is rare in Africans, almost absent in Asians, but present in 20 percent of Europeans, the same frequency as in Iceland. The inversion seems to have been favored by natural selection among Europeans in fairly recent times, perhaps the last 10,000 years. "Maybe something switched it on in the European environment, such as an interaction with diet," said Dr. David Reich, a population geneticist at the Broad Institute. Fertility is doubtless affected by different genes in different populations, and DeCode found a genetic element special to Europeans because that is where it was looking. The increased frequency of the inversion in Europeans is one of a growing number of examples of recent human evolution. The inversion itself, however, is surprisingly ancient. Its age is revealed by its counterpart, the standard or noninverted section of chromosome 17. The standard and inverted regions cannot exchange genetic elements during recombination because their DNA sequences do not match. Hence, unlike most of the rest of the genome, which gets shuffled in each generation, the two forms have existed separately since their creation. This event presumably happened when the region came adrift from its parent chromosome and got knitted back in the wrong way round. When all the known versions of a human gene are compared, in most cases they turn out to have had a single common ancestor about a million years ago. But the standard and flipped version of the chromosome 17 region last shared a common ancestor three million years ago. It is highly unusual for two different versions of a gene to endure for so long because one will usually get lost by a natural process of elimination. The DeCode researchers propose two explanations. One is that the standard and flipped versions confer different advantages, so that it is beneficial for a person to have inherited a copy of each from different parents. This balancing selection can keep two versions of a gene around in a population indefinitely. DeCode's alternative proposal is that the flipped version was carried for many years in a different human lineage, one of the archaic populations that preceded the emergence of anatomically modern humans in Africa 150,000 years ago. Then, in some episode of interbreeding, a single copy of the flipped version entered the modern human lineage some time before humans left Africa 60,000 years ago. In support of this view, the flipped version carries far fewer mutations than does the standard version, as if it had been accumulating them from a much more recent date. There have been other recent hints of modern human interaction with archaic hominids, notably the finding last October that a lineage of body lice seems to have been inherited from a different human species. Dr. Stefansson said that another property of the inversion, though one not described in today's article, is that it is associated with longevity. DeCode scientists have located two sites on Icelanders' genomes where there is some genetic variant that promotes longer lifespan. The chromosome 17 inversion, it turns out, lies at one of these sites. It occurs at much higher frequency in women over 95 and in men over 90 than in the normal population. "It seems to confer on people the ability to live to extreme old age," Dr. Stefansson said. It is particularly surprising that the same genetic element should promote fertility and longevity because most organisms are obliged to follow a strategy either of breeding fast during short lives or of living longer and having fewer children. "Usually people think of there being a tradeoff between fertility and longevity. So we are getting a free lunch here," said Dr. Alan Rogers, a population geneticist at the University of Utah. Dr. Stefansson said his findings were empirical observations for which functional explanations have yet to emerge. Despite the loose ends, other researchers seem impressed with the solidity of DeCode's findings. "It's a startling and amazing claim, and it's actually pretty convincing and compelling evidence at the same time," Dr. Reich said. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/17/science/17gene.html From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 17 16:20:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 11:20:51 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Measuring Literacy in a World Gone Digital Message-ID: Measuring Literacy in a World Gone Digital NYT January 17, 2005 By TOM ZELLER Jr. There was a time when researching a high school or college term paper was a far simpler thing. A student writing about, say, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, might have checked out a book on the history of aviation from the local library or tucked into the family's dog-eared Britannica. An ambitious college freshman might have augmented the research by looking up some old newspaper clips on microfilm or picking up a monograph in the stacks. Today, in a matter of minutes, students can identify these and thousands of other potential resources on the Internet - and, as any teacher will attest, they are not always adept at sorting the wheat from the chaff. Now the Educational Testing Service, the nonprofit group behind the SAT, Graduate Record Examination and other college tests, has developed a new test that it says can assess students' ability to make good critical evaluations of the vast amount of material available to them. The Information and Communications Technology literacy assessment, which will be introduced at about two dozen colleges and universities later this month, is intended to measure students' ability to manage exercises like sorting e-mail messages or manipulating tables and charts, and to assess how well they organize and interpret information from many sources and in myriad forms. About 10,000 undergraduates at schools from the University of California, Los Angeles to Bronx Community College are expected to take the test during the first offering period, which ends March 31. Still, just what is meant by "information" or even "technological" literacy remains a hotly debated topic in academic circles, and there is no widespread agreement on whether such skills can be taught, much less measured in a test. What seems certain, however, is that a lucrative market is emerging for testing companies that are willing to fill the perceived need. The initial technology test is aimed at midlevel college students, but the Educational Testing Service says it has also received inquiries from high schools and businesses. And while the new assessment is not a high-stakes requirement for academic advancement like the SAT, it seems inevitable that most students will one day need to prove themselves along these lines. Part of the problem, many educators say, is that the traditional vetting process for information is now so easily bypassed. "In an earlier time, information came, really, from only one place: the university library," said Lorie Roth, the assistant vice chancellor of academic programs for the California State University system, one of seven school systems that worked with the testing company over the last two years to develop the test. "Now it is all part of one giant continuum, and often the student is the sole arbiter of what is good information, what is bad information and what all the shades are in between." But not everyone agrees that measuring information literacy can be done, even with a standardized test. "There is a basic problem with identifying a single set of skills that could possibly relate to all people," said Stanley Wilder, the associate dean of the River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester in New York, who wrote a withering assessment of the information literacy movement in The Chronicle of Higher Education two weeks ago. "There isn't a serious critique of any of the assumptions that info-literacy makes," Mr. Wilder said in an interview. "They'll tell you that it teaches critical thinking, but there's never been a study that measures whether students are really lacking this, or whether libraries can impact this." Be that as it may, it is true that the information literacy movement could prove a windfall for companies like the Educational Testing Service. Developing metrics for measuring how much students know - or how much they have yet to learn - has become a lucrative market. Eduventures, a research firm in Boston, estimated the assessment market for prekindergarten to Grade 12 - excluding the college years and beyond - at $1.8 billion for 2003. Given President Bush's announcement last Wednesday that he plans to expand the standardized testing mandated under the No Child Left Behind Act - which includes a commitment to "ensuring that every student is technologically literate by the time the student finishes the eighth grade" - the market for assessments is certain to grow. Beyond the SAT, the Educational Testing Service controls a separate boutique market of higher-level tests like the Graduate Record Examination and the Graduate Management Admission Test. Despite its nonprofit status, it is the world's largest private educational testing and measurement organization. The company administers and scores nearly 25 million tests annually in more than 180 countries, and posted $825 million in revenues for fiscal year 2004. In an extensive report, "Tech Tonic: Towards a New Literacy of Technology," published in September, the Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit group that is often skeptical of technology in schools, was critical of the new test. "For E.T.S., this is part of a broader global plan to develop and promote international technology literacy standards, and then offer countries around the world a chance to buy a full array of assessment products and services that can be used to implement their standards," the report said. But if critics see this as an unjustified entry into an already littered field of standardized tests, the company argues that the information age - and a new culture of accountability - demand it. "I think there's always that tension," said Teresa Egan, the project manager who is steering the test's release at the end of this month. "People feel there's too much testing across the board now. Or they ask whether we are focusing so much time on testing that students don't have time for other educational experiences. "But the public wants accountability. People want to ensure that colleges are actually preparing students for the future - the future being an information society." The technology test will cost colleges around $25 a student - discounted to $20 for institutions that sign up during the first testing period. Students will take the Web-based exam in classrooms or instruction labs, logging on with access codes purchased by their schools. Scores in the first round will be aggregated for each institution; the company aims to make scoring for individual students available in 2006. In 2001, the testing company brought together an international consortium of educators, technology specialists and government representatives to begin defining the core characteristics of information consumption at the college level. Knowing where and how to find information, they agreed, was just the beginning. Interpreting, sorting, evaluating, manipulating and repackaging information in dozens of forms from thousands of sources - as well as having a fundamental understanding of the legal and ethical uses of digital materials - are also important components. "Critical thinking is a central aspect of the new economy," said Robert B. Reich, the secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, who is now a professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis University. Professor Reich is also the author of the 1991 book "Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism," which provided a something of a touchstone for the information literacy movement. "Our high school curricula are locked into an industrial age that may have only a tangential relationship to the information age," he said in an interview. To the extent that efforts like the new technology test help reshape curriculums along these lines, Mr. Reich said, they probably will help. According to Ms. Egan of the Educational Testing Service, the test is also fun. "Can you help me find a good source of products and gifts designed for left-handers?" reads a sample question from a fictitious office manager. "I'd like someplace that offers a wide range of merchandise with product guarantees - also that has an online catalog and online ordering. Discounts would also be a plus." Fictitious colleagues might then make suggestions via e-mail, and the test taker might also get input by instant message from people using screen names like SkyDiver, JJJunior and TVJunkie. The test taker would be asked to consider the various sources and suggestions, and to rank them by relevance to the original request. Other parts of the test ask students to do everything from the seemingly mundane (like sorting e-mail messages into appropriate folders) to head-scratching tasks like "reordering a table to maximize efficiency in two tasks with incompatible requirements," according to a brochure. Asked if she had taken the test herself, Ms. Egan responded, "What a cruel question. "I took it earlier on, when there was no way to produce a score from it. But I knew myself that there was a lot I needed to learn." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/17/technology/17test.html From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Mon Jan 17 16:21:13 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 09:21:13 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Evolutionary / Man and society In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <41EBE5F9.60106@solution-consulting.com> Here is a nice example of unintended consequences of a welfare state: http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006165 The problem is systemic - perverse reward systems create perverse behavior. Rolf is simply responding to the rewards offered. Lynn Hannes Eisler wrote: > The discussion seems somewhat odd to me. One has to distinguish > between man's, let's say, inborn, dispositions, and man's behavior. > The first hardly can be changed by environmental (or political) > influence (here we have marxism's big mistake), but the latter can. A > society works with rewards (reinforcement) and punishment to achieve > its aims, whatever they may be. Also sensitivity to reinforcement is > inborn; more complicated is to establish what is working as a > reinforcer for whom. From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 17 16:22:05 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 11:22:05 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: The Gospel of Born-Again Bodies Message-ID: The Gospel of Born-Again Bodies The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.21 By R. MARIE GRIFFITH One of the most durable themes in modern American political culture, crassly visible in the latest presidential race, is virility. In this brutish and partisan arena, candidates vie for masculine supremacy before audiences they hope will admire their strapping vigor -- indeed, not simply admire but lust after it (if they are women) or identify with it (as manly men or wannabes). Long before Arnold Schwarzenegger's famous slur on liberal "girlie men," pundits like Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter repeatedly sneered that a Democratic mollycoddle like John Kerry could not begin to match the mettle of his swaggering Republican counterpart, notwithstanding their respective sports and military records. Although Kerry fought back vigorously, the public image was set, and Mr. Bush won the battle for brawn. Liberals can be he-men too, of course. Bill Clinton's electric charisma and seductive exploits saved him from charges of effeminacy -- and judging by the hosts of beaming women who still wildly cheer him, he's only grown sexier in the post-Monica, South Beach Diet years. But the steady climate of panic in post-September 11 America has expunged the "kinder, gentler" language of yore and demanded imagery of a leaner, meaner sort, to which it is hinted only the stodgiest of feminists or the girliest of men could object. Masculinity exhibits itself variously in our culture, talking tough being one important mode and toting instruments of animal slaughter another. But that masculine ideal manifests itself above all through a body defined, in ever narrowing terms, as "fit." Not surprisingly, the new macho fitness has materialized in nearly every cranny of our culture. Its ascendancy is, interestingly enough, most peculiarly visible in that other mounting obsession of the culture, religion. Perhaps, since the U.S. population, with its acute and intensifying religious sensibilities, is the most body-obsessed society in the world, it makes sense that these fixations would be intertwined; yet studies of religion have rarely overlapped with studies of body obsession. A few years ago, I set out to investigate the intersections of religion and fitness in American culture and studied firsthand the varied ways in which Christianity has powerfully shaped American bodily ideals. Witness, for instance, contemporary images of Christian heroes, such as those featured in the massively successful Left Behind series co-written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. Such images invariably depict brute strength and courage, displaying both the will and the capacity to slay the vile enemies of God. At the same time, as scholars such as Stephen Prothero and Richard Wightman Fox have noted, popular representations of Jesus have fluctuated over time, recently shifting once again away from the gentle, feminized Jesus of Warner Sallman's iconic portrayals toward a more muscular ideal. Think, for instance, of Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ, in which the figure of Jesus looked brawny even (perhaps especially) while he was being crucified, his brutalization serving as a call to arms for audiences meant to depart theaters deeply affected by the continuing war between good and evil. Or witness the artist Stephen Sawyer's well-known depictions of a burly, steely-eyed Jesus decked out in prizefighter gloves and shorts and appearing victorious as the "Warrior King," ready for combat in a boxing ring. Evangelicals, counted among the most reliable sectors of the Republican Party's base, have embraced this shift: As Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, told one reporter in April, the "effeminate Jesus" long prevalent in the culture is "a kind of marshmallowy, Santa Claus Jesus, which is not at all in keeping with the Gospels." "Marshmallowy": soft, gooey, squishy, chubby, flaccid, fat -- now marked as the very antithesis not merely of the American presidential ideal but of Christ himself, the model Christians are to follow. That is a highly influential theme in contemporary evangelical circles, crudely but brilliantly summarized in a tabloid headline a couple of years ago, "Fat People Don't Go to Heaven!" The story beneath that lurid caption in the Globe, a national weekly tabloid circulated to millions of American readers, recounts the rise of Gwen Shamblin, founder and CEO of the nation's largest Christian diet company and recent subject of extensive news-media coverage from Larry King Live and 20/20 to The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker. Shamblin markets her concept of a spiritual route to guaranteed weight loss and her stringent guidelines for proper Christian body size (she is on record as being a size 4 or 6) in the Weigh Down Workshop, whose copious videos, audiotapes, books, conferences, and 12-week seminars teach restrained food eating as a divine command. The eternal costs of overeating are markedly severe: "Grace," in Shamblin's words to the Journal, "does not go down into the pigpen." The meanings here are plain, harking back to the muscular Christianity of earlier eras while replaying its themes in a newly severe key: Christianity is a strenuous religion, suitable for enduring hard times and fighting enemies. It is a religion best represented by robust men as well as disciplined women, who must also live up to a version (though smiling and slenderized, hence carefully feminized) of the perfect hard-body ideal. Flab is absolutely out, for both men and women, for it suggests weakness, indulgence, lack of discipline, inertia, and sheer laziness, egregious sins in a high-strung world devoted to efficiency and achievement. It turns out, in fact, that America's own purportedly secular doctrine of the perfectible body is deeply indebted to Protestant currents that have increasingly perceived the body as essential for pushing the soul along the path to redemption. Christian authorities, we well know, have long been deeply concerned about the role of the body in religious devotion and have sought to discipline it in a wide range of ways. Historians of late antiquity and medieval Europe, among many others, have traced out the effects of religious discipline on individual bodies, drawing our attention to the striking corporality of Christian piety in various epochs and its heavily gendered manifestations. Though most studies have focused on premodern asceticism and Catholic mysticism, we are also beginning to uncover the history of Protestant bodies. Aided in part by emergent paradigms in ritual theory and material-culture studies, Protestantism is increasingly appearing less a project of disembodiment (as at least its WASP varieties have frequently been imagined) than as a syncretic mix of practices and rituals deeply rooted in fixations about bodily purity and pleasure, a mix that has shaped and continuously reshaped absorption with the body in clearly discernible ways. For American Protestant people, for whom sex, alcohol, smoking, dancing, leisure activities, and other bodily pleasures have historically been restricted or even eschewed altogether, eating has long carried dense and contradictory meanings. Like many Christian ascetics and mystics of earlier periods, early modern Protestants made extensive use of fasting as a religious observance. The physical effects of food abstinence being what they are, varied groups commended slenderness as they dissected somatic indicators of true faith, affirming that the signs of authentic spiritual renewal were grounded in the body. This project of "making visible the soul" was sustained vigorously in the 19th century, for example by Protestant health reformers such as William Alcott and Sylvester Graham who advocated a purifying diet, and no less by the physiognomists and phrenologists who discerned evidence of the inner self in the face and skull. Protestants have long wrestled with the dilemmas provoked by human embodiment, albeit in ways that would, to all appearances, feel increasingly unfamiliar to their patristic and medieval forebears. While both Protestant and Catholic critiques of abundance, from Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards to Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg to Simone Weil and Dorothy Day, recall themes expressed by early and medieval Christian ascetics, the evolving fixation on bodily health and perfection represents a stark departure from older emphases on corporeal acts of penitence aimed at subjugating the flesh or achieving identification with the suffering, crucified Christ. Over the course of the 20th century, the gospel of slimness that came to permeate broad sectors of American religion and culture, obsessed with lean, tight bodies, would bear only a faint resemblance to the intense rituals of purification and self-denial that occupied Christians in earlier periods. A dynamic and extremely profitable Christian fitness culture thrives today. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are following Christian diet regimens like Shamblin's Weigh Down diet, the Hallelujah diet, the Creationist diet, Thin Within, First Place, and the Light Weigh (a Catholic program). Countless others have purchased books from this flourishing industry: Typical titles from the past year include Ben Lerner's Body by God: The Owner's Manual for Maximized Living, Jordan S. Rubin's The Maker's Diet: The 40-Day Health Experience That Will Change Your Life Forever, La Vita M. Weaver's Fit for God: The 8-Week Plan That Kicks the Devil OUT and Invites Health and Healing IN, and Danna Demetre's Scale Down: A Realistic Guide to Balancing Body, Soul, and Spirit. During the past few decades of this industry's explosion, millions of American Christians have made a religious duty out of diet, theologizing about food and fat as never before. Disregard what goes into your body, they say, and you will not only gain weight, look ugly, and feel awful, but you will also doom yourself to a lifetime and likely an eternity of divine disfavor. The body is a hazard to the soul, able to demolish the hardest-won spiritual gains merely through ingesting the wrong material. Christian diet vendors have plainly hit upon a painful but highly lucrative theme. According to the sociologist Kenneth Ferraro, religious practice in the United States is positively correlated with obesity, with Christians generally (and Southern Baptists in particular) the heaviest of all. In the course of researching the Christian fitness culture, I interviewed many women and men who have participated in Christian diet groups, paying the fees to join one such group myself as a researcher. I interviewed many authors of Christian fitness literature, along with less well-known writers of denominationally focused diet workshops and local group coordinators. I attended a variety of small- and medium-size conference meetings devoted to Christian dieting and chatted with many other participants in those settings. I joined online Christian chat groups devoted to weight loss and engaged in thoughtful discussions with people leading quite desperate lives, because (as they see it) of their weight. Before e-mail addresses became restricted, I corresponded with numerous Amazon.com reviewers of Christian diet books, asking them to tell me more about the impact of this reading upon their lives. It is clear that readers and participants in this Christian fitness culture hold a wide range of views as to the proper Christian way to think about slimness and the body in today's world. They read selectively and think for themselves, in other words, and it would be a mistake not to highlight the multiplicity of perspectives that find sustenance in this culture. But the culture of Christian food restraint has implications and consequences not always clearly perceived even by its more careful supporters. Christian literature about fitness, weight loss, and beauty has consistently instructed its readers how to uphold a pleasing image in the world, as standard-bearers of Jesus' love and prototypes of the redeemed life to which non-Christians would hopefully aspire. Yet American ideals of slender beauty stand in glaring contrast to attitudes throughout much of the developing world that have long associated fat with beauty, wealth, and merit or divine blessing, and more than a few commentators have denounced global patterns of food scarcity that emaciate impoverished populations in parts of Africa and Asia at the same time that privileged Americans struggle to stay fashionably slim. U.S. officials may lament the appalling realities of world hunger, yet few actively seek to promote physical health or longevity for those people considered national enemies (even potential ones), excepting types of humanitarian aid that unfortunately foster dependence and servility. It is well known that many citizens of other countries believe Americans to be deeply indifferent, if not contemptuous, toward foreign bodies. The ill health, life-shrinking poverty, and high death rates of such bodies, a cynic might say, bolster U.S. supremacy in both material and mythic ways. World hunger seems a discordant context for situating Protestant American body fixations, and it would be as absurd to link them cursorily as to deny the countless initiatives aimed at helping the poor and hungry across the globe. Nor is it fitting purely to scorn modern-day pursuits as merely the solipsistic hobby of affluent, self-absorbed women and men. Observers may justly wonder, nonetheless, at the paradoxes evident here. American corporations have abetted the global proliferation of fast-food chains and the promotion of heavily sugared drinks and processed snack foods in developing world markets, transforming local eating patterns and increasing obesity rates overseas. As nutritionists and investigative journalists have corroborated, those types of products contribute in highly visible ways to the illness and poverty of expanding consumer populations. It is ironic, to say the least, that at a time when the most educated, affluent Americans increasingly shun junk food in favor of presumably healthier choices ("organic," "natural"), the fast-food and soft-drink (not to mention tobacco) industries have achieved unprecedented levels of success among the poor, both in the United States and abroad. Mounting attention to the close correlations between ill health and indigence does not generally include religion as a key factor, nor are observers, aiming for pragmatic solutions more than scholarly analysis, particularly attentive to the nuances of history. But in fact religion -- as a strategic network of emotions, practices, and social alliances -- has held a vital historical role in what may aptly be termed American body politics: a system ensuring that some bodies are healthier, more beautiful, more powerful, and longer lived than others. While Christianity is by no means the only religious tradition able to contribute to such measures across space and time, Protestantism -- as the tradition that has most comprehensively influenced the course of American history -- takes a decisive center stage in this story. Like participants in assorted other religions, Christians carefully distinguish insiders from outsiders -- the saved from the damned -- and that concern with salvation plays itself out in numerous mundane ways. Intense concentration upon particular kinds of body work on the part of many American Christians provides a new way to read the politics of our cultural history and the crucial role of gender as well as more tacit, ambiguous, and intricate taxonomies of race and social class. Christian body practices offer, in short, a model for tracking the ways that ordinary middle-class white bodies have been tutored in the obligatory hungers and subtle yet stringent regulations of consumer capitalism. Lest we forget, the body -- whatever else it is -- is the material upon which diverse politics of exclusion are practiced, a point that the consumer culture of American fitness makes abundantly clear. There are no easy remedies -- perhaps no remedies at all -- to the conditions promoting modern body devotion. Outside the explicitly religious diet and exercise groups, there remains very little that is demonstrably Christian about contemporary fitness culture, but that lack hardly renders it "secular" in any clear sense. However little they may realize their participation in a time-honored tradition of religious observance, more people than ever today are avidly pursuing a born-again body. R. Marie Griffith is an associate professor of religion at Princeton University. Her latest book is Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (University of California Press, 2004). From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 17 16:23:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 11:23:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Scholars Say College Admissions Offices Misuse Advanced Placement Data Message-ID: Scholars Say College Admissions Offices Misuse Advanced Placement Data The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.21 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i20/20a02701.htm A study finds that the high-school courses aren't always good predictors of college success By DAVID GLENN Philadelphia College-admissions officers should be cautious when weighing Advanced Placement courses on applicants' high-school transcripts, according to a working paper presented here at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association this month. The paper asserts that the mere act of taking AP courses in high school -- as distinct from scoring well on the official AP tests -- does not predict that a student will perform well in college. The paper's authors -- Kristin Klopfenstein, an assistant professor of economics at Texas Christian University, and M. Kathleen Thomas, an assistant professor of economics at Mississippi State University -- analyzed the records of more than 28,000 students who graduated from Texas high schools in 1999 and who enrolled that fall in the state's four-year public universities. The researchers posed two central questions: Did the Texas students who took Advanced Placement courses in high school have higher grades in their first year of college than their non-AP peers? And were they less likely to drop out before their sophomore year? The answers turned out to be no and no. In Ms. Klopfenstein and Ms. Thomas's statistical analysis -- described in a paper titled "The Advanced Placement Performance Advantage: Fact or Fiction?" -- all of the variance in the students' grade-point averages and dropout rates was explained by the familiar predictors of college performance: high-school grade-point averages, SAT scores, parents' education and income, and the proportion of experienced teachers in the students' high schools. After such variables were accounted for, the AP courses on the students' transcripts did not have any extra predictive power of their own. "AP experience may serve as a signal of high ability and motivation," the authors write, "but it does not by itself indicate superior academic readiness." Quality vs. Quantity Most of the best-known research about the Advanced Placement program -- including studies conducted under the auspices of the College Board, which creates and administers the official AP tests -- has tried to answer a different set of questions. Those studies have generally found that AP tests are a reliable equivalent to first-year college examinations, and that institutions should feel comfortable in awarding college credit to students who score well on the tests. The new Texas study does not challenge such classic findings about the AP program. Instead, the authors express concern that some school districts and college-admissions offices behave as if simply taking an AP course, regardless of one's performance on the AP test, will help a student do better in college. In an interview, Ms. Thomas said that she generally supports the recent expansion of the AP program and similar efforts to make high-school curricula more rigorous. She worries, however, that some school districts may be paying too little attention to the quality of their AP courses, and that high schools and colleges may have policies that are not warranted by solid evidence. In particular, Ms. Thomas cited the University of California's policy of giving extra weight to AP courses when calculating applicants' high-school grade-point averages. The university considers an A in an AP course to be worth 5.0 points, as opposed to 4.0 for an A in a standard course. The university grants such extra weight whether or not the student chose to take the official AP test at the end of the course. Ms. Thomas fears that admissions policies like California's -- together with various incentives offered by federal and state governments -- might be prompting some high schools to slap together ill-designed AP programs with poorly trained teachers. The AP program has expanded very rapidly. In 1980-81, according to the College Board, 133,702 high-school students took Advanced Placement exams. In 2003-4, the number was 1,017,396. "We suspect that there's a lot of variance in the quality of AP programs," Ms. Thomas said. "As schools move to increase access, unless their principals and administrators really understand what goes into developing that program, we can just envision cases where suddenly a teacher hears, 'Guess what? You're the new AP teacher.'" Many districts have moved to add AP courses, Ms. Thomas said, in the wake of a 1999 study by Clifford Adelman, a senior research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education, who found that "intensity of high-school curriculum" is a strong predictor of students' college performance. Ms. Thomas does not dispute Mr. Adelman's general insight, but she argues that for certain districts with large numbers of struggling students, AP courses might not be the best way to make the curriculum more rigorous. AP courses often require teachers to move rapidly through a huge amount of material, she said, and "sometimes covering a topic in depth is sacrificed for covering breadth." Predicting Success The Texas study comes on the heels of a similar paper that was released last month by scholars at the University of California. Saul Geiser, a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education, and Veronica Santelices, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Education, analyzed the records of 81,445 students who enrolled as freshmen in the university system from 1998 to 2001. Mr. Geiser and Ms. Santelices found that the admissions program's "bonus point" for high-school AP courses "bears little or no relationship to college performance." Like Ms. Klopfenstein and Ms. Thomas, the California scholars found that simply taking AP courses is not a valid predictor of college grades or persistence. The California authors also found, however, that the subgroup of students who took the official AP tests, and did well on them, performed very well in college. Strong scores on AP tests, in fact, were a better predictor of students' sophomore-year grade-point averages than any other variable except their high-school grade-point averages. (Ms. Klopfenstein and Ms. Thomas were unable to perform a similar analysis because they did not have access to the Texas students' AP-test records. The College Board might soon provide them with those data, however.) At the conference panel here, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a professor of industrial and labor relations and of economics at Cornell University, and director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, cited the importance of Ms. Klopfenstein and Ms. Thomas's line of research. He also said, however, that the study's design might have missed some important potential effects of taking Advanced Placement courses. For example, he asked, "What's the impact of having taken an AP class, or classes, on where students go to college?" In a telephone interview, Trevor Packer, executive director of the College Board's Advanced Placement program, said that while he has serious reservations about the Texas paper's methodology, he welcomes both the Texas and California studies. "More and more people have felt that AP classes are something on a student's transcript that would be meaningful in the admissions process," he said. That belief, he continued, should be scrutinized carefully because the College Board has established only the much narrower claim that students who score well on AP tests should be awarded college credit in those subjects. The Texas and California studies, he said, might be useful steps toward assessing whether taking AP courses, per se, is an accurate predictor of college performance. Mr. Packer said he wished, however, that the Texas paper had distinguished between students who did well on AP tests and those who did not. "Until Klopfenstein and Thomas separate their sample into at least two different groups," he said, "it's impossible for them to make this claim that they're making that AP doesn't impact overall college success." Further Analysis Ms. Thomas said that she and Ms. Klopfenstein are eager to conduct such a study, and hope to receive data from the College Board that would allow them to do so. But she also said that it was valid for them to look at AP students as a single group, without regard to their test scores, because that is exactly what some important institutional actors, including the University of California admissions offices, have done. Mr. Packer said he also worries that the Texas study's assessment of dropout rates might be flawed because Ms. Klopfenstein and Ms. Thomas considered all students who disappeared from the Texas records in 2000 as having dropped out. It is possible, Mr. Packer said, that some of those students might have transferred to private colleges or transferred out of state. Ms. Thomas replied that national statistics suggest that very few Texas students were mislabeled in that way. In any case, she added, such a flaw would not affect her analysis of students' first-year grade-point averages. As for Ms. Klopfenstein and Ms. Thomas's concern that the quality of AP courses is sometimes weak, Mr. Packer conceded that it is a legitimate worry, but said that more-detailed studies were needed. "What would really help administrators," he said, "would be to understand what sort of AP classrooms do impact students' college success." "Administrators need research-based help in understanding what configuration of the AP classroom is helpful for expanding access and providing increased opportunity and inclusivity, without watering down the course," he said. Such studies are indeed planned by Ms. Klopfenstein and Ms. Thomas. They would like to use their Texas data to identify particular AP programs that perform improbably well, given the school district's resources or demographics. Ms. Thomas said that studies of such programs could explain how they succeed, providing a lesson for other districts. The College Board, meanwhile, plans to publish new guidelines this year about the training that AP teachers should receive, Mr. Packer said. Ms. Klopfenstein and Ms. Thomas's paper has been submitted to a journal but has not yet completed the peer-review process. From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 17 16:26:06 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 11:26:06 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: With a Little Boy in the back Message-ID: With a Little Boy in the back http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=jf05auer [How the Hiroshima bomb could get past security today!] By Catherine Auer January/February 2005 pp. 6-8 (vol. 61, no. 01) Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists I n today's security-obsessed, post-9/11 era, one might think that it would be difficult to haul a convincing replica of an atomic bomb across the country. Not so, as John Coster-Mullen inadvertently proved in October 2004. "We drove a full-scale WMD 800 miles across the United States and no one stopped or questioned us," Coster-Mullen told me. "In fact, it was quite easy!" The Little Boy look-alike in front of a partially restored B-29 bomber at a Boeing hangar in Witchita. (Photo/John Coster-Mullen) The Little Boy look-alike in front of a partially restored B-29 bomber at a Boeing hangar in Witchita. (Photo/John Coster-Mullen) October 8, 2004: Mike Kuryla, survivor of the Indianapolis sinking, signs October 8, 2004: Mike Kuryla, survivor of the Indianapolis sinking, signs "For the boys of the Indianapolis" on the replica. (Photo/John Coster-Mullen) Jason Coster-Mullen grinds a steel section of the fake bomb in the family garage. The fiberglass nose rests on the 300-pound steel tail section at right. (Photo/John Coster-Mullen) Jason Coster-Mullen grinds a steel section of the fake bomb in the family garage. The fiberglass nose rests on the 300-pound steel tail section at right. (Photo/John Coster-Mullen) In this case, the "weapon of mass destruction" would more appropriately be called a "weapon of mass duplication"--a nearly 600-pound, shiny steel replica of "Little Boy," the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, painstakingly recreated by Coster-Mullen with help from his son Jason. Last year, the president of the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum in Utah contacted Coster-Mullen and commissioned him to create a Little Boy look-alike for the airfield's modest museum. The 509th Composite Group, which was responsible for "delivering" the atomic bombs to Japan, trained during World War II with B-29 bombers at the isolated Wendover Field. Building the imitation Little Boy--naturally without the original's inner workings--was a tremendous amount of work, Coster-Mullen said, and it gave him a "whole new appreciation for what those scientists and technicians did almost 60 years ago." With the benefit of modern metal-working tools, it took Coster-Mullen and his son a full week at a metal fabrication shop in Milwaukee to cut all the sheet metal to cover a wooden skeleton. The final assembly took the father-son team another three weeks of 12-18 hour days at what they dubbed the "Los Alamos East-Waukesha Assembly Facility"--otherwise known as the Coster-Mullens' Wisconsin garage. Building a Little Boy replica is not Coster-Mullen's first "nuclear project"; the historian is also author of Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man (reviewed in the November/December 2004 Bulletin), a book that covers the design and construction of the weapons in exhaustive detail. It's not surprising, then, that he applied the same attention to detail to his museum-bound mock bomb. "We tried to duplicate everything we saw on the actual bomb," Coster-Mullen said. He enlarged photos of the real Little Boy, taken at different angles, in order to reproduce the finer points--like the correct bolt position on the nose and the location of the pullout wires on top. "We wanted it to look as if it was just ready to be lifted into the Enola Gay," he said. Except for the bomb's antennas, which Coster-Mullen included on his replica; on the real bomb, the antennas weren't installed until after the bomb was lifted into the B-29. He wanted to match everything, right down to the shade of paint--which is harder than one might imagine, Coster-Mullen said, since there is no record of exactly what color the real Little Boy was painted. (He ended up choosing a very dark green.) When the replica was ready, Coster-Mullen loaded it into a bright yellow Penske moving truck with a forklift. As it rested on a specially made stand, he and Jason put on the finishing touches--lift lugs, safety wires, pullout wires, electrical plugs, and the antennas. The mock bomb's final destination was Wendover, but before giving his fake Little Boy to the museum, Coster-Mullen drove it to the Boeing plant in Wichita, Kansas, for a surprise appearance at a 509th Composite Group reunion. During World War II, Boeing's Wichita plant manufactured hundreds of B-29 Stratofortress bombers--the kind that dropped the atomic bombs. Since 2000, volunteers at Boeing, in conjunction with the U.S. Aviation Museum, have been restoring an original B-29 to flying condition. It was in front of this partly restored bomber, Doc, that many surviving members and widows of the 509th, including Enola Gay crew and one survivor of the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, signed the replica. But before that could happen, Coster-Mullen had to get his fake bomb past Boeing security. "They knew we were coming," Coster-Mullen said. "But here's this atomic bomb inside our truck, and we were like, gulp! Our contact drove up at the right moment and greased the skids for us to get in." When the reunion attendees saw the replica, "Jaws dropped," Coster-Mullen said. "We were not quite prepared for the response we got." Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets signed the replica with a silver permanent marker--in the same place he signed the original. Coster-Mullen recounted that upon seeing the bomb, Tibbets said half-jokingly, "I've seen one of these before." After the signing and speeches in Wichita, Coster-Mullen handed the truck keys to James Petersen, president of the Wendover Airfield Museum. His son, Thomas Petersen, is the museum's historian, who told me that when he saw the replica he thought first about "how such a 'small' thing so greatly changed the course of human history," and then chuckled at the possibility of his father being pulled over while driving the bomb replica to the museum. The Wendover Airfield Museum will exhibit the Little Boy replica in a limited-access room beginning in late 2004 as part of a special display on the 509th Composite Group. "The bomb represents an important piece of world, national, and Utah history, and we wanted to be able to help the visitors be able to make the connection from this quiet airfield to the rest of the world we live in," Petersen said. "[It's] kind of like being able to see the 'shot heard 'round the world.'" The Wendover replica is finished, but the "Waukesha Assembly Facility" may have more bomb-making days ahead--Coster-Mullen says two other sites have contacted him about building Little Boy or Fat Man replicas. Catherine Auer is the Bulletin's managing editor. From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 17 16:27:18 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 11:27:18 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Boston Globe: The irresistible, singable, stick-in-your-mindable jingle is dead Message-ID: The irresistible, singable, stick-in-your-mindable jingle is dead http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2005/01/09/the_irresistible_singable_stick_in_your_mindable_jingle_is_dead?mode=PF With more and more pop songs selling products, the world of advertising is being turned upside down. By Joan Anderman, Globe Staff | January 9, 2005 In 1929, a barbershop quartet in Minneapolis sang a song about breakfast cereal on the radio. So began the long, lucrative, endearing, and excruciating heyday of the jingle, when cheerful tunes about things for sale permanently lodged themselves in people's brains. Humming consumers would then go out and buy Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat, or double their pleasure with Doublemint gum, or be a Pepper. But the jingle, as anyone with a television knows, is a vanishing art form. It is too quaint, too corny, too oldschool for our ironic times. Naming your product in a commercial for your product is just tacky, say advertising executives. Modern pitchmen prefer pop songs that create a mood or spark an emotional association or conjure up some sort of vague but potent lifestyle-oriented craving that, if all goes as planned, attaches to a product and translates to a sale. Which leaves the jingle writers scrambling to adapt to a world that has suddenly turned its back on their wares. How suddenly? Ten years ago Eric Korte, vice president and music director at the ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, was commissioning original music for 90 percent of the company's campaigns. This year, more than half of his workload involves licensing published songs, and the trend is only gaining momentum. "The jingle," Korte says, "is dead." Of course there are exceptions. The Oscar Mayer wiener theme has been in constant rotation since 1963, and good money says everyone reading this newspaper can sing it start to finish. And jingles are still vital in local and regional markets. Notes Jon Aldrich, who teaches what he believes is the world's only jingle writing course at Berklee College of Music and pens jingles for K-B toys, Filene's, and Jordan's Furniture: "Everyone knows about Coca-Cola and McDonald's. They don't need ditties about their stuff. But Joe's Pizza Place needs to tell people where they are." In New York and LA, however, music houses -- the companies that for decades have supplied the advertising industry with original music to accompany their national television and radio commercials -- are closing their doors in droves. Phil Ashley, cofounder of New York-based Rocket Music, folded his company in 2002. After creating jingles for Pepsi, Pizza Hut, Visa, Federal Express, KFC, and Gillette, Ashley says his decision was a simple matter of confronting reality. Demand for custom music was dwindling. Fees were plummeting. During his last few years in business, instead of composing original tunes, Ashley was rearranging "Route 66" for Johnny Rotten to sing in a Mountain Dew spot. Or not getting called at all. "It's a cultural change. It's history moving on," says Ashley. "We're competing against a much larger pot of sources, and it just doesn't make sense to bang our heads against the wall. I know some people in my field are waiting for a better day. But I don't think it's likely to come." For the shrinking circle of diehards, the business model has become downright Darwinian -- less a question of who's writing the stickiest song and more about who's able to adapt to the changing environment. Joey Levine is a former bubblegum-pop songwriter ("Sugar Sugar" and "Mony Mony" are his confections) who founded Crushing Music, the field's biggest commercial music house, in the late 1970s. Levine's first jingle was an inescapable Wheaties spot ("Too bad you didn't have your . . .") and over the next two decades he created indelible themes for the Peter Paul candy company ("Sometimes you feel like a nut"), Toyota ("You asked for it, you got it" and "Oh, what a feeling"), Budweiser ("This Bud's for you"), and Diet Coke ("Just for the taste of it"). Like Ashley, Levine found himself pouring more and more time into writing new arrangements for cover songs: Mike and the Mechanics' "All I Need Is a Miracle" for Verizon, for example, and the "Get Smart" theme for American Express. He realized he'd have to branch out even further and totally revamp the services he offered if he wanted to stay in business. So Levine accepted work penning themes and underscores for television programs. "I'm a songwriter by trade, and I miss writing songs," Levine says. "Change is tough, but necessary, so you don't become obsolete. My business is significantly smaller. It's hard to survive. The record labels are music houses now." The use of pop songs in advertising isn't new. What's changed is the willingness -- or more accurately, the eagerness -- of labels and artists to allow their material to be licensed for commercial purposes. Case in point: In the 1980s, Sting refused to allow the lyrics to the Police song "Don't Stand So Close to Me" to be used in a deodorant ad. In 2000, a major Jaguar campaign featured the rock star meditating in the back seat of an S-Type to the tune of his song "Desert Rose." That track had been released a year earlier on the album "Brand New Day," a sluggish seller that rocketed up the charts on the heels of the ad campaign. Today, the stigma (of a musician being perceived as a sellout) and the once steep price tag attached to this collision of art and commerce have been vastly diminished -- fueled in large part by years of mounting losses in the recording industry. "Once upon a time [selling a song to an advertiser] was a pact with the devil," says Gregory Grene, music producer at Foote Cone & Belding, whose clients include Hilton, Kraft, Taco Bell, and Diet Coke. "Now totally legitimate artists are thrilled to perform mini-concerts for ad people. The whole paradigm has shifted. The labels have no money to promote music. They're the driving force behind this." Indeed. Desperate for alternative promotional and revenue sources, the major record labels have quietly established marketing units that exist exclusively to reach out to potential advertising partners. Keith D'Arcy was hired by Sony/BMG in April to pitch recordings from the company's catalog and respond to the needs of ad agencies searching for music. He's one of 33 employees at Sony/BMG who work with advertisers. "We're creative experts that are on call to the ad community," says D'Arcy. "Eric Korte [at Saatchi] can call me with a concept and within three hours I'll have a compilation of songs to upload for him. It used to be that only big songs got licensed, but now even the major labels are paying attention to the opportunity that's created by having a new band in a cool ad." And yet, Darcy concedes, one of the key things that's been sacrificed in the glut of pop music licensing is the most basic of advertising goals: product branding. Familiar songs may evoke an emotional response -- targeting baby boomers with classic rock tunes has been especially popular in recent years, with Led Zeppelin's "Rock 'n' Roll" careening through Cadillac commercials and the Rolling Stones singing "Start Me Up" for Microsoft. But there's rarely an explicit association between the song and the product being pitched, and that can cut both ways. On the one hand, companies are increasingly looking at unorthodox ways of reaching a generation of young, sophisticated consumers who are turned off by traditional advertising -- which accounts for the recent collaboration between mainstream retailer Kmart and the cutting-edge Danish garage rock band the Raveonettes. "You're trying to create a club for people who don't want to join clubs," says Ron Lawner, CEO of Boston-based Arnold Advertising, whose 1999 VW campaign using British singer-songwriter Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" sparked a huge surge in the late artist's album sales. "We've moved on to messaging that includes more of your life than just the product." But the connection -- like so many aspects of modern life -- is ephemeral. D'Arcy notes that advertisers are licensing songs for shorter and shorter periods of time, sometimes just a few weeks, and considering the speed at which modern culture moves and changes, the ad world's constantly shifting landscape of rock tunes makes a certain sense. One has to wonder if product loyalty is headed in the same direction: destined to become as fleeting as the shelf life of a pop song. The bottom line is we're in a hurry. It takes much longer for a company to build equity -- adspeak for audience familiarity -- with an original jingle than a pop tune, which comes with an immediately captive audience. And in practical terms it takes much longer to write and produce an original piece of music -- which is roughly the equivalent of a horse and buggy in these days of instantly downloadable digital music files. The future of the jingle looks bleak, but Levine isn't giving up. He's downsized Crushing Music from 10 staff writers to a revolving stable of freelancers who can crank out musical moods on demand, from abstract sound designs -- a few beats on a synth pad, a chorus of whooshes -- to faux Bowie. He's radically reduced his once-labyrinthian network of studios. And in what is perhaps the most telling nod to the jingle writer's decline, after nearly 30 years in business Levine is changing his company's name. "Certain people have certain perceptions. If I put this under a new banner, and show you new people, some young lions, you never know," Levine says. "I might get hotter." Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman at globe.com From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 17 16:29:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 11:29:51 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New York: Louis Auchincloss, the Last of the Gentlemen Novelists Message-ID: Louis Auchincloss, the Last of the Gentlemen Novelists http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/arts/books/10790/index.html Feature Old School Meet Louis Auchincloss, the last of the gentlemen novelists. What happens to a moral realist when the world alters around him? By [33]Boris Kachka Two things defined the Auchincloss family, declares Louis Auchinclossretired lawyer, ancient patrician, prolific novelist of mannersin a perfect mid-Atlantic accent. One is that they ran to a very high degree in the male line. Most families disappear through the distaff side. The other signature Auchincloss trait is the familys self-sufficiency. While the Scots are routinely credited these days with inventing America, this particular clandescended from Paisley native Hugh Auchincloss, who emigrated in 1803was carefully preoccupied with burnishing its own wealth and reputation. There was no Auchincloss fortune, says the writer dryly as we sit together on overstuffed sofas. Each generation either made or married its own money. There isnt a bum in the lot. Theyve always got an eye for the main chance. Theyre not romantics; they dont take chances. Nor do the Carnochansthe Scots-American family that inhabits the 87-year-old authors 60th (and most genealogically themed) book, East Side Story. Instead, they make teeth-gritting sacrifices in the face of moral and familial dilemmas in scenes that stretch across five generations. Over his long writing life, Auchincloss has been praisedand as often dismissedfor his chronicles of a ruling class thats pretty much dead and buried. In response, the novelist is equal parts modesty and defiance, insisting that when people say your subject is limited, its because they dont like it. Unless, of course, the writing is transcendent. A lot of people had it in for Proust because he wrote about dukes and duchesses, says Auchincloss. But Proust was a great writer, for all his faults, and I dont think Im that. I know a great writer when I see one. The Manhattan native (always the Upper East Side) lives alone in a Park Avenue top-floor three-bedroom apartment. He shows me various artistic heirlooms: an original Audubon acquired for $100 in his Yale days (now worth several thousand); a portrait of his great-grandfather Charles H. Russell, president of the long-gone Bank of Commerce, by realist William Sidney Mount; a painting, probably a Jean-Marc Nattier, that could be worth a hundred thousand but that the Met cant verify. Wildenstein says its authentic, Auchincloss says, but I cant sell it for ten cents. Up on a sagging shelf are his most personal relics60-odd books in a row, which his wife had bound in olive-green leather. She said, If I had known you were going to write so many, I wouldnt have gotten into this. But since she died, Ive continued it myself. By any valuation, Auchinclosss life would seem richthough, like the lives of his characters, riddled with compromises. Having attended Groton and Yale, he hastily entered law school after his first manuscript was rejected. When he finally published a novel, it was under a pseudonym at his embarrassed fathers insistence. Besides his law career (he retired sixteen years ago as a partner in Hawkins Delafield & Wood), Auchincloss has served terms as chairman of the board at the Museum of the City of New York and president of the Academy of Arts and Letters (which, like any organization you run, usually rolls along unless you hit a snag or a crisis). His strongest works of fiction, which critics interpreted as modeled on such figures as columnist Walter Lippmann and Groton headmaster the Reverend Endicott Peabody, go some distance toward bolstering his claim to be examining not just a diminished ethnic group but the crucial role of the twentieth centurys managerial classthose dutiful, soft-spoken oarsmen who guided the ships of state and commerce. Consider Gordon, one of the several beta Carnochans in the book casting about for a clear aim in life. In childhood, he takes the fall for his deceitful cousin David over a broken toy. Accepting his lot, Gordon spends the rest of his life loyally following David through Yale and Skull and Bones to a prestigious law firm. We expect judgment to come down on David; instead, Gordon is professionally ruined by depressive episodes compounded by Davids betrayals. It seemed a final and conclusive answer to what the world was really like, Auchincloss writes of Gordon. He could only live with it. The resignation that courses through East Side Story seems earned. But where Gordon flamed out, Auchinclosss star has gradually faded. In 1965, his novel The Rector of Justin was nominated for both a Pulitzer and a National Book Award. Yet even as the plaudits piled up, the moralizing novelist was being overtaken by peers like Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and Vladimir Nabokov. Four decades later, the literary canon seems divided between the hefty books of these writers macho descendants and small-scale psychosexual dramas of the American domestic scene. For all its characters noble struggles, Auchinclosss work yields neither the bravura visions of the first nor the incisive characterizations of the second. Hes a dogged realist whose fictional world doesnt seem so real anymore. Auchincloss allows that on some fronts, his critics have a point. I think I have a tendency to publish too soon, he muses. Some of them could have been quite improved if Id held them up for a year. Still, the novelist bristles at the notion that he and his kin are obsolete. Subject matter aside, he argues, hes not so far off from John UpdikeHe might be writing in 1900or even Mailer (if you leave out the four-letter words). Auchinclosss great subject is bygone morality, but not as the red states would have it. Morals to a great number of people are entirely confined to sex, and thats a thing I leave out completely, he says. Professional morality is what he mourns: in colleges, in law firms, on Wall Street. When Martha Stewart comes out of jail, everybody will greet her with kisses and lovethat, to Auchincloss, is a moral failure. The authors lament couldnt be timelier, of course. Yet even his most rapacious characters are still bound by public virtue. Gordons tormentor, David, uses his influence to become a paragon of altruismleading a legal crusade in defense of Japanese internees during World War IIwhile his son Ronny hews to the (shifting) middle ground between hippies and Red-baiters. In his morality, Ronny is a strikingly contemporary character for Auchincloss, but as a noble lawyer and a representative of the Golden Mean, he still seems like a throwback; hed have little to say about the status-seekers and swingers so darkly drawn in the work of Wasp colleagues like Tom Wolfe and Rick Moody. The Wasps havent waned, Auchincloss arguesand the intensity of his manner, his air of conviction, make his words convincing. Theyve lost their monopoly. But if Auchincloss insists that little has changed, he does acknowledge that there couldnt be another writer like him today. The author would scribble novels into his notebook in his white-shoe office or while waiting for the judge to call out orders. I dont think I could do that if I were practicing today, he says, noting that his lawyer-son could no more write a novel than he could climb to the moon. From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 17 16:30:46 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 11:30:46 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Ulan Bator Journal: The Mongolians Are Coming to China! With Heavy Metal! Message-ID: Ulan Bator Journal: The Mongolians Are Coming to China! With Heavy Metal! NYT November 26, 2004 By JAMES BROOKE ULAN BATOR, Mongolia - China built the Great Wall more than 2,000 years ago to keep out invaders from the north. But the Chinese are having a harder time repulsing modern interlopers like these: long-haired Mongolian men in black, whose office d?cor features a wolf pelt, a portrait of Genghis Khan and a music store poster of Eminem. So the Chinese police got nervous when they heard that Hurd was crossing the Gobi Desert, coming down from Mongolia, 600 miles to the north. With their new hit CD, "I Was Born in Mongolia," Hurd, a heavy metal, Mongolian-pride group, was coming for a three-day tour, culminating Nov. 1 with a performance in Hohhot, capital of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. "The morning we were to get on the train, the translator guy called and said 'Your performances are cancelled,' " Damba Ganbayar, Hurd's keyboardist and producer, said glumly as he lounged in a white plastic chair. "He said, 'I will call with details.' I never got the details." The details, according to reports from Hohhot, were that riot policemen and trucks surrounded the college campus where the group was to play. They checked identity cards, detained four people overnight and dispersed about 2,000 frustrated concertgoers into the autumn night. In the next several days, the Chinese authorities shut down three Mongolian-language chat forums, according to the Southern Mongolia Human Rights Information Center, a New York-based group that tracks "Chinese colonialism" in what some call the southern end of Greater Mongolia. "Banned in Hohhot" may not have an epic ring to it, but it is a sign of the times. With reports of local protests almost daily fare in China, the authorities are increasingly nervous also about ethnic minorities. In late October, several days of fighting erupted between Hui Muslims and Han Chinese - China's dominant ethnic group - in central Henan Province after a traffic accident. During the 1960's, the Chinese-Soviet split kept Mongolia, a Soviet satellite nation, apart from China's Inner Mongolia. Today, the Chinese region is home to four million ethnic Mongolians, almost double the 2.5 million in the country of Mongolia. But Chinese migration to Inner Mongolia over the years has left the ethnic Mongolians there vastly outnumbered by 18 million Han Chinese. In recent years, barriers have gone down between those two Mongolias as China has become its northern neighbor's largest trading partner and foreign investor. With Inner Mongolia's economy growing by 22 percent during the first nine months of this year, officials in the two Mongolias agreed in October to open a free-trade zone where the Trans-Mongolian Railway crosses into China. On the cultural front, music groups from here often appear on Inner Mongolia's Mongolian-language channel. Hurd, which means speed, has done three concert tours in Inner Mongolia since 2000. It claims to be the most popular rock group for Mongolians on both sides of the border. "In 2000, it was very Soviet-style, with lots of policemen around with flashlights, very disciplined concerts," Mr. Damba Ganbayar recalled. "Later, it became more relaxed, like normal rock concerts." "Even so, they advised us not to say, 'We Mongolians are all together!' or 'All Mongolians rise up and shout!' " the keyboardist continued. "People would shout, 'Genghis!' But it was nothing political." But on later visits south of the border, he noticed a growth in Mongol pride. "More and more the young people say, 'We want to keep the Mongolian language and the traditions,' " he said. "I met a guy with a Mongolian name, and he shouted, 'I am Mongolian!' - in Chinese. I met many like that." Encounters between Mongolians and Inner Mongolians are a bit like encounters between Mexicans and New Mexicans. Many Mongols here say they consider Inner Mongolians to be more Chinese than Mongolian. When people here travel south, they do not say they are going to Inner Mongolia, but to China. "We don't have an Inner Mongolian problem," a Chinese diplomat in the region said in an interview. "Most of the Inner Mongolian population has been 'Han-ized.' They speak Chinese, think like Chinese. Hohhot is like any other Chinese city." Munh-Orgil Tsend, Mongolia's foreign minister, said in an interview, "For us, Inner Mongolia is a province of China that happens to have ethnic brother on other side of the border." On the northern side of the border, Hurd's nationalist identity has grown over the last two years, a time when the group did not record any new songs. "Hurd's national pride and love of homeland takes the ethos of Bruce Springsteen's 'Born in the U.S.A.' to a new level," said Layton Croft, an American foundation representative and musician here, who attended one of their concerts in October. "There is a loyal, mostly rural, Mongolian fan base for such music." Hurd's Mongol nationalism is aimed at that audience: young Mongolians who now leave the country for work, the men in construction in South Korea, the women as 'hostesses' in Macao. But the "I Was Born in Mongolia" CD, with its paeans to a "land of great legendary heroes," came out here as ethnic Mongolians in China were discovering that a Han Chinese-owned company was taking over administration of the Genghis Khan Mausoleum, the region's biggest tourist money-maker. Entrusted to the care of the Darhad Mongolian tribe since 1696, this shrine holds relics of the great conqueror, including his saddle and his black bow. The actual burial place of Genghis Khan, who died in 1227, is not known, and has been the object of several archeological expeditions. But construction of a new "mausoleum" by Dong Lian, the Chinese company, prompted protests by Mongolians who see the move as another power grab by Chinese settlers. >From the Chinese side, "anything associated with nationalism, separatism, political rights, they want to suppress it," said an Inner Mongolian trader here who asked not to be identified. In the best-known case, a bookstore owner who goes by one name, Hada, is serving a 15-year sentence after being convicted of separatism in 1996. But with the canceling of concerts by Hurd and Horda, an Inner Mongolian band, some fear new restraints on Mongolian cultural expression. "The government is shutting down a lot of music shops, confiscating a lot of music tapes," said Enhebatu Togochog, who runs the Southern Mongolian information center in New York. "They say they are purifying the cultural market." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/26/international/asia/26mongolia.html From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 17 16:32:31 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 11:32:31 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Property Rights Law May Alter Oregon Landscape Message-ID: Property Rights Law May Alter Oregon Landscape NYT November 26, 2004 By FELICITY BARRINGER [Note date. I continue to be dubious about judges running things, even and especially even, when they agree with me. A little economics is a dangerous thing.] PORTLAND, Ore., Nov. 20 - Over the past three decades, Oregon has earned a reputation for having the most restrictive land-use rules in the nation. Housing was grouped in and near the cities, while vast parcels of farmland and forests were untouched by so much as a suburban cul-de-sac. Environmentalists and advocates for "smart growth" cheered the ever-growing list of rules as visionary, while some landowners, timber companies and political allies cried foul. But in a matter of days, the landowners will get a chance to turn the tables. Under a ballot measure approved on Nov. 2, property owners who can prove that environmental or zoning rules have hurt their investments can force the government to compensate them for the losses - or get an exemption from the rules. Supporters of the measure, which passed 60 percent to 40 percent, call it a landmark in a 30-year battle over property rights. "I've been getting calls from California, Idaho, Washington, Alaska and Wisconsin," said Ross Day, a Portland lawyer for the conservative group Oregonians in Action who co-wrote the law, Ballot Measure 37. "They all want to find out what our secret recipe was to get it passed." Whatever the benefits of Oregon's land-use rules, Mr. Day added, "the people paying the cost are property owners." "If Enron does something like this, people call it theft," he said. "If Oregon does it, they call it land-use planning." Richard J. Lazarus, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center who specializes in environmental law, called the measure a blunt instrument that could undermine all zoning and environmental protections and undercut land values. "If you can build a little Houston anywhere, or a gravel pit or a shopping center next to your home, you don't have maximization of property values," Professor Lazarus said. "If you fail to regulate now, you're reducing property values for future Oregonians," he continued. "A lot of what government is doing in environmental protection is at least trying to balance the needs of present and future generations." The new law, Professor Lazarus said, "is one of those very simple solutions, but, boy, did they open a can of worms." Conservatives across the country have championed the idea of compensation for aggrieved landowners since at least the mid-1990's and the 1994 Republican "Contract With America." Four states have laws dating from that period that provide some compensation for affected property owners. "In Oregon, they're serious," said Michael M. Berger, a partner in the Los Angeles law firm of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. "It helps make people sit up and take notice that this is something they have to deal with. This is a big shock to the body politic - it's a very red-state thing to do, and Oregon is very blue, so this shows it cut across everyone." Both sides expect the measure to survive judicial scrutiny, and the state and local governments are to start fielding claims on Dec. 2. If claims are found to be valid and the government will not or cannot pay, it must instead waive any restrictions that went into force after the owners - or their parents or grandparents - acquired the land. Some fear that the state will be unable to pay and that hillsides in the Cascades now bristling with fir trees and pear orchards could sprout a crop of McMansions, Wal-Marts or resort condominiums in a few years. The supporters of the new law successfully depicted the current plight of property owners in a campaign with a decidedly populist edge. One advertisement showed a woman penalized for cutting blackberry bushes - potential wildlife habitat - in her backyard in Portland. Another woman, Dorothy English, 92, was a fixture on drive-time radio advertisements in the final week of the campaign. Ms. English bought land in the hills west of Portland in 1953 and is still fighting for the right to carve several lucrative building lots out of the 20 acres she has left. "They've made fools of people in this state," she said last Wednesday. "I've always been fighting the government and I'm not going to stop." The Hood River Valley, 60 miles east of Portland and the source of more than a third of the nation's Bosc pears, is one of the places that could be most affected. Many of the farmers are the third or fourth generations of their families to work the same land. Most land-use regulation came after their families did, so their claims could be extensive and expensive. The valley nestles along the Columbia River Gorge, a strong draw for windsurfers; the development pressure is strong. Sitting in their living room in the town of Hood River, overlooking fields newly planted in cherries, John Benton and his wife, Julie, both 57, said that their income was eroding and that their 100-acre farm had "barely supported us." The Bentons, whose family ownership dates to 1910, said that orchard farmers like themselves could not make a living without an infusion of cash from selling land for home construction. By contrast, their neighbor Fritz VonLubken, who is 69 and bought his orchards from a grandfather who came to the area in 1912, said he believed that farmland needed to be preserved. "You zone for industrial districts," Mr. VonLubken said. "Well, farming is an industry. It needs to be protected. We're a high-value business, and this is the best location for us." Mike McCarthy, whose 250 acres scattered on the northeastern apron of Mount Hood produce a plentiful crop of pears, said, "These are the most productive soils in Oregon," and, as such, were irreplaceable. The success of the ballot measure has led advocates of planning to do some soul searching. It won a majority in all 35 of the state's counties except the one that encompasses Corvallis and Oregon State University and got a thin majority even in the progressive city of Portland. "It definitely calls into question a lot of the mechanisms we have now," said David Bragdon, the president of the Metro Council, which sets the growth parameters for 460 square miles in three metropolitan Portland counties. "And it undermines the mechanisms we have." Mr. Bragdon added, "There is a resentment in rural areas of urban policy makers and the urban elite." The long-used planning philosophy is wryly called "timberland, farmland and ring around the city." Each county has established "urban growth boundaries" around its cities and has tried to keep most development to areas within them. On farmland, houses can be built only under strict conditions - for instance, the buyer must show that he can generate $80,000 in annual gross income from farming for a period of years before he can build. Nonfarm dwellings are allowed only in areas with poor soil. In return, farmers receive substantial property tax breaks; their land may be assessed at as little as 0.5 percent of land where development is encouraged. Even if they succeed, farmers who fight to have the urban growth boundary extended to their lands must pay a one-time tax amounting to perhaps 7.5 percent of the land's new value - in addition to federal and state capital gains taxes on the sale of the property. Thanks to such tight policies, suburban sprawl has been largely banished in Oregon. Gov. Theodore R. Kulongoski, a Democrat who opposed the compensation measure, said last week that he would push to have claims paid rather than tear holes in the state's land-use system. But, like many other states, Oregon is strapped. To pay the claims, some pro-planning forces suggest setting high taxes on the profits on newly developable land. If, instead, the government grants exemptions to land-use rules, many property owners might want to sell for the ready profit. Mr. VonLubken, like Professor Lazarus, said he believed that the first wave of farmland sales would be the most lucrative and that those new residents, having paid a premium for bucolic splendor, would support regulation to help keep a second wave of newcomers away. The state's population grew 20.4 percent in the 1990's, to about 3.4 million people in 2000. The federal government, largely through the Forest Service, is the largest landowner in Oregon; state, tribal and federal lands constitute about 55 percent of the state's total acreage. Of the remaining 27.7 million acres of privately held land, 56 percent is farmland. Others states that allow for compensation for aggrieved property owners are Florida, Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. But they set a threshold, for instance a 25 percent reduction in a property's value, and will pay only for losses caused by new land-use rules. The retroactive feature of the Oregon law could affect many more people. Until the claims start, though, no one will hazard a guess at just how much land will be affected, and at what cost. "It's no coincidence that they passed this Measure 37 in a state that has prided itself on having the most extensive planning and regulatory scheme for rural lands," said J. David Breemer, a staff lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative advocacy organization. "This type of initiative and legislation will be more common now." The planners, however, are still flying their flags. "Quality of life is something that is shared," said Robert Liberty, a former president of 1,000 Friends of Oregon, an ardent pro-planning group, who was just elected to the board of the Portland regional planning agency. "A golf course is not. A four-car garage is not. One of the best things about the planning process is that it makes a better community for everyone, regardless of income." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/26/national/26property.html From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 17 16:32:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 11:32:58 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Our Towns: On Campus, Hanging Out by Logging On Message-ID: Our Towns: On Campus, Hanging Out by Logging On NYT December 1, 2004 By PETER APPLEBOME Princeton, N.J. LIKE many addictions, it begins innocently enough. A tentative experiment here, a repeat visit there. Before too long, only the strong survive. "At the beginning of the year you had people checking every five minutes to see if they had any new friends," said Isabel Wilkinson, a Princeton University freshman from New York City. "I like to think it's subsided a little, but it's still heinous in terms of procrastination or wasting time. Last night I couldn't sleep, so I went on for a half-hour or 45 minutes." For those who assume that (A) the Internet has become the world's most effective way to waste time and that (B) college students now are probably having more fun than when you were there, consider the reigning college obsession, a phenomenon so hot that The Daily Princetonian editorialized that it's "possibly the biggest word-of-mouth trend to hit campus since St. Ives Medicated Apricot Scrub found its way into the women's bathrooms." That would be Thefacebook.com, a Web site that began 10 months ago with five Harvard students and is now the most popular way to either network or waste time for a million college students at around 300 colleges, from Yale to the University of the Pacific. Back when college students didn't all wander around campus with cellphones attached to their ears, you enrolled in college and got your facebook, a slim volume filled with sanitized high school graduation photos of your fellow freshmen. Thefacebook.com still has faces, even if some of the Princeton ones are of Don King, smiley stick figures or some girl who looks as though she's waking up from a night of downing tequila. Students sign up from their campus e-mail address (only school networks are accepted) and are able to visit the listing of everyone who signs up at their school, with thumbnail links (just name and picture) to students at all the other colleges. Diversions include profiles and photos you can update whenever the mood hits, lists of favorite movies and books, semi-imaginary groups to join online, course lists, political views, relationship status, and, most important, lists of everyone's friends both at your school and at any others people care to cite. It's like the Swiss Army knife of procrastination. So, for example, Princeton students with a few hours on their hands can sit in their dorms and check out the profiles of the 395 members of People Against Popped Collars (the preppy look of rolling up the collar of your knit shirt) or the mere 28 members of Princetonians for Popped Collars. He or she could join groups like People Against Groups (15 members, first meeting July 23, 2025), Chicagoans Sick of Suburbanites Saying They're From Chicago, Future Trophy Wives of America and groups actually about real things like politics or the outdoors. Users could check out all the people who cite "Jane Eyre" as a favorite book (about 46), Coldplay as a favorite band (about 268) or "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" as a favorite movie (6). List members can peruse one another's pictures, sexy and glamorous, ironic and cool or goofy or obscene, and most important, play status roulette, checking out who has the most and coolest friends. In a bit of online Darwinism, students can ask anyone they know, sort of know or would like to know to be on their official friends list with no guarantee they'll say yes. "It's definitely about status, but if you have too many people on your friends list, it just looks dorky," said Scott Peper, a freshman from Grandview, N.Y. "If you have 230 friends, you're taking it way too seriously." GIVEN the ubiquity of cellphones, instant messaging and a million Internet diversions, it could be argued that the last thing students need is another virtual community. "It's like a way to sort of interact with people without really interacting with them," said Alicia Agnoli, a senior from Martha's Vineyard. But Evan Baehr, a senior who has done a survey of campus politics and sexual mores by using Thefacebook.com, figures that it more or less does what promoters say it does: provide information that helps people make friends and form bonds. Still, some don't quite see the point. "Before I got here it was a way to get to know people," said Amanda Rinderle, a freshman from Amherst, Mass. "But once you're here it sort of loses its purpose. Why not just talk to them and get to know them?" E-mail: peappl at nytimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/01/nyregion/01towns.html From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 17 16:37:13 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 11:37:13 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: If No Icelanders Admit to Feeling Blue, Are They? Message-ID: If No Icelanders Admit to Feeling Blue, Are They? NYT December 2, 2004 By SARAH LYALL REYKJAVIK, Iceland - What do residents of the world's northernmost capital do to stave off depression in the dead of winter, when darkness settles over them like a shroud? "Depression? I don't think I have ever experienced feeling depressed," declared Gustaf Adolf Hjaltason, a maritime surveyor who spends his evenings coaching a high-school swimming team. "When you survey a ship in the dark, in fact, you can't see as much, and it's cold and it feels like the middle of the night," he went on, trying to articulate what he likes about winter, and beginning to sound a bit less chipper. "Of course, you get used to everything." Iceland demands that its residents get used to things, and they respond with a Viking stoicism born of more than 1,000 years of living on inhospitable volcanic rock. They are used to being scarcely populated - some 290,000 people, at last count, spread over 39,756 square miles. They are used to jokes about elves, and to eating things like reindeer p?t? and dried puffin strips. Most of all, they are inured, as the great Icelandic novelist Halldor Laxness put it, to "the monotony of horizonless winter days." Studies conducted over the last several years have found that Icelanders suffer less from winter-related depression than people in many southern climates, including those on the East Coast of the United States. "It seems they can manage and keep going in the wintertime; they don't get slowed down and don't become apathetic," said Andres Magnusson, a psychiatrist at the University of Iceland who has worked on several studies on Icelanders and depression. While some have speculated that their cheeriness is due to high fish consumption, Mr. Magnusson said that it appeared to be a genetic adaptation, the result of centuries of living in adverse lighting conditions. Many Icelanders claim that winter, which lasts until May and at its height provides only four hours of feeble light a day, is their favorite season. They look forward, they say, to snuggling up by candlelight in front of their geothermally powered radiators. (Few Icelandic homes have fireplaces.) "It can be very romantic," said Bryndi Olfafsdottir, who works at a public swimming pool. "Actually, though, I would like to live in Spain." To some, the darkness is a relief. "As a matter of fact, when summer is finished - when it has been two months of nothing but brightness - then I'm waiting for the winter," said 26-year-old Theodor Kristjansson, frothing up some cappuccinos at the Caf? Paris in downtown Reykjavik. "It's more cozy." Of course, "a lot of people just watch TV, sleep and work," he conceded. "When you wake up it's dark, and when you finish work it's dark, and you never know what time it is. I get very tired." He was almost ready to talk himself out of his stated position. "I'd like to go someplace that's not Iceland," he said suddenly, "although I think I would always come back." Sitting at his usual table at the cafe with his usual entourage of five coffee-drinking friends, Gunnar Dal, a renowned novelist and philosopher, described the darkness as "just another shade of light." When you commune alone with the cold and the dark under the starry Icelandic sky, he said, "you're nearer to your own soul; you realize that you're there for a purpose. "Sometimes people say they get depressive, but for me depression is a very powerful creator," he continued. "You can be very happy even when you're depressed. Laughing people aren't necessarily happy, and a crying man is not necessarily sad." Mr. Dal, 82, recommends daily swigs of cod-liver oil - usually referred to here as Lysi, after the most popular brand, as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola - as a surefire mood enhancer, better than Prozac. "It's almost as good as garlic," he said. Across town, Siggi Gislason was partaking of his own form of antidepressive therapy: soaking in an outdoor geothermal pool in a tiny Speedo bathing suit as freezing winds slapped him on the face. Chatting in such pools, which are like hot tubs without the swingers (or Californians), is a popular social activity during the long winter nights. "There are nice things to the winter," said Mr. Gislason, who is 26 and is studying for a master's degree in civil engineering. "Yesterday, I was coming home from work and I saw the Northern Lights. I felt like a small creature in a big world, part of a great creation." Handling the winter darkness, Mr. Gislason said, requires the same set of skills as negotiating the giddy constant light of summer, without the urgent need for heavy curtains. Einar Arason, Mr. Gislason's 34-year-old neighbor in the hot pot, said he liked staying at home and reading. Most Icelandic books are published just before Christmas, when book buying skyrockets. "I'm not the outgoing type, always doing stuff socially," said Mr. Arason, a teacher. He has never considered the dark an issue. "For we who live here, it's always been like this," he said. So, does the fact that no one in Iceland admits to being depressed mean that no one is, in fact, depressed? Don't believe it, said Bjorg Sveinsdottir, a psychotherapist finishing her coffee at Caf? Paris. Having overheard other customers extolling the joys of darkness, she felt compelled to present an alternative view. When the sky is black, she said, her patients can get very blue. "In many surveys, Icelandic people come across as happy people," Ms. Sveinsdottir said. "Everyone wants to show a brave face. If you say that you are sad, then you are seen as being weak. It's a way of coping, with gritted teeth." Ms. Sveinsdottir, who admitted to being perhaps "too in touch with my emotions," said she was having trouble readjusting to the Icelandic winter after living for a time in London. That city has its own light-related issues, but all things are relative. "In London, the climate was wonderful compared to here," Ms. Sveinsdottir said wistfully. "I felt I was living in paradise." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/02/international/europe/02iceland.html From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 17 16:38:36 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 11:38:36 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] TCS: Faculty Clubs and Church Pews Message-ID: Faculty Clubs and Church Pews http://remotefarm.techcentralstation.com/112904A.html By William J. Stuntz Published 11/29/2004 The past few months have seen a lot of talk about red and blue America, mostly by people on one side of the partisan divide who find the other side a mystery. It isn't a mystery to me, because I live on both sides. For the past twenty years, I've belonged to evangelical Protestant churches, the kind where George W. Bush rolled up huge majorities. And for the past eighteen years, I've worked in secular universities where one can hardly believe that Bush voters exist. Evangelical churches are red America at its reddest. And universities, especially the ones in New England (where I work now), are as blue as the bluest sky. Not surprisingly, each of these institutions is enemy territory to the other. But the enmity is needless. It may be a sign that I'm terminally weird, but I love them both, passionately. And I think that if my church friends and my university friends got to know each other, they'd find a lot to like and admire. More to the point, the representatives of each side would learn something important and useful from the other side. These institutions may be red and blue now. But their natural color is purple. You wouldn't know it from talking to the people who populate universities or fill church pews. A lot of my church friends think universities represent the forces of darkness. Law schools -- my corner of the academic world -- are particularly suspect. A fellow singer in a church choir once asked me what I did for a living. When I told her, she said, "A Christian lawyer? Isn't that sort of like being a Christian prostitute? I mean, you can't really do that, right?" She wasn't kidding. And if I had said no, you don't understand; I'm a law professor, not a lawyer, I'm pretty sure that would not have helped matters. ("Oh, so you train people to be prostitutes") You hear the same kinds of comments running in the other direction. Some years ago a faculty colleague and I were talking about religion and politics, and this colleague said "You know, I think you're the first Christian I've ever met who isn't stupid." My professor friend wasn't kidding either. I've had other conversations like these -- albeit usually a little more tactful -- on both sides, a dozen times over the years. Maybe two dozen. People in each of these two worlds find the other frightening, and appalling. All of us are appalling, I suppose, but these reactions are mostly due to ignorance. Most of my Christian friends have no clue what goes on in faculty clubs. And my colleagues in faculty offices cannot imagine what happens in those evangelical churches on Sunday morning. In both cases, the truth is surprisingly attractive. And surprisingly similar: Churches and universities are the two twenty-first century American enterprises that care most about ideas, about language, and about understanding the world we live in, with all its beauty and ugliness. Nearly all older universities were founded as schools of theology: a telling fact. Another one is this: A large part of what goes on in those church buildings that dot the countryside is education -- people reading hard texts, and trying to sort out what they mean. Another similarity is less obvious but no less important. Ours is an individualist culture; people rarely put their community's welfare ahead of their own. It isn't so rare in churches and universities. Churches are mostly run by volunteer labor (not to mention volunteered money): those who tend nurseries and teach Sunday School classes get nothing but a pat on the back for their labor. Not unlike the professors who staff important faculty committees. An economist friend once told me that economics departments are ungovernable, because economists understand the reward structure that drives universities: professors who do thankless institutional tasks competently must do more such tasks. Yet the trains run more or less on time -- maybe historians are running the economics departments -- because enough faculty attach enough importance to the welfare of their colleagues and students. Selfishness and exploitation are of course common too, in universities and churches as everywhere else. But one sees a good deal of day-to-day altruism, which is not common everywhere else. And each side of this divide has something to teach the other. Evangelicals would benefit greatly from the love of argument that pervades universities. The "scandal of the evangelical mind" -- the title of a wonderful book by evangelical author and professor Mark Noll -- isn't that evangelicals aren't smart or don't love ideas. They are, and they do. No, the real scandal is the lack of tough, hard questioning to test those ideas. Christians believe in a God-Man who called himself (among other things) "the Truth." Truth-seeking, testing beliefs with tough-minded questions and arguments, is a deeply Christian enterprise. Evangelical churches should be swimming in it. Too few are. For their part, universities would be better, richer places if they had an infusion of the humility that one finds in those churches. Too often, the world of top universities is defined by its arrogance: the style of argument is more "it's plainly true that" than "I wonder whether." We like to test our ideas, but once they've passed the relevant academic hurdles (the bar is lower than we like to think), we talk and act as though those ideas are not just right but obviously right -- only a fool or a bigot could think otherwise. The atmosphere I've found in the churches to which my family and I have belonged is very different. Evangelicals like "testimonies"; it's common for talks to Christian groups to begin with a little autobiography, as the speaker describes the path he has traveled on his road to faith. Somewhere in the course of that testimony, the speaker always talks about what a mess he is: how many things he has gotten wrong, why the people sitting in the chairs should really be teaching him, not the other way around. This isn't a pose; the evangelicals I know really do believe that they -- we (I'm in this camp too) -- are half-blind fools, stumbling our way toward truth, regularly falling off the right path and, by God's grace, picking ourselves up and trying to get back on. But while humility is more a virtue than a tactic, it turns out to be a pretty good tactic. Ideas and arguments go down a lot easier when accompanied by the admission that the speaker might, after all, be wrong. That gets to an aspect of evangelical culture that the mainstream press has never understood: the combination of strong faith commitments with uncertainty, the awareness that I don't know everything, that I have a lot more to learn than to teach. Belief that a good God has a plan does not imply knowledge of the plan's details. Judging from the lives and conversations of my Christian friends, faith in that God does not tend to produce a belief in one's infallibility. More the opposite: Christians believe we see "through a glass, darkly" when we see at all -- and that we're constantly tempted to imagine ourselves as better and smarter than we really are. If that sensibility were a little more common in universities, faculty meetings would be a lot more pleasant. And it should be more common: Academics know better than anyone just how vast is the pool of human knowledge, and how little of it any of us can grasp. Talking humbly should be second nature. There is even a measure of political common ground. True, university faculties are heavily Democratic, and evangelical churches are thick with Republicans. But that red-blue polarization is mostly a consequence of which issues are on the table -- and which ones aren't. Change the issue menu, and those electoral maps may look very different. Imagine a presidential campaign in which the two candidates seriously debated how a loving society should treat its poorest members. Helping the poor is supposed to be the left's central commitment, going back to the days of FDR and the New Deal. In practice, the commitment has all but disappeared from national politics. Judging by the speeches of liberal Democratic politicians, what poor people need most is free abortions. Anti-poverty programs tend to help middle-class government employees; the poor end up with a few scraps from the table. Teachers' unions have a stranglehold on failed urban school systems, even though fixing those schools would be the best anti-poverty program imaginable. I don't think my liberal Democratic professor friends like this state of affairs. And -- here's a news flash -- neither do most evangelicals, who regard helping the poor as both a passion and a spiritual obligation, not just a political preference. (This may be even more true of theologically conservative Catholics.) These men and women vote Republican not because they like the party's policy toward poverty -- cut taxes and hope for the best -- but because poverty isn't on the table anymore. In evangelical churches, elections are mostly about abortion. Neither party seems much concerned with giving a hand to those who most need it. That could change. I can't prove it, but I think there is a large, latent pro-redistribution evangelical vote, ready to get behind the first politician to tap into it. (Barack Obama, are you listening?) If liberal Democratic academics believe the things they say they believe -- and I think they do -- there is an alliance here just waiting to happen. Humility, love of serious ideas, commitment to helping the poor -- these are things my faculty friends and my church friends ought to be able to get together on. If they ever do, look out: American politics, and maybe American life, will be turned upside down. And all those politicians who can only speak in one color will be out of a job. I can hardly wait. William J. Stuntz is a Professor at Harvard Law School. From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 17 16:42:28 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 11:42:28 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC: Britons growing 'digitally obese' Message-ID: Britons growing 'digitally obese' http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4079417.stm People are finding more things to do with their colourful gadgets Gadget lovers are so hungry for digital data many are carrying the equivalent of 10 trucks full of paper in "weight". Music, images, e-mails, and texts are being hoarded on mobiles, cameras laptops and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), a Toshiba study found. It found that more than 60% kept 1,000 to 2,000 music files on their devices, making the UK "digitally fat". "Virtual weight" measurements are based on research by California Institute of Technology professor Roy Williams. He calculated physical comparisons for digital data in the mid-1990s. He worked out that one gigabyte (1,073,741,824 bytes) was the equivalent of a pick-up truck filled with paper. The amount of data people are squirreling away on their gadgets is clearly a sign that people are finding more things to do with their shiny things. 'Digitally obese' If digital hoarding habits continue on this scale, people could be carrying around a "digitally obese" 20 gigabytes by next year. "Britain has become a nation of information hoarders with a ferocious appetite for data," said Martin Larsson, general manager of Toshiba's European storage device division. "As storage capabilities increase and the features and functionalities of mobile devices expand to support movie files and entire libraries of multi-media content, we will all become virtually obese," he told the BBC News website. The survey reflects the increasing trend for portable devices with built-in hard drives like music and media players from Apple, Creative Labs, Archos, iRiver and others. This trend is set to grow, according to analysts. They suggest the number of hard drives in consumer electronics gadgets could grow from 17 million last year to 55 million in 2006. "Consumers are driving the move towards smaller devices that have greater functionality, and industry is trying to keep up," said Mr Larsson. "People are looking for more than just phone calls and text messages on the move, they want things like web browsing, e-mailing, music, photos and more." Bigger please Many are finding memory keys and memory sticks are simply not big enough to hold everything. Toshiba hard drive Hard drives are getting smaller, cheaper and better "Floppies and memory keys have their place, but they don't have anything like the capacity or flexibility of a hard drive so are unable to meet the demand for more and more storage capacity in consumer devices," said Mr Larsson. The cost of making hard drives has dropped and is continuing to do so because of improved technologies so they are proving to be more cost-effective than other forms of memory, he added. The amount of data that can be stored has grown by 400% in the last three years, while the cost for every gigabyte has fallen by 80%. It is also getting easier to transfer files from one device to another, which has traditionally been a slow and problematic area. "Transfer of data between different memory types has improved significantly in recent times, and will be further helped by the standards for hard drives which are currently being developed by the major manufacturers," said Mr Larsson. According to technology analysts IDC, a fifth of all hard drives produced will be used in consumer electronics by 2007. From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Jan 17 16:47:45 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 08:47:45 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: An Evolutionary Mind... Message-ID: <01C4FC71.3763AE00.shovland@mindspring.com> If barriers to steel imports save jobs, they also save the consumption financed by the wages from those jobs, which increases or maintains the number of jobs in the economy. The drug benefit is part of Medicare, not Social Security. The bad effects of the drug "benefit" result mainly from the prohibition on bargaining for bulk prices by Medicare, which is a windfall for Pharma. There is no Social Security crisis. The problem with No Child Left Behind was that it was unfunded. Some feel that it is intended to advance the voucher agenda by taking money away from schools that don't "perform," rather than encouraging schools to improve their performance, which can be done in measurable ways. Unfettered market forces also have unintended or negative consequences, such as the gouging of consumers engendered by deregulaton of electric power in California. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 8:12 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: An Evolutionary Mind... Hannes & Christian: The view I am working from is somewhat like Alice Andrews: It appears that around 50% of our behavior is from gene expression, which can be modulated by environmental triggers. The other part is probably quite modifiable. The dilemma as I see it is unforeseen consequences of attempts to modify behavior, a common phenomenon. I.e.: Children rewarded for reading lose interest in the reading because they focus on the reinforcers. Because of the unintended consequences it appears that socialism and welfare state economics are very tricky and difficult to impliment. So some prefer to have a lower level of social welfare programs because they often backfire. Arguably Bush's policies contain many of these. Bush put barriers up for steel imports, saving steel industry jobs but costing many more jobs because of the ripple effect of raising steel prices. Bush passed a Medicare drug benefit that now appears to vastly accelerate the social security crisis. Bush passed "no child left behind" and may have harmed education by costing school districts new resources because of the burden of complying with this program. So it appears government can help or harm, but often harms because we aren't smart enough to view the consequences of our actions. Bentham is wrong, because we cannot know what is the greatest good for the greatest number. In my humble opinion, Lynn Christian Rauh (from webmail) wrote: >Lynn and Steve, > >If man cannot be "perfected" by changes in the environment, it follows that it >cannot be "imperfected" by changes. > >If you assume the above then you shouldn?t bother with how society is structured >at all. > >However, both of you have your takes on how things OUGHT to be so that men >(individually or socially) are BETTER (more perfect). > >Christian > > > >Quoting "Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D." : > > > >>Steve, >>You asked me to reflect on your hate speech. Fair enough. I feel: >> - sadness: You are a talented person who engages in reckless talk >>that cheapens dialog. >>I am obligated to oppose hate speech. Deontological obligation. Never >>again Jewish gas chambers, never again Cambodian killing fields, never >>again Saddam's mass executions. Every person is obligated to oppose hate >>speech from whatever source. >> Buddha said: Thoughts become speech; speech becomes actions, actions >>become habit, habit becomes character. Take care therefore for your >>thoughts. >> So I speak against hate, and in favor of thoughtful and >>compassionate dialog. >> >> About the perfection angle: Read "Radical Son" by Horowitz, where he >>discusses that. That notion is also behind the infamous 'politically >>correct dialog' that feminists and constructivists championed about 20 >>years ago. It is also behind the attempts to end poverty, as Johnson's >>great failure, the "War on Poverty." It is also behind Stalin's embrace >>of Lysenko. The idea is that by changing society we can fundamentally >>change people. So there is a substantial body of evidence for that as an >>implicit idea, perhaps not espoused but more a theory-in-action. >> >>Steve Hovland wrote: >> >> >> >>>As a card carrying liberal, I do not think that >>>people can be perfected if we have the right >>>kind of society. I have no idea where you >>>get this formulation. >>> >>>Steve Hovland >>>www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>>-----Original Message----- >>>From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >>>Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2005 9:08 PM >>>To: Alice Andrews; paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: An Evolutionary Mind... >>> >>>Alice, >>>Wonderful! I am glad for you. It is always worthwhile to share something >>>you clearly worked hard on. I also read the Dembski review in the same >>>issue, and had fun with that. >>> >>> You said, The feminist academic psychologist also asked me if it was >>>not dangerous to our students to teach that "motherhood is innate and >>>that the only way to be happy is to be a mother." >>> You have identified the problem I have with feminists, namely that >>>they ignore data that contradicts their theory, and they believe that >>>only ideas that support their theory should be taught. >>> At another level, you have identified a classic difference between >>>modern conservatism and modern liberalism. The conservative believes >>>that people cannot be perfected by society, the liberal believes that, >>>given the right society, people can be perfected. Every contrary example >>>is explained away. >>> And I liked your description of your reaction to the dutch treat >>>date where the man wanted to kiss you, even though you were raised not >>>to have just that reaction. Sounds innate! So I think your article was a >>>thought-provoking one and I hope it is widely read. I will forward it to >>>the paleo list and encourage people to look it up. >>> >>>Lynn >>> >>>Alice Andrews wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>>>Hi Lynn, >>>> >>>>remember that piece you read some of....re me and the economist, >>>>etc. "An Evolutionary Mind,"?...well it's a lot longer (i'm afraid) >>>>but published! >>>>http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/index.asp >>>>Thanks again for your encouraging words...they definitely inspired me >>>>to continue on writing! >>>>All best! >>>>Alice >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>><< File: ATT00000.html >> << File: ATT00001.txt >> >>>_______________________________________________ >>>paleopsych mailing list >>>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> > > > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > << File: ATT00001.html >> << File: ATT00002.txt >> From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Jan 17 16:52:55 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 08:52:55 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Evolutionary / Man and society Message-ID: <01C4FC71.F03BA040.shovland@mindspring.com> Unintended negative consequences are not an adequate argument for the complete abolition of welfare. They are an argument for inspection to prevent abuses and for adjustments to the system when negative unintended consequences manifest. There can also be good unintended consequences from any action. One might invest a small amount of money in an unknown company and have it turn into Microsoft. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 8:21 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Evolutionary / Man and society Here is a nice example of unintended consequences of a welfare state: http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006165 The problem is systemic - perverse reward systems create perverse behavior. Rolf is simply responding to the rewards offered. Lynn Hannes Eisler wrote: > The discussion seems somewhat odd to me. One has to distinguish > between man's, let's say, inborn, dispositions, and man's behavior. > The first hardly can be changed by environmental (or political) > influence (here we have marxism's big mistake), but the latter can. A > society works with rewards (reinforcement) and punishment to achieve > its aims, whatever they may be. Also sensitivity to reinforcement is > inborn; more complicated is to establish what is working as a > reinforcer for whom. _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From waluk at earthlink.net Mon Jan 17 20:11:31 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 12:11:31 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Perfecting humans References: <01C4FC5E.6BD87610.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <01bc01c4fcd0$bd35bff0$6b03f604@S0027397558> Perfecting humans has already been done. See for youself: http://www.kurzweilai.net. It's Ramona and she'll be around forever....or as long as computers function. Gerry Reinhart-Waller http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk > Actually, I have no interested in perfecting humans. > We all seem to have a capability for making new > mistakes :-) > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > From waluk at earthlink.net Mon Jan 17 20:28:02 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 12:28:02 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox news References: <01C4FBBA.B57DDCF0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <020a01c4fcd3$0c51e850$6b03f604@S0027397558> Reality is of our own making. Truth is as relative as is the information collected on the internet. Having access to a variety of sources is a key ingredient in becoming well informed but what is truth to one person is falsehood to another. Truth also changes according to geographic locale and historic time. Truth is delicate and is best expressed in the oratory of a wordsmith. The power to convince is far greater than the truth. Gerry Reinhart-Waller ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2005 11:01 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox news >I think it's safer to assume there are no objective > sources, and that we are well-served by checking > out a variety of sources, especially those we don't > agree with. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Jan 17 20:39:56 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 12:39:56 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox news Message-ID: <01C4FC91.A6EFFE20.shovland@mindspring.com> Good perceptions, Gerry :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: G. Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 12:28 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox news Reality is of our own making. Truth is as relative as is the information collected on the internet. Having access to a variety of sources is a key ingredient in becoming well informed but what is truth to one person is falsehood to another. Truth also changes according to geographic locale and historic time. Truth is delicate and is best expressed in the oratory of a wordsmith. The power to convince is far greater than the truth. Gerry Reinhart-Waller ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2005 11:01 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox news >I think it's safer to assume there are no objective > sources, and that we are well-served by checking > out a variety of sources, especially those we don't > agree with. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Mon Jan 17 20:55:12 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 12:55:12 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] perfection In-Reply-To: <200501171913.j0HJDkC05428@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050117205512.26781.qmail@web13424.mail.yahoo.com> >>If man cannot be "perfected" by changes in the environment, it follows that it cannot be "imperfected" by changes. If you assume the above then you shouldn?t bother with how society is structured at all.<< --What if everything is perfect, exactly how it must be and can be no other way, and what if recognition of that perfection is the key to changing the world? Nearly every seemingly unsolvable problem in the world seems to involve attributions of imperfection or evil toward humans... what if that were to change? What if species survival requires that it change? Needless to say, what is perfect in terms of the universe as a system may feel like imperfection to us, as we are given boundaries to defend and feel a sense of violation when the universe fails to respect them. When other people fail to respect them, we contort ourselves philosophically out of fear, anger or projected guilt. When someone hurts you, you don't see or feel them as perfect. But the universe may have another opinion about that. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Jan 17 21:43:21 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 13:43:21 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] perfection Message-ID: <01C4FC9A.8320BB20.shovland@mindspring.com> Imperfection probably has survival value- random generation of diversity. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 12:55 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] perfection >>If man cannot be "perfected" by changes in the environment, it follows that it cannot be "imperfected" by changes. If you assume the above then you shouldn?t bother with how society is structured at all.<< --What if everything is perfect, exactly how it must be and can be no other way, and what if recognition of that perfection is the key to changing the world? Nearly every seemingly unsolvable problem in the world seems to involve attributions of imperfection or evil toward humans... what if that were to change? What if species survival requires that it change? Needless to say, what is perfect in terms of the universe as a system may feel like imperfection to us, as we are given boundaries to defend and feel a sense of violation when the universe fails to respect them. When other people fail to respect them, we contort ourselves philosophically out of fear, anger or projected guilt. When someone hurts you, you don't see or feel them as perfect. But the universe may have another opinion about that. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From waluk at earthlink.net Mon Jan 17 23:10:40 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 15:10:40 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox news References: <01C4FC91.A6EFFE20.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <00f301c4fce9$c4bc97d0$3503f604@S0027397558> Hitler was a reasonable wordsmith in addition to being a charismatic leader. He was able to convince but only for a short while. By identifying his shortcomings is to make sense of a nightmare period in world history. I often wonder if it was history or a very vocal disenfranchised group that lead to his demise. Gerry Reinhart-Waller ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 12:39 PM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox news > Good perceptions, Gerry :-) > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: G. Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] > Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 12:28 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox > news > > > Reality is of our own making. Truth is as relative > as > is the information collected on the internet. Having > access to a variety of sources is a key ingredient in > becoming well informed but what is truth to one > person > is falsehood to another. Truth also changes > according > to geographic locale and historic time. Truth is > delicate and is best expressed in the oratory of a > wordsmith. The power to convince is far greater than > the truth. > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Steve Hovland" > To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" > > Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2005 11:01 AM > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox > news > > >>I think it's safer to assume there are no objective >> sources, and that we are well-served by checking >> out a variety of sources, especially those we don't >> agree with. >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> > > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From waluk at earthlink.net Tue Jan 18 04:20:45 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 20:20:45 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox news References: <01C4FCC2.8BA46BC0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <025401c4fd15$15cb44c0$3503f604@S0027397558> Hitler's attack on Russia was a leap of faith.....and a stupid move. His forces were not equipped for climatic differences between central Europe and territory beyond the Urals. His defeat was caused more by stupidity than by strategic mistakes....hmmm, could be that his strategic mistakes were caused by his stupidity. Gerry Reinhart-Waller ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'G. Reinhart-Waller'" Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 6:29 PM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox news > Hitler went down because he attacked Russia. > > Fighting on two fronts exhausted his resources. > > Both Germany and Japan grossly underestimated > the US. > > Stragetic mistakes lead to defeat. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: G. Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] > Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 3:11 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Cc: shovland at mindspring.com > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox > news > > Hitler was a reasonable wordsmith in addition to > being > a charismatic leader. He was able to convince but > only > for a short while. By identifying his shortcomings > is > to make sense of a nightmare period in world history. > I often wonder if it was history or a very vocal > disenfranchised group that lead to his demise. > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Steve Hovland" > To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" > > Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 12:39 PM > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox > news > > >> Good perceptions, Gerry :-) >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: G. Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] >> Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 12:28 PM >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox >> news >> >> >> Reality is of our own making. Truth is as relative >> as >> is the information collected on the internet. >> Having >> access to a variety of sources is a key ingredient >> in >> becoming well informed but what is truth to one >> person >> is falsehood to another. Truth also changes >> according >> to geographic locale and historic time. Truth is >> delicate and is best expressed in the oratory of a >> wordsmith. The power to convince is far greater >> than >> the truth. >> >> Gerry Reinhart-Waller >> >> >> ----- Original Message ----- >> From: "Steve Hovland" >> To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" >> >> Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2005 11:01 AM >> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox >> news >> >> >>>I think it's safer to assume there are no objective >>> sources, and that we are well-served by checking >>> out a variety of sources, especially those we don't >>> agree with. >>> >>> Steve Hovland >>> www.stevehovland.net >>> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> > > > From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Jan 18 14:38:21 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 06:38:21 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Iran war? Message-ID: <01C4FD29.7640C820.shovland@mindspring.com> Iran War I am the President. I am not crazy. The buck stops here. Buck buck buck buck buck buck buck buck. I am the President. I am not crazy. Merry Kerry quite contrary, Pudnin pie and fairy dairy. I am the President. I am not crazy. I am the real deal. Square deal. New Deal. Wheeler dealer. Axis of evil turning burning turning burning. I am the President. I am not crazy. I am the President. I am not crazy. I am the President. I am not crazy. From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Jan 18 14:54:03 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 06:54:03 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Iran war? Message-ID: <01C4FD2A.7FA303A0.shovland@mindspring.com> Iran War I am the President. I am not crazy. The buck stops here. Buck buck buck buck buck buck buck buck. I am the President. I am not crazy. Merry Kerry quite contrary, Pudnin pie and fairy dairy. I am the President. I am not crazy. I am the real deal. Square deal. New Deal. Wheeler dealer. Axis of evil turning burning turning burning. I am the President. I am not crazy. I am the President. I am not crazy. I am the President. I am not crazy. From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 18 15:10:08 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 10:10:08 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Panel of Researchers Urges Government to Step Up Spending on Study of Cybersecurity Message-ID: Panel of Researchers Urges Government to Step Up Spending on Study of Cybersecurity News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.18 http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/01/2005011802n.htm [45]By ANDREA L. FOSTER The federal government is not adequately supporting long-term research into protecting the nation's technology infrastructure from terrorist attacks, according to a report that a presidential advisory committee approved last week. The report, from the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, concludes that networks supporting the country's financial, utility, telecommunications, transportation, and defense systems are "highly vulnerable to terrorist and criminal attacks." The report recommends, among other things, that the federal government provide more money for research and that it encourage university students to study cybersecurity. The report is scheduled to be given to President Bush first and to be released to the public by early March. But the report's key findings and recommendations were made public Wednesday in a presentation that the advisory committee's cybersecurity panel made to the full committee. The 24-member committee, which includes university and industry scientists, endorsed the cybersecurity panel's final draft. "We hope that by raising the issue and providing some of the documentary evidence that we have that people will take this seriously and attempt to address it in some meaningful way," said Eugene H. Spafford, a member of the subcommittee that prepared the report. He is a computer-science professor at Purdue University and executive director of the university's Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security. In many ways the report echoes the views of the Computing Research Association, which in July told the cybersecurity panel that the government needed to spend more on cybersecurity research and development. The association represents computer scientists in academe and in industry. Federal agencies assume that other agencies will provide money and grants for research on cybersecurity, the new report says, but no agency is doing enough. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, assumes that industry and the National Science Foundation will provide support for cybersecurity research, according to the cybersecurity panel. And the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency assumes that the science foundation will take up responsibility. The report recommends that the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security provide more money for research on civilian cybersecurity. The report says that researchers are discouraged from applying for cybersecurity grants through the Defense Department agency because it is focused on providing money for short-term projects that can show results in 12 to 18 months. Also, the agency's programs are increasingly classified, excluding most colleges and universities from participation, the report states. The Cyber Trust, set up by the science foundation to provide grants for cybersecurity research, has supported only 8 percent of the proposals it has received, although a quarter of the proposals were worthy of support, the report states. It recommends that the science foundation's cybersecurity budget be increased by $90-million a year. The report observes that fewer than 250 faculty members in the United States are actively involved in cybersecurity research. The federal government should step up its recruitment of cybersecurity researchers and students so that the number of scientists in the field doubles by the end of the decade, the report says. Mr. Spafford said that universities are not paying enough attention to cybersecurity research, in part because the field "doesn't fit neatly within the traditional department." Besides computer engineering and computer science, he said, information security "touches on many other academic disciplines and draws from them," including management, philosophy, and political science. _________________________________________________________________ Background articles from The Chronicle: * [51]Computer-Security Experts Urge Researchers to Restructure Networks (12/5/2003) * [52]Computer-Security Experts Challenge Researchers to Focus on Long-Term Solutions (11/21/2003) * [53]Science Foundation Will Boost Cybersecurity Research, Director Tells Congress (5/15/2003) * [54]White House Envisions Role for Colleges in Cybersecurity Plan (3/7/2003) References 45. mailto:andrea.foster at chronicle.com 49. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/01/2005011801n.htm 50. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/01/2005011802n.htm 51. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i15/15a02201.htm 52. http://chronicle.com/daily/2003/11/2003112103n.htm 53. http://chronicle.com/daily/2003/05/2003051501t.htm 54. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i26/26a03501.htm E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles. From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 18 15:11:44 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 10:11:44 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] VV: Will more professors develop video games for their classes? Message-ID: Will more professors develop video games for their classes? http://www.villagevoice.com/generic/show_print.php?id=59899&page=aviv&issue=0502&printcde=MzMxODE2Nzg2NQ==&refpage=L2FydHMvaW5kZXgucGhwP2lzc3VlPTA1MDImcGFnZT1hdml2JmlkPTU5ODk5 by Rachel Aviv January 11th, 2005 12:05 PM On Martin Luther King Day in 2002, the West Virginia-based white-power group known as National Alliance came out with Ethnic Cleansing, a video game for neo-Nazis and similarly deranged Americans. A beefy white character dressed in Klan robes darts around a city slaying "sub-humans," who, upon collapsing, whimper little death-ditties ranging from "Oy vey!" to "I'll take a siesta now." In the background, plans for world domination and inspirational hints like "Diversity, It's Good for Jews" are pasted on subway walls and street lamps. Ethnic Cleansing doesn't just indulge such fantasies, but meticulously teaches the specifics of its worldview (why we should kill, who we should kill, and the history of white "victimization") through repetition, hands-on participation, and a series of escalating challenges. The natural instructive potential of video gamescurrently enjoyed by mostly religious and military groupshas caught the attention of educators willing to try anything that gets a student to become obsessive about mastering a system of thought. As James Gee, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), sees it, Ethnic Cleansing is a persuasive example of how games can be used to convey ideological messages. "Modern video games are profoundly motivating, certainly much more so than textbooks," he tells the Voice. "They're about taking on an identity, making choices and looking at the world a certain way. We can only hope that people with better philosophies than the National Alliance make some games. What about the worldview of a scientist?" Recently a handful of professors across the country have developed video games for their classrooms that dramatize science, history, politics, and even literature. At MIT, a group of scholars and software designersleaders in the Microsoft-funded Games-to-Teach projectdesigned 15 prototypes for college use. In Sole Survivor, an Intro to Psych game, students experiment on a series of depressed, psychotic, or otherwise dysfunctional individuals in order to save the world from "evil leaders of a Planetary Alliance." Prospero's Island, a lit-crit simulation being designed in collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company, has players work through Tempest-specific metaphors by completing tasksfeeding junipers to Caliban (for increased sex and strength), or literally climbing the waterfall of Prospero's tears. So far, the only design used with any real frequency (or that has significant funding) is Environmental Detectives, a game about toxicology that, according to the publicity material, "combines the dramatic appeal of Erin Brockovich with the pedagogical value of inquiry-based learning." A digitalized quest for the source of a "mystery" chemical spill, E.D. has been used in about 14 courses, the majority of them at Harvard and MIT. Games-to-Teach designers hope that more classrooms will adopt not only the game, but the obsessive video game culturein particular, the lack of stigma surrounding failure. But even for profs who agree that their teaching methods could use a technological update, video games are still financially forbidding, not to mention conceptually loony. According to Edward Castronova, a professor at the University of Indiana (and author of the forthcoming Synthetic Worlds), "At this point, saying to an English professor, 'Why don't you teach this course with a video game?' is kind of like saying, 'Why don't you teach this course with a basketball?' " A self-described "academic failure," Castronova once wrote an economics paper in which he computed the gross national product per capita of the fantasy land in Sony's EverQuest, declaring it the 77th richest nation in the world. He is part of a burgeoning community of professors who rely on dreamy, digital netherworlds to convey course materialeach one describing their class as the "first of its kind." At Northern Illinois University, Stephen Haliczer, a proud "apostle of interactivity," designed a simulation, "Surviving the Inquisition," for his online course "Witchcraft, Heresy, Criminality, and Social Control in Modern Europe." Students play a converted Jew who is tried by an Inquisitor and then tortured, absolved, or burned at the stake. "It was a blast," says Michael Spires, a grad student in Haliczer's seminar in 2003. "The standard image that most non-historians have of the Inquisition is that it was run by terribly vicious and oppressive people, but that is really not the case. When you play, you seeif you had any wits about you, you could game the system." Wary of misrepresenting history, most humanities professors who have experimented with digital simulations have done it in slightly tamer contexts, where the gamer mentality can co-opt the academic lesson without any major distortion. The U.S. Congress simulation LegSim (now being used at more than 10 schools, including SUNY Geneseo, Brown, and the University of Oklahoma) allows students to operate their own virtual legislaturedrafting bills, "meeting" in committee, and voting online. The New School is developing a similar kind of political digi-world called Swing Statesundergrads will play a Republican or Democratic presidential candidate, fighting to win an election. Although New York schools haven't designed many curricular games, the city has pushed ahead in a slightly different field"meaningful content" games, which promote social and political awareness. Last June, a trio of New York-based nonprofits (NetAid, a U.N. organization that fights world poverty; Global Kids, Inc., a leadership group for urban youth; and Web Lab, a new-media think tank) hosted a conference called "Serious Issues, Serious Games" to explore ways of using digital playthings to "advance society." Out of the conference emerged Games for Change, an interest group that has already worked with a number of pristine simulations where "winning" involves successfully dealing with issues like AIDS, poverty, and racial profiling. For educators, games are not only a catchy way to appeal to the otherwise bored and twitchy, but also a concrete embodiment of pedagogical theories about interactive, student-based learning. Unlike the usual proponents of vague and utopian teaching methods, those intellectually invested in video games feel a sense of inevitability about their project: Games have already outsold the Hollywood box office. According to Suzanne Seggerman, co-director of Games for Change, they will easily worm their way into the academy, just as film did 30 years ago. "Using video games as a learning tool is newborn, squirmy, and barely formed," she says. "But it's only a matter of time. Talk to me in 10 years. We'll all be playing." More Education Supplement 2005 [10]More Than 'Just Say No' Addiction studies thrives in academia [11]The Acid Test At an Indiana lab, better thinking through chemistry [12]Wrestling With the Margins The academy puts on its tights and steps into the ring [13]Education Listings [14]The Plot Thins English majors! Christopher Booker's new study just made your life much easiermaybe References 10. http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/0502,tuhus-dubrow,59940,12.html 11. http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/0502,dayal,59938,12.html 12. http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/0502,lagorio,59937,12.html 13. http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/0502,edlist,59936,12.html 14. http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/0502,winter,59908,12.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 18 15:12:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 10:12:51 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Harvard Chief Defends His Talk on Women Message-ID: Harvard Chief Defends His Talk on Women NYT January 18, 2005 By SAM DILLON The president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, who offended some women at an academic conference last week by suggesting that innate differences in sex may explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers, stood by his comments yesterday but said he regretted if they were misunderstood. "I'm sorry for any misunderstanding but believe that raising questions, discussing multiple factors that may explain a difficult problem, and seeking to understand how they interrelate is vitally important," Dr. Summers said in an interview. Several women who participated in the conference said yesterday that they had been surprised or outraged by Dr. Summers's comments, and Denice D. Denton, the chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, questioned Dr. Summers sharply during the conference, saying she needed to "speak truth to power." Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who once led an investigation of sex discrimination there that led to changes in hiring and promotion, walked out midway through Dr. Summers's remarks. "When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill," Dr. Hopkins said. "Let's not forget that people used to say that women couldn't drive an automobile." The Boston Globe first reported yesterday about Dr. Summers's remarks and the stir they created. Not all reactions were negative. Some female academics and the organizer of the two-day conference that Dr. Summers addressed on Friday at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit economic research organization in Cambridge, defended the remarks as a well-intentioned effort to speak candidly about the persistent underrepresentation of women in university departments of mathematics, engineering and physical sciences. "A lot of people who absolutely disagreed with him were not irritated, and he said again and again, 'I'm here to provoke you,' " said Richard Freeman, an economics professor at Harvard who directs the bureau's labor studies program and invited Dr. Summers to speak. "He's very good at stimulating debate, but he cares deeply about increasing diversity in the science and engineering workforces, especially since we have many more women getting Ph.D.'s in science and engineering than ever before." About 50 academics from across the nation, many of them economists, participated in the conference, "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce: Women, Underrepresented Minorities, and their S. & E. Careers." Dr. Summers arrived after a morning session and addressed a working lunch, speaking without notes. No transcript was made because the conference was designed to be off-the-record so that participants could speak candidly without fear of public misunderstanding or disclosure later. In his presentation, Dr. Summers addressed the question of why so few women were on math and engineering faculties at top research universities. "I began by saying that the whole issue of gender equality was profoundly important and that we are taking major steps at Harvard to combat passive discrimination," he recalled in yesterday's interview. "Then I wanted to add some provocation to what I understand to be basically a social science discussion." He discussed several factors that could help explain the underrepresentation of women. The first factor, he said, according to several participants, was that top positions on university math and engineering faculties require extraordinary commitments of time and energy, with many professors working 80-hour weeks in the same punishing schedules pursued by top lawyers, bankers and business executives. Few married women with children are willing to accept such sacrifices, he said. Dr. Hopkins said, "I didn't disagree, but didn't like the way he presented that point because I like to work 80 hours a week, and I know a lot of women who work that hard." In citing a second factor, Dr. Summers cited research showing that more high school boys than girls tend to score at very high and very low levels on standardized math tests, and that it was important to consider the possibility that such differences may stem from biological differences between the sexes. Dr. Freeman said, "Men are taller than women, that comes from the biology, and Larry's view was that perhaps the dispersion in test scores could also come from the biology." Dr. Summers said, "I was trying to provoke discussion, and I certainly believe that there's been some move in the research away from believing that all these things are shaped only by socialization." It was at this point in his presentation that Dr. Hopkins walked out, and shortly thereafter, Dr. Denton told the Harvard president that she believed his assertions had been contradicted by research materials presented at the conference. Dr. Summers said he responded that "I didn't think for a moment that I had proven anything, but only that these are things that need to be studied." A late phone call yesterday to Dr. Denton at the University of Washington, where she is the dean of engineering, was not returned. Paula E. Stephan, a professor of economics at Georgia State University, said Dr. Summers's remarks offended some participants, but not her. "I think if you come to participate in a research conference," Dr. Stephan said, "you should expect speakers to present hypotheses that you may not agree with and then discuss them on the basis of research findings." Catherine Didion, a director of the International Network of Women Engineers and Scientists, said she was "surprised by the provocation in tone and manner" of Dr. Summers's remarks. "Initially all of the questions were from women, and I think there was definitely a gender component to how people interpreted his remarks," Dr. Didion said. "Male colleagues didn't say much afterwards and later said they felt his comments were being blown out of context. Female colleagues were on the whole surprised by his comments." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/national/18harvard.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 18 15:29:04 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 10:29:04 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Op-Ed: This Is Your Brain on Politics Message-ID: This Is Your Brain on Politics New York Times Op-Ed, 5.1.18 By JOSHUA FREEDMAN Los Angeles - PRESIDENT BUSH begins his second term this week as the leader of a nation that appears to be sharply divided. Since the election, there's been endless discussion about the growing gap between "red" and "blue" America. When former President Bill Clinton said a few months ago that he was probably the only person in America who liked both Mr. Bush and Senator John Kerry, it seemed it might be true. Yet, surprisingly, recent neuroscience research suggests that Democrats and Republicans are not nearly as far apart as they seem. In fact, there is empirical evidence that even the fiercest partisans may instinctively like both Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry, although they struggle against this collaborative impulse. During the eight months before the election, I was part of a group of political professionals and scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, who used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or f.M.R.I., to scan the brains of 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats, producing images like those seen above. We measured brain activity while subjects looked at political advertisements and at images of the presidential candidates. The news media have focused on our finding that the amygdala, a part of the brain that responds to danger, was more heightened in Democrats when viewing scenes of 9/11 than in Republicans. This might seem to indicate fundamental differences, but other aspects of our results suggest striking commonalities. While viewing their own candidate, both Democrats and Republicans showed activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area associated with strong instinctive feelings of emotional connection. Viewing the opposing candidate, however, activated the anterior cingulate cortex, which indicates cognitive and emotional conflict. It also lighted up the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area that acts to suppress or shape emotional reactions. These patterns of brain activity, made visible on the f.M.R.I.'s, suggest that both Bush and Kerry voters were mentally battling their attraction to the other side. Bush voters wanted to follow Mr. Kerry; Kerry voters found appeal in Mr. Bush. Both groups fought this instinct by arguing to themselves that their impulses were wrong. By recalling flaws associated with the opposition, the voters displaced attraction with dislike. Because the process happened nearly instantaneously, only the final sense of dismay reached full awareness. Simplifying the neurophysiology somewhat, one can regard the process of reaching an opinion or making a choice as a collaboration between two regions of the brain - the limbic area, which feels emotions, and the prefrontal cortex, which controls the processing of ideas and information. The two areas work in tandem: thoughts provoke feelings, and in turn, the intensity of these feelings determines how the thoughts are valued. In reacting to pictures of the opposing candidate, the voters we tested countered the feelings of connection with even stronger hostile emotions, which they induced by calling up negative images and ideas. This dance between strong emotions and interconnected ideas is well known in psychiatry, and it forms the foundation of cognitive behavioral therapy, an effective form of talk therapy. When there is a divorce, for example, adolescents may induce in themselves feelings of rage toward one parent out of loyalty to the other. A cognitive behavioral therapist could help quench this rage by challenging the child's beliefs about the estranged parent. Without the beliefs to sustain it, the rage disappears. In the case of this past election, while we witnessed an electorate that seemed irreconcilably divided, using f.M.R.I., we could see that the Republicans and Democrats we tested liked both candidates. The initial reflex toward allegiance is easy to explain: people rise through the ranks to run for higher office because they are able to evoke in others a powerful impulse to join their cause. Voters sense this attraction, and to keep from succumbing, they dredge up emotion-laden negative images as a counterweight. This suggests that the passions swirling through elections are not driven by a deep commitment to issues. We are not fighting over the future of the country; we are fighting for our team, like Red Sox and Yankee fans arguing over which club has the better catcher. Both in an election and in baseball, all that really matters is who wears the team uniform. Will an awareness that we are conning ourselves to feel alienated from each other help to close the political gap? It is unknown, because neuroscience has advanced only recently to the point where humans can begin to watch themselves think and feel. If we are going to solve the nation's complicated problems, it is important to close this gap because in a setting where emotions run high, careful thoughts have no chance against intoxicating ones. In divisive politics, as in highly spiced dishes, all subtlety is lost. So, Democrats, admit that you admire the confidence and decisiveness of President Bush. And Republicans, concede that you would like a president to have the depth of knowledge and broad intelligence of Mr. Kerry. Now that f.M.R.I. is revealing our antagonisms as a defensive ploy, it is time to erase the red and blue divide. Joshua Freedman, a psychiatrist, is on the faculty of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/opinion/18freedman.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 18 15:31:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 10:31:29 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: (Panix.com) Purloined Domain Name Is an Unsolved Mystery Message-ID: Purloined Domain Name Is an Unsolved Mystery NYT January 18, 2005 By TOM ZELLER Jr. [I can't say my understanding is very great, but I was down for somewhat less than two days. Nice to learn that it has six thousand customers, including me.] It was yet another reminder of how vulnerable a company's brand name can be in the world of electronic commerce. In the space of about 48 hours over the weekend, Panix.com, New York City's oldest commercial Internet service provider, saw its name slip out of its control and become the center of an international cyberhunt to get it back. Whether maliciously or inadvertently, the company's main domain name - panix.com - had somehow been transferred to a company in Australia. Mail to users with a panix.com address was suddenly being sent to a server computer in Canada that had no relation to the company. And in Vancouver, Wash., Panix's registrar - the broker responsible for securing rights to the domain name and administering its use - was completely unaware that the name had been pinched. By yesterday evening, things were mostly back to normal at Panix. But finger-pointing continued, and the incident served as a reminder that, for all of the safeguards in place to protect one of the more valuable assets in online commerce - a company's domain name - those business addresses remain vulnerable to theft. The panix.com incident follows other cases of Internet names being hijacked, including the temporary commandeering last fall of the domain name for eBay Germany (ebay.de), by a 19-year-old German man who said he had done it "just for fun." Alexis Rosen, president of Public Access Networks, which owns Panix, said, "The system is broken. And it's incumbent on the registries and registrars to fix it." Mr. Rosen was lamenting the byzantine system for distributing and maintaining domain names. The rules have been established by and are overseen by the closest thing the global Internet has to a governing body: the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, a nonprofit international collective. According to Icann's rules, Mr. Rosen or at least Panix.com should have received a notice that someone, somewhere - it is still unclear - had submitted a request to transfer the domain name. That would have set in motion a process that would have made the transfer happen automatically, unless Panix took steps to block it. Mr. Rosen argued that a notice should also have been provided by the registrar through which he originally received the panix.com domain, a company called Dotster. But Dotster says it was simply following Icann's rules. Whatever the sequence, over the weekend an Australian Internet company, MelbourneIT, found itself the new owner of the panix.com domain. MelbourneIT executives said they knew nothing about it until receiving calls from Panix.com representatives. The two sides determined that the transfer had been initiated via an MelbourneIT affiliate in Britain, but that no one had yet figured out who actually submitted the request. Another layer of notification, Mr. Rosen said, should have come from VeriSign, a company in Mountain View, Calif., that maintains the Internet's master registry of all dot-com addresses. But Mr. Rosen said that VeriSign had provided no such notification and had not been helpful at first when he alerted it to his problem over the weekend. He received an e-mail message from a VeriSign customer service representative. "Unfortunately there is little that VeriSign Inc. can do to rectify this situation," the message read in part. VeriSign did not return phone calls yesterday seeking comment. Meanwhile, Mr. Rosen's 6,000 customers, many of them local businesses and community groups in the New York tri-state area, were slowly losing their e-mail and Web sites. Eventually, Panix's status as one of the region's original Internet service providers prompted longtime Internet users to pressure the various parties to do something. Mr. Rosen said VeriSign eventually contacted MelbourneIT and nudged it to return the domain name to Panix's control. Some placed the blame on new domain transfer rules that Icann established in November, which were designed to make it easier to transfer domain names from one registrar to another. The rule changes were made in response to widespread complaints from domain owners that their registrars were making it too hard for them to sever ties and take their business elsewhere. Under the new rules, domain transfer requests are automatically approved after five days unless the owner of the domain takes action to stop the move. One angry Panix customer, Kenny Greenberg, posted a message on the Icann Web site saying that "there is obviously a huge flaw with the existing transfer policy." But Tim Cole, the chief registrar liaison for Icann, said such criticism was premature. "For one thing, some research has to be done into what the hijacking consisted of," Mr. Cole said. "How did it take place? It could be a disgruntled former employee of Panix, for instance, or someone who simply hacked into a computer to determine the right administrative contact names. And no amount of policy could prevent that." Other Internet specialists seemed to agree. They said the only protective measure - itself not foolproof - would be for domain owners to insist that registrars put a "lock" on domain names, which requires an extra layer of verification before a name can be transferred. (Dotster said yesterday it would automatically begin locking its customers' domain names.) "Somebody simply spoofed the contact info for this domain," said Susan Crawford, a professor of Internet law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. "It has always been an easy thing to do, which is why all registrants should have a lock put on the name. Nothing can be made perfectly secure, and as far as I can tell, neither the registrar nor the registry acted improperly." Mr. Rosen said the inability to assign blame was indicative of the current system's problems. "It happened to us not because of any error on our part," he said. "If it can be done to us it can be done to anybody." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/technology/18domain.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 18 15:32:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 10:32:21 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Some Gene Research Just Isn't Worth the Money Message-ID: Essay: Some Gene Research Just Isn't Worth the Money NYT January 18, 2005 By KEITH HUMPHREYS and SALLY SATEL How should we set priorities in medical research? Officials at the National Institutes of Health will grapple with this question as they allocate billions of dollars from the agency's budget this year. Two geneticists, Dr. Kathleen Merikangas of the National Institute of Mental Health and Dr. Neil Risch of Stanford University, have taken on this challenge by introducing an intriguing framework for setting priorities for genetic research. The best candidates for genetic research, they believe, are disorders whose emergence and course cannot be derailed by changes in personal habits or manipulation of the environment. Examples are autism, Type 1 diabetes and Alzheimer's disease. In contrast, lower priority on the genetic research hierarchy should go to conditions like Type 2 diabetes or alcohol or nicotine addiction, they argue. Type 2 diabetes, after all, can be largely avoided through exercise and weight loss, and teenagers will buy less beer if taxes on alcohol are high enough. Similarly, a combination of smoking bans, social pressure and taxes have had an impact on smoking. Not surprisingly, the geneticists' proposal, published in Science, drew fire from their colleagues who study addiction, including Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. In a published rebuttal last June, they insisted that addiction deserved a much higher ranking for genetic-research money, noting that the health and social costs of alcohol and drug addiction exceed $500 billion a year. No one can dispute addiction's high cost. But is genetic research the best way to reduce it? Probably not. Environmental approaches may not be as sexy as high-tech gene-based solutions, but they work. In the past 20 years, California has reduced smoking to 16 percent of adults from 26 percent through higher cigarette taxes, closer monitoring of sales outlets, restrictions of smoking in public places, endorsement of antismoking attitudes in the general public and better decisions about health by current and prospective smokers. "Californizing" the country in a public health sense would reduce smoking to a much greater extent than a comparable investment in genetics research. Within a generation, most of those who continued to smoke despite every environmental barrier would be those at high genetic risk; the rest would be a small cohort who are not interested in quitting. At that point, investigating smokers' genes might warrant a greater investment because they would be a more highly genetically determined group. But for now, resources could be better directed toward diseases where society has no similarly potent environmental tools. Could genetic screening prevent addiction? Ideally, people of legal age could refuse cigarettes or alcohol if they knew that their genes put them at higher risk for progressing from casual to compulsive use. But screening can backfire: fraternity members, for example, might be more likely to go on a drinking binge if they knew their genetic risk for alcoholism was low. In its defense, genetic research may one day improve addiction treatment. In response to Dr. Merikangas and Dr. Risch, addiction genetics researchers noted that therapeutic response of alcoholic patients to the medication naltrexone, an agent first developed for heroin users, might be associated with a variant of a gene that codes for a specific brain receptor. If replicated, this finding might allow clinicians to use genetic information to decide whether to offer naltrexone to a particular patient. But future improvements in treatment from genetics research are unlikely to have much effect because, research shows, most addicts who recover do so without formal treatment. A survey by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, for example, found that three-quarters of adults who had once been alcohol-dependent but no longer have alcohol problems never received treatment. As Dr. Merikangas and Dr. Risch emphasize, addiction is malleable under the right circumstances. Only 12 percent of American soldiers addicted to heroin in Vietnam maintained the heroin habit after returning home. That is a striking example of a physiological process (drug dependence) interrupted by psychological and environmental processes - less need to manage the anxiety or boredom of a war zone, reduced availability of inexpensive heroin and increased recognition of the personal cost of continued drug use. Less startling examples of environments' changing addictive behavior abound: when is the last time you saw a heavy smoker light up at a religious service? Finally, much of the harm to public health from drug and alcohol use has nothing to do with addiction. In 1986, Len Bias, the basketball star, died not because he was addicted but because cocaine can induce sudden cardiovascular death. Improved treatments for alcoholism would not make our highways safe: of the 32.3 million Americans who acknowledge driving drunk in the last year, most were nonaddicted people who made bad choices after drinking too much. Genetic research on addiction could have benefits. There is a distant possibility of improving treatment, and it might help in understanding related traits, like impulse control and anxiety. But unlike benefits from research into more intractable diseases, major cuts in drug- and alcohol-related harm depend not on genes but on choices by policy makers and individual citizens. Keith Humphreys is an associate professor of psychiatry at Stanford. Sally Satel is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an unpaid advisory board member for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/health/18essa.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 18 15:33:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 10:33:02 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: For Sale: 'Muscles' in a Bottle Message-ID: For Sale: 'Muscles' in a Bottle NYT January 18, 2005 By DAVID TULLER Grant Deans is 5-foot-10 and weighs 190 pounds, but he wants to be bigger. Mr. Deans, 20, a martial arts practitioner and bodybuilder who can bench-press 215 pounds, has scoured the vast array of sports dietary supplements and settled on a few he hopes will advance his goal. He takes whey, a protein derived from milk, to bolster his daily caloric intake; branched-chain amino acids, said to help muscles recover from workouts; and creatine, a compound promoted as boosting energy levels and increasing the intensity of workouts. "The supplements are a really useful tool," said Mr. Deans, a college student in Norcross, Ga., who has been taking them on and off for five years. "It would just take too much time and energy to prepare six or seven meals a day to get the right amount of protein to build muscles." Ten or 20 years ago, sports enthusiasts like Mr. Deans might have taken a few basic vitamins and minerals. But in recent years, the fitness marketplace has been flooded with products bearing short, catchy names like Adenergy, Lean Stack and Cell-Tech or intimidating, pseudoscientific ones like Sterobol Suspension Muscle Mass Enhancer, Vaso XP Xtreme Vasodilator & Growth Promoter and Xenadrine-NRG. Sports-related supplements accounted for $1.9 billion of the $19 billion Americans spent on dietary supplements in 2003, according to Nutrition Business Journal, a trade publication, up 6 percent from the previous year. The supplements are different from the anabolic steroids that have been controversial in professional sports, most recently baseball. In advertisements, often accompanied by molecular diagrams and before-and-after photos illustrating a metamorphosis from saggy sack to bulging Hercules, supplement makers claim benefits that are nothing short of miraculous. A product called Aftermath, for example, boasts that it can help "swell your muscles to grotesque size" and eliminate the chance of "dooming yourself to girlyman status." Xpand Nitric Oxide Reactor, a drink mix that comes in tropical berry and pi?a colada flavors, offers bodybuilders "the most unbelievable muscular and vascular pumps you have ever experienced." But scientists say that for many supplements, there are few reliable studies to demonstrate their safety and effectiveness. And with hundreds of different ingredients available to manufacturers, it can be difficult for even those who specialize in the field to keep track of products and to assess the scientific basis for manufacturers' claims. "It used to be that if a coach or athlete called and said, 'What do you think about product X,' you had a pretty good idea," said Dr. Ann Grandjean, executive director of the Center for Human Nutrition, a research and education organization in Omaha. "Now there are so many out there, so if an athlete calls and asks about elk antler velvet, you have to go out and do a lot of research." Many supplements are touted as muscle builders. Others claim to increase the ability of muscle tissue to recover quickly from workouts. Still others boast that they have thermogenic - or heat-producing - properties that help speed up the metabolism and melt away fat, enhancing energy. Among the most common products are protein supplements, often sold as powders, and supplements containing amino acids, the building blocks of protein, which many athletes believe can help muscles grow and repair themselves. Experts recommend that athletes consume about twice as much protein as sedentary people. And many bodybuilders and others say that supplements are necessary because it takes too much time to prepare and eat enough high-protein meals. But Dr. Grandjean and other sports nutrition experts say that a well-balanced diet should provide sufficient quantities of proteins and amino acids for even the most active. Creatine, a chemical found in meat, is also popular as a supplement, and some studies support claims that creatine can benefit athletes engaged in sports that demand short bursts of energy. Another ingredient, glucosamine sulfate, is promoted as helping to lubricate and repair joints. Nitric oxide is said to increase the blood flow to muscles and to reduce inflammation. But data to support many such claims are mixed, at best. The federal government has recently taken a more active interest in sports supplements. A new federal law that criminalizes nonprescription use of prohormones - substances that act like steroids once they are in the body - takes effect this week. The law, which has prompted a last-minute buying spree of supplements containing these ingredients, also includes money for programs that educate young athletes, who are major consumers of sports supplements, about the potential dangers of these products. Passage of that law followed a decision by the Food and Drug Administration to crack down on two ingredients that were widely used in fitness supplements: ephedra, a plant-based stimulant that many athletes have used to burn off fat but that has been linked to cardiovascular and other health problems, and androstenedione, a prohormone that gained fame when it was revealed that the baseball slugger Mark McGwire was taking it. Many supplement makers and trade groups have supported these steps, saying that they prove that the government has enough authority to act when it deems a product unsafe. But critics say that regulation of supplements remains so lax that many products are of unknown purity, and studies show that what is in the products does not always conform to what the label says. Accidental contamination is not the only possible explanation, said Dr. Linn Goldberg, a professor of medicine at Oregon Health & Science University. "If I said I was selling Dr. Goldberg's Gogo Juice and you took it and didn't have any results, you'd go, 'This is a bunch of junk,' " he said. "But if I put something in it that actually enhanced your ability, you'd go, "This stuff works.' " Supplement companies say they take strenuous efforts to maintain strict quality control. But some consumers have still noticed major differences in their responses when they switch brands. James Hopkins, a business writer in San Francisco who regularly cycles and lifts weights, said he began taking creatine in 1998 and believed it helped him bulk up. But when he tried another brand, he began experiencing painful leg cramps, one of the potential side effects of creatine. "I thought, My body's telling me something; taking this stuff is stupid, too much of an investment in vanity," said Mr. Hopkins, 47. Some critics also fear that the industry will find ways around the new restrictions by promoting legal substitutes for the banned substances. The new prohormone law, for example, does not restrict the use of a substance called DHEA, which many experts say has similar effects. "We've made such a big deal about getting things off the market that the public is now lulled into a false sense of security," said Dr. Mike Perko, chairman of health science at the University of Alabama. The F.D.A. has some authority to regulate dietary supplements under a 1994 law. But manufacturers of these items, unlike pharmaceutical companies, are not required to prove that their products are safe or effective, and policing the industry can be an extremely hard task. For their part, many people who use sports supplements view the government's actions as an encroachment on their autonomy. They point out, accurately, that far more deaths are attributed every year to overdoses of aspirin than to ephedra or other restricted substances. "People can make other choices that are deleterious to their health, but nobody's standing up to pass laws banning triple cheeseburgers and Twinkies," said Rick Collins, a lawyer who represents supplement makers and the United Supplement Freedom Association. "The irony is that most of these people are following healthy diets that are far superior to the average American's diet, and they are infinitely more concerned about their health from the nutritional standpoint," Mr. Collins said. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/health/nutrition/18supp.1.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 18 15:33:54 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 10:33:54 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Rave On, and Out: Going High Into That Good Night Message-ID: Rave On, and Out: Going High Into That Good Night NYT January 16, 2005 By BENEDICT CAREY IF there's a drug for social phobia, maybe there could be one to help us relax in the company of death. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration gave the go-ahead to a Harvard University plan to study the recreational drug "ecstasy" as a treatment for anxiety in terminal cancer patients. Elsewhere, researchers in California are studying the effect of psilocybin - the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms - in similar patients. Both teams hope to learn whether the drugs, which can induce effusiveness and heightened awareness, will help people express and manage their fears in a therapeutic setting. Although these illegal drugs are controversial, their use is a natural outgrowth of the medicalization of all emotional difficulty, from childhood shyness to adult phobias and depression. Doctors already prescribe antidepressants widely to dying patients, as well as anti-anxiety medications, like Valium, which can be emotionally numbing. The possibility of using potent consciousness-altering agents raises a question: At what point do the theological, cultural and personal significance of mortality become altered, or lost? Does going high into that good night risk mocking end-of-life customs - prompting rave flashbacks rather than life review, rude jokes rather than amends? "I see death not only as an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of your own existence, but to offer your life as a gift to others," said the Rev. Donald Moore, a professor of theology at Fordham University. The end presents us with a time to ponder - and discuss, if possible - what life has meant and might continue to mean for others. Any drug that interferes with that experience comes at a steep cost, he said. "If I never ponder these things," Father Moore said, "if I never face up to these questions intellectually, if I'm so spaced out it doesn't make any difference, then I think the experience is pretty empty and meaningless. In death we can become more a part of others' lives, and if I have decided simply to escape, I may have missed that opportunity." >From the sixth-century politician Boethius, who turned to philosophy for consolation at the end, to Mozart, who plunged into his requiem Mass, history is filled with examples of those who faced the unknown unaided, and apparently shared in some universal reckoning with their purpose. But there is no philosophical or psychological reason why existential questions should wait to the end of life. Death itself hardly respects concerns about meaning or timing. It strikes friends and loved ones often without warning. Moreover, it casts a deepening psychological shadow starting in middle age, which gives most people ample opportunity to contemplate the purpose and content of their lives simply by virtue of living to adulthood, psychologists say. If a drug taken at the end can help them simply reflect on the pleasure of having lived, that in itself might provide comfort and meaning to those left behind, said Dr. Simon Blackburn, professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge. "If you look at what people envy as opposed to what they say they like, I think we envy people who go out on a high," he said. "An old don in my college, he had a stroke at the end of college dinner, and died on the spot, sitting in his suspenders, in candlelight, holding a wine glass. It was the perfect end for him, just incredible, and I think it struck people as very admirable." The insistence on making amends, on finding or declaring meaning, stems as much from cultural expectations of a good death as it does from the needs or the psychological state of a dying person, psychiatrists say. Some people have an anguished need to talk with loved ones, but cannot bring themselves to do so; others simply want to say goodbye and laugh their way out. And the effect of even a strong drug may not alter those desires much. Researchers tested LSD in terminal patients in the 1960's, and heroin in the 1980, and neither drug made much difference in the emotional or family experience at the end of life, said Dr. David F. Musto, a professor of psychiatry and medical history at Yale University School of Medicine. "The larger danger is that we try to manage a death along the lines of what we consider the right way of doing it," Dr. Musto said. "Some want to leave peacefully, and others are anxious to find some meaning and get things taken care of," and new drug treatments may help both. Not to mention those who want simply to laugh, and trust their maker to understand their choice. "There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth," wrote the Catholic philosopher and commentator G. K. Chesterton, in his classic "Orthodoxy," "and I have sometimes fancied it was His mirth." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/16/weekinreview/16care.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 18 15:35:16 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 10:35:16 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] How copyright could be killing culture Message-ID: How copyright could be killing culture http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050117/DOCS17/TPEntertainment/Film Globe and Mail (Toronto), 5.1.17 The high cost of getting permission to use archival footage and photos threatens to put makers of documentaries out of business By GUY DIXON As Americans commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. and his legacy today, no television channel will be broadcasting the documentary series Eyes on the Prize. Produced in the 1980s and widely considered the most important encapsulation of the American civil-rights movement on video, the documentary series can no longer be broadcast or sold anywhere. Why? The makers of the series no longer have permission for the archival footage they previously used of such key events as the historic protest marches or the confrontations with Southern police. Given Eyes on the Prize's tight budget, typical of any documentary, its filmmakers could barely afford the minimum five-year rights for use of the clips. That permission has long since expired, and the $250,000 to $500,000 needed to clear the numerous copyrights involved is proving too expensive. This is particularly dire now, because VHS copies of the series used in countless school curriculums are deteriorating beyond rehabilitation. With no new copies allowed to go on sale, "the whole thing, for all practical purposes, no longer exists," says Jon Else, a California-based filmmaker who helped produce and shoot the series and who also teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of California, Berkeley. Securing copyright clearances isn't just a problem for the makers of Eyes on the Prize. It's a constant, often insurmountable hurdle for documentary filmmakers and even for writers wanting to reproduce, say, copyrighted pictures or song lyrics in their work. But it's particularly difficult for any documentary-makers relying on old news footage, snippets of Hollywood movies or popular music -- the very essence of contemporary culture -- to tell their stories. Each minute of copyrighted film can cost thousands of dollars. Each still photo, which might appear in a documentary for mere seconds, can run into the hundreds of dollars. And costs have been rising steeply, as film archives, stock photo houses and music publishers realize they are sitting on a treasure trove, Else and other filmmakers say. "The owners of the libraries, which are now increasingly under corporate consolidation, see this as a ready source of income," Else says. "It has turned our history into a commodity. They might as well be selling underwear or gasoline." And there's another catch: tighter legal restrictions. Copyright legislation has grown stricter in recent years to protect media owners from digital piracy. Broadcasters and film distributors, in turn, have become more stringent in making sure they are legally covered, too. As illustrated in a recent study by the American University in Washington, which interviewed dozens of documentary-makers on the myriad problems of getting copyright clearances, broadcasters and film distributors insist that a documentary have what is known as errors and omissions insurance, to protect against copyright infringement. Of course to get it, all copyrights in the documentary have to be cleared anyway. It's enough of a legal rigmarole to make underfunded filmmakers simply avoid using archival clips altogether or to remove footage that they shot themselves that might include someone singing a popular hit or even Happy Birthday to You (a copyrighted song). It also means that films like Eyes on the Prize, made in a less restrictive era of copyright rules, can simply fade away if the task of renewing copyrights becomes too difficult or costly. "What seems on the face of it a very arcane, bureaucratic piece of copyright law, and the arcane part of insurance practice, suddenly results in the disappearance of the only video history of the American civil-rights movement . . . slowly and without anyone noticing it," says Else. Ironically, the growing popularity of documentary films these days is only making things worse. The explosion of digital channels, the DVD market and even the use of documentary footage on the Internet have created a new level of success for documentaries, explains veteran National Film Board producer Gerry Flahive. But "suddenly for people who have companies that own stock-footage collections, the material is more valuable. So it has become more expensive." Before the digital and documentary explosion, a clip of President Nixon speaking, for instance, usually could be licensed "in perpetuity," meaning that the film could continue to use the footage indefinitely. Now the incentive is for copyright owners to grant only limited permission. "Increasingly, it's harder and harder to get 'in perpetuity,' because rights-holders realize that somebody will have to come back in five years or 10 years and pay more money," Flahive says. Some are calling this the new "clearance culture," in which access to copyrights affects the creation of new art as much as, if not more than, actual artistic and journalistic decisions. It also means that access to copyrighted footage is only open to those filmmakers with the deepest pockets (or many lawyers on their side). "You can afford it if the broadcasters pay you a significant amount of money to do the film. If they don't, and they aren't, the issue facing all documentary filmmakers in Canada . . . is that it is getting harder and harder to get a reasonable budget together," Ottawa-based filmmaker Michael Ostroff says. "It's a serious, serious problem." The American University study (at http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/rock/index.htm) is a fascinating, if dispiriting, look at the tricks documentary-makers have to pull to get around copyright restrictions, from turning off all TVs and radios when filming a subject indoors to replacing a clip of people watching the World Series with a shot of professional basketball on the TV set instead because that's what the filmmaker had rights for. But at a time when documentaries are probing the U.S. war on terrorism or globalization, for instance, in ways that are more in-depth than typical mainstream news media, the question of whether copyright restrictions are creating a blinkered view of the world is a serious one. "Why do you think the History Channel is what it is? Why do you think it's all World War II documentaries? It's because it's public-domain footage. So the history we're seeing is being skewed towards what's fallen into public domain," says filmmaker Robert Stone in the American University study. Flahive at the NFB said that this pushes filmmakers to tell stories in more innovative ways. Animation, for example, is becoming a new vehicle for documentary-makers. Else of Eyes on the Prize isn't as giving. "Would you rather see the footage of the actual attack on the [civil-rights] marchers at the bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965, or would you rather see a re-enactment of that? There is no creative substitute for the real thing," he says. "In a culture that increasingly has trouble separating the real thing from something that's made up, I think that having the real photographic record of real events on television screens in our living rooms is priceless. It's invaluable. And it's becoming increasingly difficult," he says, adding that he doesn't feel comfortable with the idea that creative decisions should have to be based purely on the basis of copyright rules. There are ways around the rules, though. The legal defence in the United States of "fair use" means that footage can be used if the documentary is specifically critiquing that footage. So, a documentary-maker could use a clip of Gene Kelly splashing around in Singing in the Rain, if the documentary is commenting on Hollywood musicals and that one in particular, Else says. A documentary on rain, however, couldn't use the clip. But having to use "fair use" as a legal defence means that the documentary-maker is coming under legal pressure. Many simply can't afford the legal fees to get out of that kind of situation. Documentary-makers typically say they want copyright controls maintained, as the American University study found. They just want the costs and restrictions on copyrighted material to be made more rational. A music publisher should allow more concessions for a documentary-maker using a song for a film airing on public television, as opposed to someone using a song for a Nike commercial. But with the possibility that copyright rules could easily tighten further, there's growing concern about the impact this could have on documentaries, as it has on Eyes on the Prize. As the award-winning filmmaker Katy Chevigny says in the American University report: "The only film you can make for cheap and not have to worry about rights clearance is about your grandma, yourself or your dog." From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 18 15:36:10 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 10:36:10 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: High Rise, High Tech: Online Rant Control Message-ID: High Rise, High Tech: Online Rant Control NYT December 2, 2004 By LOCKHART STEELE WHEN it comes to apartment buildings, New Yorkers are famously crabby, bickering over everything from pet regulations to lobby d?cor. Complaints normally voiced in co-op meetings or whispered in elevators have found a raucous new outlet as residents in a growing number of buildings turn to online message boards to share gripes and gossip. Tenants do not have to wait for that chance encounter in the hallway to vent. Now they can rant and bicker 24 hours a day, with an audience of dozens or even hundreds of neighbors. Discussions run from the practical (renovation advice) to the droll. (On one board, correspondents complained about a local bakery prone to giving change only in nickels.) A premium is placed on a witty turn of phrase, but for novices it can be tricky to figure out where the tongue ends and the cheek begins. For regulars, that is part of what makes the message boards addictive reading. Each forum's moderator - usually its founder - tries to keep debates within the bounds of civility. But the virtual communities are by nature anarchic. As a result, residents cloaked with a screen name can push their neighbors' buttons with glorious impunity. (Screen names are chosen at sign-up. Many people opt for pseudonyms, and thick skins are counseled.) "It's like a little neighborhood talk show," said Dorie Lederfajn Paparo, 33, a regular contributor to the message board at Co-op Village on the Lower East Side, which gets as many as 100 postings a day. At the Crest, a new rental development at 63 Wall Street, tenants set up an online forum last summer to share grievances about perceived building flaws like cracked floors and collapsing closet shelves. Within a few weeks the site was buzzing with complaints. "Does anyone have part of their closet in their home office opening to a wall instead of regular closet?" one correspondent asked. Another complained: "My apartment is damp. Like my bath towel doesn't dry out from day to day." The grouchy confab on the Crest's online message board, and e-mail messages from residents, led Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist (www.newyork.craigslist.org), a Web site that is used to hunt for jobs, merchandise and real estate, to ban Crest listings in September; the problems were largely fixed in October, and listings resumed. Executives at Metro Loft Management, which manages the Crest, said the problems would have been resolved in any case, but they acknowledge that the message board got their attention. Though no official count exists, at least several dozen New York buildings have set up online message boards, and the number is growing. The kind of mutinous mood stirred up online at the Crest can spell trouble for management companies and co-op boards accustomed to controlling information. But residents empowered and entertained by the new medium are unlikely to tone down their invective, and at least some managing agents and landlords are listening in. At Citylights, a 522-unit co-op in Long Island City, Queens, residents use the message board to complain about the co-op board, said Peter C. Iorlano, 31, who lives there: "If they saw them in the lobby, they wouldn't say anything, but through the power of the Internet they get a little bold." "People don't say, `Gee, the elevators work well today,' " he added. "You see people how they truly are." Beneath the wry banter, though, the spirit is often generous, and the messages can contain invaluable neighborhood tips and information about the building, including ways to handle temperamental radiators or how much to tip the super. "It can be really hard if you're not an extreme extrovert to develop a sense of community in this city," said Evan D. Macbeth, 29, a computer consultant who lives at the Crest. "A lot of people are not extroverted in person but are very friendly and communicative online. Message boards foster that." Most forums are open to the public, so residents who want to read but not post anything (lurkers, in Internet parlance) can stop by. And they do: moderators say traffic reports show up to 10 lurkers for every resident who posts a message, indicating that even those who do not speak up are intrigued by what their neighbors have to say. Open access means that some visitors - and even some posters - do not even live in the building. One self-identified potential Crest resident polled members about whether they would move in if given the chance to do it again. Though the poster, Joe Hecht, 31, said he got the sense that conditions had improved at the building, enough concerns were raised to discourage him from signing a lease. That sort of newfound vox populi, mostly unaccountable by its very nature, strikes some in management as less than responsible. "It's completely anonymous, so people post whatever they want," said Jack Berman, 38, a principal at Metro Loft. "If you're trying to be proactive, why hide behind a fake name?" The prospect of eavesdroppers has caused some residents to make message boards private. Kyle Merker, 43, who works as a consultant for nonprofit organizations, started a private e-mail list for the Cass Gilbert at 130 West 30th Street shortly after he moved in last spring. (Unlike message boards, e-mail lists deliver messages directly to users' in-boxes, an arrangement favored by smaller buildings without enough volume to sustain robust message boards.) "We want to solve problems with our developer, but not create any friction," Mr. Merker said. "They know it exists. It's not like it's a secret society or anything." Some co-op board members, like those at Citylights, know about their building's message board but elect not to post on it for fear that their remarks might deviate from the board's official position. "They all read it, but they can't post on the board because they think they'll be held too accountable for off-the-cuff opinions," said Jake Atwood, 32, who runs the Citylights board. But others on the management side are finding benefits. Rose Associates, the management company for 3 Hanover Square in downtown Manhattan, created its own private message board for tenants on the building's Web site. Jon McMillan, the director of planning for Rockrose Development, which has begun site preparation for a 3,242-unit development in Long Island City, said he regularly reads Citylights' message board to see what its residents are saying about his firm's project. "It's one way to understand what the concerns of the community are," he said. "The people in Citylights look out over our site. We dig a little hole and they all see it and start talking about it." With the problems at the Crest mostly resolved, meanwhile, tenants are fashioning new uses for their forum, CrestTenants.com. "People are meeting over the board," said Lorelai Wu, 24, a freelance artist who manages the site. Recent activities organized on the board include a game night and the creation of "dog-walk Wednesdays." Terri Wu, 31, a research scientist who lives at Citylights and participates in the message board said, "The board's focus is community, real estate, and how the area is changing." So far it has not been used for that Internet favorite, the singles hookup. "Well, it could," Ms. Wu said. "You never know." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/02/realestate/02POST.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 18 15:38:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 10:38:19 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Magazine: In Search of Lost Time Message-ID: In Search of Lost Time New York Times Magazine December 5, 2004 By CATHRYN JAKOBSON RAMIN A few months ago, as I trudged down the stairs of my office building, deep in my thoughts, I noticed a dark-haired woman waving to me from the window of her car. She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place her. Like quite a few others, she had slipped out of my mental Rolodex. In my brain, the synaptic traces that connected us had frayed. Yet again, I had misplaced an entire human being. ''So wonderful to see you,'' she said, inquiring by name after every member of my family, including the two dogs. Apparently she was not a casual acquaintance. Fending off panic, I proceeded through a mental list: Work? School? Synagogue? I couldn't visualize her in these places. I was about to cut and run with a quick ''nice to see you, too'' when the rear window slid down, revealing a toothy grin. ''We've been to the orthodontist,'' she said. The minute I saw Sam's freckled face, the mystery was solved. Our sons were best pals in nursery school and kindergarten. I had sat in her kitchen, discussing birthday parties. I remembered her backyard dotted with Little Tikes plastic play furniture. I knew what she did for work, and the name of her Portuguese nanny. ''Lisa,'' I said, as if her identity had never eluded me, ''it's terrific to see you.'' Why, as I edge toward the end of my 40's, has so much of what I know become impossible to access on demand? Where are the thoughts that spring forth in the shower but evanesce before they can be recorded, the mental lists that shed items on the way to the supermarket? The names of books and movies, actors and authors, le mot juste, the memory of social plans agreed upon in some calendarless situation -- what have become of these? I take some comfort in the fact that I am not alone. In the space of one week, a psychologist remarked that she had turned over all social scheduling to her husband, at his insistence, because the couple had appeared at yet another dinner party on the wrong night. A woman who publishes a local magazine noted that she'd just come from the bank, where she'd spent 10 minutes searching through her purse, briefcase and pockets for a check that she'd never written. A freelance illustrator disclosed that he'd gone to work on Friday, completed a drawing for an editor and mailed it off, only to return on Monday to re-execute the identical assignment without any sense of deja vu. The feelings of embarrassment, frustration and anger that surround such middle-aged lapses serve to disguise a more primitive emotion. At the heart of it, there is fear -- cold, implacable anxiety, emerging from the suspicion that this is just the beginning. Memory, the instrument we trusted to guide us, has instead betrayed us, making us deeply uncertain about our cognitive futures. We worry about decades of dependence, of life with a diminished mind trapped in a still vigorous body. To the person who has misplaced his keys three times in two days or just called a colleague by the wrong name, forgetfulness in middle age can feel like incipient Alzheimer's disease. But for most of us, the memory deficits we encounter in midlife reflect a common pattern of brain aging and are not thought to be predictive of the progressive degeneration that leads to dementia. Neuropsychological tests can help tease out the difference between normal aging and pathology. Individuals, even in the early stages of Alzheimer's, show a marked inability to remember a list of several words after a 20-minute delay. When they are reminded that, for instance, one of the words is a type of fruit, they still lack the ''aha!'' experience that allows the average person to say, ''Oh, yes, it was an orange.'' ''We are hyper-alert about Alzheimer's disease,'' said Dr. Oliver Sacks, the author and neurologist, when I asked him why we find cognitive lapses so worrisome. ''Even momentary forgetting, quite benign, can be unduly upsetting, because there is general alarm around us. But that is only one part of it: For people who have always been very competent, forgetting brings a disturbing sense of the loss of control and mastery.'' So much that is fundamental is bound up in the ease and accuracy of recollection. Foremost, there is trust: On the afternoon when you forget that it is your turn to carpool and leave three kids and a disgruntled coach standing on a soccer field in the teeming rain, your belief (and theirs) that you are a reliable person is severely tested. There is self-knowledge: at the holiday table, when your brother recounts your role in setting the garage on fire some 30 years earlier and you can't recall the event, your historical perspective is altered forever. There is self-esteem: when you open your mouth to ask a question at a professional meeting, certain that you have the facts at your fingertips, but the words elude you, you feel witless and weak. ''In an information age,'' writes Charles Baxter in a collection of essays called ''The Business of Memory,'' ''forgetfulness is a sign of debility and incompetence. It is taken as weakness, an emblem of losing one's grip. For anyone who works with quantities of data, a single note of forgetfulness can sound like a death knell. To remember is to triumph over loss and death; to forget is to form a partnership with oblivion.'' Nearly 15 years ago, when I was pregnant with my first son, I realized that something was happening to my mind. Beyond the typical things -- forgetting names, directions to places I'd been before -- I found it harder to comprehend or retain complex reading material. I could no longer make rapid connections between ideas, because I'd lost access to knowledge I'd already absorbed. ''How bothersome the loss is,'' Dr. Sacks said, ''depends very much on personality. Someone who has prided herself on control, on having everything in order, may be much less tolerant than the easygoing person.'' As an indisputably Type A person, I was deeply perturbed. Three years ago, a few days before I turned 45, I went to the movies with my husband. On the short drive home, I realized that I couldn't remember the title of the film, which I had liked very much, or the name of the actor who played the leading role. Was this just the result of growing older -- the same middle-aged muddle my friends felt -- or was it something of a different magnitude? The question, for me, had become urgent. I could give up, resigning myself to existence in a mental fog. Or I could subject my brain to the best analysis and treatment that science could offer. I went first to see Dr. Gary Small, director of U.C.L.A.'s Center on Aging. He's the author of ''The Memory Bible,'' as well as the recently published ''The Memory Prescription.'' After meeting with him, I enrolled in a research study he was conducting; I'd adhere to a high-protein diet including fruits and vegetables with antioxidant properties, omega-3 fatty-acid supplements, daily multivitamins and capsules of vitamins E and C. The program also called for exercise, daily mental challenges and stress-release activities. Dr. Small was investigating whether following this regimen for two weeks would improve memory. In order to assess my base-line cognitive abilities, Dr. Small ordered two imaging studies -- a PET scan and an M.R.I. of my brain -- as well as a brief neuropsychological evaluation. The images were heartening -- apparently, my brain was free of the signs of Alzheimer's disease or evidence of stroke or tumors. As for my neuropsych evaluation, Dr. Karen Miller, a neuropsychologist working on the research study, explained gently that although some of my scores were below those of my peers, when averaged, they were consistent with the impairment that one might expect at my age. At first I didn't grasp the importance of what Dr. Miller had said. That five of my scores showed significant cognitive deficits was in fact the first concrete evidence that something was awry in my brain. I clung instead to the notion that what I was experiencing was ''average.'' And what precisely did it mean to have an average amount of memory impairment? Although we notice it first in middle age -- sometimes as early as our mid-30's -- memory starts to decline in our 20's. This has been demonstrated with mice, rats, primates and humans, all of whom begin to lose processing speed at about the same relative age. If you're a middle-aged rat, 15 months old, this means that it takes you longer to locate an underwater platform in a water maze. If you're a middle-aged human, it means that when you hear a list of words, you begin to lose some of your ability to ''acquire'' them (place them in short-term memory and parrot them back immediately), ''store'' them (move them -- after 10 seconds -- from short-term memory to long-term memory) and ''retrieve'' them (haul them out of long-term memory). These abilities don't change overnight, but by the time a person reaches her early 40's, there are statistically significant differences from the early-to-mid-20's peak. One explanation for these changes is put forth by Dr. George Bartzokis, director of U.C.L.A.'s Memory Disorders and Alzheimer's Disease Clinic, who has studied the midlife breakdown of the myelin sheath, a sheet of lipid fat that wraps around the delicate branches of a neuron and is critical to brain development. From infancy, cholesterol levels in the brain slowly increase in order to facilitate myelin growth. Bartzokis suggests that at some point after age 30, these cholesterol levels reach a point where they become high enough to promote the development of a toxic protein that begins to eat away at myelin and other membranes, disrupting the smooth flow of neuronal messages. (It is not clear whether reducing blood cholesterol has an effect on levels of brain cholesterol, but researchers suggest that cholesterol-lowering medications are among the preventative therapies worth investigating.) ''Our hypothesis is that the very process of myelination -- which allows us to become wise human beings -- sets up the degeneration,'' Dr. Bartzokis says. ''How to prevent that degeneration is the focus of a great deal of research.'' In some individuals, the escalation of toxic protein may begin earlier or progress more quickly than in others, possibly engendering the development of the plaques and tangles that are the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. Scientists believe that there is a relationship between this toxic protein production and the Apolipoprotein E gene. All of us carry two copies of this gene. Research confirms that individuals who carry the e-4 variant of the Apolipoprotein E gene (about 20 percent of the population) are vulnerable to developing Alzheimer's disease at an earlier age. There is a blood test to determine whether a person carries this variant. Several scientists warned me, however, that the test could not predict whether or not a person would develop Alzheimer's and noted that it would be difficult to obtain without a diagnosis of unspecified dementia. My internist, accustomed at this point to my requests for odd laboratory tests, simply noted ''memory impairment'' in the appropriate form and faxed it to Athena Diagnostics in Massachusetts. If the test was positive, health-insurance providers would likely consider me a terrible risk. Still, I wanted to know. Several weeks and half a dozen phone calls later, I had my answer: I didn't carry the variant. Generally speaking, middle-aged forgetting follows a familiar pattern. People's names often go first, because they are word symbols with no cues attached. Difficulties with word retrieval tend to follow. Instead of the phrase you want, you get what James Reason, a psychologist at the University of Manchester, in Britain, called ''the ugly sisters'' -- similar-sounding but frustratingly incorrect combinations of syllables. Recently acquired ''how to'' memory becomes challenging to consolidate. You think and think, but you just can't remember the steps required to back up the new hard drive, a skill you perfected yesterday. Prospective memory, that is, remembering to perform an action at some distance in the future -- to fetch milk from the store on the way home, for instance -- is vulnerable, particularly in the face of competing distractions. The cues that are supposed to remind you that you need milk -- your husband's phone call a half-hour before, or the Post-it now deep in your handbag -- fail to alert you, until you pull into your driveway. ''As you age,'' said Dr. Daniel Schacter, a Harvard psychologist, ''those retrieval cues have to be readily accessible, unambiguous and informative. The equivalent of a string around the finger isn't going to do it. You're going to be asking yourself what that string is for.'' A decline in the availability of working memory, which allows us to manage several ideas or intentions at the same time, storing and retrieving them with the fluidity of a three-card monte player, is perhaps the most odious loss of all. Multitasking can be frustrating and often counterproductive. New research, from Dr. David E. Meyer, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, shows that for all but the most routine endeavors -- and few cognitive efforts seem to require such minimal attention -- it is more time-consuming and wearying for the brain to alternate among tasks than it would be if the same jobs were done one at a time. There are many potential catalysts for forgetfulness; in fact, the list is so long that it's a wonder we remember anything at all. Stress, anxiety and depression all inhibit memory. Hypothyroidism can affect memory and concentration. Type 2 diabetes and its precursor, insulin resistance, can also significantly reduce cognitive function. Even fish-eating can be a hazard. Exposure to neurotoxins, most commonly the methyl mercury that we consume when we eat large predatory ocean fish, like swordfish and tuna, can result in what Dr. Jane Hightower, a San Francisco internist who wrote the resolution on fish and methyl mercury toxicity that was adopted by the American Medical Association, calls ''fish fog.'' None of these factors seemed to account for my own cognitive troubles, however. I wasn't depressed. My mercury levels were a little high, but not high enough to cause fish fog. My thyroid was fine. I felt stressed, certainly, but for the most part because I was so worried about my memory. One catalyst, on the other hand, did seem plausible: lack of sleep. Like many people who had spoken to me about their memory deficits, I slept poorly -- often I was up at 3 a.m., when, in the words of the poet Richard Lang, the bedroom turns into ''a switching yard for the freight trains of anxiety.'' A modest but constant sleep shortage can undermine alertness, a University of Pennsylvania study notes. Those with ''minor'' sleep debts -- say, sleeping just four to six hours a night -- may display cognitive declines equal to people who have not slept for up to two full nights. Good sleep, both REM and non-REM sleep, appears to be critical to the ability to absorb information. During non-REM sleep, which comprises about 80 percent of snooze time, simple spatial tasks and recollections of personal experiences may be consolidated, according to Dr. Michael Perlis, who directs the University of Rochester's Sleep and Neurophysiology Research Laboratory. Tasks involving visual skills, like facial recognition and memory of events with strong emotional impact, appear to be fortified during REM, as are memories of complex actions and procedures. Dr. Jan Born, at the University of Lubeck, in Germany, recently demonstrated how our sleeping brains may continue to focus on problems that baffle us during waking hours. That's why, in addition to being well rested while you take in information, it may also be important to have a good night's sleep afterward, in order to successfully move that information into long-term memory. Born's study suggests that creativity or problem-solving insight may often happen during that portion of non-REM sleep known as slow-wave sleep -- the deepest type of sleep, usually occurring during the first third of the sleep cycle and usually devoid of dreams. But from age 40, said Dr. Robert Stickgold, a sleep researcher and assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, ''slow-wave sleep virtually disappears, diminishing from about 20 percent of the night to near zero. Since slow-wave sleep helps us consolidate certain types of memories, this might explain a substantial component of our memory decline with age.'' Several pharmaceutical companies, Dr. Michael Perlis said, are pursuing the development of new compounds that may reverse declines in slow-wave sleep. ''This new class of drugs may or may not help people fall asleep as quickly, or stay asleep as long, as traditional sleeping pills,'' he said. ''But they have the potential to produce qualitatively better sleep.'' As a research subject in Gary Small's study, I'd been following his recommended memory regimen. Along with the diet, I pursued the recommended exercise program, spending some time each day on an elliptical trainer. Studies indicate that as we age, our mental abilities are improved by regular aerobic and strength-training workouts, while nonaerobic exercise, like stretching and toning, are less beneficial. I felt more energetic, but frankly, I didn't feel much sharper. Frustrated, I went to see Dr. Jonathan Canick, the director of the neuropsychological assessment service at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. Canick is a pragmatic specialist, accustomed to evaluating patients with serious dementias, head injuries, brain tumors and strokes, as well as those with more subtle neurocognitive disorders. ''When a patient ends up in my office,'' he said, ''it's because the medical professionals are stumped.'' Dr. Canick suggested that for most middle-aged people, the real issue was not so much declining memory or retention but rather the faltering ability to attend to and process the onslaught of colliding streams of information coming at us all day long. ''It gets experienced as a memory issue,'' he said, ''but in reality, it could be about attention, learning or retrieving information.'' We could blame evolution: our brains, designed to attend to novel stimuli like a tiny sound downstairs in the middle of the night, ignore that which seems old and familiar. A great deal of what we experience every day -- some of it important, some not -- simply fails to be encoded. As we age, our brains slip into ''been there, done that'' mode. ''If it blows by you,'' he said, ''and it doesn't register, you're never going to be able to retrieve it -- because it doesn't exist.'' Over the course of two days, Dr. Canick put me through an exhausting seven hours of neuropsychological tests. I knew I was struggling. To test facial recognition, I thumbed through a book of head shots. A minute later, presented with a book containing the same photos as well as a group of new ones, I was unable to say whom I had already seen. In another task, I was asked to connect the dots through an alternating and ascending lineup of numbers and letters. I lost the sequence and had to backtrack to rediscover it. Numbers, letters, words, figures -- they were bewildering. ''Keep going,'' Dr. Canick said. ''Go to the end.'' He worked my brain like a trainer works an athlete, looking for weakness. Halfway into the testing, he told me that there was no evidence of a dementing, neurodegenerative or progressive disorder. But the tests I flubbed nevertheless showed impairments that were disturbing and not considered ''average'' in midlife. He explained that there might be a reason for these deficits. People with mild traumatic brain injuries, he said, often demonstrate variable and reduced ability for attention, processing information, word-finding or multitasking. Typically, they interpret their experience of slowed processing and attention deficits as ''memory'' problems. ''For now, it's only a hypothesis,'' he said. ''But your symptoms and your results show the distinct neurobehavorial fingerprint of brain damage, the kind that stems from a series of mild traumatic brain injuries.'' ''That's impossible,'' I said. ''I've never even been knocked unconscious.'' ''And that,'' Dr. Canick said, ''reflects a very common misperception.'' Concussions do not always result in a loss of consciousness, he explained; one can have a mild concussion, experienced as ''seeing stars,'' and remain conscious. In fact, a person doesn't even have to experience direct impact to her head. Rapid acceleration or deceleration of the head, which is often accompanied by a rotation of the brain, can result in concussion. In some cases the brain bounces off the interior of the skull, causing dendrites and axons to be stretched and sheared, damaging the myelin sheath and disrupting communication in a way that could cause a person eventually to slow cognitively and physically. Mild traumatic brain injuries often are undiagnosed, Dr. Canick said. With successive concussions, the effect is more logarithmic than linear. Even if the first injury did little harm, the second can have exponential impact, as does every injury that follows. A few weeks later, I broached the subject of brain injury with my brother Peter, expecting him to agree that Dr. Canick's hypothesis was ridiculous. He did not. ''Don't you remember,'' Peter asked, ''when we were children, and I hit you with. . . . '' I never heard the end of the sentence. I hadn't given it a thought in 30 years, but in less than a second, I was 9 years old, back in the basement of our house in Scarsdale. My brother, a whirling towheaded kid drunk on centrifugal force, spun in circles, an old broomstick extended horizontally from his hands. I was in the wrong place. The impact knocked me flat. For the next three weeks, as my eye sockets and forehead turned every color in the rainbow, my fourth-grade teacher referred to me as Miss Technicolor. There were other head injuries as well: horseback-riding wrack-ups and, because I am tall, forehead-smashing collisions with low-hanging doorways and tree branches. One by one, these recollections emerged. According to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, at least 1.1 million people each year sustain mild traumatic brain injuries that result in confusion, disorientation or impaired consciousness for fewer than 30 minutes. The number is probably underestimated, given that many people with mild injuries don't go to a doctor's office or an emergency room at all. How could I know that Dr. Canick was right -- that my mild traumatic head injuries could actually produce long-lasting neurocognitive deficits? I was reluctant to credit his diagnosis, suspecting that he might want to be the guy with the answer, whether or not that answer was correct. I understood the concept of logarithmic damage, but why had I failed to notice any impairment until I reached my mid-30's? ''You must take into account the concept of neuronal reserve,'' said Dr. Ronald Ruff, a clinical neuropsychologist in San Francisco, who concurred with Dr. Canick's findings. ''By age 25, you have all the neurons you're going to get,'' he said. ''For most of us, the fact that we experience continuous slow cell death over the years doesn't become evident until we reach our 80's. If, on the other hand, you've had concussions, or abused substances or alcohol, you'll have diminished your share of neurons, and the slope of decline will be sharper. In your 20's, this is usually no big deal, but by the time you reach your mid-30's or 40's, the net availability has declined so much that, when you're called to rise to the height of your capacity, you start to notice.'' That made sense, I thought -- but why, in my case, had the onset of cognitive problems occurred so swiftly? Hormonal changes during pregnancy can affect memory and cognition, Dr. Canick said. In addition, ''you had an underlying vulnerability,'' he explained. ''You toughed it out during your 20's, because you had the neuronal resources to do it. After the birth, you faced a new situation -- you were compelled to divide your attention as you never had before, and you discovered the deficiency in your brain function.'' Serious long-term effects of mild traumatic brain injury are often missed because the injured person returns rapidly to normal life, said Dr. Tracy McIntosh, professor of neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania. ''Several months down the road -- about two months later in mice -- you'll begin to see subtle cognitive changes,'' he said, because, perhaps, it takes that long for the injured neurons to die or the neural pathways to become dysfunctional. The vast majority of these injuries were thought to resolve completely within a few months or even weeks, but brain-injury specialists like Dr. McIntosh now question that assumption. I returned to Dr. Canick to talk more about the results of my test and his theory about brain trauma. ''Your results range from the 10th percentile to the 98th,'' he said. ''You cannot rely upon your own abilities, because they are so variable.'' He said it was as if neurologically I were two different people. ''You don't know which of the two people is going to be available for any task. And that is destabilizing, as well as a recipe for anxiety, confusion, angst and self-doubt.'' Dr. Canick's descriptions felt achingly familiar, an explanation for a dichotomy I'd felt for years. As a psychologist, Dr. Canick could not prescribe drugs. But he told me that several of his brain-injured, attention-compromised patients had improved with the use of neurostimulants, either Ritalin or Adderall, the same drugs that are regularly administered to children with A.D.H.D. Although these drugs enabled people to focus better and make more effective use of their brains, he cautioned that they did not bestow abilities that weren't there in the first place. I discovered that Adderall -- an amphetamine and a controlled substance with a high potential for abuse and addiction -- was rapidly developing a black-market status. Despite its side effects -- dry mouth, insomnia, lack of appetite, headache and racing heartbeat -- college students were using it to improve their focus on exams, some young professionals have been taking it to increase their productivity at work and increasingly, middle-aged people like myself were using it to restore their attention and concentration. If you were willing to visit a psychiatrist or a sympathetic general practitioner and answer a series of rather transparent questions that suggested that you were suffering from adult attention deficit disorder, it seemed that prescriptions were readily available. Adderall and Ritalin appear to provide a boost in focus to virtually anyone who ingests them. Dr. Anthony Rostain, medical director the University of Pennsylvania's Adult A.D.H.D. Treatment and Research Program, suggested that he wouldn't be surprised if, in the future, hordes of middle-aged people popped pills for cognitive enhancement. In fact, he predicted that these stimulants would be available over the counter. ''Given the performance orientation we have today,'' he said, ''and the urgent need to improve productivity, it seems to me that people will use these drugs in the same way we now use socially sanctioned stimulants like caffeine.'' Other cognitively enhancing drugs, he noted, were on the way -- the market for them was vast, and the pharmaceutical companies had taken notice. I wish I could say that the Adderall didn't help. But after about a week, the gears meshed in my brain. Once again, I could move sentences around in a manuscript without finding myself holding a handful of orphaned words. I regained access to my vocabulary. My errands proceeded in an orderly fashion. Dr. Canick asked me to return to his office. He wanted to test me again now that I was on the drug. On the test of facial recognition, my scores improved from well below average -- in the 19th percentile -- to the 93rd. On a test of mental arithmetic, my performance increased from the 50th percentile to the 91st for people my age. Verbal math problems, once unfathomable because I could not remember how many doughnuts Sally, Bill and Jane had each purchased, became quite easy. Other tests showed more modest improvements, but the trend was clear. I didn't kid myself. Drugs aside, the mechanism was still broken. If Dr. Canick's diagnosis was correct, I was dealing with a problem that could be patched up but never fixed. New imaging technology will detect microscopic damage to axons and specific neural pathways, perhaps answering the question of whether indeed my brain had suffered an injury. While I knew that my expectations for myself were high, and that a pathology could be involved, I also saw that many people in midlife experienced the same sense of perpetual distraction and preoccupation. What had brought us to this point? I wondered. Were we trying too hard to live fast-paced, information-heavy lives, when our brains were naturally slowing down? Our fleeting attention, it seemed to me, might be a protective if ill-timed response -- the brain's way of saying that it had simply had enough. After a month of Adderall I could see that there were side effects I hadn't read about in the drug literature. I worked like a demon, but I found myself disconnected. At the computer I was entirely focused, but off duty, certain pleasures, like wandering around aimlessly in my own mind, were no longer available to me. I began to take mini-vacations from Adderall -- a Sunday off, so that I could recline in a lounge chair and watch my kids perform cannonball dives. I suspected that I was gunning a middle-aged engine at speeds better suited to one with fewer miles on it, and that there would be consequences. Because I never experienced the feeling of euphoria that causes some people to desire ever-increasing doses of the drug, I didn't worry about addiction, but I was concerned about psychological dependency. Sometimes I wondered whom I was trying to fool. Was this cognitive enhancement actually no more than vanity, as frivolous as a face lift, but more deceptive, because in the end, you duped only yourself? I could not imagine tossing the Adderall prescription and returning to the mental fog. Nevertheless I found myself wondering whether at some point in the future, such hard-edged, drug-induced accuracy might start to feel as unseemly to me as a thigh-high miniskirt, and I'd quit. Not long ago, I spent some time with Dr. Thomas Crook III, a clinical psychologist who had devoted his long career -- including 14 years at the National Institute of Mental Health, where he served six years as chief of the Geriatric Psychopharmacology Program -- to helping to establish age-associated memory impairment as a clinical condition that warranted attention and treatment. Years ago, he noted the insensitivity implicit in telling older patients who complained about their memories that what they were experiencing was inconvenient but typical. If they went in complaining that they could no longer read, he wrote in 1993, ''it would scarcely occur to the clinician to inform them that their problems are no worse than those of other persons of the same age and, therefore, that they do not merit treatment.'' Something he mentioned gave me hope that I would not always feel so troubled by what had happened to my mind. Although for many, essential cognitive skills, like the ability to remember names or recognize faces, decline precipitously as the decades go by, people's self-reported impressions reflect a different understanding. ''Asked how they would describe their memories,'' Dr. Crook said, ''people who are in their 40's are the most critical. In their 50's, they feel a little bit better about their capacities, and by the time they reach their 60's, they're as satisfied as they were in their early 30's.'' With Adderall, I had a Proustian taste of what I thought I'd left behind. I was glad to know that, at least while pharmaceutically enhanced, I still had the chops. Still, I often thought about what Dr. Crook had said. At what point might I stop dwelling on what had been lost, I wondered, and begin to relish what I had gained with age? Perspective and insight, fused with acceptance, formed the cornerstone of wisdom. The rest, presumably, I could get from Google. Cathryn Jakobson Ramin is at work on a book about midlife memory for HarperCollins. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/magazine/05MEMORY.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 18 15:39:48 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 10:39:48 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Brooks: The New Red-Diaper Babies Message-ID: The New Red-Diaper Babies Opinion column by David Brooks, The New York Times, 4.12.7 There is a little-known movement sweeping across the United States. The movement is "natalism." All across the industrialized world, birthrates are falling - in Western Europe, in Canada and in many regions of the United States. People are marrying later and having fewer kids. But spread around this country, and concentrated in certain areas, the natalists defy these trends. They are having three, four or more kids. Their personal identity is defined by parenthood. They are more spiritually, emotionally and physically invested in their homes than in any other sphere of life, having concluded that parenthood is the most enriching and elevating thing they can do. Very often they have sacrificed pleasures like sophisticated movies, restaurant dining and foreign travel, let alone competitive careers and disposable income, for the sake of their parental calling. In a world that often makes it hard to raise large families, many are willing to move to find places that are congenial to natalist values. The fastest-growing regions of the country tend to have the highest concentrations of children. Young families move away from what they perceive as disorder, vulgarity and danger and move to places like Douglas County in Colorado (which is the fastest-growing county in the country and has one of the highest concentrations of kids). Some people see these exurbs as sprawling, materialistic wastelands, but many natalists see them as clean, orderly and affordable places where they can nurture children. If you wanted a one-sentence explanation for the explosive growth of far-flung suburbs, it would be that when people get money, one of the first things they do is use it to try to protect their children from bad influences. So there are significant fertility inequalities across regions. People on the Great Plains and in the Southwest are much more fertile than people in New England or on the Pacific coast. You can see surprising political correlations. As Steve Sailer pointed out in The American Conservative, George Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates, and 25 of the top 26. John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest rates. In The New Republic Online, Joel Kotkin and William Frey observe, "Democrats swept the largely childless cities - true blue locales like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boston and Manhattan have the lowest percentages of children in the nation - but generally had poor showings in those places where families are settling down, notably the Sun Belt cities, exurbs and outer suburbs of older metropolitan areas." Politicians will try to pander to this group. They should know this is a spiritual movement, not a political one. The people who are having big families are explicitly rejecting materialistic incentives and hyperindividualism. It costs a middle-class family upward of $200,000 to raise a child. These people are saying money and ambition will not be their gods. Natalists resist the declining fertility trends not because of income, education or other socioeconomic characteristics. It's attitudes. People with larger families tend to attend religious services more often, and tend to have more traditional gender roles. I draw attention to natalists because they're an important feature of our national life. Because of them, the U.S. stands out in all sorts of demographic and cultural categories. But I do it also because when we talk about the divide on values in this country, caricatured in the red and blue maps, it's important that we understand the true motive forces behind it. Natalists are associated with red America, but they're not launching a jihad. The differences between them and people on the other side of the cultural or political divide are differences of degree, not kind. Like most Americans, but perhaps more anxiously, they try to shepherd their kids through supermarket checkouts lined with screaming Cosmo or Maxim cover lines. Like most Americans, but maybe more so, they suspect that we won't solve our social problems or see improvements in our schools as long as many kids are growing up in barely functioning families. Like most Americans, and maybe more so because they tend to marry earlier, they find themselves confronting the consequences of divorce. Like most Americans, they wonder how we can be tolerant of diverse lifestyles while still preserving the family institutions that are under threat. What they cherish, like most Americans, is the self-sacrificial love shown by parents. People who have enough kids for a basketball team are too busy to fight a culture war. E-mail: dabrooks at nytimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/07/opinion/07brooks.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 18 15:40:31 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 10:40:31 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: In Kingdom of Cockroaches, Leaders Are Made, Not Born Message-ID: In Kingdom of Cockroaches, Leaders Are Made, Not Born NYT December 7, 2004 By JOHN SCHWARTZ It might seem counterintuitive - or, let's face it, silly - for scientists to create an artificial cockroach. Nature has, after all, given us so many of them, and considerable energies of humankind have been focused on exterminating them. But an international team of scientists has done just that. The purpose of the matchbox-size robo-roach is to study "collective intelligence," said Jos? Halloy, senior research scientist at the Free University of Brussels, one of the institutions collaborating on the project. Roaches, ants, bees and many other creatures are gregarious and share a kind of mob intellect, he said. The researchers have found a chemical blend that smells roachish enough for the impostors to trick real roaches into believing they are part of the group, and even to modify group behavior by getting the roaches to follow them from dark to light places. As tempting as it might be to imagine a pied piper leading roaches into glue traps, Dr. Halloy said their goal was not roach control. "Everybody is enthusiastic that we are going to build a program to get rid of the cockroaches," he said. "That is not the present stage or the aim at the moment." When it comes to killing roaches, "classical methods are better." Ultimately, he said, the technologies could be used to make smarter computers and robots. "We want machines to perform independently without human intervention," Dr. Halloy said. The researchers are studying collective behavior among many species. Working closely with Jean-Louis Deneubourg of the Center for Nonlinear Phenomena and Complex Systems at the university, the researchers say they hope to influence "collective choice" and eventually "control animal behavior through the use of artificial systems" like herding sheep without the menace of a sheepdog or persuading flocks of grackles to leave parks. The researchers say they are also making progress with chickens, which exhibit a destructive "panic behavior" that might be calmed with poultrybots. "That's the dream," Dr. Halloy said. "But of course, we are far away from that. What we are trying to do is prove the concept." "The idea of using microrobots to influence the collective behavior of animals, and cockroaches in particular, is an old idea of Jean Louis's, and we had some really hilarious brainstorming sessions a few years ago talking about it," said another scientist in the field, Dr. Eric Bonabeau. Dr. Bonabeau is chairman of Icosystem, a company in Cambridge, Mass., and Paris that is exploring swarm technology "for military purposes." That could make the roaches sound almost cuddly. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/07/science/07roach.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 18 15:41:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 10:41:47 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: What Corporate America Can't Build: A Sentence Message-ID: What Corporate America Can't Build: A Sentence NYT December 7, 2004 By SAM DILLON BLOOMINGTON, Ill. - R. Craig Hogan, a former university professor who heads an online school for business writing here, received an anguished e-mail message recently from a prospective student. "i need help," said the message, which was devoid of punctuation. "i am writing a essay on writing i work for this company and my boss want me to help improve the workers writing skills can yall help me with some information thank you". Hundreds of inquiries from managers and executives seeking to improve their own or their workers' writing pop into Dr. Hogan's computer in-basket each month, he says, describing a number that has surged as e-mail has replaced the phone for much workplace communication. Millions of employees must write more frequently on the job than previously. And many are making a hash of it. "E-mail is a party to which English teachers have not been invited," Dr. Hogan said. "It has companies tearing their hair out." A recent survey of 120 American corporations reached a similar conclusion. The study, by the National Commission on Writing, a panel established by the College Board, concluded that a third of employees in the nation's blue-chip companies wrote poorly and that businesses were spending as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training. The problem shows up not only in e-mail but also in reports and other texts, the commission said. "It's not that companies want to hire Tolstoy," said Susan Traiman, a director at the Business Roundtable, an association of leading chief executives whose corporations were surveyed in the study. "But they need people who can write clearly, and many employees and applicants fall short of that standard." Millions of inscrutable e-mail messages are clogging corporate computers by setting off requests for clarification, and many of the requests, in turn, are also chaotically written, resulting in whole cycles of confusion. Here is one from a systems analyst to her supervisor at a high-tech corporation based in Palo Alto, Calif.: "I updated the Status report for the four discrepancies Lennie forward us via e-mail (they in Barry file).. to make sure my logic was correct It seems we provide Murray with incorrect information ... However after verifying controls on JBL - JBL has the indicator as B ???? - I wanted to make sure with the recent changes - I processed today - before Murray make the changes again on the mainframe to 'C'." The incoherence of that message persuaded the analyst's employers that she needed remedial training. "The more electronic and global we get, the less important the spoken word has become, and in e-mail clarity is critical," said Sean Phillips, recruitment director at another Silicon Valley corporation, Applera, a supplier of equipment for life science research, where most employees have advanced degrees. "Considering how highly educated our people are, many can't write clearly in their day-to-day work." Some $2.9 billion of the $3.1 billion the National Commission on Writing estimates that corporations spend each year on remedial training goes to help current employees, with the rest spent on new hires. The corporations surveyed were in the mining, construction, manufacturing, transportation, finance, insurance, real estate and service industries, but not in wholesale, retail, agriculture, forestry or fishing, the commission said. Nor did the estimate include spending by government agencies to improve the writing of public servants. An entire educational industry has developed to offer remedial writing instruction to adults, with hundreds of public and private universities, for-profit schools and freelance teachers offering evening classes as well as workshops, video and online courses in business and technical writing. Kathy Keenan, a onetime legal proofreader who teaches business writing at the University of California Extension, Santa Cruz, said she sought to dissuade students from sending business messages in the crude shorthand they learned to tap out on their pagers as teenagers. "hI KATHY i am sending u the assignmnet again," one student wrote to her recently. "i had sent you the assignment earlier but i didnt get a respond. If u get this assgnment could u please respond . thanking u for ur cooperation." Most of her students are midcareer professionals in high-tech industries, Ms. Keenan said. The Sharonview Federal Credit Union in Charlotte, N.C., asked about 15 employees to take a remedial writing course. Angela Tate, a mortgage processor, said the course eventually bolstered her confidence in composing e-mail, which has replaced much work she previously did by phone, but it was a daunting experience, since she had been out of school for years. "It was a challenge all the way through," Ms. Tate said. Even C.E.O.'s need writing help, said Roger S. Peterson, a freelance writer in Rocklin, Calif., who frequently coaches executives. "Many of these guys write in inflated language that desperately needs a laxative," Mr. Peterson said, and not a few are defensive. "They're in denial, and who's going to argue with the boss?" But some realize their shortcomings and pay Mr. Peterson to help them improve. Don Morrison, a onetime auditor at Deloitte & Touche who has built a successful consulting business, is among them. "I was too wordy," Mr. Morrison said. "I liked long, convoluted passages rather than simple four-word sentences. And I had a predilection for underlining words and throwing in multiple exclamation points. Finally Roger threatened to rip the exclamation key off my keyboard." Exclamation points were an issue when Linda Landis Andrews, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, led a workshop in May for midcareer executives at an automotive corporation based in the Midwest. Their exasperated supervisor had insisted that the men improve their writing. "I get a memo from them and cannot figure out what they're trying to say," the supervisor wrote Ms. Andrews. When at her request the executives produced letters they had written to a supplier who had failed to deliver parts on time, she was horrified to see that tone-deaf writing had turned a minor business snarl into a corporate confrontation moving toward litigation. "They had allowed a hostile tone to creep into the letters," she said. "They didn't seem to understand that those letters were just toxic." "People think that throwing multiple exclamation points into a business letter will make their point forcefully," Ms. Andrews said. "I tell them they're allowed two exclamation points in their whole life." Not everyone agrees. Kaitlin Duck Sherwood of San Francisco, author of a popular how-to manual on effective e-mail, argued in an interview that exclamation points could help convey intonation, thereby avoiding confusion in some e-mail. "If you want to indicate stronger emphasis, use all capital letters and toss in some extra exclamation points," Ms. Sherwood advises in her guide, available at www.webfoot.com, where she offers a vivid example: ">Should I boost the power on the thrombo? "NO!!!! If you turn it up to eleven, you'll overheat the motors, and IT MIGHT EXPLODE!!" Dr. Hogan, who founded his online Business Writing Center a decade ago after years of teaching composition at Illinois State University here, says that the use of multiple exclamation points and other nonstandard punctuation like the :-) symbol, are fine for personal e-mail but that companies have erred by allowing experimental writing devices to flood into business writing. He scrolled through his computer, calling up examples of incoherent correspondence sent to him by prospective students. "E-mails - that are received from Jim and I are not either getting open or not being responded to," the purchasing manager at a construction company in Virginia wrote in one memorandum that Dr. Hogan called to his screen. "I wanted to let everyone know that when Jim and I are sending out e-mails (example- who is to be picking up parcels) I am wanting for who ever the e-mail goes to to respond back to the e-mail. Its important that Jim and I knows that the person, intended, had read the e-mail. This gives an acknowledgment that the task is being completed. I am asking for a simple little 2 sec. Note that says "ok", "I got it", or Alright." The construction company's human resources director forwarded the memorandum to Dr. Hogan while enrolling the purchasing manager in a writing course. "E-mail has just erupted like a weed, and instead of considering what to say when they write, people now just let thoughts drool out onto the screen," Dr. Hogan said. "It has companies at their wits' end." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/07/business/07write.html From waluk at earthlink.net Tue Jan 18 16:48:19 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 08:48:19 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox news References: <01C4FCD6.FBC04820.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <006a01c4fd7d$8504f350$5d00f604@S0027397558> I doubt if Hitler read Tolstoy's "War and Peace". From what I've researched, his history skills were sadly lacking. In the end, his oratory ability was overshadowed by both history and truth. Gerry Reinhart-Waller http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'G. Reinhart-Waller'" Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 8:56 PM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox news > And he had the example of Napoleon which > should have told him something. > > He thought it would be over quickly. > > They often do, and then it becomes a > costly, nightmarish quagmire. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: G. Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] > Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 8:21 PM > To: Steve Hovland > Cc: paleopsych at paleopsych.org > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox > news > > > Hitler's attack on Russia was a leap of faith.....and > a > stupid move. His forces were not equipped for > climatic > differences between central Europe and territory > beyond > the Urals. > > His defeat was caused more by stupidity than by > strategic mistakes....hmmm, could be that his > strategic > mistakes were caused by his stupidity. > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk > > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Steve Hovland" > To: "'G. Reinhart-Waller'" > Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 6:29 PM > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] internet rumors vs. fox > news > > >> Hitler went down because he attacked Russia. >> >> Fighting on two fronts exhausted his resources. >> >> Both Germany and Japan grossly underestimated >> the US. >> >> Stragetic mistakes lead to defeat. >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> --snip-- From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Tue Jan 18 19:49:43 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 11:49:43 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] not crazy In-Reply-To: <200501181923.j0IJNGC17612@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050118194943.90344.qmail@web30804.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>Iran War I am the President. I am not crazy. The buck stops here.<< --Wow, powerful poem. I hope he doesn't read it, it might make him go crazy. :) Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Jan 18 22:05:51 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 14:05:51 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] not crazy Message-ID: <01C4FD66.D1E8C140.shovland@mindspring.com> thanks Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2005 11:50 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] not crazy >>Iran War I am the President. I am not crazy. The buck stops here.<< --Wow, powerful poem. I hope he doesn't read it, it might make him go crazy. :) Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 19 15:06:07 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 10:06:07 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Special ACLU area Message-ID: Exclusive ACLU Area In Hell Nearly Complete 12/28/2004 - Matt Myford [Thanks to Dick for this.] Preparations for an ACLU-only area in Hell are nearly complete, underground construction sources said yesterday. The area, more than 3 square miles of "hotter than usual" turf, will hold members of the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization whose sole objective is the elimination of Christmas from public life. "There's a mini-volcano there burping up hot lava and everything," said an anonymous representative of Otherwordly Construction, Inc. The company recently sold its soul to the devil for the exclusive, no-bid offer of expanding Hell. The construction project is believed to be the first known addition to Hell since the 1940s, when Nazi and Japanese war criminals headed for their eternal damnation en masse. Rumors have been swirling that whenever a particularly active ACLU busybody prepares for afterlife, he'll be "express shipped" to the ACLU area of Hell, "no ifs, ands, or buts about it." A feature story in an upcoming issue of Architectural Digest will reveal the area of Hell for ACLU members. One editor said it "makes the lands of Mordor in those Lord of the Rings movies look like a bright, sunny meadow." Analysts estimate the ACLU expansion of Hell increases 10 square feet for every nativity scene protested and 5 square feet for every time someone is forced to say "Happy Winter Solstice" instead of "Merry Christmas." In related news, Hell is "expanding its horizons" by housing "foreign" folks, including Islamic terrorists. "It's all about diversity, right?" said a representative in Hell. "For instance, we're keeping the 9/11 hijackers here for 10,000 years or so. That may sound like a long time, but next to eternity, it ain't nothin', bub." From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 19 15:06:53 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 10:06:53 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Chronicle: Daily news: 01/19/2005 -- 03 (fwd) Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 09:29:00 -0500 (EST) From: checker at panix.com To: checker at panix.com Subject: The Chronicle: Daily news: 01/19/2005 -- 03 [1][;sz=120x90;ptile=1;num=42347?] Search The Site __________ Go [2]More options | [3]Back issues [4]Home [5]News [6]Today's news [7]Current issue [8]Special issues & data [9]The Faculty [10]Research & Books [11]Government & Politics [12]Money & Management [13]Information Technology [14]Students [15]Athletics [16]International [17]Community Colleges [18]Short Subjects [19]Gazette [20]Corrections [21]Opinion & Forums [22]The Chronicle Review [23]Forums [24]Colloquy [25]Careers [26]News & Advice [27]My Career homepage [28]Search jobs [29]by position type [30]by discipline/field [31]by state/region [32]by institution [33]Tools & Resources [34]Employer Profiles [35]Sponsored information & solutions [36]Services [37]Help [38]Contact us [39]Subscribe [40]Manage your account [41]Advertise with us [42]Rights & permissions [43][;sz=120x90;ptile=1;num=42347?] [44]The Chronicle of Higher Education Today's News Wednesday, January 19, 2005 Female Professors Assail Remarks by Harvard's President, Who Says It's All a Misunderstanding [45]By PIPER FOGG [space.gif] [space.gif] [space.gif] [space.gif] [space.gif] [space.gif] [space.gif] [space.gif] [space.gif] [space.gif] [space.gif] [46]Easy-to-print version [47]E-mail this article [48]Subscribe [space.gif] [space.gif] [space.gif] [space.gif] [space.gif] [space.gif] HEADLINES [space.gif] [space.gif] [49]NIH reportedly is weakening its plan for free access to journal articles [50]Senators support nominee for health secretary; stem-cell research does not come up in initial hearing [51]Female professors assail remarks by Harvard's president, who says it's all a misunderstanding [52]New database of graduation rates could help colleges learn from better-performing peers [53]Louisiana College picks new president whom most faculty members oppose [54]Former professor sues Wisconsin college, saying he was fired for refusing to inflate grades [55]ACT Inc. starts for-profit subsidiary to enter testing market for international students [space.gif] Harvard University's president, Lawrence H. Summers, has come under fire by some scholars for suggesting that one reason fewer women make it to the top in mathematics and science may be the result of innate differences from men. Some prominent female scholars have called his remarks offensive, while other academics say his comments synthesized some current research on gender differences. Mr. Summers said his views, delivered on Friday at an economics conference in Cambridge, Mass., have been "misconstrued." Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who led at 1999 panel on the status of women there, walked out in disgust in the middle of Mr. Summers's speech, she said. News of the incident was first reported on Monday in The Boston Globe. About 50 people attended the conference, sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research and titled "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce: Women, Underrepresented Minorities, and Their S&E Careers," at which Mr. Summers gave a luncheon talk. While no transcript of his remarks exists, conference attendees say he discussed several possible hypotheses for why fewer women than men are in the top ranks in science and math at elite universities. He discussed the theory that women with children are reluctant to work the 80-hour weeks that are required to succeed in those fields. Conference attendees said Mr. Summers then discussed the possibility that men and women may have different innate abilities that were previously attributed to socialization. When Ms. Hopkins heard that, she said, "I was profoundly upset." "That kind of discrimination holds people back," she said. But Mr. Summers, an economist who served as treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, said in an interview on Tuesday that people have misinterpreted his remarks as suggesting that women cannot do science. "Nothing I said or believe provides any basis for either stereotyping women or for fatalism about our ability to draw more women into scientific careers," he said. He added that he did intend to challenge an audience of social scientists to understand the many factors that have led to the underrepresentation of women in science and engineering, and he noted that more study is needed on the issue. Not everyone was offended by Mr. Summers's speech. Paula E. Stephen, a professor of economics at the University of Georgia, said that Mr. Summers had organized a set of comments on current research findings on the topic and also put forth potential remedies, including providing professors with more child-care services. One reason some reactions to Mr. Summers's comments were so vehement may have been a suspicion that he is insufficiently committed to women in academe. Last fall, 26 female professors at Harvard complained that the number of tenured women there had declined during his presidency. He has said that he is committed to the advancement of women. _________________________________________________________________ Background articles from The Chronicle: * [56]Where the Elite Teach, It's Still a Man's World (12/3/2004) * [57]Female Professors Say Harvard Is Not Granting Tenure to Enough Women (10/1/2004) * [58]How Babies Alter Careers for Academics (12/5/2003) [space.gif] [space.gif] [space.gif] [space.gif] [59][;sz=120x930;num=76543?] [space.gif] _________________________________________________________________ [60]Copyright ? 2005 by [61]The Chronicle of Higher Education | [62]Contact us [63]User agreement | [64]Privacy policy | [65]About The Chronicle | [66]Site map | [67]Help [68]Subscribe | [69]Advertise with us | [70]Press inquires | [71]RSS | [72]Today's most e-mailed [73]Home | [74]Chronicle Careers | [75]The Chronicle Review [76][;sz=468x60;ptile=2;num=42347?] References Visible links 1. http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/news.che/;sz=120x90;ptile=1;num=42347? 2. http://chronicle.com/search 3. http://chronicle.com/archive 4. http://chronicle.com/ 5. http://chronicle.com/ 6. http://chronicle.com/news/ 7. http://chronicle.com/chronicle/ 8. http://chronicle.com/special/ 9. http://chronicle.com/faculty/ 10. http://chronicle.com/research/ 11. http://chronicle.com/government/ 12. http://chronicle.com/money/ 13. http://chronicle.com/infotech/ 14. http://chronicle.com/students/ 15. http://chronicle.com/athletics/ 16. http://chronicle.com/international/ 17. http://chronicle.com/cc/ 18. http://chronicle.com/briefs/ 19. http://chronicle.com/gazette/ 20. http://chronicle.com/help/corrections.htm 21. http://chronicle.com/review/ 22. http://chronicle.com/review/ 23. http://chronicle.com/forums/ 24. http://chronicle.com/colloquy/ 25. http://chronicle.com/jobs/ 26. http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/ 27. http://chronicle.com/jobs/home/ 28. http://chronicle.com/search/jobs/ 29. http://chronicle.com/jobs/browse/position/ 30. http://chronicle.com/jobs/browse/field/ 31. http://chronicle.com/jobs/browse/location/ 32. http://chronicle.com/jobs/browse/institution/ 33. http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/tools/ 34. http://chronicle.com/jobs/profiles/ 35. http://chronicle.com/solutions/ 36. http://chronicle.com/help/ 37. http://chronicle.com/help/ 38. http://chronicle.com/contact/ 39. http://chronicle.com/subscribe/ 40. http://chronicle.com/services/ 41. http://chronicle.com/advertising/ 42. http://chronicle.com/help/copyright.htm 43. http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/news.che/;sz=120x90;ptile=1;num=42347? 44. http://chronicle.com/ 45. mailto:piper.fogg at chronicle.com 46. http://chronicle.com/cgi2-bin/printable.cgi?article=http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/01/2005011903n.htm 47. http://chronicle.com/cgi2-bin/emailer.cgi?article=http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/01/2005011903n.htm 48. http://chronicle.com/subscribe/?article 49. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/01/2005011901n.htm 50. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/01/2005011902n.htm 51. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/01/2005011903n.htm 52. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/01/2005011904n.htm 53. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/01/2005011905n.htm 54. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/01/2005011906n.htm 55. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/01/2005011907n.htm 56. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i15/15a00801.htm 57. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i06/06a01402.htm 58. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i15/15a00101.htm 59. http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/news.che/;sz=120x930;num=76543? 60. http://chronicle.com/help/copyright.htm 61. http://chronicle.com/ 62. http://chronicle.com/contact/ 63. http://chronicle.com/help/useragreement.htm 64. http://chronicle.com/help/privacy.htm 65. http://chronicle.com/help/about.htm 66. http://chronicle.com/search/guide/ 67. http://chronicle.com/help/ 68. http://chronicle.com/subscribe/?cn 69. http://chronicle.com/advertising/ 70. http://chronicle.com/press/ 71. http://chronicle.com/help/rss.htm 72. http://chronicle.com/news/topemailed.htm 73. http://chronicle.com/ 74. http://chronicle.com/jobs/ 75. http://chronicle.com/review/ 76. http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/news.che/;sz=468x60;ptile=2;num=42347? Hidden links: 77. javascript:showNews(); 78. javascript:showRev(); 79. javascript:showJobs(); 80. javascript:showServ(); 81. http://chronicle.com/cgi2-bin/printable.cgi?article=http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/01/2005011903n.htm 82. http://chronicle.com/cgi2-bin/emailer.cgi?article=http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/01/2005011903n.htm 83. http://chronicle.com/subscribe/?article From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 19 15:09:18 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 10:09:18 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE and NYT: More on Summer's Remarks Message-ID: Female Professors Assail Remarks by Harvard's President, Who Says It's All a Misunderstanding News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.19 http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/01/2005011903n.htm By PIPER FOGG Harvard University's president, Lawrence H. Summers, has come under fire by some scholars for suggesting that one reason fewer women make it to the top in mathematics and science may be the result of innate differences from men. Some prominent female scholars have called his remarks offensive, while other academics say his comments synthesized some current research on gender differences. Mr. Summers said his views, delivered on Friday at an economics conference in Cambridge, Mass., have been "misconstrued." Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who led at 1999 panel on the status of women there, walked out in disgust in the middle of Mr. Summers's speech, she said. News of the incident was first reported on Monday in The Boston Globe. About 50 people attended the conference, sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research and titled "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce: Women, Underrepresented Minorities, and Their S&E Careers," at which Mr. Summers gave a luncheon talk. While no transcript of his remarks exists, conference attendees say he discussed several possible hypotheses for why fewer women than men are in the top ranks in science and math at elite universities. He discussed the theory that women with children are reluctant to work the 80-hour weeks that are required to succeed in those fields. Conference attendees said Mr. Summers then discussed the possibility that men and women may have different innate abilities that were previously attributed to socialization. When Ms. Hopkins heard that, she said, "I was profoundly upset." "That kind of discrimination holds people back," she said. But Mr. Summers, an economist who served as treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, said in an interview on Tuesday that people have misinterpreted his remarks as suggesting that women cannot do science. "Nothing I said or believe provides any basis for either stereotyping women or for fatalism about our ability to draw more women into scientific careers," he said. He added that he did intend to challenge an audience of social scientists to understand the many factors that have led to the underrepresentation of women in science and engineering, and he noted that more study is needed on the issue. Not everyone was offended by Mr. Summers's speech. Paula E. Stephen, a professor of economics at the University of Georgia, said that Mr. Summers had organized a set of comments on current research findings on the topic and also put forth potential remedies, including providing professors with more child-care services. One reason some reactions to Mr. Summers's comments were so vehement may have been a suspicion that he is insufficiently committed to women in academe. Last fall, 26 female professors at Harvard complained that the number of tenured women there had declined during his presidency. He has said that he is committed to the advancement of women. _________________________________________________________________ Background articles from The Chronicle: * [56]Where the Elite Teach, It's Still a Man's World (12/3/2004) * [57]Female Professors Say Harvard Is Not Granting Tenure to Enough Women (10/1/2004) * [58]How Babies Alter Careers for Academics (12/5/2003) References 56. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i15/15a00801.htm 57. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i06/06a01402.htm 58. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i15/15a00101.htm ---------------- No Break in the Storm Over Harvard President's Words NYT January 19, 2005 By SAM DILLON and SARA RIMER Members of a Harvard faculty committee that has examined the recruiting of professors who are women sent a protest letter yesterday to Lawrence H. Summers, the university's president, saying his recent statements about innate differences between the sexes would only make it harder to attract top candidates. The committee told Mr. Summers that his remarks did not "serve our institution well." "Indeed," the letter said, "they serve to reinforce an institutional culture at Harvard that erects numerous barriers to improving the representation of women on the faculty, and to impede our current efforts to recruit top women scholars. They also send at best mixed signals to our high-achieving women students in Harvard College and in the graduate and professional schools." The letter was one part of an outcry that continued to follow remarks Mr. Summers made Friday suggesting that biological differences between the sexes may be one explanation for why fewer women succeed in mathematic and science careers. One university dean called the aftermath an "intellectual tsunami," and some Harvard alumnae said they would suspend donations to the university. Perhaps the most outraged were prominent female professors at Harvard. "If you were a woman scientist and had two competing offers and knew that the president of Harvard didn't think that women scientists were as good as men, which one would you take?" said Mary C. Waters, chairman of Harvard's sociology department, who with other faculty members has been pressing Mr. Summers to reverse a sharp decline in the hiring of tenured female professors during his administration. At the center of the storm, Mr. Summers posted a statement late Monday night on his Web page, saying that his comments at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit economic research organization in Cambridge had been misconstrued and pledging to continue efforts to "attract and engage outstanding women scientists." "My aim at the conference was to underscore that the situation is likely the product of a variety of factors and that further research can help us better understand their interplay," he said. "I do not presume to have confident answers, only the conviction that the harder we work to research and understand the situation, the better the prospects for long term success." Mr. Summers also received support from Hanna H. Gray, a former president of the University of Chicago and a member of the Harvard Corporation, the university's governing body. Dr. Gray said she believed that Mr. Summers's remarks had been misinterpreted. "I think that Larry Summers is an excellent president of Harvard, firmly committed and deeply respectful of the role of women in universities and one who is anxious to strengthen and enhance that," she said. At Friday's conference, Mr. Summers discussed possible reasons so few women were on the science and engineering faculties at research universities, and he said he would be provocative. Among his hypotheses were that faculty positions at elite universities required more time and energy than married women with children were willing to accept, that innate sex differences might leave women less capable of succeeding at the most advanced mathematics and that discrimination may also play a role, participants said. There was no transcript of his remarks. His remarks caused one professor to walk out and another to openly challenge them. In their letter to Mr. Summers, the standing committee on women, reproached him for thinking that he could speak as an individual and an economist at a small, private conference without it reflecting on the university. They said it "was obvious that the president of the university never speaks entirely as an individual, especially when that institution is Harvard and when the issue on the table is so highly charged." On and off the campus, Mr. Summers's remarks were the subject of heated debate yesterday. Denice D. Denton, the dean of engineering at the University of Washington who confronted Mr. Summers over his remarks at the conference, said that her phone had not stopped ringing and that she had received scores of e-mail messages on the subject. She said Mr. Summers's remarks might have put new energy into a longstanding effort to improve the status of women in the sciences. "I think they've provoked an intellectual tsunami," Dr. Denton said. Howard Georgi, a physics professor and former chairman of the department, sent an e-mail message to Mr. Summers, saying he made a mistake in judgment in accepting the invitation to speak as a provoker. Dr. Georgi also sent a note to his students assuring them that they were appreciated. Maud Lavin, who graduated from Harvard in the class of 1976, was one of the first women to take a demanding theoretical math sequence, Math 11 and Math 55, and is an associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ms Lavin said in an interview yesterday that she would not donate any more money to Harvard as long as Mr. Summers was president, after firing off an angry e-mail message to him. "I am offended and furious about your remarks on women in science and mathematics," Ms. Lavin wrote. "Arguments of innate gender difference in math are hogwash and indirectly serve to feed the virulent prejudices still alas very alive and now even more so due to your ill-informed remarks." Students were also discussing the remarks. Thea Daniels, 21, a Harvard senior majoring in sociology said she and her roommates spent Monday evening talking about them. "We were just upset," Ms. Daniels said. "It's disconcerting that the man who is supposed to have your best interest in mind and is the leader of your education community thinks less of us." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/19/education/19harvard.html From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 19 15:11:08 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 10:11:08 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: New Database of Graduation Rates Could Help Colleges Learn From Better-Performing Peers Message-ID: New Database of Graduation Rates Could Help Colleges Learn From Better-Performing Peers News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.19 http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/01/2005011904n.htm By ELIZABETH F. FARRELL Graduation rates at colleges with similar students and resources vary widely, and colleges could do a lot more to improve their numbers, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Education Trust. The report is the first to analyze data culled from the trust's new database, [56]College Results Online, also introduced on Tuesday. College Results Online provides information on the six-year, five-year, and four-year graduation rates through the year 2003 at 1,400 institutions, and the information will be updated annually. The database was created, using publicly available statistics, to help explain why so many students who enter college fail to earn their diplomas. Across the United States, fewer than 40 percent of college students graduate in four years and only about 60 percent graduate in six years. "We became suspicious of the conclusion that poor results were just about poor students," Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, said in a conference call on Tuesday. In response, the trust, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization based in Washington, assembled what it describes as the first database that allows users to compare graduation rates at their college with the figures for similar institutions. The database determines which colleges are most similar to a given institution by making comparisons using 11 factors that are believed to influence completion rates, including students' SAT and ACT scores, the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants, and the proportion of nontraditional students, who are older than typical students coming out of high school. "Among relatively similar institutions, you'll find ones that not only do a little bit better, but a lot better" than their peers, said Ms. Haycock. "While factors like students' preparation do matter, what institutions do matters too. ... We're trying to get that message out." The University of Northern Iowa, for instance, had a six-year graduation rate of 65.1 percent, compared with a median rate of 53.3 percent for similar institutions. Alcorn State University, a historically black college in southwestern Mississippi, had a median rate about 10 percentage points higher than its peers over the same six-year period. According to Ms. Haycock and others at the Education Trust, their database will help colleges improve by learning from the leaders in their peer group. Prospective students and high-school guidance counselors can also use the data to figure out which colleges have the highest success rates. During the conference call, representatives of some of the most successful universities shared tips for improving graduation rates, such as intensive mentor programs for students and online planning tools that help students figure out which courses they need to take to graduate on time. The report summarizing the trust's findings, "One Step From the Finish Line: Higher College Graduation Rates Are Within Our Reach," is available on the organization's [57]Web site (requires [58]Adobe Reader, available free). _________________________________________________________________ Background articles from The Chronicle: * [59]Advocacy Group Criticizes Colleges for Permitting Too Many Students to Drop Out (5/27/2004) * [60]Graduation Rates Called a Poor Measure of Colleges (4/2/2004) * [61]A Common Yardstick? The Bush Administration Wants to Standardize Accreditation; Educators Say It Is Too Complex for That (8/15/2003) * [62]Republican Lawmakers Call for More Accountability in Higher Education (5/23/2003) * [63]Will Congress Require Colleges to Grade Themselves? (4/4/2003) * [64]Education Department Hears Appeals to Make Colleges More Accountable for Student Performance (3/10/2003) References 59. http://chronicle.com/daily/2004/05/2004052703n.htm 60. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i30/30a00101.htm 61. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i49/49a02501.htm 62. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i37/37a02301.htm 63. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i30/30a02701.htm 64. http://chronicle.com/daily/2003/03/2003031002n.htm E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles. From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 19 15:12:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 10:12:12 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Common Review: Sleeping Beauty by Laurie Fendrich Message-ID: Sleeping Beauty by Laurie Fendrich The Common Review, Vol. 3, No. 3 http://www.greatbooks.org/tcr/sleepbeauty.shtml First, the summary from the Chronicle of Higher Education (5.1.19) Beauty is no longer an essential part of art, and modern philosophy is largely to blame, says Laurie Fendrich, a professor of fine arts at Hofstra University and an abstract painter. "Beauty considered in the purest and narrowest sense, as something where the visual parts fit into a whole in a pleasing way, and where this balance and harmony suggest to sensitive viewers something they think is transcendent or nonmaterial, is now extremely rare in serious contemporary art," she writes. That is because philosophy and science no longer encourage the idea that transcendence is possible, she says. "In particular," she writes, "the philosophical collapse of belief in natural law -- which is the idea that principles to morality exist outside of manmade conventions, and that reason can discover them -- inadvertently, by sheer accident, took down beauty with it." The idea that there is no larger truth reduces beauty to a subjective experience, she says. Yet, as a painter, she cannot quite accept that. She has to believe that somehow the choices she makes in pursuit of beauty matter absolutely. Otherwise, she says, "it might as well be art therapy." "I'd just as soon toss my brush in the trash and head for the white wine," she says. ---------------------------- While I was in Rome this past May, wandering around looking at art and architecture, newspapers carried the story of a London warehouse fire that destroyed millions of dollars worth of contemporary art. Works by (not so) Young (anymore) British Artists (originally called "YBA" for short) in the famous Charles Saatchi collection, were incinerated. Included among other similarly spirited works of art was Damien Hirst's dead shark, somberly suspended in a tank of blue formaldehyde. And then there was Tracey Emin's tent, its insides brazenly embroidered with the names of everyone she's ever slept with. Curators publicly bemoaned the loss to culture, and insurers hunkered down to do the depressing arithmetic. Meanwhile, many journalists covering the story couldn't help but smirk. Once again, a collision of a commonsense and practical human endeavor (in this case, firefighting) with the fatuous delirium of the art world had exposed the tinny arrogance of contemporary artists and the moneyed idiocy of contemporary collectors. Even I, an abstract painter, had a nice laugh thinking about smart art people huffing over the disappearance of chemically preserved dead sharks and camping tents with funky stitching. To permissive me, however, whatever serious people call art is art. The London warehouse fire destroyed art that is at the center of a vigorous cultural debate, and it follows that there was a genuine cultural loss. Logically speaking, that's hard to deny: the fire consumed some of the most well-known and-within the art world, at least-respected artwork of our time, bought and sold for very high prices by very astute and competitive collectors. I'm not a fan of these particular British artists, but contemporary art in general interests me. I follow it, and I include some of it in my Top 100 "play list" of art that I'd take to the proverbial desert island. And like most contemporary artists, I'm ambitious, which means I want my art to be favorably recognized in my own time. But during the past forty years, most contemporary art hasn't been like mine. Where I still try to make something beautiful, a lot of the best and most serious contemporary artists have turned their backs on beauty. Their real interests range from sex and death to politics, race, ethnicity, popular culture, religion, math, science and the theoretical underpinnings of art itself-in other words, to anything but beauty. Broadly speaking, this kind of art all fits into the category of "conceptual" art, rather than "retinal" art (to use Marcel Duchamp's famous distinction). Its first and primary concern isn't aesthetics. Beauty considered in the purest and narrowest sense, as something where the visual parts fit into a whole in a pleasing way, and where this balance and harmony suggest to sensitive viewers something they think is transcendent or nonmaterial, is now extremely rare in serious contemporary art. (High-end schlock contemporary art by an artist like Thomas Kincade, the self-described "painter of light," or illustrator-fauvists, with their either cynical or oblivious exploitation of a kitsch idea of beauty, doesn't count here.) But even broader ideas of beauty-where art might take a while to assimilate as beautiful because it's presented in the form of expressionist distortion of some sort-are becoming rarer. Overall, art that is about beauty usually doesn't command the same attention, nor, frankly, does it seem as compelling, as the widely varying art-from, say, Lawrence Weiner's austere work consisting purely of words, to the Chapman brother's penis-nosed, sneakered, mannequin kids-that eschews beauty. During the past decade, it looked briefly as if beauty might make a comeback. The word itself started popping up in New York Times art reviews, and a flurry of books about beauty appeared, notable among them Dave Hickey's The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993), Uncontrollable Beauty (1998)-a collection of essays by a variety of art-world ponderers, selected by Bill Beckley and David Shapiro-Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just (1999), and Arthur Danto's The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (2003). For all their differences, these books argue the same point: The value of beauty has been in decline for a long time, but because beauty is essential to human beings, it can and will be resuscitated-even if that requires a little bit of tinkering with its meaning. All that writing on beauty-much of it coming from within the art world-hasn't, to my eye and experience, changed contemporary art's antibeauty tilt all that much. And now there are books that argue the opposite-that contemporary art is in crisis-such as Julian Spalding's The Eclipse of Art (2003) and Donald Kuspit's The End of Art (2004). For Donald Kuspit, art is past the crisis stage; it's simply over, and we're into an age of something awful that he calls "postart." Of course, in the wake of Francis Fukuyama's famously wrongheaded pronouncement that we've reached "the end of history," one should take with a ton of salt any news flash that something is "over." Whether or not art is over, however, beauty is in big trouble. If Plato is right-if you do become like what you imitate-ambitious art students incubating in art schools will only aggravate things once they hit the streets. Art students imitate art that gets the most attention, and these days, it's anything but beautiful art. Yes, balance, harmony and unity are still taught in beginning design classes, but they're taught as techniques, rather than convictions. In art schools, postmodern ideas that knowledge shifts according to who's "producing" it, that identity is "socially constructed" and therefore "slippery," and that "authorship" is a fiction and doesn't matter, permeate the studios like the smell of turpentine. Oscar Wilde proposed that art mirrors not life, but the viewer. I believe that modern ideas in philosophy and science that had nothing to do with art-that were outside of it, and unconcerned with it-have been more powerful in weakening the power of beauty in art than anything that ever happened within art itself. By dragging beauty from its original lofty connection to a transcendent world and placing it squarely on the ground, next to all the other qualities of all the goods of the material world, modern philosophy and science cultivated a new kind of viewer. In particular, the philosophical collapse of belief in natural law-which is the idea that principles to morality exist outside of manmade conventions, and that reason can discover them-inadvertently, by sheer accident, took down beauty with it. Up until modernity, Western ideas about beauty and morality were connected by a powerful structural analogy. Plato, in particular, continually explored the deep connection between beauty and goodness. True, the analogy is subtle, and it is never so stupidly understood as to mean good people are physically beautiful or have good taste. But morals and beauty were each of a hierarchical system that ranked things from highest to lowest, and, in a complicated way that only a genius could trace, the moral realm and the aesthetic realm merged. Beauty and morality both lived under the protective wing of natural law right up until the modern age, when powerful ideas arguing that natural law was an invention of human beings-and that beauty and morality were products of history rather than aspects of universal truths-finally took over. Western art started out with an understanding of the world that was the opposite of what it is today. Beauty was in an ordered world, not just in the ordering mind, and human beings and gods were both a part of nature. At the foundation of Greek art was the general Greek worldview, which Plato's philosophy, in particular, articulates, out of which the classical political philosophy of natural law developed. Modern liberal political philosophy rejected classical natural law, of course, favoring a variety of social contract theories instead. Although there are some who still defend natural law-most notably, the Catholic Church-it's become an old-fashioned notion. The trouble with natural law begins in its claim to universality, but it doesn't end there. Natural law involves ranking things from low to high, which clashes with our own practice of justice that stress equality, rather than distinctions. Worse is the incontrovertible fact that natural law has been used over and over again to justify egregiously offensive institutions and ideas, such as slavery and the inferiority of women, or economic or social inequalities, such as the divine right of kings and the privileges accorded to aristocratic classes. Social contract theories can be equally adept at justifying inequalities-the parts of Rousseau's thought that turn women into Stepford wives can't be ignored. To be fair to natural law, however, people have turned to it at critical moments when rebelling against unjust institutions or rulers-as Jefferson did, for example, in writing the Declaration of Independence. Ancient Greek artists have not left us evidence that they worried about natural law. Generally speaking, people thought that creatures were ranked, with man close to the top, and the animals, earth, trees, sky and all the rest of the natural world below him. Man was more wonderful than anything else in the natural world because even though he had a material, bodily existence, he also had reason, as well as a soul. But man was fixed in a place lower than the gods, who occupied the highest place. He had the tragic fate of not merely dying, like all living things, but knowing ahead of time that he must die. On occasion, a potentially divine side of man appeared, albeit in fleeting, bold moments and in only a few, blessed lives-for example, when a warrior was young and perfectly fit, and the blaze of combat in a just cause could compel him to forget his fear of death, reaching instead for glory and honor in battle. This kamikaze-pilot kind of beauty is too extreme for us to embrace today. And even though we can understand the Greek principle that art was about pleasure, we think of our pleasures differently from the way they thought about them. In Greek thinking, everything, from human beings to pleasures, seems to have been ranked, and the highest pleasure was always connected to the highest and most noble ideas. In art these highest ideas showed up as beauty. The Roman historian Pliny noted that the Greeks valued likeness (what we call "naturalism"). It's not hard to see this, even without Pliny's help. All we have to do is look at classical Athenian statues from the fourth and third centuries BCE (marble Roman copies of which are now scattered in museums around the world). Everything is under control in these statues; proportion, balance and rhythm all work to convey an extraordinary naturalism. And we still take pleasure in likeness today, valuing it so much that most people prefer photography-based images ("it looks real" kinds of images) to patterns and designs or expressionist distortions of things. We don't love likeness, however, in the same way as the classical Greeks did. No matter how naturalistic, Greek ideas of imitation were always modified by the overarching Greek conviction that transitory artistic imitations referred to something permanent. The highest or best likeness showed up in the statue of the perfect male nude, the beauty of which revealed that a man had the potential to be divine. The Greeks thought that by applying in art the proportions of geometry to the body, they created a link to the realm beyond and superior to the senses. Accurate proportion-which is the trick to achieving likeness, by the way-was a special kind of imitation. It imposed on the biological body the clarity of geometry. And the intriguingly special proportion of the golden section, where the ratio of the smaller part of a whole to the larger part is the same as the larger part is to the whole, also fascinated the Greeks. It shows up in the proportions of the Parthenon, for example-in mathematics, it's a proportion of about 5:8. Proportion was so important in Greek art that the canon of Polyclitus, now lost, stated that beauty lies in the proportions of the parts of the human body. Today, geometry is confined to the tenth grade, pushed to the side by modern physics. And Greek statues, although mesmerizing for their awesome antiquity, do not move us by how close they are to something divine. Who can believe in Sophocles' idea of man as a wonderful thing when, whether we're practicing Christians or not, most of us harbor residual traces of the Christian idea that at bottom man is a bad sort of fellow? Even without accepting Christianity's cloud of sin hanging over the human race, we look around us and perceive humanity constantly at work on a stupefying variety of evils: genocide, terrorism, wars of aggression, racism, subjugation of women, exploitation and abuse of children-who can list it all? The medieval Christian thinker Thomas Aquinas fundamentally changed natural law by adapting it to Christian theology. Natural law was still in force, and man was still near the top of its hierarchy. But the plurality of merely superhuman gods who existed within natural law was replaced by a single omnipotent God who, after creating the world and its Christian morality, floated of necessity above the human hurly-burly on earth. But natural law was turned upside down with the publication of Machiavelli's The Prince. In his blatant reduction of justice to sheer power, Machiavelli turned morality into a question of who wins rather than who is right. Machiavelli was subversive, however, and ahead of his time. Aquinas' natural law-that God created each living thing and gave it its nature-continued to pervade Western culture. Without Aquinas, for example the Renaissance Sistine Chapel ceiling would not be adorned with all those sensuous, dangling nudes. The classical Greek art that had been lost during the Middle Ages-either suppressed for its pagan qualities, or simply melted down for its bronze-was rediscovered during the Renaissance but also reinterpreted to fit Christian beliefs. The nude was now explained as beautiful because God made man in his own image. From its inception until now, beauty in Renaissance art was attached to illusion. Although there were internal artistic struggles over whether color should be the most important part of painting (as it was for Titian), or design should dominate it (as Michelangelo thought), art used illusion to try to capture not just physical likeness, but the underlying design accepted as inherent in the natural world. There was a fierce longing, particularly in painting, to capture the roundedness of nature and even to compete with it over which was more powerful. Raphael's epitaph exposes the ferocity of the struggle to get a hold of nature and aesthetically subdue her: "Here lies the famous Raffaello Sanzio. When he was alive, the Great Parent of things feared she would be beaten by him; when he was dead, she feared she herself would die." The pure "aesthetic experience" as we know it wasn't possible until the eighteenth century, when beauty rose to the top of the charts as its own hot topic. While political philosophers coming after Machiavelli-especially Hobbes and Locke-had been doing the hard work of systematically replacing classical natural law with modern natural right, beauty was on the back burner. During the Enlightenment, however, philosophy's beady eyes turned to beauty. Kant's revolution established that abstract universals like beauty derive from how the human mind works, rather than from objective qualities in objects themselves, and paved the way for subjective feeling, or taste, to become the standard for beauty. By the middle of the nineteenth century, confidence was high that direct, individual experience was the final arbiter of taste was high. Logical positivism had a huge impact on early modern artists, particularly the impressionists, who based their art on their sensations. Meanwhile, beauty in traditional art had devolved into academic formulae for good taste and teachable tricks for achieving an expedient naturalism. Nonartists seldom realize how deft many artists can become at making illusions. After four hundred years of the Renaissance model, illusion had become the sine qua non of beauty, and beauty was ready for the assembly line. The invention of the camera (in 1839) helped artists with mediocre talent achieve the same effects as masters. The rising ubiquity of beauty-in the sense of good-looking industrially produced goods and easy reproductions of beautiful images-made the old idea of beauty as "high" and "rare" antiquated. Modern artists who were truly artists-who truly wanted to make beauty-were essentially forced to break with Western art's tradition of beauty through naturalism. Of all the nineteenth century's ideas, Darwin's theory of evolution undermined beauty the most. Evolution had nothing directly to do with beauty, but in time it would have a brutal effect on it. Darwin revealed that life begins with the simplest organisms and, over eons, evolves to the most complex creatures such as apes and human beings. The change is mechanistic, occurring through random mutation-not through designed mutation, or acquired characteristics that are inherited, but through sheer accident. The species whose history of random mutations makes them survivors survive, and the others don't. Darwin called this mechanism "natural selection." Darwin's theory that humankind's appearance at the summit of the animal kingdom could be explained simply materially, by the concept of evolution, was the scientific repudiation of natural law that philosophy had been anticipating since Machiavelli. For all his avowed love of Aristotle, Darwin replaced design with accident-and cruel accident, at that. The Descent of Man (1871) turned human beings into creatures who weren't even particularly important accidents, just another species-accident that happened to derive from the same ancestor as apes. Forget both divine spark and divine design. Human beings became biologically defined material creatures, on a par with newts and chimps. All three are equally worthy or unworthy of delight and despair, or preservation and extinction. In the famous ending to The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin observes the beauty in evolution: There is a grandeur in this view of life with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved. But Darwin's elucidation of the mechanism of natural selection, whereby new species emerge from earlier forms of life, was not such a beautiful idea to everyone when it was first introduced, and it remains loathsome to many people today. When it comes to beauty, it can present a serious problem-and not just for creationists. Pondering beauty after Darwin demands a reconciliation of the idea of beauty with human beings who are no more than mechanistic products of random mutations in lower life forms. To my husband, who is an abstract painter like me, but an avowed materialist of the Daniel Dennett sort, there is no problem here. For him, beauty needs no connection to transcendence in order to be beauty. If he has the sensation of beauty when he paints, and a small but attentive audience responds with a like feeling to what he's painted that's all he asks of his life as an artist. He fully accepts that beauty is material, and considers my yearning for a transcendent beauty to be a weakness, a sign of someone who can't face the truth and wants to be comforted. There are many artists like me who find Darwinian materialism so dispiriting that it affects our overall confidence in our art. Absorbing Kant's teachings-that our paintings aren't in themselves beautiful-is hard enough. But to absorb Darwin's teaching-that beauty is only one of the myriad material explanations for reproductive success-is heartbreaking. When I intuitively adjust something in my painting to make the color more beautiful, for example, I believe the adjustment matters absolutely. If it's only for me and a few other deluded souls, it might as well be art therapy. I'd just as soon toss my brush in the trash and head for the white wine. There is no reconciliation of beauty-which is irrational, or at least nonrational-with rational, material explanations of the world. It's hard even to be a deist after Darwin, despite Darwin's final ringing sentence in The Origin of Species. Sure, the Harvard professor and popular science professor Stephen Jay Gould managed to stay upbeat, as do college-town Episcopalians with a couple of scotches under their belts. Both resort to the fallback idea of a distantly removed winder-upper of clocks. But many people, especially the pitiable fundamentalists, find hard-core evolution, with its lack of intentional design, too bitter a pill to swallow. In fact, half of all Americans won't swallow it and still believe that God directly created Adam. A quarter of them want creationism taught in the public schools. But contemporary artists, whether like my husband or like myself, are by nature outsiders. We're more aligned with freethinkers than religious fundamentalists. Many artists know very little math or laboratory science, but almost without exception they instinctively rebel at fundamentalist rebuttals to religiously inconvenient scientific ideas. Among the art world cognoscenti, blame for the lack of beauty in contemporary art (or, more often, credit) is laid at the feet of Marcel Duchamp, the granddaddy of conceptual art who made it abundantly clear, in both his art and memorably sly ironic comments, that he had nothing but contempt for beauty. By the time Duchamp appeared on the art scene shortly after 1910, modern art had been going strong for nearly half a century, and it would have another half century before it would poop out with the arrival of pop art. From our vantage point today, it's clear that one of the most important accomplishments of modern art was to open us up to new ideas about what can be considered beautiful. Modern art threw aside idealized nudes and pastoral landscapes, replacing them with thrilling explorations of color and form, including radical distortions of nature and full abstraction. Isamu Noguchi, for example, an artist who rose to prominence in the 1930s and 1940s, at the height of modern art, summed up the modern spirit when he said, "Everything is sculpture. Any material, any idea without hindrance born into space, I consider sculpture." Modern art ought to have been good for beauty-indeed, it ought to have been beauty's salvation, having rescued it from the banality of French Academic art-and it was, for a while. Although Picasso considered art to be a lie that reveals truth (rather than a lie that reveals beauty), he could churn out forms from his imagination that all but the most rigid middle class families eventually would incorporate as part of what they considered beautiful. When Duchamp initially offered a urinal for consideration alongside other modern works of art in the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York, modern art's more radical enthusiasts barely hesitated an instant before embracing the idea that a "found," factory-produced object like a urinal could be as beautiful as any work by Picasso. "I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty," Duchamp said. Duchamp was the first artist to recognize that modern art could not eternally spin out new forms for aesthetic delectation and still maintain what we now call its "cutting edge." Inevitably, it would die out because artists and audience alike would grow tired and bored at an endless parade of expressionism, cubism and abstraction. Duchamp was right about the boredom part of modern art, even if there are some artists like my husband and myself who continue to love the particular beauty of its abstract forms. But even without the general cultural exhaustion with modern art , or Duchamp's ironic jabs, modern philosophy and science would have eventually undermined belief in beauty all on their own. Modern philosophy and science inadvertently dragged beauty from what had always been its lofty perch, and fixed it firmly to the ground, right in the middle of the material world. Turning beauty into no more than the material here and now is what eventually made it problematic for artists to believe beauty is worthy of pursuit and not some perverse inclination on the part of a particular group of self-indulgent artists. The exasperated stance toward contemporary artists that so many non-art people take-asking why artists can't just make something beautiful-is patently unfair. It pressures artists to come up with what no one else can, to come up with what the rest of society no longer deeply believes in-beauty. Contemporary science and philosophy, considered together, explain the current antibeauty slant in contemporary art better than any of the particulars that have to do with either modern art or Duchamp's ironic stance toward it. Beauty, it turns out, was ditched for good reason. Before science progresses much further, it might be a good idea for it to weed out the human gene that longs for transcendent beauty. Otherwise, we'll all be a miserable lot, desiring from both art and life something neither can deliver. From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 19 15:13:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 10:13:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] WSJ: Waxing Nostalgic About Early Recordings Message-ID: Waxing Nostalgic About Early Recordings http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110006171 January 18, 2005 In an old attic, I found a treasure trove for a music lover. BY BARRYMORE LAURENCE SCHERER Recently, while looking through an old house for sale in our neighborhood, I came upon a pile of 78s in the attic. (Note to those who regard even vinyl LPs as antiques: 78 rpm shellac discs were the recording-industry standard before 1950.) I mentioned my interest to the owner, who was delighted that the records would have a good home. They had been her grandmother's, and when I came by to remove them, I discovered that the single pile was only the tip of the iceberg. There were several hundred in all. Bliss! I grew up in the era of Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. My family and friends all played LPs and 45s on their "hi-fi" sets. But a different drummer set my musical gait. Not only was I drawn to classical music, but I preferred to listen to it on old 78s. My affinity had been seeded by a small parcel of old records that had been my grandfather's. They were a motley assortment of 1920s dance music, comic songs, some orchestral selections and opera records. Two discs particularly fascinated me: Enrico Caruso singing "Rachel, Quand du Seigneur" from H?levy's opera "La Juive" and John McCormack singing "Una Furtiva Lagrima" from Donizetti's "L'Elisir d'Amore." I loved everything about these relics: I loved the heft of these old discs in my hands; I loved the way they sounded, not just the expressive power of the two tenor voices but also the wheezy orchestras that accompanied them. I loved the way the big red Victor Talking Machine label looked as it spun so fast on the turntable. (As a kid, I used to wonder if the dog listening to his master's voice was getting dizzy.) And I was mystified by the black, blank side of each disc, for until 1923 Victor red seals, the label's premium line, were all single-sided; only cheaper black seals, and records by other labels were double-faced. It wasn't until high school that I was able to indulge my passion for old music on old shellac at the Salvation Army depot on Manhattan's West 46th Street. There was a room in that blessed establishment piled high with 78s and old books--five cents a disc, 10 cents a volume. For $2 I could fill two shopping bags. I'd stuff one with the works of Lord Macaulay, broken sets of Bulwer-Lytton, leatherbound texts on practical surgery (whose colored engravings were just as horrifyingly detailed as any photograph). In the other I'd load 20 78s (as many as I could carry), everything from Franz L?har conducting selections from his operettas to Sousa's Band playing his "Pathfinder of Panama" march and the Peerless Quartet singing "Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May," with lyrics by New York's dapper future mayor, Jimmy Walker. Soon I was hunting for the Holy Grail: a genuine spring-wound Victrola. I finally found a 1917 table model in a little antiques shop in Queens. The price was $8, and I carried it home in my arms by bus. Upon arriving with my new treasure, I raised the heavy mahogany lid, savoring the motor's characteristic aroma of lubricating oil. I wound it up, placed a carefully chosen record on the green felt turntable, inserted a steel needle in the sound box, and felt my heart nearly burst as the voices of Caruso, Marcella Sembrich, Antonio Scotti and their colleagues melded together in my first experience of pure acoustical reproduction, the "Lucia" Sextet. Acoustical recording and playback fascinated me because of their sheer mechanical simplicity. Before the introduction of electrical recording with a microphone in 1925, the recording industry still used the basic method invented by Edison in 1877: You sang, spoke or played into a recording horn--a large metal funnel--which collected the sound and channeled it to a recording head containing a micadiaphragm attached to a cutting stylus. The sound waves vibrated the diaphragm, which vibrated the stylus, which made a groove along the surface of a revolving wax disc or, in Edison's case, a cylinder. The resulting wax master was then used to create metal dies from which records were pressed. Basically, the process is reversed for playback on a gramophone. No vacuum tubes, no digital wizardry, no electronic amplification comes between you and the original performers. Play a well-preserved acoustical record on a well-preserved gramophone (with a big external horn) or a Victrola (with the horn concealed inside the cabinet), and the sound usually surprises listeners because there's hardly any proverbial "scratchy" surface noise. That noise is only apparent when you play 78s on an electrical pickup, which amplifies the scratch along with the music. This historical immediacy is especially telling when you consider that a number of major composers made 78 rpm records, among them Sir Edward Elgar, Richard Strauss and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Ruggiero Leoncavallo supervised the first complete recording of "Pagliacci" in 1907; four years earlier he had composed his famous song "Mattinata" especially to fit on a 10-inch disc, and then accompanied Caruso's recording of it at the piano. And virtually all of this historic material is available on CD. More than mere nostalgia, 78s are valuable historic documents of the way music was performed a century ago. Old 78s have attuned my ear to early-20th-century performance practice, especially in the case of vocal style, string and wind articulation, flexible tempo and phrasing that had been standard when Brahms, Dvorak, Verdi and Puccini were actively composing. For instance, singers and string players used to slide between important notes of a phrase, an articulation called portamento that generally vanished by 1950. And thanks to the crystalline diction of early recording artists, vocal discs, especially comic songs and scenes by prominent actors and comedians like John Barrymore, Al Jolson and Billy Murray, document subtle American accents that are no longer spoken. I maintained my interest in old 78s while pursuing the university and postgraduate degrees that led me from singing to musicology and finally to journalism. And even though I treasure the thousands of CDs I've collected as a critic and lecturer, my passion has never abated. That trove of 78s I found in my neighborhood proved to be gold. Once I began to sort through them (and to clean off half a century's accumulation of dust) I was astonished at the variety. There are several complete symphonies and operas, complete recordings of Gilbert & Sullivan, and an extraordinary wealth of dance music performed by Paul Whiteman and Duke Ellington. There are discs by Fanny Brice and Eddie Cantor (gallows humor on the stock market, recorded right after the crash in 1929: "Reserve a hotel room and the clerk asks, 'For sleeping or jumping?'"). There's Gershwin playing piano in his "An American in Paris," Carl Sandburg singing and strumming folk songs, and a lugubrious ditty called "William Jennings Bryan's Last Fight," praising his old-time religion upon his death following the Scopes Monkey Trial. And there is a true novelty, a "Message by His Excellency Benito Mussolini to the North American People and the Italians of America." Recorded around 1929, in Italian, it reveals him as having a surprisingly well-modulated voice, quite unlike the ranting of his Nazi ally to the north. I admit that I don't often go hunting for such troves--our house has only so much room to store them. But I'm one of the lucky ones, for my wife is not only patient with my obsession but over the years has come to understand it herself, just as, soon after we met, I came around to her enthusiasm for Wagner. Mr. Scherer writes about classical music for the Journal. From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 19 15:15:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 10:15:21 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Raw Eggs? Hair of the Dog? New Options for the Besotted Message-ID: Raw Eggs? Hair of the Dog? New Options for the Besotted NYT December 7, 2004 By JONATHAN D. GLATER [Did the Sage ever deal with this important issue? Did he himself ever need such a remedy?] On the third day of a seemingly endless bachelor party in Cabo San Lucas last year, Hal Walker, 33, woke up with a set of classic symptoms. His head ached. Loud noises made him wince. Bright lights hurt his eyes. Mr. Walker's flight home from Mexico to Colorado, where he is now a co-owner of the Island Grill in Fort Collins, left at 8 a.m., and it was all he could do to get to the airport. "If you can find a remedy for hangovers, that would be great," he said, voicing a sentiment familiar to anyone who has imbibed just a little too much and was sorry about it the next day. In fact, recent studies suggest that help for at least some aftereffects of intoxication may not be too much to ask for. Last summer, a group of doctors reported in The Archives of Internal Medicine that an extract from the fruit of the prickly pear cactus, taken in capsule form, was effective in staving off hangover symptoms like dry mouth and nausea. Perfect Equation of Vista, Calif., financed the research and has patented the extract, which it says is derived from the skin of the prickly pear, Opuntia ficus. Another company, Living Essentials of Walled Lake, Mich., markets Chaser, a pill containing activated calcium carbonate and activated charcoal. The company has financed a study of the dietary supplement, completed in 2002, its marketing director, Carl Sperber, said. The findings have not been published. Experts say that despite such products, a true hangover cure remains elusive. And the hangover itself is imperfectly understood, perhaps because scientists have largely devoted their efforts to understanding alcohol dependence and the health effects of drinking. Dr. Linda C. Degutis, an associate professor of emergency medicine and public health at Yale, said hangovers were "incredibly understudied." Most popular remedies, including those sold over the counter, have no peer-reviewed research to back up their assertions. Some experts argue that even conducting such research raises ethical issues. The development of a foolproof hangover cure, for example, might encourage people to drink more, knowing they could take a pill to avoid suffering the next day. And the prospect of bus drivers' or airplane pilots' popping hangover pills and going to work is enough to give anyone pause. Some researchers argue that hangovers impose such large costs on society that they have to be studied. No one has precise figures, but one study cited in the prickly pear article estimated the cost of alcohol-related problems, including hangovers, at nearly $150 billion a year in the United States. Such studies - focusing on whether remedies for hangover symptoms would also prevent the effects of a hangover on judgment, concentration, motor skills and other critical functions - "are absolutely the next step," said Dr. Michael G. Shlipak, associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and an author of the prickly pear report. One obstacle, however, may be that there is no consensus among scientists on how to define a hangover, Dr. Degutis said. Headache, thirst, nausea and muscle aches are probably the most familiar symptoms. Dr. Shlipak's study identified additional symptoms, including soreness, tremulousness and dizziness. The effects of alcohol on the body are well known. When people drink, alcohol is quickly absorbed through the stomach lining. Most of it directly enters the bloodstream. In the body, alcohol dilates blood vessels, creating a warm flush. It also depresses the central nervous system, resulting first in euphoria and then, as the alcohol wears off, anxiety, insomnia and depression. Carried in the blood to the liver, alcohol breaks down into acetaldehyde and other byproducts that leave the body through the urine and the lungs. On average, the body can process about one drink an hour, and sticking to that pace for a limited period should reduce the likelihood of a hangover, Dr. Degutis said. One drink is defined as one 12-ounce can of beer, 1.5 ounces of 80 proof whiskey or 5 ounces of wine. But every person's body is different, she cautioned. What happens when a drinker consumes enough alcohol to result in a hangover is a little less clear. Dr. Shlipak and his colleagues have focused on the possibility that the immune system may react to toxic byproducts of fermentation in alcoholic beverages called congeners. Congeners "are poisons, and the body recognizes them as such," said Dr. Jeffrey G. Wiese, an associate professor of medicine at Tulane and also an author of the prickly pear study. As a general rule, Dr. Wiese said, the darker the alcoholic beverage is, the more congeners it has. So according to studies, vodka generally causes less severe hangovers than, say, bourbon. The researchers theorize that congeners may set off the release of cytokines, molecules that white blood cells release in fighting off viruses or other invaders. Cytokines signal inflammation in the body and cause the achy, tired feelings that people get when they have the flu. Prickly pear extract, Dr. Shlipak and his colleagues suggest, helps by reducing the immune response to congeners. In their study, the researchers found that when graduate student testers drank five hours after taking the pill, they experienced less severe hangover symptoms. Living Essentials says Chaser works by capturing certain congener molecules, preventing the body from absorbing them. "The secret is the activation of the calcium carbonate," said Mr. Sperber, the marketing director. "You can't just take Tums and burnt toast and get the same effect." Dr. Shlipak said that he had not seen any studies on the effectiveness of Chaser but that charcoal, which does not bind to alcohol, could in theory block the absorption of the congeners in alcoholic beverages. That would mean that people who had consumed charcoal before drinking would still absorb all the alcohol, but might experience less severe hangover symptoms. "It's possible," Dr. Shlipak said. "Without commenting on how their product works or if it works, I think the concept is intriguing." Other researchers pointed out that anyone who can remember to pop any type of hangover pill through a night of drinking should be able to remember to drink water or even take the radical step of drinking a little less. Dehydration also plays an important role in hangovers. The body tends to lose water as more alcohol is consumed because alcohol is a diuretic, causing people to urinate more frequently regardless of how much water they are drinking. That is why interspersing water or some other beverage with alcoholic drinks is a good idea, said Dr. Erik DeLue, a doctor of internal medicine at St. Margaret Mercy Hospital in Hammond, Ind., outside Chicago. Not only does the water rehydrate the body, Dr. DeLue said, but it also reduces the desire to consume more alcohol to slake thirst. "It's doubly effective," he said. There is some evidence that the withdrawal of alcohol contributes to some hangover symptoms. The body essentially becomes more excited to counter alcohol's depressant effects, and after the alcohol is removed, the body is left in that somewhat hyper state. That explains why some people with hangovers may experience an accelerated heart rate and become twitchy and sweaty. In serious cases, alcohol withdrawal can lead to "holiday heart," called that because it may occur after a few days of binge drinking. The heart may beat too quickly or, worse, its muscles may beat out of sequence, in extreme instances causing heart failure or, indirectly, a stroke. After drinking too much, people tend not to sleep very deeply, Dr. Wiese said, because the brain also becomes more alert as the depressant effects wear off. While that means that alcohol-fueled dreams may be very lively, it also means that in addition to being dried out and suffering various aches, pains and twitches, hangover victims are quite likely to wake up tired, thirsty and very, very sleepy. Mark Harris, a former dot-com worker who lives in San Francisco, recalled a painful day suffering several symptoms after a company outing in Palo Alto, Calif., about 10 years ago. "There were some bigwigs, and they were all trying to outdrink each other," Mr. Harris said. "We put down a lot of Guinness. There was a lab meeting in the morning, and it was not optional, and all of us knew it. "So the next day, we all dragged ourselves in. I tried the Odwalla blackberry shake to mitigate the circumstances. I thought maybe the fresh fruits and the vitamins would help me out." He paused and added, "That was just horrific." Several people interviewed about their hangovers said they had stumbled across possible cures by chance and every once in a while found a solution that they liked. Sheila Turner, a publicity agent in Washington, said she used vitamin C. Other people swear by tomato juice, raw eggs, carbonated beverages, hot coffee or big greasy breakfasts. Doctors say there is little evidence to support most popular hangover remedies. Tomato juice makes some sense, Dr. Degutis said, because it contains salt, which helps the body retain fluids. But raw eggs make no sense at all, Dr. Wiese said, "unless it's that the pain of eating the raw egg takes your mind off" the hangover. Many doctors recommend drinking orange juice, Gatorade or similar sports drinks that replenish electrolytes and taking pain relievers like aspirin or ibuprofen. Tylenol may not be a good idea, some experts said, because, like alcohol, it is metabolized by the already-overworked liver. One thing that no one advises is more alcohol, the traditional cure known as "hair of the dog that bit you." While drinking to help a hangover may alleviate the problem of alcohol withdrawal, it can also impair mental functioning, contribute to alcohol addiction and a worse hangover down the road, Dr. Degutis said. Many experts agreed that the best cure for a hangover was to avoid drinking too much in the first place. "Ideally, you're not supposed to drink more than three if you're a man, two if you're a woman," Dr. Karin Rhodes, an emergency attending physician for the University of Chicago Hospitals, said. "And you should never drive within four hours of drinking two or more drinks." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/07/health/07hang.html From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 19 15:16:46 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 10:16:46 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Slate: Risky Business - A book tries, and fails, to quantify catastrophic risks Message-ID: Risky Business - A book tries, and fails, to quantify catastrophic risks. By Jeffrey Rosen http://www.slate.com/id/2109600 Risky Business A book tries, and fails, to quantify catastrophic risks. By Jeffrey Rosen Posted Monday, Nov. 22, 2004, at 6:16 AM PT Book cover Richard Posner's Catastrophe: Risk and Response was inspired, he says, by Margaret Atwood's 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, set in the near future, which imagines the extinction of the human race in a world menaced by bioterrorism and uncontrolled technological advance." He hastens to assure his readers that he hasn't become "an apocalyptic visionary," but a peculiar unreality suffuses his book, which proves unexpectedly blind to the real threats we face. By "catastrophic risk," Posner means risks that have a low probability of materializing but are likely to create nearly unimaginable harms if they do. He believes they are real and growing. His examples include falling asteroids that could wipe out a quarter of the earth's population within 24 hours; global warming, which could cause floods ("Harvard gone the way of Atlantis") followed by "snowball earth"; nanotechnology that could envelop the earth in "gray goo"; bioterrorism; and "superintelligent robots" that "may kill us, put us in zoos, or enslave us, using mind-control technologies to extinguish any possibility of revolt, as in the movie The Matrix." Posner's thesis when discussing these emotionally laden subjects is as deadpan as his prose: "[T]he tools of economic analysis--in particular cost-benefit analysis--are indispensable to evaluating the possible responses to the catastrophic risks." Unfortunately, assigning precise numerical weights to the costs and benefits of preventing catastrophic risks is a daunting challenge, and Posner's attempts to do so are numbingly technical and ultimately unsatisfying. In the end, balancing liberty and security involves disputed questions of value rather than precisely quantifiable facts--questions that must be resolved not by experts but by politics. Consider the possibility that atomic particles, colliding in a powerful accelerator such as Brookhaven Lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, could reassemble themselves into a compressed object called a stranglet that would destroy the world. Posner sets out to "monetize" the costs and benefits of this "extremely unlikely" disaster. He estimates "the cost of extinction of the human race" at $600 trillion and the annual probability of such a disaster at 1 in 10 million. These figures are "arbitrary," he acknowledges, because it is impossible to calculate the real probability of a stranglet disaster, and scientists who have attempted to do so have been attacked for politicizing the question. His attempts to calculate the benefits of developing the RHIC are also arbitrary because there's no impartial way to calculate the value the public assigns to research in particle physics. After elaborate calculations based on arbitrary figures, he suggests that perhaps the costs and benefits can't be precisely monetized: Congress, or the public, could be told instead that "there is one chance in 10 million of a world destroying accelerator accident that could be avoided by closing down RHIC at a cost in benefits forgone estimated at $2.1." What then, is the point of the elaborate calculations? Posner argues that even arbitrary figures could promote reasoned decision-making that might close down some of the most dangerous research in RHIC. But if the decision is made by democratic bodies accountable to the public, this may be too optimistic. Behavioral psychologists have found that the public tends to make judgments about risk based on emotional feelings about whether something is good or bad, safe or dangerous, rather than on a dispassionate calculation of costs and benefits. Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon, for example, has argued that risk is a subjective concept that has different meanings to different citizens--some focus more on the low probability of particular threats, others on the potential severity, still others on the possibility that children might be harmed. These differences in risk perception can only be resolved through political negotiation. But democratic politics is an enterprise for which Posner has contempt. He is addicted to the rule of experts, and he proposes a series of arid and (for a self-styled pragmatist) surprisingly impractical policy solutions for applying cost benefit analysis to risk calculation: a "science court" of experts that would review dangerous government research projects; the creation of an international environmental protection agency to enforce a modified Kyoto Protocol under the auspices of the United Nations; a federal review board that would forbid any scientific research that poses an "undue risk" to human survival. Few of these proposals have any realistic chance of being adopted in America. And even if they were adopted, public emotionalism would continue to demand irrational (or as the behavioral psychologists say, "quasi-rational") allocations of resources that would thwart the experts' recommendations. Although Posner promises to monetize the costs of these psychological and political impediments, he fails to do so. Even if Posner's proposals could be imposed by judicial fiat, which they can't and shouldn't, they seem underwhelming on their own terms. In a surprising hole at the end of the book, Posner declines to offer practical examples of how cost-benefit analysis could cast precise light on the very real terrorist threats that menace us. Consider the possibility of biological terrorism. Posner argues plausibly that the government should balance the costs of abridging civil liberties against the benefits of preventing terrorist catastrophies. He correctly criticizes some civil libertarians for failing to calculate these costs and benefits. But he then proves unable to calculate them himself--and dismisses those, including me, who have argued that the public tends to overestimate the likelihood that they will be personally harmed by especially frightening forms of terrorism that are easy to visualize. After 9/11, in fact, respondents in a poll perceived a 20 percent chance that they would be personally hurt in a terrorist attack within the next year. These predictions could have come true only if an attack of similar magnitude to 9/11 occurred nearly every day for the following year. Although the actual probability of terrorist attacks is impossible to measure, nothing in al-Qaida's history suggests anything like the capacity to produce 9/11-scale attacks on a daily basis. Posner also insists that we should calculate the costs to liberty and privacy of extreme police and military measures, such as torture, and the likelihood that these extreme methods would, in fact, increase security. But he then proves unable to calculate these costs and benefits as well. "I have no idea whether [torture] is necessary," he says after a long digression on the hypothetical benefits of torture, and the effort to monetize the benefits of privacy similarly defeats him. It may be possible, in fact, to attempt to calculate the costs and benefits of some security technologies with more precision than Posner offers. Consider the government's original proposal, called Total Information Awareness, to use data-mining at airports to determine whether individual travelers had consumer and travel patterns that resembled the 19 hijackers of 9/11. After the system was proposed, libertarian critics, using cost-benefit analysis, pointed out the great danger of false positives: Even if the system were 99 percent accurate in identifying terrorists, a 1 percent error rate applied to 300 million travelers would mean that 3,000,000 (that's .01 x 300 million) of those identified as potential terrorists would be wrongly identified. But if we assume that the next attack will look nothing like the last one, a data-mining system that looked for passengers who took flying lessons in Florida, for example, is more likely to have something closer to a 1 percent accuracy rate. Such a system would falsely accuse nearly all innocent travelers of being terrorists and correctly identify only a fraction of terrorists while missing nearly all of the real terrorists. No rational evaluation of costs and benefits would support such a system, which is why the government correctly abandoned Total Information Awareness and replaced it with a system designed to verify a traveler's identity rather than model suspicious behavior. Posner does not describe the successful attempt by civil libertarians to lobby against badly conceived security technologies by applying the methods of cost-benefit analysis because actual political debates have no place in his elaborate models of catastrophic risks. He wants to reorient legal education to produce polymaths like himself, requiring law students to demonstrate "basic competence" in math, statistics, and science so that they could replicate his Herculean feats of interdisciplinary synthesis. Specialists in various disciplines may benefit from the collaborative research projects that Posner usefully outlines. But the greatest challenges that menace us cannot be precisely quantified by science; they are psychological and political. Jeffrey Rosen is a law professor at George Washington University and legal affairs editor of The New Republic. His new book is The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age. From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 19 15:18:07 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 10:18:07 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: String Theory, at 20, Explains It All (or Not) Message-ID: String Theory, at 20, Explains It All (or Not) NYT December 7, 2004 By DENNIS OVERBYE ASPEN, Colo. - They all laughed 20 years ago. It was then that a physicist named John Schwarz jumped up on the stage during a cabaret at the physics center here and began babbling about having discovered a theory that could explain everything. By prearrangement men in white suits swooped in and carried away Dr. Schwarz, then a little-known researcher at the California Institute of Technology. Only a few of the laughing audience members knew that Dr. Schwarz was not entirely joking. He and his collaborator, Dr. Michael Green, now at Cambridge University, had just finished a calculation that would change the way physics was done. They had shown that it was possible for the first time to write down a single equation that could explain all the laws of physics, all the forces of nature - the proverbial "theory of everything" that could be written on a T-shirt. And so emerged into the limelight a strange new concept of nature, called string theory, so named because it depicts the basic constituents of the universe as tiny wriggling strings, not point particles. "That was our first public announcement," Dr. Schwarz said recently. By uniting all the forces, string theory had the potential of achieving the goal that Einstein sought without success for half his life and that has embodied the dreams of every physicist since then. If true, it could be used like a searchlight to illuminate some of the deepest mysteries physicists can imagine, like the origin of space and time in the Big Bang and the putative death of space and time at the infinitely dense centers of black holes. In the last 20 years, string theory has become a major branch of physics. Physicists and mathematicians conversant in strings are courted and recruited like star quarterbacks by universities eager to establish their research credentials. String theory has been celebrated and explained in best-selling books like "The Elegant Universe," by Dr. Brian Greene, a physicist at Columbia University, and even on popular television shows. Last summer in Aspen, Dr. Schwarz and Dr. Green (of Cambridge) cut a cake decorated with "20th Anniversary of the First Revolution Started in Aspen," as they and other theorists celebrated the anniversary of their big breakthrough. But even as they ate cake and drank wine, the string theorists admitted that after 20 years, they still did not know how to test string theory, or even what it meant. As a result, the goal of explaining all the features of the modern world is as far away as ever, they say. And some physicists outside the string theory camp are growing restive. At another meeting, at the Aspen Institute for Humanities, only a few days before the string commemoration, Dr. Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, called string theory "a colossal failure." String theorists agree that it has been a long, strange trip, but they still have faith that they will complete the journey. "Twenty years ago no one would have correctly predicted how string theory has since developed," said Dr. Andrew Strominger of Harvard. "There is disappointment that despite all our efforts, experimental verification or disproof still seems far away. On the other hand, the depth and beauty of the subject, and the way it has reached out, influenced and connected other areas of physics and mathematics, is beyond the wildest imaginations of 20 years ago." In a way, the story of string theory and of the physicists who have followed its siren song for two decades is like a novel that begins with the classic "what if?" What if the basic constituents of nature and matter were not little points, as had been presumed since the time of the Greeks? What if the seeds of reality were rather teeny tiny wiggly little bits of string? And what appear to be different particles like electrons and quarks merely correspond to different ways for the strings to vibrate, different notes on God's guitar? It sounds simple, but that small change led physicists into a mathematical labyrinth, in which they describe themselves as wandering, "exploring almost like experimentalists," in the words of Dr. David Gross of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif. String theory, the Italian physicist Dr. Daniele Amati once said, was a piece of 21st-century physics that had fallen by accident into the 20th century. And, so the joke went, would require 22nd-century mathematics to solve. Dr. Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., described it this way: "String theory is not like anything else ever discovered. It is an incredible panoply of ideas about math and physics, so vast, so rich you could say almost anything about it." The string revolution had its roots in a quixotic effort in the 1970's to understand the so-called "strong" force that binds quarks into particles like protons and neutrons. Why were individual quarks never seen in nature? Perhaps because they were on the ends of strings, said physicists, following up on work by Dr. Gabriele Veneziano of CERN, the European research consortium. That would explain why you cannot have a single quark - you cannot have a string with only one end. Strings seduced many physicists with their mathematical elegance, but they had some problems, like requiring 26 dimensions and a plethora of mysterious particles that did not seem to have anything to do with quarks or the strong force. When accelerator experiments supported an alternative theory of quark behavior known as quantum chromodynamics, most physicists consigned strings to the dustbin of history. But some theorists thought the mathematics of strings was too beautiful to die. In 1974 Dr. Schwarz and Dr. Joel Scherk from the ?cole Normale Sup?rieure in France noticed that one of the mysterious particles predicted by string theory had the properties predicted for the graviton, the particle that would be responsible for transmitting gravity in a quantum theory of gravity, if such a theory existed. Without even trying, they realized, string theory had crossed the biggest gulf in physics. Physicists had been stuck for decades trying to reconcile the quirky rules known as quantum mechanics, which govern atomic behavior, with Einstein's general theory of relativity, which describes how gravity shapes the cosmos. That meant that if string theory was right, it was not just a theory of the strong force; it was a theory of all forces. "I was immediately convinced this was worth devoting my life to," Dr. Schwarz recalled "It's been my life work ever since." It was another 10 years before Dr. Schwarz and Dr. Green (Dr. Scherk died in 1980) finally hit pay dirt. They showed that it was possible to write down a string theory of everything that was not only mathematically consistent but also free of certain absurdities, like the violation of cause and effect, that had plagued earlier quantum gravity calculations. In the summer and fall of 1984, as word of the achievement spread, physicists around the world left what they were doing and stormed their blackboards, visions of the Einsteinian grail of a unified theory dancing in their heads. "Although much work remains to be done there seem to be no insuperable obstacles to deriving all of known physics," one set of physicists, known as the Princeton string quartet, wrote about a particularly promising model known as heterotic strings. (The quartet consisted of Dr. Gross; Dr. Jeffrey Harvey and Dr. Emil Martinec, both at the University of Chicago; and Dr. Ryan M. Rohm, now at the University of North Carolina.) The Music of Strings String theory is certainly one of the most musical explanations ever offered for nature, but it is not for the untrained ear. For one thing, the modern version of the theory decreed that there are 10 dimensions of space and time. To explain to ordinary mortals why the world appears to have only four dimensions - one of time and three of space -string theorists adopted a notion first bruited by the German mathematicians Theodor Kaluza and Oskar Klein in 1926. The extra six dimensions, they said, go around in sub-submicroscopic loops, so tiny that people cannot see them or store old National Geographics in them. A simple example, the story goes, is a garden hose. Seen from afar, it is a simple line across the grass, but up close it has a circular cross section. An ant on the hose can go around it as well as travel along its length. To envision the world as seen by string theory, one only has to imagine a tiny, tiny six-dimensional ball at every point in space-time But that was only the beginning. In 1995, Dr. Witten showed that what had been five different versions of string theory seemed to be related. He argued that they were all different manifestations of a shadowy, as-yet-undefined entity he called "M theory," with "M" standing for mother, matrix, magic, mystery, membrane or even murky. In M-theory, the universe has 11 dimensions - 10 of space and one of time, and it consists not just of strings but also of more extended membranes of various dimension, known generically as "branes." This new theory has liberated the imaginations of cosmologists. Our own universe, some theorists suggest, may be a four-dimensional brane floating in some higher-dimensional space, like a bubble in a fish tank, perhaps with other branes - parallel universes - nearby. Collisions or other interactions between the branes might have touched off the Big Bang that started our own cosmic clock ticking or could produce the dark energy that now seems to be accelerating the expansion of the universe, they say. Toting Up the Scorecard One of string theory's biggest triumphs has come in the study of black holes. In Einstein's general relativity, these objects are bottomless pits in space-time, voraciously swallowing everything, even light, that gets too close, but in string theory they are a dense tangle of strings and membranes. In a prodigious calculation in 1995, Dr. Strominger and Dr. Cumrun Vafa, both of Harvard, were able to calculate the information content of a black hole, matching a famous result obtained by Dr. Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University using more indirect means in 1973. Their calculation is viewed by many people as the most important result yet in string theory, Dr. Greene said. Another success, Dr. Greene and others said, was the discovery that the shape, or topology, of space, is not fixed but can change, according to string theory. Space can even rip and tear. But the scorecard is mixed when it comes to other areas of physics. So far, for example, string theory has had little to say about what might have happened at the instant of the Big Bang.. Moreover, the theory seems to have too many solutions. One of the biggest dreams that physicists had for the so-called theory of everything was that it would specify a unique prescription of nature, one in which God had no choice, as Einstein once put it, about details like the number of dimensions or the relative masses of elementary particles. But recently theorists have estimated that there could be at least 10100 different solutions to the string equations, corresponding to different ways of folding up the extra dimensions and filling them with fields - gazillions of different possible universes. Some theorists, including Dr. Witten, hold fast to the Einsteinian dream, hoping that a unique answer to the string equations will emerge when they finally figure out what all this 21st-century physics is trying to tell them about the world. But that day is still far away. "We don't know what the deep principle in string theory is," Dr. Witten said. For most of the 20th century, progress in particle physics was driven by the search for symmetries - patterns or relationships that remain the same when we swap left for right, travel across the galaxy or imagine running time in reverse. For years physicists have looked for the origins of string theory in some sort of deep and esoteric symmetry, but string theory has turned out to be weirder than that. Recently it has painted a picture of nature as a kind of hologram. In the holographic images often seen on bank cards, the illusion of three dimensions is created on a two-dimensional surface. Likewise string theory suggests that in nature all the information about what is happening inside some volume of space is somehow encoded on its outer boundary, according to work by several theorists, including Dr. Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study and Dr. Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley. Just how and why a three-dimensional reality can spring from just two dimensions, or four dimensions can unfold from three, is as baffling to people like Dr. Witten as it probably is to someone reading about it in a newspaper. In effect, as Dr. Witten put it, an extra dimension of space can mysteriously appear out of "nothing." The lesson, he said, may be that time and space are only illusions or approximations, emerging somehow from something more primitive and fundamental about nature, the way protons and neutrons are built of quarks. The real secret of string theory, he said, will probably not be new symmetries, but rather a novel prescription for constructing space-time. "It's a new aspect of the theory," Dr. Witten said. "Whether we are getting closer to the deep principle, I don't know." As he put it in a talk in October, "It's plausible that we will someday understand string theory." Tangled in Strings Critics of string theory, meanwhile, have been keeping their own scorecard. The most glaring omission is the lack of any experimental evidence for strings or even a single experimental prediction that could prove string theory wrong - the acid test of the scientific process. Strings are generally presumed to be so small that "stringy" effects should show up only when particles are smashed together at prohibitive energies, roughly 1019 billion electron volts. That is orders of magnitude beyond the capability of any particle accelerator that will ever be built on earth. Dr. Harvey of Chicago said he sometimes woke up thinking, What am I doing spending my whole career on something that can't be tested experimentally? This disparity between theoretical speculation and testable reality has led some critics to suggest that string theory is as much philosophy as science, and that it has diverted the attention and energy of a generation of physicists from other perhaps more worthy pursuits. Others say the theory itself is still too vague and that some promising ideas have not been proved rigorously enough yet. Dr. Krauss said, "We bemoan the fact that Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life on a fruitless quest, but we think it's fine if a thousand theorists spend 30 years of their prime on the same quest." The Other Quantum Gravity String theory's biggest triumph is still its first one, unifying Einstein's lordly gravity that curves the cosmos and the quantum pinball game of chance that lives inside it. "Whatever else it is or is not," Dr. Harvey said in Aspen, "string theory is a theory of quantum gravity that gives sensible answers." That is no small success, but it may not be unique. String theory has a host of lesser known rivals for the mantle of quantum gravity, in particular a concept called, loop quantum gravity, which arose from work by Dr. Abhay Ashtekar of Penn State and has been carried forward by Dr. Carlo Rovelli of the University of Marseille and Dr. Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, among others. Unlike string theory, loop gravity makes no pretensions toward being a theory of everything. It is only a theory of gravity, space and time, arising from the applications of quantum principles to the equations of Einstein's general relativity. The adherents of string theory and of loop gravity have a kind of Microsoft-Apple kind of rivalry, with the former garnering a vast majority of university jobs and publicity. Dr. Witten said that string theory had a tendency to absorb the ideas of its critics and rivals. This could happen with loop gravity. Dr. Vafa; his Harvard colleagues, Dr. Sergei Gukov and Dr. Andrew Neitzke; and Dr. Robbert Dijkgraaf of the University of Amsterdam report in a recent paper that they have found a connection between simplified versions of string and loop gravity. "If it exists," Dr. Vafa said of loop gravity, "it should be part of string theory." Looking for a Cosmic Connection Some theorists have bent their energies recently toward investigating models in which strings could make an observable mark on the sky or in experiments in particle accelerators. "They all require us to be lucky," said Dr. Joe Polchinski of the Kavli Institute. For example the thrashing about of strings in the early moments of time could leave fine lumps in a haze of radio waves filling the sky and thought to be the remains of the Big Bang. These might be detectable by the Planck satellite being built by the European Space Agency for a 2007 launching date, said Dr. Greene. According to some models, Dr. Polchinski has suggested, some strings could be stretched from their normal submicroscopic lengths to become as big as galaxies or more during a brief cosmic spurt known as inflation, thought to have happened a fraction of a second after the universe was born. If everything works out, he said, there will be loops of string in the sky as big as galaxies. Other strings could stretch all the way across the observable universe. The strings, under enormous tension and moving near the speed of light, would wiggle and snap, rippling space-time like a tablecloth with gravitational waves. "It would be like a whip hundreds of light-years long," Dr. Polchinski said. The signal from these snapping strings, if they exist, should be detectable by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, which began science observations two years ago, operated by a multinational collaboration led by Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Another chance for a clue will come in 2007 when the Large Hadron Collider is turned on at CERN in Geneva and starts colliding protons with seven trillion volts of energy apiece. In one version of the theory - admittedly a long shot - such collisions could create black holes or particles disappearing into the hidden dimensions. Everybody's favorite candidate for what the collider will find is a phenomenon called supersymmetry, which is crucial to string theory. It posits the existence of a whole set of ghostlike elementary particles yet to be discovered. Theorists say they have reason to believe that the lightest of these particles, which have fanciful names like photinos, squarks and selectrons, should have a mass-energy within the range of the collider. String theory naturally incorporates supersymmetry, but so do many other theories. Its discovery would not clinch the case for strings, but even Dr. Krauss of Case Western admits that the existence of supersymmetry would be a boon for string theory. And what if supersymmetric particles are not discovered at the new collider? Their absence would strain the faith, a bit, but few theorists say they would give up. "It would certainly be a big blow to our chances of understanding string theory in the near future," Dr. Witten said. Beginnings and Endings At the end of the Aspen celebration talk turned to the prospect of verification of string theory. Summing up the long march toward acceptance of the theory, Dr. Stephen Shenker, a pioneer string theorist at Stanford, quoted Winston Churchill: "This is not the end, not even the beginning of the end, but perhaps it is the end of the beginning." Dr. Shenker said it would be great to find out that string theory was right. >From the audience Dr. Greene piped up, "Wouldn't it be great either way?" "Are you kidding me, Brian?" Dr. Shenker responded. "How many years have you sweated on this?" But if string theory is wrong, Dr. Greene argued, wouldn't it be good to know so physics could move on? "Don't you want to know?" he asked. Dr. Shenker amended his remarks. "It would be great to have an answer," he said, adding, "It would be even better if it's the right one." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/07/science/07stri.html From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 19 15:22:22 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 10:22:22 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Libraries Reach Out, Online Message-ID: Libraries Reach Out, Online NYT December 9, 2004 By TIM GNATEK [Note date. I'm sending 15 articles a day, probably up till Lent, when I take my annual Lenten break, to clear off the deck. I'll be going through about half a year's Times Literary Supplement. Lots of cool things. [I've finished six books in my project of abandoning reality for fiction. I'm about to start Orhan Pamuk, _Snow_, about a Turkish exile who tried to go back home from Germany, where religion is still quite powerful. This is exactly what I'm most interested in, the clash of cultures and, more so, how cultures differ and whether the differences are so deep and permanent that they might by now be innate.] THE newest books in the New York Public Library don't take up any shelf space. They are electronic books - 3,000 titles' worth - and the library's 1.8 million cardholders can point and click through the collection at www .nypl.org, choosing from among best sellers, nonfiction, romance novels and self-help guides. Patrons borrow them for set periods, downloading them for reading on a computer, a hand-held organizer or other device using free reader software. When they are due, the files are automatically locked out - no matter what hardware they are on - and returned to circulation, eliminating late fees. In the first eight days of operation in early November, and with little fanfare, the library's cardholders - from New York City and New York state and, increasingly, from elsewhere - checked out more than 1,000 digital books and put another 400 on waiting lists (the library has a limited number of licenses for each book). E-books are only one way that libraries are laying claim to a massive online public as their newest service audience. The institutions are breaking free from the limitations of physical location by making many kinds of materials and services available at all times to patrons who are both cardholders and Web surfers, whether they are homebound in the neighborhood or halfway around the world. For years, library patrons have been able to check card catalogs online and do things like reserve or renew books and pay overdue fines. Now they can not only check out e-books and audiobooks but view movie trailers and soon, the actual movies. And they can do it without setting foot in the local branch. "The lending model is identical to what libraries already have," said Steve Potash, president of OverDrive, which provides the software behind the e-book programs in New York City, White Plains, Cleveland and elsewhere. "But lending is 24/7. You can borrow from anywhere and have instant, portable access to the collection." At the same time, libraries are leveraging technology - including wireless networks that are made available at no charge to anyone who wants to use them - to draw people to their physical premises. Library e-books are not new - netLibrary, an online-only e-book collection for libraries, has operated since 1998 - but the New York Public Library decided to wait for software that would let users read materials on hand-held devices, freeing them from computers. "The key was portability," said Michael Ciccone, who heads acquisitions at the library. "It needs to be a book-like experience." E-books' short history has already begun to yield some lessons. At the Cleveland Public Library, Patricia Lowrey, head of technical services, thought technical manuals and business guides would be in greatest demand. "We were dead wrong on that," Ms. Lowrey said. "There are a lot of closet romance readers in cyberspace." She saw patrons check out the same kinds of materials rotating in the physical collection. The e-books librarians like best, according to Ms. Lowrey, are the digitized guides and workbooks for standardized tests, which in printed form are notorious for deteriorating quickly or disappearing altogether. Cleveland's success with e-books encouraged librarians there to expand to audiobooks in November, when OverDrive introduced software to allow downloads of audiobooks. "We had 28 audiobooks checked out in the first six hours, with no publicity at all," Ms. Lowrey said. The OverDrive audiobook software encodes audiobooks from suppliers' source material, such as compact discs or cassettes, packages the stories into parts with Windows Media technology, and manages patrons' downloads. Borrowers can listen using a computer while online or offline; the books can also be stored on portable players or burned to CD's. The King County Library System in Washington State, which serves communities like Redmond and Bellevue and the computer-savvy workers at local companies like Microsoft and Boeing, has also embraced both e-books and audiobooks. In November, the King County libraries added 634 audiobooks to the 8,500 e-books in its catalog (www.kcls.org). With no publicity at all, 200 of the audiobooks had already been checked out. "As soon as people find out about it, it will be extremely popular," said Bruce Schauer, the library's associate director of collections. At the King County Library System's Web site, patrons can watch film trailers and reserve titles, which they can pick up at a branch. Before long, they can expect to be able to borrow entire movies online. Mr. Potash of OverDrive says the company plans to release such a video program for libraries by next summer. Posting electronic versions of libraries' holdings is only part of the library's expanding online presence. Library Web sites are becoming information portals. Many, like the Saint Joseph's County Library in South Bend, Ind., have created Web logs as community outreach tools. Others are customizing their Web sites for individual visitors. The Richmond Public Library in British Columbia (www.yourlibrary.ca), for example, offers registered users ways to track books and personal favorites, or receive lists of suggested materials, much like the recommendation service at Amazon. Other libraries have moved their book clubs online. Members of the online reading group at the public library in Lawrence, Kan., (www.lawrence.lib.ks.us) receive book passages by e-mail and discuss them in an online forum. "Libraries have been very enthusiastic adopters of technology," said Patricia Stevens, the director of cooperative initiatives at the Online Computer Library Center, an international cooperative with some 50,000 libraries that share digital resources. The center, which recently acquired the netLibrary e-book service, plans to announce a downloadable audiobook package with the audiobook publisher Recorded Books this month. It also provides add-on Web site programs that put traditional librarians' functions on the Internet. "The services found inside a library are now online," Ms. Stevens said. "And the trend is to continue moving to remote self-service." An example is QuestionPoint, a creation of the Online Computer Library Center and the Library of Congress that offers live 24-hour assistance from cooperative librarians via a chat service. More than 1,500 libraries worldwide make remote reference help available through QuestionPoint, which recently consolidated with a similar program, the 24/7 Reference Project, started by the Metropolitan Cooperative Library System in Southern California. Another library IM tool, Tutor.com, is geared for a younger audience, helping children with their homework. More than 600 library sites offer the program, which matches students with tutors, whether for help reducing fractions or diagramming sentences. More than 105,000 tutoring sessions have been logged in the United States since September. But libraries' investments in online services are aimed at more than just remote users. They are also adding technology inside their buildings to draw community members in. Despite all the modernization, old-fashioned formulas still matter. "Most libraries measure success by using circulation, so if you check out a book, that's good for us," said Ms. Lowrey of the Cleveland Public Library. "There might be a door counter as well, so if you come in to use a wireless connection or a PC, we're watching those numbers as well." In Sacramento, the library system has drummed up interest by holding several after-hours video game parties in which teenagers gather to play networked games like Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II. Always on the lookout for the kernel of learning to be found in the fun, the librarians have matched the game play with reading material. "We saw the Star Wars game as providing a great tie-in to books," said Suzy Murray, youth services librarian for Sacramento's Carmichael branch. "Teen boys, in addition to being voracious consumers of video games, are also huge fans of science fiction, so the connection seemed very natural." But one of the most effective uses of technology to entice visitors, librarians say, is turning the building into a wireless hot spot. For less than $1,000, a library can set up a wireless network and draw the public in for free-range Internet access. The Wireless Librarian (people.morrisville.edu/~drewwe/wireless) lists more than 400 such library hot spots in the United States. Michele Hampshire, Web librarian for the library in Mill Valley, the woodsy San Francisco suburb, logs an average of 15 wireless users a day on the library's high-speed connection. "We're not collecting personal information; we don't put filters on, you don't even need a library card," Ms. Hampshire said. She and other librarians do not consider the rise of online access a threat, Ms. Hampshire said. Rather, it will allow librarians to spend less time and money reshelving books and reordering supplies, and more time helping online and in-person visitors to find materials. " Google will never replace me," she said. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/09/technology/circuits/09libr.html From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 19 15:37:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 10:37:27 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR 'The Annotated Brothers Grimm': Grimmer Than You Thought Message-ID: 'The Annotated Brothers Grimm': Grimmer Than You Thought New York Times, 4.12.5 By NEIL GAIMAN THE ANNOTATED BROTHERS GRIMM By Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Translated and edited by Maria Tatar. JACOB and Wilhelm Grimm did not set out to entertain children, not at first. They were primarily collectors and philologists, who almost two centuries ago assembled German fairy tales as part of a life's work that included, Maria Tatar points out, ''massive volumes with such titles as 'German Legends,' 'German Grammar,' 'Ancient German Law' and 'German Heroic Legends.' '' (''Jacob Grimm's 'German Grammar' alone,'' we are told helpfully, ''took up 3,854 pages.'') They published their first collection of M?rchen, ''Children's Stories and Household Tales,'' in 1812, with a second volume in 1815 and an expanded and revised edition in 1819; folklorists who became, of necessity, storytellers, they reworked the tales for years, smoothing them while removing material they considered unsuitable for children. The Grimms' fairy tales are inescapably, well, grimmer than the courtly, sparkling 17th-century ''Cinderella'' and ''Tales of Mother Goose'' of Charles Perrault. The Brothers Grimm toned down bawdier content -- in their first edition, Rapunzel's question to the enchantress was why, after the Prince's visits, her belly had begun to swell -- but not much of the violence and bloodshed. Occasionally they were even heightened. ''The Juniper Tree'' is a treatment of death and rebirth, just deserts and restoration, that feels almost sacred, but the child murder and cannibalism make it untellable today as children's fiction. ''The Annotated Brothers Grimm'' gives us a sample of the 210 tales in the authoritative version of the seventh and final edition of 1857. Tatar, dean of humanities and professor of Germanic languages and literature at Harvard University, has newly translated 37 of the 210, as well as nine tales for adults, and annotated them, drawing on the commentary of the Grimms themselves and of writers who have reused the Grimms' material, from Jane Yolen and Peter Straub to Terry Pratchett. Annotating fairy tales must be different in kind from the task of annotating, say, a Sherlock Holmes story or Lewis Carroll's ''Hunting of the Snark.'' Sherlock Holmes stories don't have a multiplicity of variants from different cultures and times; Red Riding Hood exists in versions in which, before she clambers into bed with the wolf, she first eats her grandmother's flesh and drinks her blood; in which she strips for the wolf; in which, naked, she excuses herself to use the privy and escapes; in which she is first devoured, then cut from the wolf's stomach by a huntsman; in which. . . . Tatar's book, with its annotations, explanations, front matter and end matter, illustrations and biographical essay and further-reading section, is difficult to overpraise. A volume for parents, for scholars, for readers, it never overloads the stories or, worse, reduces them to curiosities. And as an object, it's a chocolate-box feast of multicolored inks and design. The annotations are fascinating. Tatar points out things so plain that commentators sometimes miss them (for example, that ''Hansel and Gretel'' is a tale driven by food and hunger from a time when, for the peasantry, eating until you were full was a pipe dream). In the introduction to ''Snow White,'' we learn that ''the Grimms, in an effort to preserve the sanctity of motherhood, were forever turning biological mothers into stepmothers,'' while an annotation tells us that in the 1810 manuscript version ''there is only one queen, and she is both biological mother and persecutor.'' Only rarely does Tatar note the blindingly obvious. When the heroine of ''The Singing Soaring Lark'' (the Grimms' ''Beauty and the Beast'') sits down and cries, we're told that characters often cry when things are going badly: ''The weeping is emblematic of the grief and sadness they feel, and it gives the character an opportunity to pause before moving on to a new phase of action.'' Well, quite. The assemblage of stories -- Germanic tales that have become part of world culture -- parades an array of nameless youngest sons and intelligent and noble girls. As both A. S. Byatt (who wrote the introduction) and Tatar point out, the heroes and heroines triumph not because they have good hearts or are purer or nobler than others (indeed, most of the young men are foolish, and some are downright lazy) but because they are the central characters, and the story will take care of them, as stories do. The ''adult'' section contains several murderous cautionary tales, along with the nightmare of ''The Jew in the Brambles,'' a story not much reprinted since 1945, in which the hero tortures a Jewish peddler using a magic fiddle, making him dance in brambles; at the end the peddler is hanged. Three of the Grimms' tales contain Jewish figures; ''the two that feature anti-Semitism in its most virulent form were included in the Compact Edition designed for young readers'' (1825), Tatar tells us. ''The Jew in the Brambles'' casts a long shadow back through the book, leaving one wondering whether the ashes Cinderella slept in would one day become the ashes of Auschwitz. AND yet most of the stories, no matter how murderous, exude comfort. Rereading them feels like coming home. Tatar's translation is comfortable and familiar (the occasional verse translations are slightly less felicitous); several times I found myself reading right through an unfamiliar or forgotten tale to find out what happened next, ignoring the annotations completely. Illustrations are an important ingredient of fairy tales. The variety and choice here are beyond reproach: among them, Arthur Rackham, with his polled trees that gesture and bend like old men and his adults all gnarled and twisted like trees; the elegance of Kay Nielsen; the lush draperies and delicate fancies of Warwick Goble. ''The Annotated Brothers Grimm'' treats the stories as something important -- not, in the end, because of what they tell us of the buried roots of Germanic myth, or because of the often contradictory and intermittently fashionable psychoanalytic interpretations, or for any other reason than that they are part of the way we see the world, because they should be told. That's what I took from it, anyway. But fairy tales are magic mirrors: they show you what you wish to see. Neil Gaiman is the creator of the graphic novel series ''Sandman.'' http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/books/review/05GAIMANL.html From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 19 15:38:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 10:38:19 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Shared Nightmare Over the Food Supply Message-ID: Washington Memo: Shared Nightmare Over the Food Supply NYT December 11, 2004 By ELIZABETH BECKER WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 - When Tommy G. Thompson, the departing secretary of health and human services, used his farewell news conference last week to warn that terrorists could easily poison the nation's food supply, he was saying out loud what he and other experts have been warning since the attacks of Sept. 11. Other Washingtonians who spend sleepless nights worrying about tainted food can expand on Mr. Thompson's nightmare with the chilling precision of the author Stephen King, and with the knowledge that terrorists can strike the food supply without anyone's noticing. In the three years since the Sept. 11 attacks, millions of pounds of ground beef suspected of contamination by the E. coli pathogen were shipped around the country, sold at countless grocery stores, and sickened several dozen people. In another case, millions of pounds of turkey potentially infected with the deadly listeria bacteria showed up at several delicatessens, nicely packaged as lunchmeat. Eight people died from that outbreak. Produce is not necessarily safe either. Last year, Mexican scallions tainted with hepatitis A were shipped across the border, chopped up and served raw in the salsa at a Chi-Chi's restaurant in Pennsylvania, killing three people. All three of these examples were accidents, the result of poor sanitation and poor inspection in this country's slaughterhouses or at its borders. All three were at different points in the long, often poorly regulated chain from field to dinner. "That's the scary part," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer group. "Our systems are so bad that unless terrorists admit it, we could be poisoned and not know it was intentional." The only known instance of food bioterrorism in the United States occurred in 1984 and went unsolved for a year for just that reason. Members of a religious cult poisoned a salad bar in The Dalles, Ore., but did not leave a calling card or brag about their handiwork. The local authorities were suspicious, but the outbreak at 10 restaurants was investigated as a case of poor sanitation until the leader of the cult came forward and accused some of his members of the crime. Twenty years later, Mr. Thompson said at the Dec. 3 news conference that it was still easy to poison food. "For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do," he said. That remark set off such speculation that President Bush stepped in and said that his administration was "doing everything we can to protect the American people." And Mr. Thompson seemed to backpedal. "Our nation is now more prepared than ever before to protect the public against threats to the food supply," Mr. Thompson said this week, as the administration released new safety rules requiring food importers, processors and manufacturers to keep records of the sources of their products and who receives them. But these rules represent the bare minimum required to begin patching together a system to simply identify how food is moving through this country, say the leading Congressional critics, who happen to be mostly Democrats. Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut who has made food safety one of her causes, said Congress needed to demand more accountability of food companies and to spend a lot more money protecting the nation's food. "Our country must not simply pay lip service to our bioterror defense," Ms. DeLauro said, "but recognize the threat facing America's food supply and our increasing food imports, and fully fund these needs." As it is, less than 6 percent of the meat and 1 percent of produce entering the country are inspected at the border. "Even this low percentage of inspection is mostly visual, looking at the packaging and labeling, and not inspecting for contamination with a sophisticated laboratory test," said Mary Bottari, of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, a consumer group. Moreover, critics say, responsibility for the safety of food is divided between the Food and Drug Administration and the Agriculture Department, diluting the effectiveness of the laws on the books. The United States lags far behind Europe in its ability to trace the source of food contamination, in part because Europe strengthened its procedures after suffering through mad cow disease in the 1990's. In some European countries, scanning machines at supermarkets not only register the price of a cut of beef but also flash a picture of the farm where a cow was raised. In this country, searching for the source of contaminated hamburger often takes weeks. One batch of hamburger can contain meat from hundreds of cows raised in dozens of states and several countries. And that is why the hamburger horror is one of the most common nightmare situations. "You wouldn't even need to infect the cow with E. coli to spread the disease," said Felicia Nestor, an independent food safety consultant. "You could dump E. coli into a gargantuan feedlot where there are thousands of cattle pressed up against each other or you could give it to someone at a slaughterhouse where worker turnover is sometimes 100 percent. The worker could dump it into a huge grinder and there it goes - the country is infected." In other words, food and safety experts agree with Mr. Thompson's message that the job of ensuring a safe food supply is far from finished. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/11/politics/11food.html From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 19 15:40:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 10:40:12 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Technology Review: Cargo security: Point of impact: where technology collides with business and personal lives Message-ID: Cargo security: Point of impact: where technology collides with business and personal lives by Lok, Corie 4.7.2 ??? TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: How vulnerable is the cargo shipping system to attack? ??? STEPHEN FLYNN: The system was designed with virtually no security built into it. Is there an opportunity to put a weapon of mass destruction into the system? Yes. Anybody on the planet who has between $ 3,000 and $ 5,000 can get a 40-foot [12-meter] box dropped off at their home or backed up to their workplace. They can load it with up to 32 tons [29 metric tons] of material, close the doors, put a 50-cent lead seal on it, and it'll be off to the races. ??? TR: There's no inspection of the containers? ??? FLYNN: The Bureau of Customs and Border Protection only inspects those containers it has determined to be "high risk." The figure that's in use today is that 4 percent of all containers are somehow physically inspected. There aren 't really firm standards set for inspection. It could be the inspectors simply looked at the documentation. It could mean that they looked at the seal to see that the seal hadn't been tampered with, or they looked at the exterior of the box to check that the thing hadn't been breached. It could mean that they physically opened the back door, and everything looked fine in the dark, and they closed it back up. It could mean that they ran a non-intrusive scanner to x-ray the interior. Or it could mean that they opened up the box and took everything out and looked it over. Since a container can hold up to 32 tons of material, unladening or "unstuffing" the box is very rare. ??? TR: That doesn't sound very secure. ??? FLYNN: It shouldn't. But the real question here is, how can we be confident the other 96 percent are low risk? The targeting system used by U.S. government agencies to trigger an inspection relies heavily on the cargo manifest. The manifest is supplied by the transportation provider, such as a shipping company, but it's essentially secondhand information. The manifest says, "This is what my customer tells me that I'm shipping, and I'm going to take his word for it." The transportation provider doesn't do any verification of its own. ??? TR: What would happen if terrorists did blow up a container? ??? FLYNN: If you had even one container go off, or if it's at-Qaeda-style, you have three, then it immediately will raise the question in America's mind: if this one box could go off, which was presumed to be legitimate, what about all the other boxes? And the answer right now would be we really don't know. So the political imperative will be that you will shut the system down until you can sort it out. ??? Within about three weeks, you'll shut down the global trade system, because you've got 90 percent of general merchandise, virtually everything that goes into retailing, everything that goes into the manufacturing sector, moving in these ubiquitous 40-by-8-foot [12-by-2.4-meter] boxes. And it doesn't have to be a weapon of mass destruction. It can be just a reasonably high-end conventional explosive, like a major truck bomb. ??? TR: What effect would shutting down the system have? ??? FLYNN: It means global recession. Probably global depression. The person on the street may think, "I'll just go to WalMart and get what I need." Well, WalMart, within two weeks, will have nothing on the shelves. Because there are no warehouses: their warehouse is in the transportation and distribution system. So it's a tremendous vulnerability that has cascading effects, not just for the bottom line, but for the daily lives of Americans. A good example is the West Coast longshoremen lockout of the fall of 2002. It's estimated this 10-day event cost the U.S. economy over $ 20 billion. ??? TR: Are there technologies out there that could improve security? ??? FLYNN: The good news is that there are, and they're off the shelf, or near off the shelf. One key thing is the need to track the containers that move through the system. The technology for this is a combination of Global Positioning System and radio frequency identification [RFID] technologies. We don't need to have real-time data about where every box is. We need to capture a record of where the boxes have been, and then at key points we interrogate the box to find out, "Where have you been, what have you been up to?" That can get downloaded through RFID. Then that information gets relayed to somebody who decides, "Oh, there's information here that arouses my concern. Before this box is allowed into this loading port, I want it set aside so we can check on it. All the other boxes can keep going" But there may be some places where, because there's particularly high risk of other things happening, such as cargo theft, you want real-time GPS tracking. ??? TR: What about checking to make sure the boxes haven't been tampered with? ??? FLYNN: The kinds of things we're looking at are sensors built into the box that can pick up things like light, or change in barometric pressure, or change in temperature, which would only come from somebody breaching the wall of the container or opening the door. And then there are other sensors out there for dealing with very important issues like radiation. All these sensors are important, because you can literally punch your way through the boxes. It takes next to nothing to breach a container. ??? TR: How do you integrate the tracking and sensor technologies? ??? FLYNN: When the sensor goes off, the location of the box should be logged, and then I want that information stored until the box gets to a point where I can act on it, like a loading port. There, it goes through an RFID interrogator that says, "A box is coming in, here's the box's data, and whoops, the sensor went off." We can find out just where that was. And then the terminal operator can say, "l don't want that box in here. Let's shift it off over to this--hopefully safer--area here, and then we'll go through and do an inspection." ??? TR: How much will all this technology cost? ??? FLYNN: Equipment that monitors the position and integrity of the cargo would likely cost from $ 100 to $ 200 per box. Built-in sensors that could detect chemical and radiological materials would add another $ 50. Affordable and dependable sensors for biological agents are probably still a couple of years away but will come in about that price as well. A container has a typical life span of 10 years and is used up to five times per year, so even if the final installation and maintenance price tag came in at $ 500, and the sensors were replaced every five years, the cost of the "smart box" technologies could be as low as $ 10 to $ 20 per use. To put that figure into context, transpacific freight rates have fluctuated by more than $ 1,000 per container over the past 18 months with no measurable impact on world trade. ??? TR: Couldn't the bad guys find a way around these technologies? ??? FLYNN: The bad guys who are sophisticated will compromise your system--block your sensor, jam the signal, they'll do all those things. But security works when you build layers. Each layer itself doesn't have to be perfect. But collectively they create a pretty powerful deterrent. And it'll get you to the point where these guys say, "This is not a system that I want to mess with," versus the one we have right now, which is practically an open invitation for terrorists to do their worst. ??? STEPHEN FLYNN ??? POSITION: Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies, Council on Foreign Relations ??? ISSUE: Container security. The cargo shipping system moves tens of millions of containers around the world each year by train, truck, and ship, with next to no security. What can technology do to make the system less vulnerable to terrorist attacks? ??? PERSONAL POINT OF IMPACT: Using security expertise garnered as a U.S. Coast Guard commander, helped initiate Operation Safe Commerce, a $ 58 million federal pilot project to test container security technologies at the Port of New York and New Jersey, the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, and the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma From guavaberry at earthlink.net Thu Jan 20 02:47:08 2005 From: guavaberry at earthlink.net (K.E.) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 21:47:08 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Harvard Chief Defends His Talk on Women In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6.1.2.0.0.20050119214643.0405e840@mail.earthlink.net> The Anita Borg Institute (and a large number of other very senior folks) have written a response to Larry Summers. You can find it here. http://www.anitaborg.org/pressroom/pressreleases_05/Responce,%20summers.htm At 10:12 AM 1/18/2005, you wrote: >Harvard Chief Defends His Talk on Women >NYT January 18, 2005 >By SAM DILLON <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> The Educational CyberPlayGround http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/ National Children's Folksong Repository http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Culdesac/Repository/NCFR.html Hot List of Schools Online and Net Happenings, K12 Newsletters, Network Newsletters http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Community/index.html 7 Hot Site Awards New York Times, USA Today , MSNBC, Earthlink, USA Today Best Bets For Educators, Macworld Top Fifty <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Jan 20 04:02:10 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 20:02:10 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Harvard Chief Defends His Talk on Women Message-ID: <01C4FE61.C3245EC0.shovland@mindspring.com> With belief trumping science in the White House, it's not too surprising to see the disease spreading to academia. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: K.E. [SMTP:guavaberry at earthlink.net] Sent: Wednesday, January 19, 2005 6:47 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Harvard Chief Defends His Talk on Women The Anita Borg Institute (and a large number of other very senior folks) have written a response to Larry Summers. You can find it here. http://www.anitaborg.org/pressroom/pressreleases_05/Responce,%20summers.htm At 10:12 AM 1/18/2005, you wrote: >Harvard Chief Defends His Talk on Women >NYT January 18, 2005 >By SAM DILLON <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> The Educational CyberPlayGround http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/ National Children's Folksong Repository http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Culdesac/Repository/NCFR.html Hot List of Schools Online and Net Happenings, K12 Newsletters, Network Newsletters http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Community/index.html 7 Hot Site Awards New York Times, USA Today , MSNBC, Earthlink, USA Today Best Bets For Educators, Macworld Top Fifty <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From paul.werbos at verizon.net Thu Jan 20 20:10:19 2005 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Paul J. Werbos, Dr.) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 15:10:19 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] inauguration and exit strategies In-Reply-To: <01C4FE61.C3245EC0.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4FE61.C3245EC0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <6.2.0.14.0.20050120143733.01e2d6a8@incoming.verizon.net> The Bush inauguration speech today was much better than one might have predicted. I really hope that key Democrats will give it proper credit as a kind of unifying starting point that we can all agree on, and all agree to try to maximize... with a strong flag, of course, that it will be a major challenge for us all to work together to really achieve the kinds of goals he talked about. Nit-picking about the shading of words is really not a... sapient... approach. But what of exit strategies? The exist strategy problem which seems most clearcut... in sheer logic... is not the issue of exit strategy from Iraq but exit strategy from the deficit. Colin Powell has said that we are indeed well on the road to a true Vietnam-style disaster in Iraq. (Though I am tempted to revisit aspects of the Vietnam history that few are aware of.) Rice says no. Whom should we believe? NEITHER. Powell knows traditional war-fighting stuff better, but this is a kind of complex socio-historical thing that no one I know really has a right to predict with confidence. But it's clear that Bush WANTS a credible exit... that the plan is rooted in accepting a new elected government in which the Shia play a dominant role.. that Sistani fully understands this, and will be happy to make it pleasant for Bush to go... that Bush will accept this... Bush has stated very clearly that the protection of minorities (like Sunni and Kurds and others) is an important goal of US policy, but if Sunnis keep killing everyone else and trying to revive Saddam Hussein, he will not stay longer for the sake of protecting them more effectively. He would have responded to other things... but in any case, it's a muddle, but not a very changeable muddle, and it is at least plausible that the US will be out of Iraq by the end of the term of this Administration. Who knows? At a minimum, this is Bush's intent and it doesn't seem impossible. But... the deficit situation is far more serious. It is what drove the Financial Times to endorse Kerry -- albeit with an obvious expression of distaste as they did so. It is a clear case where predictions made earlier simply fell flat, in a clearcut unequivocal way. I believe I remember statements by Bill Clinton saying that there should be no tax cuts... and that the benefits should NOT be spent, but should be held for social security, without which he predicted there would be a major crisis in funding social security. And I remember early Bush predictions that the tax cuts would unleash the magic of "supply side economics" (formerly called "voodoo economics") and generate X number of new jobs and no deficit. Here we are. It seems clear -- surprise, surprise -- that objective econometrics, warts and all, predicted reality a lot better than positive thinking ideological boosters. And we DO have a crisis in social security and with deficits -- maybe half the deficit due to Iraq, but not all. So what is the exit strategy from THAT one? How do we keep the US economy afloat? (And I can't help recalling that Schroder and Chirac have dug themselves into a very similar hole...). The "privatizing" scheme reminds me a lot of the time when people tried to reduce the US government budget in part by moving government workers from a defined-benefit scheme (CSRS) to a floating market-holding kind of scheme (FERS). They told federal employees they would be much better off under the new scheme.. and then told Congress how much money it would save. Likewise, lots of private companies made similar changes... and... after so many people became destitute as a result, and appeared on TV this past year... I really doubt Congress will go along with it. If they do... well. if the Democrats are clear enough, it would pave the way for a really massive realignment of Congress. It sounds good on the surface... but there is a kind of no-free-lunch principle at work here, and it really doesn't work in the end, if the entire system is considered. So what can be done? One possibility.... After proposing a really extreme reform motion... and carefully NOT twisting anyone's arm to vote for it... and seeing it defeated... IMMEDIATELY AFTER AND AS SOON AS POSSIBLE... Then Bush could say: "OK guys, I tried it the painless way. (Though objective third parties would deeply doubt it would be painless.) We MUST save social security. So... I have had bipartisan discussions... here is our fallback plan, we agree to do in a nice smooth bipartisan way... no recriminations or second-guessing.... we are going to have a massive reform BOTH in taxes and in social security. Our goal is not only to save social security, but SIMPLIFY the tax system so as to make it possible for ordinary people to do their taxes again without relying on accountant... so as to reduce the number of people who have to file at all... We will engage a European-style value-added tax which, in the long-term, will take over from the present income tax system. We will calibrate the level of the tax to automatically balance the budget in the next 5 years. We will phase out not only complex deductions but also taxes, and level down core income taxes -- not to zero in five years -- but enough to substantially simplify the system. The loss of some deductions will be a loss to some people, but everyone will benefit in the net in the long-term because of the lower tax rates and the greater simplicity and rationality of the system. Also, because this will make us closer to the European systems of taxation, it will make it easier for us to organize the improved economic cooperation we hope for in the coming decades... And if there is a bipartisan agreement to support this and not make anyone feel embarrassed... maybe the US economy could be salvaged. And I really hope the word "SIMPLIFY" would be real. So many lawyer/lobbyists bragged about the new benefits they delivered for small businesses and large financial companies... on the last round... yet I'd bet that a whole lot of small businesses were more upset by the new paperwork than pleased by the benefits. And I even saw some large funds send out notices that they were totally at wits end trying to handle the weird new paperwork that the new investment deductions imposed. I hope there will be an exit strategy from all of THAT.... ======= Whatever. Quick thoughts on a snowy holiday... not any kind of cosmic inspiration, just a matter of trying to follow a trail of imperfect logic wherever it might go... Best of luck to us all... Paul From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 20 21:04:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 16:04:58 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: (and London Times) Germaine Greer's Orwellian Ordeal on 'Big Brother' Message-ID: Germaine Greer's Orwellian Ordeal on 'Big Brother' NYT January 20, 2005 By SARAH LYALL [London TImes pieces follow.] LONDON, Jan. 19 - Possibly the only thing more surprising than the news that Germaine Greer - the Australian feminist, literary scholar and cultural critic - had joined the cast of the latest "Celebrity Big Brother" series was what she did when she quit, five days later. Contestants habitually complain about their experiences on reality television shows. It is one of the standard features of the entertainment, like groveling for meals or getting drunk and falling over. But the complaints are usually directed at the other participants. As one said about another in a past season, "If I had stayed in that house a minute longer, I would have murdered Les." What made the 65-year-old Ms. Greer's departure last week so riveting, by contrast, was that her attack was not a personal whining session, but a blistering cultural and literary critique of the show that revealed her as perhaps the only contestant who has ever actually read (or at least admitted reading) George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," where the whole notion of Big Brother was born. Ms. Greer, still best known for her 1970's feminist manifesto, "The Female Eunuch," compared the show, in which celebrities are confined together as viewers decide who goes and who stays, to "a fascist prison camp" where bullying was encouraged and sensory deprivation used as a weapon of torture. "The business of the 'Big Brother' house was to bring about a state of abjection among the inhabitants," she told reporters after her departure. In a furious article in The Sunday Times of London, Ms. Greer expanded on her theme, complaining that deliberately poor conditions and the withholding of privileges were wearing down the weaker contestants, leading them to turn on one another. When one participant begged to be given Diet Coke, saying that he could not cope without it, for instance, the program makers distributed it to the other cast members and encouraged them to taunt him. Food in the house was stale and rancid, Ms. Greer said. The kitchen was filthy and contestants had to share towels and bathrobes "crawling with bacteria promiscuously collected from all eight bodies." Even worse, she said, was the way the program makers would "lock down" the contestants in their bedrooms when technicians entered the set, drawing the blinds but leaving the lights on. During lockdowns, contestants were forbidden to eat or use the bathroom. A shrill, reverberating alarm sounded if they tried to doze off. "As Mussolini's enforcers found, it is easy to break a prisoner by turning day into night and jumbling their mealtimes," wrote Ms. Greer, who during the show had urged her fellow contestants to revolt by stripping and sitting naked. (No one did.) "It would have served Big Brother right if housemates had wet their beds and daubed their walls" with excrement. To some, it was as if Ms. Greer, alone among the parade of contestants present and past, had dared finally to mention the emperor's lack of clothes. "My personal take on why Greer signed up for 'Big Brother' was that it was a simple, benevolent decision to try to help mankind," the critic Caitlin Moran wrote in The Times of London. "In all the reality shows over the past five years, we have never, on a single occasion, had anyone even remotely sane and intelligent on them." But Ms. Greer's attack offended another Times columnist, Julie Burchill, a "Big Brother" fan whose article on the matter carried the headline "My Feminist Hero Has Become a Rancid Bore." "It is rather offensive to those who have spent time in fascist prisons - or even people who have two brain cells to rub together - to compare a game show to a fascist prison," Ms. Burchill wrote, accusing Ms. Greer of failing to understand "the risibly obvious fact that this 'Big Brother' was not the original oppressive brute, as created by George Orwell," but rather a "pantomime villain toying with a few pampered volunteers." Ms. Greer was certainly the odd one out when she entered the "Celebrity Big Brother" house along a motley crowd of has-beens and would-be's, including Brigitte Nielsen, the Amazonian former wife of Sylvester Stallone; and John McCririck, the eccentric host of television horse-racing programs. Mr. McCririck offered a window into his personality when he said of his wife on the show: "Her body's sagging, and in truth I'm fed up with her." Ms. Greer explained that she had joined the show because she wanted money to help rehabilitate her 125 acres of Australian rain forest, as well as to "strike a blow for old ladies." She is said to have received ?50,000 ($93,355) for agreeing to participate. Had she won, she said, she would have donated the prize money to Buglife, an invertebrate conservation charity. Some feminists were upset at what they saw as a betrayal of the cause and distressed by the undignified spectacle of the various tasks Ms. Greer had to undergo in order to win food and privileges: wading through rotting vegetables and cigarette butts; sitting on a revolving merry-go-round that made her vomit repeatedly; dressing like a Victorian serving-wench. "Germaine is one of the icons of my life, but because of the way culture is, she will now be known for 'Big Brother' rather than for anything else she's done," said Bonnie Greer, a co-panelist with Ms. Greer on a television arts-review program. (The two women are unrelated.) Ms. Greer has constantly defied expectation and never been far from the public eye. In 1994 she publicly opened her house to homeless people, only to discover later that one of her "guests" had in fact been a reporter for a British tabloid researching a tell-all article. She has stripped for magazines, denounced marriage as state-sanctioned slavery for women, and written with equal fluency about Shakespeare, the environment and orgasms. She seems unbothered by the latest fuss. In her Sunday Times article, she said that she had remained in the house until she realized that she could not persuade the other housemates to join her in her planned revolt against "Big Brother's" bullying thought police. "It is now up to the British public to decide what should become of cruelty television," she said, "and to turn their thumbs down." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/20/arts/television/20gree.html -------------- The Sunday Times [London], 5.1.16 Germaine Greer: Filth! Germaine Greer, the veteran feminist, reveals why she quit Big Brother. It wasn't just the degradation, it was the dirt When Davina McCall asked me in her bright, overenthusiastic fashion why I called Big Brother a bully, there was not a hint of irony in the presenter's intelligent brown eyes. People who have read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four will already be aware, however, that the whole point of Big Brother is that he is a bully. They will also know that the language spoken by Big Brother's "Inner Party" bureaucracy is called Newspeak. In Davina's Newspeak, Big Brother is a force for good and the abuses that he designs are "challenges" - character-building exercises, not degrading ordeals. Both Kenzie and Lisa, two of my former housemates, can be heard regularly intoning Big Brother's mantra, "It's all good" - which is Newspeak for "It's all bad (but we musn't complain)." The bullying began the day before we entered the Big Brother house, when the eight of us were sequestered overnight in different hotels. To keep secret our identities, our rooms had been booked in the names of employees of Endemol, the company behind Big Brother. My first taste of Big Brother's incompetence was that I had not been told about this. The hotel denied all knowledge of any reservation and insisted on charging the room to my credit card. Once I succeeded in getting into a room, gangs from the Endemolian Inner Party arrived to take photographs, ask more and more intrusive questions and to repack my things in my Big Brother suitcase. One Endemolian held up each item, scrutinised it and described it; another wrote down what she said. The only thing to be confiscated from my bag was my kohl eyebrow pencil, in case I should write with it. I would be eyebrowless for the duration. Big Brother allowed us to bring in no electrical appliances of any kind. An electric shaver would be supplied for the men, but no hair drier for anyone and no Caprice Ceramic Hair Straightener either - so Caprice, my former housemate, must be hoping to quit before her hair does. I was the second housemate to arrive, after John McCririck, who had already entertained viewers by bouncing off the walls as he tried to walk through the set. He told me that he was there only because he was a failed punter, failed journalist, failed broadcaster and really needed the money, and my heart went out to him. I was to become more concerned for him as it became increasingly obvious that he didn't understand the game and didn't realise that Big Brother would regularly deceive and disappoint him. And so began his epic battles, all of them misconceived, against the routine ill-treatment of the housemates. Again and again he would ask, "What are they playing at?" Strangely, for an experienced television performer, John didn't understand just how many cameras and microphones there were around him and just how much editorial control Endemol had over the way that the housemates would appear to the watching millions. Endemol chose to show footage of John asleep with his hand in his underpants and of him picking large bogies from his nose and eating them. Equally revealing and embarrassing images of other housemates would not have gone to air unless Endemol willed it. What this means is that Endemol has huge scope for influencing public perception of the housemates, almost to the point of being able to pick its own winner. I would not be at all surprised to find some housemates had caveats in their contracts to protect them against the more humiliating kinds of intrusion. The rest of us had to keep a guard on our behaviour day and night. The housemate who understands this best is Caprice Bourret, who will never allow herself to be seen sleeping or in any unflattering posture whatsoever. Beneath a soft and yielding exterior lies stern self-discipline and a will of iron. The tabloids described the work-out routine she did on day three as "raunchy"; in truth, it was gruelling and Caprice didn't even break sweat. As if. Caprice is in the Big Brother house to advertise her brand of lingerie and swimwear; for her it is a win-win situation. Not only is she getting a few million quids' worth of free advertising, she is also being handsomely paid for being there. As we waited for the next housemates to arrive she told me she was afraid of Brigitte Nielsen because she was more like a man than a woman. I was not to see her make such a tactical error again. Enter Mark Berry, better known as Bez, hero of the Happy Mondays' 1986 hit single Freaky Dancin', who is fast winning his way into the nation's heart as people get used to his Manchester dialect. At first I thought he was going to get up my nose because he insisted on taking the only upper-level bunk bed: mine. I was a bit miffed but thought it better to submit. Just as well, because the bed broke on the first night. Bez is a flyweight; if I'd been sleeping in his bed, Brigitte, who sleeps underneath, would now be history. The broken bed followed the general rule of the Big Brother house that everything supplied for the housemates must be as trashy as possible. As the days passed I realised that Bez is a man who makes light of his own pain while showing concern for the pain of others. He is compassionate without being lugubrious, genuinely well intentioned and lighthearted to the point of sunniness. This apparently is what enormous amounts of E can do for a person; unfortunately for the rest of us E-use is much more likely to result in chronic depression than lifelong glee. When Brigitte insisted on playing Spin the Bottle and that all the truth or dare questions be about sex, Bez confessed that he masturbated three or four times a day. WHENEVER technicians come onto the set, which is quite often, the housemates are "locked down", shut in their sleeping quarters with the blind down. If it's day-time the lights will be left on, and a cacophonous alarm will be sounded repeatedly if anyone should fall asleep. Or at least this used to be the case before the unfortunate importation of Jacqueline Stallone, Brigitte's former mother-in-law, who was still on LA time and could not be made to stay out of bed for more than an hour or two at a time. During lockdown the bathroom and lavatory are also locked, in case housemates should come face to face with a technician. As two of the female housemates seemed to have a urinary problem, barring access to the lavatory resulted in real and completely unentertaining suffering which might go on for hours. It would have served Big Brother right if housemates had wet their beds and daubed the walls with shit. The bathroom and lavatory needed to be locked because access to the toilet during lock-down was through the bathroom, and the external bathroom wall is glass, which brings us to Big Brother's principal bullying tactic: the removal of all privacy. "Big Brother is watching you" even when you shower, so housemates had to wash their private parts with their pants on. The alternative was to bleach their pubic hair in the Jacuzzi, which contained so much chlorine that the towel Brigitte wore on the first night in lieu of a bathing costume went in blue and came out pinkish-orange. The one unseen space in the house is the lavatory, but even there Big Brother could hear housemates grunting and the splash as they took a dump. A good example of Big Brother's not-so-unique combination of cruelty with incompetence is that the external door to the lavatory had no bolt. Although housemates tried to remember always to knock, every single one has been surprised on the lavatory several times. The point of this is either deliberately to disrupt bowel and bladder function, or it has no point at all. It is moot whether Big Brother's incompetence is greater than his cruelty or vice versa. The lavatory had a weak flush and was often blocked. It was more than Big Brother could do to fix it. Housemates had been told to "expect the unexpected", but there is no surprise value in such mundane and insulting squalor, of which viewers could know nothing unless Caprice decided to do one of her two lavatory routines. She loves to talk about farting, which she calls "flagellation". She also becomes strangely excited when she finds a floater or "log" in the lavatory bowl and runs about looking for someone to blame. Dirt doesn't show up on television. Although the Big Brother kitchen might look okay, it is anything but. The housemates graze constantly and the single sink is often full of dishes either weltering in their own grease or stewing for hours in lukewarm water. Dirt from the last Big Brother series still lines the oven. None of the cleaning products in the cupboard is capable of removing this burnt-on fat or the ancient grime that has accumulated in the gaps between the floor tiles. When Big Brother replaced all the ceramic plates with wooden bowls and spoons for a "medieval court game", the only way to make these safe would have been to boil them after each use. This was not done. Some of the bowls are split. The longer they are left in dirty water the more dangerous they become. Serving food on wood in restaurants is illegal; in the Big Brother house it is compulsory. The housemates need a bigger refrigerator. They need kitchen towels, clingfilm and greaseproof paper. And they need fresh food daily. Prolonged negotiations resulted, we thought, in Big Brother's providing fresh milk, but he could never remember to deliver it. When I left we had been without milk, tea and sugar for 18 hours. As the refrigerator was too small to hold more than a day's rations for eight people, we had no option but to keep food, including cooked food, uncovered on the countertop or in a cupboard so hot that sweetcorn fermented in an unopened tin. Even in the refrigerator the food decayed. The mushrooms I had to make a pasta sauce with were covered with slime; Another dish I cooked had to be made with fermenting peppers because I thought Brigitte had asked for them to be replaced. She had forgotten. ALTHOUGH the janitorial role quickly became mine by default, I was damned if I was going to ask for everything we needed. Part of the strategy is to induce each housemate to believe that Big Brother is his or her sole confidant and friend. My instinctive response was to withhold as much as humanly possible. I went to the diary room to talk to Big Brother only when summoned. I'm claustrophobic and the hot red padded space quickly made me feel sick. I'd been nauseated since the food trial on day three anyway. I still don't know how much of the vomiting in the food trial was visible to the public. There were three vomiters: Bez, Kenzie and me. Was it cruelty or cock-up that meant that we were all cold and hungry before beginning the "challenge"? We were ordered into lockdown just as I was cooking lunch and kept there for more than three hours. We were already low on blood sugar and soon all of us were shivering violently. We vomited because we were sat on a revolving merry-go-round which was rotated at 17rpm or above for 15 minutes. I won't bore you with what it felt like to vomit helplessly and repeatedly on prime-time television. Suffice it to say that the three of us sprayed human bile all over the Big Brother "garden". Despite the dirt, housemates have no way of washing clothes, let alone ironing them, so they have no option but to appear increasingly dishevelled as the ordeal wears on. Furthermore, everyone in the house is using the same stock of blue towels, which cannot be told apart, and the same bathrobes. By now both will be crawling with bacteria promiscuously collected from all eight bodies. The entertainment value of these entirely avoidable health hazards is absolutely nil, especially as Big Brother has no intention of sharing his cock-ups with the public. Viewers have no way of knowing that the housemates are all becoming increasingly dehydrated or that because the climate control system can blast only super-dry heated air, the dry-mouthed, wheezing housemates keep asking for it to be turned down, which Big Brother interprets as off. Housemates must either shiver or sweat. As viewers know, the Big Brother house boasts one double bedroom and one dormitory; what they may not realise is that both are supposed to be hermetically sealed at night and supplied by air circulated through ceiling vents. Lisa l'Anson brought kennel cough with her and barked through most of the first night and part of every night since. Now everyone coughs, off and on. John fought a heroic battle against being forced to breathe recycled air all night and illegally placed his bag between the one exterior door and the jamb to let a little fresh air in. This Big Brother would not allow; when Kenzie obeyed the order to remove the bag, John insulted him in unforgivable terms. Kenzie quite properly went ballistic and Big Brother had what he wanted. If Kenzie had disobeyed the order, it would have been repeated until it was obeyed. Kenzie doesn't know that viewers are disappointed that he hasn't apologised; viewers don't know that Kenzie has nothing to apologise for. For the infrared cameras to work properly, the bedroom must be completely dark. When the blind comes down there is not a chink of natural light. Housemates may not be sure whether it is night or day; they are allowed no watches. As Mussolini's enforcers found, it is easy to break a prisoner by turning day into night and jumbling mealtimes. So severe is the false night effect that some housemates thought the one clock in the house was being tampered with and that what seemed to be morning was actually late afternoon. BY the end of Nineteen Eighty-four, Winston Smith has come to love Big Brother. If I was supposed to come to love Lisa or Brigitte or Caprice, I had little chance. None of them made any attempt at contact with me or tried to involve me in any of their activities, which was fine with me. At one point, when I was sitting alone by the Jacuzzi, Lisa wandered within earshot. I took the opportunity to apologise for my ignorance of her brilliant career and asked her to tell me about herself. For a heartbeat she looked as if she might not be able to resist the opportunity to talk about her favourite subject, but then she backed away and said with sweet condescension that normally she'd love to stop and chat but she really needed to put tiger balm oil on her temples, and off she went to join the girls. I have now seen footage of Lisa and Brigitte musing in a hurt kind of way on why I didn't like them. It shouldn't have come as such a surprise; there's not a lot to like. Brigitte has a certain kamikaze charm which is part and parcel of her astonishing selfishness. As far as I can tell, Lisa has no charm whatsoever. If Lisa spoke to me at all, it was in dismissive tones and over her shoulder. She was giving me orders long before the game in which she was queen and we were all "cortiays", which was the best she could make of "courtiers". By the beginning of day three I had been so completely ostracised from the group of girls that if I entered the space where they were bonding, they would fall silent or loudly change the subject. If they had not, I might not have felt as sorry for Brigitte as I did. For in these gab sessions the girls shared highlights of their lives so far and I might have known that Brigitte had already willingly surrendered her right to any shred of dignity or privacy. Brigitte's has been a strange and mostly ignominious career which is now reaching its nadir. In a television reality show called The Surreal Life she was happy to walk about naked and indulge in public dalliance with the rap star Flavor Flav. Three days after she entered the Big Brother house, a follow-up programme called Strange Love, in which Flavor Flav pursues her to Italy in an attempt to win her back, premiered on the VH1 channel. Now that I know Brigitte makes a career out of exhibiting her life on television, I feel a bit of a fool for refusing to be involved in Endemol's attempt to outflank VH1 by invoking the only really interesting and faintly classy episode in Brigitte's life, her brief marriage to Sylvester Stallone two decades ago. I believed her when she complained that bringing Stallone's mother into the Big Brother house, as Endemol did last Monday, would result in newspaper coverage that would jeopardise her position with regard to custody of her sons in her current divorce from her fourth husband. If I'd known, I'd have thought that her readiness to get the bazongas out for the boys in the house would be much more likely to alienate a divorce court judge than a hostile encounter with a woman who was briefly her mother-in-law. Although I was and am sorry for Brigitte, she is quite right that I don't like her. It's hard to like someone who insists on taking a handful of spaghetti out of the one 500g pack that you have to feed eight people, cooks it for herself, seasons it with your second to last chilli pepper, and then eats half of it and leaves the rest. (There was pasta that I had cooked on the table, but she preferred her own.) Damn right I don't like her or her habit of grabbing her store-bought breasts, banging them together like cymbals and shouting "Hot diggity!" at the top of her lungs, by way of signifying that she is having a good time. At no time did Brigitte ever display the least respect for me, not as a woman, an older woman or even a human being. The guys were different. They talked to me. They sometimes asked me genuine questions and would even listen when I replied, if they could. More often, Lisa or Brigitte would simply interrupt and talk over me. In real life I wouldn't have let it happen. In the Big Brother house you roll your eyes and let the viewers decide who is a cow and who isn't. Kenzie had been afraid that he would be the odd one out in the house because he was only 19; with his sweetness, simplicity, mental suppleness and capacity for fun, he'd never be the odd one out anywhere. The difficulty with Kenzie was to get enough of him. Unlike Lisa and Brigitte he seldom took centre stage. When he did, unlike them he had something to say. Neither Caprice nor Lisa nor Brigitte ever said a witty thing. Kenzie and Jeremy often did, Jeremy in so deadpan a fashion that the girls didn't get it. John, on the other hand, invariably laughed at his own jokes, which were often nasty and seldom funny. CELEBRITY Big Brother is now a shambles. When Mama Stallone refused to play the "cortiay" game, the scenario for the following days fell apart. Deprived of the joy of watching Brigitte warm the lavatory seat for the woman who made her life a misery 20 years ago, viewers must be finding life in the house rather flat. The housemates are still eating with their pestilential wooden spoons. They have been delivered far more food than they can store, so botulism will still be stalking the kitchen. Brigitte and her former mother-in-law were still talking to each other occasionally until Mama was voted off the show on Friday night - probably a great relief to both of them. It's all good. As for myself, what did I learn under the eye of Big Brother? First, there is no such thing as reality television. Very little that is seen to happen actually happens and a great deal of what actually happens remains unseen. Second, while it is understood that Big Brother is a bully by definition, the housemates have a choice as to whether to replicate and amplify his unreasonable and sadistic behaviour. Take the incident of the Diet Coke. When John said he could not function without it, Big Brother chose to torment him by denying it to him while offering it to all the other housemates. Not only did they all drink it but they taunted John, as children might taunt an unpopular child in the playground. Did viewers notice that I didn't join in? If the Endemolian Inner Party had decided to point out my non-compliance, they would have. As it didn't, they didn't. As reality television series multiply across the networks they will become increasingly sadistic and prurient. The only way forward for ordeal by television is down, which in Newspeak is of course up, towards maximum exploitation of vulnerable people. In my estimation both John and Brigitte were vulnerable. I walked out because I didn't want to be part of their undoing, not because I was afraid for myself. As long as there was a possibility that the housemates could be got to revolt against Big Brother, I had a reason to stay. If they had taken off their microphones, refused to join in the humiliation of Brigitte and the manipulation of her mother-in-law and told Big Bugger to go stuff himself, we could have made a difference to the mindset of the British viewing public - who so enjoyed the anguish and humiliation of Nicole Appleton in I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here! that they voted for her to undergo bush tucker trials five times. We've watched the rise of bullying at school and the attempts made to combat it. Big Brother is bullying in all its forms writ large. It is the politics of the playground projected back to people as entertainment, and it gives children in particular and people in general absolutely the wrong idea about what is acceptable behaviour. It would be pompous to suggest that the proliferation of ordeal television is actively promoting a bullying culture in Britain without a lot more work being done on the extent and nature of bullying in schools and workplaces. But it is now up to the British public to decide what should become of cruelty television, and to turn their thumbs down. I went into the Big Brother house to raise money for my charity and to finance my regeneration work in my Australian rainforest. If someone else were to offer me a similar amount of money for burying myself in muck and derision for a few days, I would probably do it again. What I wouldn't do is be drawn into complicity with the degradation and humiliation of others who I consider, rightly or wrongly, to be weaker than myself. ------------------- The Sunday Times [London], 5,1,9 Big Sister takes up an exposed position ??? The chattering classes are aghast. Whatever made her do it? Why, oh why, is Germaine Greer demeaning herself as a feminist heroine by appearing on that ghastly reality show Celebrity Big Brother, with a bunch of contestants whose brains, my dear, must have the cutting edge of a rotten banana? ??? One critic confessed to being left shaken at the "shock horror" appearance last week of the 65-year-old professor of English literature and author of The Female Eunuch amid the likes of Brigitte Nielsen, the Amazonian former wife of Sylvester Stallone, the model Caprice and John McCririck, the racing pundit. ??? Flabbergasted misses the point. The most pertinent question is why Greer didn't opt for the rival series I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!, whose jungle camp is based near her Australian property in Queensland. There, in her native clime, she could demonstrate her extensive knowledge of plants, cooking, the rainforest and snakes. ??? But isn't her appearance on Big Brother's 18-day orgy of bad taste a touch hypocritical? After all, Greer has written: "Watching Big Brother is about as dignified as looking through the keyhole in your teenage child's bedroom door." ??? She added: "Reality TV is not the end of civilisation as we know it; it is civilisation as we know it." ??? No one who has studied Greer's form would hold her to that. She has spent the past 40 years doing the opposite of what was expected of her, no matter how many U-turns it might entail. Children are a burden, she wrote in The Female Eunuch. A few years later, she declared they were a joy. Sex is a weapon in the female struggle against oppression, she asserted. Later she retracted, saying women might be better off without it. ??? The former stunner -who counts among her lovers George Best, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Aitken, Warren Beatty (whom she apparently found disappointing) and the late John Peel (who claimed she forced him to have sex) -now advocates celibacy. ??? By offering Greer large sums of money to enter the Big Brother house, the producers evidently expect her to have the same galvanising effect as Janet Street-Porter in the recent I'm a Celebrity. ??? She might, with luck, undergo a psychological meltdown like Vanessa Feltz, the journalist. But the hope is she will unleash some of her lethal verbal invective. She called Victoria Beckham "a starved carnivore" and described the writer of her unauthorised biography as "flesh- eating bacteria". In a broadside addressed to Tony Blair after Cherie suffered a miscarriage, she said: "She's 47 years old, she doesn't practise contraception because she's a Catholic -stay off her." ??? Greer reserved her most venomous put-down for Suzanne Moore, her fellow columnist on The Guardian, after the latter commented on an inaccurate report that Greer had had a hysterectomy at 25. Greer accused her of having "hair birds-nested all over the place, f***-me shoes and three inches of fat cleavage ". ??? Still, squandering such ammunition on C-list celebrities ranks with mauling dead sheep. What is really in it for her? Money is important: Greer always demands top rate so she can finance rainforest rehabilitation on her Australian estate, although this time her chosen charity is Buglife, the invertebrate conservation trust. ??? She is also an unashamed exhibitionist. Her late-night performances on Newsnight Review have failed to reach the masses. Fortunately, her penchant for grabbing the headlines has allowed her to transcend such restricted forums. Some of her neighbours in Essex choked when she called on them to embrace an expansion of Stansted airport. There was also an outcry and accusations of encouraging paedophilia when she confessed that she loved looking at pictures of "ravishing" young boys. Sales of her book The Boy soared. ??? By coincidence, just as a heated national debate began on crime and trespass in the countryside in 2000, she became front-page news when she was held hostage in her home by a teenage student who had become obsessed with her, crying "Mummy, Mummy" until the police arrived. ??? On another occasion, she invited homeless people to stay in her remote farmhouse, only for her private life to be exposed by a tabloid news reporter posing as a tramp. ??? The Big Brother format encourages guests to strip off and in this department, too, she has not been reticent. She has exposed herself, photographically in counter-culture periodicals such as Oz and Suck, and in memoirs such as her 1990 book Daddy, We Hardly Knew You. ??? Big Brother's producers must have been delighted when she admitted to sleeping in the nude, adding: "It's going to be hard to remember to cover my bits." She will doubtless be glad to repeat her well-chronicled experiences of lesbian sex, rape, abortion, infertility and menopause. ??? Which Germaine Greer will emerge when the layers are peeled away? The harridan with a viperish tongue? ("She is the rudest woman and has no social graces at all," says a commissioning editor.) Or the captivating university lecturer? (One of her former students recalls: "She always filled the lecture hall. She was rigorous, a perfect teacher who never dumbed down but remained accessible and amusing.") She was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1939. Her father, once a dapper sales rep for The Adelaide Advertiser, returned from the war so aged that his wife failed to recognise him. He was withdrawn and his daughter despised him as "a lounge lizard, a line-shooter, a jerk". She dismissed her abusive mother as "a woman who has done nothing but lie on beaches for 70 years". ??? She began hatching plans to escape at the age of 12. At the Star of the Sea convent, she was a tall and precocious girl who took the male parts in school plays. "We were all sex-struck," she said, "and that's the nuns' fault entirely. " ??? By the age of 18 she was at Melbourne University, well known for carrying a bag of coloured condoms. However, she was raped "by just the sort of boy my mother would have liked me to marry". ??? Moving to Sydney to teach, she joined a bohemian, free-love group before deciding to study for an MA at Sydney University, where Clive James was a contemporary. In his memoirs he describes a thinly disguised Greer character as striding forth "like a Homeric goddess" to deflower him. He escaped and hid behind a tree. ??? Thanks to a Commonwealth scholarship, Greer arrived at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1964 to do a doctorate on Shakespeare's comedies. She did not find English men sexy, proclaiming them all "queer or kinky". She told a friend: "You know what the last pom (I went to bed with) said to me? 'Let's pretend you're dead'." ??? At Cambridge she caused a stir by turning up to receive her PhD in a microskirt and black stockings. Soon after, she married Paul du Feu, a building worker with an English degree. Their marriage lasted three weeks, after which du Feu posed naked for Cosmopolitan. ??? Greer went to teach at Warwick University and hit the jackpot in 1970 with The Female Eunuch, which argued that marriage was slavery. It sold 1m copies. With the royalties she bought a cottage in Tuscany and a five-storey house in Notting Hill, London, that became a refuge for waifs and strays. ??? In her 1984 book, Sex and Destiny, she depicted western society as anti-children, anti-family and sex-obsessed. Seven years later she charted her menopause in The Change, which irritated some feminists by claiming sex was not essential for older women. ??? For all her notoriety, she is a highly respected authority on 17th-century literature and has always inspired affection -surprisingly, more among the men she rails against than women. ??? Once she gave a lecture at Oxford, arguing that the female orgasm was not only a facet of gender tyranny but was also vastly overrated. A male student raised his hand. "About that overrated orgasm," he drawled. "Won't you give a Southern boy another chance?" The speaker was a young Rhodes scholar called Bill Clinton. -------------- The Times (London) January 13, 2005, Thursday My feminist hero has become a rancid bore by Julie Burchill ??? Julie Burchill turned down the chance to appear in Celebrity Big Brother and then watched as her former idol, Germaine Greer, made a fool of herself ??? "Who is the bigger fool? -the fool, or the fool who follows him?" is a line from a jumped-up sci-fi film that my husband and I are fond of quoting pompously at each other when the other implies that one of us has acted in a silly way. ??? Guaranteed to break the ice and heal any rifts, it also -as I watched the most recent Celebrity Big Brother -struck me as the only question I'd be interested in asking early-bathing escapee Germaine Greer when I next see her. Especially when, a few hours after I'd watched her being sick on a roundabout after volun tarily wading through manure wearing a colander on her head, she had the brass-faced nerve to whine: "Every day crazy people write to me -every day I get a dose of insanity!" Pot, kettle! ??? Yes, that would definitely be the question. Not "Are you yet in any way sorry that you so gratuitously insulted my home-girl Suzanne Moore that time when you said that her hair resembled a bird's nest, she wore f***-me shoes and that hair dye had rotted her brain, thus furnishing the saddest, most seat-sniffing sort of man with the very thing he has his wettest, most sexist dreams about -a catfight?" ??? (Except it wasn't, as it turned out, because it takes two to make a fight and my Suze was too much of a lady to respond -not that she needed to, with a rottweiler like me for a mate, but anyway.) It wouldn't be "Is it true that you don't think it important for women to have orgasms during sex, and isn't this because you yourself are as sexlessly sterile as a mule, posing-naked-or-not? In fact, wasn't all that frantic shagging around you did in the Sixties and Seventies just a rather tragic decoy?" ??? And it wouldn't even be "Don't you agree that hypocrisy is the rankest of the minor vices, combining as it does the sanctity of the pulpit with the stench of the public toilet?" No, it would definitely be "Who is the fool, etc?" For having read the pronouncement of Miss Greer on my beloved reality television "Watching Big Brother is about as dignified as looking through the keyhole into your teenage child's bedroom door. To do so occasionally would be shameful; to get hooked on it is downright depraved" -and then witnessing her wretched performance on the latest Celebrity Big Brother, I can only conclude that not only is she seven sorts of ocean-going, grade-A, top-flight fool, but that she is far more foolish than the apparent "fools" on the show. ??? Even I was surprised at the wisdom of Lisa, the dignity of Caprice (with her strange albino-Nefertiti beauty, which I "got" for the first time. And she's Jewish!), the stoicism of Jeremy, the patience of Bez, the eccentricity of Brigitte -and the sheer ooo-those-eyes gorgeousness of Kenzie, a real star in the making whose cuteness quotient makes Gareth Gates look like Rik Waller. I could easily imagine what fun it would be to hang out with them in anything approaching normal circumstances. But Germaine? When I was a wide-eyed 12-year-old teenybopper, I shoplifted The Female Eunuch and thought that this must be the cleverest, wittiest, most compassionate woman in the world -and that an hour in her company would be akin to gorging from an intellectual version of the Horn of Cornucopia. Now she appears to be the sort of rancid bore who one would actually leave even a quite lively party to avoid being cornered by. ??? That she is a woman, and that this is generally a male speciality sport, says it all about where she has gone wrong in shunning the company of other women in order to seek the approval of men. Basically, she has turned into one -a club bore; tellingly, though she and John McCririck started off as opponents, they began to resemble each other more and more as the senile delinquents of the house, both of them apparently in that place where old age and infancy blur grotesquely. ??? He sulked, went silent, cried "I want my milk," and fretted for "Bitty" sorry, "Booby" -while she, for all her lifelong blabber about sisterhood and socialism, finally freaked out at having to share a borrowed, toy kitchen with the helpful Brigitte! ??? Perhaps, like a lot of academic snobs, GG thought that "TV is for appearing on, not watching." (When this sort of ponce DOES appear on TV, they invariably make a right pig's ear of it, and end up being laughed at rather than laughed with, bless!) If she HAD watched the last Big Brother, she might have seen the truly amazing Kitten -someone who appeared to have grasped the meaning of being a "revolutionary" from compulsively studying Rik Mayall's performance in The Young Ones -and she might have grasped what NOT to do when voluntarily playing a game for a good deal of money. ??? Lesson One is that is rather offensive to those who have spent time in fascist prisons -or even people who have two brain cells to rub together -to compare a game show to a fascist prison or, as Greer did, a gas chamber; Lesson Two is that if you talk about "overthrowing Big Brother", as they both did, you are liable to make both your housemates and the public fear for your mental health, and your ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy, and to get yourself voted out PDQ. ??? It is a source of some amusement to me that the likes of Kitten and Greer would be exactly the sort of snoot who'd accuse hoi polloi of mistaking soap actors for the characters they play -yet seemed totally incapable of working out the risibly obvious fact that this Big Brother was not the original oppressive brute, as created by George Orwell, but rather a piss-taking pantomime villain toying with a few pampered volunteers. Only the name's the same ... ??? In fact, when Germaine cried: "Brigitte, you don't have to warm the toilet seat any more -this is revolution!' it was the wretched Kitten who seemed to pose the greater threat to the patriarchal system. The phrase "First as tragedy, then as farce" came horribly to mind; then GG bolted. But unrepentant and lesson unlearnt, she was last heard declaiming: "I will find another way to save the rainforest!" ??? Personally, I think she left because she couldn't live with the fact that Jackie Stallone's better looking. ??? On a final note, lest this be mistaken for sour grapes, can I just say that I was approached by this edition of CBB back in September with promises of "a substantial sum". Even though, as I've said, I adore reality TV, I turned it down as I instinctively knew that it was no place for a writer, though for a showbiz kid participation would be a fine and even wise decision. Why Germaine did not have the wit to understand such a basic fact I have no idea -well, actually I have several, but it pains me slightly, even after our "history", to have to name them. ??? But, as I say, she picked on my girl first, so hell, here goes. The first is that she genuinely has lost some of her marvellous marbles and, like an old lady lifting up her dress and revealing her genitalia to a weeping world, simply does not understand how loony she looks. ??? The other, which is even sadder, is that this woman, who once seemed blessed with the world's biggest BS detector, has spent so long among the arrogant autistics of academia that she has lost much of the common sense that the Australian people are as a rule so rich in. She is indeed educated beyond all instinct and honesty she makes me even more pleased than I usually am with myself that I left school at 16 -and the only sour grapes involved was the nice Meursault I sipped at while snickering at Miss Greer's antics nightly. ??? "You've had a good innings -time to hang up your bat," was the way the famously terse Clement Attlee used to put it; come, Miss Greer, you have delighted us long enough! Now give some other old bat a chance. ??? And don't look at me, for as I said, I know better than to take my high intelligence downmarket, and be made a fool (or even a fool-who-follows) of. ??? Should Germaine Greer have appeared in CBB? E-mail debate at thetimes.co.uk From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 20 21:09:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 16:09:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Harvard President Apologizes Again for Remarks on Gender Message-ID: Harvard President Apologizes Again for Remarks on Gender NYT January 20, 2005 By SARA RIMER With the unabated furor over his recent remarks suggesting that women may not have the same innate abilities in math and science as men, Harvard's president, Lawrence H. Summers, issued a two-page apology to the Harvard community late last night. "I was wrong to have spoken in a way that has resulted in an unintended signal of discouragement to talented girls and women," Mr. Summers said in a letter that was posted on his Harvard Web site. "Despite reports to the contrary, I did not say, and I do not believe, that girls are intellectually less able than boys, or that women lack the ability to succeed at the highest levels of science," Mr. Summers wrote. It was his third public statement in three days about his remarks at a conference on women and minorities in science and engineering last Friday, with each statement becoming stronger and more apologetic. His remarks have dominated the discussion on the Harvard campus and beyond, with female academics, alumni and donors expressing concern over his leadership. Mr. Summers, an economist and a former treasury secretary, acknowledged that he had been hearing plenty of reaction himself. "I have learned a great deal from all that I have heard in the last few days," he wrote in his statement. "The many compelling e-mails and calls that I have received have made vivid the very real barriers faced by women in pursuing scientific and other academic careers." He wrote in the letter that he had attended the conference, held by the National Bureau of Economics, "with the intention of reinforcing my strong commitment to the advancement of women in science, and offering some informal observations on possibly fruitful avenues for further research." However, he added: "Ensuing media reports on my remarks appear to have had quite the opposite effect. I deeply regret the impact of my comments and apologize for not having weighed them more carefully." Mr. Summers emphasized earlier this week that he had been deliberately provocative in his statements at the conference. Cynthia Friend, the chairwoman of Harvard's department of chemistry and chemical biology, called Mr. Summers's apology "important" and "welcome." But Professor Friend, who was for about 20 years the only woman in her department at Harvard, said that the apology did not erase Mr. Summers's remarks at the conference. "The problem is you can't take it back," she said. Nancy Hopkins, a biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was at the conference and was so upset by Mr. Summers's remarks that she walked out. "I applaud what he is saying now," she said last night, responding to Mr. Summers's letter. "But I still remain deeply concerned that someone could say the things he said last Friday." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/20/education/20harvard.html ------------ Statement from the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology/Institute for Women and Technology, http://anitaborg.org. I don't have the exact URL. Last Friday, Dr. Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University and an economist, spoke before a meeting of the National Bureau of Economic Research, about the causes for women's under-representation in science. He suggested that, since fewer girls than boys have top scores on science and math tests in late high school, perhaps genetic, rather than social, differences explain why so few women are successful in these fields. We would like to respond: Well-accepted, path-breaking research on learning (see, for example, Bransford, et al., How People Learn, and Claude Steele's work on "stereotype threat"), shows that expectations heavily influence performance, particularly on tests. If society, institutions, teachers, and leaders like President Summers, expect (overtly or subconsciously) that girls and women will not perform as well as boys and men, there is a good chance many will not perform as well. At the same time, there is little evidence that those scoring at the very top of the range in standardized tests, are likely to have more successful careers in the sciences. Too many other factors are involved. Finally, well-documented evidence demonstrates women's efforts and achievements are not valued, recognized and rewarded to the same extent as those of their male counterparts (see, for example, Virginia Valian's work on gender schema). As leaders in science, engineering, and education, we are concerned with the suggestion that the status quo for women in science and engineering may be natural, inevitable, and unrelated to social factors. Counter-examples to this suggestion are drawn quickly from the fields of law, and of medical science. In 1970, women represented just 5% of law students and 8% of medical school students. These low percentages have increased substantially in response to social changes and concerted institutional and individual effort. Obviously, the low rates of participation in 1970 were indicative of social, and not genetic, barriers to success. We must continue to address the multitude of small and subtle ways in which people of all kinds are discouraged from pursuing interest in scientific and technical fields. Society benefits most when we take full advantage of the scientific and technical talent among us. It is time to create a broader awareness of those proven and effective means, including institutional policies and practices, which enable women and other underrepresented groups to step beyond the historical barriers in science and engineering. Sincerely, Carol B. Muller, President and CEO, MentorNet and Consulting Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University Sally M. Ride, Joseph and Ingrid Hibbens Professor of Space Science, University of California, San Diego Janie Fouke, Professor and Dean, College of Engineering, Michigan State University Telle Whitney, President, Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology Denice D. Denton, Dean of Engineering, University of Washington, and University of California, Santa Cruz Chancellor Designate Nancy Cantor, Chancellor, Syracuse University Donna J. Nelson, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Oklahoma Jim Plummer, Dean of Engineering, Stanford University Ilene Busch-Vishniac, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and former Dean of the Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University Carolyn Meyers, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University Sue V. Rosser, Dean, Ivan Allen College, Georgia Institute of Technology Londa Schiebinger, Professor of History of Science and Barbara D. Finberg Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Stanford University Eric Roberts, Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University David Burgess, Professor of Biology, Boston College and past president, Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native American in Science Craig Beeson, Associate Professor, Medical University of South Carolina Susan Staffin Metz, Senior Advisor, Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education, Stevens Institute of Technology Lucinda Sanders, CEO, National Center for Women & Information Technology Bevlee A. Watford, President, WEPAN - the Women in Engineering Programs and Advocates Network Elizabeth S. Ivey, President, Association for Women in Science Mary Frank Fox, NSF ADVANCE Professor, Co-director, Center for Study of Women, Science, & Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology Sheldon Wettack, Professor of Chemistry and former Dean of Faculty, Harvey Mudd College Maria Klawe, Dean of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Princeton University William A. Wulf, President, National Academy of Engineering Joan Girgus, Professor of Psychology and Special Assistant to the Dean of the Faculty, Princeton University Phoebe S. Leboy, Professor of Biochemistry, University of Pennsylvania Eleanor L. Babco, Executive Director, Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology Betty Shanahan, Executive Director & CEO, Society of Women Engineers Catherine Didion, Director, International Network for Women Engineers and Scientists (INWES) Daryl E. Chubin, Director, AAAS Center for Advancing Science & Engineering Capacity Monique Frize, President, INWES (International Network for Women Engineers and Scientists) Susan L. Ganter, Executive Director, Association for Women in Science and Associate Professor of Mathematical Sciences, Clemson University E. Ann Nalley, Professor of Chemistry, Cameron University and President Elect, American Chemical Society Judy Franz, Executive Officer, American Physical Society H?ctor D. Abru?a, Emile M. Chamot Professor and Chair, Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology, Baker Laboratory, Cornell University Myra H. Strober, Professor of Education and Business (by courtesy), Stanford University Jane Zimmer Daniels, Co-Founder & Founding President WEPAN (Women in Engineering Programs & Advocates Network) Emily A. Carter, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Applied and Computational Mathematics, Associated Faculty in PICSciE, Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, and PRISM. Princeton University Jean H. Rhodes, Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Boston Iris Schrijver, Director, Molecular Pathology Laboratory, Director, Molecular Genetic Pathology Fellowship Program, Medical Director, Stanford POCT, Assistant Professor of Pathology and (by courtesy) Pediatrics, Stanford University School of Medicine Virginia A. Zakian, Harry C. Wiess Professor in the Life Sciences, Department of Molecular Biology, Lewis Thomas Labs, Princeton University Barbara Simons, Former President, Association for Computing Machinery Ursula Martin, Professor and Director of [16]women at CL project, University of Cambridge Jo Boaler, Associate Professor, Mathematics Education, Stanford University Katherine Rose Jolluck, Professor of History, Stanford University Purnima Mankekar, Associate Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University Robert M. Gray, Lucent Technologies Professor of Engineering and Vice Chair, Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University Margaret W. Conkey, Class of 1960 Professor of Anthropology, Director, Archaeological Research Facility, University of California, Berkeley and President, Archaeology Division, American Anthropological Association Peter Stansky, Frances and Charles Field Professor of History Emeritus, Stanford University Aihua Xie, Professor of Physics, Oklahoma State University and Chair, the APS Committee on the Status of Women in Physics Pino Martin, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University Linda P.B. Katehi, John A. Edwardson Dean of Engineering, Purdue University Jo Anne Miller, Chair, MentorNet Board of Directors, CEO, RNM Engineering and Principal, Nokia Innovent Amelia Tess Thornton, CEO, The Thornton Group Andrea LaPaugh, Professor of Computer Science, Princeton University Deborah L. Rhode, Professor of Law, Director of the Center on Ethics, Stanford University Barbara C. Gelpi, Professor of English, Emerita, Stanford University Mary Jean Harrold, NSF ADVANCE Professor of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology Cherrill M. Spencer, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and Vice-President, Math/Science Network Carla Schlatter Ellis, Professor of Computer Science, Duke University Iris Schrijver, Pathology Department, Stanford University Susan Lord, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, University of San Diego Helen Quinn, Past President, American Physical Society Margaret Murnane, Professor of Physics, JILA, University of Colorado at Boulder Patricia P. Jones, Professor Vice Provost for Faculty, Professor of Biological Sciences, Stanford University Frances Hellman, Professor of Physics, UC Berkeley Gail Wight, Assistant Professor of Media Art, Stanford University Ruth O'Hara, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine Mary Pickering, Professor of History, San Jose State University Sheri Sheppard, Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University David Leith, Professor and Emeritus Director of Research, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University Adina Paytan, Assistant Professor of Geological and Environmental Sciences, Stanford University Matthew H. Sommer, Professor of History, Stanford University Audrey Shafer, Associate Professor, Anesthesia, Stanford University School of Medicine David Grusky, Professor of Sociology, Stanford University Sherry Yennello, Professor and Associate Dean, Texas A&M University Ashima Madan, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Stanford University Medical Center Denise L. Johnson, Associate Professor of Surgery , Advising Dean, Stanford University Medical School Sylvia Yanagisako, Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University Jennifer M. Chou-Green, Academic Career E-mentoring Project Director, MentorNet Sandra Robinson, Region 5 Women in Engineering Coordinator, IEEE Robin Jeffries, Sun Microsystems, Inc. Indira Nair , Vice Provost of Education, Carnegie Mellon University ; Professor, Engineering and Public Policy (Affiliations are for identification purposes only.) From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 20 21:10:31 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 16:10:31 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Dowd: Don't Know Much About Algebra Message-ID: Don't Know Much About Algebra Liberties column by Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, 5.1.20 Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, has been pilloried for suggesting that women may be biologically unsuited to succeed at mathematics. He may have a point. Just look at Condoleezza Rice. She's clearly a well-educated, intelligent woman, versed in Brahms and the Bolsheviks, who has just been rewarded for her loyalty with the most plum assignment in the second Bush cabinet. Yet her math skills are woefully inadequate. She can't do simple equations. She doesn't even know that X times zero equals zero. If you multiply 1,370 dead soldiers times zero weapons of mass destruction, that equals zero achievement for Ms. Rice, who helped the president and vice president bamboozle the country into war. Was Condi out doing figure eights at the ice skating rink when she should have been home learning her figures? She couldn't have spent much time studying classic word problems: If two trains leave Chicago at noon, one going south at 20 miles an hour and one going north at 30 miles an hour, how far will each have gotten by midnight? Otherwise, she might have realized that if two cars leave the Baghdad airport at noon on the main highway into the capital of Iraq, neither one is going to get there with any living passengers. Our 22 months at war have not added up to that one major highway's being secured. It's lucky for Ms. Rice that she's serving with men who are just as lame at numbers as she is. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz couldn't be bothered to tally correctly the number of dead soldiers when he testified before Congress. And his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, didn't realize that using an autopen signature on more than 1,000 letters to the relatives of fallen troops added up to zero solace. Our new top diplomat has obviously not mastered fractions. When she asserted during her confirmation hearing that 120,000 Iraqi troops had been trained, Senator Joe Biden corrected her, saying she was off by a bit. His calculation of trained Iraqi troops was actually 4,000 - hers was 30 times that. Maybe she's confusing hyperbole and hypotenuse. Her geometry is skewed if she thinks she'll now be more powerful than Rummy and Dick Cheney. Doesn't she know that the Pentagon has more sides than her Crawford triangle with George and Laura? She could at least have read "The Da Vinci Code." Then she would have learned about Fibonacci numbers, a recurring mathematical pattern in nature. When you invade a country, you should expect an insurgency. Or, as Fibonacci might have calculated it, if you kill one jihadist, two more arrive to take his place; if you kill three, five more pop up; if you get five, eight more appear, and so on. The incoming secretary of state and her colleagues are, alas, also lousy at economics. After Bush officials promised that the postwar expenses would be covered by Iraqi oil revenues, we find ourselves spending $1 billion a week of our own money. Ms. Rice and her fellow imperialists know so little about physics that they arrogantly jumped into "spooky action at a distance," turning the country they had hoped to make into a model democracy into a training ground for international terrorists, a nucleus for a new generation of radioactively dangerous fanatics. How could they forget Newton's third law: for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction? The administration needs a lesson in subtraction. How do we subtract our troops and replace them with Iraqi troops while the terrorists keep subtracting Iraqi troops with car bombs and rocket-propelled grenades? Condi may not know Einstein's theory of relativity, but she has a fine grasp of Cheney's theory of moral relativity. Because they're the good guys, they can do anything: dissembling to get into war; flattening Iraqi cities to save them; replacing the Geneva Conventions with unconventional ways of making prisoners talk. The only equation the Bushies know is this one: Might = Right. It is puzzling that if you add X (no exit strategy) to Y (Why are we there?) you get W?: George Bush's second inauguration. At Condi's hearing, she justified the Bush administration's misadventures by saying history would prove it right. "I know enough about history to stand back and to recognize that you judge decisions not at the moment, but in how it all adds up," she told a skeptical Senator Biden. Problem is, she's calculating, but she can't add. For now, Sam Cooke is right about the Bushies. They don't know much about history. E-mail: liberties at nytimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/20/opinion/20dowd.html From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 20 21:11:23 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 16:11:23 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Meaning of 'Proficient' Varies for Schools Across Country Message-ID: Meaning of 'Proficient' Varies for Schools Across Country NYT January 19, 2005 By SUSAN SAULNY Judged solely by recent statewide tests, fourth graders in Mississippi and Colorado would appear to be the best young readers in the nation. In both states, 87 percent of fourth graders passed their exams. But Mississippi came in dead last among the 50 states when fourth-grade reading was examined using a different standard, a newly mandated but decades-old test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or N.A.E.P. On that test, only 18 percent of Mississippi's fourth graders achieved proficiency. Colorado's proficiency rate fell to 37 percent on the national test, but that score was high enough to rank fifth in the nation. Such comparisons of performance on state tests versus national tests have never been possible before on a nationwide basis. The N.A.E.P., known as the nation's report card, used to be voluntary for states. In 2003, it became mandatory. The comparisons suggest how widely the definition of "proficient" varies from state to state, as each administers its own exams and sets its own performance standards. And those standards matter more today than ever, because they factor into the federal education law, No Child Left Behind, which requires that all students reach proficiency on state reading and math tests by 2014. States are also judged on yearly progress toward that goal, and harsh penalties, including the loss of federal aid, await those that fail to bring all students to a proficient level. "No Child Left Behind leaves a fairly crucial decision" about defining proficiency up to the states, said Ronald A. Skinner, research director of Education Week, which published the state and national scores side by side recently in an annual survey of schools. "Certainly those states that have set the bar lower will have an easier time meeting the mark and avoiding federal sanctions for their schools. It's going to be tough on states that have put tough standards on their students." Researchers and educators say the new data will make it possible to address questions they could not answer before. "When you compare yourselves using N.A.E.P., you're able to compare yourselves to a much more expansive and comprehensive national base," said Douglas E. Wood, executive director of the National Academy for Excellent Teaching at Teachers College at Columbia University. "It seems to me that offers us additional information by which to make policy decisions." In Mississippi, Kristopher J. Kaase, the director of the Department of Education's office of student assessment, said the state had traditionally used its own definition of the word proficient. "We call it solid academic performance required for success at the next grade level," Mr. Kaase said. "Step away from that for a moment. Who's ready to move on to the next grade level? At least a C student. I don't think anyone would have any qualms about that. Would they be proficient according to N.A.E.P.? Probably not." The smallest disparities between results on the state and national tests were found in a variety of states across the country, including Massachusetts, Maine, Wyoming, South Carolina, Vermont and Missouri. The largest disparities were in the South. In Alabama, for instance, 72 percent of fourth graders were proficient on the state's math test, but only 19 percent passed N.A.E.P. at the proficient level. In New York, the gaps between state and N.A.E.P. scores were much smaller, but the state did not fare as well as Connecticut or New Jersey on the national test. Thirty-five percent of eighth graders in New York were proficient on the N.A.E.P. reading test, compared with 45 on the state test. Thirty-three percent of New York fourth graders were proficient on N.A.E.P.'s math test, while 78 percent passed the state math test. Mr. Kaase said that No Child Left Behind has made Mississippi wary about raising standards. "What is already a challenging goal - reaching 100 percent proficient by 2014 - you can make it much more challenging or nearly impossible, depending on what you do," he said. "It becomes a delicate balance. But we do feel we need to continue to press. We're not satisfied." Colorado's definition of proficient, a state official said, was changed to comply with No Child Left Behind, which requires that results be reported in three categories. The state had for years reported its test results in four categories: unsatisfactory, partially proficient, proficient and advanced. To meet the new requirements, Colorado grouped its partially proficient students with the proficient. "We had a dilemma," said William J. Maloney, the commissioner of education. "We would have had to throw our whole system in the Dumpster just to accommodate the N.C.L.B. So we said: 'Here is Colorado. For the purposes of the feds, we combined proficient and partially proficient.' " Unlike Mississippi and Colorado, Missouri adheres to a strict definition of proficient that aligns closely with the N.A.E.P., or surpasses it. In 2003, eighth graders in Missouri did better on the N.A.E.P. reading test than on the state's own exam. "We've tried to look at it as 'How can we best serve our kids?' instead of trying to play some numbers game against federal law," said Bert Shulte, the deputy commissioner of education in Missouri. But Mr. Shulte realizes the long-term risks of Missouri's decision. "It makes it harder for us to achieve a federal numerical goal," he said. "But in terms of what it says to students when they achieve proficiency, it is a better-grounded message." Some educators and policy makers say that rather than focusing on a state's performance on a single test, the goal should be improvement over time. "On the one hand, you can say, if there's a huge disparity, if a state is telling parents that 80 percent of students are proficient but on N.A.E.P it's 20 percent, they're lying," said Kati Haycock, the director of the Education Trust, a group that advocates standards. "While that may at some level be true, in order to make progress in education you have to have near-term goals that are achievable. So if you're a state with really low achievement and you say, 'I've got to set my state's bar where N.A.E.P. is, and make it under N.C.L.B.'s timeframe,' I think educators would throw up their hands and say, 'We can't get that far.' " Ms. Haycock cited North Carolina and Texas as examples of states that have shown the biggest gains on the N.A.E.P. over the last 10 years while having low-level state assessments. Mississippi fits into that picture as well. In 2003, for instance, the number of fourth graders scoring at or above the proficient level on the N.A.E.P. math exam more than doubled to 17 percent, from 8 percent in 2000, while 74 percent of fourth graders were deemed at or above the proficient level on the state test. "And so, where a mismatch as large as you see in some states may be worrisome, considering near-term targets, I think the evidence would not suggest that's a bad thing," Ms. Haycock said. Mark Musick, the president of the Southern Regional Education Board, an organization that advises 16 states on education policy, said he has been arguing for years that "the states should look to N.A.E.P. and any other information, take it and see if the results are telling them basically the same thing." Mr. Musick, a former chairman of N.A.E.P.'s governing board, added, "If there's some wild difference, then they should try to figure out why that difference exists." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/19/education/19scores.html From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 20 21:13:07 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 16:13:07 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Las Vegas Mercury: How to Clone the Perfect Blonde Message-ID: Books: How to Clone the Perfect Blonde http://www.lasvegasmercury.com/2005/MERC-Jan-20-Thu-2005/25670831.html Thursday, Jan 20, 2005, 09:41:24 AM How to Clone the Perfect Blonde Sue Nelson and Richard Hollingham 272 pages, Quirk Books Grade: B+ Cloning around By John Ziebell "Could science really make your shallowest dreams come true?" This is the big question asked by the authors of How to Clone the Perfect Blonde, both responsible adult correspondents for the BBC. The title sounds glib, but the answers are entertaining and sophisticated, a brief collection of mini-treatises on why perceived solutions to desires like building a perfect partner, turning back time, upgrading your body or living forever might be more the stuff of nightmares than fantasy. How to Clone the Perfect Blonde is billed as a layman's explanation of cutting-edge scientific practice for people who "couldn't get past Chapter 2 of A Brief History of Time"--pretty much everybody I know. The book's success stems in part from humor, a clarity of language and the authors' ability to neatly condense fairly heady theoretical background information, but it also offers graceful illustrations of the interrelationships between complex ideas, using examples that range from Homer Simpson to Alan Turing and "Star Trek" to string theory, taking time out along the way to explain why, if we needed proof, 12 Monkeys is a better movie than Groundhog Day--in terms of how they deal with physics, at least. And this is fun stuff. Who really knew, offhand, why Einstein needed both a general and special theory of relativity? Eight chapters deal with such cultural staples as cloning, artificial intelligence, time travel, black holes, teleportation, cryonics and body modification--and they don't mean piercing. Some of these ideas have probably crossed most of our minds in the course of one fantasy or another: Who would you clone as your perfect partner...and what would you do if the clone had the personality of a werewolf? Exactly what services would your robot provide? Why wouldn't you teleport to work--and how might you be reassembled on the other end if you did? The sections begin with comic or at least conversational approaches to their topics. "How to Lose your Love Handles" begins by discussing the false allure of obesity remedies and moves into an explanation of the human genome, which introduces a discourse on gene therapy, addressing concerns that are not only physical--genetic alteration can cure, but also kill--but philosophical: "Eugenics isn't dead," the text notes, "It's just become more complicated." Witness the growth industry of genetically modified foods, brought to us by Monsanto, the folks who introduced caffeine to Coca Cola and Agent Orange to Vietnam. The discussion of time travel begins with the "If Only" game--as in, "If only I could go back and..."--to launch its exploration of parallel universes, relativity and that eternally sticky genre-fiction problem of messing with the past. Quite often, the book points out, our misconceptions cut both ways. If your grandmother has had a hip replaced or a cochlear implant to improve bad hearing, she's undergone the ultimate in elective surgery--she's a cyborg. Sure, somewhere in chiaroscuro-lit laboratories white-coated geeks are hard-wiring lampreys or transplanting monkey brains, but most of this research is compensatory--artificial limbs, the book notes, are becoming more and more like the real ones every day: "At the moment, rather than being better, stronger and faster, any bionic man would be worse, weaker and slower." Some bits are creepier than others. The science behind cryonics is sound, and embryos can be frozen successfully for later use...but what about Michael Jackson? The Acor Life Extension Foundation reportedly has some 50 individuals flash-frozen at its facility in Arizona, even though we have no idea whether either the human the consciousness or the human form could survive defrosting. "Of course," the authors add with typical Brit tongue in cheek, "future generations might have better things to do than bring back the dead." Which segues into one of the neat little sidebars that helps make this work unique, this one on the Frozen Dead Guy Festival in Nederland, Colo.--well, you'll have to get the book to check that out for yourself. From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 20 21:15:31 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 16:15:31 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] George Mason; (Tyler Cowen) Off the Clock: For Mason Economics Professor, Good Ethnic Meals Make the Grade Message-ID: Off the Clock: For Mason Economics Professor, Good Ethnic Meals Make the Grade The Daily Gazette - George Mason University http://gazette.gmu.edu/articles/printfriendly.php?id=6325 Tuesday, December 21st, 2004 [We're talked with him many times at GMU get togethers.] By [2]Tara Laskowski For 14 years, economics professor Tyler Cowen has eaten his way to local fame. Hidden among the nooks and crannies of the George Mason web server is his tasty treatthe most extensive ethnic restaurant guide in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area. Cowen's 70-page ethnic [3]food guide is updated every six months and covers more than 70 cuisines. In it, you'll find short, straightforward, and sometimes blunt reviews of hundreds of restaurants. Cowen isn't afraid to mince words. In his review of Thanh Son Tofu in Falls Church, he writes, "They serve one main dish, tofu. That's right, just slabs of tofu, done three main ways. Five for a dollar. The best tofu around, period. Tofu to die for. Tofu. Wonderful tofu. The Vietnamese love this place. By the way, you'd better be in the mood for tofu." Cowen knows where to find the best shrimp, the tastiest curry, and the spiciest Kung Pao chicken. He doesn't speak Chinese, but he orders off menus that only the Chinese customers know about. He does speak German, but writes, "There are no German places in this area worth eating at. Don't even think about it, as they say." He likes places with atmosphereloud locals, loud music, or the owner's grandmother sitting in the back booth knitting. The best places to eat, he says, are often in ugly strip malls where immigrants can afford the rent to start a restaurant. He doesn't like expensive meals that aren't worth their salt. And he'll try most anything. The list of foods he's tried runs longer than the restaurantseverything from jellyfish to brains, but for Cowen it's the taste that's most important. "I've tried insectsthey're not that interesting. They taste mostly like potato chips. I don't eat potato chips, so why would I eat insects?" But even an obsessed food fan like Cowen has his limits. "Everyone has a line, and I draw mine at worms," he says. What he does like are the basicspork, fish, beef, chicken. He likes it when food surprises him, and he loves to try to figure out what ingredients are in the meal or how it was prepared. His three criteria for a good restaurant are that it has good food, it makes you think about food and eating in a different way, and that it gets better with memory. "You can have many great meals that are ultimately forgettable. The best ones develop their own history in your life and make you look forward to going back." His food research has brought him local and international fame. The Washington Post profiled him a few years ago as "The Lone Critic." He's even been a keynote speaker for the Association of International Culinary Professionals. And Cowen gets at least one e-mail a day from local readers of his guide. "A friend says that Taco Jalisco down on Rt. 1 near Ft. Belvoir was good and authentic," begins a recent e-mail. Or, "Thank you for your recommendation of the Lebanese place near the intersection of Lee Highway and Hillwoodwe went last night and had a great meal." Whether it's to suggest a restaurant or a meal, to comment on a review, or to give a review of their own, Cowen's loyal readers have helped spread the word. The director of the Mercatus Center at Mason, Cowen does extensive research on the economics of the arts and the globalization of world's culturesincluding how globalization changes the way the world eats. He earned his BS in Economics from Mason in 1983, then went on to get his PhD at Harvard University. He returned to Mason to teach in 1989. A self-taught cook, Cowen has traveled to about 65 countries and has sampled hundreds of dishes. He frequently brings his wife or stepdaughter with him to eat, but isn't afraid to go alone and start a conversation with the people around him. His parents were very conservative about food when Cowen was growing up, so Cowen thinks his passion for food comes from traveling. "It's tragic that I can only live in one place," says Cowen. "I travel for both work and pleasure, but really it's the food I look forward to." Sometimes his love of food can get him in trouble, though. Just a few weeks ago, Cowen was out to dinner with his wife to celebrate their second anniversary, and she asked him if he remembered what they had talked about the night he had proposed. "No," Cowen answered, not at all to his wife's surprise. "But I remember what you ordered." References 3. http://www.gmu.edu/jbc/Tyler/diningnewest0704.htm From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 20 21:18:23 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 16:18:23 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Scientist: Darwin Meets Chomsky Message-ID: Darwin Meets Chomsky http://www.the-scientist.com/ [I have no better URL.] Volume 18 | Issue 24 | 16 | Dec. 20, 2004 Scientists converge in a multidisciplinary approach to understanding human language by Nick Atkinson Darwin saw parallels between the evolution of species and of languages Charles Darwin spotted it. In The Descent of Man, he wrote: "The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have developed through a gradual process are clearly the same." He'd been struck by ideas that William Jones had advanced 50 years earlier, that the similarities between languages as disparate as Sanskrit, Latin, and Old Persian, suggest a common historical ancestry. These foundations for an entirely new field of research were largely ignored for almost a century. Language wasn't recognized as a heritable trait, subject to processes of natural selection. Instead, studies of biological and language evolution followed different trajectories, evidence of which is still reflected in the departmental structure of most universities. The divide is finally being bridged, even if a common terminology has taken a while to establish. "It's important to make the distinction between historical linguistics, how a language changes over time, and studies of the evolution of language in humans," says Partha Niyogi at the University of Chicago. He is one of a flotilla of scientists from diverse backgrounds who are currently charting new waters in language evolution research. Previously intractable problems, such as how meaningful language first emerges from a more primitive signaling system, are now being addressed with newly combined theories and methodologies. INNATE GRAMMAR Groundbreaking work by Noam Chomsky laid the foundations for this type of language research, of trying to understand how human language is possible at all. Why, for example, do children all over the world, regardless of their backgrounds, arrive at roughly the same set of rules governing the way they communicate? Natalia Komarova, at the University of California, Irvine, says that such questions are important. "Every child faces an enormously complex task while mastering her native language. Without formal instruction, she has to figure out all the rules of underlying grammar." Komarova points out that this goal must be achieved using only a limited set of sentences, those actually heard, from the infinite number of possibilities. "In fact," she says, "if you're completely open-minded it's mathematically impossible to guess the correct rule." Somehow, though, children do manage this impressive feat, overcoming what is known as the paradox of language acquisition. Chomsky's revolutionary insight was in postulating an innate universal grammar, which helps children navigate the infinite realm of choice. Komarova and others, such as Harvard University's Martin Nowak, are beginning to explore the evolutionary origins of the universal grammar by drawing on some of the tools that evolutionary biologists have been developing over the last few decades. Nowak says that the complexity of the problem has hampered progress. "To study [language] from an evolutionary standpoint requires detailed knowledge of several fields." His own work lies at the center of a rapidly growing literature that uses evolutionary biological tools to yield insight into some of the basic questions on language evolution.1,2 Nowak points to limitations of current methodologies. "Most traditional linguistic models have assumed that one party is the teacher and the other is the student. However, that's not the case in real life," he says, referring to recent studies of a newly emerging sign language in a Nicaraguan deaf community, whose evolution through successive cohorts of children has been closely followed.3 "Children appear to learn from their peers; they arrive at a consensus by which they communicate effectively." This research supports Chomsky's theory of an innate grammar and provides valuable field data on how new languages evolve, but it greatly increases the complexity of the models theoreticians must now develop. Fortunately, a precedent already exists. Courtesy of Claude Bramble HELLO, HELLO? Can linguistics shed light on animal communication, such as alarm calling in vervet monkeys? (shown above) If so, animal models might in turn help us undestand human language. EVOLUTION TACTICS At its simplest level, language can be viewed as a sequence of signals between speaker and listener. This is where methods lifted from evolutionary biology come into play. The late John Maynard Smith championed the adoption of game theory,4 which revolutionized ethology during the 1970s and 1980s. Game theory is now applied to a diverse range of research questions, enabling the study of frequency dependence: population-dynamic situations in which an individual's best response depends on what others are doing. Niyogi, who recently collaborated with Komarova and Nowak,1 says such a conceptual shift is essential. Traditional linguistic approaches can't really tackle more realistic scenarios, such as how a group of children might learn from a more fluid set of teachers, including both peers and a wider, age-structured group, he says. "Linguists are going to have to come to terms with the fact that we need a more sophisticated, population-based setting." Another tantalizing possibility is to define the limits of the universal grammar. An overly intricate grammar would take too long to learn, as too many examples would be needed to test the validity of each linguistic rule. After all, humans have only a limited time for learning language before they reach adulthood. "This is really where linguistics meets evolutionary biology," says Komarova. "There is a selection pressure to make universal grammar smaller and easier to learn." An ultracompact grammar isn't necessarily the most efficient, though. Larger grammar pools increase flexibility, making it possible to express more complex ideas and thus facilitate innovation. Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, at New York University, is interested in the origins of the human mind.5 He emphasizes the complexity of the task ahead and the need for new, more flexible approaches. "It's easy to view language as the product of natural selection, but we shouldn't see it as a single trait shaped by a single selection pressure," he says. Instead, we need to see it as a mixture of cognitive mechanisms, some old and some new, each of which might be subject to numerous differing, even competing, selection pressures. MORE THAN A GAME Simon Kirby, reader in the evolution of language and cognition at the University of Edinburgh, says that the cross-disciplinary approach has helped dismantle the dogma that all languages are equal. "One of the main contributions coming from the evolutionary biology side is that languages improve qualitatively," he says, "so a language can become more efficient at conveying information as it evolves. The flow of ideas between disciplines isn't all one-way traffic. Theories of learning are vital for any attempt to understand human language. "When the story is finally told about how language has evolved, learning theory will play a central role," says Niyogi. He argues that both the linguistics and computer science communities, which together are responsible for the major developments in learning theory, share the view that its role hasn't been sufficiently incorporated into evolutionary models. "You can't simply collapse 50 years of language research into a single parameter, call it "P" and say it's analogous to cultural transmission." Not all the findings from ethological game-theory studies necessarily map onto linguistics research. Language is a consensus between speakers and listeners. In other biological systems, mutualisms are often kept honest because both partners are continually attempting to exploit one other. But Harvard University's Steve Pinker says that the cooperative nature of language is the most likely factor driving its evolution. "I don't think that language could have evolved primarily as a technique of manipulation," he says. Most animal signals are clear-cut examples of manipulation, in which signalers and receivers exert selective pressure to produce more effective means of exploitation and resistance, respectively. Pinker draws a distinction between these types of interactions, such as mating calls, and the complexity of language, which requires a huge investment by the listener simply to decode the information. Why, Pinker asks, would the listener bother to do this if only to be manipulated as a result? Nevertheless, it's clear that many of the other central evolutionary concepts, such as kin selection, are vital to language. "Human interactions are not entirely antagonistic. There are kin, spouses, and reciprocators, where the relationship is largely (albeit not completely) nonzero-sum and positive," says Pinker, drawing attention to the fact that often both parties can benefit through successful communication. "I think the cooperative story has to be basically right. Lying and manipulation are a parasitic overlay." LANGUAGE FRUIT FLY Comparing animal signals, morphologic structures, genetic systems, and learning processes across species has paid dividends, according to Tecumseh Fitch at the University of St. Andrews' School of Psychology in Scotland. "Many historical linguistics methods can be successfully applied to nonhuman systems," says Fitch. "Bird and whale-song dialects show geographic variation and changes through time, just like human language does." This raises the possibility of using other animal species, what Niyogi calls a "language fruit fly," to better understand human speech. Clearly these are exciting times for language research. And there's no shortage of raw materials, says Kirby. "We have an embarrassment of data. Language is going on all the time, all around us." References 1. MA Nowak et al, "Computational and evolutionary aspects of language," Nature 2002, 417: 611-7. [PubMed Abstract][Publisher Full Text] 2. WG Mitchener, MA Nowak "Chaos and language," Proc Roy Soc Lond B 2004, 271: 701-4. [Publisher Full Text] 3. A Senghas et al, "Children creating core properties of language: evidence from an emerging sign language in Nicaragua," Science 305: 1779-82. [Publisher Full Text] Sept. 17, 2004 4. JM Smith Evolution and the Theory of Games Cambridge University Press 1982., 5. G Marcus The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought New York: Basic Books 2004., From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 20 21:19:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 16:19:29 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Scientist: How to mend a broken internet Message-ID: How to mend a broken internet http://archive.newscientist.com/secure/article/article.jsp?rp=1&id=mg18424736.100 New Scientist vol 184 issue 2473 - 13 November 2004, page 46 Can we patch what we've got, or is a total rethink needed? Danny O'Brien investigates THE smart conference suite at Stanford University in California was packed with the cream of the computing community. They were there, earlier this year, to hear David Cheriton explain his vision of the future of the internet. If Cheriton is to be believed, the wired world we now know and rely on is on the brink of collapse. The internet, he insists, is broken. How can this be? Emails still get through. The web seems to work well enough. Prophesies of doom might seem alarmist, even laughable. But Cheriton, a professor of computing at Stanford, has played a leading role in computer networking for the best part of 20 years, and the networking community takes him seriously. Cheriton reckons that the internet is dangerously insecure, and it's a verdict that few internet experts would disagree with. What held the audience's rapt attention, however, was Cheriton's radical solution to the problem. "Look at the way things are going," he says. From phone networks to banking, power distribution and air-traffic control systems, just about every critical communication network will soon rely on the internet. And that makes us all vulnerable. "Unless we do something soon, the internet will become the largest target of attack on the planet in terms of doing economic damage." Hints of what may be in store are already emerging. Earlier this year, criminal gangs held several gambling websites to ransom, threatening to knock their servers off the web by flooding them with bogus traffic. Denial of service attacks like these now happen almost every week, and the internet's security monitoring organisation, CERT, has had almost 320,000 reports of malicious attacks since it began gathering statistics in 1988. Though police forces across the globe have set up dedicated units to tackle cybercrime, the pace is quickening, and more than a third of these attacks took place in 2003 [11](see Graph). The source of the problem is there for all to see. The internet was created at a time when no one dreamed its users would be anything other than benevolent. So it was designed to deliver its packets of digital data in the most straightforward way possible, without any thought of defeating spam, or defending its servers from malicious hackers or viruses. Even the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the internet's official guardian, acknowledges there are problems. But what should be done about it is still hotly disputed. Karl Auerbach, a computer engineer who has been involved with the internet since 1974, explains the caution: "There's a lot about the current internet we don't understand," he says. "You can bring down a net by trying to repair it." Machines on the internet are attacked almost every week, and the pace is quickening. Over 100,000 attacks occurred in 2003 alone On top of the net's poor security, there are other concerns that many internet experts consider equally pressing. Most high-tech manufacturers foresee a future in which everything from your car to your fridge will be connected to the net. The problem is how to give them all a unique address that will identify them on the net. Like an old telephone network in which the number of subscribers has outgrown the pool of available phone numbers, the existing design of the internet has too few addresses for all these devices. The IETF's solution is a rewrite of the internet protocol (IP) on which the net is founded. Called IPv6, the rewrite was proposed as long ago as 1992 and it undeniably provides more numbers, or "IP addresses": up from the 4.5 billion available today to a staggering thousand billion billion billion billion. With IPv6, the IETF also took the opportunity to defend the net against denial of service attacks by adding new security features such as encrypted signatures to authenticate packets of information and further encryption to prevent the packets being tampered with. Since then, IPv6 has been the Net's big chance to improve itself. But there's one big problem with IPv6. Even now, 12 years after it was introduced, most people are still not using it. And that highlights a problem with re-engineering the net: the pace of change is dictated by the most conservative users. Even when the people nominally in charge have agreed on a change, they have to persuade everyone else to switch. Upgrading to IPv6 means installing it on every part of the net, and while most modern computers support the new protocol, just one old machine on a route between two computers - be it a desktop PC, or one of the computers along the way that steers packets of data to their destination - will force the network to default to the old system. To the dismay of IETF engineers, internet users are turning to an alternative - and many would say clunky - solution to their problems. Network Address Translation (NAT) is the most common, cheap fix to the shortage of IP numbers. It is a way of hiding several computers behind a single IP address. Think of it as like a telephone operator at a company with several phones but only one line to the outside world. Just as the operator switches calls to any number of internal extensions, so the NAT machine diverts packets from the internet to the computer that requested them. All traffic through these computers goes to and from the net via a single IP address, but because the internet uses packets rather than a continuous uninterrupted stream like a phone call, the NAT machine can juggle the data for hundreds of machines. It's a simple solution, with the advantage that no global upgrade is required. If you are using a local area network or broadband service to connect to the net, there's a good chance there's NAT between you and the global internet. The IETF hates NAT. What its engineers would like is for any computer on the internet to be able to address a data packet to any other, without the intervention of any machines on the way. That was the original mission of the Internet engineers: and, for a brief period, they achieved it. Then NAT came along and spoilt it. "NATs balkanise the net," Auerbach says. Worse, by disguising the shortage of IP addresses, NAT has slowed down the switch to IPv6. "With NAT in place, there's no compelling reason for most users to switch." This is where Cheriton disagrees with the IETF. Far from casting NAT as the villain of the peace, he sees it as the internet's potential saviour that will rescue us from what he says is the great IPv6 white elephant. NAT and IPv6 have been around for about the same time, he points out. "They both had their chance, but NAT has succeeded," he says. "I'm a great believer in the survival of the fittest." Controversially, he claims that NAT might do a better job of securing the net against malicious attack than IPv6's encryption features. "Encryption and authentication don't get you any safety," he says, as they rely on keeping the encryption key secret. "As soon as that secret is out - and all secrets leak in the end - the security vanishes." It is incredibly easy to fake the source of data sent across the internet. Spammers and hackers do it all the time Computers often receive unsolicited packets of information that pretend to be from a trusted or familiar source but in fact come from somewhere else. It is incredibly easy to fake the source of data in this way. Spammers do it, and malicious hackers do it to cover their tracks. NAT could be made to stand guard against these rogue packets, keeping them out of local networks like a receptionist filtering calls, Cheriton says. Machines behind a NAT can't be reached directly; packets have to wait for the gatekeeping machine to explicitly permit them to enter before they can get through. Getting rid of NATs would make the net worse and more unstable, he argues. His solution is to co-opt the NAT system to weed out rogue packets. He wants to switch the NAT boxes from being enemy number one to the net's best citizen. Cheriton laid out his vision in an experimental networking project called TRIAD (or, in full, Translating Relaying Internetwork Architecture integrating Active Directories). While IPv6 makes machines that are now hidden behind NATs visible to the internet at large, Cheriton's system goes one better. Unlike today's IP addresses, TRIAD data packets will have addresses that are hierarchical, like postal addresses: for example, "Fred's Machine, c/o the Stanford NAT". You can string theses addresses together, so if you're Danny, say, and you're behind a NAT at New Scientist, a data packet from you to Fred carries the address "Fred, c/o the Stanford NAT box, c/o New Scientist NAT box/ from Danny". In this way, TRIAD allows computers behind NATs to become fully connected: they are as reachable as any other computer on the network. And because the addresses can be as long as you like, there is no limit to the maximum number of machines you can connect on the net. Number shortage solved. Openness is key But how do you find out what address to use to reach the destination you want? Under the existing internet system, a network of computers called domain name servers (DNSs) hold tables that translate addresses such as [12]www.newscientist.com into IP addresses of the form 194.203.155.123, which are what the machines that route data round the net currently understand. TRIAD will do away with DNS machines, and give NAT boxes the job of finding an address. The NAT boxes will talk amongst themselves like neighbourhood gossips to discover who is looking after a particular name. But crucially for Cheriton's idea of making the system secure, they will also share information about rogue data packets. Cheriton likens TRIAD to the way the air traffic control system works. When an aircraft is given an instruction, it can be heard by all the other pilots in the area. If a pilot receives a command that conflicts with previous orders given to other pilots, then they will refuse that order and other pilots will immediately know that the controller is making errors, or maybe even acting maliciously. Openness is the key. In the TRIAD world, say a terrorist wants to use a computer to pretend to be a machine that is authorised to close down a power station. The terrorist's machine would have to announce that it belonged to the power station's network to all the local TRIAD servers - including the one run by the power station. Such announcements would travel across the net in a matter of seconds, Cheriton says. The real power station servers could then quickly put out a message - using one of the old routes that they know from experience they can trust - telling the world to ignore the impostor. So instead of being the silent Balkanisers of the net, NAT boxes would become its chattiest and most dutiful citizens - a kind of online neighbourhood watch. Almost all the work of running the net would fall to them. But what about the spoof packets that disguise their true origin? While today it is easy for a sender to fake a data packet's address, in TRIAD all packets are traceable. Each packet must carry the addresses of every machine it visits on route through the network. So packets from Transylvania will have "c/o Transylvanian NAT" on them. If a machine from the Transylvania NAT is suspect, every intermediary NAT in the network can be told to ignore packets winging in from Transylvania. Cheriton claims this will give the network an automatic ability to contain denial of service attacks almost instantly. Many internet engineers see Cheriton as a maverick. And as he himself acknowledges, "there are a lot of wild crazies out there with ways to replace the net". But not many of them have his track record. His hunches on the future of networking, though often controversial at first, have usually proved right. In the late 1980s, when many in the networking world were abandoning the internet's TCP/IP system for a competing standard called Open Systems Interconnection (OSI), it was Cheriton who said that OSI was doomed to fail. Later, when telephone companies suggested that the internet's hardware would be rendered obsolete by a more telephone-friendly system called ATM, Cheriton declaimed against that, too - and started his own company, Granite, producing a new generation of high-speed internet hardware. That made him his first fortune, when he sold the company to internet hardware manufacturer Cisco. Five years ago, two students turned up at his house asking for seed money to start a company based on their PhD theses: Cheriton spotted the potential and wrote Larry Page and Sergey Brin their first investor's cheque. Their bright idea became Google, and when the company went public this year The Washington Post estimated Cheriton's stake at more than $300 million. But re-engineering the internet will require more than the say-so of one man, no matter how impressive his credentials. What's more, TRIAD has its own problems. If the comparatively conservative IPv6 project ultimately fails because it requires so many potentially dangerous changes to the net, isn't the more radical TRIAD even more dangerous? Nearly three years since Cheriton began working on TRIAD, the organisations responsible for defining standards on the net continue to support IPv6, and have paid little attention to his warnings. But the idea is far from dead. Research papers that adopt many of Cheriton's ideas are appearing in computing journals. IPv6 still isn't here. And the NAT keeps spreading. "I'm an old guy," says Cheriton. "I remember back in 1980, when the phone companies thought they had the solution to everything, and the Internet engineers were the young Turks. Now, we're the ones who have become ossified." While Cheriton acknowledges that his plan for TRIAD as it stands might never make it out of the labs, he believes that his ideas about NATS will win out over IPv6 in the end. He's banking that his students will go out into the world and propagate them. That's a long shot, but then again so were many of Cheriton's other high-tech gambles. Danny O'Brien Danny O'Brien is a technology writer in San Jose From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 20 21:21:07 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 16:21:07 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Statesman: Review of An End to Suffering: the Buddha in the world Message-ID: An End to Suffering: the Buddha in the world http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSReview_Bshop&newDisplayURN=300000090162 Monday 8th November 2004 An End to Suffering: the Buddha in the world Pankaj Mishra Picador, 422pp, ?17.99 ISBN 0374148368 Reviewed by Edward Skidelsky On receiving this book, I casually assigned it to the shadowy category of "oriental wisdom", a category familiar to me from the likes of Idries Shah and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. I later regretted this lazy presumption. An End to Suffering is entirely free from the cliches of eastern spirituality. It is a disengaged, highly intelligent account of a young writer's growing interest in Buddhism, interspersed with many fascinating observations about modern India and the west. These observations in fact constitute the book's main subject, the theme of Buddhism being little more than a string on which to thread them. Pankaj Mishra grew up in a high-caste but poor Hindu family in the 1970s and 1980s. He quickly freed himself from his parents' traditional piety, finding an alternative source of inspiration in the great European novelists and philosophers. Hindu scriptures he dismissed as belonging to India's "long, sterile and largely unrecorded past". The west - that of Gustave Flaubert, S0ren Kierkegaard and, above all, Friedrich Nietzsche - absorbed his youthful dreams. Yet Mishra is unable to find anything in the "cruel, garish world of middle-class India" that corresponds to the idealised west of his imagination. When finally he travels to London, his disappointment is only heightened. His alienated descriptions of contemporary England - a land "overlaid with broad concrete strips on which cars glide with toy-like precision" - are among the best things in the book. Here is a society "so prodigiously organised for expansion and consumption" that it can absorb "even the few individuals who once stood opposed to it". The life of a young London woman, with its desultory romances, leaves him dismayed. If this is the promised end of history, then history is a process without meaning. Mishra's alienation is twofold. He is an outcast from the traditions of his own society, yet unable to embrace the rhetoric of progress that once inspired men such as Vivekananda and Jawaharlal Nehru. Buddhism alone speaks to his predicament. It is, on the one hand, a resolutely "post-traditional" religion, finding no meaning in the rituals and dogmas of Hinduism or any other historical faith. Yet at the same time it counsels against grandiose schemes of political redemption, and against the endless multiplication of desire that constitutes modern capitalism. It is thus ideally suited to those who find themselves stranded, like Mishra, between past and future, between tradition and modernity. The impulse drawing Mishra to Buddhism is at root identical to that of Arthur Schopenhauer and many other Europeans and Americans following him. It is disenchantment with History, the Moloch of the modern world. Although initially suspicious of the fakeness of so much western Buddhism, Mishra eventually comes to view it with sympathy and respect. It is one of the many ironies of this book that Buddhism should return to India through the mediation of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Kerouac. Mishra is an earnest, intelligent writer, bringing to his subject something of the intensity of the 19th-century Russians. Yet his prose can be stiff, with a bookish, obligatory quality, which suggests that he has not yet fully overcome his outsider's awkwardness. His explanations of Buddhist teaching are clear but textbook; his descriptions of nature, although presumably sincere, are somewhat "literary" in feel. Mishra's writing really springs to life when he is describing his alienation from Indian and western society. It is these moments of disillusionment and withdrawal which best capture his imagination. All of which suggests that Mishra's interest in Buddhism is more negative than positive, more a matter of repulsion from than attraction to. But perhaps this negativity is inherent in Buddhism - a religion founded, as the title implies, on the hope of putting "an end to suffering". Mishra observes, surely correctly, that much of the west's obsession with the Buddhist "void" is simply a projection of its own death-romanticism. Yet it cannot be denied that Buddhism, in contrast to the main western religions, is essentially a via negativa. Mishra quotes the words of Buddha to his female disciple Vishakha, who visits him one day with her sari and hair wet from a purification bath. She explains that a beloved granddaughter has just died. Hearing that she wishes for many more sons and grandchildren, the Buddha wonders if she will ever be without wet hair and clothes. And he says: "Whoever holds a hundred things dear has a hundred causes of suffering . . . but whoever holds nothing dear has no suffering . . . they are free from sorrow, free from despair." There is nothing quite like this in Judaism or Christianity, and it is bound to strike many western readers as chilling. Nietzsche, who features throughout this book, was less sympathetic to Buddhism than Mishra admits. Although preferring it to Christianity, he none the less saw it as the product of an old, exhausted civilisation. Whether or not this judgement is true of Buddhism in its original form, it certainly seems to capture an important aspect of its contemporary appeal. For Mishra and many others, Buddhism fills the vacuum created by the collapse of religious and political hopes. It is appropriate that it should find its home in California, a land fulfilling what Nietzsche specified as the preconditions of Buddhism: "a very mild climate, very gentle and liberal customs, no militarism; and . . . it is the higher and even learned classes in which the movement has its home". The oldest of the world religions has, by a curious irony, proved itself the most adaptable to the end of history. From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 20 21:23:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 16:23:29 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Book World: Grand Designs Message-ID: Grand Designs http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A34139-2004Oct14?language=printer Reviewed by James Trefil Sunday, October 17, 2004; Page BW08 PUSHING THE LIMITS New Adventures in Engineering By Henry Petroski. Knopf. 288 pp. $25 Norman Mailer, a onetime engineering student himself, once remarked that "Physics was love, engineering was marriage." He was right. A physicist looking at a bridge sees gravity pulling relentlessly down while the atoms in the iron and concrete squeeze against each other to exert a countervailing force and keep the bridge standing. An engineer looking at the same bridge will see some of this, of course, but will see a lot of other things as well. He or she will see the economic factors that dictated the use of materials, the complex strategies that had to be worked out to keep the structure standing during construction, the endless permits and forms that had to be filled out before the first shovelful of dirt was turned over, the court cases brought by environmental groups, and all the other elements that had to be dealt with before the grand principles of the physicist could be realized in this particular structure. Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and history at Duke University, has made it his calling to help the rest of us see the world through the eyes of the engineer. He has been called, deservedly, the "poet laureate of engineering." Pushing the Limits is a collection of essays, first published in somewhat different form in the American Scientist, that amounts to a kind of intellectual travelogue in which he shares with us an engineer's-eye view of everything from obscure bridges to crazy (and as yet unbuilt) structures that have been proposed by engineers in the past. Petroski is an engaging writer, clearly in love with his subject. I enjoyed this book immensely, so let me get a minor criticism off my chest. It wasn't until page 257 (in the author's acknowledgments) that I learned that I was reading a book of collected essays. An earlier statement would have saved me a lot of trouble trying to figure out what the connection between chapters was. Once I figured it out, I could take each chapter as a self-contained unit (as was originally intended) and enjoy the book for what it is. The first half of the book is taken up with a discussion of bridges. These are some of the most dramatic built structures in the world, not least because they often occur in dramatic settings -- harbors, gorges and the like. Petroski begins with a historical survey stressing bridge design as a creative activity -- "The fresh piece of paper on the drawing board is as blank as the newly stretched piece of canvas" -- and goes on to point out fascinating details for each bridge he considers. I was amazed to learn, for example, that the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in New York is so long that the curvature of the Earth makes the tops of its towers a full inch farther apart than their bases, and that when the Pont de Normandie was completed across the mouth of the Seine in France, 80 fully loaded trucks were parked on it nose-to-tail to test it before normal traffic was allowed to cross. Two local bridges made Petroski's list -- the Arlington Memorial Bridge (he seems to have a special weakness for drawbridges) and, of course, the new Wilson Bridge which is now somewhat farther along (thank God!) than when these chapters were written. This is not a triumphalist book. The engineering character has a certain gloomy side, a side that delights in contemplating all the things that can (and do) go wrong with structures. So we have the standard discussion of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington, whose collapse in a windstorm in 1940 was captured on film and is routinely shown to engineering students, as well as discussions of bridges that have failed during earthquakes. This is interesting stuff, especially when Petroski contrasts the way we deal with airplane failures (keep all the pieces until we've wrung the last drop of information from the debris) to the way we deal with collapsed structures (bulldoze the site and rebuild ASAP). The last half of the book deals with an astonishing variety of other structures, from the Three Gorges Dam going up in China to the deadly collapse of the bonfire at Texas A&M University in 1999. The most interesting of these chapters was a stroll through some truly wild ideas that have been proposed by engineers in the past. My favorite: a 1928 scheme to build a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar and shrink the Mediterranean, thereby adding real estate to Europe and North Africa. (I'd like to see the Environmental Impact Statement for that one.) In the end, what we have here is a fascinating potpourri of history, engineering and imagination, all presented in the fluid, humane writing style that we have come to expect from this author. o James Trefil is Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Physics at George Mason University. His latest book is "Human Nature: A Blueprint for Managing the Planet By and For Humans." From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 20 21:24:49 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 16:24:49 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: 'Borges': Writer on the Couch Message-ID: 'Borges': Writer on the Couch New York Times Book Review, 4.11.7 By DAVID FOSTER WALLACE BORGES A Life. By Edwin Williamson. Illustrated. 574 pp. Viking. $34.95. THERE'S an unhappy paradox about literary biographies. The majority of readers who will be interested in a writer's bio, especially one as long and exhaustive as Edwin Williamson's ''Borges: A Life,'' will be admirers of the writer's work. They will therefore usually be idealizers of that writer and perpetrators (consciously or not) of the intentional fallacy. Part of the appeal of the writer's work for these fans will be the distinctive stamp of that writer's personality, predilections, style, particular tics and obsessions -- the sense that these stories were written by this author and could have been done by no other.* And yet it often seems that the person we encounter in the literary biography could not possibly have written the works we admire. And the more intimate and thorough the bio, the stronger this feeling usually is. In the present case, the Jorge Luis Borges who emerges in Williamson's book -- a vain, timid, pompous mama's boy, given for much of his life to dithery romantic obsessions -- is about as different as one can get from the limpid, witty, pansophical, profoundly adult writer we know from his stories. Rightly or no, anyone who reveres Borges as one of the best and most important fiction writers of the last century will resist this dissonance, and will look, as a way to explain and mitigate it, for obvious defects in Williamson's life study. The book won't disappoint them. Edwin Williamson is an Oxford don and esteemed Hispanist whose ''Penguin History of Latin America'' is a small masterpiece of lucidity and triage. It is therefore unsurprising that his ''Borges'' starts strong, with a fascinating sketch of Argentine history and the Borges family's place within it. For Williamson, the great conflict in the Argentine national character is that between the ''sword'' of civilizing European liberalism and the ''dagger'' of romantic gaucho individualism, and he argues that Borges's life and work can be properly understood only in reference to this conflict, particularly as it plays out in his childhood. In the 19th century, grandfathers on both sides of his family distinguished themselves in important battles for South American independence from Spain and the establishment of a centralized Argentine government, and Borges's mother was obsessed with the family's historical glory. Borges's father, a man stunted by the heroic paternal shadow in which he lived, evidently did things like give his son an actual dagger to use on bullies at school, and later sent him to a brothel for devirgination. The young Borges failed both these ''tests,'' the scars of which marked him forever and show up all over the place in his fiction, Williamson thinks. It is in these claims about personal stuff encoded in the writer's art that the book's real defect lies. In fairness, it's just a pronounced case of a syndrome that seems common to literary biographies, so common that it might point to a design flaw in the whole enterprise. The big problem with ''Borges: A Life'' is that Williamson is an atrocious reader of Borges's work; his interpretations amount to a simplistic, dishonest kind of psychological criticism. You can see why this problem might be intrinsic to the genre. A biographer wants his story to be not only interesting but literarily valuable.** In order to ensure this, the bio has to make the writer's personal life and psychic travails seem vital to his work. The idea is that we can't correctly interpret a piece of verbal art unless we know the personal and/or psychological circumstances surrounding its creation. That this is simply assumed as an axiom by many biographers is one problem; another is that the approach works a lot better on some writers than on others. It works well on Kafka -- Borges's only modern equal as an allegorist, with whom he's often compared -- because Kafka's fictions are expressionist, projective, and personal; they make artistic sense only as manifestations of Kafka's psyche. But Borges's stories are very different. They are designed primarily as metaphysical arguments?; they are dense, self-enclosed, with their own deviant logics. Above all, they are meant to be impersonal, to transcend individual consciousness -- ''to be incorporated,'' as Borges puts it, ''like the fables of Theseus or Ahasuerus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator or the extinction of the language in which they were written.'' One reason for this is that Borges is a mystic, or at least a sort of radical Neoplatonist -- human thought, behavior and history are all the product of one big Mind, or are elements of an immense cabalistic Book that includes its own decoding. Biography-wise, then, we have a strange situation in which Borges's individual personality and circumstances matter only insofar as they lead him to create artworks in which such personal facts are held to be unreal. ''Borges: A Life,'' which is strongest in its treatments of Argentine history and politics,?? is at its very worst when Williamson is discussing specific pieces in light of Borges's personal life. Unfortunately, he discusses just about everything Borges ever wrote. Williamson's critical thesis is clear: ''Bereft of a key to their autobiographical context, no one could have grasped the vivid significance these pieces actually had for their author.'' And in case after case, the resultant readings are shallow, forced and distorted -- as indeed they must be if the biographer's project is to be justified. Random example: ''The Wait,'' a marvelous short-short that appears in the 1949 story collection ''The Aleph,'' takes the form of a layered homage to Hemingway, gangster movies and the Buenos Aires underworld. An Argentine mobster, in hiding from another mobster and living under the pursuer's name, dreams so often of his killers' appearance in his bedroom that, when the assassins finally come for him, he ''gestured at them to wait, and he turned over and faced the wall, as though going back to sleep. Did he do that to awaken the pity of the men that killed him, or because it's easier to endure a terrifying event than to imagine it, wait for it endlessly -- or (and this is perhaps the most likely possibility) so that his murderers would become a dream, as they had already been so many times, in that same place, at that same hour?'' The distant interrogative ending -- a Borges trademark -- becomes an inquisition into dreams, reality, guilt, augury and mortal terror. For Williamson, though, the real key to the story's significance appears to be that ''Borges had failed to win the love of Estela Canto. . . . With Estela gone, there seemed nothing to live for,'' and he represents the story's ending all and only as a depressed whimper: ''When his killers finally track him down, he just rolls over meekly to face the wall and resigns himself to the inevitable.'' It is not merely that Williamson reads every last thing in Borges's oeuvre as a correlative of the author's emotional state. It is that he tends to reduce all of Borges's psychic conflicts and personal problems to the pursuit of women. Williamson's theory here involves two big elements: Borges's inability to stand up to his domineering mother,? and his belief, codified in a starry-eyed reading of Dante, that ''it was the love of a woman that alone could deliver him from the hellish unreality he shared with his father and inspire him to write a masterpiece that would justify his life.'' Story after story is thus interpreted by Williamson as a coded dispatch on Borges's amorous career, which career turns out to be sad, timorous, puerile, moony and (like most people's) extremely boring. The formula is applied equally to famous pieces, such as '' 'The Aleph' (1945), whose autobiographical subtext alludes to his thwarted love for Norah Lange,'' and to lesser-known stories like ''The Zahir'': ''The torments described by Borges in this story . . . are, of course, displaced confessions of the extremity of his plight. Estela [Canto, who'd just broken up with him] was to have been the 'new Beatrice,' inspiring him to create a work that would be 'the Rose without purpose, the Platonic, intemporal Rose,' but here he was again, sunk in the unreality of the labyrinthine self, with no prospect now of contemplating the mystic Rose of love.'' Thin though this kind of explication is, it's preferable to the reverse process by which Williamson sometimes presents Borges's stories and poems as ''evidence'' that he was in emotional extremities. Williamson's claim, for instance, that in 1934, ''after his definitive rejection by Norah Lange, Borges . . . came to the brink of killing himself'' is based entirely on two tiny pieces of contemporaneous fiction in which the protagonists struggle with suicide. Not only is this a bizarre way to read and reason -- was the Flaubert who wrote ''Madame Bovary'' eo ipso suicidal? -- but Williamson seems to believe that it licenses him to make all sorts of dubious, humiliating claims about Borges's interior life: ''A poem called 'The Cyclical Night' . . . which he published in La Nacion on October 6, reveals him to be in the throes of a personal crisis''; ''In the extracts from this unfinished poem . . . we can see that the reason for wishing to commit suicide was literary failure, stemming ultimately from sexual self-doubt.'' Bluck. Again, it is primarily because of Borges's short stories that anyone will care enough to read about his life. And while Williamson spends a lot of time detailing the explosive success that Borges enjoyed in middle age, after the 1961 International Publishers' Prize (shared with Samuel Beckett) introduced his work to audiences in the United States and Europe,?? there is little in his book about just why Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is an important enough fiction writer to deserve such a microscopic bio. The truth, briefly stated, is that Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature. He is modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations in religious or ideological certainty -- a mind turned thus wholly in on itself.??? His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything. And the mind of those stories is nearly always a mind that lives in and through books. This is because Borges the writer is, fundamentally, a reader. The dense, obscure allusiveness of his fiction is not a tic, or even really a style; and it is no accident that his best stories are often fake essays, or reviews of fictitious books, or have texts at their plots' centers, or have as protagonists Homer or Dante or Averroes. Whether for seminal artistic reasons or neurotic personal ones or both, Borges collapses reader and writer into a new kind of aesthetic agent, one who makes stories out of stories, one for whom reading is essentially -- consciously -- a creative act. This is not, however, because Borges is a metafictionist or a cleverly disguised critic. It is because he knows that there's finally no difference -- that murderer and victim, detective and fugitive, performer and audience are the same. Obviously, this has postmodern implications (hence the pontine claim above), but Borges's is really a mystical insight, and a profound one. It's also frightening, since the line between monism and solipsism is thin and porous, more to do with spirit than with mind per se. And, as an artistic program, this kind of collapse/transcendence of individual identity is also paradoxical, requiring a grotesque self-obsession combined with an almost total effacement of self and personality. Tics and obsessions aside, what makes a Borges story Borgesian is the odd, ineluctable sense you get that no one and everyone did it. This is why, for instance, it is so irksome to see Williamson describe ''The Immortal'' and ''The Writing of the God'' -- two of the greatest, most scalp-crinkling mystical stories ever, next to which the epiphanies of Joyce or redemptions of O'Connor seem pallid and crude -- as respective products of Borges's ''many-layered distress'' and ''indifference to his fate'' after various idealized girlfriends dump him. Stuff like this misses the whole point. Even if Williamson's claims are true, the stories so completely transcend their motive cause that the biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way, irrelevant. *Of course, Borges's famous ''Pierre Menard, Author of the 'Quixote' '' makes sport of this very conviction, just as his later ''Borges and I'' anticipates and refutes the whole idea of a literary biography. The fact that his fiction is always several steps ahead of its interpreters is one of the things that make Borges so great, and so modern. **Actually, these two agendas dovetail, since the only reason anybody's interested in a writer's life is because of his literary importance. (Think about it -- the personal lives of most people who spend 14 hours a day sitting there alone, reading and writing, are not going to be thrill rides to hear about.) ?This is part of what gives Borges's stories their mythic, precognitive quality (all cultures' earliest, most vital metaphysics is mythopoetic), which quality in turn helps explain how they can be at once so abstract and so moving. ??The biography is probably most valuable in its account of Borges's political evolution. A common bit of literary gossip about Borges is that the reason he wasn't awarded a Nobel Prize was his supposed support for Argentina's ghastly authoritarian juntas of the 1960's and 70's. From Williamson, though, we learn that Borges's politics were actually far more complex and tragic. The child of an old liberal family, and an unabashed leftist in his youth, Borges was one of the first and bravest public opponents of European fascism and the rightist nationalism it spawned in Argentina. What changed him was Peron, whose creepy right-wing populist dictatorship aroused such loathing in Borges that he allied himself with the repressively anti-Peron Revolucion Libertadora. Borges's situation following Peron's first ouster in 1955 is full of unsettling parallels for American readers. Because Peronism still had great popularity with Argentina's working poor, the exiled dictator retained enormous political power, and would have won any democratic national election held in the 1950's. This placed believers in liberal democracy (such as J. L. Borges) in the same sort of bind that the United States faced in South Vietnam a few years later -- how do you promote democracy when you know that a majority of people will, if given the chance, vote for an end to democratic voting? In essence, Borges decided that the Argentine masses had been so hoodwinked by Peron and his wife that a return to democracy was possible only after the nation had been cleansed of Peronism. Williamson's analysis of the slippery slope this decision put Borges on, and his account of the hatchet job that Argentina's leftists did on Borges's political reputation in retaliation for his defection (such that by 1967, when the writer came to Harvard to lecture, the students practically expected him to have epaulettes and a riding crop), make for his book's best chapters. ? Be warned that much of the mom-based psychologizing seems right out of ''Oprah'': e.g., ''However, by urging her son to realize the ambitions she had defined for herself, she unwittingly induced a sense of unworthiness in him that became the chief obstacle to his self-assertion.'' ??Williamson's chapters on Borges's sudden world fame will be of special interest to those American readers who weren't yet alive or reading in the mid-1960's. I was lucky enough to discover Borges as a child, but only because I happened to find ''Labyrinths,'' an early English-language collection of his most famous stories, on my father's bookshelves in 1974. I believed that the book was there only because of my parents' unusually fine taste and discernment -- which verily they do possess -- but what I didn't know was that by 1974 ''Labyrinths'' was also on tens of thousands of other homes' shelves in this country, that Borges had actually been a sensation on the order of Tolkien and Gibran among hip readers of the previous decade. ??? Labyrinths, mirrors, dreams, doubles -- so many of the elements that appear over and over in Borges's fiction are symbols of the psyche turned inward. DAVID FOSTER WALLACE?S most recent books are ??Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity?? and ??Oblivion: Stories.?? http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/books/review/07WALLACE.html From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 20 21:25:34 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 16:25:34 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] First Chapter: 'Borges' Message-ID: First Chapter: 'Borges' By EDWIN WILLIAMSON Family and Nation The ancestors of Jorge Luis Borges were among the first Europeans to arrive in America. Explorers, conquistadors, founders of cities, and rulers of provinces, they were builders of the vast empire that Spain was to establish in the New World. Gonzalo Martel de la Puente followed Pizarro in the conquest of Peru, Domingo Mart?nez de Irala won Paraguay for the Spanish Crown, Jer?nimo de Cabrera founded the city of C?rdoba in Tucum?n, while Juan de Garay secured the settlement of the remote township of Buenos Aires. However, Borges himself was indifferent to these connections: "The Iralas, the Garays, the Cabreras and all those other Spanish conquistadors who founded cities and nations, I have never dreamed about them.... I am quite ignorant about their lives. They were people of very little intelligence-Spanish soldiers, and from the Spain of those times!" The ancestors Borges dreamed about were the men who had broken with Spain and had fought to create the Argentine nation. On his mother's side, Francisco de Laprida was president of the congress that declared the independence of the "United Provinces of South America." General Miguel Estanislao Soler commanded a division in the patriot army that the great Argentine liberator, San Mart?n, led across the Andes to free Chile and then Peru from the Spanish yoke. On his father's side, Juan Cris?stomo Lafinur was one of the first poets of Argentina and a friend of Manuel Belgrano, a founding father of the nation. Among Borges's papers there survives a postcard depicting Lafinur (proudly identified with a cross by the young Jorge Luis) standing in the foreground of the picture as General San Mart?n is being received by the National Assembly of the new republic. The most romantic of all Borges's ancestors was undoubtedly Isidoro Su?rez, a great-grandfather on his mother's side. At the age of twenty-four, Su?rez led the cavalry charge that turned the tide of battle at Jun?n, the second-last engagement in the liberation of South America. The battle took place on August 6, 1824, high up in the Andes of Peru, and the lofty silence of the snowcapped peaks was broken only by the clash of lance and sword, for no guns were used in combat by either army, and the patriots defeated the Spaniards in little under an hour. Su?rez's heroism won the praise of Sim?n Bol?var himself, who declared that "when history describes the glorious Battle of Jun?n ... it will be attributed to the bravery of this young officer." And it was Bol?var who promoted Su?rez to the rank of colonel after the young officer again distinguished himself at Ayacucho, the battle that finally put paid to the rule of Spain in America. Borges conceived of the War of Independence as a "rupture in the continuity of the bloodline," a "rebellion of sons against their fathers." His family, after all, took great pride in being criollos, people of pure Spanish descent born in America, but the meaning of independence, in Borges's view, lay in the fact that the criollos had "resolved to be Spaniards no longer:" they had made "an act of faith" in the possibility of creating a national identity distinct from that of Spain, and it followed that if the Argentines did not persevere in the struggle to forge this new identity, "a good many of us" would "run the risk of reverting to being Spanish, which would be a way of denying the whole of Argentine history." The movement toward independence in the area now comprising modern Argentina was spearheaded by Buenos Aires. An important reason for the city's historic role is to be found in the strategic position it occupies on the estuary of a mighty river system that reaches right up into the heart of South America. This huge estuary was first discovered by Spanish explorers searching for a westward passage to Japan. In 1536 the first settlement, called Santa Mar?a de los Buenos Aires, was established on its right bank, but it succumbed to Indian raids, and it was not until 1580 that the town was founded on a permanent basis by the conquistador Juan de Garay. By this time the estuary was known as the R?o de la Plata, the "River of Silver" (distorted since in English to "River Plate"), thus called because the Spaniards believed that deposits of silver could be found on its shores. No silver was discovered, however, and for the next two hundred years, Buenos Aires was to languish as an outpost of empire in a forgotten corner of the Americas. The tiny settlement was all but engulfed by vast plains, empty save for herds of wild cattle and horses that roamed the pampas, as these plains were called. These herds were hunted by tribes of nomadic Indians and plundered for their meat and hide by freewheeling horsemen of Spanish descent called gauchos. Otherwise the colony subsisted on the illegal exchange of silver from Peru for African slaves imported from Brazil. Only in the late eighteenth century, when advances in shipbuilding made it economical for Spain to communicate directly with the region, did it become possible to exploit the strategic position of Buenos Aires, and in 1776 the city was made the capital of the new viceroyalty of R?o de la Plata. This relatively sudden promotion of Buenos Aires transformed the geopolitics of South America-all the Spanish territories (except Venezuela) that lay to the east of the Andes were obliged to sever a connection with Peru that went back 250 years and deal thenceforward with the upstart port city to the south. In this historic wrench lay the fundamental cause of the bloody conflicts that would bedevil the area for most of the nineteenth century. After the first revolt against Spain in 1810, Buenos Aires would struggle to maintain its authority over the provinces comprising the former viceroyalty. It failed to prevent Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay from going their separate ways, and even though the remaining provinces came together to declare independence from Spain at the Congress of Tucum?n in 1816, there followed a long period of instability as the interior provinces continued to challenge the authority of Buenos Aires. The basic dispute was between the liberal unitarios, who sought to create a centralized state led by Buenos Aires, and the more conservative federales, who favored a confederation of provinces that would preserve as much local autonony as possible. The lack of effective nationwide institutions led to endless power struggles between caudillos, or provincial chieftains, of both conservative and liberal persuasion, who employed gaucho cavalry (montoneros) to further their own ends. Both sides of Borges's family were unitarios, and in his celebrated "Conjectural Poem," he recalled the murder of his ancestor Laprida, onetime president of the Congress of Tucum?n, by the montoneros of Felix Aldao, a caudillo of the province of Mendoza. Eventually there appeared a caudillo strong enough to impose some order on this chaos. In 1829 Juan Manuel de Rosas, a wealthy landowner and a strong advocate of federalismo, became governor of the huge province of Buenos Aires, and over the next six years he acquired enough power to become the effective leader of the "United Provinces." In the city of Buenos Aires, a bastion of liberalism, Rosas instituted a reign of terror designed to wipe out the unitarios. He created a secret organization known as La Mazorca that recruited servants to spy on their masters and formed death squads to root out opponents. Rosas also enlisted the support of the clergy, who preached blind loyalty to the caudillo and allowed his portrait to be displayed in the churches. He gained immense popularity with the lower classes, and a hysterical personality cult came into being-the color red, the color of the federales, was worn on sashes and banners, and slogans such as "Long live the Federation! Death to the filthy, savage unitarios!" became tokens of loyalty to the supreme leader. After Rosas achieved total power in 1835, those liberals he did not manage to eliminate he drove into exile abroad. The privations endured by Borges's family under the dictatorship of Rosas were indeed horrible and outrageous. Colonel Su?rez, the "Hero of Jun?n," was forced into exile in Uruguay, where he died in 1846. One of the colonel's brothers was shot against the wall of the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires by agents of the Mazorca. The man's eleven-year-old son was forced to watch the execution, after which the boy had to find work in a tavern, since there was no one to look after him. Thanks to Rosas, the family of Borges's grandfather, Isidoro Acevedo, lost their estates in the north of the province of Buenos Aires near the town of Pergamino. Isidoro's father joined a rebellion against Rosas but was taken prisoner and put to work in the tyrant's stables for nine years. One night the Mazorca raided the family home, horsewhipped Isidoro's mother and sacked the house. The two oldest daughters managed to escape but lost touch with their family for several years and ended up living in Brazil. Isidoro's mother took her three remaining children to Buenos Aires, where she was forced to earn a living as a seamstress mending trousers for Rosas's soldiers. Grandfather Isidoro used to tell a gruesome story about how, as a boy of ten, he came across a cart covered by a tarpaulin and, taking a peek inside, found the bloody heads of dozens of men killed by the Mazorca. He was so shocked that he was unable to speak for several hours after he got home. When he grew up, Isidoro became an unitario like his father and joined the struggle to overthrow Rosas. The tyrant was finally deposed in 1852, when his many enemies united to defeat him at the Battle of Caseros. But the victor of Caseros was yet another caudillo, General Urquiza, the boss of the rival province of Entre R?os, who managed to topple Rosas with the support of Brazil, Uruguay, and the exiled unitarios. Being himself a federal, Urquiza passed a new constitution providing for a confederation of provinces, though under a strong presidentialist regime. The unitarios refused to accept this federal arrangement, but they were defeated by Urquiza at the Battle of Cepeda in 1859. Two years later the unitarios rebelled again, and this time their leader, Bartolom? Mitre, overthrew Urquiza at the Battle of Pav?n, and Buenos Aires was at last accepted by the provincial caudillos as the de facto capital of the nation. With Buenos Aires at its head, Argentina was set upon the road of stability and modernization. In the course of the 1860s and 1870s, successive liberal presidents, Mitre, Sarmiento and Avellaneda-all former unitario leaders-put in place the machinery of a modern nation-state: an integrated judicial system, a central bank, a professional army, a system of public schools and libraries, an academy of science and other technical institutions. The Argentine economy was geared toward the export of wool, meat, and wheat for the industrial centers of Europe, and this required the progressive privatization and enclosure of land in the pampas. Successive governments actively promoted European immigration with the aim of developing a rural middle class to replace the gauchos and the Indian hunters on the open range. Foreign capital was invested in the construction of a modern infrastructure of communications and transport. The British in particular would build new docks in Buenos Aires and a railway network across the pampas designed to consolidate the export economy by linking up the hitherto fractious provinces to Buenos Aires and, through the port city, to the world outside. Domingo Sarmiento, who became president in 1868, was a prominent liberal intellectual and the author of one of the most influential books in Argentine history, Facundo: or, Civilization and Barbarism, a book in which the liberal vision of the nation's destiny was most fully expressed. Originally published in 1845, at the height of the struggle against Rosas, Facundo takes the form of a biography of Facundo Quiroga, a famous caudillo who pursued a violent career in the aftermath of independence until he was killed in 1835, almost certainly on Rosas's orders. Sarmiento argued that Argentina could be saved from this chaotic "barbarism" only by adopting the modern "civilization" of the European Enlightenment. By "barbarism" Sarmiento meant the lack of stable government based on legitimate authority. He argued that barbarism was rooted in the pampas because the great plains were so underpopulated that the people who lived there lacked the habits of social coexistence that provide the basis for civilized values. In this sense the gaucho was a barbarian because he led a life of anarchic individualism in which he resorted to force in order to assert his will. This made him the ideal tool for the ambitions of regional caudillos, whose power struggles had led to the anarchy that had engulfed the entire viceroyalty of the R?o de La Plata in the aftermath of independence. How could this barbarism be tamed once more? There were two forms of civilization available to the rulers of Argentina: there was the clerical civilization of Catholic Spain, which had been successful in ensuring order during the colonial period, and the civilization of the Enlightenment. The former, in Sarmiento's view, was incapable of turning back the tide of barbarism. He portrayed the inland city of C?rdoba, a bastion of Hispanic traditionalism, as a somnolent relic, its venerable buildings reflected on the stagnant waters of an ornamental lake. By way of contrast, he described the vitality of Buenos Aires, standing at the mouth of the river system of the Plata, a thriving port equipped to trade in goods and ideas with the world at large. Having initiated the wars of independence, Buenos Aires could claim a historic right to lead the nation toward modernity. The plight of Argentina was encapsulated by Sarmiento in the vivid image of a gaucho's dagger stuck in the heart of liberal Buenos Aires. But even in Facundo one encounters an ambivalence toward the gaucho, for when Sarmiento wrote about the gaucho's skills as horseman, tracker, and wandering troubadour, he could not help but display a certain admiration for this authentic son of the native soil. The fact was that even though the gaucho might have been a "barbarian," he also represented whatever distinctive identity the young republic could claim to possess in relation to Spain. And yet, by the logic of his own argument in favor of progress and modern civilization, Sarmiento had to accept that the gaucho's traditional way of life was condemned eventually to disappear. It was during Sarmiento's term of office as president that a book appeared which was to become the other great classic of Argentine literature. Continues... http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/31/books/chapters/1031-1st-williamson.html From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 20 21:26:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 16:26:52 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] WebMD: Coming Soon: Designer Babies? Message-ID: Coming Soon: Designer Babies? http://my.webmd.com/content/Article/96/103766.htm?printing=true Embryo screening for genes that cause disease is already happening. How far will it go? By [2]Jeanie Lerche Davis WebMD Medical News Reviewed By [3]Michael Smith, MD on Thursday, November 04, 2004 Is the age of "designer babies" looming closer? In Britain, four couples have won approval for embryo screening for cancer genes. Some consider it a controversial case. All the couples are affected by an inherited form of aggressive colon cancer and are getting in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments to get pregnant. The couples appealed to the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority -- which governs embryo screening in Britain -- to allow them to select an embryo without the cancer gene. They have won that right. Now, their child and future generations are unlikely to have the cancer gene. Could this happen in the U.S.? Are we on a slippery slope leading toward designer babies with "basketball star" genes, green eyes, or curly hair? To find out, WebMD spoke with a few experts. Embryo Screening Still Evolving "The use of the technology to prevent disease is wonderful. ... When you're preventing lethal and horrible disease in children, it's a good use," Art Caplan, PhD, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics, tells WebMD. "But when you get into hair color and freckle selection, that's a whole different story," Caplan says. "In our market, whatever you can pay for, you can do. We don't have [a regulatory agency] here to stop us from going where money and bias can take us. The prospect for a slippery slope has been handled in England because they have built stairs." However, fertility doctors in the U.S. do have ethical guidelines that limit the use of embryo screening technology, says Cecilia Dominguez, MD, a reproductive endocrinologist with the Center for Reproductive Medicine at the Emory University School of Medicine. "Right now, preimplantation genetics is used exclusively for major and small groups of genetic abnormalities like Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which is a devastating disease, costs a lot of money, yet leads to early death of the child," she tells WebMD. "We can prevent this fatal disease, which is very important for families with strong genetics." David Wolmer, MD, chief of reproductive endocrinology and fertility at Duke University School of Medicine, agrees. "If a family has a known genetic disorder like muscular dystrophy, we feel it is OK to transfer embryos that do not have that gene," Wolmer tells WebMD. "We do the same with families who have cystic fibrosis -- specifically screening embryos for those genes, to try to avoid having a child with that disorder." Needed: Embryo Screening Review Process However, says Wolmer, "We need a review process that allows people who aren't just doing it to be self-serving. Some couples are asking for a blanket embryo screening, to look at the huge realm of possibilities. That's the slippery slope to me, that people with no family history of a disease are asking us to take a blanket look at the huge realm of possibilities like Down syndrome, for example, which is a genetic abnormality but not an actual genetic disorder." It's important "to be very careful at that point," Wolmer says. "We need to look at the family's intent when they request embryo screening. In our society today, different yardsticks are used to measure if this is OK or not -- science, theology, law. I think that an Institutional Review Board process in the U.S. needs to be applied here. We can't lose sight of what is research and what is accepted therapy." Everyone involved in IVF and embryo screening must consider ethics at every point, says Wolmer. Embryo Screening Not 100% Accurate Wolmer brings up another point: Embryo screening is not a perfect process; there is no 100% guarantee. "There's a question whether that one cell may be abnormal, but the others may be normal," says Wolmer. "Also, one abnormal cell doesn't mean the whole trait or disorder will develop." Ordering up "basketball player genes" or green eyes -- those things just aren't possible with current technology, Dominguez tells WebMD. "Figuring that out from one or two embryonic cells is very tricky. We're not anywhere near the point of being able to do that." Even after embryo screening for genetic abnormalities, "there's still a chance you're wrong," Dominguez says. "Screening is very difficult to do, and it can only be done in the best labs. Some day we will be able to fully fingerprint an embryo. But even if someone has a cancer gene, there's no 100% certainty they will develop the disorder. There are other factors, like environment, that play into this, too." Published Nov. 4, 2004. _________________________________________________________________ SOURCES: Art Caplan, PhD, director, University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics. Cecilia Dominguez, MD, reproductive endocrinologist, Center for Reproductive Medicine, Emory University School of Medicine. David Wolmer, MD, chief of reproductive endocrinology and fertility, Duke University School of Medicine. References 2. http://my.webmd.com/content/Biography/7/1756_50703.htm 3. http://my.webmd.com/content/Biography/7/1756_53096.htm From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 20 21:32:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 16:32:41 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Guardian: Last veterans to tell their war stories Message-ID: Last veterans to tell their war stories http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5062769-110595,00.html As the nation falls silent today to remember the First World War dead, historians are battling to record the memories of the 19 survivors David Smith Sunday November 14, 2004 His head was bowed, his hand trembled a little on his walking stick and his blue eyes were deep with sadness and reflection. Henry Allingham, 108 years old, stood last Thursday for the sounding of the 'Last Post' and two minutes of silent remembrance. The time was the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Then Jennifer Pike, 15, played Bach's Sarabande from Partita No 2 in D minor on a violin handcrafted out of wood from trees growing on the First World War battlefields of Ypres and the Somme. As the sound poured through the Imperial War Museum in London, Allingham sank back into his wheelchair and wiped a tear from his right eye. The music finished and there was a moment of uncertain silence until an exclamation of 'Bravo!' prompted applause all around the vast atrium. Allingham is the oldest veteran of the First World War. Two years ago he was one of 60 known veterans in Britain. Last year, the number halved to 30, and last week it dipped below 20, when Tom Kirk, once a surgeon on the destroyer HMS Lydiard, died aged 105. It was a sober reminder that time is running out for the men, all born in the reign of Queen Victoria, who fought 'the war to end all wars', and that the link with firsthand experience of the Western Front, with all its comradeship and horrors, will one day be severed. As the nation pauses today for Remembrance Sunday, the race is on to preserve these heroes' stories. Max Arthur, military author and historian, is interviewing the last veterans of the Great War for a book, The Last Post, due to be published next October. He is determined that these survivors of the conflict that left 31 million people dead, wounded or missing - a tenth of them British - should claim their place in posterity. 'I did the book Forgotten Voices of the Great War and realised the survivors are a depleting band, so we need to get them while we can,' Arthur said. 'One dreads the day when there are none left, but inevitably it will come. This year is the 90th anniversary of the start of the First World War and it can only go on another year or two, although some of the veterans look as if they will go on for ever. They all have a unique story. Ninety per cent of them are still compos mentis. Some find it easier to talk than others and still have vivid details of their time on the Western Front. There was no particular reason why they should have been the ones to survive and they're grateful to have got through.' The other saviour of the veterans' legacy is Dennis Goodwin, 78, secretary of the First World War Veterans' Association. 'Eighteen years ago, I found some men in their eighties in a nursing home,' he said. 'The staff were very good, but words like "Gallipoli", "Somme" and "Passchendaele" meant nothing to them. It seemed a shame these names were going to disappear into obscurity. 'My phone number was put in a newspaper and it has never stopped ringing since. Relatives have told me it has extended the veterans' lives by giving them an interest: like all good orchids, plenty of light and tender, loving care and they flourish. They get under your skin and in your blood. They become like your dad.' Goodwin, of Rustington, West Sussex, has witnessed the total steadily dwindle to 19, but says that, oddly, it can also rise. 'The age process is kicking in stronger each succeeding year, but we are finding new veterans, too. We've got a network of helpers all around the country: they read in the local paper that someone has turned 103 or 104 and try to find out if they were a First World War veteran. 'In 2003, we found some new ones, so we replaced quite a few who died. We recently found another one, Henry Newcombe, who joined in August 1918 and served for three or four months.' At the Imperial War Museum last week, Goodwin linked arms with Allingham as the old soldier from Eastbourne, East Sussex, went on a walkabout to inspect a British 18-pounder mark II field gun and a French 75mm field gun that were used during the slaughter on the Western Front. They were met by schoolchildren, including a six-year-old girl. Goodwin said to her: 'Do you know the age difference? One hundred and two years. You've got a lot of catching up to do!' As the girl smiled, Allingham pulled a funny face and shook her by the hand. The seemingly invincible Victorian, wearing his war medals including the French L?gion d'Honneur, said: 'For a long time, I wanted to forget the war, but Dennis did a lot to take me out of my rut. 'He made me feel disrespectful that I didn't do more to remember, and he's done the same for a lot of people. Now I do what I can to make sure the lads aren't forgotten.' Last of the british ... and the solitary german survivor Air mechanic Henry Allingham, 108 Aboard HMS Kingfisher during Jutland, then serviced and recovered planes in the Ypres and Somme salients. Recalls falling into a shell hole: 'It had rats, bodies, arms and legs.' Later a car salesman. Lives in Eastbourne. Sgt Alfred Anderson, 108 Fought at the Somme with the Black Watch. Batman to Captain Fergus Bowes-Lyon, brother of the future Queen Mother. Suffered shrapnel wounds to his neck and arms. Later a city council clerk. Lives in Alyth, Perthshire. Pte George Charles, 104 Joined the Durham Light Infantry. Did not see combat. Worked as a chartered accountant and now lives in a nursing home in Halesworth, Suffolk. Traced by the First World War Veterans Association in the past year. Pte Bert Clark, 104 Was called up after the German offensives of 1918. Later served in Ireland and India. Lives in a nursing home in Rushton. Traced in the past year. Midshipman Kenneth Cummins, 104 Was torpedoed while aboard The Viceroy of India and was rescued from lifeboats. Later he had to retrieve nurses' bodies after a hospital ship was sunk. Lives in Great Bedwyn, Wilts. Gunner William Elder, 107 Worked as a gardener, then in 1915 joined the Royal Garrison Artillery. Fought on the Somme and in the first and second battles of Ypres. Joined the Home Guard in the Second World War. Lives in Kettering. Gunner Alfred Finnigan, 108 Joined the Royal Field Artillery, where he led a six-horse gun team. Lost all his friends in the war: his only injury was a horse bite. Lives in Whitland, Wales. Pte George Hardy, 104 Enlisted in 1918 with 6th Enniskillen Dragoons but did not see combat. Crossed the Channel with the army of occupation. Lives in a nursing home in Porthcawl, Wales. Traced in the past year. Cpl Harold Lawton, 105 Attached to the East Yorkshire regiment at Bethune. Was captured during German offensive of March 1918, spending the rest of the war as a PoW. Later dean of the arts faculty at Southampton University. Lives in Rutland. Pte Fred Lloyd, 106 Tried to join the Sussex regiment, but was too small. Later conscripted to the Royal Field Artillery. Lost two brothers in the war. Later returned to his job as a gardener. Lives in Uckfield. Pte Albert 'Smiler' Marshall, 107 The last man to draw a sword during a British cavalry charge. Trained with the Essex Yeomanry, where his sergeant nicknamed him 'Smiler'. Fought at Loos, Mons and Ypres. Trapped in a shell hole in no man's land, he sang the hymn: 'Nearer to thee, Lord.' Later a head gardener. Lives in Ashtead, Surrey. Pte Harry Newcombe, 104 Joined the Sussex regiment in August 1918 and was still training when war ended. Joined the army of occupation and spent a year in Germany. Joined the GWR as dining room attendant. Lives in Worthing. Traced in the last year. Pte Harry Patch, 106 Holds his own Armistice Day on 22 September to mark the day in 1917 when three friends were blown to pieces in front of him. Conscripted to the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry. Returned to job as a plumber. Lives in Wells, Somerset. Dispatch rider Ted Rayns, 105 Enlisted at 17 as a dispatch rider, taking messages from the Western Front to gun batteries. Present at the three battles of the Somme. Firefighter during the Second World War. Lives in Stafford. Traced in the past year. Pte George Rice, 107 Joined the Durham Light Infantry at 17 and went to the front, but, owing to the need for skilled tradesmen, was drafted into munition manufacture in Birmingham. Called up again in 1918 in the Machinegun Corps. Later worked in car industry. Lives in Kings Heath, Birmingham. Rigger William Roberts, 104 Signed up aged 15 after his father was killed at the Somme in 1916, joining the Royal Flying Corps. Worked as an aircraft fitter and claims to have flown with TE Lawrence. Later became a local authority transport manager. Lives in Jacksdale, Notts. Chief petty officer stoker Bill Stone, 104 Enlisted on his 18th birthday. Saw the scuttled German fleet at Scapa Flow. Torpedoed twice in the Second World War and is believed to be the last man to have fought in both world wars. Lives in Oxford. Navigator Charles Watson, 104 The last survivor to be shot down in the First World War. His plane crashed in front of French lines and he helped the injured pilot to safety. Later a draughtsman. Lives in Bromham, Beds. Pte Cecil Withers, 106 Joined the 1st Battalion Royal Fusiliers and served in the second battle of the Somme. Wounded by shrapnel above his eye. Victim of British mustard gas which inadvertently went into British trench. Later worked for Prudential Insurance. Lives in Bexley, Kent. Pte Charles Kuentz, 107 Only survivor who fought on both Eastern and Western Fronts, where he was engaged at the Somme and Ypres. Carried the rosary of his dead mother in his backpack. Lost a son in the Second World War. Later a postal inspector. Lives in Colmar, Alsace. From HowlBloom at aol.com Fri Jan 21 04:43:26 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 23:43:26 EST Subject: [Paleopsych] the birth of galaxies--just another wonder-dance Message-ID: The following story hints that galaxies formed in the darkness of the great gravity wars roughly 400,000 years After the Big Bang (400,000 ABB). These proto-galaxies, these huge gravitational clumps, were ovoid, spinning, and would have looked like primitive, potato-shaped galaxies if we?d been able to see them. But we would not have seen them. They?d have been utterly dark. Slowly (actually rapidly in cosmic time) gravity balled together the fists of black holes at these galaxies? hearts. ?until those black holes heart?the ultimate destroyers?began to birth stars. Thus the great destroyers were also the great creators. And the competition and pre-biotic carnage of the gravity crusades led to the empires of circling stars we now see as galaxies. Howard Retrieved January 20, 2005, from the World Wide Web http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050111090727.htm Source: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Date: 2005-01-20 Print this page Email to friend Good News From Big Bad Black Holes LIVERMORE, Calif. -- Astronomers have discovered how ominous black holes can create life in the form of new stars, proving that jet-induced star formation may have played an important role in the formation of galaxies in the early universe. _..\text\black hole spewing stars.jpeg_ (aoldb://mail/write/..\text\black%20hole%20spewing%20stars.jpeg) This false-color image incorporates infrared data (invisible to the human eye). The blue regions (essentially the whole of Minkowski?s Object) show enhanced star formation. The red background galaxy and two red foreground stars appear in sharp contrast. The red overlay is the radio jet. (Image courtesy of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) Related News Stories Galaxies And Black Holes: You Can't Have One Without The Other (February 20, 2001) -- Galaxies and black holes are so intimately connected that it is almost impossible to find one without the other, according to University of Michigan astronomer Douglas Richstone. ... > full story Which Came First: Black Hole Or Galaxy? (January 14, 2000) -- U-M astronomer says black holes formed early and influenced galactic ... > full story Astrophysicists Discover Massive Forming Galaxies (September 19, 2003) -- A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory astrophysicist, in collaboration with international researchers, has found evidence for the synchronous formation of massive, luminous elliptical galaxies in ... > full story Black Holes In Distant Galaxies Point To Wild Youth, Chandra Discovers (June 5, 2002) -- Like 'flower power' tattoos on aging ex-hippy baby boomers, unexpectedly large numbers of neutron stars and black holes in elliptical galaxies suggest some of these galaxies lived through a ... > full story > more related stories Related section: Space & Time Click Here Using the Very Large Array (VLA) at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico, the Keck telescopes in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers Wil van Breugel and Steve Croft have shown that "Minkowski?s Object," a peculiar starburst system in the NGC 541 radio galaxy, formed when a radio jet ? undetectable in visible light but revealed by radio observations? emitted from a black hole collided with dense gas. The researchers carried out the observations after computer simulations at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory by Chris Fragile, Peter Anninos and Stephen Murray had shown that jets may trigger the collapse of interstellar clouds and induce star formation. The astronomers will present their findings today at the American Astronomical Society 205th national meeting, in San Diego, Calif. "Some 20 years ago this kind of thinking was thought to be science fiction," said van Breugel, who along with Croft works at the Laboratory?s Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics. "It brings poetic justice to black holes because we think of them as sucking things in, but we?ve shown that when a jet emits from a black hole, it can bring new life by collapsing clouds and creating new stars." Radio jets are formed when material falls into massive black holes. Magnetic fields around the black holes accelerate electrons to almost the speed of light. These electrons are then propelled out in narrow jets and radiate at radio frequencies because of their motion in the magnetic fields. The jets may affect the formation of stars when they collide with dense gas. But only recently have van Breugel and Croft figured out how this happens. The regions between stars in a galaxy are filled with mainly gas and dust, and are commonly called the interstellar medium. The gas appears primarily in two forms as cold clouds of atomic or molecular hydrogen or as hot ionized hydrogen near young stars. In the case of the recent discovery, the Livermore researchers observed that when a radio jet ran into a hot dense hydrogen medium in NGC 541, the medium started to cool down and formed a large neutral hydrogen cloud and, in turn, triggered star formation. Although the cloud did not emit visible radiation, it was detected by its radio frequency emission. "The formation of massive black holes is critical to the formation of new galaxies," Croft said. Van Breugel, who has been studying black holes since his days as a postdoctoral fellow more than 20 years ago, said the recent observations are another good reason to study the relationship between black holes and early galaxies. He said the conditions his team saw in NGC 541 may be important in understanding the formation of galaxies in the early universe. "Our observations show that jets from black holes can trigger extra star formation. In the early universe this process may be important because the galaxies are still young, with lots of hydrogen gas but few stars, and the black holes are more active," he said. According to the big bang theory, the universe is believed to have originated approximately 13.5 billion years ago from a cosmic explosion that hurled matter in all directions. Although van Breugel and Croft observed the jets by using the VLA, Keck and Hubbel images, they also said that the Livermore computer simulations by Fragile, Anninos and Murray were crucial to verify that this is happening. NGC 541 is approximately 216 million light years from Earth and is roughly half the size of the Milky Way. In addition to van Breugel and Croft, other collaborators on the project include W. de Vries, UC Davis; J. H. van Gorkom, Columbia University; R. Morganti and T. Osterloo, ASTRON, Netherlands; M. Dopita, Australian National University; C. Fragile, UC Santa Barbara; and Anninos and Murray, LLNL. Founded in 1952, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a national security laboratory, with a mission to ensure national security and apply science and technology to the important issues of our time. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. Editor's Note: The original news release can be found here. This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Can't find it? Try searching ScienceDaily or the entire web with: Google Web sciencedaily.com Search Our Archives Find: in: from: to sort: relevance date > more options New Job Postings Find: City: State: View: Post: Jobs / Resumes Click Here Click Here We want to hear from you! Take our quick readership survey. ??????? Copyright ? 1995-2004 ScienceDaily LLC | Contact: editor at sciencedaily.com ??????? ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 12795 bytes Desc: not available URL: From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 21 14:54:42 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 09:54:42 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Letters: Women, Science and Harvard (6 Letters) Message-ID: Women, Science and Harvard (6 Letters) NYT January 21, 2005 [Update below] To the Editor: Re "Harvard President Apologizes Again for Remarks on Gender" (news article, Jan. 20): When Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard University, suggested that women's underrepresentation in science may be attributed to innate factors related to gender, he created a "teachable moment" for greater public awareness of the need to advance women in science. Considerable research and experience refute the notion that the status quo for women in science is natural, inevitable and unrelated to social factors. Research also shows that expectations heavily influence learning and performance. If society and individuals anticipate that women will not perform as well as men, there is a good chance that those expectations will be met. We must continue to address the many ways people are discouraged from pursuing an interest in science and engineering. Society benefits most when we take full advantage of all the talent among us. It is time to create a broader awareness that enables women and other underrepresented groups to step beyond historical barriers in science and engineering. Carol B. Muller Sally K. Ride Palo Alto, Calif., Jan. 20, 2005 The writers are, respectively, chief executive of MentorNet, the E-Mentoring Network for Women in Engineering and Science; and a professor of space science, University of California, San Diego. The letter was also signed by 98 other academics and scientists. . To the Editor: If Lawrence H. Summers wanted to be intentionally provocative and stimulate debate, he could have called for mandatory 50 percent female full professorship in every discipline at Harvard in 10 years. Now that would have been provocative. Margaret E. Kosal Stanford, Calif., Jan. 18, 2005 The writer is a science fellow at Stanford University. . To the Editor: I do not understand the public outcry regarding Lawrence H. Summers's suggestion that innate differences between the sexes may explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers. Is Harvard, a bastion of excellence in higher education, not allowed to touch that question? I hope not. For critical and free-thinking ideas to flourish, it needs to be addressed. There is a procedure in evaluating hypotheses within the scientific method. If Mr. Summers's statement falls on its merits, it will be because it will be thoroughly investigated and then summarily rejected. This, in turn, will attract more women into the various scientific fields and foster a greater understanding. Isn't that, after all, the point of science? Tony McGovern Broomfield, Colo., Jan. 20, 2005 . To the Editor: I am saddened that the president of Harvard is under attack for suggesting some possible causes for the relative scarcity of senior women in science. As a woman with a talent for science, I have a personal interest in understanding why I have met so few like me. We have ample evidence that there are differences in the ways men's and women's brains process information and in the ways their bodies process medications. Why shouldn't science question whether some differences, unrelated to social conditioning, might make the genders more or less competent at science? While the academic community may have faith that scientific talent is gender-neutral, some of us would still like to know the truth of the matter so that we may one day understand, predict and control it. Elizabeth Bryson San Diego, Jan. 20, 2005 . To the Editor: As the president of Harvard, Lawrence H. Summers should be media-savvy enough to realize that according to currently fashionable double standards, it is not advisable to make public statements claiming that men might be innately better at anything. David Ballantyne Raleigh, N.C., Jan. 20, 2005 . To the Editor: Women are a rarity in mathematics and engineering. As a female engineering student, I see this every day. That said, the idea that this fact is representative of the different biological programming between men and women is utter nonsense. In recent years, the number of women entering these fields has increased significantly, as has the range of female understanding. It is thus not inability that limits numbers, but perhaps the stubborn refusal to let go of ignorant hypotheses. Kelsey Burrell La Jolla, Calif., Jan. 20, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/21/opinion/l21harvard.html --------------------------------- >From frank.forman at ed.gov Fri Jan 21 09:45:45 2005 Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 09:45:45 -0500 (EST) From: frank.forman at ed.gov To: checker at panix.com Subject: NYTimes.com Article: Harvard Chief Sorry for Remark on Women The article below from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by frank.forman at ed.gov. /--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight ------------\ SIDEWAYS: Winner of 2 Golden Globes - BEST PICTURE & BEST SCREENPLAY Critics in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston also agree... SIDEWAYS is the BEST PICTURE of the year. SIDEWAYS stars Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Sandra Oh and Virginia Madsen. SIDEWAYS is now playing in select theaters and will open nationwide this Friday. Watch the trailer at: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/sideways/index_nyt.html \----------------------------------------------------------/ Harvard Chief Sorry for Remark on Women NYT January 21, 2005 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 9:14 a.m. ET BOSTON (AP) -- Lawrence Summers' bluntness has earned him both enemies and admirers in several top Treasury Department jobs and now as president of Harvard. He's rarely been one to apologize for his directness -- until this week. Summers has spent much of the last few days saying sorry following a tumult over comments he made at a conference on women in science that he thought were off the record. Summers insists his remarks about possible biological differences in scientific ability between men and women have been misrepresented -- that he wasn't endorsing a position, just stating there is research that suggests such a difference may exist. But his words have sparked wide discussion on Harvard's campus and a string of angry calls and e-mails. In a letter to the Harvard community posted late Wednesday on the university Web site, Summers wrote: ``I deeply regret the impact of my comments and apologize for not having weighed them more carefully.'' ``I was wrong to have spoken in a way that was an unintended signal of discouragement to talented girls and women,'' he added in what was his third statement expressing contrition since the conference last Friday. Summers, an economist by training, said in a telephone interview that he hopes he'll be able to participate in academic discussions in the future. ``But particularly on sensitive topics, I will speak in much less spontaneous ways and in ways that are much more mindful of my position as president,'' he said. Some academics think that's too bad. They say it's important for college presidents to be engaged in debating important issues, and worry this episode will discourage them. ``It's rare that a university president comes and offers provocative ideas,'' said Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard and the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Cambridge research institute that hosted the conference where Summers spoke. ``All too often in universities somebody comes and it's like cutting a ribbon, and they mouth some platitudes.'' Summers already had a reputation as brilliant but indelicate, and drew attention in 2002 when a prominent black studies professor, Cornel West, left Harvard after a dispute with Summers. But Freeman and several other participants at last Friday's conference say Summers has been portrayed unfairly. They say he was simply outlining possible reasons why women aren't filling as many top science jobs as men. ``He didn't say anything that people in that room didn't have in their own minds,'' said Claudia Goldin, another Harvard and NBER economist who attended the conference. Goldin said Summers simply summarized research from papers presented at the conference. ``Why can they say them and he can't?'' The short answer -- because Summers is president of Harvard. Summers acknowledged the rules are different for him, and critics say Summers' influential position is precisely why they were so offended. ``We need to be drawing on all of the talent of our population,'' University of Washington engineering school dean Denise Denton, who confronted Summers about his comments, said in a telephone interview. ``The notion that half the population may not be up to the task, even remotely getting that idea out there, especially from the leader of a major university in the United States, that's of concern.'' Women comprise a majority of American undergraduates, but they have lagged in ascending to top university science jobs. The debate over why this is so was renewed at Harvard this year after only a few female scientists were put forward for tenure. Summers said bringing more women into the sciences is a top priority. But MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins, who walked out of Summers' talk and said it made her ``nauseous,'' said the president was expressing his own views at the conference -- and setting an unacceptable tone for Harvard. ``(We can't) start to say to young people, 'From the day you get to Harvard University your chances of making to the top aren't very good, because you're a woman,''' said Hopkins, a Harvard alumna. Summers reiterated to the AP that he ``was not expressing convictions'' but avoided apologizing for raising the issue at all. ``I certainly believe that every subject should be brought to bear in research on vitally important problems,'' he said. As Treasury secretary under President Clinton, Summers held the power to move markets with an offhand comment, and was accustomed to having every utterance scrutinized. But in this case, he believed the conference proceedings would remain private. An account was of the meeting was first published in The Boston Globe. Goldin said it's distressing the comments were leaked. ``Academic conferences are always off the record,'' she said. ``They are places to voice concerns, to provoke, so that you promote further research in areas, to ask your colleagues 'What do you think about this hypothesis?''' But Summers said, as president of Harvard, he should have known ``that some would put more than academic interpretations on my comments, even in a research setting.'' ------ On the Net: Harvard University: http://www.harvard.edu/ http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Harvard-Summers.html From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 21 14:56:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 09:56:58 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Walter B. Wriston, Banking Innovator as Chairman of Citicorp, Dies at 85 Message-ID: Walter B. Wriston, Banking Innovator as Chairman of Citicorp, Dies at 85 NYT January 21, 2005 By DOUGLAS MARTIN Walter B. Wriston, the former chairman of Citicorp who became the most influential banker of his generation by making his bank into the world's largest through a barrage of innovations, including the automated teller machine, died on Wednesday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. He was 85. The cause was pancreatic cancer, his brother-in-law, Robert Dineen, said. When he started at what was then First National City Bank in 1946, Mr. Wriston sat at a roll-top desk waiting for customers and feared that he would be bored to death by the stodgy banking world. By the time he retired in 1984, he had dazzled the industry through aggressive international expansion, computerization and diversification that seemed dizzying except when compared with the changes that followed. Mr. Wriston redefined banking as he erased rules that had long constrained banks, from operating across state lines to competing with Wall Street investment firms to paying small savers the same interest rates as large investors. By pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into automated teller machines and other technological improvements, he revolutionized the way Americans handle their money. The company, now named Citigroup, also came to dominate the credit card business. >From the fiscal crisis of New York City in the 1970's to the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980's, Mr. Wriston was at the forefront. He led the way in creating the financial supermarkets of today - offering insurance, brokerage services and even data-processing and real estate development services. His final positions were chairman and chief executive of both Citibank and its holding company, then Citicorp. Previously, holding companies had been more common among smaller banks; Mr. Wriston was instrumental in adopting them to the needs of larger banks, allowing them to offer more services. Under Mr. Wriston's 17 years of leadership, Citicorp's assets grew by 761 percent, to $150.6 billion; its net income by 764 percent, to $890 million; and its loans by 937 percent, to $102.7 billion. But he also left the company with hundreds of millions of bad loans to poor countries, a hole that took the better part of a decade to dig out of. Ultimately, the company prospered and in 1998 merged with Travelers Group Inc. in a $84 billion deal to become the world's largest financial company. It was renamed Citigroup. John F. McGillicuddy, the former chairman of the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company, said yesterday that Mr. Wriston was "the acknowledged leader of our generation of bankers." Mr. McGillicuddy said that Citibank was the first to make profitability its principal goal rather than simply having a good balance sheet. "He changed banking from a relatively slow-moving institution to a fast-moving institution," Mr. McGillicuddy said. Paul A. Volcker, who as chairman of the Federal Reserve System, sparred with Mr. Wriston over banking regulations, said that he believed that the Citicorp chairman saw himself "as a rival of the Federal Reserve in terms of his influence on the banking system." When asked to describe Mr. Wriston, Mr. Volcker said, "The word aggressive keeps coming back." In particular, the two clashed over Mr. Wriston's contention that banks no longer needed high levels of capital as long as they were profitable, well managed and growing. In the end, Mr. Wriston won out: capital restrictions today are much lower. One of his early innovations, developed with another First National City executive in 1961, was a revolutionary financial instrument - the negotiable certificate of deposit, or C.D. The bank proposed to offer these to corporations in denominations of $100,000 or more at higher interest rates. They attracted surplus cash that corporations had on hand from time to time, and were quickly imitated by other banks. As chairman of Citicorp, he continued an expansion of foreign and domestic branches he had begun as executive vice president, extending it to 41 states and 91 nations. Employees grew from 26,900 to 71,000. "He is more responsible for the current landscape of American global banking than anyone in the 20th century," Phillip L. Zweig, author of "Wriston: Walter Wriston, Citibank and the Rise and Fall of American Financial Supremacy" (Crown, 1995), said yesterday. Mr. Wriston was not without his critics. Ralph Nader in 1973 issued a 406-page report denouncing Citibank, saying that, among other things, it cheated customers and underpaid employees. The bank issued a point-by-point rebuttal, with a forward by Mr. Wriston accusing Mr. Nader of "reckless misuse of facts." Walter Bigelow Wriston was born in Middletown, Conn., on Aug. 3, 1919. His father, Henry Merritt Wriston, was a history professor at Wesleyan University who would later achieve distinction as president of Brown University and as an adviser to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. His mother, the former Ruth Colton Bigelow, was a chemistry teacher. In 1925, the family moved to Appleton, Wis., where Henry was named president of Lawrence College. In an interview in Vision magazine in 1976, Henry said the family "never had any money in the house." He added, "Walter was not brought up on Easy Street." The boy was raised as a strict Methodist and was forbidden to go to the movies or listen to the radio. He walked several miles to school, often in subzero temperatures. He became an Eagle Scout at 15, and excelled at debating. When he enrolled at Wesleyan, he first majored in chemistry but switched to history because chemistry labs and basketball practice conflicted. He edited the college newspaper and won a prize for public speaking. After earning a master's degree from the Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, he immediately joined the State Department as a junior foreign service officer. He was drafted into the Army, and served 38 months in command of a Signal Corps unit in the Philippines. After he was discharged as a second lieutenant, he decided to look for work in New York City rather than rejoining the State Department. In June 1946, he reluctantly accepted a job as a junior inspector in the controller's office of First National City Bank. He promised himself he would leave within a year if it was as boring as he expected. But his "dart hit the board" in a phrase Current Biography attributed to Mr. Wriston. He began to climb the ranks and he eventually attracted the attention of George S. Moore, who was in charge of the expansion of international operations. Mr. Moore chose him as his assistant on the basis of an evaluation that described Mr. Wriston as the most brilliant young man who had ever worked at the bank. By 1960, he had become executive vice president. In 1967, Mr. Wriston succeeded Mr. Moore as president of the bank. That year, First National City edged past the Chase Manhattan Bank, headed by David Rockefeller, to become the biggest bank in New York City. In the world, the bank was then second only to Bank of America. As president, Mr. Wriston immediately reorganized the corporation into five groups, ranging from personal banking to an investment management group capable of giving every conceivable financial service to some 7,000 institutions and individuals of high worth. The holding company called Citicorp was set up in 1968, a move that allowed the company to engage in activities normally prohibited to banks. Among other things, the corporation extended its small leasing business into an international operation that by 1973 was the world's largest, supplying everything from jumbo jets to gumball machines. In May 1970, Mr. Wriston succeeded Mr. Moore as chairman of the bank and holding company. He immediately set a goal of a 15 percent annual increase in earnings, a target considerably higher than the 10 percent or lower earnings growth rate of the 1960's. With the exception of 1975, a recession year, the goal was met. "We have zero interest in asset growth," Mr. Wriston told Vision in 1976. "What we're interested in being is the most profitable financial services business in the world, and we are." Perhaps Mr. Wriston's most revolutionary achievement was setting up the first network of A.T.M.'s, which allowed customers to do their banking at any time, rather than depending on a human teller from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Citicorp's initial investment was $50 million and it developed the technology internally. When Mr. Wriston received the Presidential Medal of Freedom recently, he said the bank "got a lot of flak" for the necessarily impersonal nature of A.T.M.'s. Ads of competitors spoke of "smiling young ladies who remember your name," he said. Mr. Wriston said, "And the answer to that was at 7:30 at night when you go to the movies and you don't have any money, you like the soulless machine." Mr. Zweig said that Mr. Wriston craftily brought women into management positions by identifying them in documents only by their initials. Some directors in particular could not imagine women in the executive dining room, Mr. Zweig said. Mr. Wriston, who also aggressively recruited minority employees, was known for his wide knowledge and sharp wit. When a New York State legislator accused the bank of peddling risky bonds during the fiscal crisis without warning people of possible problems, Mr. Wriston held up The New York Daily News with the front-page headline: "City Broke." He suggested that this news in a paper read by millions constituted adequate disclosure. Citibank was once accused of both lagging in making loans to the poor and seducing them into borrowing more money than they should. Mr. Wriston, a commanding six-feet-four figure, gibed, "Do I have a third choice?" He sometimes displayed his erudition in pop music by dropping snatches of songs into otherwise solemn discussions, The New York Times reported in 1985. On the frustrations of having too little knowledge to make a sensible decision, he paused before warbling, "I don't know enough about you." His blue eyes twinkled. Mr. Wriston's first wife, the former Barbara Bengle, died in 1966. He is survived by his wife, the former Kathryn Dineen; his daughter, Catherine, of Darien, Conn.; and two grandchildren. During his retirement Mr. Wriston wrote several books about business and technology, and served on numerous boards. Small, innovative technology companies especially intrigued him. Fortune magazine in 1999 asked him why. "Well, if I'm not awfully careful, I learn something," he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/21/obituaries/21wriston.html From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 21 14:57:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 09:57:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: In Age of Security, Firm Mines Wealth Of Personal Data Message-ID: In Age of Security, Firm Mines Wealth Of Personal Data http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22269-2005Jan19?language=printer By Robert O'Harrow Jr. Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, January 20, 2005; Page A01 It began in 1997 as a company that sold credit data to the insurance industry. But over the next seven years, as it acquired dozens of other companies, Alpharetta, Ga.-based ChoicePoint Inc. became an all-purpose commercial source of personal information about Americans, with billions of details about their homes, cars, relatives, criminal records and other aspects of their lives. As its dossier grew, so did the number of ChoicePoint's government and corporate clients, jumping from 1,000 to more than 50,000 today. Company stock once worth about $500 million ballooned to $4.1 billion. Now the little-known information industry giant is transforming itself into a private intelligence service for national security and law enforcement tasks. It is snapping up a host of companies, some of them in the Washington area, that produce sophisticated computer tools for analyzing and sharing records in ChoicePoint's immense storehouses. In financial papers, the company itself says it provides "actionable intelligence." "We do act as an intelligence agency, gathering data, applying analytics," said company vice president James A. Zimbardi. ChoicePoint and other private companies increasingly occupy a special place in homeland security and crime-fighting efforts, in part because they can compile information and use it in ways government officials sometimes cannot because of privacy and information laws. ChoicePoint renewed and expanded a contract with the Justice Department in the fall of 2001. Since then, the company and one of its leading competitors, LexisNexis Group, have also signed contracts with the Central Intelligence Agency to provide public records online, according to newly released documents. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and other government authorities have said these new tools are essential to national security. But activists for civil liberties and privacy, and some lawmakers, say current laws are inadequate to ensure that businesses and government agencies do not abuse the growing power to examine the activities of criminals and the innocent alike. These critics said it will soon be hard for individuals looking for work or access to sensitive facilities to ever shake off a criminal past or small transgression, such as a bounced check or minor arrest. Chris Hoofnagle, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit group in the District, said ChoicePoint is helping to create a " 'Scarlet Letter' society." The information industry has traditionally fought regulations, arguing that it can police itself. But hoping to avoid a regulatory backlash that could curtail his company's access to information, ChoicePoint chief executive Derek V. Smith said he'll be reaching out to Capitol Hill in the coming months to promote the industry's benefits -- and express his willingness to work with lawmakers to develop new regulations. "We have a new responsibility to society, and we want to make sure that's legitimized," Smith said. "We'd like everybody to play by the same rules and standards that society believes are correct." An entire industry has mushroomed during the past decade because of extraordinary increases in computing power, the expansion of telecommunications networks and the ability of companies like ChoicePoint to gather and make sense of public records, criminal histories and other electronic details that people now routinely leave behind. Some of these companies -- including the three major credit bureaus -- have become multi-pronged giants that regularly refresh information about more than 200 million adults and then sell that data to police, corporate marketers, homeland security officials and one another. In doing so, they wield increasing power over the multitude of decisions that affect daily life -- influencing who gets hired, who is granted credit or who can get on an airplane. ChoicePoint is not alone in eyeing the government for new business. LexisNexis and others also work closely with national security and intelligence officials. To compete in the homeland security market, LexisNexis paid $775 million last year for Seisint Inc., a rival company with a supercomputer and a counter-terrorism system dubbed Matrix. ChoicePoint, though, has distinguished itself through 58 acquisitions in recent years. Those purchases have recently been companies that have close ties to the government or have products that will sate the demand for more refined details about people and their activities. One ChoicePoint acquisition last year, Alexandria-based Templar Corp., was initially conceived by the departments of Defense and Justice to improve information sharing. Templar's system helps draw information together instantly from multiple databases. A District firm called iMapData Inc., also acquired by ChoicePoint last year, creates electronic maps of "business, economic, demographic, geographic and political" information. Its customers include intelligence and homeland security agencies. ChoicePoint, Templar and iMapData help operate a fledgling law enforcement network in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia called the Comprehensive Regional Information Management and Exchange System, or CRIMES. A similar system operates in south Florida. ChoicePoint officials hope the system will be a model for a national information-sharing network mandated last fall when Congress approved intelligence reform legislation. In marketing materials distributed to government officials, ChoicePoint says the system offers investigators "the ability to access all relevant information with a single query." Two weeks ago, ChoicePoint also completed the acquisition of i2 Ltd., a British technology firm with a subsidiary in Springfield, i2 Inc., that creates computer software to help investigators and intelligence analysts in the United States and scores of others countries finds links among people, their associates and their activities. In 2001, the FBI announced a $2 million deal to buy i2 software over three years. Company officials said their software was used by the military to help find Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In an interview, i2 Inc. President John J. Reis said analysts increasingly use the software to head off crimes or attacks, not just investigate them after the fact. "We are principally a company whose focus is all about converting large volumes of information into actionable intelligence," he said. Police, lawyers, private investigators, reporters and many others have been using commercial information services for years, as the availability of personal information skyrocketed during the 1990s. But those commercial services did not play such an important role in the secretive, high-technology realm once dominated solely by the National Security Agency and other members of the government intelligence community. The government still maintains some of the world's most sophisticated eavesdropping and spy gear. But officials often depend on commercial systems for public records, identity verification and automated analysis, such as finding anomalous personal information that might suggest a person has hidden ties to risky groups. Growing numbers of commercial systems offer "scoring" services that rate individuals for various kinds of risks. To expand its presence in the intelligence community, ChoicePoint hired a team of prominent former government officials as homeland security advisors in late 2003. They included William P. Crowell Jr., the former deputy director of the National Security Agency; Dale Watson, a former FBI executive assistant director of counter-terrorism and counterintelligence, and Viet D. Dinh, a former assistant attorney general and primary author of the USA Patriot Act. Current and former government officials praise the new services as important to efforts to investigate criminal and terrorist activity and to track down people who pose a threat. But some of those same officials, including Pasquale D'Amuro, an assistant director at the FBI and head of its New York office, also expressed qualms about whether ChoicePoint and other information services operate with enough supervision. "There are all kinds of oversight and restrictions to the federal government, to Big Brother, going out there and collecting this type of information," he said. "Yet there are no restrictions in the private sector to individuals collecting information across this country, which potentially could be a problem for the citizens of this country." Hoofnagle, the privacy activist, recently filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission claiming that ChoicePoint has worked hard to avoid triggering oversight under existing laws, including the Fair Credit Reporting Act. If ChoicePoint's reports about people are not legally considered consumer reports under the act, Hoofnagle said in the letter, then the law should be expanded to include them. Hoofnagle's letter, co-authored with George Washington University law professor Daniel J. Solove, described the Fair Credit Reporting Act as a "landmark law that ensures that compilations of personal information used for many different purposes are accurate, correctable, fairly collected." In a response, ChoicePoint said the thrust of Hoofnagle's letter was baseless. The Fair Credit Reporting Act was "not meant to be omnibus privacy legislation," the company's letter said. "Information used for investigative, law enforcement or governmental purpose is not regulated in the same manner as the information used to make decisions related to credit, insurance, or employment." ChoicePoint started as a spin-off from Equifax Inc., the credit bureau and information service. It was considered an underperforming division, with its main source of revenue coming from the insurance industry. ChoicePoint examined credit records and other personal information to help top insurers assess customers and vet insurance applications for signs of fraud. Smith and other ChoicePoint executives wanted much more. Intent on becoming a national data and analysis clearinghouse, the company went on a buying spree. ChoicePoint bought one company that screens new employees for signs of illicit drug use. It purchased another that specializes in the use of DNA to identify people, living or dead. In 2002, it bought VitalChek Network Inc., a Nashville company that provides the technology and networks to process and sell birth, death, marriage and divorce records in every state. It collected data in other ways, too. Through an employee screening system called Esteem, the company compiles reports from dozens of retailers such as Target, Home Depot and others about employees who have admitted to, or been convicted of, shoplifting. For a time in 2003 and last year, ChoicePoint even offered a background-check-in-a-box sold on the shelves of Sam's Club. The $39.77 package included a "How To Hire Quality Employees" handbook, a CD containing an online background screening package and one complimentary drug test. By 2003, ChoicePoint could claim to have the leading background screening and testing business in the nation, analyzing job applicants, soccer coaches, day-care workers and Boy Scout volunteers. About 5 million criminal records searches that year turned up almost 400,000 applicants or others who had recent criminal records. Since its inception, Smith said, his company has focused primarily on making the country a safer place, especially in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Smith said he recognizes that there have to be limits on what his company can do, if only to maintain the trust of the many millions of people whose information fuels his business. "Whatever the country decides to do, I'm willing to accept, as long as it's done in an enlightened way," Smith said. "The stakes have escalated since 2001." Some reporting for this story was done for Robert O'Harrow's book, "No Place to Hide," published by Free Press, copyright 2005. O'Harrow also received financial assistance from the Center for Investigative Reporting. O'Harrow will be online at 11 a.m. tomorrow to talk about this article and his book. Go to [3]www.washingtonpost.com/technology. From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 21 14:59:22 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 09:59:22 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Scientist: Black holes, but not as we know them Message-ID: Black holes, but not as we know them http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524836.500&print=true 5.1.22 THEY are the most fearsome objects in the universe. They swallow and destroy everything that crosses their path. Everyone knows that falling into a black hole spells doom. Or does it? In the past few years, cracks have started to appear in the conventional picture. Researchers on the quest for a more complete understanding of our universe are finding that black holes are not so black, and perhaps not holes either. Furious debates are raging over what black holes contain and even whether they deserve the name. The term "black hole" was coined in the 1960s by physicist John Wheeler to describe what happens when matter is piled into an infinitely dense point in space-time. When a star runs out of nuclear fuel, for example, the waste that remains collapses in on itself, fast and hard. The gravitational attraction of this matter can overwhelm its natural tendency to repel itself. If the star is big enough, the result will be a singularity. Around the singularity lies an event horizon, a point of no return. Light cannot escape once it passes beyond this boundary, and the eventual fate of everything within it is to be crushed into the singularity. But this picture always contained the seeds of its own destruction. In 1975 Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge calculated that black holes would slowly but inexorably evaporate. According to the laws of quantum mechanics, pairs of "virtual" particles and antiparticles continually bubble up in empty space. Hawking showed that the gravitational energy of the black hole could be lent to virtual particles near the event horizon. These could then become real, and escape, carrying away positive energy in the form of "Hawking radiation". Over time, the black hole will bleed away into outer space. This led to a problem dubbed the information paradox. While relativity seems to suggest that information about matter falling into a black hole would be lost, quantum mechanics seemed to be suggesting it would eventually escape. Hawking claimed the random nature of Hawking radiation meant that while energy could escape, information could not. But last summer, he changed his mind (New Scientist, 17 July 2004, p 11). His reversal was just one part of a larger movement to rethink the rules that govern black holes. Much of the impetus for this rethink comes from string theory, our best attempt to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics. Now 20 years old, string theory posits that space-time, and everything in it, is composed of vibrating strings so small we will be lucky ever to get evidence of their existence. Its big appeal is the promise that it could unite general relativity and quantum mechanics, because one type of string carries the force of gravity, while the vibration of the strings is random, as predicted by quantum mechanics. String theory was first applied to black holes in the mid-1990s. Andrew Strominger and Cumrun Vafa of Harvard University began to work on the information paradox by imagining what the inside of a black hole might be like. The researchers found that string theory would allow them to build highly dense little structures from strings and other objects in string theory, some of which had more than three dimensions. These structures worked just like black holes: their gravitational pull prevents light escaping from them. Strominger and Vafa counted how many ways the strings in these black holes could be arranged, and found this was amazingly large. The calculation was heralded as a huge validation for string theory. In the 1970s, Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein, then at Princeton University, had calculated the entropy of a black hole using quantum mechanics. The entropy of an object is roughly a measure of the amount of information it can contain. In particular, it measures the number of different ways the parts making up an object can be arranged. It just so happened that the number of ways that Strominger and Vafa calculated that strings could be arranged in a black hole exactly matched the entropy calculated by Hawking and Bekenstein. Fuzzballs But this did not tell physicists how those strings were arranged. Over the past year, Samir Mathur of Ohio State University and his colleagues have begun to look at what string configurations there could be in black holes. They found that the strings would always connect together to form a large, very floppy string, which would be much larger than a point-size singularity. Mathur's group calculated the total physical sizes of several stringy black holes, which they prefer to call "fuzzballs" or "stringy stars". To his surprise, they found they were the same size as the event horizon is in traditional theory. "It is changing our picture of the black hole interior," says Mathur. "It would really mean the picture of the round hole with a black dot in the centre is wrong." Mathur's fuzzball does away with the idea of the event horizon as a sharp boundary. In the traditional view, the event horizon is a well-defined limit. Objects passing particular points in space at particular moments in time are guaranteed to end up being pulverised at the black hole singularity. In the fuzzball picture, the event horizon is a frothing mass of strings, not a sharp boundary. The fuzzball picture also challenges the idea that a black hole destroys information. In Mathur's description, there is no singularity. The mass of strings reaches all the way to the fuzzy event horizon. This means information can be stored in the strings and imprinted on outgoing Hawking radiation. So what happens to the information that falls into a black hole? Imagine pouring cream into black coffee. Drop the coffee and cream into the old-style black hole and they will go to the singularity and be lost. You will never see the results of the mixture. But drop your coffee and cream onto a Mathur fuzzball and information about the cream-coffee mixture will be encoded into string vibrations. Hawking radiation that comes out can carry detailed information about what happened to each particle of cream and every particle of coffee. "There's no information problem. It's like any other ball of cotton," says Mathur. This picture is very preliminary, cautions Vafa. Mathur has not yet calculated exactly how his model applies to large black holes or understood how a black hole evolves over time. Gary Horowitz of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, also recently proposed that information can get out of a black hole. But unlike Mathur, they believe that black holes do contain a singularity at their heart. They suggested that information might escape by means of quantum teleportation. This allows the state of one particle to be instantly teleported to another. So Horowitz and Maldacena suggested that information could pass from matter hitting the singularity to outgoing Hawking radiation. But to make their calculation work, they had to assume that infalling matter and outgoing radiation would not collide with each other. If they did, this could disrupt the teleportation process. Quantum information theorists Daniel Gottesman of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, and John Preskill of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena say such disruption could occur very easily. That seems to raise a problem for Horowitz and Maldacena. But last summer, Seth Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology worked out that all such disruptions would actually cancel each other out. Then Lloyd calculated that the most information a black hole would possibly retain permanently was just half a bit - everything else will eventually escape. This applies to all black holes, whether they are supermassive ones at the heart of a galaxy (see "Giants of the universe") or mini black holes created in a particle accelerator (see "Baby black holes"). But Gottesman and Preskill have a second criticism that might be more fatal to the teleportation picture. They showed that the effect could allow faster-than-light communication, which is taboo in relativity. The teleportation calculation relies on the assumption that every piece of matter inside a black hole has the same quantum state. Although quantum mechanics allows one particle to have an instantaneous effect on the quantum state of another, this cannot be used to communicate. For example, if one person, Alice, measures the quantum state of a particle that is linked with a particle held by her friend, Bob, the effect of this measurement will be instantaneously communicated to Bob's, but there is no way to use this to communicate faster than light, because Alice needs to tell Bob what kind of measurement process she carried out on her particle, before he can decode the meaning of the change he sees. That information has to travel to Bob in the normal way. Black hole communication However, if Alice throws her particle into a black hole, the researchers found the measurement will be immediately constrained to the quantum state of the black hole. This would have an effect on Bob's particle that he could determine without needing the extra information from Alice. Gottesman concludes that the teleportation idea cannot work very well. Indeed, he wonders if the framing of the information paradox is wrong in a way that is not yet understood. "My own guess is somehow we're asking a stupid question," he says. The scenario also bothers quantum-gravity theorist Ted Jacobson of the University of Maryland, who still believes that the information that falls into black holes is lost forever to those outside the black hole. He finds the teleportation picture particularly unconvincing. "I put it in the category of desperate attempts to make information come out," he says. And even the researchers themselves aren't sure they are right. "We suggested one possibility," says Horowitz, but he admits it doesn't have a good basis in string theory yet. "So I can't say we are confident this is the right picture." Jacobson argues that the connection between the outside and inside of a black hole is so complicated in string theory that no one can be sure they have ruled out the possibility of information leaking out of our space-time. People may be simply assuming the conclusion that they want for their own reasons. "I see no problem with letting the darn stuff fall down the drain. Why are people so afraid of the singularity?" The problem, says Vafa, is that the concept of information could be very subtle in string theory, and not yet well-defined. "Information loss is a critical question, but our understanding of black holes is too primitive." So whether information can escape from black holes or is destroyed remains a topic of intense debate. But there might turn out to be a third option. One competing theory to string theory is called loop quantum gravity, pioneered by, among others, Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada. It proposes that space-time is constructed of loops even smaller than strings. Joining loops together creates a mesh of nodes and branches called a spin network. The advantage of this model is that space-time itself can be built out of these networks instead of having to be assumed, as it is in string theory. Abhay Ashtekar of Pennsylvania State University in Pittsburgh and Martin Bojowald of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Golm, Germany, have studied a model of a black hole created using spin networks. They found the equations that describe space-time continue to apply in an orderly way even at the singularity itself. This is very different to the conventional picture, in which the equations of physics break down when space-time collapses. It means that information that reaches the singularity could survive there, encoded in the spin networks. As far as Ashtekar and Bojowald can tell, the information trapped in a black hole will be unable to escape via Hawking radiation. Wait long enough, however, and it will survive, eventually rejoining the rest of the universe when the black hole evaporates. So whatever the theory that eventually supersedes relativity, it seems a good possibility that black holes may be just a little less dramatic than we thought. After all, who's afraid of a big ball of string? Giants of the universe While debate rages over what black holes really are, the astronomical evidence that every galaxy is built around a supermassive black hole is stronger than ever. Observations made with the Hubble Space Telescope have found that every galaxy has a mass at its core millions of times as massive as our sun. The bigger this mass, the larger the size of the "galactic bulge" - the number of stars clustered around the galactic centre. The speed with which stars orbit the centre of a galaxy reveals the mass of the object they are orbiting, and very careful measurements can reveal its size too. For a handful of galaxies, including the Milky Way, the central mass is known to be crammed into a space just a few times as wide as the distance between the Earth and the sun, indicating that what lies within is so dense, it must be a black hole. Some young galaxies emit copious amounts of high-energy radio and X-ray radiation. Lines in X-ray spectra taken from these objects are shifted as if the rays had struggled to escape from the strong gravitational field of a supermassive black hole. The closest object to the centre of our galaxy is a bright, compact source of radiation known as Sagittarius A*. X-ray flares coming from it, and picked up by the Chandra X-ray telescope, are thought to be the dying gasps of matter falling into a supermassive black hole. Baby black holes You don't have to go to space to find a black hole: mini versions could be created to order, right here on Earth. That's what some physicists claim will be possible using the world's most powerful particle accelerator, due to turn on in 2007. Currently under construction at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, the Large Hadron Collider will smash protons together with a collision energy of 14,000 billion electronvolts. This might just be enough to create several black holes every second, provided some strange ideas about unknown physics turn out to be right. Each mini wonder would weigh no more than a few micrograms and be smaller than a speck of dust. A black hole is thought to form when the core of a massive star collapses under its own weight and is crushed to a point. Vast amounts of matter weighing more than a few suns are needed to produce gravity strong enough for this to happen. Yet the special theory of relativity gives a clue to making black holes in the laboratory. Einstein used the theory to show that energy is equivalent to matter. So black holes should also pop into existence when vast amounts of energy are concentrated into a point, and that's exactly what happens when particles smash together at extreme energies. But there's a snag. According to our existing knowledge of particles and the forces that operate between them, the minimum energy needed to make a black hole this way is 10 million billion times more than LHC can produce. And the chances of ever building a particle accelerator that can reach such energies are virtually nil. In the past few years though, the prospects for making black holes in the lab have improved. This is down to a theory that says gravity is actually much stronger than we think. Huge masses are needed for the force of gravity to become important in everyday life, and this feebleness puzzles physicists. Some suggest that it can be explained if space has extra, invisible dimensions that only gravity can reach. The gravitational force leaks away into them, while our universe and the particles spewing out of accelerators are trapped in three dimensions, rather like specks of dust on the surface of a soap bubble. If the idea is right, gravity could be much stronger when it applies over distances so small that there is no chance of leakage into other dimensions. Pack enough energy into a 10-20-metre space and it could be enough to create a black hole. These mini curiosities will evaporate within 10-26 seconds, losing most of their mass by radiating energy, as predicted by Stephen Hawking. A group led by Roberto Emparan at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, calculated that most of this Hawking radiation should appear as particles that can be spotted by detectors. If Emparan is right, the LHC could provide the first evidence for Hawking radiation from a black hole. A computer simulation devised by Bryan Webber at the University of Cambridge and others creates mini black holes from LHC-style collisions. The simulation shows that the structures should decay into a large number of high-energy particles, which would be sprayed all over the detector. If the theory is right, researchers expect to see many more of these striking events than they might otherwise. By measuring the energy and momentum of the particles radiated, they hope to measure the mass of the mini marvels. Valerie Jamieson From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 21 15:00:56 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 10:00:56 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Alternet: The Great White Way Message-ID: The Great White Way http://www.alternet.org/story/20990/ By Carrie McLaren, Stay Free! Magazine Posted on January 14, 2005, Imagine yourself in the heart of Kansas, at the annual state fair, in 1928. Past the dunking booth and Ferris wheel, the stands selling corn dogs and cotton candy, farmers from around the state have gathered to show off the year's yields. Amid the horses, cattle, and hogs, a blue-eyed blonde family of four is displayed on an elevated platform. Over their heads is a large banner: fitter families contest. Not unlike dog shows today, Fitter Family contests pitted American citizens against one another in a battle to determine whose facial characteristics, posture, health, and habits judges deemed the most fit. The winners were usually Aryans who, if not Christian themselves, could pass as models of godly living - which isn't to suggest that the contests were strictly a rural phenomenon. Fitter Family and similar contests were popular throughout the U.S., a visible face of a long-burgeoning movement that was quickly coming to a head: eugenics. With roots reaching from the mid-1800s, eugenics was an attempt to apply science - in the form of Mendelian genetics - to improve the human race. Using Mendel's pea-plant experiments as a jumping-off point, eugenicists argued that society should consciously work to breed the best genetic traits in its citizens. There were two main approaches: positive eugenics encouraged persons with desirable traits to breed, and negative eugenics barred "undesirables" from breeding. Though steeped in the kind of racist and anti-immigrant beliefs generally associated with right-wingers, eugenics ideas were at least as likely to be advocated by social radicals and progressive thinkers as by conservatives. Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Woodrow Wilson, H.G. Wells, Emma Goldman, and Margaret Sanger (the founder of Planned Parenthood) were among its fans. Some, like Sanger and the English critic Havelock Ellis, saw eugenics as a way to liberate women through its promotion of birth control. For those with socialist leanings, eugenics reflected a privileging of society's interests over those of the individual. Perhaps the most surprising thing about eugenics was its widespread popularity among middle- and upper-class Americans. Popular literature from the late 1800s up through the 1930s was littered with eugenics-inspired language about bettering the human race. Although such language squarely fit progressive ideals at the time, some of the underlying mechanics were downright grisly. Charles Davenport headed the eugenics movement in the U.S. with the Eugenics Record Office, a group funded largely with Rockefeller and Carnegie dollars. Davenport pushed negative eugenics remedies to prevent births among those deemed genetically undesirable (in order of priority): the "feebleminded," paupers, alcoholics, criminals, epileptics, the insane, the constitutionally weak, people predisposed to specific diseases, deformed persons, and those born deaf, blind, or mute. Few of these problems could be scientifically tied to genes, of course, but Davenport was seldom troubled by such facts. The "feebleminded" diagnosis alone was so vague and elastic - applying to anyone deemed stupid or immoral - as to be meaningless. Nonetheless, Davenport and his cronies called for segregating, incarcerating, sterilizing and castrating all such persons. (Why castration? Some eugenicists argued that, though sterilization prevented people from breeding, the operation would encourage the unfit to have more and more sex, and spread disease, once reproduction was no longer an issue. Castration, needless to say, solved that.) Such harsh remedies were deemed necessary to prevent the unfit from polluting the gene pool and were surprisingly well-received by government officials. The U.S. Department of Agriculture was closely aligned with the American Breeders Association, a prominent supporter of eugenics. And in 1907, states began sterilizing citizens they considered a problem. Indiana was first, followed by Washington, Connecticut, Virginia, and California. Often surgery was performed without the victims' knowledge. Poor women admitted to a hospital for a minor illness might leave with their tubes tied, only to discover later that they couldn't get pregnant. The vast majority of sterilizations were carried out on the underclass: poor people, immigrants, those in jails or public mental hospitals. (Delaware even managed to criminalize marriage between poor people!) Making matters worse, the institutions set up to serve these populations were in some cases the very forces that enslaved them. As Edwin Black notes in his book War Against the Weak, eugenics infected many reform movements, from child welfare to public health. The New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration was founded to help immigrants but employed investigators to screen out "defectives." The National Committee on Prison Labor expanded its mission to include documenting hereditary criminality. New York State's Commissioner of Public Health advocated a plan by Lucien Howe to investigate hereditary blindness. The investigation never happened, but if it had gone according to Howe's plan, the state would have ultimately rounded up blind people and imprisoned them, an effort to save taxpayers' money. Men like Howe were eugenics extremists, but even he found some mainstream support. As a committee chair within the American Medical Association, Howe got the AMA to endorse a law that would allow taxpayers to issue injunctions against others' marriages if one person had eye defects - including nearsightedness. And these are just the negative eugenics efforts! Attempts to push positive eugenic remedies were equally far-out, with calls for polygamy, systematic mating, and even marriage among cousins - all in an attempt to multiply desirable bloodlines. Some argued that the government should offer genetic superiors financial incentives to have children, a tactic later used by Nazi Germany. As one Dr. Sharp of Indiana Reformatory argued in 1902: "We make a choice of the best rams for our sheep ... and keep the best dogs. ... How careful then should we be in the begetting of children?" According to Black, British eugenicists even argued that the military should issue eugenic stripes to the "meritorious wounded," presumably to "offset the injuries that might make such men less attractive to women." War was considered dysgenic - it killed off society's best. Eugenicists therefore opposed it. (By the same measure, eugenicists would have supported war today; today's military is disproportionately made up of ethnic minorities and immigrants, groups once widely considered to be genetically unfit.) The eugenics movement finally started to crumble with the rise of Nazi Germany. Partly inspired by eugenics efforts in the United States, Hitler's government began a national program to round up and sterilize the unfit. Many leading eugenicists in the States watched in awe. A prominent Virginia doctor, dismayed at the rapid growth of undesirables, urged the state legislature to broaden its sterilization law by warning, "Hitler is beating us at our own game!" Such true believers held to their guns with the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, applauding Hitler and seething with envy as their utopian fantasies played out across the Atlantic. But public support for eugenics withered rapidly, funding dried up, and serious scientists did everything they could to distance the study of genetics from its horrible cousin. By the end of World War II, the eugenics movement was dead - so dead, in fact, that in this era of gene splicing and cloning, we seldom hear of it. Daniel Kevles published what may be the best history of eugenics to date in 1985, In the Name of Eugenics (Harvard University Press). Kevles is also the author of The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Harvard), The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character (W.W. Norton); and co-author of The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project (Harvard) and Inventing America: A History of the United States (W.W. Norton). In addition, Kevles has written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. Kevles is the Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University and has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, and Princeton. Though currently immersed in a new project - a history of intellectual property in living organisms - he took time to talk to Stay Free! by telephone. - Carrie McLaren STAY FREE!: People who pushed negative eugenics argued that the genes of dark-skinned people are inferior and that unless the state prevented them from multiplying, the inferiors would take over and pollute the human race. How did this idea fit their Darwinist beliefs? It seems to contradict the idea of "survival of the fittest." DANIEL KEVLES: That's an excellent point. There's an inherent contradiction in eugenic doctrine in relationship to evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory holds that the definition of fitness is your ability to reproduce and have your children survive. In eugenic doctrine, the definition of fitness is the opposite. They define fitness by who thrives in society socially. Educated, wealthy people actually reproduce at a slower rate, but eugenicists want them to have as many children as possible. Their charge that lower income groups are proliferating too rapidly is in a sense anti-Darwinian. STAY FREE!: Did they ever address that contradiction? KEVLES: No, not really. STAY FREE!: There's an interesting quote by Margaret Sanger about Charles Davenport in your book. You write: Sanger recalled that Davenport, in expressing worry about contraception of elites, "used to lift his eyes reverently and, with his hands upraised as though in supplication, quiver emotionally as he breathed. 'Protoplasm. We want protoplasm!' " How important was religion to eugenics? KEVLES: Well, I don't think it was fundamental. Eugenics was essentially a secular religion. In the late 19th century, evolution posed a serious challenge to Christianity, so people began searching for some kind of substitute and a number of them found it in science. STAY FREE!: But weren't some eugenicists religious and enthusiastic about science? KEVLES: I wouldn't say that they were religious in a conventional Christian sense. A lot of them were agnostic, some were atheist. Even clerics felt that they had to reconcile their own beliefs with science. STAY FREE!: You wrote that business talent wasn't seen as a genetically desirable trait and that there were few businessmen in the movement. Why do you think that is? KEVLES: The main proponents of eugenics were white, middle-class folks whose criteria for achievement were fundamentally scholastic - getting good grades in school, getting ahead in one of the professions. They felt threatened by industrial corporate power and didn't particularly identify with the materialism of business success. STAY FREE!: In War Against the Weak, Edwin Black argues that eugenicists were mostly elites, not middle-class. KEVLES: I think he's mistaken; his book was fundamentally a polemical one. They were elites in the sense that they included philanthropic elites and university elites. But there was very broad middle-class support for eugenics. The important thing is to ask why. STAY FREE!: What are the signs that there was broad middle class support? KEVLES: Eugenics doctrines were widespread in mainstream magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and newspapers. The people who organized eugenics activities on a local level were the solid middle class of their communities, both in Britain and the United States. STAY FREE!: Eugenics language was common among ad men and people who worked in public relations. In the 1920s, they would constantly refer to the public's "twelve-year-old" mind and refer to immigrants as barnyard animals. KEVLES: These were common tropes of popular culture. This isn't business culture as such; advertising people aren't the captains of industry. STAY FREE!: What kind of economic arguments did the eugenics movement make? KEVLES: There was one fundamental economic argument: if we could rid ourselves of the genetically inadequate, who were burdens on society - requiring asylums for the feebleminded or homes for the poor - we could reduce the cost to taxpayers. You see this again and again. STAY FREE!: Do you think extremists like Davenport were seriously concerned about money or was it more of a rhetorical strategy to win popular support? KEVLES: Davenport was concerned about keeping taxes down; his position was both rhetorical and real. The two are not inconsistent. I don't think that these folks were just deliberately manipulating that rhetoric in order to advance a kind of subtextual doctrine. STAY FREE!: Was there any connection between the eugenics movement and libertarianism? Ayn Rand, "greed is good," "Abolish the government" - that sort of thing? KEVLES: Quite the opposite. Even though there were conventional political conservatives in the eugenics movement, they never took the position that government should interfere in, say, human reproduction. That was a departure in laissez-faire for them. At the same time, they were consistent with eugenicists on the left who found it natural to evoke the powers of the state in advancing eugenics doctrine. STAY FREE!: I guess I'm thinking of Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher who influenced eugenics - and how he argued that giving to the poor harms society by interfering with Darwinism. KEVLES: Eugenicists are not talking about giving to the poor - they're talking about eliminating their ability to reproduce. STAY FREE!: Right. But I'm asking whether eugenicists would be opposed to giving, or opposed to charity. KEVLES: Eugenicists on the right were by and large reluctant to provide the poor with relief. Those on the left were not; in fact, they tended to endorse environmental improvement along with sterilization. STAY FREE!: Retarded women were considered sources of debauchery. What was that about? KEVLES: This was Henry Goddard's theory: that the sexual impulses of feeble-minded women were not restrained and as a result they became prostitutes and illegitimate mothers. Basically, this is an uncritical interweaving of middle-class morality with the metaphors of science. STAY FREE!: After World War II, scientists backed away from studying eugenics to studying genetics. Eugenics organizations and publications renamed themselves. Human Betterment League of North Carolina changed its name to the Human Genetics League. The Annals of Eugenics became the Annals of Human Genetics. The Galton Eugenics Laboratory became the Galton Laboratory of the Department of Genetics. How much of this was a sincere attempt to get away from the horrors of eugenics verses a public relations effort? KEVLES: Scientists stayed away from human genetics between the wars because, first of all, human beings are not the best subjects for studying heredity; we reproduce slowly and have fewer children than, say, fruit flies. There are profound methodological problems. But another reason was that eugenics was the principal arena in which human heredity was studied - eugenics gave human genetics a bad name. So scientists faced a double task. One was to get rid of the race and class bias; that's why people like James V. Neel focused on traits that were purely physically determined, such as sickle-cell anemia. And second was solving the methodological problems. As far as scientists were concerned, I don't think public relations had anything to do with it. STAY FREE!: The critics you write about were mainly intellectuals. Was there a popular critique of eugenics? KEVLES: There were certainly popular dissents, which took the form of resistance to sterilization laws and other eugenics policies. STAY FREE!: Was there organizing around these issues? KEVLES: First, you've got to remember that the sterilization laws are local and state laws. They're not national. So the opposition is at the state level. Dissent was cast initially in both civil libertarian terms - you know, "this is just wrong, the state shouldn't have the power to sterilize men or women." And secondly on constitutional grounds. States were charged with violating equal protection of the laws, due process, and the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Once Hitler got going in the 1930s, a growing number of people turned against eugenics and eugenic sterilization because they saw what Hitler was doing with it. STAY FREE!: You are currently working on a book about engineering and the ownership of life. Do you see any connections between this and your eugenics research? KEVLES: No. Eugenics took some inspiration from plant and animal breeders but the influence didn't run the other way. The historian Harriet Ritvo argued in her book The Animal Estate that the emphasis in the nineteenth century given by breeders to so-called pure breeds of, say, Holstein cows was an expression of their commitment to a social aristocracy. I think there may be some truth to that. But there are other good biological and economic reasons why breeders wanted to emphasize pure breeds. STAY FREE!: One of my pet peeves is the amount of time and money spent on finding, say, a "breast cancer gene" while comparatively few resources are put into eliminating carcinogens and other pollutants from the environment. I remember once reading that people with a certain gene can't tolerate NutraSweet, as if the problem is their genes, not the product. KEVLES: I think that we as a society are more inclined to focus on the individual susceptibility to disease than we are on public health measures. It's understandable why we do that. Partly, you have companies that are financially motivated to produce NutraSweet or to make gene discoveries. But at the same time we are disinclined to pursue public health measures because they can be very expensive. It seems to me that a wise society would pursue both. That is, I don't think NutraSweet should be taken off the market, because millions of people want it. So you find out who's susceptible to adverse reactions. People are allergic to any number of things, but that doesn't mean that they should be removed from the market. What's the frequency of allergic reactions to this stuff? STAY FREE!: I don't know. What bothers me is that the onus is placed on the individual. It's not my fault if I have a reaction from consuming NutraSweet; I'm supposed to go get a genetic test to find out? KEVLES: Both sides should be responsible. But here's my question: If a tenth of a percent of the population has a bad reaction, do you deprive the rest of the population of it? Or do you put a warning label on it? STAY FREE!: Well, I think that's a question that really needs to be asked. KEVLES: The FDA asks that kind of question all the time. It's just too easy to write off these things as corporations forcing themselves and their products on people. They wouldn't work if people didn't want to use them. STAY FREE!: But more people wouldn't use them if they knew they are associated with health problems. KEVLES: I think that publicity of these side effects is important. I certainly support that. But we have a tendency in our society to attribute a lot to environmental causes rather than to things that are inherent within ourselves. Take cancer, for example. Cancer is a joint product of environmental causes, your own genes, and also accidents. Genetic accidents. A mutation in a gene that controls cell growth can make the cell cancerous. These mutations can arise from carcinogens in the environment or in your diet, but they can also arise from accidents in cellular replication. To say all this is a result of environmental carcinogens is just wrong. STAY FREE!: Well, most people may assume environmental toxins cause cancer, but it seems to me that very little is done about it. I guess this says something about where I sit on the political spectrum. KEVLES: I'm not saying that corporations that pollute ought not be held to account. They should. But we also have a tendency to believe in environmental perfectionism in the United States; it's in our culture. That leads us to expectations that are unrealistic about what we can accomplish for our health. The fact of the matter is that we're all mortal. STAY FREE!: What kind of eugenics laws exist now? If I had a retarded son could I legally have him sterilized? KEVLES: It would depend on the state and the circumstance. A number of states have gone far in the other direction and made it very difficult; I think there are good reasons why you might want to have a retarded child sterilized. When my book came out in the mid-'80s there was a case in California where a woman was concerned that her young daughter, who was severely retarded, might become pregnant in a hospital; being affectionate and unknowing, the girl might submit to some orderly's advances. The mother ran up against state law in California that wouldn't allow her to sterilize her daughter. So she eventually took her case to the California Supreme Court and won there. I'm not an expert on the laws, but I know generally that it has been difficult. STAY FREE!: The fear that people are getting stupider seemed to come in cycles throughout the 20th century, at least in the U.S. and Britain. Every so often, there's an outcry about the decline of national intelligence - even in the 1950s and 1970s, long after the decline of eugenics. What do you think is behind this? KEVLES: I think these things come from a variety of sources. One of the main sources is racism in American culture. The folks who are usually the target of these charges are minority groups and, in more recent years, recent immigrants. From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 21 15:02:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 10:02:51 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Yorker: Seymour M. Hersch: The Coming Wars Message-ID: New Yorker: Seymour M. Hersch: The Coming Wars What the Pentagon can now do in secret. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050124fa_fact January 19, 2005 Issue of 2005-01-24 and 31 Posted 2005-01-17 George W. Bush's re?lection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities' strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control--against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism--during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as "facilitators" of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way. Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region. Bush's re?lection is regarded within the Administration as evidence of America's support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon's civilian leadership who advocated the invasion, including Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy. According to a former high-level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people did not accept their message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no second-guessing. "This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone," the former high-level intelligence official told me. "Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign. We've declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah--we've got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism." Bush and Cheney may have set the policy, but it is Rumsfeld who has directed its implementation and has absorbed much of the public criticism when things went wrong--whether it was prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib or lack of sufficient armor plating for G.I.s' vehicles in Iraq. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called for Rumsfeld's dismissal, and he is not widely admired inside the military. Nonetheless, his reappointment as Defense Secretary was never in doubt. Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld's responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon's control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia. The President's decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books--free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) "The Pentagon doesn't feel obligated to report any of this to Congress," the former high-level intelligence official said. "They don't even call it `covert ops'--it's too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it's `black reconnaissance.' They're not even going to tell the cincs"--the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.) In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. "Everyone is saying, `You can't be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,'" the former intelligence official told me. "But they say, `We've got some lessons learned--not militarily, but how we did it politically. We're not going to rely on agency pissants.' No loose ends, and that's why the C.I.A. is out of there." For more than a year, France, Germany, Britain, and other countries in the European Union have seen preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon as a race against time--and against the Bush Administration. They have been negotiating with the Iranian leadership to give up its nuclear-weapons ambitions in exchange for economic aid and trade benefits. Iran has agreed to temporarily halt its enrichment programs, which generate fuel for nuclear power plants but also could produce weapons-grade fissile material. (Iran claims that such facilities are legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or N.P.T., to which it is a signator, and that it has no intention of building a bomb.) But the goal of the current round of talks, which began in December in Brussels, is to persuade Tehran to go further, and dismantle its machinery. Iran insists, in return, that it needs to see some concrete benefits from the Europeans--oil-production technology, heavy-industrial equipment, and perhaps even permission to purchase a fleet of Airbuses. (Iran has been denied access to technology and many goods owing to sanctions.) The Europeans have been urging the Bush Administration to join in these negotiations. The Administration has refused to do so. The civilian leadership in the Pentagon has argued that no diplomatic progress on the Iranian nuclear threat will take place unless there is a credible threat of military action. "The neocons say negotiations are a bad deal," a senior official of the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) told me. "And the only thing the Iranians understand is pressure. And that they also need to be whacked." The core problem is that Iran has successfully hidden the extent of its nuclear program, and its progress. Many Western intelligence agencies, including those of the United States, believe that Iran is at least three to five years away from a capability to independently produce nuclear warheads--although its work on a missile-delivery system is far more advanced. Iran is also widely believed by Western intelligence agencies and the I.A.E.A. to have serious technical problems with its weapons system, most notably in the production of the hexafluoride gas needed to fabricate nuclear warheads. A retired senior C.I.A. official, one of many who left the agency recently, told me that he was familiar with the assessments, and confirmed that Iran is known to be having major difficulties in its weapons work. He also acknowledged that the agency's timetable for a nuclear Iran matches the European estimates--assuming that Iran gets no outside help. "The big wild card for us is that you don't know who is capable of filling in the missing parts for them," the recently retired official said. "North Korea? Pakistan? We don't know what parts are missing." One Western diplomat told me that the Europeans believed they were in what he called a "lose-lose position" as long as the United States refuses to get involved. "France, Germany, and the U.K. cannot succeed alone, and everybody knows it," the diplomat said. "If the U.S. stays outside, we don't have enough leverage, and our effort will collapse." The alternative would be to go to the Security Council, but any resolution imposing sanctions would likely be vetoed by China or Russia, and then "the United Nations will be blamed and the Americans will say, `The only solution is to bomb.'" A European Ambassador noted that President Bush is scheduled to visit Europe in February, and that there has been public talk from the White House about improving the President's relationship with America's E.U. allies. In that context, the Ambassador told me, "I'm puzzled by the fact that the United States is not helping us in our program. How can Washington maintain its stance without seriously taking into account the weapons issue?" The Israeli government is, not surprisingly, skeptical of the European approach. Silvan Shalom, the Foreign Minister, said in an interview last week in Jerusalem,with another New Yorker journalist, "I don't like what's happening. We were encouraged at first when the Europeans got involved. For a long time, they thought it was just Israel's problem. But then they saw that the [Iranian] missiles themselves were longer range and could reach all of Europe, and they became very concerned. Their attitude has been to use the carrot and the stick--but all we see so far is the carrot." He added, "If they can't comply, Israel cannot live with Iran having a nuclear bomb." In a recent essay, Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (and a supporter of the Administration), articulated the view that force, or the threat of it, was a vital bargaining tool with Iran. Clawson wrote that if Europe wanted co?peration with the Bush Administration it "would do well to remind Iran that the military option remains on the table." He added that the argument that the European negotiations hinged on Washington looked like "a pre?mptive excuse for the likely breakdown of the E.U.-Iranian talks." In a subsequent conversation with me, Clawson suggested that, if some kind of military action was inevitable, "it would be much more in Israel's interest--and Washington's--to take covert action. The style of this Administration is to use overwhelming force--`shock and awe.' But we get only one bite of the apple." There are many military and diplomatic experts who dispute the notion that military action, on whatever scale, is the right approach. Shahram Chubin, an Iranian scholar who is the director of research at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, told me, "It's a fantasy to think that there's a good American or Israeli military option in Iran." He went on, "The Israeli view is that this is an international problem. `You do it,' they say to the West. `Otherwise, our Air Force will take care of it.'" In 1981, the Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq's Osirak reactor, setting its nuclear program back several years. But the situation now is both more complex and more dangerous, Chubin said. The Osirak bombing "drove the Iranian nuclear-weapons program underground, to hardened, dispersed sites," he said. "You can't be sure after an attack that you'll get away with it. The U.S. and Israel would not be certain whether all the sites had been hit, or how quickly they'd be rebuilt. Meanwhile, they'd be waiting for an Iranian counter-attack that could be military or terrorist or diplomatic. Iran has long-range missiles and ties to Hezbollah, which has drones--you can't begin to think of what they'd do in response." Chubin added that Iran could also renounce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. "It's better to have them cheating within the system," he said. "Otherwise, as victims, Iran will walk away from the treaty and inspections while the rest of the world watches the N.P.T. unravel before their eyes." The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids. "The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible," the government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told me. Some of the missions involve extraordinary co?peration. For example, the former high-level intelligence official told me that an American commando task force has been set up in South Asia and is now working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists and technicians who had dealt with Iranian counterparts. (In 2003, the I.A.E.A. disclosed that Iran had been secretly receiving nuclear technology from Pakistan for more than a decade, and had withheld that information from inspectors.) The American task force, aided by the information from Pakistan, has been penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan in a hunt for underground installations. The task-force members, or their locally recruited agents, secreted remote detection devices--known as sniffers--capable of sampling the atmosphere for radioactive emissions and other evidence of nuclear-enrichment programs. Getting such evidence is a pressing concern for the Bush Administration. The former high-level intelligence official told me, "They don't want to make any W.M.D. intelligence mistakes, as in Iraq. The Republicans can't have two of those. There's no education in the second kick of a mule." The official added that the government of Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani President, has won a high price for its co?peration--American assurance that Pakistan will not have to hand over A. Q. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, to the I.A.E.A. or to any other international authorities for questioning. For two decades, Khan has been linked to a vast consortium of nuclear-black-market activities. Last year, Musharraf professed to be shocked when Khan, in the face of overwhelming evidence, "confessed" to his activities. A few days later, Musharraf pardoned him, and so far he has refused to allow the I.A.E.A. or American intelligence to interview him. Khan is now said to be living under house arrest in a villa in Islamabad. "It's a deal--a trade-off," the former high-level intelligence official explained. "`Tell us what you know about Iran and we will let your A. Q. Khan guys go.' It's the neoconservatives' version of short-term gain at long-term cost. They want to prove that Bush is the anti-terrorism guy who can handle Iran and the nuclear threat, against the long-term goal of eliminating the black market for nuclear proliferation." The agreement comes at a time when Musharraf, according to a former high-level Pakistani diplomat, has authorized the expansion of Pakistan's nuclear-weapons arsenal. "Pakistan still needs parts and supplies, and needs to buy them in the clandestine market," the former diplomat said. "The U.S. has done nothing to stop it." There has also been close, and largely unacknowledged, co?peration with Israel. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon said that the Defense Department civilians, under the leadership of Douglas Feith, have been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine potential nuclear, chemical-weapons, and missile targets inside Iran. (After Osirak, Iran situated many of its nuclear sites in remote areas of the east, in an attempt to keep them out of striking range of other countries, especially Israel. Distance no longer lends such protection, however: Israel has acquired three submarines capable of launching cruise missiles and has equipped some of its aircraft with additional fuel tanks, putting Israeli F-16I fighters within the range of most Iranian targets.) "They believe that about three-quarters of the potential targets can be destroyed from the air, and a quarter are too close to population centers, or buried too deep, to be targeted," the consultant said. Inevitably, he added, some suspicious sites need to be checked out by American or Israeli commando teams--in on-the-ground surveillance--before being targeted. The Pentagon's contingency plans for a broader invasion of Iran are also being updated. Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military's war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran. Updating the plan makes sense, whether or not the Administration intends to act, because the geopolitics of the region have changed dramatically in the last three years. Previously, an American invasion force would have had to enter Iran by sea, by way of the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman; now troops could move in on the ground, from Afghanistan or Iraq. Commando units and other assets could be introduced through new bases in the Central Asian republics. It is possible that some of the American officials who talk about the need to eliminate Iran's nuclear infrastructure are doing so as part of a propaganda campaign aimed at pressuring Iran to give up its weapons planning. If so, the signals are not always clear. President Bush, who after 9/11 famously depicted Iran as a member of the "axis of evil," is now publicly emphasizing the need for diplomacy to run its course. "We don't have much leverage with the Iranians right now," the President said at a news conference late last year. "Diplomacy must be the first choice, and always the first choice of an administration trying to solve an issue of . . . nuclear armament. And we'll continue to press on diplomacy." In my interviews over the past two months, I was given a much harsher view. The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become clear that the Europeans' negotiated approach cannot succeed, and that at that time the Administration will act. "We're not dealing with a set of National Security Council option papers here," the former high-level intelligence official told me. "They've already passed that wicket. It's not if we're going to do anything against Iran. They're doing it." The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran's ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. "Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement," the consultant told me. "The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse"--like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said. "The idea that an American attack on Iran's nuclear facilities would produce a popular uprising is extremely illinformed," said Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar who worked on the National Security Council in the Bush Administration. "You have to understand that the nuclear ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum, and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on their ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern nation that's technologically sophisticated." Leverett, who is now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the Brookings Institution, warned that an American attack, if it takes place, "will produce an Iranian backlash against the United States and a rallying around the regime." Rumsfeld planned and lobbied for more than two years before getting Presidential authority, in a series of findings and executive orders, to use military commandos for covert operations. One of his first steps was bureaucratic: to shift control of an undercover unit, known then as the Gray Fox (it has recently been given a new code name), from the Army to the Special Operations Command (socom), in Tampa. Gray Fox was formally assigned to socom in July, 2002, at the instigation of Rumsfeld's office, which meant that the undercover unit would have a single commander for administration and operational deployment. Then, last fall, Rumsfeld's ability to deploy the commandos expanded. According to a Pentagon consultant, an Execute Order on the Global War on Terrorism (referred to throughout the government as gwot) was issued at Rumsfeld's direction. The order specifically authorized the military "to find and finish" terrorist targets, the consultant said. It included a target list that cited Al Qaeda network members, Al Qaeda senior leadership, and other high-value targets. The consultant said that the order had been cleared throughout the national-security bureaucracy in Washington. In late November, 2004, the Times reported that Bush had set up an interagency group to study whether it "would best serve the nation" to give the Pentagon complete control over the C.I.A.'s own ?lite paramilitary unit, which has operated covertly in trouble spots around the world for decades. The panel's conclusions, due in February, are foregone, in the view of many former C.I.A. officers. "It seems like it's going to happen," Howard Hart, who was chief of the C.I.A.'s Paramilitary Operations Division before retiring in 1991, told me. There was other evidence of Pentagon encroachment. Two former C.I.A. clandestine officers, Vince Cannistraro and Philip Giraldi, who publish Intelligence Brief, a newsletter for their business clients, reported last month on the existence of a broad counter-terrorism Presidential finding that permitted the Pentagon "to operate unilaterally in a number of countries where there is a perception of a clear and evident terrorist threat. . . . A number of the countries are friendly to the U.S. and are major trading partners. Most have been cooperating in the war on terrorism." The two former officers listed some of the countries--Algeria, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, and Malaysia. (I was subsequently told by the former high-level intelligence official that Tunisia is also on the list.) Giraldi, who served three years in military intelligence before joining the C.I.A., said that he was troubled by the military's expanded covert assignment. "I don't think they can handle the cover," he told me. "They've got to have a different mind-set. They've got to handle new roles and get into foreign cultures and learn how other people think. If you're going into a village and shooting people, it doesn't matter," Giraldi added. "But if you're running operations that involve finesse and sensitivity, the military can't do it. Which is why these kind of operations were always run out of the agency." I was told that many Special Operations officers also have serious misgivings. Rumsfeld and two of his key deputies, Stephen Cambone, the Under-secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, will be part of the chain of command for the new commando operations. Relevant members of the House and Senate intelligence committees have been briefed on the Defense Department's expanded role in covert affairs, a Pentagon adviser assured me, but he did not know how extensive the briefings had been. "I'm conflicted about the idea of operating without congressional oversight," the Pentagon adviser said. "But I've been told that there will be oversight down to the specific operation." A second Pentagon adviser agreed, with a significant caveat. "There are reporting requirements," he said. "But to execute the finding we don't have to go back and say, `We're going here and there.' No nitty-gritty detail and no micromanagement." The legal questions about the Pentagon's right to conduct covert operations without informing Congress have not been resolved. "It's a very, very gray area," said Jeffrey H. Smith, a West Point graduate who served as the C.I.A.'s general counsel in the mid-nineteen-nineties. "Congress believes it voted to include all such covert activities carried out by the armed forces. The military says, `No, the things we're doing are not intelligence actions under the statute but necessary military steps authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to "prepare the battlefield."'" Referring to his days at the C.I.A., Smith added, "We were always careful not to use the armed forces in a covert action without a Presidential finding. The Bush Administration has taken a much more aggressive stance." In his conversation with me, Smith emphasized that he was unaware of the military's current plans for expanding covert action. But he said, "Congress has always worried that the Pentagon is going to get us involved in some military misadventure that nobody knows about." Under Rumsfeld's new approach, I was told, U.S. military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists. This could potentially involve organizing and carrying out combat operations, or even terrorist activities. Some operations will likely take place in nations in which there is an American diplomatic mission, with an Ambassador and a C.I.A. station chief, the Pentagon consultant said. The Ambassador and the station chief would not necessarily have a need to know, under the Pentagon's current interpretation of its reporting requirement. The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls "action teams" in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. "Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?" the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. "We founded them and we financed them," he said. "The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren't going to tell Congress about it." A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon's commando capabilities, said, "We're going to be riding with the bad boys." One of the rationales for such tactics was spelled out in a series of articles by John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, and a consultant on terrorism for the rand corporation. "It takes a network to fight a network," Arquilla wrote in a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle: When conventional military operations and bombing failed to defeat the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya in the 1950s, the British formed teams of friendly Kikuyu tribesmen who went about pretending to be terrorists. These "pseudo gangs," as they were called, swiftly threw the Mau Mau on the defensive, either by befriending and then ambushing bands of fighters or by guiding bombers to the terrorists' camps. What worked in Kenya a half-century ago has a wonderful chance of undermining trust and recruitment among today's terror networks. Forming new pseudo gangs should not be difficult. "If a confused young man from Marin County can join up with Al Qaeda," Arquilla wrote, referring to John Walker Lindh, the twenty-year-old Californian who was seized in Afghanistan, "think what professional operatives might do." A few pilot covert operations were conducted last year, one Pentagon adviser told me, and a terrorist cell in Algeria was "rolled up" with American help. The adviser was referring, apparently, to the capture of Ammari Saifi, known as Abderrezak le Para, the head of a North African terrorist network affiliated with Al Qaeda. But at the end of the year there was no agreement within the Defense Department about the rules of engagement. "The issue is approval for the final authority," the former high-level intelligence official said. "Who gets to say `Get this' or `Do this'?" A retired four-star general said, "The basic concept has always been solid, but how do you insure that the people doing it operate within the concept of the law? This is pushing the edge of the envelope." The general added, "It's the oversight. And you're not going to get Warner"--John Warner, of Virginia, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee--"and those guys to exercise oversight. This whole thing goes to the Fourth Deck." He was referring to the floor in the Pentagon where Rumsfeld and Cambone have their offices. "It's a finesse to give power to Rumsfeld--giving him the right to act swiftly, decisively, and lethally," the first Pentagon adviser told me. "It's a global free-fire zone." The Pentagon has tried to work around the limits on covert activities before. In the early nineteen-eighties, a covert Army unit was set up and authorized to operate overseas with minimal oversight. The results were disastrous. The Special Operations program was initially known as Intelligence Support Activity, or I.S.A., and was administered from a base near Washington (as was, later, Gray Fox). It was established soon after the failed rescue, in April, 1980, of the American hostages in Iran, who were being held by revolutionary students after the Islamic overthrow of the Shah's regime. At first, the unit was kept secret from many of the senior generals and civilian leaders in the Pentagon, as well as from many members of Congress. It was eventually deployed in the Reagan Administration's war against the Sandinista government, in Nicaragua. It was heavily committed to supporting the Contras. By the mid-eighties, however, the I.S.A.'s operations had been curtailed, and several of its senior officers were courtmartialled following a series of financial scandals, some involving arms deals. The affair was known as "the Yellow Fruit scandal," after the code name given to one of the I.S.A.'s cover organizations--and in many ways the group's procedures laid the groundwork for the Iran-Contra scandal. Despite the controversy surrounding Yellow Fruit, the I.S.A. was kept intact as an undercover unit by the Army. "But we put so many restrictions on it," the second Pentagon adviser said. "In I.S.A., if you wanted to travel fifty miles you had to get a special order. And there were certain areas, such as Lebanon, where they could not go." The adviser acknowledged that the current operations are similar to those two decades earlier, with similar risks--and, as he saw it, similar reasons for taking the risks. "What drove them then, in terms of Yellow Fruit, was that they had no intelligence on Iran," the adviser told me. "They had no knowledge of Tehran and no people on the ground who could prepare the battle space." Rumsfeld's decision to revive this approach stemmed, once again, from a failure of intelligence in the Middle East, the adviser said. The Administration believed that the C.I.A. was unable, or unwilling, to provide the military with the information it needed to effectively challenge stateless terrorism. "One of the big challenges was that we didn't have Humint"--human intelligence--"collection capabilities in areas where terrorists existed," the adviser told me. "Because the C.I.A. claimed to have such a hold on Humint, the way to get around them, rather than take them on, was to claim that the agency didn't do Humint to support Special Forces operations overseas. The C.I.A. fought it." Referring to Rumsfeld's new authority for covert operations, the first Pentagon adviser told me, "It's not empowering military intelligence. It's emasculating the C.I.A." A former senior C.I.A. officer depicted the agency's eclipse as predictable. "For years, the agency bent over backward to integrate and co?rdinate with the Pentagon," the former officer said. "We just caved and caved and got what we deserved. It is a fact of life today that the Pentagon is a five-hundred-pound gorilla and the C.I.A. director is a chimpanzee." There was pressure from the White House, too. A former C.I.A. clandestine-services officer told me that, in the months after the resignation of the agency's director George Tenet, in June, 2004, the White House began "coming down critically" on analysts in the C.I.A.'s Directorate of Intelligence (D.I.) and demanded "to see more support for the Administration's political position." Porter Goss, Tenet's successor, engaged in what the recently retired C.I.A. official described as a "political purge" in the D.I. Among the targets were a few senior analysts who were known to write dissenting papers that had been forwarded to the White House. The recently retired C.I.A. official said, "The White House carefully reviewed the political analyses of the D.I. so they could sort out the apostates from the true believers." Some senior analysts in the D.I. have turned in their resignations--quietly, and without revealing the extent of the disarray. The White House solidified its control over intelligence last month, when it forced last-minute changes in the intelligence-reform bill. The legislation, based substantially on recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, originally gave broad powers, including authority over intelligence spending, to a new national-intelligence director. (The Pentagon controls roughly eighty per cent of the intelligence budget.) A reform bill passed in the Senate by a vote of 96-2. Before the House voted, however, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld balked. The White House publicly supported the legislation, but House Speaker Dennis Hastert refused to bring a House version of the bill to the floor for a vote--ostensibly in defiance of the President, though it was widely understood in Congress that Hastert had been delegated to stall the bill. After intense White House and Pentagon lobbying, the legislation was rewritten. The bill that Congress approved sharply reduced the new director's power, in the name of permitting the Secretary of Defense to maintain his "statutory responsibilities." Fred Kaplan, in the online magazine Slate, described the real issues behind Hastert's action, quoting a congressional aide who expressed amazement as White House lobbyists bashed the Senate bill and came up "with all sorts of ludicrous reasons why it was unacceptable." "Rummy's plan was to get a compromise in the bill in which the Pentagon keeps its marbles and the C.I.A. loses theirs," the former high-level intelligence official told me. "Then all the pieces of the puzzle fall in place. He gets authority for covert action that is not attributable, the ability to directly task national-intelligence assets"--including the many intelligence satellites that constantly orbit the world. "Rumsfeld will no longer have to refer anything through the government's intelligence wringer," the former official went on. "The intelligence system was designed to put competing agencies in competition. What's missing will be the dynamic tension that insures everyone's priorities--in the C.I.A., the D.O.D., the F.B.I., and even the Department of Homeland Security--are discussed. The most insidious implication of the new system is that Rumsfeld no longer has to tell people what he's doing so they can ask, `Why are you doing this?' or `What are your priorities?' Now he can keep all of the mattress mice out of it." From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 21 15:06:05 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 10:06:05 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] silicon.com: Could future computer viruses infect humans? Message-ID: Could future computer viruses infect humans? http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch/print.htm?TYPE=story&AT=39125887-39024667t-40000019c by [5]Jo Best November 12, 2004 Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at Reading University and a man who has wired up his nervous system to a computer and put an RFID chip in his arm, is looking forward to becoming a cyborg once again - but warned the day will come when computer viruses can infect humans as well as PCs. Speaking this week at Consult Hyperion's fifth Digital Identity Forum, Warwick said the time would come when those who weren't cyborgs would be considered the odd ones out. "For those of you that want to stay human... you'll be a subspecies in the future," he said. Warwick believes that there are advantages for a human being to be networked to a computer. Networking a human brain would mean an almost "infinite knowledge base", he said, adding it would be akin to "upgrading humans... giving us abilities we dont already have". Warwick says the security problems that dog modern computing won't be much different from those that could plague the cyborgs of the future. "We're looking at software viruses and biological viruses becoming one and the same," he said. "The security problems [will] be much, much greater... they will have to become critical in future." If humans were networked, the implications of being hacked would be far more serious and attitudes towards hackers would be radically changed, he added. "Now, hackers' illegal input into a network is tolerated," said Warwick, but if humans were connected to the internet and hacks carried out, "this would be pushing the realms of tolerance". With his own networking experiments, in which he used his body's connectivity to operate a mechanical arm in the US, Warwick didn't publicise the IP address of his arm in case someone hijacked it. While the idea of networked humans may be a significant way off, Warwick's experiments are intended to have a practical purpose. He has been working with Stoke Mandeville hospital on the possible implications of the networked nervous system for those with spinal injuries; for example, to enable people to control a wheelchair through their nervous system. Nevertheless, Warwick said the idea of marrying humanity and technology isn't currently a popular one. Talking of his RFID experiments, he said: "I got a lot of criticism, I don't know why." Putting RFID chips in arms is now more than a novelty. Party goers at one club in Barcelona can choose to have RFID chips implanted in their arms as a means of paying for their drinks and some Mexican law enforcement officials had the chips implanted as a means of fending off attempted kidnappings. The US Food and Drug Administration has also recently [6]approved the use of RFID in humans. One potential application would be allowing medical staff to draw information on a patient's health from the chip. References 5. mailto:editorial at silicon.com From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 21 15:06:54 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 10:06:54 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CBS: Crusade Against Credit Message-ID: Crusade Against Credit http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/04/60minutes/printable653794.shtml Nov. 4, 2004 Debt is an American epidemic. More people are maxed out on their credit cards, going bankrupt or facing foreclosure than ever before. That's one reason The Dave Ramsey Radio Show is so popular. Dave helps people pay off their debts, 60 Minutes Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports. With a degree in finance from the University of Tennessee, Dave Ramsey was a millionaire at 30, and again at 40, but in between, he lost everything. Now he crusades against credit to a radio audience of 2 million and growing, offering a how-to, step-by-step plan to eliminate debt. 60 Minutes sat in on the show on a day when listeners called in to perform what Ramsey called an "on-air plastectomy," which means chopping up their credit cards. Kenny from Mississippi used a blender to chop up his seven credit cards. Ramsey: "Hey, dude, you know that might break the blender, don't you think?" Kenny: "I don't care." Ramsey: "Does your wife know this is happening?" Kenny: "Yes, she's listening." And when the noise of the blender came, Ramsey commented, "I'll bet that next daiquiri tastes different. Way to go, Kenny!" For three hours a day, Ramsey takes calls from listeners he calls typical Americans, buried under student loans, car payments and over $30,000 on their credit cards. "This is not a game," says Ramsey. "Debt has become a part of who we are. It's become that spoiled child in the grocery store with their lip stuck out: 'I want it. I want it. I deserve it because I breathe air.' And, well, that's an uphill climb in our culture, right now, to go against that and say, 'Hey, let's be grownups here. Let's be mature, learn to delay pleasure, save up and pay for things.'" Ramsey is tough on his listeners, but hes also a harsh critic of car dealers and bankers who hand out easy money and 5.2 billion credit card offers a year, even to people they know cant make the payments, playing on their self-esteem. Says Ramsey, "Its kind of like, still, 'I'm somebody because they called me. Oh, oh, I'm a platinum! Look at me.'" Companies will offer credit cards even to dogs and dead people, and Ramsey says, "Consumers got to wake up and just say no." He's a stand-up comic, a noodge about money. Ramsey takes his show on the road, drawing in some 40,000 people a year, often in churches. His message is both old-fashioned and radical: Save money for a rainy day (as most Americans don't) and don't spend more than you earn (as most Americans do). "In America today," he says, "you could drive up in front of an old boy's house. He's got the Chevy Silverado four-wheel drive loaded up, awesome, kickin' butt truck. There's a $32,000 bass boat sitting over here. There's a satellite dish on the side of the house. And all of this is in front of a trailer." People think it's fine to be in debt. No one thinks its wrong. Ramsey concurs: "It is a normal way of getting along, and 'normal' is 'broke' in America." The radio show bills itself as being about more than just personal finance, and every day, someone calls in with an emotional story or a desperate situation that is affecting his personal life. Ramsey says he is not a trained counselor, but after 12 years of listening, he has heard it all. 60 Minutes replayed one recent call for him, from a woman named Joan, calling about her husband, and they are deeply in debt. Joan: "I know you don't advocate bankruptcy, but my husband is so depressed over our debt, and he's talking about it. I'm wondering if there's something we could do." Ramsey: "He's talking about bankruptcy?" Joan: "Talking about suicide." Ramsey: "He's talking about suicide. When did that happen?" Joan: "Well, just in the last month or so." Ramsey: "Well. I'm not a counseling expert, but I will tell you, when someone talks about suicide, I go into emergency lifesaving mode. You get in high gear. Do you understand me? Joan: "Well, he's not the type that would " Ramsey: "No, you no, listen. You did not understand me. OK? This is serious. When it comes out of someone's mouth that they are considering suicide, honey, they're considering suicide today. You get him in counseling. Do you understand me?" Joan: "Yes." Ramsey: "Your husband's life depends on your action right now." Stahl observes that it is almost as if Ramsey took Joan by the shoulders and had to shake her. "Yeah. Well, she was in denial about how serious it is," Ramsey replies. "The number one cause of male suicide is financial." He says he knows because he has been there. Was he suicidal? "I don't know if I was suicidal," Ramsey says, "but you do have that thought go through your head that I've-- you know, 'I've got a million-dollar life insurance policy. This could be more valuable to these kids and this wife than this idiot that's looking in the mirror.' Thats a huge problem. It's an identity issue with guys." Part of his appeal is his confession and his story as a one-time hotshot with his own real estate company, until he went belly up. "My best year ever, I made $250,000 at 25 years old, cash taxable income," he recalls. "It was fun. Id always wanted a Jaguar, so I got me a Jaguar." He was not saving any money at all. Says his wife, Sharon, "We didn't know how to save. No." The Ramseys have been married for 22 years. He says, "We started with nothing. And, by the time we were 26, we had about $4 million worth of real estate." In order to get into real estate, Ramsey admits, "Oh, we borrowed to our eyeballs. I borrowed." Then, the banks called in the notes. Dave and Sharon Ramsey found themselves with two little girls and $3 million worth of debt. They tried, but in the end, were unable to avoid bankruptcy. Sharon Ramsey, for her part, says she was "terrified... Looking back, I mean, it was the most difficult time in our lives, in our marriage." Says her husband, "Sharon and I, we didn't get a divorce. We held on to each other. But sometimes it was just to get a better grip." And they did not tell their family. Says Dave Ramsey, "There was a lot of shame and guilt tied with the subject of misbehaving with money. Lots of people feel that. And it's a big secret. Lots of spouses hide it from their husbands or wives when they've goofed up and gone into credit card debt." Thats what happened with Steve and Stacey Burch of Houston. Before they became followers of Dave Ramsey, they were spendaholics. They bought a Lexus, expensive jewelry and put in a pool, and all the while, Steve, who runs a plumbing supply business, was secretly playing the stock market with their credit cards until the debt hit $150,000. Recalls Stacey, "When this was revealed to me it was devastating, because I couldn't believe that I had been lied to." Then, they enrolled in one of Ramseys financial courses, in which people spend 13 weeks in night class, learning how to manage money. In their class, the Burches cut up their 15 credit cards and went from big spenders to big sellers. "One of the things that Dave says is sell," explains Stacey. "You know, sell everything that's not bolted down." They sold land, had garage sales, stopped eating out, stuck to a "no-frills, no-fun" budget, and they got rid of the Lexus. "I wanted my marriage more than anything," recalls Steve. "The car became worth nothing to me at that moment." How much more do they have to pay off? Reports Steve, "Since we started Dave's program roughly in May of 2003 to current, we've paid off $75,500." As for the Ramseys, today they are debt free. They dont even have a mortgage. He says he understands that most people need a mortgage loan to buy a house, though he says they should pay it off as quickly as possible. Even Ramseys children Denise, Rachel and Daniel live by their father's "fitness plan." When they turned 15, the girls got checkbooks and had to manage their own money. No credit cards or allowances for these kids; they get a "commission" for doing chores like making their beds and cleaning their rooms. But they can't spend every penny. Following Dave Ramsey's method, they have to put money aside for saving and giving, and they have to live within their means. Denise: "When our friends would be, like, 'Hey, lets go to the movies,' its like: 'I dont have the money,' you know. 'Dad, please.'" Did his kids ever go to their father and say, "This isn't fair"? Rachel: "Oh, I did." Denise: "Oh, yeah, at first." So they would go to him and say, Will you give me something for the movies?" Says Rachel, "He's, like, 'Whats in your account?' Were, like, 'Nothing.' Hes, like. 'No, youre not going to the movies.' And he didn't give in. But there's a payoff. By the time she was 16 years old, Rachel had saved $8,000. And their father matched their savings to help them buy a car: a used 2001 BMW. Ramsey spells out his method in books, budget kits, and videos, with instructions on belt tightening, budgeting and, above all, getting rid of all the plastic. What is wrong with having credit cards, as long as you pay them off immediately and don't have the interest problems? Ramsey's answer: "The big thing you have to look at, though, is this: When you spend cash instead of spending plastic, you spend 12 to 18 percent less... You know why? Because cash hurts. You dont register the pain with plastic. I mean you go buy a stereo you start layin' out Uncle Benjamin on the counter you're goin', 'Wait a minute. I want to think about this a minute.' Whoa!" Ramsey knows he is up against the credit card industry, one of the most powerful industries in the United States. "I'm not in the macro business, I'm in the micro business," he says, emphasizing reaching out to one person at a time. "But well see some shifts. For instance, this year, debit card charges outnumbered credit card charges for the first time ever." Back in the radio studio with Ramsey, 60 Minutes listened as a bachelor named Fred from Nashville called in. He had sold his ski boat and two cars and was finally debt free. Ramsey exhorted him to, "Scream 'I'm debt free' at the top of your lungs." And Fred did it. Ramsey concludes, "$46,000 paid off in three years. Don't miss the numbers. $46,000 paid off in three years, making $36 grand. Why? Because he decided to take control of his life. Rather than letting life and bankers happen to him. It's the Dave Ramsey show." From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 21 15:07:57 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 10:07:57 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: Why Bad Habits Persist Message-ID: Why Bad Habits Persist http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2004-11-16-3 Automatic behaviors undermine good intentions Betterhumans Staff 11/16/2004 4:18 PM Breaking up is hard to do: Quitting smoking and other bad habits, suggests new research, is difficult in part because maintaining new behaviors takes memory control eroded by such things as stress and aging Bad habits beat good intentions because learning new habits requires memory control while past behavior becomes automatic. US psychologists including [1]Cindy Lustig of the [2]University of Michigan in Ann Arbor have shown that fulfilling good intentions is undermined by previously learned habits, which remain strong in more automatic, unconscious forms of [3]memory. "People usually think of memories as fading as time goes by. In addition, learning new information often interferes with the retrieval of older memories," the researchers write. "At the same time, old habits are infamous for their ability to return. Both the retroactive interference caused by new learning and the spontaneous recovery of old information after a delay have been observed at least since the classic experiments of Pavlov, but how they occur remains a mystery." Cue the cup The researchers set out to determine how time affects the controlled retrieval of old memories and their accessibility. Participants first learned one way of responding to a cue word and later learned another. For example, if they first learned to associate "coffee" with "cup," they then learned to associate "coffee" with "mug." The participants were given memory tests immediately after learning the words and the day after. Some were told to control their memory and give the first response ("cup") while others were told to give whatever response came automatically to mind. The group controlling their responses did well at giving the first response on both days. For the group giving their response automatically, however, the new word association faded fast. On the first day, their answers were evenly split, but on the second they gave the first response more often than the second. The memory of the second response faded while the memory of the first response grew stronger than it had been on the first day. Stress and aging The researchers say that the findings might help explain why both stress and aging can cause people to return to bad habits. Stress weakens control over memory and behavior, making habitual responses more influential. Aging can erode aspects of memory control while leaving automatic, learned behavior unharmed. The latter might explain why it's more difficult for older adults to learn and maintain new behaviors. Overall, the findings suggest that while an old habit's strength may fade over time, the memory of it will still be stronger than good intentions that follow. The research is reported in the journal [4]Psychological Science. References 1. http://www.lsa.umich.edu/psych/people/directory/profiles/faculty/?uniquename=clustig 2. http://www.umich.edu/ 3. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory 4. http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/index.cfm?journal=ps&content=ps/home From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 21 15:11:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 10:11:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Berkeley Alumini Mag: Q&A: A conversation with Yuri Slezkine Message-ID: Q&A: A conversation with Yuri Slezkine From the Berkeley alumni magazine http://www.alumni.berkeley.edu/Alumni/Cal_Monthly/November_2004/QA-_A_conversation_with_Yuri_Slezkine.asp_ [Interview w/author of "The Jewish Century"] In the 20th century, we all had to become literate, urban, mobile, and occupationally flexible. In other words, we all had to become Jewish. By Russell Schoch A few years ago, historian Yuri Slezkine set out to write a book about the early Soviet elite. He focused on a residential building in Moscow that housed the leaders of the Soviet Union of the 1930s. When he figuratively looked inside that building, a prototype of communist living, he found that it had been occupied in large part by Jewish immigrants from the Pale of Settlement, the restricted region in which Jews were allowed to settle in the Russian Empire. In attempting to understand their internal movement, and the two other great migrations of Russian Jews in the 20th century--to the United States and Israel--he was forced to step back and examine more broadly the role of Jews in the modern age. The result, The Jewish Century (published by Princeton University Press), has been called ??a passionate and brilliant tour de force?? and ??an extraordinary book with continual surprises?? about modernity, the 20th century, and the history of the Jews. One of Slezkine??s metaphoric points is that all of us have had to become ??Jewish?? in the modern age because Jews have long been urban, mobile, literate, articulate, and occupationally flexible--traits the 20th century demanded. Slezkine uses the characters and writings of Pushkin, Joyce, Proust, and the Yiddish writer Sholom Alecheim to illuminate his beautifully written book. Slezkine was born in Moscow in 1956 into a family that considered itself a part of the Russian intelligentsia. He learned English in part by listening to the BBC and read the collected works of Charles Dickens in Russian (and later in English). He has written: ??I became half-Jewish in 1967 when I told my father that Mishka Ryzhevskii from Apartment 13 was a Jew, and my father said: ??Let me tell you something.???? He was told that his mother??s family was Jewish, and that his grandmother--like one of Hodl??s daughters in Sholom Aleichem ??s Tevye the Dairyman--had left the Pale of Settlement, moved to Moscow, and embraced communism. Although his first love was history, Slezkine studied Russian literature and linguistics because, he says, history was too politicized under the Soviets. His first trip outside the Soviet Union was in the late 1970s, when he found work as a translator in Mozambique, in East Africa. He returned to Moscow to serve as a translator of Portuguese, and spent 1982 in Lisbon before taking a leap, the next year, to Austin, Texas. He received his Ph.D. in history at the University of Texas in 1989 and taught at Wake Forest University before coming to Berkeley in 1992. His earlier books include Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North and two co-edited volumes, one of life stories of Russian women from 1917 to the Second World War, and one on the myth of Siberia in Russian culture. His next project, he says, will be to return to that residential building in Moscow and finish the story he set out to tell before The Jewish Century intruded. Daniel Boyarin, the Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Berkeley, calls Slezkine??s new book ??a brilliant addition to Jewish studies?? and says that ??it provides the best explanation I know of anti-Semitism.?? Yuri Slezkine discussed that and other issues of The Jewish Century in an interview as the fall semester began. A professor of history at Berkeley, Slezkine this fall also became director of the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. ____________________________________ In your book, you say that Jews experienced three Paradises and one Hell in the 20th century. Hell of course refers to the Holocaust. What are the Paradises? These are the destinations of the three great migrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There are the two we all know about--from Eastern Europe, mostly the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, to America and to Palestine. Then there is the one I am particularly interested in: from the Pale of Settlement to the Soviet cities. Most of the Jews who stayed in Russia moved to Kiev, Kharkov, Leningrad, and Moscow, and they moved up the Soviet social ladder when they got there. This third, invisible or less visible, migration was much bigger than the one to Palestine and much more ideologically charged than the one to America. And, for the first 20 years or so of the Soviet state, it was also seen by most people involved as the most successful. But, by the end of the 20th century, it was seen by most people involved--the children and grandchildren of the original migrants--as either a tragic mistake or a non-event. All three migrations were, in a sense, pilgrimages, and all three represented different ways of being Jewish, and of being modern, in the modern world: non-ethnic liberal statehood in the United States; secular ethnic nationalism in Israel; and communism--a world without capitalism or nationalism--in the Soviet Union. That, plus the Holocaust, of course, which stands for the dangers of not going on one of those three pilgrimages, represents much of the 20th century, I think. Why were Jews so successful in the early Soviet state? The story of the Jews in the early Soviet Union is similar to the story of the Jews in America. That is, they were especially successful in the realms of education, journalism, medicine, and other professions that were central to the functioning of Soviet society, including science. Jews in the Soviet Union were much more literate than any other group, they were untainted by any association with the imperial regime, and they seem to have been very enthusiastic about what the Communist Party was doing. This was to some extent a conscious commitment to ideology, but mostly it was just because there were no more legal barriers against Jews. The doors opened, and they flooded in and did exceedingly well in the 1920s and the first part of the 1930s. My belief is that you can??t understand the second part of the Jewish story in Russia--the anti-Semitic policies, and what happens to Soviet Jews later, their desire to emigrate, for example--unless you know the first part of the story, which is mostly about amazing success. You write that Jews were important members of both the secret police and those who ran the gulag. This was news to me. The fact was not known to me when I was growing up in the Soviet Union. Most people found out about it when they read Solzhenitsyn??s The Gulag Archipelago. He didn??t make a point of it at the time, but he talks about the people who were running the White Sea Canal labor camps, and they were virtually all ethnic Jews. What was your reaction? Mostly surprise, because it seemed so incongruous to those of us who thought of Jews as the primary victims and primary opponents of the Soviet regime. But later I discovered that the role of communism in modern Jewish history was tremendously important. I don??t think you can understand modern Jewish history without considering the Russian Revolution or understand communism without considering the role of the Jews. What accounts for Jewish success more generally? Jews belong to a certain community of peoples that engage in certain occupations in similar ways--and provoke similar resentments. Looking at it comparatively, one discovers that this specialization is very old and fairly common. What is this specialization? At different times and in different places, there were tribes--ethnic groups--that specialized exclusively in providing services to the surrounding food-producing societies. They include Roma-Gypsies, various so-called ??Travelers?? or ??Tinkers,?? the Fuga in Ethiopia, the Sheikh Mohammadi in Afghanistan, and of course the Armenians, the Overseas Chinese, the Indians in East Africa, the Lebanese in West Africa and Latin America, and so on. I call them all Mercurians,?? as opposed to their ??Apollonian?? hosts. What do you mean by those terms? Apollo was the god of both livestock and agriculture. ??Apollonian?? societies, the way I use the term, are societies organized around food production, societies that consist mostly of peasants, plus various combinations of warriors and priests who appropriate peasant labor by controlling access to land or salvation. Mercury, or Hermes, was the god of messengers, merchants, interpreters, craftsmen, guides, healers, and other border-crossers. ??Mercurians,?? the way I use the term, are ethnic groups, demographically complete societies, that do not engage in food production, but live by providing services to the surrounding Apollonians. In the modern world, Apollonians have to become more Mercurian--more Jewish, if you will; but Apollonian values, peasant and warrior values, essentially, live on, of course. The two attitudes, two ideal types, are still with us today, and the Jews, the most accomplished of all Mercurians, are still playing a very special role in the modern world--as the models of both success and victimization. There are striking similarities in the way all Mercurians think of themselves and of their non-Mercurian neighbors, and in the way they actually behave. Can you give illustrations of what you mean? Essentially, the idea is that certain things in traditional Apollonian societies are too dangerous or too unclean to be performed by members of those societies: communicating with other lands, other worlds, and other tribes; handling money; treating the body; and dealing with fire by engaging in metal work, for example. All these are typical Mercurian specialities. Most Tinkers and Travelers started out as tinsmiths. My great-grandfather was a Jewish blacksmith. It??s a very large world, if you think about it: disease, exchange, negotiations, travel, burials, reading. And these were the things the permanent internal strangers, or Mercurians, were willing to do, compelled to do, equipped to do--or very good at doing. And these occupations were not limited to Jews. There were a lot of groups performing such functions. And, throughout the world, they share certain features and are regarded in similar ways. Think of Jews and Gypsies. Both were traditionally seen as dangerous internal aliens, homeless for reasons of divine punishment, and engaged in harmful, morally suspect activities. They were always seen as mirror images of their host communities: Their men weren??t warriors, their women seemed aggressive--and, perhaps for that reason, attractive; they remained strangers by staying aloof, not intermarrying, not fighting, not sharing meals--just making, exchanging, selling, and possibly stealing, things and concepts. And so they were feared and hated accordingly, with the Holocaust as the culmination of that long history of fear and hatred. And I think they were seen in similar ways because they were, in many ways, similar. Both were exclusive, nomadic service providers; both had rigid taboos regarding unclean food and intermarriage; both could only survive by remaining strangers--hence the prohibitions against sharing food and blood with their neighbors, and the obsession with cleanliness. But Gypsies have certainly not had the success that Jews have had in the modern world. I distinguish between the majority of Mercurians, including Gypsies, who engage in small, non-literate pariah entrepreneurship; and those, like the Jews, who specialize, among other things, in the interpretation of written texts. With the rise of the modern world, the Gypsies have continued to ply their trade in the diminishing world of folk oral culture, while the Jews have gone on to define modernity. In any case, the ways in which Mercurians and Apollonians regard each other are similar wherever one looks. What is true of Jews and their peasant neighbors in Imperial Russia is, I think, true of Gypsies and their hosts, as well as of Indians and local populations in East Africa, and so forth. Including the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia? Yes. The Overseas Chinese too are supposed to be clever--too clever, perhaps. You can call on the usual anti-Semitic list: they are aloof, devious, unmanly, and so on. This is the way Apollonians describe Mercurians throughout the world. And of course one could interpret these same qualities in a positive light. ?? Cunning?? and ??deviousness?? may become ??intelligence?? and ??a general commitment to the life of the mind.?? Gypsies are proud of being smarter than the non-Gypsies they deal with, as Jews are, or were in the traditional Jewish world. Mercurian views of Apollonians tend to be negative too: ??soulfulness,?? ?? courage,?? and ??earthiness?? may become ??stupidity,?? ??belligerence,?? and ?? uncleanliness.?? In other words, the oppositions mind/body, intelligence/physicality, impermanence/permanence, non-belligerence/belligerence remain the same and are agreed upon by everyone involved. Everyone knows which traits are associated with which group; the difference is in the interpretation. Which leads you to conclude what about the Jews? Seen in this way, some things about the Jewish experience and the traditional Jewish economic role become less unique, so to speak. To be crude about it, perhaps, it??s not an accident that there was a Gypsy holocaust. What do you mean? That there are similarities between Jews and Gypsies and a whole lot of other peoples who engaged in similar pursuits that go beyond their common fate under the Nazis, or the hostility that they encounter wherever they go. This could change the way one understands anti-Semitism. In my book, I tried to contextualize the Jewish experience, to explain both the Jewish victimization and the Jewish success. On the particular question of anti-Semitism, my book makes the argument that anti-Semitism is not a disease, not mystical, not inexplicable. It makes the argument that the beliefs and perceptions and actions usually associated with anti-Semitism are very common, and that they are applied not only to the Jews. Does your argument give you, personally, a different understanding of what it means to be a Jew, and of anti-Semitism? Sure! Of course it does. I didn??t write the book to preach anything in particular. But I hope that one conclusion people draw from this part of the book is that something that is understood is easier to combat. If you think of anti-Semitism as a mysterious epidemic, then it??s hard to know what to do about it. When you feel you understand what brings it about, then it becomes more intelligible. And less dangerous. But what of the Holocaust? The Jewish Holocaust was in some ways bigger than any other event of that sort in the history of the world. But the perceptions on which it is based are perfectly familiar and very common. The history of the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, for example, is a history of relentless pogroms as well as remarkable success. You??ve seen these common beliefs yourself? Growing up in Russia one couldn??t help noticing that the things people said or thought about Armenians were in many ways analogous to things people said or thought about the Jews. And there was my experience in East Africa, which is one reason I became interested in the comparison. In Mozambique, it was striking how similar the economic and social roles of local Indians were to the economic and social roles of Jews in Eastern Europe. Did you see the Indians at the time as ??Jews??? I did. Everyone did. They??re often called that--??the Jews of East Africa.?? And the Overseas Chinese are sometimes referred to as ??the Jews of Southeast Asia.?? But it??s one thing to realize that the rhetoric is similar; it??s another to recognize that the rhetoric is based on something people actually do, and that this goes far back into the past, and that it??s much wider than the familiar example of the Indians and the Overseas Chinese. In your book, you examine modernist literature in this way. Joyce??s Ulysses, for example, is the central text of modernism, and it is about that very opposition. The main character, Leopold Bloom, is a ??half-Jew?? ; and the figure of Ulysses is the ultimate earthly representative of Mercurianism, of cleverness, restlessness, diplomacy, ingenuity--all those things. Is there a famous Apollonian Jew, to use your terms? Irving Howe said that Trotsky was one of the greatest figures in the 20th century because he managed to be both a writer and a warrior; somebody who analyzes history while making it; somebody who is equally good at thinking and killing. One could say that Israel, and Zionism generally, is an attempt to abandon traditional Jewishness for the sake of Apollonianism with a Jewish face, as it were. I suppose Ariel Sharon would be a Jewish Apollonian. He stands for the rejection of the world of the shtetl, the life of the Diaspora, the Pale of Settlement--the Mercurian way. How do you mean that? Life in the Pale means living with physical weakness, coupled with eloquence and intelligence; it means doing things others despise. It means being committed to Diaspora life and tradition. And Zionism was to be the ultimate rejection of that life and tradition. The state of Israel became a place where one could escape the fate of Tevye the Dairyman--the great Sholom Aleichem character. It became a place that existed for the purpose of avenging Tevye??s weakness through a rejection of Tevye??s cleverness and non-belligerence. The Holocaust created an aura around Israel that made it different from all other modern states, that excluded it from some of the expectations that are usually associated with modern states--and from certain criticisms. Because of its very special role, history, and moral claims, Israel became the state to which standard rules don??t apply. Israel has been transformed from an attempt to get away from the ghetto into a new kind of ghetto, which is the only place you can say certain things. For instance? It??s the only place in the Western world where a member of Parliament can say--and get away with it--??Let??s deport all Arabs from Israel.?? Or where so many people can say, as part of a routine political conversation: ??We should create more Jewish children because we want this to be a pure ethnic state.?? Imagine someone saying the same thing in Germany: ??Let??s procreate to make more Germans because we have too many Turks here.?? And Israel also can do things other states cannot do? Yes, like build walls. There was an attempt to build a wall in a town in the Czech Republic--to separate the Gypsy area from the rest of the town. What happened? There was an outcry. It couldn??t be done. So, this seems to me to be yet another tragic irony in the history of the Jews: The attempt to create a state like any other led to the creation of a state that is remarkably different from the family of states it set out to join. But that??s only one of the three great migrations. The history of the Jews in America has been one of tremendous achievement and success. The history of the Jews in Russia has been a tragedy, in the most basic sense of the word: There cannot be tragedy without the initial hope and fulfillment, without the nobility of character that the fatal flaw would go on to undermine. That??s how I see the story of my grandmother??s life. And, using your Mercurian metaphor, you say that all of us in the modern age have had to become Jewish. A central part of my argument is that the modern world has become universally Mercurian. Mercurianism is associated with reason, mobility, intelligence, restlessness, rootlessness, cleanliness, crossing boundaries, and cultivating people and symbols as opposed to fields and herds. We??re all supposed to be Mercurians now, and traditional Mercurians--especially Jews--are better at being Mercurian than anyone else. And that is the reason for their extraordinary success and extraordinary suffering in the modern world. That, it seems to me, is the reason why the history of the 20th century, and the history of the Jews in particular, is the history of three Promised Lands and one Hell. From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 21 15:13:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 10:13:58 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wikipedia: RFID Message-ID: RFID http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a method of remotely storing and retrieving data using devices called RFID tags. An RFID tag is a small object, such as an adhesive sticker, that can be attached to or incorporated into a product. RFID tags contain [3]antennae to enable them to receive and respond to [4]radio-frequency queries from an RFID [5]transceiver. Contents [6]1 History of RFID tags [7]2 Types of RFID tags [8]3 The RFID System [9]4 Current usage [10]5 Potential uses [11]6 Controversy [12]6.1 Passports [13]6.2 Driver's Licenses [14]7 External links [15]7.1 In the news [16]7.2 Opposition [17]7.3 Industry associations [18]7.4 Industry gazettes, journals and blogs [[19]edit] History of RFID tags Although some people think that the first known device may have been invented by [20]Leon Theremin as an espionage tool for the Russian Government in 1945, the first real usage of RFID devices predates that. During [21]World War II the [22]United Kingdom used RFID devices to distinguish returning English airplanes from inbound German ones. [23]RADAR was only able to signal the presence of a plane, not the kind of plane it was. Perhaps the first work exploring RFID is the landmark [24]1948 paper by Harry Stockman, entitled "Communication by Means of Reflected Power" (Proceedings of the IRE, pp1196-1204, October 1948). Stockman predicted that " ...considerable research and development work has to be done before the remaining basic problems in reflected-power communication are solved, and before the field of useful applications is explored." It required thirty years of advances in many different fields before RFID became a reality. [[25]edit] Types of RFID tags RFID tags can be either active or passive. Passive RFID tags do not have their own power supply: the minute [26]electrical current induced in the antenna by the incoming radio-frequency scan provides enough power for the tag to send a response. Due to power and cost concerns, the response of a passive RFID tag is necessarily brief, typically just an ID number ([27]GUID). Lack of its own power supply makes the device quite small: commercially available products exist that can be embedded under the skin. As of [28]2004, the smallest such devices commercially available measured 0.4 [29]mm ? 0.4 mm, and thinner than a sheet of paper; such devices are practically invisible. Passive tags have practical read ranges that vary from about 10 mm up to about 5 [30]metres. Active RFID tags, on the other hand, must have a power source, and may have longer ranges and larger memories than passive tags, as well as the ability to store additional information sent by the transceiver. At present, the smallest active tags are about the size of a coin. Many active tags have practical ranges of tens of metres, and a battery life of up to several years. As passive tags are much cheaper to manufacture, the vast majority of RFID tags in existence are of the passive variety. As of 2004 tags cost from US$0.40. The aim is to produce tags for less than US$0.05 to make widespread RFID tagging commercially viable. However, chip manufacturers supply of integrated circuits is not sufficient and demand is too low for prices to come down soon. Most analysts agree that a price level of less than $0.10 is only achievable in 6-8 years. There are four different kinds of tags commonly in use, their differences based on the level of their radio frequency: Low frequency tags (between 125 to 134 [31]kilohertz), High frequency tags (13.56 [32]megahertz), [33]UHF tags (868 to 956 megahertz), and [34]Microwave tags (2.45 [35]gigahertz). See also for some [36]Transponder devices which deliver a similar function, and contactless [37]chipcards. [[38]edit] The RFID System An RFID system may consist of several components: tags, tag readers, tag programming stations, circulation readers, sorting equipment, and tag inventory wands. Security can be handled in two ways. Security gates can query the ILS to determine its security status or the tag may contain a security bit which would be turned on and off by circulation or self-check reader stations. The purpose of an RFID system is to enable data to be transmitted by a portable device, called a tag, which is read by an RFID reader and processed according to the needs of a particular application. The data transmitted by the tag may provide identification or location information, or specifics about the product tagged, such as price, color, date of purchase, etc. The use of RFID in tracking and access applications first appeared during the 1980s. RFID quickly gained attention because of its ability to track moving objects. As the technology is refined, more pervasive--and invasive--uses for RFID tags are in the works. In a typical RFID system, individual objects are equipped with a small, inexpensive tag which contains a transponder with a digital memory chip that is given a unique electronic product code. The interrogator, an antenna packaged with a transceiver and decoder, emits a signal activating the RFID tag so it can read and write data to it. When an RFID tag passes through the electromagnetic zone, it detects the reader's activation signal. The reader decodes the data encoded in the tag's integrated circuit (silicon chip) and the data is passed to the host computer for processing. Security gates can then detect whether or not the item has been properly checked out of the library. When users return items, the security bit is re-set and the item record in the ILS is automatically updated. In some RFID solutions a return receipt can be generated. At this point, materials can be roughly sorted into bins by the return equipment. Inventory wands provide a finer detail of sorting. This tool can be used to put books into shelf-ready order. [[39]edit] Current usage Low -frequency RFID tags are commonly used for [40]animal identification, beer [41]keg tracking, and [42]automobile key-and-lock, [43]anti-theft systems. [44]Pets are often embedded with small chips so that they may be returned to their owners if lost. In the United States, two RFID frequencies are used: 125kHz (the original standard) and 134.5kHz, the international standard. High-frequency RFID tags are used in [45]library [46]book or bookstore tracking, [47]pallet tracking, [48]building [49]access control, [50]airline [51]baggage tracking, and [52]apparel item tracking. High-frequency tags are widely used in identification [53]badges, replacing earlier [54]magnetic stripe cards. These badges need only be held within a certain distance of the reader to authenticate the holder. [55]UHF RFID tags are commonly used commercially in pallet and [56]container tracking, and [57]truck and [58]trailer tracking in shipping yards. [59]Microwave RFID tags are used in long range access control for vehicles, an example being [60]General Motors' [61]OnStar system. Some [62]toll booths, such as [63]California's [64]FasTrak system, use RFID tags for [65]electronic toll collection. The tags are read as vehicles pass; the information is used to debit the toll from a [66]prepaid [67]account. The system helps to speed traffic through toll plazas. [68]Sensors such as [69]seismic sensors may be read using RFID transceivers, greatly simplifying [70]remote data collection. In January 2003, [71]Michelin announced that it has begun testing RFID transponders embedded into tires. After a testing period that is expected to last 18 months, the manufacturer will offer RFID-enabled tires to car-makers. Their primary purpose is tire-tracking in compliance with the United States Transportation, Recall, Enhancement, Accountability and Documentation Act (TREAD Act). Cards embedded with RFID chips are widely use as [72]electronic cash, e.g. [73]Octopus Card in [74]Hong Kong and the [75]Netherlands to pay fares in [76]mass transit systems and/or retails. Starting from the 2004 model year, a "Smart Key" option is available to the [77]Toyota [78]Prius and some [79]Lexus models. The key fob uses an active RFID circuit which allow the car to acknowledge the key's presence within 3 feet of the sensor. The driver can open the doors and start the car while the key remains in a purse or pocket. In August 2004, the [80]Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (ODRH) approved a $415,000 contract to trial the tracking technology with [81]Alanco Technologies. Inmates will wear "wristwatch-sized" [82]transmitters that can detect if prisoners have been trying to remove them and send an alert to [83]prison [84]computers. This project is not the first such rollout of tracking [85]chips in [86]US prisons. Facilities in [87]Michigan, [88]California and [89]Illinois already employ the technology. Implantable RFID "chips", originally designed for animal tagging are being used and contemplated for humans as well. [90]Applied Digital Solutions proposes their chip's "unique under-the-skin format" as a solution to identity fraud, secure building access, computer access, storage of medical records, anti-kidnapping initiatives and a variety of law-enforcement applications. Combined with sensors to monitor body functions, the [91]Digital Angel device could provide monitoring for patients. The Baja Beach Club in [92]Barcelona, [93]Spain uses an implantable [94]Verichip to identify their VIP customers, who in turn use it to pay for drinks. The [95]Mexico City police department has implanted approximately 170 of their police officers with the Verichip, to allow access to police databases and possibly track them in case of kidnapping. [[96]edit] Potential uses RFID tags are often envisioned as a replacement for [97]UPC or [98]EAN bar-codes, having a number of important advantages over the older bar-code technology. RFID codes are long enough that every RFID tag may have a unique code, while UPC codes are limited to a single code for all instances of a particular product. The uniqueness of RFID tags means that a product may be individually tracked as it moves from location to location, finally ending up in the consumer's hands. This may help companies to combat theft and other forms of product loss. It has also been proposed to use RFID for [99]point-of-sale store checkout to replace the [100]cashier with an automatic system, with the option of erasing all RFID tags at checkout and paying by credit card or inserting money into a payment machine. This has to a limited extent already been implemented at some stores[101][1] (http://www.ncr.com/repository/articles/pdf/sa_selfcheckout_integrated solutions.pdf). An organization called EPCglobal is working on a proposed international standard for the use of RFID and the [102]Electronic Product Code (EPC) in the identification of any item in the [103]supply chain for companies in any industry, anywhere in the world. The organization's board of governors includes representatives from [104]EAN International, [105]Uniform Code Council, [106]The Gillette Company, [107]Procter & Gamble, [108]Wal-Mart, [109]Hewlett-Packard, [110]Johnson & Johnson, and [111]Auto-ID Labs. However, most RFID manufacturers work towards ISO-classification 18000-6 in stead of EPC standardization. ISO-classification has a wider industry recognition and EPC is in principle only looking after the needs of retailers and Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies. In July 2004, the Food and Drug Administration issued a ruling that essentially begins a final review process that will determine whether hospitals can use RFID systems to identify patients and/or permit relevant hospital staff to access [112]medical records. Update: According to the News Scan of Information Week on Oct. 18 2004, FDA has approved the country's first RFID chips that can be implanted in humans. The 134.2kHz RFID chips, from VeriChip Corp., a subsidiary of Applied Digital Solutions Inc., can incorporate personal medical information and could save lives and limit injuries from errors in medical treatments, according to the company. The FDA approval was disclosed during a conference call with investors. Many somewhat far-fetched uses, such as allowing a [113]refrigerator to track the expiration dates of the food it contains, have also been proposed, but few have moved beyond the prototype stage. Other future application related with transport and safety is using the RFID as intelligent traffic signals on the road (Road Beacon System or RBS). The system is based on an onboard vehicle reader and RFID tags embedded under the asphalt, signalling the driver when passing over. The chips have a very low implementation cost and a fast field implementation. They require no maintenance and run without batteries. They can send any kind of information to the driver, from speed limits to position information. The onboard vehicle reader can be completely customized, the driver can choose the information he is interested on. Also, the driver can be informed or alerted depending on his preferences. As an example, a driver will probably switch off tourist information during business trips but will switch it on during vacation periods. Other possible applications are for high precision indoor/outdoor positioning systems, transport exploitation systems, logistics or as a law enforcement ally (black box auditing). More details in: [114][2] (http://www.roadbeacon.com). [[115]edit] Controversy How would you like it if, for instance, one day you realized your underwear was reporting on your whereabouts? [116][3] (http://news.com.com/2100-1029_3-5065388.html) - California Senator [117]Debra Bowen, at a 2003 hearing The use of RFID technology has engendered considerable controversy and even product [118]boycotts. The four main [119]privacy concerns regarding RFID are: * The purchaser of an item will not necessarily be aware of the presence of the tag or be able to remove it; * The tag can be read at a distance without the knowledge of the individual; * If a tagged item is paid for by [120]credit card or in conjunction with use of a [121]loyalty card, then it would be possible to tie the unique ID of that item to the [122]identity of the purchaser; and * Tags create, or are proposed to create, globally unique serial numbers for all products, even though this creates privacy problems and is completely unnecessary for most applications. Most concerns revolve around the fact that RFID tags affixed to products remain functional even after the products have been purchased and taken home, and thus can be used for [123]surveillance, and other nefarious purposes unrelated to their supply chain inventory functions. Although RFID tags are only officially intended for short-distance use, they can be interrogated from greater distances by anyone with a high-[124]gain antenna, potentially allowing the contents of a house to be scanned at a distance. Even short range scanning is a concern if all the items detected are logged in a [125]database every time a person passes a reader, or if it is done for nefarious reasons (e.g., a [126]mugger using a hand-held scanner to obtain an instant assessment of the wealth of potential victims). With permanent RFID serial numbers, an item leaks unexpected information about a person even after disposal; for example, items that are resold, or given away, enable mapping of a person's [127]social network. Another privacy issue is due to RFID's support for a [128]singulation (anti-collision) [129]protocol. This is the means by which a reader enumerates all the tags responding to it without them mutually interfering. The structure of the most common version of this protocol is such that all but the last [130]bit of each tag's [131]serial number can be deduced by passively [132]eavesdropping on just the reader's part of the protocol. Because of this, whenever RFID tags are near to readers, the distance at which a tag's signal can be eavesdropped is irrelevant; what counts is the distance at which the much more powerful reader can be received. Just how far this can be depends on the type of the reader, but in the extreme case some readers have a maximum power output (4 [133]W) that could be received from tens of kilometres away. The potential for privacy violations with RFID was demonstrated by its use in a [134]pilot program by [135]the Gillette Company, which conducted a "smart shelf" test at a [136]Tesco in [137]Cambridge. They automatically [138]photographed shoppers taking RFID-tagged [139]safety razors off the shelf, to see if the technology could be used to deter [140]shoplifting. [141][4] (http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?document_id=5363) In January [142]2004 a group of privacy advocates was invited to [143]METRO Future Store in Germany, where an RFID pilot project was implemented. It was uncovered by accident that METRO "Payback" customer [144]loyalty cards contained RFID tags with customer IDs, a fact that was disclosed neither to customers receiving the cards, nor to this group of privacy advocates. This happened despite assurances by METRO that no customer identification data was tracked and all RFID usage was clearly disclosed. [145][5] (http://www.spychips.com/metro/overview.html) The controversy was furthered by the accidental exposure of a proposed [146]Auto-ID consortium [147]public relations [148]campaign that was designed to "neutralize opposition" and get consumers to "resign themselves to the inevitability of it" whilst merely pretending to address their concerns. [149][6] (http://www.spychips.com/press-releases/security_gaffe.html) The standard proposed by EPCglobal includes privacy-related guidelines for the use of RFID-based [150]EPC. These guidelines [151][7] (http://www.epcglobalinc.org/public_policy/public_policy_guidelines.ht ml) include the requirement to give consumers clear notice of the presence of EPC and to inform them of the choice that they have to discard, disable or remove EPC tags. These guidelines are non-binding, and only partly meet the [152]joint position statement (http://www.spychips.com/jointrfid_position_paper.html) of 46 multi-national [153]consumer rights and privacy groups. In 2004, Lukas Grunwald released a computer program RFDump which with suitable hardware allows reading and reprogramming the metadata contained in an RFID tag, although not the unchangeable serial number built into each tag. He said consumers could use this program to protect themselves, although it would also have significant malicious uses. There are applications instead where using RFID technology inversely as usual generates no concerns about privacy. This is the case of the Road Beacon System (RBS) [154][8] (http://www.roadbeacon.com) where the user is the only one who is using the reader collecting RFID information embedded under the road. This information can be stored in a "black box" but it is only avalilable for him/her, and is not travelling over networks, mobile phones or the Internet. [[155]edit] Passports A number of countries have proposed to embed RFID devices in new [156]passports [157][9] (http://news.com.com/E-passports+to+put+new+face+on+old+documents/2100 -7337_3-5313650.html), to facilitate efficient machine reading of [158]biometric data. Security expert [159]Bruce Schneier said of these proposals: "It's a clear threat to both privacy and personal safety. Quite simply, it's a bad idea." The RFID enabled passport uniquely identifies its holder, and in the proposal currently under consideration, will also include a variety of other personal information. This would greatly simplify some of the abuses of RFID technology just discussed, and expand them to include, for example, abuses based on machine reading of a person's race or nationality. For example, a mugger operating near an airport could target victims who have arrived from wealthy countries, or a terrorist could design a [160]bomb which functioned when approached by persons of a particular race. [[161]edit] Driver's Licenses The [162]US state of [163]Virginia has considered putting RFID tags into [164]drivers' licenses in order to make lookups faster for Police Officers and other government officials. The Virginia General Assembly also hopes that by including the tags fake [165]identity documents would become much harder to obtain. The proposal was first introduced in the "Driver's License Modernization Act" of 2002, which lapsed without vote, but as of 2004 the concept is still under consideration by a committee. The idea was supposedly prompted by the fact that several of the [166]September 11 [167]hijackers held fake Virginia drivers' licenses. However the [168]American Civil Liberties Union has claimed that in addition to being a risk to privacy and liberty, the proposal in fact would not have hindered the hijackers, since all their false documents were valid, officially issued documents obtained for a false identity. That is, the current weakness in the system is not inspecting documents in the field, but verifying identities before issuing documents. Under the proposal, no information would be stored on the tag other than a number corresponding to the holder's information in a [169]database, only accessible by authorized personnel. Also, to deter [170]identity thieves one would simply need to wrap ones driver's license in [171]aluminium foil. [172][10] (http://www.cavalierdaily.com/CVarticle.asp?ID=21006&pid=1202), [173][11] (http://washingtontimes.com/metro/20041006-113607-9806r.htm) [[174]edit] External links [[175]edit] In the news * [176]EE Times: [177]Euro banknotes to embed RFID chips in 2005 (http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20011219S0016) (December 2001) * [178]ZDNet: [179]Overcoming the Challenges of RFID (http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107_2-5165705.html), Mark Palmer, (February 2003) * [180]Wired: [181]Use of RFID in an inner city school (http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,60898,00.html) * [182]ZDNet: [183]Editorial: "Are spy chips set to go commercial?" (http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-980345.html) (January 2003) * Techworld: [184]RFID tags to make it into bank notes (http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=displaynews&Ne wsID=412) (September 2003) * [185]RFID tags become hacker target (http://news.com.com/RFID+tags+become+hacker+target/2100-1029_3-52 87912.html), Robert Lemos, July 28, 2004 * SD Times: [186]Active vs. Passive Tags (http://www.sdtimes.com/opinions/guestview_111.htm) (September, 2004) * ACM Queue: [187]The Magic of RFID (http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid= 216), a technical RFID Overview for software engineers by Roy Want, Intel Research. (October 2004) [[188]edit] Opposition * [189]Stop RFID (http://www.spychips.com/index.html), an [190]activist site devoted to exposing privacy problems with RFID. * [191]EFF position on RFID (http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/RFID/) * See also [192]privacy external links for privacy rights organizations on the topic.. [[193]edit] Industry associations * [194]EPCglobal website (http://www.epcglobalinc.org/) * [195]Association for Automatic Identification and Data Capture Technologies (http://www.aimglobal.org/technologies/rfid/), [196]trade association webpage about RFID [[197]edit] Industry gazettes, journals and blogs * [198]RFID Gazette (http://www.rfidgazette.org/), providing daily RFID-related news * [199]The Future Is Here: A Beginner's Guide to RFID (http://www.rfidgazette.org/2004/06/rfid_101.html), an RFID Gazette essay. (June 2004) * RFIDbuzz: [200]Website (http://www.rfidbuzz.com/) and [201]Wiki (http://www.rfidbuzz.com/wiki/) * RFID Journal: [202]Michelin Embeds RFID Tags in Tires (http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/269/1/1/) * [203]RFID Log (http://www.rfidlog.com/), industry news service on RFID innovation, implementation and legal processes * [204]RFID News (http://www.rfidnews.org/), [205]weblog and monthly e-magazine covering the RFID Industry * [206]RFID and Contactless technology News (http://www.contactlessnews.com/), free resource for breaking news and research on the use of contactless and radio frequency identification technologies. Profit, privacy, and the battle for control of the emerging technology are frequently covered topics in this industry leading resource. * [207]MoreRFID.com (http://www.morerfid.com/), free RFID information site. * [208]RFID Global Resource Link (http://www.byvalor.com/), a comprehensive directory for system integrators to have quick access to all global RFID-related resources. 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http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20011219S0016 178. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZDNet 179. http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107_2-5165705.html 180. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wired 181. http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,60898,00.html 182. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZDNet 183. http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-980345.html 184. http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=displaynews&NewsID=412 185. http://news.com.com/RFID+tags+become+hacker+target/2100-1029_3-5287912.html 186. http://www.sdtimes.com/opinions/guestview_111.htm 187. http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=216 188. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=RFID&action=edit§ion=11 189. http://www.spychips.com/index.html 190. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activist 191. http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/RFID/ 192. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy#External_Links 193. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=RFID&action=edit§ion=12 194. http://www.epcglobalinc.org/ 195. http://www.aimglobal.org/technologies/rfid/ 196. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_trade_group 197. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=RFID&action=edit§ion=13 198. http://www.rfidgazette.org/ 199. http://www.rfidgazette.org/2004/06/rfid_101.html 200. http://www.rfidbuzz.com/ 201. http://www.rfidbuzz.com/wiki/ 202. http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/269/1/1/ 203. http://www.rfidlog.com/ 204. http://www.rfidnews.org/ 205. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog 206. http://www.contactlessnews.com/ 207. http://www.morerfid.com/ 208. http://www.byvalor.com/ From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 21 15:15:15 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 10:15:15 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Technology Review: Just Another Chip in the (Privacy) Wall Message-ID: Just Another Chip in the (Privacy) Wall http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/11/wo_kushner111804.asp?p=0 An electronic database implanted under the skin can assure speedy and proper medical care-but is it worth it? By David Kushner November 18, 2004 You can almost see the ads now: Imagine a bright future with a chip in your arm! Went to the supermarket, but left the wallet at home? No problem! Flex your bicep and the smiling cashier passes a scanner over your arm. Voila-identification chip recognized! Problem solved. Your credit is good with us! Passed out during a sunrise jaunt on the top of Haleakala Mountain in Maui? Fret not! The hospital down below is on the case. Arm please. Scanner! The readout on the computer is fine. Just a little altitude sickness. Key to the safety deposit box weighing you down? Chuck it! Next time you're in the bank, give the teller a friendly wave-and watch the doors open to greet you! After decades as the stuff of sci-fi novels and anime movies, the age of chipped humans is finally a reality. Last month, following two years of review, the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of an implantable chip for medical applications. Each Verichip is the size of a grain of rice and contains a unique, 16-digit radio frequency ID. Linked to a database, that ID tag can call up a variety of information-from medical records to financial information. Not surprisingly, the technology is causing its share of controversy. Civil liberties groups are calling this the end of privacy. Religious groups are calling it the number of the beast. Down on the shores of Delray Beach, FL, Applied Digital-the company behind the Verichip-calls it a goldmine. Like a lot of new technologies, the Verichip happened rather by accident. Fifteen years ago, a company called Digital Angel developed implantable identification chips for the purpose of tracking companion pets and cattle. But the idea was nothing to moo at. Last year, 800,000 animal chips were sold in the United States for $55 to $70 apiece-30 percent more than in 2002. If the chips could identify animals, why not a human being? This thought occurred to Richard Seelig, a surgeon in New Jersey, shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Seelig watched with horror as New York City firemen scrawled their social security numbers in black ink on the forearms-just in case they were to be burned beyond recognition in the inferno. Familiar with Digital Angel's work, Seelig voluntarily implanted himself with a radio frequency identification chip. And the race to bring it to the rest of the world was on. According to Angela Fulcher, spokesperson for Applied Digital, the human chip works in essentially the same manner as the animal chips. The chip is contained inside a cylindrical transponder, a glass tube 11 millimeters in length and 2.1 millimeters in diameter. Along with the chip is an antenna coil, which picks up and transmits the identification number to a scanner. The Pocket Reader, an existing handheld scanner created by Applied Digital, reads the radio frequency ID number when it's passed over the skin within a space of three or four inches. Unlike the animal version, the human chip is coated with Biobond-a porous polypropylene sheathe that connects to surrounding tissues. The chip is implanted, via a proprietary Verichip inserter, in a fleshy area such as the bicep. "Based on our experience at with microchips and animals," Fulcher says, "we see the lifespan at being 10 years." Although newly approved by the FDA, Verichips are already in use outside the United States. In total, an estimated 1,000 people have been implanted thus far. In Mexico, Rafael Macedo de la Concha, the country's attorney general, was implanted with a chip to provide secure access to government documents. In Barcelona, a beach club is injecting partiers with ID chips in lieu of hand stamps. Despite the announcement of the FDA approval, however, such frivolous implants may soon be second guessed. Organizations have criticized Applied Digital for not adequately disclosing the FDA's finding of Verichip's risks. A group called the Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, or Caspian, obtained a letter from the FDA to Applied Digital dated October 12, and posted it on the Web. The letter cites several "potential risks to health associated with the device," including adverse tissue reaction, migration of the implanted transponder, electromagnetic interference, electrical hazards, and incompatibility with magnetic resonance imaging. In addition to medical concerns, privacy advocates lament the potential abuses of implantable IDs. The outcry stems from the proliferation of radio frequency identification in products and badges. The San Francisco Public Library is trying to put ID chips in all of its books. In Virginia, the Department of Motor Vehicles is considering putting chips on every driver's license. The Ross Correctional Facility in Chillicothe, Ohio is running a pilot program that will track prisoners using chipped badges. Ostensibly, the idea is to provide a kind of DNA for merchandise (and inmates), a unique identifier that can track where and how products are distributed. But questions raised by implantable chips only complicate the matters-particularly in light of the increased use of surveillance in the workplace. "I see implantable chips as the wave of the future," says Frederick S. Lane III, author of The Naked Employee: How Technology Is Compromising Workplace Privacy. Lane says "The problem is that it gives employers access to so much information that they get to call the shots as far as what's innocuous." And the battles could intensify if, as some fear, the devices can be used in conjunction global position satellites. Fulcher says Applied Digital has in fact developed a prototype of an implantable "personal location device," and has already obtained the intellectual property. Bringing such technology to market, Fulcher says, "is a multimillion dollar conversation. At the moment, we're focusing on our current technology. If the right partner came along, however, that might be of interest." David Kushner is a contributing writer for Technology Review who covers digital entertainment technology. He is the author of Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture. From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 21 15:17:28 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 10:17:28 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Gary North: When You Won't Be Able to Find a Physician Message-ID: When You Won't Be Able to Find a Physician Gary North's REALITY CHECK Issue 397 November 19, 2004 That day is coming. The closer you are to age 65, the faster it is coming. You have to begin planning for this now. The care that you will receive is going to resemble the Post Office. When you are over 65, a physician who accepts any Medicare patients is not allowed to accept payment from you if you are under Medicare. It's a felony if he does. The only exception is if you're covered by your employers' policy. Because hospitals charge high prices to uninsured people, but accept Medicare payments or insurance company payments for 20 cents on the dollar, if you aren't under Medicaid, you can get ruined. Why does the government allow this dual pricing practice? Simple: the bureaucrats know that this forces everyone under Medicare/Medicaid at age 65. Insuring yourself against a catastrophic illness with a high-deductible ($5,000) coverage would be affordable, but it's not possible. Private insurance companies do not cover people older than age 65. THE SQUEEZE ON PHYSICIANS There was a time when "my son, the doctor" meant a lot. It meant money, social prominence, and steady work. Today, it means filling out Medicare forms, high liability insurance, massive debts at graduation, and years of forfeited income early in life, when the compound growth process should get started. There are two physicians in my congregation. Both of them have quit practicing. One is an official with Blue Cross/Blue Shield. The other runs a business selling an amazing cream, available only by prescription, that removes aging spots and scarring. Back before World War I, the government first gave physicians protection from competition. Then, beginning in the 1960s, the government has tightened the regulatory screws. "The government giveth, and the government taketh away." There is a joke about a physician who calls a plumber. The plumber works for three hours and charges the man $150 for labor. "Why, I don't make that much per hour, and I'm a physician." The plumber replies, "Neither did I, when I was a physician." Recently, I received a letter from a family physician. What he says about his profession is not understood by the general public. If he is correct, there is going to be a shortage of physicians, especially highly motivated ones. (Note: "shortage" always means "at some price.") ********************* A PHYSICIAN'S WARNING Anonymous I am a family physician and teach medical students. One of the things I try to help them deal with is the little-understood (even by those in med. school) fact that by age 65, most family physicians will have earned less than most factory workers who are willing to work equivalent hours, yet the average 'proceduralist' physician will make within the first four or five years of practice, more money than the family physician will during his/her lifetime. As a top-10%'er in my class, I had all the options, and had the 'backup' of an undergraduate degree/license as a pharmacist; that's now good for about $60/hr minimum. I had, unfortunately for my family (income equates to potential time spent with family), a 'calling' to be a family physician, in terms of abilities, interest, and what I felt 'right' doing. I will make the same amount of money by age 65 (if the government doesn't screw up health care further by regulation) slightly less than I would have if I got out of high-school and signed on at $7.50/hr, working the same hours I now do, with never any career 'advancement' besides a wage keeping pace with inflation. My patients of course are clueless; they see the Mercedes driven by a former classmate (I tutored) who is now a urologist, and the big house of the family physician down the street who signed on to work for the local hospital as a 'funnel' physician (so they can get HMO contracts by having lots of primary care providers); she works four days a week in the office, 9 to 4:30, and takes telephone-only call 3 days a month (no hospital practice required) and makes $115,000 a year. I'll make less than that, and work a 60-hour week, with some months being 'negative' -- I've gone as long as 9 months without a paycheck, if there are practice transitions going on (new partner, relocation, etc.). So far, it just represents my willingness to take some cash-flow risks, and my willingness to view medicine as a 'calling' rather than as a privileged license to take advantage of. SOCIALIZED MEDICINE The problem is that, unlike most areas of business, medicine is socialized, and there is no competition. The worst aspect of this is that the patients pay several-fold more for health care than they should have to, and get far less quality than they ought to. (Ironically most of this is due to government-imposed 'quality-assurance' and 'cost-containment' solutions which are actually insurance-lobbyist dreams-come-true but the public is persuaded are to 'help control costs and assure quality.') The reality is that a patient who presents with several inter-related problems has three kinds of care they will encounter: 1. Revolving-door. They see a physician who schedules 20-25 patients per day, and 'works in' another 10; they are in actual face-to-face contact with the physician for less than five minutes, problems are minimized and treated in a 'meets code specifications' type manner, and that physician makes maybe $150,000 to $300,000 per year for a 40-hour work week, usually with great benefits since they usually work for an HMO or hospital. 2. Biopsy the Wallet. They see a physician who has determined what that particular patient's insurance's weaknesses are, and spends the slightly-less-rushed encounter time to ask enough leading questions to determine a 'need' for whatever well-reimbursed tests or procedures the physician can 'capture.' That physician may make a little more income, and work the same basic hours. 3. Try to do the right thing. They see a physician who maybe sees 2-3 patients per hour, and tries to do a thorough history and examination and order whatever tests are appropriate or do whatever procedures are actually necessary. This physician will have a shabby office, and you will spend an hour or more in their waiting room, but will receive a caring and thorough evaluation. That physician will make between $50,000 and $120,000 for a 60-hour work week, and have puny 'benefits' because they are likely self-employed. They don't get the glitzy advertisements or marketing from the local hospital or HMO because they 'buck' the system and don't just skew their evaluation and treatment to maximize the HMO profits so they can get their 'cut.' This is all due to the socialization of health care, and the fact that when patients are seen, procedures (most of which are very easy to do, and anyone with half a brain could do well, but are 'restricted' due to government and medical-association licensure issues) are way overpaid, and 'cognitive services' (which is what the physician's 12-15 years of post-high-school education are supposed to train us for) are typically unreimbursed or paid minimally for. Example: If I treat a diabetic hypertensive Medicare patient with lipid problems, depression, and arthritis, and multiple medication interactions, I may spend 40 minutes with them ($120 dollars cost to me in overhead) and Medicare won't even pay me enough to break even (I'd be better off sending the patient next door to see a specialist who will do some $900 procedure on them and make them a happy patient, and handing a $20 dollar bill to them to get them out of my office, than to see them and spend those 40 minutes with them). On the other hand, if I dream up some reason to do a procedure on them (ear wax removal? Skin lesion biopsy? etc.), sick the nurse on them, and move on to the next patient after 5 minutes with them, I may have a profit of $50 for 5-10 minutes' work. Yes, careers can be a 'calling,' but when my kids say things like, 'Dad, why can't we ever go on vacation like the Smith's [union factory worker], or have a swimming pool like the Jones' [self-employed plumber], or just have supper together as a family like the Johnson's [both school teachers],' I have no good answers. The Smith's even have friends in the media, who caution social planners to be sure to keep blue-collar workers from having problems 'accessing' health care. The Jones family earns public sympathy as small business owners that the private practice family physician never gets. The Johnson's are in the martyr class of Teachers, Policemen, and Firemen who are reputationally under-paid, yet all attain a lifetime average of more per hour than the family physician who refuses to 'play the game' by practicing for the system instead of for the patient. In a fair world (a capitalistic, free-enterprise one), I could charge say $5 more per visit, and patients who valued the extra time and better care would pay me $5 more than the doctor down the street. Since the average profit per doctor visit is in the $10-15 range, I'd get a substantial raise, encouraging and rewarding me for 'doing the right thing' -- instead, they all pay the same $10 co-pay, whether they go to the revolving-door doc, the find-a-procedure-to-do doc, or myself. My income suffering isn't the big deal, but my kids don't get family time, and they will be lucky if we can send them to college, while the kids of those who surf socialism's great 'safety net' will treasure the many family vacations spent jet-skiing before they trod off to their ivy-league colleges. 'Callings' are at least affordable in a capitalistic environment, but as our society becomes more socialistic, they are not going to be the way most people make life decisions. WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR PAYMENT? I rarely visit a doctor's office: maybe once a year. Two more visits, and I'll be on Medicare. My goal is to pay cash, despite my Medicare coverage. I figure I'm a more valuable patient this way. I use two physicians: a successful one and a conventional one. The conventional one treats everyone, accepts Medicare, accepts insurance company payments, and will have to work until he's 70. The other is an "alternative medicine" physician. He accepts no Medicare patients, accepts no third-party payments from insurers, and requires payment after every visit. I can pay him whatever he charges after I reach 65. He is not under the Medicare regulations. He is booked solid for three months out. It's working for him. In 1978, I spent two weeks lecturing to physicians in a dozen cities. I was accompanied by physicians from Canada and Australia. Two other teams like the one I was on also included physicians from England. We warned physicians about the coming of socialized medicine and government regulation. Attendance was sparse. The Australian physician had adopted the practice of not accepting third-party payments. That way, he got paid on time. He also attracted patients who were after top-flight service. That, he provided. He recommended that every American physician adopt such a procedure. Few did. The idea is now spreading. The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons have adopted The Physicians' Declaration of Independence (July 4, 2004). Its opening paragraph is a shot across the bow of socialized medicine. When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one Profession to dissolve the Financial Arrangements which have connected them with Medicare, Medicaid, assorted Health Maintenance Organizations, and diverse Third Party Payers and to assume among the other Professions of the Earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. The rest of it is equally good. Paragraph 2 is basic. We hold these truths to be self-evident: that the Physician's primary responsibility is toward the Patient; that to assure the sanctity of this relationship, payment for service should be decided between Physician and Patient, and that, as in all transactions in a free society, this payment be mutually agreeable. Only such a Financial Arrangement will guarantee the highest level of Commitment and Service of the Physician to the Patient, restrain Outside Influence on Decision-Making, and assure that all information be kept strictly confidential. When a Third Party dictates payment for the Physician's service, it exercises effective control over the Decision-Making of the Physician, which may not always be in the best interest of the Patient. The Third Party then intrudes heavily into the sacred Patient-Physician relationship and demands to inspect the Medical Record in a self-serving attempt to satisfy itself that its money is being spent in accordance with its own pre-ordained accounting principles. The declaration ends with this forthright assertion: We, therefore, the undersigned Physicians of the United States of America, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name of our Patients solemnly publish and declare, that we will withdraw our participation in all above-described Third Party Payment Systems. Henceforth and Forever, we shall agree to provide our services directly to our Patients, and be compensated directly by them, in accordance with the ancient customs of our Profession. As has always been true of our Profession, our charges will be adjusted to reflect the Patients' ability to render payment. Nothing prevents any patient from purchasing and using Insurance. The Patients' medical interactions with us will remain completely confidential. We pledge the highest level of Service and Dedication to their Well-Being. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. http://www.aapsonline.org/medicare/doi.htm To put all this into a form that most of us recognize, he who pays the piper calls the tune. I want to call the tune. I can call it by paying. If my physician has structured his payments system to treat people like I am, he will be responsive to my demands. But what of my local physician who is booked up for three months? He isn't charging enough. He is rationing access by making us wait for months. He should offer an "emergency appointment" option for an extra $100 per visit. That would be allocation by price. As more physicians get the message, he will have competitors. IF YOU GET SICK By relying on third party payments, Americans have passed the buck to third parties. They have chosen low-deductible policies, paid for by employers. This has led to the usual scenario: the insured try to maximize their "free" care, and the companies try to reduce payment. Costs soar. Employers are trying to get out of the insurance-provision business. The health insurance industry looks more and more like Congress. The physicians are caught in the middle. They are expected by everyone to charge less per visit. So, my advice is this: don't get sick. Take responsibility for your health. Do the things you know you should, and avoid the things you know are bad for you. The fact is, the largest single medical expense of your life will be your last six months of life. About two-thirds of everything you will spend on hospital and physicians' care will be spent in those final six months. (This, according to the Blue Cross/Blue Shield man in our congregation.) So, Medicare will bust the fiscal system as more old people start dying. The expenses have only just begun. This means that having an HSA policy is a good idea. These are tax-deductible medical policies. You deposit money on a tax- deductible basis. If you get sick, you can spend this money tax- free. The system will be abused, then reformed, then abused, and so on. But for now, HSA's represent a major savings. http://snipurl.com/annw Establish a good relationship with a physician today, so that he will continue to see you. Pay cash. Don't make his secretary fill out forms unless the expense is really high. A social relationship is important. Give him a book that he might like when you visit his office. You just happened to pick it up. Talk about things he is interested in. Send him a nice Christmas present. Yes, even if he's Jewish. If you know he's interested in sports or other events, buy two tickets and just happen to have an out-of-town event pop up, and does he want them? Do this before you hit age 65. Establish a pattern early. Living in a small town is better if you're over age 65. In a popular retirement area, you will sit in a large office that looks like Grand Central Station. You will get 10 minutes of time with the doctor. It's all Medicare, all the time. If you're in a small town, maybe there won't be a large office area. You'll get in. CONCLUSION We are about to hit the brick wall in health care delivery. If you can find a physician who doesn't accept Medicare, go there. Pay up front. Be sure he wants you as a patient. The younger he/she is, the better. Get in on the ground floor, when there is no patient base. A hungry physician is happy to see you. Over time, it will be harder to get on the list. Basically, the government is substituting rationing for price competition in health care delivery. Under such conditions, you must seek out legal ways to get to the front of the line. From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 21 15:38:01 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 10:38:01 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC: (Holy Grail) The never-ending search Message-ID: The never-ending search http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4044765.stm Friday, 26 November, 2004, 11:07 GMT By Brendan O'Neill Fascination with the Holy Grail has lasted for centuries, and now the Bletchley Park code-breakers have joined the hunt. But what is it that's made the grail the definition of something humans are always searching for but never actually finding? Could an obscure inscription on a 250-year-old monument in a Staffordshire garden point the way to the Holy Grail - the jewelled chalice reportedly used by Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper? That is one theory entertained by Richard Kemp, the general manager of Lord Lichfield's Shugborough estate in Staffs. Kemp has called in world-renowned code-breakers to try to decipher a cryptic message carved into the Shepherd's Monument on the Lichfield estate. The monument, built around 1748, features an image of one of Nicholas Poussin's paintings, and beneath it the letters "D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M." It has long been rumoured that these letters - which have baffled some of the greatest minds over the past 250 years, including Charles Darwin's and Josiah Wedgwood's - provide clues to the whereabouts of Christ's elusive cup. Spot of bother Poussin was said by some to have been a Grand Master of the Knights Templar, named after the order that captured Jerusalem during the Crusades and who were known as the "keepers of the Holy Grail". Oliver and Sheila Lawn Oliver and Sheila Lawn, with the mysterious inscription Yet Oliver and Sheila Lawn, a couple in their 80s who were based at the code-breaking Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire during World War II, have had a spot of bother with the Shepherd's Monument. Mr Lawn said yesterday that deciphering the letters was "much more difficult" than cracking the Enigma code in WWII. He thinks it's a message from an obscure Christian sect, declaring their belief that Jesus was an Earthly prophet, not a divinity - while his wife Sheila thinks it could be a coded tribute from a widowed earl to his wife. So yet another trail to the Grail seems to have run dry. What is it about the Holy Grail that so excites the popular imagination? And why are so many willing to believe that such an item exists, when there is a dearth of evidence? Renewed interest The Holy Grail is believed by some to have been the chalice used at the Last Supper, by others to have been a cup used by Joseph of Arimathea to catch the blood of the crucified Christ, and by others still to have been both. Some claim that Joseph may have brought the cup to Britain in the first century CE. Stories about the Grail have been told for centuries. There has been a renewed interest since the publication of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in 1982, which claims, in a nutshell, that Jesus survived the crucifixion and together with Mary Magdalene founded a bloodline in France, the Merovingians, who were protected by the Knights Templar and later by the Freemasons. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, that book has been denounced as mad conspiracy-mongering by some.) The probability that the cup found its ways to Joseph and that he travelled with it to Britain is as near as nil as makes no difference Eric Eve [45]Code points away from Holy Grail The Holy Grail has even turned up in Hollywood. In Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the eponymous hero both fights off the Nazis and finds the Grail. Now Ron Howard, the Happy Days actor turned film director, is making a big-screen version of The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's novel about how clues in Da Vinci paintings could lead to the discovery of a religious mystery, including the Grail, and shake the foundations of Christianity. Brown's novel has become a publishing phenomenon over the past two years, feted and hated in equal measure. Purely legendary According to experts, this is precisely where the Grail belongs - in fiction and films. Eric Eve is a tutor in theology and a New Testament scholar at Oxford University. He says he is unaware of any evidence for the existence of a Holy Grail. Mark Rylance as Leonardo from the BBC's The Man Who Wanted to Know Does Leonardo's Last Supper contain clues? "In the version of the legend I know, the Grail is meant to be the chalice Jesus used at the Last Supper, subsequently brought to England by Joseph of Arimathea. But there is no 1st Century evidence about what happened either to the chalice or to Joseph - assuming he's even an historical character. "The probability that the cup found its ways to Joseph and that he travelled with it to Britain is as near as nil as makes no difference. I would say it is purely legendary." Richard Barber, author of The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend, published by Penguin next month, says the Grail legend came into being more than a thousand years after Christ's death. "It is pure literature. It was imagined by a French writer, Chretien de Troyes, at the end of the 12th Century, in the romance of Perceval. His vision is at the root of all the Grail stories." Conspiracy theories Barber believes that 20th Century fascination with the Grail stems from "the revival of interest in medieval literature in the 19th Century, when Tennyson, Wagner and the Pre-Raphaelite artists were all enthusiasts for the Grail legends" - and that our fascination today has been boosted by the contemporary penchant for conspiracy theories and cover-ups. "The Grail - because it is mysterious and has always belonged in the realms of the imagination - is a marvellous focus for the new genre of 'imagined history', the idea that all history as taught and recorded is a vast cover-up. Once this kind of idea becomes current, particularly with the internet, it acquires a life of its own - regardless of whether it has any basis in reality. Richard Holloway: 'Absolute nonsense' Even some of those who have written of the Grail as having some "basis in reality" admit that it is difficult to say what the Grail is, never mind where it is. Erling Haagensen is co-author (with Henry Lincoln) of The Templars' Secret Island: The Knights, The Priest and The Treasure, which claims that "something" is hidden on the tiny island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea. "I do not know what the Holy Grail is," says Haagensen. "Something very important and with strong connections to the Holy Grail is hidden on the island of Bornholm. The Ark of the Covenant might theoretically be hidden there. "But there is something even more important, which always followed the Ark of the Covenant, and which we can now prove is found at Bornholm. This will be revealed in our coming book," he adds, mysteriously. Yet while some authors - and a host of conspiracy websites - believe that "something" will one day be found, even men of the cloth have little faith in the existence of the Holy Grail. "It's all good fun but absolute nonsense", says Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh. "The quest for the Holy Grail belongs with the quest for the ark Noah left on Mount Ararat or the fabled Ark of the Covenant Indiana Jones is always chasing. There ain't any objective truth in any of it - but of course it's a dream for publishers, who know the world is full of gullible people looking for miracles and they keep on promising that this time the miracle's going to come true. "Only it isn't - but the money keeps rolling in." References 45. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/beds/bucks/herts/4040127.stm From HowlBloom at aol.com Fri Jan 21 21:58:19 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 16:58:19 EST Subject: [Paleopsych] big bagels and black holes Message-ID: <1a7.2fa5b699.2f22d4fb@aol.com> More on black holes. There are a number of theories in the world of theoretical physics (not just the world of Buddhism) in which the universe is cyclical?it dies and from its cinder is born again. One of those is my Big Bagel Theory. Others include Max Tegmark?s toroidal theory, a theory in which the cosmos is also curved like a doughnut, and a theory in which ?branes?? skin-like surfaces on which universes spread?periodically meet. In most of these theories the universe ends in a big crunch that?s the mirror opposite of the big bang, then a new universe pops out of the singularity of that crunch. A question I?ve been pondering, and occasionally muttering about on paleopsych over the last year or so, goes something like this. Can we or whatever beasts are burped out after us by the creative cosmos manage to sum up what we? ve learned and pass it through the eye of the needle, through the singularity of the big crunch, and on to whatever cosmos comes after us? In other words, can universes learn from their parents? The answer would have been ?no? a year or two ago. Information, said the party line, can?t pass through a singlurity?it can?t stream through the infinitessimal squinch in time and space that makes for big bangs, big crunches, and black holes. Well, now the view of just how much a singularity turns all information into non-information seems to be changing. First Stephen Hawking changed his mind in the summer of 2004 and decided that information can, indeed, sift into?and, more important, out of?the singularity of a black hole. Now a bunch of other theoretical physicists are discovering ways their theoretical structures also make the sluicing of data through the eye of the needle, through a singularity, possible. Which brings us back to the question?can one cosmos pass its wisdom on to the cosmos that comes after it? Can universes learn, then pass their knowledge on from one generation to the next and through the next to universes ten generations down the line? Can information scrunchers like us humans possibly become part of this process? Can we?or can our great, greate, great, grandchildren a million generations down the line?find ways to compress knowledge so it passes through the big crunch on to the next big bang? The answer has shifted from what it was two years ago. Then it was an unequivocal ?no?. Now it?s just conceivably ?yes?. Howard Ps. For those who don?t know the Bloom Big Bagel Theory, conceived in 1959, then supported in surprising ways when we discovered in 1998 that the universe is accelarating in its expansion, I?ll toss in an old summary below. And below that is an article summing up the new views on information?s passage through and/or out of black holes and, by implication, other singularities. The Big Bagel Theory. We can do this the easy way, or we can do it the hard way. The easy way is Rob Kritkausky?s animation of the theory, which isn? t quite complete but gets a heck of a lot across in a very small amount of time. The animation is at _http://www.bigbangtango.org/website/BigBagel.htm_ (http://www.bigbangtango.org/website/BigBagel.htm) The hard way is by using words. Here come the words: The Bloom Big Bagel theory of the cosmos says that at the infinitessimally small point of the beginning of the Big Bang, two cosmoses whomped out, each into its own curved plane of space. One is the cosmos in which we live. The other is the cosmos of anti-matter. Do we need a silly, comic-book level theory of this sort? We sure as heck do. When I went through several hundred astrophysics papers trying to find the dates of nucleogenesis of the various complex atoms--the atoms beyond hydrogen, helium, and lithium--I couldn't find the information. Why? Because there is a subject in astrophysics called nucleocosmochronology. You'd think that chronologists of the birth of nucleii would try to figure out the date of the first iron atom, the first, oxygen atom, the first potassium atom, and so on. But, no. There's something else on nucleocosmochronologist's minds. It's a simple question. Why is there so much ordinary matter in this universe and so little anti-matter? Theory says that the amount of ordinary matter and anti-matter should be the same. So where did all the anti-matter go? The Bloom Big Bagel Theory of the Cosmos is toroidal. In topology, that means it?s doughnut-like. Big Bagel Theory says to idiots like me, "Hey, nut case, the missing anti-matter went into a negative universe, a universe in which time runs in reverse, a universe in which its obstreperous backwardness actually fits." Meanwhile, astrophysicists are now asking why the universe's elements--novas, stars, and galaxies--accel erate away from each other once they pass a certain point. They've tried a bunch of names to account for whatever the cause might be--negative gravity, quintessence, the cosmological constant, and, this year's favorite, dark energy. But Big Bagel theory says that a curved space represents a curve in gravity. Gravity tells space how to bend. Reach the highpoint of the bagel and you begin to slide down a gravity curve. You begin to accelerate. You do it for two reasons simultaneously (two reasons that are simultaneous and seem each others opposites may be instances of Niels Bohr's complimentarity). Once you get over the hump, gravity turns negative--it pushes you away from a common gravitational center instead of toward that center. And once you get over the hump, you're being pulled by the gravity of the anti-universe. When the two universes meet at the outer limits of the Big Bagel they annihilate to a pinprick of energy and are back where they started, in the center, big-banging and big-bageling again. The idea of an anti-universe gains a peculiar kind of support--and a new kind of reality--from the concept that i=the square root of minus one. There is no square root of minus one, so why does it show up in calculations that actually predict things we can measure? Because the square root of minus one doesnt' exist HERE. It exists THERE...in the anti-universe on the underside of the bagel. Those two universes were once one. They will be one again someday...when they meet on the bagel's outer limit, its periphery. So it makes sense that the math of this cosmos--our cosmos--has to use the math of the negative cosmos, too. The matter universe and the anti-matter universe are twins and will continue to be connected--even if only distantly--so long as they both exist. ________ Now for the articles on the ways in which information could slip through a singularity-- Retrieved January 20, 2005, from the World Wide Web http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524836.500 Free E-Zines Subscribe to Magazine Customer Service 21 January 2005 Black holes, but not as we know them 22 January 2005 From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues. JR Minkel JR Minkel is a writer in New York City More Stories Explore: fundamentals Explore: space Enlarge image Black hole revolution Enlarge image Black holesTHEY are the most fearsome objects in the universe. They swallow and destroy everything that crosses their path. Everyone knows that falling into a black hole spells doom. Or does it? In the past few years, cracks have started to appear in the conventional picture. Researchers on the quest for a more complete understanding of our universe are finding that black holes are not so black, and perhaps not holes either. Furious debates are raging over what black holes contain and even whether they deserve the name. The term "black hole" was coined in the 1960s by physicist John Wheeler to describe what happens when matter is piled into an infinitely dense point in space-time. When a star runs out of nuclear fuel, for example, the waste that remains collapses in on itself, fast and hard. The gravitational attraction of this matter can overwhelm its natural tendency to repel itself. If the star is big enough, the result will be a singularity. Around the singularity lies an event horizon, a point of no return. Light cannot escape once it passes beyond this boundary, and the eventual fate of everything within it is to be crushed into the singularity. But this picture always contained the seeds of its own destruction. In 1975 Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge calculated that black holes would slowly but inexorably evaporate. According to the laws of quantum mechanics, pairs of "virtual" particles and antiparticles continually bubble up in empty space. Hawking showed that the gravitational energy of the black hole could be lent to virtual particles near the event horizon. These could then become real, and escape, carrying away positive energy in the form of "Hawking radiation". Over time, the black hole will bleed away into outer space. This led to a problem dubbed the information paradox. While relativity seems to suggest that information about matter falling into a black hole would be lost, quantum mechanics seemed to be suggesting it would eventually escape. Hawking claimed the random nature of Hawking radiation meant that while energy could escape, information could not. But last summer, he changed his mind (New Scientist, 17 July 2004, p 11). His reversal was just one part of a larger movement to rethink the rules that govern black holes. Much of the impetus for this rethink comes from string theory, our best attempt to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics. Now 20 years old, string theory posits that space-time, and everything in it, is composed of vibrating strings so small we will be lucky ever to get evidence of their existence. Its big appeal is the promise that it could unite general relativity and quantum mechanics, because one type of string carries the force of gravity, while the vibration of the strings is random, as predicted by quantum mechanics. String theory was first applied to black holes in the mid-1990s. Andrew Strominger and Cumrun Vafa of Harvard University began to work on the information paradox by imagining what the inside of a black hole might be like. The researchers found that string theory would allow them to build highly dense little structures from strings and other objects in string theory, some of which had more than three dimensions. These structures worked just like black holes: their gravitational pull prevents light escaping from them. ?The number of ways strings can be arranged in black holes is amazingly large?Strominger and Vafa counted how many ways the strings in these black holes could be arranged, and found this was amazingly large. The calculation was heralded as a huge validation for string theory. In the 1970s, Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein, then at Princeton University, had calculated the entropy of a black hole using quantum mechanics. The entropy of an object is roughly a measure of the amount of information it can contain. In particular, it measures the number of different ways the parts making up an object can be arranged. It just so happened that the number of ways that Strominger and Vafa calculated that strings could be arranged in a black hole exactly matched the entropy calculated by Hawking and Bekenstein. Fuzzballs But this did not tell physicists how those strings were arranged. Over the past year, Samir Mathur of Ohio State University and his colleagues have begun to look at what string configurations there could be in black holes. They found that the strings would always connect together to form a large, very floppy string, which would be much larger than a point-size singularity. Mathur's group calculated the total physical sizes of several stringy black holes, which they prefer to call "fuzzballs" or "stringy stars". To his surprise, they found they were the same size as the event horizon is in traditional theory. "It is changing our picture of the black hole interior," says Mathur. "It would really mean the picture of the round hole with a black dot in the centre is wrong." Mathur's fuzzball does away with the idea of the event horizon as a sharp boundary. In the traditional view, the event horizon is a well-defined limit. Objects passing particular points in space at particular moments in time are guaranteed to end up being pulverised at the black hole singularity. In the fuzzball picture, the event horizon is a frothing mass of strings, not a sharp boundary. The fuzzball picture also challenges the idea that a black hole destroys information. In Mathur's description, there is no singularity. The mass of strings reaches all the way to the fuzzy event horizon. This means information can be stored in the strings and imprinted on outgoing Hawking radiation. So what happens to the information that falls into a black hole? Imagine pouring cream into black coffee. Drop the coffee and cream into the old-style black hole and they will go to the singularity and be lost. You will never see the results of the mixture. But drop your coffee and cream onto a Mathur fuzzball and information about the cream-coffee mixture will be encoded into string vibrations. Hawking radiation that comes out can carry detailed information about what happened to each particle of cream and every particle of coffee. "There's no information problem. It's like any other ball of cotton," says Mathur. This picture is very preliminary, cautions Vafa. Mathur has not yet calculated exactly how his model applies to large black holes or understood how a black hole evolves over time. Gary Horowitz of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, also recently proposed that information can get out of a black hole. But unlike Mathur, they believe that black holes do contain a singularity at their heart. They suggested that information might escape by means of quantum teleportation. This allows the state of one particle to be instantly teleported to another. So Horowitz and Maldacena suggested that information could pass from matter hitting the singularity to outgoing Hawking radiation. ?The most information any black hole would possibly retain is just half a bit - everything else will eventually escape?But to make their calculation work, they had to assume that infalling matter and outgoing radiation would not collide with each other. If they did, this could disrupt the teleportation process. Quantum information theorists Daniel Gottesman of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, and John Preskill of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena say such disruption could occur very easily. That seems to raise a problem for Horowitz and Maldacena. But last summer, Seth Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology worked out that all such disruptions would actually cancel each other out. Then Lloyd calculated that the most information a black hole would possibly retain permanently was just half a bit - everything else will eventually escape. This applies to all black holes, whether they are supermassive ones at the heart of a galaxy (see "Giants of the universe") or mini black holes created in a particle accelerator (see "Baby black holes"). But Gottesman and Preskill have a second criticism that might be more fatal to the teleportation picture. They showed that the effect could allow faster-than-light communication, which is taboo in relativity. The teleportation calculation relies on the assumption that every piece of matter inside a black hole has the same quantum state. Although quantum mechanics allows one particle to have an instantaneous effect on the quantum state of another, this cannot be used to communicate. For example, if one person, Alice, measures the quantum state of a particle that is linked with a particle held by her friend, Bob, the effect of this measurement will be instantaneously communicated to Bob's, but there is no way to use this to communicate faster than light, because Alice needs to tell Bob what kind of measurement process she carried out on her particle, before he can decode the meaning of the change he sees. That information has to travel to Bob in the normal way. Black hole communication However, if Alice throws her particle into a black hole, the researchers found the measurement will be immediately constrained to the quantum state of the black hole. This would have an effect on Bob's particle that he could determine without needing the extra information from Alice. Gottesman concludes that the teleportation idea cannot work very well. Indeed, he wonders if the framing of the information paradox is wrong in a way that is not yet understood. "My own guess is somehow we're asking a stupid question," he says. The scenario also bothers quantum-gravity theorist Ted Jacobson of the University of Maryland, who still believes that the information that falls into black holes is lost forever to those outside the black hole. He finds the teleportation picture particularly unconvincing. "I put it in the category of desperate attempts to make information come out," he says. And even the researchers themselves aren't sure they are right. "We suggested one possibility," says Horowitz, but he admits it doesn't have a good basis in string theory yet. "So I can't say we are confident this is the right picture." Jacobson argues that the connection between the outside and inside of a black hole is so complicated in string theory that no one can be sure they have ruled out the possibility of information leaking out of our space-time. People may be simply assuming the conclusion that they want for their own reasons. "I see no problem with letting the darn stuff fall down the drain. Why are people so afraid of the singularity?" The problem, says Vafa, is that the concept of information could be very subtle in string theory, and not yet well-defined. "Information loss is a critical question, but our understanding of black holes is too primitive." So whether information can escape from black holes or is destroyed remains a topic of intense debate. But there might turn out to be a third option. One competing theory to string theory is called loop quantum gravity, pioneered by, among others, Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada. It proposes that space-time is constructed of loops even smaller than strings. Joining loops together creates a mesh of nodes and branches called a spin network. The advantage of this model is that space-time itself can be built out of these networks instead of having to be assumed, as it is in string theory. Abhay Ashtekar of Pennsylvania State University in Pittsburgh and Martin Bojowald of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Golm, Germany, have studied a model of a black hole created using spin networks. They found the equations that describe space-time continue to apply in an orderly way even at the singularity itself. This is very different to the conventional picture, in which the equations of physics break down when space-time collapses. It means that information that reaches the singularity could survive there, encoded in the spin networks. As far as Ashtekar and Bojowald can tell, the information trapped in a black hole will be unable to escape via Hawking radiation. Wait long enough, however, and it will survive, eventually rejoining the rest of the universe when the black hole evaporates. So whatever the theory that eventually supersedes relativity, it seems a good possibility that black holes may be just a little less dramatic than we thought. After all, who's afraid of a big ball of string? From issue 2483 of New Scientist magazine, 22 January 2005, page 28 Giants of the universe While debate rages over what black holes really are, the astronomical evidence that every galaxy is built around a supermassive black hole is stronger than ever. Observations made with the Hubble Space Telescope have found that every galaxy has a mass at its core millions of times as massive as our sun. The bigger this mass, the larger the size of the "galactic bulge" - the number of stars clustered around the galactic centre. The speed with which stars orbit the centre of a galaxy reveals the mass of the object they are orbiting, and very careful measurements can reveal its size too. For a handful of galaxies, including the Milky Way, the central mass is known to be crammed into a space just a few times as wide as the distance between the Earth and the sun, indicating that what lies within is so dense, it must be a black hole. Some young galaxies emit copious amounts of high-energy radio and X-ray radiation. Lines in X-ray spectra taken from these objects are shifted as if the rays had struggled to escape from the strong gravitational field of a supermassive black hole. The closest object to the centre of our galaxy is a bright, compact source of radiation known as Sagittarius A*. X-ray flares coming from it, and picked up by the Chandra X-ray telescope, are thought to be the dying gasps of matter falling into a supermassive black hole. Baby black holes You don't have to go to space to find a black hole: mini versions could be created to order, right here on Earth. That's what some physicists claim will be possible using the world's most powerful particle accelerator, due to turn on in 2007. Currently under construction at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, the Large Hadron Collider will smash protons together with a collision energy of 14,000 billion electronvolts. This might just be enough to create several black holes every second, provided some strange ideas about unknown physics turn out to be right. Each mini wonder would weigh no more than a few micrograms and be smaller than a speck of dust. A black hole is thought to form when the core of a massive star collapses under its own weight and is crushed to a point. Vast amounts of matter weighing more than a few suns are needed to produce gravity strong enough for this to happen. Yet the special theory of relativity gives a clue to making black holes in the laboratory. Einstein used the theory to show that energy is equivalent to matter. So black holes should also pop into existence when vast amounts of energy are concentrated into a point, and that's exactly what happens when particles smash together at extreme energies. But there's a snag. According to our existing knowledge of particles and the forces that operate between them, the minimum energy needed to make a black hole this way is 10 million billion times more than LHC can produce. And the chances of ever building a particle accelerator that can reach such energies are virtually nil. In the past few years though, the prospects for making black holes in the lab have improved. This is down to a theory that says gravity is actually much stronger than we think. Huge masses are needed for the force of gravity to become important in everyday life, and this feebleness puzzles physicists. Some suggest that it can be explained if space has extra, invisible dimensions that only gravity can reach. The gravitational force leaks away into them, while our universe and the particles spewing out of accelerators are trapped in three dimensions, rather like specks of dust on the surface of a soap bubble. If the idea is right, gravity could be much stronger when it applies over distances so small that there is no chance of leakage into other dimensions. Pack enough energy into a 10-20-metre space and it could be enough to create a black hole. These mini curiosities will evaporate within 10-26 seconds, losing most of their mass by radiating energy, as predicted by Stephen Hawking. A group led by Roberto Emparan at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, calculated that most of this Hawking radiation should appear as particles that can be spotted by detectors. If Emparan is right, the LHC could provide the first evidence for Hawking radiation from a black hole. A computer simulation devised by Bryan Webber at the University of Cambridge and others creates mini black holes from LHC-style collisions. The simulation shows that the structures should decay into a large number of high-energy particles, which would be sprayed all over the detector. If the theory is right, researchers expect to see many more of these striking events than they might otherwise. By measuring the energy and momentum of the particles radiated, they hope to measure the mass of the mini marvels. Valerie Jamieson New Scientist magazine ? Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd. Home Breaking News Explore by Subject Special Reports Back Page Subscribe Archive RSS Jobs ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 53331 bytes Desc: not available URL: From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 22 15:06:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 10:06:25 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Gary North: My Fellow Americans Message-ID: "MY FELLOW AMERICANS... .." Gary North's REALITY CHECK Issue 415 January 21, 2005 Once every four years, a President is inaugurated. The President gives an inaugural address, which is covered by the TV networks. If most daytime viewers had their preferences, the networks would not pre-empt the soap operas or Oprah. The coverage is a revenue-loser for the networks. The festivities are prime time TV news that evening. The "New York Times" reproduces the inaugural address the next morning. Almost nobody reads it. The event fades rapidly from the memory of everyone who was not part of the event. This is a good thing. Paying a lot of attention to political speeches, let alone political parades, is a mistake most of the time. This is especially true of second inaugural addresses. The only famous one is Lincoln's, and he was dead a month later. His famous phrase, "with malice toward none, with charity toward all," was repudiated for the next decade by Congress during what came to be known as Reconstruction. In the twentieth century, only two inaugural addresses stand out, Franklin Roosevelt's first address and Jack Kennedy's. Kennedy's famous phrase is remembered more as the last hurrah of a now-lost vision than as a serious proposal: "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." The can-do political liberalism of Kennedy's inaugural address in retrospect was overwhelmed by reality, first by his assassination and then by his successor's escalation of the war in Vietnam. What my generation remembers about that phrase was the military draft and the quagmire in Vietnam, the first war that the United States clearly lost, and did so on national television. We do not remember the Peace Corps, except possibly Tom Hanks' version in "Volunteers." If you want two images that serve as the grave markers of Kennedy's inaugural address, think of the rider less horse and the casket, and think of the photo of that last helicopter out of Saigon. "Ask not" by 1993 had become, "Don't ask, don't tell." We remember Johnson as totally confident when he came into office, but invisible four years later at the Democrats' national convention. We think of Nixon as confident when coming in both times, but ludicrous with his V sign as he flew away in a helicopter, disgraced. Politics had consumed its two most dedicated American worshipers: Johnson and Nixon. Ford is barely remembered: the only President who received no electoral votes. His most memorable phrase: "I'm a Ford, not a Lincoln." Too bad he didn't say it at his inaugural. That may be because he didn't give an inaugural address -- a tradition I favor. Carter's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue is remembered, but mostly as a stunt. What he said at the inaugural isn't remembered at all. None of the inaugural addresses since Kennedy's are part of the American heritage of rhetoric. Roosevelt's is remembered, mainly because of its phrase, "we have nothing to fear but fear itself." In the context of 25% unemployment, the closing of thousands of rural banks, and the seeming imperviousness of the depression to government action, that was a ludicrous statement. In fact, later in the speech, Roosevelt said as much, but that is not what we recall of his rhetoric. What was most significant about that inaugural address was that Roosevelt announced what he intended to do. He then spent the next 12 years doing the opposite. In the name of the People, he solidified control by the elite he represented yet pretended to despise. By the time of his death in 1945, he could well have said, "Mission accomplished!" Nothing that has happened in Washington in the last 60 years has significantly challenged his revolution, which in fact was a consolidation. A CALL TO REVOLUTION Roosevelt's 1933 address announced in plain language a Constitutional revolution. That revolution had been launched by Lincoln in the Civil War, had escalated under Teddy Roosevelt, and had been solidified by Wilson during World War I. It involved the centralization of power by the Federal government, power that was exercised primarily by the President and the executive bureaucracy. Roosevelt in 1933 faced a national crisis, and he called on the voters to accept whatever he might do. With only one major exception, they did. The exception was his plan to pack the Supreme Court in 1937. But the Court buckled, and ratified his acts after 1937. Late in the speech, Roosevelt praised the Constitution. He did so as a send-up of his threat to ignore it. I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption. But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis -- broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe. Roosevelt offered an explanation for the depression. He demonized the bankers. This, of course, had been part of the Democrats' political tradition ever since William Jennings Bryan hijacked the Party with his Cross of Gold speech in 1896. Roosevelt announced: And yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered, because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Here was the time-honored analysis of Marxists and socialists: nature as bountiful but perversely restrained by the institutions of capitalism. It was time to identify these unscrupulous manipulators. Primarily, this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. Money changers. Where had Americans heard that term before? In church. Jesus chased the money changers out of the temple. Roosevelt made it clear that he was prepared to do the same. True, they have tried. But their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money. Quite true. The Federal Reserve System, created under Wilson in 1913, had the power to control the money supply through the control of credit, mainly through the purchase of U.S. government debt. But the public was not borrowing in 1933. Commercial banks were failing. Within days of the inaugural, Roosevelt unilaterally shut the banks, fearing more bank runs. (The bank "holiday" idea had been Herbert Hoover's, as Hoover insisted in his autobiography, but Roosevelt had refused to support Hoover's plan.) The Federal Reserve System had been heralded by its proponents as the engine of financial stability, the guarantor of continuity of credit. Yet the nation in 1933 was facing the worst depression in its history. The FED's monopoly over the money supply granted by the Federal government in 1913 in the name of financial stability had failed to work. But Roosevelt did not target the FED in his speech. He targeted commercial bankers, who were in no position to offset the public's unwillingness to borrow money in the fact of a 33% fall in prices, 1929-33. Few businessmen wanted to borrow dollars when they might have to pay off the loan with appreciating dollars. Voters then, like voters today, did not understand central banking. They understood rhetoric about profit- seeking money changers. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They only know the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. Yes, the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of that restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit. http://snipurl.com/fearitself ONE OF THEIR OWN The great irony of this speech was lost on the listeners, and has been lost on, or buried by, the history textbook writers and even the historical monograph writers. Franklin Roosevelt had been one of these money changers. He had been the well-paid agent of the bond industry prior to his election as Governor of New York in 1928. Beginning in 1921, after he had lost his position as Undersecretary of the Navy under Wilson, and after he had gone down to defeat with Cox as the Party's Vice-Presidential candidate in 1920, Roosevelt became Vice-President of Fidelity Deposit Company of Maryland. He had gone to Grotton, the elite prep school. He had gone to Harvard. He was the heir of the Delano fortune, which had been made in part by selling opium in China. He was a rich only son of a wealthy New York family. His inaugural address looked as if though was the product of a rich man who had seen the moral light. On the contrary, it was designed to divert the public's attention from a new deal for big business, which would strengthen the hand of the biggest corporations, whose managers desperately wanted price floors and protection against new competition. This story was told in detail by Antony Sutton three decades ago: "Wall Street and FDR" (Arlington House, 1975). The historical profession paid no attention to this book, which was published by a conservative publishing house. As Sutton wrote at the time, the vast majority of historians of Roosevelt's administration have been FDR apologists. The ones who know the story of his Wall Street connections deliberately have concealed this information, knowing full well that the public had been misled about Roosevelt's background as a "money changer." His Wall Street connections before his election as Governor make his inaugural address appear as a rhetorical deception without precedent in American history, which in fact it was. Roosevelt had run the American Construction Council in the mid-1920s. It was basically an industry trade council dedicated to price-fixing arrangements. The A.C.C. had originally been proposed by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Hoover and FDR were well acquainted with each other. This, too, the public has never suspected. Both men shared the same economic outlook: the Federal government as the source of economic order and protection. Both men were backed by the same Wall Street interests. This was nothing new in 1932. Except for Bryan, who was a Populist and defender of direct government ownership of business, Wall Street had controlled the nomination of every major party Presidential candidate since the end of the Civil War. It still does. Roosevelt had received donations for his 1928 campaign from Wall Street financiers, most notably Joe Kennedy. And, as Sutton shows, Roosevelt repaid them by creating a series of New Deal agencies whose primary function was to save the large corporations by allowing price-fixing under government authorization. The Supreme Court kept declaring these agencies unconstitutional, which is why Roosevelt proposed the Court-packing scheme in 1937 as a way to get a pro-New Deal majority on the Court. I knew Sutton personally. His scholarship was impeccable. His three volumes on the technology of the Soviet Union, 1917-1965, showed that the USSR had developed very little technology of its own, outside of armaments. Its technology was either stolen from the West or bought from the West. The myth of Soviet economic productivity was admitted by scholars only after 1989, when the USSR's leaders admitted that it was facing bankruptcy. Sutton's first book on Soviet Technology received almost no attention from the academic guild, even in journals that specialized in economic history. There was a systematic blackout on volumes 2 and 3, despite the fact that the set had been published by the Hoover Institution. (I pointed this out in my Foreword to his book, "The Best Enemy Money Can Buy," 1986). His book on "Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution" received no academic attention, nor did "Wall Street and Hitler." He was the first historian to publish a detailed history of Skull & Bones, the Yale University secret society that has produced three presidents (Taft and the two Bushes). That book, too, went down the academic memory hole. For some of you, this is the first time you have heard of any of this. This indicates how successful the blackout has been. Before the Internet, it was easy for the academic guild to bottle up studies like Sutton's. It no longer is. CONNECTIONS The long-term connections between American big business and the official enemy nations of the United States are not discussed publicly. Occasionally, this neglect gets to me. In 1984, I attended a closed dinner meeting of the leaders of the American Right, where the organization gave an award to John Lehman, Ph.D., the Secretary of the Navy. The man who handed him this award was his former roommate, although we attendees did not know this. Lehman had been one of Henry Kissinger's aides before he became Secretary of the Navy. He is still in the news: a member of the 9/11 Commission. He is an investment banker, as his Web site reveals. (http://snipurl.com/c5or) Anyway, at that awards meeting, he gave a brief speech on the build-up of the Soviet navy. Knowing what I knew, I started to walk out. There are limits to my tolerance. But it was a large room. I didn't make it to the door before I heard him criticize Congressional opponents of a larger U.S. Navy. This got to me: the Russians this, the Russians that. I turned around and yelled, "If they are our enemies, why do we feed them?" There was silence. So, just in case anyone missed my point, I said again, "Why do we feed them?" Of course, I could have mentioned the US-USSR Trade and Economic Council (USTEC), the highly secretive association of the largest American corporations that were trading with the Soviet Union, and which, despite partial government funding, refused to provide a list of its members. The government also refused to reveal this information, despite Freedom of Information Act requests. I had extensive files on this organization. But no one in the audience, other than Lehman, would have known what I was talking about. I could also have mentioned the fact that the U.S. government in 1972 had authorized the export to the USSR of the unique, patented ball bearing machine tools that alone made possible MIRVed nuclear warheads, a fact that Tony Sutton had revealed in his 1973 book, "National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union" (Arlington House). That fact remains unknown in American conservative circles, over three decades later. So, I skipped that, too. But the fact that our farmers had been feeding the Russians ever since Herbert Hoover's days under Harding was well known. So, I asked the obvious question. Why do we feed our enemies? Lehman mumbled. I left. Sutton had the right answer. They were the best enemies our money could buy. CONCLUSION So, all in all, I don't get too excited about Presidential inaugural addresses. I figure they're important for the President and his immediate family, mandatory for senior staffers on the White House's payroll, and good copy opportunities for editorial writers. Like the State of the Union Address, no problem is ever mentioned which does not have a multi-billion dollar government solution at hand. This means ignoring two kinds of problems: problems that really don't require government spending to solve them and problems that cannot be solved despite government spending. The test of the relevance of an inaugural address is whether the problems addressed in it are solved four years later, and the programs created to solve them are no longer being funded. "Mission accomplished!" That'll be the day. From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 22 15:07:07 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 10:07:07 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Lawrence Auster on the Inauguration Speech Message-ID: Lawrence Auster on the Inauguration Speech [Even Peggy Noonan is balking. I thought the speech to be completely vacuous bromides and rumble-bumble. But it seems now to be promising a victory for Neocon-heavy and the Republican war-on-terrorism jobs machine. There is still enough freedom in this country to say what you like, as long as you don't bother any of the Calhounian veto blocs.] Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 16:01:55 -0500 From: Lawrence Auster Subject: Blog entries on the Inaugural address Dear Reader, Here are my frankly critical responses to Bush's speech, in reverse chronological order. If you would prefer not to receive these occasional e-mails from VFR, please reply with "unsubscribe" in the subject line. Sincerely, Lawrence Auster www.amnation.com/vfr En bas cette fausse id?e de la libert?! Down with Boilerplate^Ys and the neocons^Y bizarre Orwellian re-definition of freedom. Let^Ys go back to the American and Western and Christian traditions of liberty. For example, we could start with: Now the Lord is that Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. (2 Corinthians 3:17) By the way, if you don^Yt know French, the title of this blog entry means: Down with this false idea of liberty. When posting the entry, what came into my mind was the phrase, En bas le tyran, down with the tyrant, which is what they cried in the French National Assembly the day Robespierre was overthrown. A few years ago I was thrilled to see the original transcripts of the French National Assembly from that great day in August 1794, on display in the Morgan Library in New York. My use of it here is appropriate because the object of dislike is the same: a dehumanizing, de-culturating, Jacobin force. Indeed, Boilerplate has gone so overboard with this "freedom" business that even the New York Times "conservative" David Brooks is on ABC saying that Bush is emphasizing freedom too much and needs to talk more about order and security. But that^Ys what happens when an ideology, with its accompanying simplistic slogans, takes over a person^Ys mind, especially when the person in question had a severe lack of mental furniture to begin with. Posted by Lawrence Auster at 03:00 PM Boilerplate and sounding brass Carl Simpson to LA: Even if one takes seriously the Sharansky/Gelertner/Bush ideal that universal democracy will solve all of the world^Ys problems, how do they account for the basic totalitarianism of various EU states (where you can be arrested for criticizing Islam, or homosexuality, and where political parties are simply outlawed by judges for "racism" and "intolerance") or that of our esteemed trading partner China? What do these people really mean when they use terms like "freedom", and "liberty"? I somehow don^Yt believe it^Ys the same thing that Washington, Adams, and the American founders meant. LA replies: That is such an important point and I don^Yt make it often enough. Is today^Ys Britain FREE? So Boilerplate^Ys rhetoric is false in two respects. Number one, we are not really "spreading freedom." We^Yre hunkered down in TWO countries and will be there for years. Number two, the very countries that are supposedly the models of freedom are profoundly unfree in key respects and are rapidly becoming more so. I can^Yt stand that tinny, empty, arrogant rhetoric. Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:00 PM Boilerplate^Ys liberal reversal of reality The way Boilerplate would have it, all this aggression exists in the world because WE haven^Yt yet brought freedom to these other countries. So WE have to keep striving forever to change the world, to make it free. This is our burden. It doesn^Yt occur to him that the lack of freedom he^Ys opposing has nothing to do with anything that we^Yre doing or not doing, that it may have something to do with those other countries. It doesn^Yt occur to him that the specific lack of freedom he^Ys concerned about has a specific source^Tthe Koran. No, instead this knucklehead praises the Koran as one of the bases of American freedom! Apparently Boilerplate has been much influenced by Natan Sharansky^Ys book on freedom, in which he argues that every country in the world can and should be free. But who is Sharansky, as the citizen of a country surrounded by unfree countries, to talk? Has Israel succeeded by its democratic example in making its Arab neighbors embrace freedom? Ah, but that little failure doesn^Yt matter, does it? For liberals, no failure ever matters. The only thing that matters is that moment of universalist consummation, which WILL be reached some day, and we SHALL overcome, and we just have to keep trying for it, and we just have to keep on thinkin^Y about tomorrow, and no contrary thought is permitted into consciousness. Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:50 PM | Comments (0) Nods to equality Cheney^Ys two daughters walked out on the stand side by side, the husband of the married daughter wasn^Yt there. Noting how unusual it was for the husband of the vice president^Ys daughter not to be present at the proceedings, a friend suggests the husband was excluded in order to avoid making a distinction between the lesbian daughter and the married daughter. Another nod to equality was Bush^Ys mention of the Koran. What does the Koran have to do with our political and social and moral tradition? Zilch. The Koran^Ys only idea is submission to God. The only political expression the Koran can have is sharia law, which is, of course, the very tyranny Bush says we have to crusade relentlessly to destroy wherever it exists. It is insufferable that a man this dumb and incoherent is also this arrogant. Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:45 PM Bush^Ys leaden, ideological, neo-Jacobin inaugural address There are no words to express how off-putting, arrogant, and offensive Bush^Ys inaugural is, with its theme of America as the ideological boss and transformer of the world. When President Kennedy spoke about defending freedom, he was opposing expansive Communism. But Bush is saying that America must simply make the world conform to our idea. My gosh, how limited this man is, how limited his concepts, his vocabulary. He must have said "freedom" 40 times. He has so little within himself, that when he finds something that "works" for him, he just uses it over and over again. Then there was this: "Making every American an agent of his own destiny." The government makes people agents of their own destiny? Well, that^Ys your standard big-government conservatism. The speech and its delivery are leaden-footed. Fortunately, it was very short. When he ended, there was no particular response, no big applause. The speech just seemed to stop. So, I^Yve done my patriotic duty for the day. I^Yve watched the president^Ys inaugural address. Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:15 PM ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 18:38:42 -0500 From: Lawrence Auster To: Interested Parties Subject: Noonan sharply criticizes Bush; coverage of the Jersey City murders reveals liberal order Dear Reader Here are three recent items from View from the Right. Two are on the Islam issue and the third is about Peggy Noonan's startling criticism of President Bush's inaugural address. I hope you find them of interest. Sincerely, Lawrence Auster Coverage of the Jersey City murders reveals liberal order The facts on the murder of an entire family of Egyptian Christians in Jersey City are not clear yet, but the predictable major-media slant on the crime--we mustn't blame Moslems for it, because that would lead us to behave in beastly ways--is as clear as daylight. Nothing new here. After the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, the main point made by both Clinton and Mayor Dinkins was that we must avoid any hateful thoughts or behavior against Moslems, though there were no such hateful thoughts or behavior remotely to be seen. Under the liberal dispensation, if our enemies attack us, we become the suspect party. All of which suggests a variation on my typology of traditionalists, conservatives, and liberals: If jihadist Moslems murder non-Moslems in the name of Islam, a.. Traditionalists will point to the 1,400 year-old reality of Islamic jihadism and call for an end of Islamic immigration, plus other measures aimed at reducing the numbers and power of Moslems in the West; b.. Conservatives will blame "radical" Islam, while saying we must seek out the "true," "moderate" Islam and place on it all our hopes of safety and peace; c.. Liberals will ignore the crime, and severely caution us against our own racism. Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 21, 2005 04:00 PM | Comment | The fatal complementarity of Islam and the West I have said many times that in resurgent Islam the liberal West has met its fate. Islam is a non-Western religion set on conquering and converting non-Moslems, while liberalism is a Western ideology set on tolerating and including non-Westerners. They are predators, we are prey. This complementarity spells the death of the West, unless there is a radical awakening on our part to the true nature of Islam and a willingness to oppose it. But there's a further twist to this complementarity that makes it even harder for Westerners and Americans to extricate ourselves from the trap in which our own ideology has placed us. Moslems seek to turn the whole human race into Moslems. To do this, they must change us from what we are into something else. We are the demonic and tempting Other, whom they must conquer and convert, and against whom any deception to accomplish those ends is sanctioned by God. But liberal Westerners and particularly liberal Americans (which basically means all Americans) remain indefeasibly na?ve about the nature of Islam, imagining that the Moslems are basically "just like us," potential citizens of a democratic world order. Just as the Moslems' hard-boiled view of us as the infidel Other stems from their very being and faith as Moslems, liberal Americans' naive view of the Moslems as people "just like us" stems from our very being and faith as liberal Americans. Being a liberal American means being a nice person who is tolerant of others, wanting to see other people as individuals and putting group differences into the background. To repeat the point, for our liberal American identity to be sustainable, we must go on believing that all people (except for a few extremists, of course) are basically like us. Therefore, if we became convinced that a billion Moslems are not basically like us but are irreconcilably different from us and mortally dangerous to us, then, instead of being open and accepting to them, we would have to become closed and defensive. We would lose our very being as liberal Americans, as well as our hope of a unified world. And that is why we stubbornly ignore the Moslems' actual qualities. We don't simply do it because we are "na?ve." We do it in order to maintain our view of humanity as nice people like ourselves, and thus to maintain our very identity which is based on our believing in that view of humanity. We think we disregard other people's negative qualities out of a motive of generosity and tolerance. In reality, we are pursuing an imperial impulse, constructing an image of an Americanist humanity in which everyone is reasonable and easy-going like ourselves. But--the final irony--our imperial agenda is leading to our subjection by the Moslems' imperial agenda, since our empire is an empire of tolerance and inclusion in which we must open our arms to merciless world-conquering jihadists. Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 21, 2005 03:36 PM | Comment | A startling defection in the neocon ranks Echoing VFR, Peggy Noonan derides Boilerplate's inaugural address for its arrogant global utopianism. She even describes his rhetoric as "boilerplate." This is the first critical thinking I've seen from Miss Sentimentality since, since I can't remember when--and critical of the democratist Bush ideology, no less. But where has Noonan been? Bush been sounding off this way for the last three years, and she's been an adoring fan of his all along. Perhaps it's just a matter of his having gone "too far" this time. In any case, I wouldn't be surprised if Pope Norman Podhoretz has already been on the phone this morning with the errant Noonan, or perhaps with intermediaries in the neoconservative establishment, to let her know of his displeasure. Having such a prominent Bush fan depart so publicly from the One True Faith is not acceptable. Here are excerpts from her column: The inaugural address itself was startling. It left me with a bad feeling, and reluctant dislike. Rhetorically, it veered from high-class boilerplate to strong and simple sentences, but it was not pedestrian. George W. Bush's second inaugural will no doubt prove historic because it carried a punch, asserting an agenda so sweeping that an observer quipped that by the end he would not have been surprised if the president had announced we were going to colonize Mars. History is dynamic and changeable. On the other hand, some things are constant, such as human imperfection, injustice, misery and bad government. This world is not heaven. The president's speech seemed rather heavenish. It was a God-drenched speech. This president, who has been accused of giving too much attention to religious imagery and religious thought, has not let the criticism enter him. God was invoked relentlessly. "The Author of Liberty." "God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind . . . the longing of the soul." It seemed a document produced by a White House on a mission. The United States, the speech said, has put the world on notice: Good governments that are just to their people are our friends, and those that are not are, essentially, not. We know the way: democracy. The president told every nondemocratic government in the world to shape up. "Success in our relations [with other governments] will require the decent treatment of their own people." The speech did not deal with specifics--9/11, terrorism, particular alliances, Iraq. It was, instead, assertively abstract. "We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." "Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self government. . . . Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time." "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world." Ending tyranny in the world? Well that's an ambition, and if you're going to have an ambition it might as well be a big one. But this declaration, which is not wrong by any means, seemed to me to land somewhere between dreamy and disturbing. Tyranny is a very bad thing and quite wicked, but one doesn't expect we're going to eradicate it any time soon. Again, this is not heaven, it's earth. ... And yet such promising moments were followed by this, the ending of the speech. "Renewed in our strength--tested, but not weary--we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom." This is--how else to put it?--over the top. It is the kind of sentence that makes you wonder if this White House did not, in the preparation period, have a case of what I have called in the past "mission inebriation." A sense that there are few legitimate boundaries to the desires born in the goodness of their good hearts. One wonders if they shouldn't ease up, calm down, breathe deep, get more securely grounded. The most moving speeches summon us to the cause of what is actually possible. Perfection in the life of man on earth is not. Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 21, 2005 09:40 AM From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 22 15:09:24 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 10:09:24 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] WSJ: Peggy Noonan: Way Too Much God Message-ID: http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/ 5.1.22 Peggy Noonan: Way Too Much God Was the president's speech a case of "mission inebriation"? It was an interesting Inauguration Day. Washington had warmed up, the swift storm of the previous day had passed, the sky was overcast but the air wasn't painful in a wind-chill way, and the capital was full of men in cowboy hats and women in long furs. In fact, the night of the inaugural balls became known this year as The Night of the Long Furs. Laura Bush's beauty has grown more obvious; she was chic in shades of white, and smiled warmly. The Bush daughters looked exactly as they are, beautiful and young. A well-behaved city was on its best behavior, everyone from cops to doormen to journalists eager to help visitors in any way. For me there was some unexpected merriness. In my hotel the night before the inauguration, all the guests were evacuated at 1:45 in the morning. There were fire alarms and flashing lights on each floor, and a public address system instructed us to take the stairs, not the elevators. Hundreds of people wound up outside in the slush, eventually gathering inside the lobby, waiting to find out what next. The staff--kindly, clucking--tried to figure out if the fire existed and, if so, where it was. Hundreds of inaugural revelers wound up observing each other. Over there on the couch was Warren Buffet in bright blue pajamas and a white hotel robe. James Baker was in trench coat and throat scarf. I remembered my keys and eyeglasses but walked out without my shoes. After a while the "all clear" came, and hundreds of us stood in line for elevators to return to our rooms. Later that morning, as I entered an elevator to go to an appointment, I said, "You all look happier than you did last night." A man said, "That was just a dream," and everyone laughed. The inauguration itself was beautiful to see--pomp, panoply, parades, flags and cannonades. America does this well. And the most poignant moment was the manful William Rehnquist, unable to wear a tie and making his way down the long marble steps to swear in the president. The continuation of democracy is made possible by such personal gallantry. There were some surprises, one of which was the thrill of a male voice singing "God Bless America," instead of the hyper-coloratura divas who plague our American civic life. But whoever picked the music for the inaugural ceremony itself--modern megachurch hymns, music that sounds like what they'd use for the quiet middle section of a Pixar animated film--was . . . lame. The downbeat orchestral arrangement that followed the president's speech was no doubt an attempt to avoid charges that the ceremony had a triumphalist air. But I wound up thinking: This is America. We have a lot of good songs. And we watch inaugurals in part to hear them. Never be defensive in your choice of music. The inaugural address itself was startling. It left me with a bad feeling, and reluctant dislike. Rhetorically, it veered from high-class boilerplate to strong and simple sentences, but it was not pedestrian. George W. Bush's second inaugural will no doubt prove historic because it carried a punch, asserting an agenda so sweeping that an observer quipped that by the end he would not have been surprised if the president had announced we were going to colonize Mars. A short and self-conscious preamble led quickly to the meat of the speech: the president's evolving thoughts on freedom in the world. Those thoughts seemed marked by deep moral seriousness and no moral modesty. No one will remember what the president said about domestic policy, which was the subject of the last third of the text. This may prove to have been a miscalculation. It was a foreign-policy speech. To the extent our foreign policy is marked by a division that has been (crudely but serviceably) defined as a division between moralists and realists--the moralists taken with a romantic longing to carry democracy and justice to foreign fields, the realists motivated by what might be called cynicism and an acknowledgment of the limits of governmental power--President Bush sided strongly with the moralists, which was not a surprise. But he did it in a way that left this Bush supporter yearning for something she does not normally yearn for, and that is: nuance. The administration's approach to history is at odds with what has been described by a communications adviser to the president as the "reality-based community." A dumb phrase, but not a dumb thought: He meant that the administration sees history as dynamic and changeable, not static and impervious to redirection or improvement. That is the Bush administration way, and it happens to be realistic: History is dynamic and changeable. On the other hand, some things are constant, such as human imperfection, injustice, misery and bad government. This world is not heaven. The president's speech seemed rather heavenish. It was a God-drenched speech. This president, who has been accused of giving too much attention to religious imagery and religious thought, has not let the criticism enter him. God was invoked relentlessly. "The Author of Liberty." "God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind . . . the longing of the soul." It seemed a document produced by a White House on a mission. The United States, the speech said, has put the world on notice: Good governments that are just to their people are our friends, and those that are not are, essentially, not. We know the way: democracy. The president told every nondemocratic government in the world to shape up. "Success in our relations [with other governments] will require the decent treatment of their own people." The speech did not deal with specifics--9/11, terrorism, particular alliances, Iraq. It was, instead, assertively abstract. "We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." "Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self government. . . . Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time." "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world." Ending tyranny in the world? Well that's an ambition, and if you're going to have an ambition it might as well be a big one. But this declaration, which is not wrong by any means, seemed to me to land somewhere between dreamy and disturbing. Tyranny is a very bad thing and quite wicked, but one doesn't expect we're going to eradicate it any time soon. Again, this is not heaven, it's earth. There were moments of eloquence: "America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies." "We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery." And, to the young people of our country, "You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs." They have, since 9/11, seen exactly that. And yet such promising moments were followed by this, the ending of the speech. "Renewed in our strength--tested, but not weary--we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom." This is--how else to put it?--over the top. It is the kind of sentence that makes you wonder if this White House did not, in the preparation period, have a case of what I have called in the past "mission inebriation." A sense that there are few legitimate boundaries to the desires born in the goodness of their good hearts. One wonders if they shouldn't ease up, calm down, breathe deep, get more securely grounded. The most moving speeches summon us to the cause of what is actually possible. Perfection in the life of man on earth is not. Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag" (Wall Street Journal Books/Simon & Schuster), a collection of post-Sept. 11 columns, which you can buy from the [57]OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays. References 57. http://www.opinionjournalbookstore.com/Noonan.htm From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 22 15:15:10 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 10:15:10 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: 'Russian Tradition,' Old and New Message-ID: 'Russian Tradition,' Old and New http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6511-2005Jan13?language=printer [This is a fascinating exhibit, though I'm not nearly as enthusiastic as the reviewer. Many of the paintings show what Soviet artists did for their own pleasure, when not having to paint in the Soviet Realism mode. There was a lot of imitation Impressionism and the like, but I can't say they represent much of a glorious evolution of what might have been. I saw too much mediocrity, really. And I can't say I could really see a "Russian flavor." I had hoped for something as rewarding as an exhibition of 19th century German paintings held a year or so ago, very worthy art, indeed, and much too neglected in American museums, which heavily concentrate on French, British, and American art for the 19th century. Still, I will be going back repeatedly to reflect on these Russian paintings.] By Michael O'Sullivan Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, January 14, 2005; Page WE48 THERE'S A STICKY little question at the heart of "In the Russian Tradition: A Historic Collection of 20th-Century Russian Paintings," on view at the International Gallery of the Smithsonian's S. Dillon Ripley Center and featuring works from the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis. To wit: What tradition, exactly, are they talking about? By including examples of Russian impressionism; socialist realism (especially the so-called severe style of this movement); cubist-futurism; work sanctioned and unsanctioned by the Soviet state; a propagandistic still life singing the praises of the Russian canned-food industry; romanticized portraiture; pretty, snow-covered landscapes; angular, moody and allegorical interiors; plus several other miscellaneous styles, subjects and mini-movements (most notably a few works by members of the avant-garde Jack of Diamonds group, but nothing, oddly enough, from the better-known suprematists), the show might just make one wonder what these works have in common, aside from their country of origin. As you can see, a sticky question, but not one that is unanswerable. The answer, after all, is there in the title. It's not so much the "Russian" part either -- what does Russian art look like anyway? -- as it is the "tradition." For these paintings are all fruit that, in one way or another, hasn't fallen too far from the tree of religious icon painting and 19th-century realism. That's why you won't find any Kasimir Malevich, El Lissitzky or Alexander Rodchenko here. In fact, you won't find many household names at all. Outside of the painter Nikolai Fechin, an emigre renaissance man whose house-turned-museum in Taos, N.M., I had once visited, I was only dimly aware of a handful of the 46 artists represented. And that's one of the best things about this show. The work may look familiar stylistically, but the names are mostly new. Take, for the sake of argument, the eight artists whose works incorporate snow (an element, that in its almost cliched prevalence, is probably the most "Russian" thing about this show): Rotnitski, Grabar, Gritsai, Popov, Timkov, Tutunov, Yuon, Ugarov. They're not in the Western canon yet, but maybe they should be. Perhaps paradoxically though, it isn't a chilliness that unites the artists of "In the Russian Tradition," as one might expect, but rather a surprising warmth. It's there whether figurative or landscape. It's there in the unintentionally prophetic symbolism of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin's 1912 "The Bathing of the Red Horse" and in Nikolai Baskakov's literal depiction of laughing girls in "Milkmaids, Novella" from 1962. It's there when the canvas is ripe with naked flesh, as in Geli Korzhev's portrait of the early-Soviet-era worker, "Marusya" (nude save for work boots and a red kerchief), and it's there when the canvas is devoid of the human presence, save for the smoldering ashtray and rumpled sheets of Mai Dantsig's "Unmade Bed." Outside of Russia, I suspect that many of us tend to think of the country and its people as still in need of some defrosting -- this despite the post-Stalin "thaw" and the glasnost (or openness) of the 1980s. Such stereotyping isn't helped by the knee-jerk notion that comes to our minds when a lot of us look up 20th-century Russian art in art history books: the icy minimalism of suprematism on one page, the detached abstraction of constructivism on another. "In the Russian Tradition" tries to crack that frozen image, by reminding us that painting -- not just Russian painting but all painting -- has its most ancient roots in the desire (decadent and anti-Soviet though it maybe) to illuminate and celebrate the human condition in all its frailties and many wondrous forms. IN THE RUSSIAN TRADITION: A HISTORIC COLLECTION OF 20TH-CENTURY RUSSIAN PAINTINGS -- Through March 20 at the International Gallery of the Smithsonian's S. Dillon Ripley Center, 1100 Jefferson Dr. SW (Metro: Smithsonian). 202-633-1000 (TDD: 202-357-1729). Open daily 10 to 5:30. Free. From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 22 15:15:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 10:15:51 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: A Path to Road Safety With No Signposts Message-ID: The Saturday Profile: A Path to Road Safety With No Signposts NYT January 22, 2005 By SARAH LYALL DRACHTEN, The Netherlands "I WANT to take you on a walk," said Hans Monderman, abruptly stopping his car and striding - hatless, and nearly hairless - into the freezing rain. Like a naturalist conducting a tour of the jungle, he led the way to a busy intersection in the center of town, where several odd things immediately became clear. Not only was it virtually naked, stripped of all lights, signs and road markings, but there was no division between road and sidewalk. It was, basically, a bare brick square. But in spite of the apparently anarchical layout, the traffic, a steady stream of trucks, cars, buses, motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians, moved along fluidly and easily, as if directed by an invisible conductor. When Mr. Monderman, a traffic engineer and the intersection's proud designer, deliberately failed to check for oncoming traffic before crossing the street, the drivers slowed for him. No one honked or shouted rude words out of the window. "Who has the right of way?" he asked rhetorically. "I don't care. People here have to find their own way, negotiate for themselves, use their own brains." Used by some 20,000 drivers a day, the intersection is part of a road-design revolution pioneered by the 59-year-old Mr. Monderman. His work in Friesland, the district in northern Holland that takes in Drachten, is increasingly seen as the way of the future in Europe. His philosophy is simple, if counterintuitive. To make communities safer and more appealing, Mr. Monderman argues, you should first remove the traditional paraphernalia of their roads - the traffic lights and speed signs; the signs exhorting drivers to stop, slow down and merge; the center lines separating lanes from one another; even the speed bumps, speed-limit signs, bicycle lanes and pedestrian crossings. In his view, it is only when the road is made more dangerous, when drivers stop looking at signs and start looking at other people, that driving becomes safer. "All those signs are saying to cars, 'This is your space, and we have organized your behavior so that as long as you behave this way, nothing can happen to you,' " Mr. Monderman said. "That is the wrong story." The Drachten intersection is an example of the concept of "shared space," a street where cars and pedestrians are equal, and the design tells the driver what to do. "It's a moving away from regulated, legislated traffic toward space which, by the way it's designed and configured, makes it clear what sort of behavior is anticipated," said Ben Hamilton-Baillie, a British specialist in urban design and movement and a proponent of many of the same concepts. Highways, where the car is naturally king, are part of the "traffic world" and another matter altogether. In Mr. Monderman's view, shared-space schemes thrive only in conjunction with well-organized, well-regulated highway systems. Variations on the shared-space theme are being tried in Spain, Denmark, Austria, Sweden and Britain, among other places. The European Union has appointed a committee of experts, including Mr. Monderman, for a Europe-wide study. MR. MONDERMAN is a man on a mission. On a daylong automotive tour of Friesland, he pointed out places he had improved, including a town where he ripped out the sidewalks, signs and crossings and put in brick paving on the central shopping street. An elderly woman crossed slowly in front of him. "This is social space, so when Grandma is coming, you stop, because that's what normal, courteous human beings do," he said. Planners and curious journalists are increasingly making pilgrimages to meet Mr. Monderman, considered one of the field's great innovators, although until a few years ago he was virtually unknown outside Holland. Mr. Hamilton-Baillie, whose writings have helped bring Mr. Monderman's work to wider attention, remembers with fondness his own first visit. Mr. Monderman drove him to a small country road with cows in every direction. Their presence was unnecessarily reinforced by a large, standard-issue European traffic sign with a picture of a cow on it. "He said: 'What do you expect to find here? Wallabies?' " Mr. Hamilton-Baillie recalled. " 'They're treating you like you're a complete idiot, and if people treat you like a complete idiot, you'll act like one.' "Here was someone who had rethought a lot of issues from complete scratch. Essentially, what it means is a transfer of power and responsibility from the state to the individual and the community." Dressed in a beige jacket and patterned shirt, with scruffy facial hair and a stocky build, Mr. Monderman has the appearance of a football hooligan but the temperament of an engineer, which indeed he trained to be. His father was the headmaster of the primary school in their small village; Hans liked to fiddle with machines. "I was always the guy who repaired the TV sets in our village," he said. He was working as a civil engineer building highways in the 1970's when the Dutch government, alarmed at a sharp increase in traffic accidents, set up a network of traffic-safety offices. Mr. Monderman was appointed Friesland's traffic safety officer. In residential communities, Mr. Monderman began narrowing the roads and putting in design features like trees and flowers, red brick paving stones and even fountains to discourage people from speeding, following the principle now known as psychological traffic calming, where behavior follows design. He made his first nervous foray into shared space in a small village whose residents were upset at its being used as a daily thoroughfare for 6,000 speeding cars. When he took away the signs, lights and sidewalks, people drove more carefully. Within two weeks, speeds on the road had dropped by more than half. In fact, he said, there has never been a fatal accident on any of his roads. Several early studies bear out his contention that shared spaces are safer. In England, the district of Wiltshire found that removing the center line from a stretch of road reduced drivers' speed without any increase in accidents. WHILE something of a libertarian, Mr. Monderman concedes that road design can do only so much. It does not change the behavior, for instance, of the 15 percent of drivers who will behave badly no matter what the rules are. Nor are shared-space designs appropriate everywhere, like major urban centers, but only in neighborhoods that meet particular criteria. Recently a group of well-to-do parents asked him to widen the two-lane road leading to their children's school, saying it was too small to accommodate what he derisively calls "their huge cars." He refused, saying the fault was not with the road, but with the cars. "They can't wait for each other to pass?" he asked. "I wouldn't interfere with the right of people to buy the car they want, but nor should the government have to solve the problems they make with their choices." Mr. Monderman's obsessions can cause friction at home. His wife hates talking about road design. But work is his passion and his focus for as many as 70 hours a week, despite quixotic promises to curtail his projects and stay home on Fridays. The current plan, instigated by Mrs. Monderman, is for him to retire in a few years. But it is unclear what a man who begins crawling the walls after three days at the beach ("If you want to go to a place without any cultural aspect, go to the Grand Canaries," he grumbled) will do with all that free time. "The most important thing is being master of my own time, and then doing things that we both enjoy," he said. "What are they? I don't know." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/22/international/europe/22monderman.html From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 22 15:16:33 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 10:16:33 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Picasso and Warhol... Neck and Neck Message-ID: Picasso and Warhol... Neck and Neck NYT January 22, 2005 By SARAH BOXER How should we rank artists? Forget about quality. Forget about sales. Let's pretend we're in junior high and rank artists by popularity. Let's see how much attention they're getting and whether it's coming from the cool kids. That's what Artfacts.net, a privately owned, London-based guide to modern and contemporary art, has tried. In 1999 Artfacts.net began publishing information about art exhibitions in 40 countries culled from 2,500 museums, galleries, art fairs and dealers' associations. The database included more than 20,000 artists, 600 current shows and 18,000 past ones. But, as the keepers of Artfacts.net confess on their Web site, they "weren't totally satisfied with the system of ordering artists alphabetically." So they devised a new system ranking 16,000 of the artists in the database "according to their recognition in the eyes of professionals (i.e., curators, gallery owners)." In addition to a current rank, each artist would get a graph showing the ups and downs of his or her ranking over the last five years. And the most popular artists at any given moment also get a slot on the Top 100 chart. You can view it at www.artfacts.net/ranking/Page2_EN.php. This is not the first artist-ranking scheme. Safia Dickersbach, the public relations director at Artfacts.net, said in an e-mail message that the oldest and best-known ranking system is Kunstkompass, developed in 1968 by the writer Willi Bongard and still published every year by the German business magazine Capital. But while Kunstkompass is based on hundreds of shows, Artfacts.net's list, which was originally generated from information provided by the German Art Dealers Association and the Cologne Art Fair, is based on several thousand and is "calculated entirely by a machine," she said. "No human being interferes," Ms. Dickersbach continued. "The ranking is based on a transparent set of equations and is recalculated by the Artfacts.net server on a daily basis." To shore up the new ranking system intellectually, Artfacts.net points readers to a translated excerpt from the German book "The Economy of Attention" by Georg Franck, a professor at the Institute for Architecture Sciences in Vienna. The excerpt outlines a new kind of wealth: attention income, otherwise known as fame. "Attention by other people is the most irresistible of drugs," he writes. Just as the rich get richer, the famous become more famous: "Nothing seems to attract attention more than the accumulation of attention income, nothing seems to stimulate the media more than this kind of capital, nothing appears to charge advertising space with a stronger power of attraction than displayed wealth of earned attention." Does the Artfacts.net Top 100 chart bear out Mr. Franck's homily about fame? Yes and no. According to his theory, you would expect the most popular artists to stay popular, and some of them do. Picasso has been No. 1 in the database for the last five years, which is as far back as the ranking goes. Behind him is Andy Warhol, who has been No. 2 for five years. You would also expect plenty of smooth rises, like those of Carl Andre (rising to 47 from 363), Lawrence Weiner (52 from 473) and Vito Acconci (85 from 482). And there would be lots of steady slides too, like Douglas Gordon's (from 35 to 12). But spikes and troughs are more common than regular curves. Just check out the graphs that track each artist's fortunes. Nan Goldin hits a high in 2001, as does Jeff Wall. Sam Francis spikes in 2002, along with Ellsworth Kelly. Ed Ruscha and Robert Rauschenberg dip in 2003. In 2002 Constantin Brancusi, Cindy Sherman and Philip Guston all sag. These jagged lines probably represent big exhibitions and lulls before and after them. It's fun to compare artists' five-year graphs. Who could have guessed that 99 would be the lowest rank for Damien Hirst and the highest for Paul C?zanne? Or that Fernand L?ger would share a V-shaped career with Paul McCarthy, or that Gordon Matta-Clark and Marcel Duchamp would both have W shapes? But it's not clear what can you really read into these coincidences. As the years add up, the curves will become more meaningful, and Mr. Franck's theory may have a truer test. Right now, though, with only five years' data, you can't really tell a trend from a burp. And you may never be able to tell. The system appears to have some big kinks in it. When I looked at Joan Mir?'s chart last weekend, he was shown steadily occupying the No. 3 spot for the last five years, but Tuesday's chart for Mir? showed that he was never there. Over the weekend, Antoni T?pies's chart showed that he was ranked No. 8 five years ago and had risen to No. 4 by 2004. Given Mr. T?pies's middling reputation, that seemed hard to believe. On Tuesday, history had changed: his highest rank in the last five years wasn't 4 but 46. Even if you believe the latest numbers, you can't tell at a glance how precipitous any artist's rise or and fall is compared with that of other artists, because each artist's graph has its own scale, exactly spanning his or her own high and low marks. For example, the graphs of Olafur Eliasson and Alberto Giacometti from 2000 to 2004 look almost identical. Both show a steep rise, then level off. But they indicate quite different things. Mr. Eliasson chugged nicely uphill to 17 from 94, while Giacometti practically scaled a cliff, climbing to a high of 12 from 1,703 in that period. Where do these numbers come from, anyway? The Web site itself offers only a hint of its methods. And those methods are quite arcane. Ms. Dickersbach explained some of the rules. To begin with, she noted, the only artists eligible for the list are "international artists," those with long-term ties (that is, representation by galleries or having a presence in permanent collections) in at least three countries. To rank these international artists, the staff of Artfacts.net starts by looking at exhibition announcements, newsletters and Web sites. Then the point toting begins. Solo shows are worth more than group shows or art fairs. Documenta, in Kassel, Germany, is worth more than the Venice Biennale. Public museums count more than galleries. And different museums have different weights. Those in cities like Paris or New York count for more. Small museums and university museums count for almost nothing. "Exhibitions held in a museum with a great collection of famous artists, like the Centre Pompidou, will receive more points than a relatively unknown private gallery," the Web site says. And how is a famous gallery or museum defined? Circularly. An institution with famous artists is famous, and a famous artist is one who shows in a famous institution. In all of this there's more than a hint that Artfacts.net is playing a role in the economy of attention: it is not merely recording fame but also contributing to it. The Web site notes that curators planning shows and collectors buying art always want "a return on their investment in the form of more attention (reputation, fame, etc)." The subtext is clear: to catch an artist on the upswing, please turn to our tables. As with many Web sites that deal with rank or sales (think of Amazon.com), Artfacts.net seems far from scientific. But no matter how unreliable or irritating it may be, a ranked list is an irresistible object. How irresistible? We shall see. As of the beginning of 2005, Artfacts.net said it was getting 10,000 visitors and 90,000 page visits per day. Check that number again next week. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/22/arts/design/22rank.html From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 22 15:35:22 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 10:35:22 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Essay: Navigating Expression and Religious Taboos Message-ID: Essay: Navigating Expression and Religious Taboos NYT January 22, 2005 By ALAN RIDING LONDON, Jan. 17 - Two senior BBC executives were under police protection last week after receiving death threats. An Asian-British playwright went into hiding last month when her life was threatened. A Dutch moviemaker who ignored similar warnings was murdered on an Amsterdam street in early November. The three episodes had religion in common. And in each case, the issue was blasphemy. Have European artists been exceeding the accepted boundaries of tolerance? Or is religion becoming a new taboo? That such questions are even asked is a measure of the new cultural pressures surfacing across Western Europe. Since the 1960's, confident that artistic freedom was assured by this region's liberal tradition and growing secularity, Europeans have come to view cultural Puritanism as an American monopoly. While American museums remain wary of displaying art that could be considered obscene, Europeans are no longer shocked by the use or exploitation of sex in art, advertising and newspapers or on screen, stage or television. Similarly, as the Christian right expanded its influence in the United States, religion largely vanished from the agenda of European artists and audiences. When French Christian groups complained that posters for Costa-Gavras's 2002 movie, "Amen," abused the symbol of the cross, no one paid much heed. In contrast, Andres Serrano's 1987 photograph of a crucifix in urine led the United States Congress to slash the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. The responses to "Sensation," an exhibition of irreverent British art, contrasted prevailing attitudes. When it was shown in 1997 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, complaints focused on a portrait of a notorious child murderer made with children's handprints. But when the show traveled to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999, it was Chris Ofili's painting of "The Holy Virgin Mary," decorated with elephant dung, that caused outrage. Yet in just a few years, notably since 9/11, much has changed in Europe as religion has re-entered public life and begun challenging artistic freedom. The main catalyst has been the region's large Muslim population, which has responded to criticism and hostility with new militancy. But followers of other faiths, including Christians, are also showing fresh readiness to defend their beliefs and practices. Indeed, religion suddenly seems more intertwined with politics in Europe. And perhaps for this very reason, some artists have felt the need to address it. One such artist was Theo van Gogh, a Dutch moviemaker and a distant relative of the painter Vincent van Gogh. Working with a Somali-born Dutch legislator, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he made a short television documentary, "Submission," that denounced violence against Muslim women by filming words from the Koran written on the lacerated flesh of women. Its broadcast last fall brought cries of blasphemy and death threats. Unlike Ms. Hirsi Ali, Mr. van Gogh refused a police guard. On Nov. 2, he was murdered, and a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan parentage was arrested. The murder provoked outrage in the Netherlands, stirring intense debate about artistic freedom at a time when many Dutch consider their liberal values to be increasingly hostage to religious intolerance. So where, if anywhere, should the line be drawn? Like Germany, France has "anti-hate" legislation, which is applied to extreme rightists and neo-Nazis, but rarely to artists. In 2002, a French novelist, Michel Houellebecq, was cleared of inciting racial hatred when he called Islam "the most stupid religion." And a popular French comedian known as Dieudonn? was acquitted on the same charge last year after he dressed as an Orthodox Jew for a television sketch. This week, a Greek court tried an Austrian writer, Gerhard Haderer, in absentia and sentenced him to six months' imprisonment for publishing "The Life of Jesus," a comic-strip book depicting Jesus as the leader of a drug-taking sect. Still more dramatically, in Britain - where anti-blasphemy legislation has not resulted in a conviction since the 1920's - two recent incidents have thrown the spotlight on what is acceptable. The first involved Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, a writer born in Britain of Sikh immigrant parents, whose latest play, "Behzti," or "Dishonor," portrays sex and brutality inside a Sikh temple. One week after it opened at the Birmingham Repertory Theater, several hundred Sikhs - furious at what they considered blasphemy - attacked the building, breaking windows and clashing with police. The next day, fearing more violence, the theater canceled the play's run. This decision was widely denounced by British theater directors as capitulation to intimidation. Salman Rushdie, who had faced Iranian death threats for his book "The Satanic Verses," chastised the British government for not defending Ms. Bhatti, who by then was in hiding. "Religion and art have collided for centuries," Ms. Bhatti wrote in The Guardian of London last week, "and will carry on doing battle long after my play and I are forgotten." Yet the revolt against "Behzti" points to something new: that an increasingly multiethnic Europe is forcing a re-examination of the relationship between freedom of expression and religion. In another essay in The Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash, a writer and fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford, said that any move to protect religions, races and cultures from what they might consider grossly offensive could help assure civic peace but would also bring a net loss of liberty. The alternative, which he favored, was that "precisely because Britain is increasingly multicultural, all variations of religion, all 'cultures,' including, of course, atheism, devout Darwinism, etc., should get used to living with a high degree of public offense." He added, "Either you try to protect everyone from offense, or you allow offense equally for all." The "protect everyone" option has support. In fact, it has even spawned a loose interfaith alliance here in recent weeks. Having drawn strength from Muslims' defense of Islam, the Sikhs who objected to "Behzti" won support from some Christian prelates. And when British Christian groups charged that a BBC program was blasphemous, they were supported by some Sikh leaders. At issue was a planned BBC-2 broadcast of a live theater performance of "Jerry Springer: The Opera," which satirizes Mr. Springer's American "shock-horror" television show as well as religious fanaticism in general. The musical - which not only is filled with expletives and spoof songs like "I Married a Horse" but also includes a scene set in hell in which Jesus admits he is "a bit gay" - has been drawing West End crowds without a squeak of protest. Early this month, several Christian groups organized a campaign in which a record 50,000 people telephoned or sent e-mail messages to the BBC demanding it halt the broadcast. One group, Christian Voice, posted the names and home addresses of key BBC executives on its Web site, resulting in threatening telephone calls. "If this show portrayed Mohammed or Vishnu as homosexual, ridiculous and ineffectual," the group's leader, Stephen Green, said, "it would never have seen the light of day." The BBC refused to back down. And on Jan. 8, the show was seen by an estimated 1.8 million people, or 10 percent of the total audience. But the storm did not end there. Politicians, artists and even clerics joined the fray, variously calling the show offensive, boring or entertaining. Newspapers published scores of letters on the subject. For the first time in a century, blasphemy was at the center of the news here. What does it all mean? Perhaps artists are taking on religion precisely because it is the last taboo. On the other hand, if charges of blasphemy are accompanied by threats of violence, artists or BBC executives may choose to think twice before exercising their freedom on matters of faith. Either way, religious tensions have begun spilling into the cultural arena. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/22/arts/22essa.html From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Jan 22 15:35:23 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 07:35:23 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] WSJ: Peggy Noonan: Way Too Much God Message-ID: <01C50054.EF9CA300.shovland@mindspring.com> Mostly, the address proved that the inner circle in the White House has gone round the bend. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Saturday, January 22, 2005 7:09 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] WSJ: Peggy Noonan: Way Too Much God http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/ 5.1.22 Peggy Noonan: Way Too Much God Was the president's speech a case of "mission inebriation"? It was an interesting Inauguration Day. Washington had warmed up, the swift storm of the previous day had passed, the sky was overcast but the air wasn't painful in a wind-chill way, and the capital was full of men in cowboy hats and women in long furs. In fact, the night of the inaugural balls became known this year as The Night of the Long Furs. Laura Bush's beauty has grown more obvious; she was chic in shades of white, and smiled warmly. The Bush daughters looked exactly as they are, beautiful and young. A well-behaved city was on its best behavior, everyone from cops to doormen to journalists eager to help visitors in any way. For me there was some unexpected merriness. In my hotel the night before the inauguration, all the guests were evacuated at 1:45 in the morning. There were fire alarms and flashing lights on each floor, and a public address system instructed us to take the stairs, not the elevators. Hundreds of people wound up outside in the slush, eventually gathering inside the lobby, waiting to find out what next. The staff--kindly, clucking--tried to figure out if the fire existed and, if so, where it was. Hundreds of inaugural revelers wound up observing each other. Over there on the couch was Warren Buffet in bright blue pajamas and a white hotel robe. James Baker was in trench coat and throat scarf. I remembered my keys and eyeglasses but walked out without my shoes. After a while the "all clear" came, and hundreds of us stood in line for elevators to return to our rooms. Later that morning, as I entered an elevator to go to an appointment, I said, "You all look happier than you did last night." A man said, "That was just a dream," and everyone laughed. The inauguration itself was beautiful to see--pomp, panoply, parades, flags and cannonades. America does this well. And the most poignant moment was the manful William Rehnquist, unable to wear a tie and making his way down the long marble steps to swear in the president. The continuation of democracy is made possible by such personal gallantry. There were some surprises, one of which was the thrill of a male voice singing "God Bless America," instead of the hyper-coloratura divas who plague our American civic life. But whoever picked the music for the inaugural ceremony itself--modern megachurch hymns, music that sounds like what they'd use for the quiet middle section of a Pixar animated film--was . . . lame. The downbeat orchestral arrangement that followed the president's speech was no doubt an attempt to avoid charges that the ceremony had a triumphalist air. But I wound up thinking: This is America. We have a lot of good songs. And we watch inaugurals in part to hear them. Never be defensive in your choice of music. The inaugural address itself was startling. It left me with a bad feeling, and reluctant dislike. Rhetorically, it veered from high-class boilerplate to strong and simple sentences, but it was not pedestrian. George W. Bush's second inaugural will no doubt prove historic because it carried a punch, asserting an agenda so sweeping that an observer quipped that by the end he would not have been surprised if the president had announced we were going to colonize Mars. A short and self-conscious preamble led quickly to the meat of the speech: the president's evolving thoughts on freedom in the world. Those thoughts seemed marked by deep moral seriousness and no moral modesty. No one will remember what the president said about domestic policy, which was the subject of the last third of the text. This may prove to have been a miscalculation. It was a foreign-policy speech. To the extent our foreign policy is marked by a division that has been (crudely but serviceably) defined as a division between moralists and realists--the moralists taken with a romantic longing to carry democracy and justice to foreign fields, the realists motivated by what might be called cynicism and an acknowledgment of the limits of governmental power--President Bush sided strongly with the moralists, which was not a surprise. But he did it in a way that left this Bush supporter yearning for something she does not normally yearn for, and that is: nuance. The administration's approach to history is at odds with what has been described by a communications adviser to the president as the "reality-based community." A dumb phrase, but not a dumb thought: He meant that the administration sees history as dynamic and changeable, not static and impervious to redirection or improvement. That is the Bush administration way, and it happens to be realistic: History is dynamic and changeable. On the other hand, some things are constant, such as human imperfection, injustice, misery and bad government. This world is not heaven. The president's speech seemed rather heavenish. It was a God-drenched speech. This president, who has been accused of giving too much attention to religious imagery and religious thought, has not let the criticism enter him. God was invoked relentlessly. "The Author of Liberty." "God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind . . . the longing of the soul." It seemed a document produced by a White House on a mission. The United States, the speech said, has put the world on notice: Good governments that are just to their people are our friends, and those that are not are, essentially, not. We know the way: democracy. The president told every nondemocratic government in the world to shape up. "Success in our relations [with other governments] will require the decent treatment of their own people." The speech did not deal with specifics--9/11, terrorism, particular alliances, Iraq. It was, instead, assertively abstract. "We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." "Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self government. . . . Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time." "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world." Ending tyranny in the world? Well that's an ambition, and if you're going to have an ambition it might as well be a big one. But this declaration, which is not wrong by any means, seemed to me to land somewhere between dreamy and disturbing. Tyranny is a very bad thing and quite wicked, but one doesn't expect we're going to eradicate it any time soon. Again, this is not heaven, it's earth. There were moments of eloquence: "America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies." "We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery." And, to the young people of our country, "You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs." They have, since 9/11, seen exactly that. And yet such promising moments were followed by this, the ending of the speech. "Renewed in our strength--tested, but not weary--we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom." This is--how else to put it?--over the top. It is the kind of sentence that makes you wonder if this White House did not, in the preparation period, have a case of what I have called in the past "mission inebriation." A sense that there are few legitimate boundaries to the desires born in the goodness of their good hearts. One wonders if they shouldn't ease up, calm down, breathe deep, get more securely grounded. The most moving speeches summon us to the cause of what is actually possible. Perfection in the life of man on earth is not. Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag" (Wall Street Journal Books/Simon & Schuster), a collection of post-Sept. 11 columns, which you can buy from the [57]OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays. References 57. http://www.opinionjournalbookstore.com/Noonan.htm _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 22 15:36:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 10:36:47 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: Men and Women: Same IQ, Different Brain Message-ID: Men and Women: Same IQ, Different Brain http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2005-01-21-3 Significant differences found in intelligence-related areas Betterhumans Staff 1/21/2005 2:13 PM Men and women appear to employ different brain organization to achieve the same level of general intelligence. Brain imaging has revealed that men have more [8]gray matter related to intellectual ability while women have more [9]white matter. Gray matter refers to information processing centers while white matter refers to connections between the processing centers. Men have about 6.5 times as much general intelligence gray matter as women while women have about 10 times as much white matter, report researchers from the [10]University of California, Irvine and the [11]University of New Mexico. "These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior," says researcher Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine. "In addition, by pinpointing these gender-based intelligence areas, the study has the potential to aid research on dementia and other cognitive-impairment diseases in the brain." Mental maps Using such tools as [12]magnetic resonance imaging and cognitive tests, Haier and colleagues produced brain maps that correlated brain tissue volume with [13]IQ. Besides finding differences in amounts of white and gray matter, the researchers also found regional differences. Intelligence-related gray matter, for example, appears to be distributed throughout the brain in men while in women it's more localized to the [14]frontal lobe. Regionalization may help explain why women and men appear to be hardwired to excel at different tasks, such as mathematics for men and language facility for women. Overall, however, says study coauthor Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico, the different brain organizations produce equivalent overall performance on broad cognitive measures such as intelligence tests. The research supports clinical findings that women are more cognitively affected by frontal brain injuries. They could ultimately help improve the diagnosis and treatment of brain disorders in men and women. The research is reported in the journal [15]NeuroImage ([16]read abstract). References 8. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_matter 9. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_matter 10. http://www.uci.edu/ 11. http://www.unm.edu/ 12. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/magnetic_resonance_imaging 13. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ 14. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/frontal_lobe 15. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/10538119 16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2004.11.019 From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 22 15:37:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 10:37:41 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: Smarts May Protect against Suicide Message-ID: Smarts May Protect against Suicide http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2005-01-21-1 Intellect linked to lower risk in young men Betterhumans Staff 1/21/2005 11:30 AM Smarts may protect against suicide, suggests a study linking intellect to a lower risk of suicide in young men. Few studies have assessed the connection between intelligence and suicide, and results have conflicted. The new study, by researchers from the [8]Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and the [9]University of Bristol in the UK, shows a strong link and is based on a large sample size, making it unlikely to be due to chance. Logical connection For the study, the researchers analyzed results of four intelligence tests performed at conscription into military service for 987,308 Swedish men. The men were monitored for up to 26 years and suicides recorded. Better performance on the intelligence tests was associated with a lower risk of suicide. The strongest associations were with logic test scores: Risk of suicide was three times higher for those with the lowest scores compared to those with the highest scores. Cause and effect? The findings suggest that people's ability to solve problems in times of crisis helps them avoid suicide. However, the findings don't prove a cause-and-effect relationship, as brain development during childhood can affect both intellect and susceptibility to mental illness and suicide. The research is reported in the [10]British Medical Journal ([11]read abstract). References 8. http://www.ki.se/ 9. http://www.bris.ac.uk/ 10. http://www.bmj.com/ 11. http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/330/7484/167 From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 22 15:39:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 10:39:25 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] ZDNet: The magic that makes Google tick Message-ID: The magic that makes Google tick http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/software/print.htm?TYPE=story&AT=39168647-39023769t-10000102c Matt Loney, ZDNet UK December 02, 2004 The numbers alone are enough to make your eyes water. # Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed. # Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster. # Over 30 clusters. # 104 interface languages including Klingon and Tagalog. # One petabyte of data in a cluster -- so much that hard disk error rates of # 10-15 begin to be a real issue. # Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster. # An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger # clusters. # No complete system failure since February 2000. It is one of the largest computing projects on the planet, arguably employing more computers than any other single, fully managed system (we're not counting distributed computing projects here), some 200 computer science PhDs, and 600 other computer scientists. And it is all hidden behind a deceptively simple, white, Web page that contains a single one-line text box and a button that says Google Search. When Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, he was alluding to the trick of hiding the complexity of the job from the audience, or the user. Nobody hides the complexity of the job better than Google does; so long as we have a connection to the Internet, the Google search page is there day and night, every day of the year, and it is not just there, but it returns results. Google recognises that the returns are not always perfect, and there are still issues there -- more on those later -- but when you understand the complexity of the system behind that Web page you may be able to forgive the imperfections. You may even agree that what Google achieves is nothing short of sorcery. On Thursday evening, Google's vice-president of engineering, Urs H?lzle, who has been with the company since 1999 and who is now a Google fellow, gave an insight to would-be Google employees into just what it takes to run an operation on such a scale, with such reliability. ZDNet UK snuck in the back to glean some of the secrets of Google's magic. Google's vision is broader than most people imagine, said H?lzle: "Most people say Google is a search engine but our mission is to organise information to make it accessible." Behind that, he said, comes a vast scale of computing power based on cheap, no-name hardware that is prone to failure. There are hardware malfunctions not just once, but time and time again, many times a day. Yes, that's right, Google is built on imperfect hardware. The magic is writing software that accepts that hardware will fail, and expeditiously deals with that reality, says H?lzle. Google indexes over four billion Web pages, using an average of 10KB per page, which comes to about 40TB. Google is asked to search this data over 1,000 times every second of every day, and typically comes back with sub-second response rates. If anything goes wrong, said H?lzle, "you can't just switch the system off and switch it back on again." How to slam spam The job is not helped by the nature of the Web. "In academia," said H?lzle, "the information retrieval field has been around for years, but that is for books in libraries. On the Web, content is not nicely written -- there are many different grades of quality." Some, he noted, may not even have text. "You may think we don't need to know about those but that.s not true -- it may be the home page of a very large company where the Webmaster decided to have everything graphical. The company name may not even appear on the page." Google deals with such pages by regarding the Web not as a collection of text documents, but a collection of linked text documents, with each link containing valuable information. "Take a link pointing to the Stanford university home page," said H?lzle. "This tells us several things: First, that someone must think pointing to Stanford is important. The text in the link also gives us some idea of what is on the page being pointed to. And if we know something about the page that contains the link we can tell something about the quality of the page being linked to." This knowledge is encapsulated in Google's famous PageRank algorithm, which looks not just at the number of links to a page but at the quality or weight of those links, to help determine which page is most likely to be of use, and so which is presented at the top of the list when the search results are returned to the user. H?lzle believes the PageRank algorithm is 'relatively' spam resistant, and those interested in exactly how it works can find more information here. Page II: Google's vice-president of engineering was in London this week to talk to potential recruits about just what lies behind that search page. Obviously it would be impractical to run the algorithm once every page for every query, so Google splits the problem down. When a query comes in to the system it is sent off to index servers, which contain an index of the Web. This index is a mapping of each word to each page that contains that word. For instance, the word 'Imperial' will point to a list of documents containing that word, and similarly for 'College'. For a search on 'Imperial College' Google does a Boolean 'AND' operation on the two words to get a list of what H?lzle calls 'word pages'. "We also consider additional data, such as where in the page does the word occur: in the title, the footnote, is it in bold or not, and so on. Each index server indexes only part of the Web, as the whole Web will not fit on a single machine -- certainly not the type of machines that Google uses. Google's index of the Web is distributed across many machines, and the query gets sent to many of them -- Google calls each on a shard (of the Web). Each one works on its part of the problem. Google computes the top 1000 or so results, and those come back as document IDs rather than text. The next step is to use document servers, which contain a copy of the Web as crawled by Google's spiders. Again the Web is essentially chopped up so that each machine contains one part of the Web. When a match is found, it is sent to the ad server which matches the ads and produces the familiar results page. Google's business model works because all this is done on cheap hardware, which allows it to run the service free-of-charge to users, and charge only for advertising. The hardware Kevin Mitnick in Australia - Register now! "Even though it is a big problem", said H?lzle, "it is tractable, and not just technically but economically too. You can use very cheap hardware, but to do this you have to have the right software." Google runs its systems on cheap, no-name IU and 2U servers -- so cheap that Google refers to them as PCs. After all each one has a standard x86 PC processor, standard IDE hard disk, and standard PC reliability -- which means it is expected to fail once in three years. On a PC at home, that is acceptable for many people (if only because they're used to it), but on the scale that Google works at it becomes a real issue; in a cluster of 1,000 PCs you would expect, on average, one to fail every day. "On our scale you cannot deal with this failure by hand," said H?lzle. "We wrote our software to assume that the components will fail and we can just work around it. This software is what makes it work. One key idea is replication. "This server that contains this shard of the Web, let's have two, or 10," said H?lzle. "This sounds expensive, but if you have a high-volume service you need that replication anyway. So you have replication and redundancy for free. If one fails you have 10 percent reduction inservice so no failures so long as the load balancer works. So failure becomes and a manageable event." In reality, he said, Google probably has "50 copies of every server". Google replicates servers, sets of servers and entire data centres, added H?lzle, and has not had a complete system failure since February 2000. Back then it had a single data centre, and the main switch failed, shutting the search engine down for an hour. Today the company mirrors everything across multiple independent data centres, and the fault tolerance works across sites, "so if we lose a data centre we can continue elsewhere -- and it happens more often than you would think. Stuff happens and you have to deal with it." A new data centre can be up and running in under three days. "Our data centre now is like an iMac," said Schulz." You have two cables, power and data. All you need is a truck to bring the servers in and the whole burning in, operating system install and configuration is automated." Working around failure of cheap hardware, said H?lzle, is fairly simple. If a connection breaks it means that machine has crashed so no more queries are sent to it. If there is no response to a query then again that signals a problem, and it can cut it out of the loop. That is redundancy taken care of, but what about scaling? The Web grows every year, as do the number of people using it, and that means more strain on Google's servers. Page III: Google's vice-president of engineering was in London this week to talk to potential recruits about just what lies behind that search page. Google has two crucial factors in its favour. First, the whole problem is what H?lzle refers to as embarrassingly parallel, which means that if you double the amount of hardware, you can double performance (or capacity if you prefer -- the important point is that there are no diminishing returns as there would be with less parallel problems). The second factor in Google's favour is the falling cost of hardware. If the index size doubles, then the embarrassingly parallel nature of the problem means that Google couldSo every year as the Web gets bigger and requires more hardware to index, search and return Web pages, hardware gets cheaper so it "more or less evens out" to use H?lzle's words. As the scale of the operation increases, it introduces some particular problems that would not be an issue on smaller systems. For instance, Google uses IDE drives for all its storage. They are fast and cheap, but not highly reliable. To help deal with this, Google developed its own file system -- called the Google File System, or GFS -- which assumes an individual unit of storage can go away at any time either because of a crash, a lost disk or just because someone stepped on a cable. The power of three There are no disk arrays within individual PCs; instead Google stores every bit of data in triplicate on three machines on three racks on three data switches to make sure there is no single point of failure between you and the data. "We use this for hundreds of terabytes of data," said H?lzle. Don't expect to see GFS on a desktop near you any time soon -- it is not a general-purpose file system. For instance, a GFS block size is 64MB, compared with the more usual 2KB on a desktop file system. H?lzle said Google has 30 plus clusters running GFS, some as large as 2,000 machines with petabytes of storage. These large clusters can sustain read/write speeds of 2Gbps -- a feat made possible because each PC manages 2Mbps. Once, said H?lzle, "someone disconnected an 80-machine rack from a GFS cluster, and the computation slowed down as the system began to re-replicate and we lost some bandwidth, but it continued to work. This is really important if you have 2,000 machines in a cluster." If you have 2000 machines then you can expect to see two failures a day. Running thousands of cheap servers with relatively high failure rates is not an easy job. Standard tools don't work at this scale, so Google has had to develop them in-house. Some of the other challenges the company continues to face include: Debugging: "You see things on the real site you never saw in testing because some special set of circumstances that create a bug," said H?lzle. "This can create non-trivial but fun problems to work on." Data errors: A regular IDE hard disk will have an error rate in the order of 10^-15 -- that is one millionth of one billionth of the data written to it may get corrupted and the hard-disk's own error checking will not pick it up. "But when you have a petabyte of data you need to start worrying about these failures," said H?lzle. "You must expect that you will have undetected bit errors on your disk several times a month, even with hardware checking built-in, so GFS does have an extra level of checksumming. Again this is something we didn.t expect, but things happen." Spelling: Google wrote its own spell checker, and maintains that nobody know as many spelling errors as it does. The amount of computing power available at the company means it can afford to begin teaching the system which words are related -- for instance "Imperial", "College" and "London". It's a job that many CPU years, and which would not have been possible without these thousands of machines. "When you have tons of data and tons of computation you can make things work that don.t work on smaller systems," said H?lzle. One goal of the company now is to develop a better conceptual understanding of text, to get from the text string to a concept. Power density: "There is an interesting problem when you use PCs," said H?lzle. "If you go to a commercial data centre and look at what they can support, you'll see a typical design allowing for 50W to 100W per square foot. At 200W per square foot you notice the sales person still wants to sell it but their international tech guy starts sweating. At 300W per square foot they cry out in pain." Eighty mid-range PCs in a rack, of which you will find many dozens in a Google data centre, produce over 500W per square foot. "So we're not going to blade technology," said H?lzle. "We're already too dense. Finally Intel has realised this is a problem and is now focusing more on power efficiency, but it took some time to get the message across." Quality of search results: One big area of complaints for Google is connected to the growing prominence of commercial search results -- in particular price comparison engines and e-commerce sites. H?lzle is quick to defend Google's performance "on every metric", but admits there is a problem with the Web getting, as he puts it, "more commercial". Even three years ago, he said, the Web had much more of a grass roots feeling to it. "We have thought of having a button saying 'give me less commercial results'," but the company has shied away from implementing this yet. ZDNet UK's Matt Loney reported from London. From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 22 15:40:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 10:40:19 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: What Makes People Happy? TV, Study Says Message-ID: What Makes People Happy? TV, Study Says NYT December 2, 2004 By BENEDICT CAREY A team of psychologists and economists is reporting today what many Americans know but don't always admit, especially to social scientists: that watching TV is a very enjoyable way to pass the time, and that taking care of children - bless their young hearts - is often about as much fun as housework. The findings, published in the journal Science, run contrary to previous research and to conventional wisdom about what makes people happy and why, and suggest that the fundamental realities of money, marriage, and job security have far less to do with daily moods than factors like deadlines on the job and sleep quality. The study also marks the debut of a novel questionnaire that probes the subtle, moment-to-moment emotions that constitute an ordinary day. In the new approach, called the Day Reconstruction Method, people keep a diary of everything they did during the day, from reading the paper in the morning to arguing with children or coworkers over lunch, from running to catch the 6 p.m. bus home to falling asleep with their socks on. The next day, consulting the diary, they relive each activity and, using 12 scales, rate how they felt at the time, whether hassled, criticized, worried or warm, friendly and happy. The study, of 909 women living in Texas, found that in general, the group woke up a little grumpy but soon entered a state of mild pleasure that increased by degrees through the day, punctuated by occasional bouts of anxiety, frustration, and anger. Predictably, they found that commuting, housework, and facing a boss rated as the least pleasant activities, while sex, socializing with friends and relaxing were most enjoyable. Yet contrary to previous research on daily moods, the study found that the women rated TV-watching high on the list, ahead of shopping and talking on the phone, and ranked taking care of children low, below cooking and not far above housework. Traditionally, researchers who study well-being have asked sweeping questions about contentment, trying to determine the health of relationships or to evaluate coping skills. In contrast, the new survey method prompts people to relive a normal day, rating how pleased or annoyed, depressed or competent they felt while doing specific activities, like watching TV or commuting to work. Re-imagining the day's activities, rather than reporting what they could or should be feeling about them, allows people to be more honest about their actual enjoyment at the time, some psychologists said. "This is a measure of people's mood in the moment, but that doesn't mean it's the best thing they could be doing," said Dr. Daniel Kahneman, the Princeton professor of psychology and public affairs and the lead author of the study. "If we used adjectives like thrilled, or excited, or involved, we would be getting different answers." He added: "But we are trying to get a better idea or sense of what people's daily lives are actually like, what it is they do with their time." One of the most consistent findings in the study was how little difference money made. As long as people were not battling poverty, they tended to rate their own happiness in the range of 6 or 7 or higher, on a 10-point scale. After controlling for other factors, Dr. Kahneman and his colleagues found that even differences in household income of more than $60,000 had little effect on daily moods. Job security, too, had little influence. And again, contrary to previous research, the researchers found that divorcees in the study reported being slightly more cheerful during the day than did married women. By far the two factors that most upset people's daily moods were a poor night's sleep and tight work deadlines. According to a scale the researchers developed, women who slept poorly reported relatively little enjoyment even when relaxing in front of the TV or shopping. Dr. Richard Suzman, associate director of behavioral and social research at the National Institute on Aging, said that if the new survey method proves sensitive to life changes in further studies, it could also establish quality of life measures firmly in mainstream medicine, giving researchers a more complete picture of how new drugs or medical technologies may enrich or dull the small pleasure of daily life. "This instrument should give us a much improved measure of well-being," Dr. Suzman said. "At the broadest level, it could help us set up a national well-being account, similar to the gross national product, that would give us a better understanding of how changes in policy, or social trends, affect quality of life." Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of "Authentic Happiness," said that the method also adds a valuable dimension to the understanding of what constitutes a good life. One part of it is mood, he said; another is how engaged people are in what they're doing; and a third is meaning. "You could think of them as three different takes a person has on his or her life," he said. "When a kid is deciding what job to take, the questions are: how much positive emotion will it provide, how engaging will it be, and how meaningful is the work." Dr. Seligman, who has been teaching the day-reconstruction method to some of his students, said that the measure could also be helpful in therapy. In working with the survey, one of the students learned that his perception of the day was largely determined by what happened in the last hour or so before bed. If he completed just one assignment, even a small one, he went to bed content and woke up refreshed. If not, his mood plunged. "Using these new techniques, we can see patterns, and with some people it's crucial how they end their day, with others it's crucial how the day begins," Dr. Seligman said. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/02/health/02cnd-mood.html From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 22 15:42:04 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 10:42:04 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CRN: Gray Goo is a Small Issue Message-ID: Gray Goo is a Small Issue http://www.crnano.org/BD-Goo.htm Center for Responsible Nanotechnology 2003.12.14 (note date_ Fear of runaway nanobots, or "gray goo", is more of a public issue than a scientific problem. Gray goo as a result of out of control nanotechnology played a starring role in an article titled "[15]The Gray Goo Problem" by Lawrence Osborne in today's [16]New York Times Magazine. This article and other recent fictional portrayals of gray goo, as well as statements by scientists such as [17]Richard Smalley, are signs of significant public concern. But although biosphere-eating goo is a gripping story, current [18]molecular manufacturing proposals contain nothing even similar to gray goo. The idea that nanotechnology manufacturing systems could run amok is based on outdated information. The earliest proposals for molecular manufacturing technologies echoed biological systems. Huge numbers of tiny robots called "[19]assemblers" would self-replicate, then work together to build large products, much like termites building a termite mound. Such systems appeared to run the risk of going out of control, perhaps even "eating" large portions of the biosphere. Eric Drexler warned in 1986, "We cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers." Since then, however, Drexler and others have developed models for making safer and more efficient machine-like systems that resemble an assembly line in a factory more than anything biological. These mechanical designs were described in detail in Drexler's 1992 seminal reference work, [20]Nanosystems, which does not even mention free-floating autonomous assemblers. Replicating assemblers will not be used for manufacturing. Factory designs using integrated nanotechnology will be much more efficient at building products, and a [21]nanofactory is nothing like a gray goo nanobot. A stationary tabletop factory using only preprocessed chemicals would be both safer and easier to build. Like a drill press or a lathe, such a system could not run wild. Systems like this are the basis for responsible molecular manufacturing proposals. To evaluate Eric Drexler's technical ideas on the basis of gray goo is to miss the far more important policy issues created by general-purpose nanoscale manufacturing. A gray goo robot would face a much harder task than merely replicating itself. It would also have to survive in the environment, move around, and convert what it finds into raw materials and power. This would require sophisticated chemistry. None of these functions would be part of a molecular manufacturing system. A gray goo robot would also require a relatively large computer to store and process the full blueprint of such a complex device. A nanobot or nanomachine missing any part of this functionality could not function as gray goo. Development and use of molecular manufacturing will create nothing like gray goo, so it poses no risk of producing gray goo by accident at any point. However, goo type systems do not appear to be ruled out by the laws of physics, and we can't ignore the possibility that someone could deliberately combine all the requirements listed above. Drexler's 1986 statement can therefore be updated: We cannot afford criminally irresponsible misuse of powerful technologies. Having lived with the threat of nuclear weapons for half a century, we already know that. Gray goo eventually may become a concern requiring special policy. However, goo would be extremely difficult to design and build, and its replication would be inefficient. Worse and more imminent dangers may come from non-replicating nano-weaponry. Since there are [22]numerous greater risks from molecular manufacturing that may happen almost immediately after the technology is developed, gray goo should not be a primary concern. Focusing on gray goo allows more urgent technology and security issues to remain unexplored. UPDATE: The August 2004 issue of the [23]Institute of Physics journal Nanotechnology includes an article on "Safe Exponential Manufacturing", co-authored by Chris Phoenix and Eric Drexler. They conclude that: Nanotechnology-based fabrication can be thoroughly non-biological and inherently safe: such systems need have no ability to move about, use natural resources, or undergo incremental mutation. Moreover, self-replication is unnecessary: the development and use of highly productive systems of nanomachinery (nanofactories) need not involve the construction of autonomous self-replicating nanomachines. Accordingly, the construction of anything resembling a dangerous self-replicating nanomachine can and should be prohibited. Although advanced nanotechnologies could (with great difficulty and little incentive) be used to build such devices, other concerns present greater problems. Since weapon systems will be both easier to build and more likely to draw investment, the potential for dangerous systems is best considered in the context of military competition and arms control. For more information, or to download a PDF of this important paper, [24]click here. References 15. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/magazine/14GRAY.html 16. http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/index.html 17. http://www.crnano.org/Debate.htm 18. http://www.crnano.org/crnglossary.htm#Molecular 19. http://www.crnano.org/crnglossary.htm#Assembler 20. http://www.foresight.org/Nanosystems/toc.html 21. http://www.crnano.org/bootstrap.htm 22. http://www.crnano.org/dangers.htm 23. http://www.iop.org/ 24. http://www.crnano.org/papers.htm#Goo From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 22 15:47:44 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 10:47:44 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CRN: Dangers of Molecular Nanotechnology Message-ID: Dangers of Molecular Nanotechnology http://www.crnano.org/dangers.htm Center for Responsible Nanotechnology [I think this is a couple of years old.] Current Results of Our Research These pages, marked with GREEN headings, are published for [15]comment and criticism. These are not our final findings; some of these opinions will probably change. [16]LOG OF UPDATES [17]CRN Research: Overview of Current Findings [18]Timeline for Molecular Manufacturing [19]Products of Molecular Manufacturing [20]Benefits of Molecular Manufacturing Dangers of Molecular Manufacturing <| YOU ARE HERE [21]No Simple Solutions [22]Administration Options [23]The Need for Early Development [24]The Need for International Development [25]Thirty Essential Nanotechnology Studies Dangers of Molecular Manufacturing Overview: [26]Molecular nanotechnology (MNT) will be a significant breakthrough, comparable perhaps to the Industrial Revolution--but compressed into a few years. This has the potential to disrupt many aspects of society and politics. The power of the technology may cause two competing nations to enter a disruptive and unstable arms race. Weapons and surveillance devices could be made small, cheap, powerful, and very numerous. Cheap manufacturing and duplication of designs could lead to economic upheaval. Overuse of inexpensive products could cause widespread [27]environmental damage. Attempts to control these and other risks may lead to abusive restrictions, or create demand for a black market that would be very risky and almost impossible to stop; small [28]nanofactories will be very easy to smuggle, and fully dangerous. There are numerous severe risks--including several different kinds of risk--that cannot all be prevented with the same approach. Simple, one-track solutions cannot work. The right answer is unlikely to evolve without careful planning. Molecular nanotechnology suddenly will create many risks. The potential benefits of [29]molecular manufacturing are immense, but so are the dangers. In order to avert the dangers, we must thoroughly understand them, and then develop comprehensive plans to prevent them. As explained in our [30]Timeline and [31]Products pages, molecular nanotechnology (MNT) will allow the rapid prototyping and inexpensive manufacture of a wide variety of powerful products. This capability will arrive rather suddenly, since the final steps of developing the technology are likely to be much easier than the initial steps, and many of them can be pre-planned. The sudden arrival of molecular manufacturing may not allow time to adjust to its implications. Adequate preparation is essential. CRN has identified several separate and severe risks. The first step in understanding the dangers is to identify them. CRN has begun that process here, listing and describing several separate and severe risks. Although probably incomplete, the list is already worrisome: [32]Economic disruption from an abundance of cheap products [33]Economic oppression from artificially inflated prices [34]Personal risk from criminal or terrorist use [35]Personal or social risk from abusive restrictions [36]Social disruption from new products/lifestyles [37]Unstable arms race [38]Collective environmental damage from unregulated products [39]Free-range self-replicators (gray goo) -- downgraded as a risk factor [40]Black market in nanotech (increases other risks) [41]Competing nanotech programs (increases other risks) [42]Attempted relinquishment (increases other risks) Some of the dangers described here are [43]existential risks, that is, they may threaten the continued existence of humankind. Others could produce significant disruption but not cause our extinction. A combination of several risks could exacerbate the seriousness of each; any solution must take into account its effect on other risks. Some of these risks arise from too little regulation, and others from too much regulation. Several different kinds of regulation will be necessary in several different fields. An extreme or knee-jerk response to any of these risks will create fertile ground for other risks. The temptation to impose apparently obvious and simple solutions to problems in isolation must be avoided. Other pages address the possibilities for [44]regulation; this one is concerned with discussing and analyzing the dangers. Disruption of the basis of economy is a strong possibility. The purchaser of a manufactured product today is paying for its design, raw materials, the labor and capital of manufacturing, transportation, storage, and sales. Additional money--usually a fairly low percentage--goes to the owners of all these businesses. If [45]nanofactories can produce a wide variety of products when and where they are wanted, most of this effort will become unnecessary. This raises several questions about the nature of a post-nanotech economy. Will products become cheaper? Will capitalism disappear? Will most people retire--or be unemployed? The flexibility of nanofactory manufacturing, and the radical improvement of its products, imply that non-nanotech products will not be able to compete in many areas. If nanofactory technology is exclusively owned or controlled, will this create the world's biggest monopoly, with extreme potential for abusive anti-competitive practices? If it is not controlled, will the availability of cheap copies mean that even the designers and brand marketers don't get paid? Much further study is required, but it seems clear that molecular manufacturing could severely disrupt the present economic structure, greatly reducing the value of many material and human resources, including much of our current infrastructure. Despite utopian post-capitalist hopes, it is unclear whether a workable replacement system could appear in time to prevent the human consequences of massive job displacement. Major investment firms are conscious of potential economic impact. In the mainstream financial community, there is growing recognition that nanotechnology represents a significant wave of innovation with the potential to restructure the economy. Here, for example, is an excerpt from an analysis prepared for investors by [46]Credit Suisse First Boston: Nanotechnology is a classic, general-purpose technology (GPT). Other GPTs, including steam engines, electricity, and railroads, have been the basis for major economic revolutions. GPTs typically start as fairly crude technologies, with limited uses, but then rapidly spread into new applications. All prior GPTs have led directly to major upheavals in the economy--the process of creative destruction. And nanotechnology may be larger than any of the other GPTs that preceded it. Creative destruction is the process by which a new technology or product provides an entirely new and better solution, resulting in the complete replacement of the original technology or product. Investors should expect that creative destruction will not only continue, but will also likely accelerate, and nanotechnology will be at the core. What does this mean from a practical standpoint? Because of the advent of nanotechnology, we believe new companies will displace a high percentage of today's leading companies. The majority of the companies in today's Dow Jones industrials Index are unlikely to be there 20 years from now. (Excerpted with permission from "Big Money in Thinking Small", authored by Michael Mauboussin and Kristen Bartholdson.) Along those same lines, Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital, editor of the [47]Forbes/Wolfe Nanotech Report, writes: "Quite simply, the world is about to be rebuilt (and improved) from the atom up. That means tens of trillions of dollars to be spent on everything: clothing... food... cars... housing... medicine...the devices we use to communicate and recreate...the quality of the air we breathe...and the water we drink, are all about to undergo profound and fundamental change. And as a result, so will the socio and economic structure of the world. Nanotechnology will shake up just about every business on the planet." MNT products may be vastly overpriced relative to their cost, perpetuating unnecessary poverty. By today's commercial standards, products of [48]MNT would be immensely valuable. A monopoly would allow the owners of the technology to charge high rates for all products, and make high profits. However, if carried to its logical conclusion, such a practice would deny cheap lifesaving technologies (as simple as water filters or mosquito netting) to millions of people in desperate need. Competition will eventually drive prices down, but an early monopoly is likely for several reasons. Due to other risks listed on this page, it is unlikely that a completely unregulated commercial market will be allowed to exist. In any case, the high cost of development will limit the number of competing projects. Finally, a company that pulls ahead of the pack could use the resulting huge profits to stifle competition by means such as broad enforcement of expansive patents and lobbying for special-interest industry restrictions. The price of a product usually falls somewhere between its value to the purchaser and its cost to the seller. Molecular manufacturing could result in products with a value orders of magnitude higher than their cost. It is likely that the price will be set closer to the value than to the cost; in this case, customers will be unable to gain most of the benefit of "the nanotech revolution". If pricing products by their value is accepted, the poorest people may continue to die of poverty, in a world where products costing literally a few cents would save a life. If (as seems likely) this situation is accepted more by the rich than by the poor, social unrest could add its problems to untold unnecessary human suffering. A present-day example is the agreement that the WTO was working on to provide affordable medicines to poor countries--which the Bush administration [49]partially prevented (following heavy lobbying by American pharmaceutical companies) despite [50]furious opposition from every other WTO member. Criminals and terrorists could make effective use of the technology. Criminals and terrorists with stronger, more powerful, and much more compact devices could do serious damage to society. Defenses against these devices may not be installed immediately or comprehensively. Terrorists could have a field day. Chemical and biological weapons could become much more deadly and much easier to conceal. Many other types of terrifying devices are possible, including several varieties of remote assassination weapons that would be difficult to detect or avoid. If such devices were available from a black market or a home factory, it would be quite difficult to detect them before they were used; a random search capable of spotting them would be a clear violation of current human rights standards in most civilized countries. Detecting a criminal user after the fact might also be difficult; since many devices can be computer-controlled and networked, the criminal does not have to be at the scene. Extreme solutions and abusive regulations may be attempted. A patchwork of extreme solutions may be created in response to the other risks described here. This would not be a good idea. Many of these problems appear to have an obvious solution. However, in each case, that solution, applied to the extreme necessary to impact the target problem, would exacerbate another problem and make the overall situation worse. A collection of extreme solutions will surely be undesirable; it will either be ineffective (and ineffective policies can still be quite harmful) or will create massive human suffering or human rights violation. There is a possibility that abusive restrictions and policies may be attempted, such as [51]round-the-clock surveillance of every citizen. Such surveillance might be possible with AI programs similar to one currently being developed at MIT, which is able to analyze a video feed, learn familiar patterns, and notice unfamiliar patterns. Molecular manufacturing will allow the creation of very small, inexpensive supercomputers that conceivably could run a program of constant surveillance on everyone. Surveillance devices would be easy to manufacture cheaply in quantity. Surveillance is only one possible kind of abuse. With the ability to build billions of devices, each with millions of parts, for a total cost of a few dollars, any automated technology that can be applied to one person can be applied to everyone. Any scenario of physical or psychiatric control that explores the limits of nanotechnology will sound science-fictional and implausible. The point is not the plausibility of any given scenario; it is that the range of possibilities is limited mainly by the imagination and cruelty of those with power. Greed and power are strong motivators for abusive levels of control; the fear of nanotech and other advanced technologies in private hands adds an additional impetus for abusive rule. Society could be disrupted by the availability of new "immoral" products. New products and lifestyles may cause significant social disruption. For example, medical devices could be built into needles narrower than a bacterium, perhaps allowing easy brain modification or stimulation, with effects similar to any of a variety of psychoactives. Most societies have found it desirable to forbid certain products: guns in Britain, seedless watermelon in Iran, sex toys in Texas, various drugs in various societies such as hashish in the United States and alcohol in Muslim societies. Although many of these restrictions are based on moral principles not shared by the majority of the world's population, the fact that the restrictions exist at all indicates the sensitivity of societies--or at least their rulers--to undesired products. The ability to make banned products using personal factories could be expected to be at least somewhat disruptive to society, and could provide an impetus for knee-jerk and overly broad restrictions on the technology. New lifestyles enabled by new technology could also cause social disruption. Whereas demand for banned products already exists, lifestyles develop over time, so the effects of lifestyle change are likely to be less acute. However, some lifestyle possibilities (particularly in the areas of sex, drugs, entertainment, and body or genetic modification) are likely to be sufficiently disturbing to onlookers that their very existence would cause disruption. Nanotech weapons would be extremely powerful and could lead to a dangerously unstable arms race. Molecular manufacturing raises the possibility of horrifically effective weapons. As an example, the smallest insect is about 200 [52]microns; this creates a plausible size estimate for a nanotech-built antipersonnel weapon capable of seeking and injecting toxin into unprotected humans. The human lethal dose of botulism toxin is about 100 nanograms, or about 1/100 the volume of the weapon. As many as 50 billion toxin-carrying devices--theoretically enough to kill every human on earth--could be packed into a single suitcase. Guns of all sizes would be far more powerful, and their bullets could be self-guided. Aerospace hardware would be far lighter and higher performance; built with minimal or no metal, it would be much harder to spot on radar. Embedded computers would allow remote activation of any weapon, and more compact power handling would allow greatly improved robotics. These ideas barely scratch the surface of what's possible. An important question is whether nanotech weapons would be stabilizing or destabilizing. Nuclear weapons, for example, perhaps can be credited with preventing major wars since their invention. However, nanotech weapons are not very similar to nuclear weapons. Nuclear stability stems from at least four factors. The most obvious is the massive destructiveness of all-out nuclear war. All-out nanotech war is probably equivalent in the short term, but nuclear weapons also have a high long-term cost of use (fallout, contamination) that would be much lower with nanotech weapons. Nuclear weapons cause indiscriminate destruction; nanotech weapons could be targeted. Nuclear weapons require massive research effort and industrial development, which can be tracked far more easily than nanotech weapons development; nanotech weapons can be developed much more rapidly due to faster, cheaper prototyping. Finally, nuclear weapons cannot easily be delivered in advance of being used; the opposite is true of nanotech. Greater uncertainty of the capabilities of the adversary, less response time to an attack, and better targeted destruction of the enemy's resources during an attack all make nanotech arms races less stable. Also, unless nanotech is tightly controlled, the number of nanotech nations in the world could be much higher than the number of nuclear nations, increasing the chance of a regional conflict blowing up. [53]Admiral David E. Jeremiah, Vice-Chairman (ret.), U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, in an [54]address at the 1995 Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology said: "Military applications of molecular manufacturing have even greater potential than nuclear weapons to radically change the balance of power." An excellent [55]essay by [56]Tom McCarthy (unaffiliated with CRN) explores these points in more detail. He discusses the ways that MNT can destabilize international relations: MNT will reduce economic influence and interdependence, encourage targeting of people as opposed to factories and weapons, and reduce the ability of a nation to monitor its potential enemies. It may also, by enabling many nations to be globally destructive, eliminate the ability of powerful nations to "police" the international arena. By making small groups self-sufficient, it can encourage the breakup of existing nations. Collective environmental damage is a natural consequence of cheap manufacturing. ([57]MORE) Molecular manufacturing allows the cheap creation of incredibly powerful devices and products. How many of these products will we want? What environmental damage will they do? The range of possible damage is vast, from personal low-flying supersonic aircraft injuring large numbers of animals to collection of solar energy on a sufficiently large scale to modify the planet's albedo and directly affect the environment. Stronger materials will allow the creation of much larger machines, capable of excavating or otherwise destroying large areas of the planet at a greatly accelerated pace. It is too early to tell whether there will be economic incentive to do this. However, given the large number of activities and purposes that would damage the environment if taken to extremes, and the ease of taking them to extremes with molecular manufacturing, it seems likely that this problem is worth worrying about. Some forms of damage can result from an aggregate of individual actions, each almost harmless by itself. Such damage is quite hard to prevent by persuasion, and laws frequently don't work either; centralized restriction on the technology itself may be a necessary part of the solution. Finally, the extreme compactness of nanomanufactured machinery will tempt the use of very small products, which can easily turn into nano-litter that will be hard to clean up and may cause health problems. Gray goo was an early concern of nanotechnology. When nanotechnology-based manufacturing was first proposed, a concern arose that tiny manufacturing systems might run amok and 'eat' the biosphere, reducing it to copies of themselves. In 1986, Eric Drexler wrote, "We cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers." More recent designs by Drexler and others make it clear, though, that replicating assemblers will not be used for manufacturing--[58]nanofactories will be much more efficient at building products, and a nanofactory is nothing like a 'gray goo' robot. Gray goo would entail five capabilities integrated into one small package. These capabilities are: Mobility - the ability to travel through the environment; Shell - a thin but effective barrier to keep out diverse chemicals and ultraviolet light; Control - a complete set of blueprints and the computers to interpret them (even working at the nanoscale, this will take significant space); Metabolism - breaking down random chemicals into simple feedstock; and Fabrication - turning feedstock into nanosystems. A nanofactory would use tiny [59]fabricators, but these would be inert if removed or unplugged from the factory. The rest of the listed requirements would require [60]substantial engineering and integration. Gray goo won't happen by accident, but eventually could be developed on purpose. Although gray goo has essentially no military and no commercial value, and only limited terrorist value, it could be used as a tool for blackmail. Cleaning up a single gray goo outbreak would be quite expensive and might require severe physical disruption of the area of the outbreak (atmospheric and oceanic goos deserve special concern for this reason). Another possible source of gray goo release is irresponsible hobbyists. The challenge of creating and releasing a self-replicating entity apparently is irresistible to a certain personality type, as shown by the large number of computer viruses and worms in existence. We probably cannot tolerate a community of "[61]script kiddies" releasing many modified versions of goo. Development and use of molecular manufacturing poses absolutely no risk of creating gray goo by accident at any point. However, goo type systems do not appear to be ruled out by the laws of physics, and we cannot ignore the possibility that the five stated requirements could be combined deliberately at some point, in a device small enough that cleanup would be costly and difficult. Drexler's 1986 statement can therefore be updated: We cannot afford criminally irresponsible misuse of powerful technologies. Having lived with the threat of nuclear weapons for half a century, we already know that. We wish we could take gray goo off CRN's list of [62]dangers, but we can't. It eventually may become a concern requiring special policy. Gray goo will be highly difficult to build, however, and non-replicating [63]nano-weaponry may be substantially more dangerous and more imminent. Since there are greater risks from molecular manufacturing (such as falling into an unstable arms race) that may happen almost immediately after the technology is developed, CRN does not see gray goo as a primary concern. UPDATE: In June 2004, [64]Eric Drexler and [65]Chris Phoenix published a new paper on "[66]Safe Exponential Manufacturing", which puts the perceived gray goo threat into perspective. Too little or too much regulation can result in unrestricted availability. Uncontrolled availability of MNT can result from either insufficient or overzealous regulation. Inadequate regulation would make it easy to obtain and use an unrestricted nanofactory. Overzealous regulation would create a pent-up demand for nanotech products, which if it gets strong enough, would fund espionage, cracking of restricted technology, or independent development, and eventually create a black market beyond the control of central authorities (nanofactories are very smugglable). Note that sufficiently abusive or restrictive regulation can motivate internal espionage; at least one atomic spy in the US was idealistically motivated. Uncontrolled availability of molecular manufacturing greatly increases many of the dangers cited above. Competing nanotech programs increase the danger. The existence of multiple MNT programs greatly increases some of the risks listed above. Each program provides a separate opportunity for the technology to be stolen or otherwise released from restriction. Each nation with an independent program is potentially a separate player in a nanotech arms race. The reduced opportunity for control may make restrictions harder to enforce, but this may lead to greater efforts to impose harsher restrictions. Reduced control also makes it less likely that a non-disruptive economic solution can develop. Relinquishment is counterproductive. Facing all these risks, there will be a strong temptation simply to outlaw the technology. However, we don't believe this can work. Many nations are already spending millions on basic nanotechnology; within a decade, advanced nanotech will likely be within the reach of large corporations. It can't be outlawed worldwide. And if the most risk-aware countries stop working on it, then the less responsible countries are the ones that will be developing it and dealing with it. Besides, legal regulation may not have much effect on covert military programs. MNT may be delayed by strict regulation, but this would probably make things worse in the long run. If MNT development is delayed until it's relatively easy, it will then be a lot harder to keep track of all the development programs. Also, with a more advanced technology base, the development of MNT products could happen even faster than we have described, leaving less time to adjust to the societal disruptions. Solving these problems won't be easy. Some of these risks arise from too little regulation, and others from too much regulation. Several different kinds of regulation will be necessary in several different fields. An extreme or knee-jerk response to any of these risks will simply create fertile ground for other risks. The risks are of several different types, so a single approach (commercial, military, free-information) cannot prevent all of them. Some of the risks are sufficiently extreme that society cannot adjust to the risk while testing various approaches to prevent it. A single gray goo release, or unstable nanotech arms race, is intolerable. Threading a path between all these risks will require careful advance planning [67]Support CRN DEVIL'S ADVOCATE -- [68]Submit your criticism, please! You're assuming only the bad guys will have nanotech. No. We're assuming that some bad, or just irresponsible, groups might get nanotech and misuse it before every good guy has all the technology they need to prevent every problem. In some cases the counter-technology won't be invented yet. And even if the counter-technology does exist, it probably won't be used as widely as it should be--like computer anti-virus programs today. But this is decades in the future. We think it's less than twenty years off--maybe less than fifteen. That's not much time to analyze the problems, and then design and implement solutions. If you knew that a year from now, you would have to walk a tightrope without a net, how soon would you start practicing? Nanotech won't really be that sudden or dangerous. Read our [69]Timeline and [70]Products pages to see why we think it will. (From Michael Vassar) Japan managed to prohibit guns for centuries, before Perry's gunboat finally forced a change. Primitive guns did not confer an overwhelming military advantage. Each gun required highly skilled labor and much time to make. No one could hope to take over the country even with guns, and they would have been destroyed by the Emperor for trying. By contrast, once the first nanofactory is made, it will be pretty easy to use and very easy to duplicate, and will provide an immense military advantage to its owners. This whole analysis is really too simplistic. Well, we have to start somewhere. Please [71]contact us and tell us what we're missing; we promise to listen to and think about all (polite) feedback. References 15. http://www.crnano.org/dangers.htm#criticism 16. http://www.crnano.org/log.htm 17. http://www.crnano.org/overview.htm 18. http://www.crnano.org/timeline.htm 19. http://www.crnano.org/products.htm 20. http://www.crnano.org/benefits.htm 21. http://www.crnano.org/solutions.htm 22. http://www.crnano.org/administration.htm 23. http://www.crnano.org/early.htm 24. http://www.crnano.org/development.htm 25. http://www.crnano.org/studies.htm 26. http://www.crnano.org/whatis.htm 27. http://www.crnano.org/EPAhandout.htm 28. http://www.crnano.org/bootstrap.htm 29. http://www.crnano.org/crnglossary.htm#Molecular 30. http://www.crnano.org/timeline.htm 31. http://www.crnano.org/products.htm 32. http://www.crnano.org/dangers.htm#economy 33. http://www.crnano.org/dangers.htm#overpriced 34. http://www.crnano.org/dangers.htm#terrorists 35. http://www.crnano.org/dangers.htm#Extreme 36. http://www.crnano.org/dangers.htm#products 37. http://www.crnano.org/dangers.htm#arms 38. http://www.crnano.org/dangers.htm#environmental 39. http://www.crnano.org/dangers.htm#goo 40. http://www.crnano.org/dangers.htm#Black 41. http://www.crnano.org/dangers.htm#Competing 42. http://www.crnano.org/dangers.htm#Relinquishment 43. http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html 44. http://www.crnano.org/administration.htm 45. http://www.crnano.org/bootstrap.htm 46. http://www.csfb.com/home/index/index.html 47. http://www.newsletters.forbes.com/nanotech/index.php 48. http://www.crnano.org/crnglossary.htm#MNT 49. http://www.voanews.com/article.cfm?objectID=B04FA65B-82C2-4F78-AF59FF2BD6ADF796 50. http://www.organicconsumers.org/corp/010302_globalization.cfm 51. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/fftransparent.html 52. http://www.crnano.org/crnglossary.htm#Micron 53. http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/nano4/jeremiah.html 54. http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/nano4/jeremiahPaper.html 55. http://www.mccarthy.cx/WorldSystem/ 56. http://www.mccarthy.cx/ 57. http://www.crnano.org/EPAhandout.htm 58. http://www.crnano.org/bootstrap.htm 59. http://www.crnano.org/crnglossary.htm#Fabricator 60. http://www.foresight.org/NanoRev/Ecophagy.html 61. http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/gDefinition/0,294236,sid14_gci550928,00.html 62. http://www.crnano.org/dangers.htm 63. http://www.crnano.org/dangers.htm#arms 64. http://www.foresight.org/FI/Drexler.html 65. http://www.crnano.org/about_us.htm#Principals 66. http://www.crnano.org/PR-IOP.htm 67. http://www.crnano.org/support.htm 68. mailto:cphoenix at CRNano.org?subject=Devil's%20Advocate 69. http://www.crnano.org/timeline.htm 70. http://www.crnano.org/products.htm 71. http://www.crnano.org/contact.htm From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 22 15:48:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 10:48:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Technology Review: Cyber Security's Cassandra Syndrome Message-ID: Technology Review: Cyber Security's Cassandra Syndrome http://techreview.com/articles/04/12/wo_hellweg121004.asp?p=0 A proposal to create a senior-level cyber security position at the Department of Homeland Security is killed at the eleventh hour. Why is this issue such a problem for the Bush administration? By Eric Hellweg December 10, 2004 The big news surrounding the passage of the Intelligence Reform Act this week was the creation of a new, top-level intelligence director position, which will oversee all aspects of intelligence gathering and dissemination in the U.S. government. But the technology community was calling foul at the elimination of another proposed high-level post. During last minute, "mercurial" conference sessions, a provision that would have created an assistant secretary of cyber security within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was eliminated. "The executive branch must exert more leadership" in this area, says a statement issued this week by the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, a Washington-based lobbying group. Many hoped the post would help end the musical chairs nature of the current cyber security director position, which has been a problem since the Bush administration took office in 2000. President George W. Bush appointed Richard C. Clarke to be the nation's first cyber security "Czar", but he resigned in frustration in February 2003. He was followed by Howard Schmidt, now the chief security officer at eBay, who also quit after two months. Most recently, the position was held by Amit Yoran, a former Symantec executive. But by then the position was a part of the DHS, and Yoran, reportedly frustrated by the lack of attention given to the issue, resigned in October after just one year. No one doubts the necessity of protecting the nations airports and infrastructure, but the topic of cyber security doesn't require a senior-level post says the DHS, which requested the excision, according to Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA). "We're still examining respective options for reorganization," says Katie Mynster, a spokesperson for DHS." [But] regarding that position specifically, we continue to believe that the integration of physical and cyber security within the Infrastructure Protection Directorate is the best method to protect the nations infrastructure." Security observers fear that with the elimination of the assistant secretary proposal, cyber security could slip further down the mindshare and budget priority list. Miller says that because the assistant secretary position is a political appointee-level post, requiring congressional approval hearings, it carries far more heft than the current staffing level. But there's a more practical consideration as well, Miller says. The assistant secretary position is two people removed from the president's ear, instead of the five that exist now. "Unless you're a senior person, it's tough to meet other senior people. It's harder to get face time," says Miller. "Washington is all about clout, real and perceived." Technology industry organizations on the hill that opposed the position's elimination fear that without a senior-level person pushing for budgets and awareness, the nation risks a critical infrastructure attack, one that could cost multiple billions of dollars and possibly lives. Right now, much of the discussion around cyber security involves hackers shutting down websites and stealing personal information. But with networked sensors and software-based operations at our nation's power plants, petroleum refineries, and other critical locations, cyber-security proponents fear that someone might try to gain access to these points as part of a larger, coordinated attack with terrorism -- not hacker hijinx -- as a motive. Further complicating the issue is the wide variance in security awareness among different industries and sectors. The finance industry, for example, is very much attuned to the issue of cyber security, whereas the agriculture, energy, and education sectors either don't have the budget or don't think the topic is a problem. Proponents say government-led initiatives, shepherded by an assistant secretary-level position, could help educate industries and the public, and work to protect against cyber attacks. "The message the Department of Homeland Security is sending is that cyber security just isn't that high of a priority," says Miller. From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 22 16:21:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 11:21:11 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Mary Magdalene: Author of the Fourth Gospel? Message-ID: Mary Magdalene: Author of the Fourth Gospel? by Ramon K. Jusino, M.A. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html 1988.7.13 All biblical citations taken from HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION, 1973, 1978 by the International Bible Society. [He should have used the original, the King James Version. [It's a fascinating article. The Gospel according to St. John is excerpted in WIllis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer, edd., _The Gnostic Bible_ (Boston: Shambhala, 2003) as an instance of "gnostic" writing, and the extant pages of apocryphal Gospel of Mary [Magdalene] is clearly "gnostic." She was, of course, the first witness to the resurrection of Jesus in some of the canonical gospels and was not at all the whore, conflated with the passage in Luke, so commonly depicted from the Middle Ages onward. In the Gospel of Mary, her visions from Jesus are disputed by St. Peter, who found it difficult to imagine that such a vision could come from a mere woman. Christianity was, indeed, more feminist than the surrounding religions, and it has great appeal among the downbeat urban proles in its early years, though not when it spread to Germany. (See James C. Russell, _The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation_ (Oxford UP, 1994) for the latter story.) [Karen L. King, _The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle_ (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2003) mumbles only a couple of paragraphs about why Mary's "gnostic" vision did not get incorporated into "orthodox" Christianity, something about the needs of "patriarchy." Perhaps, come to think of it, and given that marginal movements attract marginal people, in this case women at the time, as Christianity moved up the respectability ladder, it would be bad form to claim that the author of the fourth gospel was a woman. But this movement up the respectability ladder was much too soon. (King has concluded that the Gospel of Mary was early second century, despite that the Coptic translation of the original Greek dates from the fifth century, though there are earlier and somewhat different fragments in Greek, but they date to the third century.) [I have at least looked at a great many non-canonical gospels. There are certain infancy accounts and certain resurrection accounts (these last differing not much from the canonical accounts), but none present a complete and connected story of the life of Jesus from the beginning of his ministry onwards. And a great many of them are simply strange. The canonical accounts won out on literary grounds alone. But John's, or Mary Magdalene's, account is very different from the others, as we all know. It is not impossible that his account had a great many passages of a "gnostic" sort that mostly got edited out. Even if the Holy Ghost supervised the writing of the fourth gospel, it doesn't mean the editors could not have removed embarrassing passages. [Anyhow, enjoy the article and let me know what you think of it.] INTRODUCTION This article makes a case for ascribing authorship of the Fourth Gospel (the Gospel of John) in the New Testament to Mary Magdalene. As far as I know -- no previously published work has made an argument in support of this hypothesis. Most biblical scholars today assert that the Fourth Gospel was authored by an anonymous follower of Jesus referred to within the Gospel text as the Beloved Disciple. It is posited here that, in an earlier tradition of the Fourth Gospel's community, the now "anonymous" Beloved Disciple was known to be Mary Magdalene. It is further posited that Mary Magdalene is the true founder and hero of what has come to be known as the Johannine Community (i.e., Mary Magdalene was one of the original apostolic founders and leaders of the early Christian church). I realize that this hypothesis may seem very radical and perhaps unorthodox to you. However, I believe that it is well-founded and I respectfully offer the following in support of it. The evidence supporting this thesis includes some of the Gnostic Christian writings of the Nag Hammadi Library, and internal evidence from the text of the Fourth Gospel itself. This study also relies heavily on the Johannine Community research done by [16]Raymond E. Brown (America's foremost Catholic biblical scholar). I have made every attempt to write this article in such a way that it can be easily followed and understood by those without prior biblical scholarship knowledge. It is written and dedicated to those who embrace the love of God, who love and respect the church, and who are open-minded enough to investigate new ideas without feeling threatened by them. (A [17]Works Cited list is provided for you at the end of this article.) ====================================== To this day, Mary Magdalene remains a most elusive and mysterious figure. Speculation about her role in the development of early Christianity is not new. She has been the subject of many different theories and myths throughout ecclesiastical history. Such speculation is the result of the deafening silence from the Scriptures regarding this woman who is cited by all four Gospels as being present at both the Crucifixion of Jesus and the Empty Tomb on the morning of the Resurrection. Why is it that we know virtually nothing else about her? Has she made contributions to the development of the early church of which we are not aware? Here is a fact that few people seem to know: The Bible never explicitly says that Mary Magdalene was ever a prostitute at any point in her life. Luke does not name her in his narrative about the "penitent whore" who washes the feet of Jesus with her hair (7:36-50). Nor is she named as the woman who was caught in the act of adultery and saved from being stoned to death by Jesus (John 8:1-11). She is identified as once having been demon-possessed (Luke 8:2). However, the assumption that her sinful past consisted primarily of sexual sin is a presumption that is not usually made about the men who are identified as former sinners. [18]Susan Haskins has published an excellent study of the many myths and misconceptions surrounding Mary Magdalene. Her book is a "must read" for anyone who wishes to do a serious study of the Magdalene. MY THESIS We begin by presupposing the following well-settled position: The many positive contributions made by women to the development of the early church have been minimized throughout history. Claudia Setzer has recently reminded us that women, especially Mary Magdalene, were essential witnesses to the Risen Christ. Setzer [19](259) asserts that the prominent role of female disciples was an early and firmly entrenched piece of tradition which quickly became an embarrassment to the male leaders of the emerging institutional church. Many prominent scholars have argued, quite convincingly, that there was a concerted effort on the part of the male leadership of the early church to suppress the knowledge of any major contributions made by female disciples. It is asserted here that much of Mary Magdalene's legacy fell victim to this suppression. This study posits the theory that the Fourth Gospel, once universally believed to have been authored by John of Zebedee, was actually authored by Mary Magdalene. It is further posited that she was the Beloved Disciple of the Fourth Gospel and, therefore, the founder and leader of what has come to be known as the Johannine Community. Indeed, there is more evidence pointing to her authorship of the Fourth Gospel than there ever was pointing to authorship by John. The research of Raymond E. Brown [20](1979) is used as the primary basis for this study. Brown's research on the Johannine Community is clearly second-to-none. He is readily acknowledged by most theologians today as America's foremost Catholic Scripture scholar. This study does not dispute any of Brown's essential assertions on this subject. Rather, I use much of Brown's research to substantiate the hypothesis in this article. This study builds on Brown's research by attempting to identify the author of the Fourth Gospel where Brown does not. At one time, Brown did argue that the Fourth Gospel was authored by John of Zebedee [21](1966: xcviii). However, Brown has since changed his view on this because he found that there was little evidence to support Johannine authorship of this Gospel [22](1979: 33). Mary Magdalene is posited as the author of the Fourth Gospel in the sense in which antiquity defined authorship [23](Brown 1990: 1051-1052). The author is the person whose ideas the book expresses, not necessarily the person who set pen to papyrus [24](Brown 1966: lxxxvii). According to Brown, the Fourth Gospel was authored by an anonymous follower of Jesus referred to in the Gospel text as the Beloved Disciple. This Beloved Disciple knew Jesus personally and was in the originating group of the Johannine Community [25](Brown 1979: 31). The Fourth Gospel was based on this disciple's own eyewitness account (John 21:24). Brown identifies several phases in the development of the Fourth Gospel: 1) the initial pre-Gospel version authored by the Beloved Disciple; 2) the pre-Gospel work produced by "the evangelist" or main writer; and, 3) the final version written by a redactor after the death of the Beloved Disciple [26](1979:22-23). I assert that Mary Magdalene's contribution to the writing of the Fourth Gospel took place within the first phase of development identified by Brown -- i.e., the initial pre-Gospel version. The Gospel went through several phases of modification. The end result of these modifications was the eventual suppression of her role as author of this Gospel and leader of their community. THE BELOVED DISCIPLE OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL Before we go any further, let us take a look at what the Fourth Gospel actually says about this Beloved Disciple. In the Gospel of John there are seven passages which refer to the beloved anonymous founder of the Johannine Community. These passages are as follows: 1. (1:35-40) This passage refers to "another disciple" who heard John the Baptist and followed Jesus along with Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter. Even though this passage does not specifically refer to the disciple as being loved by Jesus, Brown argues that this passage is a reference to the Beloved Disciple. He says that the disciple is not referred to as the beloved simply because he is not yet a disciple of Jesus at this point in the story [27](Brown 1979: 33). 2. (13:23-26) This passage clearly refers to the anonymous disciple as "the disciple whom Jesus loved." The disciple is sitting next to Jesus during the Last Supper. Peter nods to the disciple to get him to ask Jesus for the identity of his betrayer. The disciple asks Jesus and Jesus tells him that his betrayer is, of course, going to be Judas Iscariot. 3. (18:15-16) After the arrest of Jesus, the other disciple is allowed to enter the courtyard of the high priest with him. Peter, on the other hand, was not allowed in at first. Peter was let in only after the other disciple, who was known to the high priest, spoke to the gatekeeper. The other disciple is not explicitly referred to as the Beloved Disciple. However, Brown asserts that this passage refers to the same disciple whom Jesus loved [28](1979: 82). 4. (19:25-27) The Beloved Disciple is at the foot of the Cross along with the mother of Jesus, and other women including Mary Magdalene. Jesus tells the Beloved Disciple to take care of his mother. The disciple is said to have taken the mother of Jesus into his home. 5. (20:1-11) Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved run to the Empty Tomb after being told by Mary Magdalene that the body of the Lord was missing. 6. (21:7) In this passage, several of the disciples are out fishing after the Resurrection of Christ. The Beloved Disciple is the first to notice that the man who was speaking to them was Jesus. The disciple says to Peter, "It is the Lord!" 7. (21:20-24) The Beloved Disciple's death is addressed in a conversation between Peter and the Risen Christ. The passage also asserts that the Gospel was written by the Beloved Disciple and based on his eyewitness testimony. Chapter 21 was obviously written by a redactor (or editor) after the death of the Beloved Disciple. You may note at this point that in the above cited passages from the Gospel of John, the Beloved Disciple is clearly male. Also, in 19:25-27 and 20:1-11 the Beloved Disciple and Mary Magdalene appear in the same scenes simultaneously. How can I allege that Mary Magdalene is the Beloved Disciple in light of this? The answer will be addressed in detail below. But for now: The reason that the Beloved Disciple was turned into a man in the text was because this disciple was clearly the founder and hero of the community that produced this Gospel. At some point after the death of Jesus, the emerging male leadership of that community simply became embarrassed about having a female founder. (Remember, we're dealing with male attitudes towards women 2,000 years ago.) In order to "mainstream" their community, they suppressed some of the more radical practices that Jesus taught them through his example -- such as treating everyone with equal dignity and respect, including the sick, the poor, the oppressed, the outcast, and women. Jesus apparently did not object to men and women sharing power and positions of leadership. Some of his successors, however, were not courageous enough to be so radical. So, in the case of the Gospel of John, the female Beloved Disciple had to become male. I will elaborate on just how I believe this happened below. One fact is very clear: For some reason, the writer of the Gospel of John wanted to keep the identity of the Beloved Disciple a secret. This disciple was obviously an extremely important figure in the history of their community. Why, then, is the name of this disciple concealed? Was the goal to protect this disciple from persecution? Hardly -- after all, the disciple was clearly deceased when the final draft of John's Gospel was produced (21:20-24). Is it possible that the writer of the final draft had forgotten the name of their beloved founder? Not very likely. This is, indeed, an interesting mystery. THE EXTERNAL EVIDENCE Today, the majority of biblical scholars, both Catholic and Protestant, assert that St. John of Zebedee did not write the Gospel that bears his name. They ascribe authorship to the "anonymous" Beloved Disciple. So, if the evidence pointing to John as author of this Gospel is so flimsy -- how, then, did this book become known universally as the Gospel of John? The Fourth Gospel was initially accepted earliest by "heterodox" rather than "orthodox" Christians [29](Brown 1979: 147). The oldest known commentary on the Fourth Gospel is that of the Gnostic Heracleon (d. 180). The Valentinian Gnostics appropriated the Fourth Gospel to such an extent that Irenaeus of Lyons (d. 202) had to refute their exegesis of it. Brown well notes the relationship between the Fourth Gospel and the early Christian Gnostics when he writes that there is "abundant evidence of familiarity with Johannine ideas in the...gnostic library from Nag Hammadi" [30](1979: 147). In contrast to this, Brown points out that clear use of the Fourth Gospel in the early church by "orthodox" sources is difficult to prove [31](1979: 148). This would seem to suggest that the contents of the Fourth Gospel, at one point, were not attractive to "orthodox" Christians yet very attractive to Gnostic Christians for some reason. In fact, the earliest indisputable "orthodox" use of the Fourth Gospel was by Theophilus of Antioch, c. 180 A.D., in his Apology to Autolycus. This strong connection between the Fourth Gospel and Gnostic Christians provides significant support for my thesis. If you are unfamiliar with [32]Gnostics, I suggest that you look them up. They were branded as heretics by the emerging institutional church very early on in ecclesiastical history. Of significance to this study is the following: Many Gnostic groups practiced radical egalitarianism. They believed that God acted and spoke through both men and women. Both men and women were known to be leaders and/or prophets in their communities. Many men, including those in the church, felt threatened by them. The popularity of the Fourth Gospel among Gnostics made it important for the early church to pursue the question of its apostolic authorship [33](Perkins: 946). It was Irenaeus who defended the apostolicity of the Fourth Gospel by appealing to a tradition circulating in Asia Minor which, he claimed, linked John of Zebedee to the Fourth Gospel. The testimony of Irenaeus, however, makes for very tenuous evidence establishing John of Zebedee as the Fourth Gospel's author. First of all, it turned out that Irenaeus confused John of Zebedee with a presbyter from Asia Minor who was also named John. Secondly, Irenaeus claimed that he got his information about Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel when he was a child from Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna (d. 156) [34](Perkins: 946). The church tradition that established John as the author of the Fourth Gospel was based, primarily, on Irenaeus' childhood recollections! It is mainly for this reason, in the absence of other supporting evidence, that the majority of biblical scholars today assert that John was not the author of the Fourth Gospel. Brown's research reveals that there was a schism early in the history of the Johannine Community. He posits that the community divided in two due to an internal christological disagreement. The majority of the community, whom Brown refers to as the Secessionists, defended the community's high christology and moved toward Docetism, Montanism, and Gnosticism [35](Brown 1979: 149). The rest of the community, whom Brown refers to as the Apostolic Christians, were amalgamated into the emerging institutional church. The Apostolic Christians became accepted as "orthodox" believers because they were willing to modify their christological beliefs in order to conform to the teachings of the emerging church hierarchy. The Secessionists, the majority of the Johannine Community, were quickly labeled as "heretics" by the institutional church because they did not make any such modifications. This schism took place before the final canonical redaction of the Fourth Gospel. The final redaction that we have today is the work of an editor belonging to the group which aligned itself with the institutional church. Both groups, however, took their pre-canonical version of the Fourth Gospel with them after the schism and claimed it as their own [36](Brown 1979: 149). My hypothesis includes the assertion that, at the time of the schism, this pre-canonical version of the Fourth Gospel clearly identified Mary Magdalene as the Beloved Disciple. The Secessionists, as Brown calls them, preserved the tradition of the Magdalene as the Beloved Disciple -- the founder and hero of their community. The Secessionists brought their tradition with them to several Gnostic groups. This explains Mary Magdalene's identification as the Beloved Disciple in several ancient Gnostic documents from a corpus of literature known as the Nag Hammadi Library. The Apostolic Christians, on the other hand, gravitated toward the institutional church and were pressured into suppressing, among other things, their tradition claiming that a woman was their founder and former leader. The end result of this suppression is the Fourth Gospel as we have it today. The following outline charts the events which led to the dissemination of the pre-canonical version of the Fourth Gospel to both "heterodox" and "orthodox" Christians. It is based on the outline from Brown [37](1979: 166) on the history of the Johannine Community: FIRST STAGE -- (mid-50s to late 80s A.D.): The originating group of the community is led by Mary Magdalene. She is highly esteemed as the primary witness to the Resurrection of Christ. She is recognized as such even by believers who do not belong to this particular community. She is known, very early on, as the companion of Jesus, and the disciple whom Jesus loved. An essential part of their proclamation of the gospel is the fact that Mary Magdalene was the first to see the Risen Christ. SECOND STAGE -- (c. 80-90 A.D.): At this point, the community has a version of their Gospel, either written or oral, which includes the tradition that Mary Magdalene was their founder, hero, and leader. Mary Magdalene is probably deceased by this time. There is a schism in the community which is most likely the result of an internal dispute about their high christology. The community is divided into two groups which Brown calls the Secessionists, and the Apostolic Christians. THIRD STAGE -- (c. 90-100 A.D.): The Apostolic Christians: As the church becomes a more organized institution, this group is fearful of ostracism and persecution. They seek amalgamation with the leaders of the emerging institutional church. The claim that a female disciple of Jesus had been their community's first leader and hero quickly becomes an embarrassment. They need to obscure that fact if they are to be accepted by the male leadership of the growing organized church. A redactor in this community reworks their Gospel in order to make it consistent with this obscuration. The result of this redaction is the canonical Fourth Gospel as we have it today. The Secessionists: They are the largest of the two groups. They hold on to their tradition which cites Mary Magdalene as the Beloved Disciple of Jesus. Many members of this community take this tradition to various Gnostic groups. Their identification of Mary Magdalene as the disciple whom Jesus loved is reflected in the Gnostic Christian writings of Nag Hammadi -- e.g., the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary. The evidence which links authorship of the Fourth Gospel to Mary Magdalene is found in the Gnostic writings of the Nag Hammadi Library. Of particular interest are the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary (referring to Magdalene). [38]The Nag Hammadi Library was discovered in 1945 in the area of Nag Hammadi in Egypt. Much has been written about it since its publication in the mid-1970s. This library consists of 4th century Coptic manuscripts which are copies of manuscripts originally written in Greek. These manuscripts belonged to Gnostic Christians. Most scholars cite the mid-second century as the earliest plausible date of composition for these documents. However, a few of the documents are said by some to have been written as early as the late first century -- making them contemporary with the New Testament Gospels [39](Haskins: 34). The importance of this 1945 discovery cannot be overstated. Let's look at a few important excerpts from the Nag Hammadi Library. This first passage comes to us from the Gospel of Philip: ** And the companion of the [Savior is] Mary Magdalene. [But Christ loved] her more than [all] the disciples [and used to] kiss her [often] on her [mouth]. The rest of [the disciples were offended] by it [and expressed disapproval]. They said to him, "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Savior answered and said to them, "Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness" (NHC II.3.63.32ff) [40](Robinson 1977: 138).** Another passage from the Gospel of Philip reads as follows: **There were three who always walked with the Lord: Mary his mother and her sister and Magdalene, the one who was called his companion. His sister and his mother and his companion were each a Mary (NHC II.3.59.6-11) [41](Robinson 1988: 145).** The Gospel of Mary (referring to the Magdalene) says the following: **Peter said to Mary, "Sister, we know that the Savior loved you more than the rest of women. Tell us the words of the Savior which you remember -- which you know (but) we do not, nor have we heard them." Mary answered and said, "What is hidden from you I will proclaim to you." (NHC BG 8502.1.10.1-8) [42](Robinson 1988: 525).** At this point in the text, Mary Magdalene goes on to tell Peter, Andrew, and Levi about her visions of the Risen Christ and her conversations with the Lord. These visions involve something which she refers to as the seven powers of wrath (NHC BG 8502.1.16.12-13) [43](Robinson 1988: 526). After she concludes her discourse about her revelations from the Lord, the men argue over whether to accept the authenticity of the Magdalene's vision. The Gospel of Mary concludes as follows: **When Mary had said this, she fell silent, since it was to this point that the Savior had spoken with her. But Andrew answered and said to the brethren, "Say what you (wish to) say about what she has said. I at least do not believe that the Savior said this. For certainly these teachings are strange ideas." Peter answered and spoke concerning these same things. He questioned them about the Savior: "Did he really speak with a woman without our knowledge (and) not openly? Are we to turn about and all listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?" Then Mary wept and said to Peter, "My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I thought this up myself in my heart, or that I am lying about the Savior?" Levi answered and said to Peter, "Peter, you have always been hot-tempered. Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries. But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Savior knows her very well. That is why he loved her more than us. Rather let us be ashamed and put on the perfect man and acquire him for ourselves as he commanded us, and preach the gospel, not laying down any other rule or other law beyond what the Savior said." When [...] and they began to go forth [to] proclaim and to preach. (NHC BG 8502.1.17.7ff) [44](Robinson 1988: 526-527).** For some reason, there are four pages missing from the account of her revelations in the extant text. In all, ten of the nineteen pages of the Gospel of Mary are missing [45](Robinson 1988: 524, 526). Clearly, these passages establish as indisputable fact that, at least in some ancient gnostic communities, Mary Magdalene was thought of as having been the "Beloved Disciple" and the companion of the Lord. She is repeatedly singled out as the disciple whom Jesus loved the most. This would seem to contradict the assertion in the Fourth Gospel that the male founder of the Johannine Community is "the disciple whom Jesus loved" (John 13:23). How can there be two strong traditions each identifying two different people as the disciple whom Jesus loved the most? This begins to make sense only if we explore the possibility that, in reality, both of these traditions are referring to the same disciple. EXPLORING POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS There is no doubt that the Beloved Disciple in the canonical version of the Fourth Gospel is an anonymous male disciple. Yet, as we have seen, the writings of the Nag Hammadi Library reflect a strong tradition repeatedly naming Mary Magdalene as the disciple whom Jesus loved. How do we explain this disturbing contradiction? There are only three possible explanations for this: 1. There is no connection between the Fourth Gospel and the Gnostic writings cited here. They simply reflect two different traditions which cite two different people as Jesus' favorite disciple. This is simply a coincidence. 2. Brown's explanation: The writers of the Gnostic gospels were influenced by the portrait of Mary Magdalene as an extraordinary proclaimer of the Resurrected Christ. This portrait of Mary Magdalene sparked the Gnostic writers to make her the disciple whom Jesus loved most and the chief recipient of post-resurrectional revelation [46](Brown 1979: 154). In other words, the Gnostic writers spawned a tradition naming Mary Magdalene as the Beloved Disciple in response to what they had read in the Fourth Gospel. In this scenario, the canonical Fourth Gospel predates the traditions revealed in the writings of Nag Hammadi. 3. My thesis: The pre-canonical version of the Fourth Gospel clearly named Mary Magdalene as the disciple whom Jesus loved, just as the Gnostic writings still do. The Gnostic writings reflect a dependency on the pre-Gospel text which the "Secessionists" brought to the Gnostic groups after the schism [47](Brown 1979: 149). The rest of the community, Brown's "Apostolic Christians," also had the same pre-Gospel text. They, however, redacted their text in order to make it more acceptable to the emerging institutional church which they wished to join. They quashed references to Mary Magdalene as having been their founder. They, instead, made references in the text to a "Beloved Disciple," but turned the disciple into an anonymous male. In two passages of the text, their redaction attempts to make the Beloved Disciple and Mary Magdalene seem to be two different individuals by having them appear together in the same scenes. (Structural flaws within those passages, discussed below, support this contention.) They did this because they knew that the church leaders would not accept the authenticity of a Gospel written by a woman. As Brown has observed: "The acceptance of the (Fourth) Gospel into the canon...was only at the price of an assurance that it had apostolic origins" [48](1979: 149). And, in the worldview of the institutional church leaders, no woman's ministry could be deemed apostolic. Of the three possible explanations, it is the third which is most plausible. The first explanation can be easily refuted. There is most certainly a connection between the Fourth Gospel and the Gnostic writings cited here. Brown's research shows that the majority of the Johannine Community (the Secessionists) took a pre-canonical version of the Fourth Gospel with them to the Docetists, the Montanists, and the Gnostics [49](1979: 149). In addition to this, as we have seen, the Fourth Gospel was very popular among Gnostics well before its acceptance and canonization by the institutional church [50](Perkins: 946). And Brown points out that there is "abundant evidence of familiarity with Johannine ideas" in the Gnostic writings of Nag Hammadi [51](1979: 147). There was obviously much contact between the Johannine Community and Gnostic groups very early on. Therefore, it cannot be mere coincidence that Mary Magdalene is cited in the Gnostic writings as the "disciple whom Jesus loved" in much the same way as the anonymous male disciple is cited as such in the Fourth Gospel. The similarities are too striking to dismiss as unrelated. In order to refute the second explanation, which comes from Brown, we must carefully analyze the internal evidence which supports my thesis. THE INTERNAL EVIDENCE As previously stated, an important assertion of mine is that a redactor carefully concealed the identity of Mary Magdalene as the Beloved Disciple, by referring to her only as an anonymous disciple. As the redactor reworked the seven passages cited above which refer to the Beloved Disciple, he simply changed any reference to Mary Magdalene by substituting it with an anonymous reference to the Beloved Disciple or to "another disciple." For most of the document this was fairly easy to do and the resulting text appeared to be congruous. Instead of seeing the Magdalene's name, the reader is simply presented with the anonymous male disciple. Removing references to Mary Magdalene from most of the story was easy. However, in the course of his work, the redactor was confronted with a problem. The tradition placing Mary Magdalene at the foot of the Cross and at the Empty Tomb on Sunday morning was too strong to deny. The Magdalene's presence at both of these events was common knowledge among most early Christian communities. (This is evidenced by the fact that all three of the other New Testament Gospels report her presence at these events.) The redactor could not simply omit any reference to the Magdalene at the Crucifixion or any reference to her as a primary witness to the Resurrection. However, the redactor still wanted to establish the Beloved Disciple as the founder of his community and as an eyewitness to these major events in the work of salvation. This way, he could still maintain that the founder of his community was an eyewitness to the events in the Gospel even though he inexplicably fails to reveal his identity (John 21:24). At this point, the redactor probably asked himself a question very similar to this one: How can I suppress the knowledge of Mary Magdalene having been the founder of our community without being so obvious as to remove her from the Crucifixion/Resurrection accounts, with which most Christians are already familiar? The redactor's solution to this problem was actually quite simple. In those two events where he could not deny the presence of the Magdalene, he would rework the text so as to make it appear as if Mary Magdalene and the Beloved Disciple were two different people appearing simultaneously in the same place, at the same time. Consequently, Mary Magdalene and the male Beloved Disciple appear together in the Fourth Gospel in only two passages -- 19:25-27 (at the foot of the Cross) and 20:1-11 (at the Empty Tomb on Sunday morning). ...Isn't that interesting? And it is precisely at these two points that we find some major structural inconsistencies within the text of the Fourth Gospel. Brown discusses the inconsistencies in both of these passages. (That shows that I'm not just reading inconsistencies into passages that have none.) Notably, Brown finds no such structural defects in any of the other passages which contain references to the Beloved Disciple. STRUCTURAL INCONSISTENCIES IN THE FOURTH GOSPEL The passage from the Fourth Gospel which has Mary Magdalene and the Beloved Disciple together at the foot of the Cross reads as follows: **Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said... (John 19:25ff)** I cut the passage here in order to make a point. The structure of this pericope is very puzzling. In the first sentence (v. 25) we read a list of women standing by the Cross of Jesus. In the second sentence (v. 26) the writer seems to refer to the aforementioned list of women at the Cross when he calls one of them "the disciple whom (Jesus) loved." If one were to read only the portion of the passage cited above, one would readily assume that the Beloved Disciple is one of the women standing by the cross with Jesus' mother. (Read it over to yourself and see if you don't agree.) The entire passage reads as follows: **Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, "Dear woman, here is your son," and to the disciple, "Here is your mother." From that time on, this disciple took her into his home. (John 19:25-27)** The original pre-Gospel version of this passage probably referred to Mary Magdalene as the disciple whom Jesus loved. Through the use of masculine determiners and cases (in Greek), the redactor was able to change the Beloved Disciple into the anonymous male seemingly in mid-thought. The structure of this passage seems a little forced and indicates that it was probably altered as I have asserted. Brown in no way posits the thesis proposed by me here. However, he did notice the inconsistency between v. 25 and vss. 26-27. At one point in his discussion of this passage he questions why the Beloved Disciple was not included in the list of people standing by the cross in v. 25 [52](Brown 1970: 922). He noted that the mother of Jesus and the Beloved Disciple were not listed by the other three Gospels as having stood by the cross. He concluded that the mother of Jesus "was specifically mentioned in the tradition that came to the evangelist, as seen in vs. 25, but that the reference to the Beloved Disciple...is a supplement to the tradition" [53](Brown 1970: 922). Brown sensed, for reasons other than those posited here, that the "Beloved Disciple" seemed oddly out of place in this passage. If we compare John 19:25-27 with the passage from the Gospel of Philip cited previously, we notice some striking similarities. **There were three who always walked with the Lord: Mary his mother and her sister and Magdalene, the one who was called his companion. His sister and his mother and his companion were each a Mary (NHC II.3.59.6-11) [54](Robinson 1988: 145).** The Gospel of Philip makes reference to the same group of women that are standing by the Cross in the Fourth Gospel. However, the Gospel of Philip clearly cites Mary Magdalene as the "companion" of Jesus. Brown's explanation for this similarity is that the Gnostic writers were somehow influenced by the Fourth Gospel into making Mary Magdalene the disciple whom Jesus loved the most [55](1979: 154). In other words, as stated previously, he argues that what we read in the Gospel of Philip is a reaction to what is written in the canonical Fourth Gospel. This is highly unlikely. Asserting that the writer of the Gospel of Philip responded in this way to the Fourth Gospel does not explain why the structural inconsistency appears in this Fourth Gospel passage in the first place. Furthermore, Brown argues that the Gnostics made Mary Magdalene into the Beloved Disciple in response to her portrayal in the Fourth Gospel. However, he does not attempt to explain why the name of the Beloved Disciple in the Fourth Gospel is veiled in secrecy in the first place. I believe that the more plausible explanation is that the Gnostic literature cited here reflects the earlier tradition. The redactor of the Fourth Gospel modified that tradition for the reasons stated above. The Fourth Gospel passage which has Mary Magdalene and the Beloved Disciple together at the Empty Tomb reads as follows: **Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have put him!" So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter, who was behind him, arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus' head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen. Finally, the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.) Then the disciples went back to their homes, but Mary stood outside the tomb crying. (John 20:1-11)** The structural inconsistencies in this passage are glaring. In his discussion of this pericope Brown observes that "there are an extraordinary number of inconsistencies that betray the hand of an editor who has achieved organization by combining disparate material" [56](1970: 995). This pericope has also been described as containing "both high drama and confused choreography" [57](Setzer: 262). In his comments on John 20:1-11, Brown cites several inconsistencies. One, in particular, that is worth looking at for the purposes of this study is this observation by Brown: "It is not clear when or how Magdalene got back to the tomb in (v.) 11" [58](1970: 995). Brown notices that there is a broken trail in the travels of Mary Magdalene from one place to another in this pericope: * In v. 2 Mary Magdalene runs AWAY from the tomb to Peter and the "other disciple" to tell them that the body of Jesus was missing from the tomb. At this point, Mary Magdalene is AWAY from the tomb along with Peter and the "other disciple." * In v. 3 Peter and the "other disciple" run to the tomb. Mary Magdalene is not mentioned as having returned to the tomb with the two men. She has stayed behind -- still AWAY from the tomb. * In v. 11 Mary Magdalene is abruptly portrayed as remaining behind weeping at the tomb. However, there is no account of her returning to the tomb in this scene after telling Peter and the "other disciple" that the body of Jesus was missing. When did Mary Magdalene return to the tomb? The reader loses track of her trail between v. 2 and v. 11. Brown noticed this [59](1970: 995). I assert that this inconsistency is due to the insertion of her alter ego, the male Beloved Disciple, in vss. 2 thru 10. It is obvious that this passage has had some extensive re-editing done to it. The redactor's effort to conceal the identity of Mary Magdalene as the Beloved Disciple, and make two individuals out of one, has created a muddled account of the Magdalene's whereabouts between vss. 2 and 10 in this passage. Brown maintains that this passage "has undergone considerable development" [60](1970: 1001). He considers the possibility that Luke 24:12 reflects an earlier tradition in which Peter runs to the tomb without the other disciple. A pre-canonical version of the Fourth Gospel may have reflected this before the redactor reworked it. Brown asserts that the insertion of the Beloved Disciple into the scene in John 20 was the work of the redactor. In fact, he maintains that it is precisely the introduction of the Beloved Disciple into this text that has caused the inconsistencies which I've discussed here [61](Brown 1970: 1001). Setzer describes the insertion of the Beloved Disciple in this passage as a "contrivance" [62](262). She notes, as does Brown, that the account of Peter and the Beloved Disciple running to the tomb together is "sandwiched between" Mary Magdalene's initial discovery of the Empty Tomb and her first encounter with the Risen Jesus. She asserts that this "contrivance" let the Gospel retain the tradition that Mary Magdalene was the first to discover the Empty Tomb while still giving the Beloved Disciple prominence as the first person to reach the Empty Tomb and believe that Jesus has risen [63](Setzer: 262). Setzer's observation is very consistent with the hypothesis that I've proposed here. My thesis also alleges a contrivance on the part of the final editor of the Fourth Gospel. The redactor wanted to maintain that the Gospel was based on the eyewitness testimony of his community's founder and hero. However, he did not wish to admit that this founder and hero was a woman. Yet, he could not very well deny Mary Magdalene's presence at the Crucifixion and the Empty Tomb. So, his "contrivance," as Setzer puts it, was to change Mary Magdalene into an anonymous male disciple throughout the text except in those places where he could not deny her presence due to the strong prior tradition to the contrary. In those scenes, he placed the Beloved Disciple and Mary Magdalene together in the same passages. This accounts for the structural inconsistencies, the confused choreography, and the apparent contrivance. One other inconsistency which Brown points out [64](1970: 995) is worth noting here: **Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.) (John 20:8-9)** The contrast between "he saw and believed" in v. 8 and "they still did not understand" in v. 9 is peculiar. Verse 9 is clearly making reference to verse 8. However, the reference is contradictory. This appears to be an attempt to blend two different traditions: one in which the disciples did not immediately understand, or believe in, the Resurrection (Matthew 28:17; Mark 16:11,13; Luke 24:11), and another in which Mary Magdalene, changed here to the "other disciple," instantly perceives the truth (Matthew 28:1,8; Mark 16:9; Luke 24:10). ADDITIONAL SUPPORTING EVIDENCE Brown draws many conclusions in his research which are consistent with my thesis. Indeed, everything in Brown's profile of the Beloved Disciple is compatible with what is known about Mary Magdalene -- that is, except for her gender. Brown notes that "the Johannine attitude toward women was quite different from that attested in other first-century Christian churches." He adds: "The unique place given to women (as proclaimers) in the Fourth Gospel reflects the history, the theology, and the values of the Johannine community" [65](Brown 1979: 183). May I respectfully suggest an additional explanation? Perhaps, the unique place given to women in the Fourth Gospel is due to its having been originally authored by a woman. Brown suggests that the Johannine picture becomes more understandable if the Beloved Disciple had been a disciple of John the Baptist, and if the disciple began to follow Jesus when Jesus was in fellowship with the Baptist [66](1979: 32-34). This is certainly a plausible scenario which does not contradict my thesis. Brown also notes that the Fourth Gospel contains many accurate references to Holy Land places and customs [67](1979: 22). These references suggest eyewitness authorship by someone who lived in the Holy Land before the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70. All of these observations by Brown are consistent with a paradigm that includes Mary Magdalene as the author of the Fourth Gospel. Another factor which tends to support my thesis is the "one-upmanship" of the Beloved Disciple in relation to Peter in the Fourth Gospel [68](Brown 1979: 31). The juxtapositional relationship between Peter and the Beloved Disciple in the Fourth Gospel is very similar to the relationship between Peter and Mary Magdalene in the Nag Hammadi Corpus. This suggests that the redactor of the Fourth Gospel changed Mary Magdalene into the anonymous male disciple but kept the competition motif between the disciple and Peter. Brown has observed that very often in the Fourth Gospel the Beloved Disciple is explicitly contrasted with Peter. Some of the examples that he points out [69](Brown 1979: 82-83) are as follows: * in 13:23-26 the Beloved Disciple is resting on Jesus' chest while Peter has to petition the Disciple to ask Jesus a question for him; * in 18:15-16 the Beloved Disciple has access to the high priest's palace while Peter does not; * in 20:2-10 the Beloved Disciple immediately believes in the Resurrection while Peter and the rest of the disciples do not understand; * in 21:7 the Beloved Disciple is the only one who recognizes the Risen Christ while he speaks from the shore to the disciples on their fishing boat; * in 21:20-23 Peter jealously asks Jesus about the fate of the Beloved Disciple. The writings of the Nag Hammadi Library contain this same kind of "one-upmanship" between Peter and Mary Magdalene: * the Gospel of Mary portrays Peter as being jealous of the revelations that the Magdalene got from the Risen Christ (NHC BG 8502.1.17.7ff) [70](Robinson 1988: 526-527); * the Gospel of Thomas has Peter saying the following about the Magdalene: "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life" (NHC II.2.51.19-20) [71](Robinson 1988: 138); * in the Gospel of Philip the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene is contrasted with Jesus' relationship with the rest of the disciples (NHC II.3.63.32ff) [72](Robinson 1977: 138; 1988: 148); * similar examples of Peter being upstaged by Mary Magdalene occur in the Gospel of the Egyptians and Pistis Sophia (Gnostic documents found prior to the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library). CONCLUDING REMARKS Positing Mary Magdalene as author of the Fourth Gospel does not challenge its apostolic origin. If Mary Magdalene was the leader and hero of the Fourth Gospel's community, then she was probably recognized as an Apostle within that community. Indeed, in recognition of the fact that she was the first to proclaim the Resurrection of Christ, the Roman Catholic Church has honored her with the title apostola apostolorum which means "the apostle to the apostles." In proposing this thesis I am certainly not challenging the integrity of the Fourth Gospel. Nor do I impute specious intent upon any of the Gospel's redactors. It is well known today that the Bible is replete with pseudonymous writings: a common practice in antiquity which was not viewed as dishonest. Despite the redactions and the inconsistencies they may have caused -- the intention of the author, the evangelist, and any subsequent redactors was to proclaim the gospel "in such fashion that they told us the honest truth about Jesus" (Dei Verbum, n. 19) [73](Abbott: 124). They also preserved "without error that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation" (Dei Verbum, n. 11) [74](Abbott: 119). In other words, in concealing the identity of the Beloved Disciple, or making that disciple male rather than female, the redactor was not tampering with any essential tenet of the gospel of Jesus. Therefore, the redactor of the Fourth Gospel was still dispensing the Truth. Readers should also refrain from assuming or inferring that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had any kind of illicit amorous relationship based on any of the readings cited here. We should not be too quick to look at ancient literature through a "modern lens." I am certainly making no claim of possessing the final word on this issue. However, the conclusions of this study do not come under the rubric of the "overly imaginative deductions about ecclesiastical history" that Brown warns us about [75](1979: 19). There are some very compelling reasons for considering the possibility of Mary Magdalene's authorship of the Fourth Gospel: * there is solid extrabiblical documentary evidence which establishes a strong tradition among, at least some, Gnostic Christians naming Mary Magdalene as the disciple whom Jesus loved the most. This is strong external evidence which corroborates the identification of Mary Magdalene as the Beloved Disciple; * there is a well-established historical link between the Fourth Gospel and Gnostic Christians which predates both the canonization of the Fourth Gospel and the ascription of its authorship to John of Zebedee [76](Perkins: 946). This corroborates the hypothesis which says that the Secessionists of the Johannine Community brought their pre-canonical Fourth Gospel with them into the Gnostic Christian communities after the schism; * there is the strong internal evidence which shows extensive structural inconsistencies in the two passages of the Fourth Gospel which contain both Mary Magdalene and the Beloved Disciple appearing together. This corroborates the hypothesis which says that a redactor re-edited prior pre-canonical versions of the Fourth Gospel as discussed above; * the "one-upmanship" of the Beloved Disciple in relation to Peter in the Fourth Gospel is very similar to the relationship between Peter and Mary Magdalene in the Nag Hammadi Corpus. This helps to corroborate the hypothesis which says that the Fourth Gospel's Beloved Disciple and Mary Magdalene are, in reality, one and the same; * there are many accurate references in the Fourth Gospel to Holy Land places and customs which denote eyewitness authorship by someone who lived in the Holy Land before the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70 [77](Brown 1979: 22). Mary Magdalene was most certainly in a position to give very vivid and accurate eyewitness accounts of the events depicted in the Fourth Gospel. This might explain some striking differences between the Fourth Gospel and the Synoptic Gospels which, according to most biblical scholars, were pseudonymous and not written by eyewitnesses; * the unique place given to women as proclaimers in the Fourth Gospel was quite different from that of other first-century Christian churches [78](Brown 1979: 183). This is very consistent with the hypothesis which says that the Fourth Gospel was, in fact, authored by a woman -- i.e., Mary Magdalene. Well...I hope that the preceding material has been a "good read" for you. I know that my hypothesis will seem very radical to you -- at least at first. However, before you dismiss it, I want you to consider a few things. Does this thesis seem radical to you only because I propose that a woman authored one of the four Holy Gospels in the Bible? If I had a thesis which proposed that Bartholomew, or Andrew, or James, or any of the other male apostles authored the Fourth Gospel instead of John -- would that be considered very radical? Probably not. In fact, the church has no problem with the prevailing scholarship which says that a man whose name we don't even know wrote one of the most sacred Christian documents. Imagine -- even a nameless man is preferable to a woman. What about all of the evidence that I have reviewed for you? Compare that to the basis for which authorship of the Fourth Gospel has been ascribed to John of Zebedee for almost 2,000 years. Most biblical scholars reject that evidence today. (Remember? It was the childhood recollections of Irenaeus.) That is why John's Gospel is considered anonymous by them today. But, alas, the standard of proof for establishing a woman as the author of a Gospel is much, much higher. Gnostic documents and structural inconsistencies notwithstanding -- the church-at-large will probably never acknowledge Mary Magdalene as an author of a New Testament Gospel. Perhaps things haven't really changed that much since the earliest days of the church. Maybe authorship of a Gospel by a woman is still the embarrassment that Setzer says it would have been 2,000 years ago. Here's something else to think about: Why is Mary Magdalene the most famous harlot in the world when the Bible never says that she was ever a prostitute at any time? Oh, you are sure you recall reading that in the Bible, are you? ...Find it. Send me the biblical citation and I will post it on this website. You'll find my e-mail address further down. Raymond Brown has likened the quest to identify the author of the Fourth Gospel to a good detective story [79](1966: lxxxvii). A good detective sifts through evidence which is relevant and discards that which is not. When the evidence begins to point in a certain direction, he or she pursues leads and explores all of the various explanations and alibis. When one theory emerges as plausible and more credible than any other, the detective draws a conclusion that usually involves the naming of a suspect or suspects. The evidence supporting authorship of the Fourth Gospel by Mary Magdalene is much stronger than that which established John of Zebedee as its author for nearly two thousand years. After careful consideration of the evidence cited herein, I respectfully submit that the "prime suspect" in any quest to identify the author of the Fourth Gospel should be Mary Magdalene. WORKS CITED Abbott, Walter M., gen. ed. 1966. The Documents of Vatican II. New York: Guild Press. Brown, Raymond E. 1979. The Community of the Beloved Disciple. New York: Paulist Press. 1970. The Gospel According to John (xiii-xxi). New York: Doubleday & Co. 1966. The Gospel According to John (i-xii). New York: Doubleday & Co. Brown, Raymond E., and Raymond F. Collins. 1990. Canonicity, pp. 1034-1054 in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, edited by Raymond E. Brown, et al. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Haskins, Susan. 1993. Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor. New York: Harper Collins. Perkins, Pheme. 1990. The Gospel According to John, pp. 942-985 in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, edited by Raymond E. Brown, et al. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Robinson, James M., gen. ed. 1988. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. Revised edition. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. 1977. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. Setzer, Claudia. 1997. Excellent Women: Female Witnesses to the Resurrection, Journal of Biblical Literature 116:259-272. =================================== My e-mail address: [80]RamonKJusino at hotmail.com [moved down by me] [1]THE GOSPEL OF MARY: BEYOND A GNOSTIC AND A BIBLICAL MARY MAGDALENE by Esther A. deBoer [2]THE GOSPELS OF MARY: THE SECRET TRADITION OF MARY MAGDALENE, THE COMPANION OF JESUS by Marvin W. Meyer [3]THE GOSPEL OF MARY OF MAGDALA: JESUS AND THE FIRST WOMAN APOSTLE by Karen L. King [4]THE WOMAN WITH THE ALABASTER JAR by Margaret Starbird [5]THE GODDESS IN THE GOSPELS by Margaret Starbird [6]MAGDALENE'S LOST LEGACY by Margaret Starbird [7]THE RED TENT by Anita Diamant [8]THE COMMUNITY OF THE BELOVED DISCIPLE by Raymond E. Brown [9]THE GOSPEL OF MARY MAGDALENE Edited by Jean-Yves Leloup, et al [10]THE NAG HAMMADI LIBRARY IN ENGLISH Edited by James M. Robinson Buying these products here through Amazon.com helps to support this website. Inclusion of these products here does not imply full agreement with their contents. ([11]more products...) [12]This article available in .PDF format [13]more links... [14]Advancing My Thesis [15]The Appendices (my continuing research) Published pursuant to Canon 218 of the New Code of Canon Law of the Roman Catholic Church. ----------------------------------- Fr. Raymond E. Brown, S.S. (1928-1998) This article was completed and posted prior to the death of Fr. Brown on August 8, 1998. On that day the Church lost a great scholar and teacher who contributed much to the study of the Holy Scriptures. May he rest in the eternal peace of our loving God. ----------------------------------- [82]SEE RELATED LINKS AND OTHER IMPORTANT INFORMATION. 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http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#brown1 50. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#perkins 51. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#brown1 52. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#brown1 53. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#brown1 54. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#robinson 55. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#brown1 56. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#brown1 57. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#setzer 58. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#brown1 59. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#brown1 60. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#brown1 61. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#brown1 62. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#setzer 63. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#setzer 64. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#brown1 65. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#brown1 66. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#brown1 67. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#brown1 68. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#brown1 69. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#brown1 70. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#robinson 71. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#robinson 72. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#robinson 73. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#abbott 74. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#abbott 75. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#brown1 76. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#perkins 77. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#brown1 78. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#brown1 79. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#brown1 80. mailto:RamonKJusino at hotmail.com?SUBJECT=http://www.BelovedDisciple.org 81. http://www.zondervan.com/ 82. http://Ramon_K_Jusino.tripod.com/magdalene2.html 83. http://ramon_k_jusino.tripod.com/Magdalene.pdf 84. http://groups.yahoo.com/ 85. http://x.webring.com/hub?ring=catholic 86. http://x.webring.com/hub?ring=catholic 87. mailto:ramonkjusino at hotmail.com 88. http://www.webring.org/cgi-bin/webring?ring=catholic;id=364;prev5 89. http://www.webring.org/cgi-bin/webring?ring=catholic;id=364;prev 90. http://www.webring.org/cgi-bin/webring?ring=catholic;id=364;next 91. http://www.webring.org/cgi-bin/webring?ring=catholic;id=364;next5 92. http://www.webring.org/cgi-bin/webring?ring=catholic;random 93. http://www.webring.org/cgi-bin/webring?ring=catholic;list 94. http://www.ocih.org/ 95. http://Ramon_K_Jusino.tripod.com/mmbannerlink.html 96. http://members.tripod.com/~Ramon_K_Jusino/magdalene.html#top 97. mailto:RamonKJusino at hotmail.com?SUBJECT=http://www.BelovedDisciple.org 98. http://Ramon_K_Jusino.tripod.com/magdalene2.html 99. http://Ramon_K_Jusino.tripod.com/magdalena.html 100. http://Ramon_K_Jusino.tripod.com/magdalene3.html 101. http://Ramon_K_Jusino.tripod.com/magdaleneFAQs.html 102. http://Ramon_K_Jusino.tripod.com/aboutme.html 103. http://Ramon_K_Jusino.tripod.com/mmbooklist.html 104. http://Ramon_K_Jusino.tripod.com/myreviews.html 105. http://Ramon_K_Jusino.tripod.com/leonardo.html 106. http://ramon_k_jusino.tripod.com/advancing_my_thesis.htm From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sat Jan 22 17:26:03 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 09:26:03 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] bush speech In-Reply-To: <200501211913.j0LJDGC19566@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050122172603.58831.qmail@web30803.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>The Bush inauguration speech today was much better than one might have predicted. I really hope that key Democrats will give it proper credit as a kind of unifying starting point that we can all agree on, and all agree to try to maximize...<< --I agree it was an inspiring speech, and it deeply troubles me that anger on the Left is so strong that it will no work alongside Bush to decrease the pressure on him to do anything "messianic" at the wrong time. Equally troubling is the fascist vibe from the Right any time Bush is criticized. Is there no compassionate, clear-headed middle capable of forgiving Bush for his mistakes, while not making excuses for poor strategy? A peace deal between Israel and Palestine is so close at hand. Does Bush have the balls to broker a deal that his Evangelical followers are sure to call a "false peace"? I hope to God he does. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - What will yours do? http://my.yahoo.com From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Sat Jan 22 20:48:02 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 15:48:02 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] Evolutionary / Man and society In-Reply-To: <41EBE5F9.60106@solution-consulting.com> References: <41EBE5F9.60106@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <41F2BC02.9020003@uconn.edu> This and other similar examples of welfare abuse mask the majority of people under welfare who are genuinely being helped. I am sure there are as many people who got easy money on a free market and are living off that without producing anything. Isn't that a failure of that system? And Mr. Rolf was an ex-banker living a 2500 dollar life. Ex-bankers usually have a much more luxurious life when they decide to rest. Poor man. Christian Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. wrote: > Here is a nice example of unintended consequences of a welfare state: > http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006165 > > The problem is systemic - perverse reward systems create perverse > behavior. Rolf is simply responding to the rewards offered. > Lynn > > Hannes Eisler wrote: > >> The discussion seems somewhat odd to me. One has to distinguish >> between man's, let's say, inborn, dispositions, and man's behavior. >> The first hardly can be changed by environmental (or political) >> influence (here we have marxism's big mistake), but the latter can. A >> society works with rewards (reinforcement) and punishment to achieve >> its aims, whatever they may be. Also sensitivity to reinforcement is >> inborn; more complicated is to establish what is working as a >> reinforcer for whom. > > > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych -- ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt...... If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake. - Thomas Jefferson, from a letter he sent in 1798 after the passage of the Sedition Act _____________________________________________________________________ ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Sat Jan 22 21:14:09 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 16:14:09 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] Mosque vs. Church Burning Message-ID: <41F2C221.3000700@uconn.edu> Maybe because I was out of the country this last month but I wasn't aware of the mosque burning incident in Springfield, MA. I just heard yesterday that 3 of the four young men were being released and charges lifted if they did community service and stayed out of trouble for the next 2 years. From the names the men were Hispanic, most probably Christians. Why am I pointing that out? Because it made me wonder what kind of punishment and repercussion a similar case would have if it involved 4 Arab named men burning down a church. Community service? I guess not. It was also surprising to me (pardon my ignorance) that the mosque goers were black americans and not Arabs. Christian -- ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt...... If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake. - Thomas Jefferson, from a letter he sent in 1798 after the passage of the Sedition Act _____________________________________________________________________ ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Sat Jan 22 21:16:44 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 16:16:44 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] More on global warming Message-ID: <41F2C2BC.4090404@uconn.edu> I am very cynical of any (anti) theory about global warming that receives lobbying efforts from industry. For the latest effort of corporations to keep on warming the place: Americans are trying to discredit me, claims Chief Scientist By Steve Connor, Science Editor 17 January 2005 The Government's chief scientific adviser is being aggressively targeted by American lobbyists trying to discredit his view that man-made pollution is behind global warming. http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=601497 Yours, Christian -- ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt...... If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake. - Thomas Jefferson, from a letter he sent in 1798 after the passage of the Sedition Act _____________________________________________________________________ ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Jan 23 07:02:37 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 23:02:37 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] bush speech Message-ID: <01C500D6.77EDED50.shovland@mindspring.com> Many of us feel that the election was stolen (again) and that Bush is a war criminal. How can we make peace with that? This is a time for conflict, not peace-making. As our good book says "a time for war, a time for peace etc etc" Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Saturday, January 22, 2005 9:26 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] bush speech >>The Bush inauguration speech today was much better than one might have predicted. I really hope that key Democrats will give it proper credit as a kind of unifying starting point that we can all agree on, and all agree to try to maximize...<< --I agree it was an inspiring speech, and it deeply troubles me that anger on the Left is so strong that it will no work alongside Bush to decrease the pressure on him to do anything "messianic" at the wrong time. Equally troubling is the fascist vibe from the Right any time Bush is criticized. Is there no compassionate, clear-headed middle capable of forgiving Bush for his mistakes, while not making excuses for poor strategy? A peace deal between Israel and Palestine is so close at hand. Does Bush have the balls to broker a deal that his Evangelical followers are sure to call a "false peace"? I hope to God he does. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - What will yours do? http://my.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 23 18:10:40 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 13:10:40 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Charles Murray: Sex Ed at Harvard (and more) Message-ID: Sex Ed at Harvard New York Times Op-Ed, 5.1.23. By CHARLES MURRAY [Two more items beneath.] Washington FORTY-SIX years ago, in "The Two Cultures," C. P. Snow famously warned of the dangers when communication breaks down between the sciences and the humanities. The reaction to remarks by Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, about the differences between men and women was yet another sign of a breakdown that takes Snow's worries to a new level: the wholesale denial that certain bodies of scientific knowledge exist. Mr. Summers's comments, at a supposedly off-the-record gathering, were mild. He offered, as an interesting though unproved possibility, that innate sex differences might explain why so few women are on science and engineering faculties, and he told a story about how nature seemed to trump nurture in his own daughter. To judge from the subsequent furor, one might conclude that Mr. Summers was advancing a radical idea backed only by personal anecdotes and a fringe of cranks. In truth, it's the other way around. If you were to query all the scholars who deal professionally with data about the cognitive repertoires of men and women, all but a fringe would accept that the sexes are different, and that genes are clearly implicated. How our genetic makeup is implicated remains largely unknown, but our geneticists and neuroscientists are doing a great deal of work to unravel the story. When David C. Geary's landmark book "Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences" was published in 1998, the bibliography of technical articles ran to 52 pages - and that was seven years ago. Hundreds if not thousands of articles have been published since. This scholarship shows a notable imbalance, however: scholarship on the environmental sources of male-female differences tends to be stale (wade through a recent assessment of 172 studies of gender differences in parenting involving 28,000 children, and you will discover that two-thirds of the boys were discouraged from playing with dolls - but were nurtured pretty much the same as girls in every other way); but scholarship about innate male-female differences has the vibrancy and excitement of an important new field gaining momentum. A recent notable example is "The Essential Difference," published in 2003 by Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge University, which presents a grand unified theory of male and female cognition that may well be a historic breakthrough. "Exciting" is the right word for this work, not "threatening" or "scary." We may not know the answers yet, but we can be confident that they will be more interesting than, say, a discrete gene for science that clicks on for men differently than it does for women. Rather, it will be a story of the interaction of many male and female genetic differences, and the way a person's environment affects those differences. Hardly any of the answers will lend themselves to simplistic verdicts of "males are better" or vice versa. For every time there is such a finding favoring males, there will be another favoring females. Some people will find the results threatening - because some people find any group differences threatening - but such fears will be misplaced. We may find that innate differences give men, as a group, an edge over women, as a group, in producing, say, terrific mathematicians. But knowing that fact about the group difference will not change another fact: that some women are terrific mathematicians. The proportions of men and women mathematicians may never be equal, but who cares? What's important is that all women with the potential to become terrific mathematicians have full opportunity to do so. Of course, new knowledge will not be without costs. Perhaps knowing that there is a group difference will discourage some women from even trying to become mathematicians or engineers or circus clowns. We - scientists, parents, educators, employers - must do everything we can to prevent such unwarranted reactions. And the best way to do that is to put the individual's abilities, not group membership, at the center of our attention. Against the cost of the new knowledge is the far greater cost of obliviousness, which can lead us to pursue policies that try to make society conform to expectations that conflict with what human beings really are. In the study of gender, large and growing bodies of good science are helping us understand the sources of human abilities and limitations. It is time to accept their existence, their seriousness and their legitimacy. Charles Murray is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/opinion/23murray.html --------------------------------- Different but (Probably) Equal New York Times Op-Ed, 5.1.23 By OLIVIA JUDSON London - HYPOTHESIS: males and females are typically indistinguishable on the basis of their behaviors and intellectual abilities. This is not true for elephants. Females have big vocabularies and hang out in herds; males tend to live in solitary splendor, and insofar as they speak at all, their conversation appears mostly to consist of elephant for "I'm in the mood, I'm in the mood..." The hypothesis is not true for zebra finches. Males sing elaborate songs. Females can't sing at all. A zebra finch opera would have to have males in all the singing roles. And it's not true for green spoon worms. This animal, which lives on the sea floor, has one of the largest known size differences between male and female: the male is 200,000 times smaller. He spends his whole life in her reproductive tract, fertilizing eggs by regurgitating sperm through his mouth. He's so different from his mate that when he was first discovered by science, he was not recognized as being a green spoon worm; instead, he was thought to be a parasite. Is it ridiculous to suppose that the hypothesis might not be true for humans either? No. But it is not fashionable - as Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, discovered when he suggested this month that greater intrinsic ability might be one reason that men are overrepresented at the top levels of fields involving math, science and engineering. There are - as the maladroit Mr. Summers should have known - good reasons it's not fashionable. Beliefs that men are intrinsically better at this or that have repeatedly led to discrimination and prejudice, and then they've been proved to be nonsense. Women were thought not to be world-class musicians. But when American symphony orchestras introduced blind auditions in the 1970's - the musician plays behind a screen so that his or her gender is invisible to those listening - the number of women offered jobs in professional orchestras increased. Similarly, in science, studies of the ways that grant applications are evaluated have shown that women are more likely to get financing when those reading the applications do not know the sex of the applicant. In other words, there's still plenty of work to do to level the playing field; there's no reason to suppose there's something inevitable about the status quo. All the same, it seems a shame if we can't even voice the question. Sex differences are fascinating - and entirely unlike the other biological differences that distinguish other groups of living things (like populations and species). Sex differences never arise in isolation, with females evolving on a mountaintop, say, and males evolving in a cave. Instead, most genes - and in some species, all genes - spend equal time in each sex. Many sex differences are not, therefore, the result of his having one gene while she has another. Rather, they are attributable to the way particular genes behave when they find themselves in him instead of her. The magnificent difference between male and female green spoon worms, for example, has nothing to do with their having different genes: each green spoon worm larva could go either way. Which sex it becomes depends on whether it meets a female during its first three weeks of life. If it meets a female, it becomes male and prepares to regurgitate; if it doesn't, it becomes female and settles into a crack on the sea floor. What's more, the fact that most genes occur in both males and females can generate interesting sexual tensions. In male fruit flies, for instance, variants of genes that confer particular success - which on Mother Nature's abacus is the number of descendants you have - tend to be detrimental when they occur in females, and vice versa. Worse: the bigger the advantage in one sex, the more detrimental those genes are in the other. This means that, at least for fruit flies, the same genes that make a male a Don Juan would also turn a female into a wallflower; conversely, the genes that make a female a knockout babe would produce a clumsy fellow with the sex appeal of a cake tin. But why do sex differences appear at all? They appear when the secret of success differs for males and females: the more divergent the paths to success, the more extreme the physiological differences. Peacocks have huge tails and strut about because peahens prefer males with big tails. Bull elephant seals grow to five times the mass of females because big males are better at monopolizing the beaches where the females haul out to have sex and give birth. Meanwhile, the crow-like jackdaw has (as far as we can tell) no obvious sex differences and appears to lead a life of devoted monogamy. Here, what works for him also seems to work for her, though the female is more likely to sit on the eggs. So by studying the differences - and similarities - among men and women, we can potentially learn about the forces that have shaped us in the past. And I think the news is good. We're not like green spoon worms or elephant seals, with males and females so different that aspiring to an egalitarian society would be ludicrous. And though we may not be jackdaws either - men and women tend to look different, though even here there's overlap - it's obvious that where there are intellectual differences, they are so slight they cannot be prejudged. The interesting questions are, is there an average intrinsic difference? And how extensive is the variation? I would love to know if the averages are the same but the underlying variation is different - with members of one sex tending to be either superb or dreadful at particular sorts of thinking while members of the other are pretty good but rarely exceptional. Curiously, such a result could arise even if the forces shaping men and women have been identical. In some animals - humans and fruit flies come to mind - males have an X chromosome and a Y chromosome while females have two X's. In females, then, extreme effects of genes on one X chromosome can be offset by the genes on the other. But in males, there's no hiding your X. In birds and butterflies, though, it's the other way around: females have a Z chromosome and a W chromosome, and males snooze along with two Z's. The science of sex differences, even in fruit flies and toads, is a ferociously complex subject. It's also famously fraught, given its malignant history. In fact, there was a time not so long ago when I would have balked at the whole enterprise: the idea there might be intrinsic cognitive differences between men and women was one I found insulting. But science is a great persuader. The jackdaws and spoon worms have forced me to change my mind. Now I'm keen to know what sets men and women apart - and no longer afraid of what we may find. Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist at Imperial College in London, is the author of "Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/opinion/23judson.html --------------------------------- Lawrence Summers, Provocateur NYT January 23, 2005 By JAMES TRAUB LAWRENCE SUMMERS is at it again. Three years had passed since the blithely tactless president of Harvard University and former Treasury Secretary said something that grossly offended one of his institution's core constituencies, and the academic world generally. (In 2001, he said that "serious and thoughtful people" - including Harvard professors - "are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in effect if not their intent" and that too many people - including Harvard professors - "when they think of police, think too quickly of Chicago in 1968.") Mr. Summers appeared to have locked himself in whatever padded room universities presidents normally occupy. And then, this month, he escaped: He suggested at an economics conference that the low representation of women scientists at universities might stem from, among other causes, innate differences between the sexes. Mr. Summers's provocative yodel set off a worldwide avalanche of commentary and condemnation. One of the most prominent female scientists at M.I.T. walked out in the middle of the talk; a Harvard faculty committee on women wrote the president a letter saying he had done grave damage to the university's reputation. Mr. Summers was forced to don the hairshirt. He personally apologized to Harvard's standing committee on women. He was, he said, only trying to "stimulate various kinds of statistical research" and was dedicated to increasing the number of female scientists at Harvard. It may be another three years at least before Mr. Summers slips out of the padded room for another talk on the wild side. And what should we think of that? That is, what are the obligations of the leaders of the great universities, if any, toward provoking debate? Are they a species of public intellectual, or a species of chief executive, responsive to only their internal constituencies - students, faculty, alumni donors? Mr. Summers is an exceedingly rare bird. University presidents are among the most timorous and emollient of public speakers. Many of them are undoubtedly sharp-witted and sharp-tongued in private; but most are so concerned about offending any constituency that they confine themselves to stately and orotund utterances. Richard Freeman, the Harvard economist who organized the conference, held on Jan. 14, said he asked Mr. Summers to speak in his capacity as world-class economist, not institutional leader; otherwise, "he would have given us the same type of babble that university presidents give." Some academic leaders do take a stand on public issues, but most who do align themselves with the forces of right-thinking opinion. Twenty years ago, A. Bartlett Giamatti, then the president of Yale, was much admired for taking on Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority. But Mr. Falwell had few admirers at Yale; a truly courageous president would have defended him. Much the same is true of today's many champions of diversity and affirmative action. It was not always so. In the first half of the 20th century, there was no bigger bully pulpit than the presidency of Harvard. Charles Eliot, a vinegary character who believed that his chief qualification for the job was "the capacity to inflict pain," played the role of public seer in the last half of the 19th century. James Bryant Conant, a champion of the emerging meritocracy of the 30's and 40's, had the effrontery to propose "wielding the ax against the root of inherited privilege" through a program "to confiscate (by constitutional methods) all property once a generation." A quarter-century later, Kingman Brewster of Yale, a WASP of antediluvian lineage, committed class betrayal by suggesting that the Black Panthers could not get a fair trial in the United States. Mr. Summers has not achieved, and perhaps has not sought, this leadership role. Though he has become a hero among cultural conservatives - a very poor source of street cred, by the way, in the Ivy League - he has won few converts, including at Harvard. Perhaps this is because he seems almost perversely committed to speaking against the grain of his institution and of academic culture generally. I spent dozens of hours with Mr. Summers while writing about him two years ago, and he insisted more than once that he had no ambition to serve as academia's in-house neoconservative gadfly. But he did feel that in a time of suffocating propriety, tact-free speech was a cause as worthy as laying the ax to inherited privilege had once been. He talked about the need for tough-mindedness and for a willingness to challenge orthodoxies. Mr. Summers may have felt that biological cognitive difference was just the kind of taboo that demanded scrutiny; or perhaps he just thought, in his economist's way, that it was an intriguing speculation worthy of further research. When Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who argues that significant innate differences exist between men and women, was asked by The Harvard Crimson whether Mr. Summers's remarks were within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, he said, "Good grief, shouldn't everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of academic rigor?" But claims of intellectual superiority or inferiority are not only wounding; they call into question the university's self-understanding. Nancy Hopkins, the M.I.T. professor who walked out on Mr. Summers, remarked that Harvard should be amending its admissions policy if it really believes that women suffer from an inherent cognitive deficit in the sciences. After all, if Mr. Summers had made the same speculation about African-Americans, his comments would have seemed beyond the pale. Perhaps Mr. Summers inadvertently bumped up against the limits of his campaign to anatomize the pieties of academic culture. But it may be better for Harvard if he doesn't spend too much time in his padded woodshed. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/weekinreview/23trau.html From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 23 18:11:49 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 13:11:49 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Mag: The Making of a Molester Message-ID: The Making of a Molester New York Times Magazine, 5.1.23 By DANIEL BERGNER Not long ago, Roy became a type of monster. The transformation took a year and a half, and now, one morning each week, he sits in a room of similar cases. The windowless room is plain, with a blue industrial carpet, a circle of brown cushioned office chairs, a blackboard, a pair of unused conference tables pushed to the rear wall and a faint hum from the air ducts. To reach it from the waiting area -- on the second floor of a probation building in Connecticut -- Roy and the other men walk down a series of corridors and around a series of turns that feel like a path through a maze. The room is wedged in a back corner. ''No one,'' a probation officer said, ''likes to think about what's back there.'' Roy wonders constantly how he wound up in this place, in the circle of 10 or 12 chairs, a circle of child molesters. His story begins on the beach and ends on the Internet. It seems to him that he was, only recently, a normal man, about 40, running a crew of technicians, repairing elaborate, computerized telecommunications equipment for Wall Street trading firms and in his off hours leading a wedding band, singing Frank Sinatra and Barry White at the Plaza. For a hobby, he flew kites -- kites bigger than most living rooms, brilliantly striped, with rippling streamers and ''space socks'' trailing more than a hundred feet behind, kites that could perform ballets when he held the lines. He recalls no history of longing for young girls. He had no criminal record of any kind. But then one summer, on vacation, his second wife pointed out her 11-year-old daughter's body. Roy and his wife were standing on the sand; his stepdaughter and her best friend played several yards in front of them at the edge of the surf. ''Look at those girls,'' Roy remembers his wife saying. ''They're changing already. You can see their bodies changing.'' Roy has a soft, smooth face and an easy, engaging smile. (At his request, I've shielded his identity by using a nickname some of his former band members gave him.) Now in his mid-40's, he's round in the middle and broad in the shoulders; there's something bearish about him, but in a way that's more pandalike and cheerful than threatening. Nearby along the circle sits an elderly man with a graceful wave of white hair combed back from his forehead. There's a well-scrubbed blue-eyed man in his mid-30's, wearing a button-down shirt with a pleasant check of pale blue. Like the rest, they're here by court mandate for group counseling as part of their probation. Most, including Roy, have served time in jail or prison, from a few weeks to several years. The man with the wave of white hair touched the vagina of his grandniece; he kissed her chest and had her hold his penis. This happened repeatedly when the girl was between 7 and 9 years old. As an adult, the man in the checked shirt performed oral sex on his 11-year-old brother and later took his 6-year-old daughter to a motel room along with his brother, who was by then 16. Living out a fantasy he'd had for months, he persuaded them both to undress and urged his brother to have sex with his daughter, only desisting, only waking from the trance of his desire -- ''seconds away from something really, really bad happening,'' he has told me -- when his brother began to cry. ''What possessed me?'' Roy asks in one form or another in the group sessions that I've been observing for close to a year, in conversation with me and, it is clear, alone with himself. It's a question that seems to churn through the thinking of most of the men. The one who longed to watch his brother and daughter, and who is a published poet, has talked to me about feeling like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In group one morning, another convict made reference to ''Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Heinz.'' How does a man enter the realm of the monstrous? How broad or thin is the border between the normal and that realm? ''Could anybody end up getting into this mess?'' Roy once asked me plaintively. Focus your awareness on your feet,'' Patrick Liddle, the group's therapist, its leader, instructs the men at the start of many sessions. They sit with their hands on their thighs, their eyes closed, as he teaches them a relaxation technique. ''Now allow your awareness to move up to the center of your chest.'' He speaks in a soothing monotone, the voice he maintains with them always no matter how disquieted their crimes make him feel. Part of his job is to give them methods to keep their lives under control, to keep themselves from molesting again. This technique is one way. ''Center your attention on the steady beating of your heart.'' He wears fashionably tailored suits and shoes polished to a low gloss. The clothes are part of the program. Liddle's boss sets the dress code for his staff, an attempt to confer value on those in treatment, men who could hardly have fallen lower. ''Picture in your mind a large open field covered in deep grass up to your waist.'' Roy and the others sit perfectly still. Their fingers curl gently. Their jaws are slack; their mouths, slightly open. They seem almost to be sleeping, and like sleeping men anywhere, they look almost like children. ''Now slowly open your eyes.'' They return from the field of tall grass to the faces of the other men. Liddle sometimes asks them for introductions, though the faces stay mostly the same. They go around the circle. ''I was convicted of two counts of sexual assault four and three counts of risk of injury to a minor and enticing a minor over the Internet,'' Roy began during a session months ago. He managed not to mumble. Facing up to what he has done, he knows, is a requirement for graduating from treatment. And this might lead, he hopes, to a judge's reducing his term of probation. The treatment theory is basic: to acknowledge both his crime and the anarchy of lust that lies within him is the first step toward his finding self-control. So the ability to confront himself -- and to be candid with Liddle about his sexual yearnings -- is a requirement, too, if he wants to do anything outside the bounds of his probation restrictions: visit his parents over the state line in New York or go to a bowling alley or a movie or a family function, anyplace where he might come in contact with children under 16. Any family gathering he attends must be adults only; he has to leave right away if kids show up. The group leaders and probation officers work in tandem, evaluating how well they can trust the men, and the therapists can be at least as wary as the probation officers. (In Connecticut, counseling is ordered for almost all sex offenders on probation, and the state-financed organization Liddle works for, the Center for the Treatment of Problem Sexual Behavior, handles nearly all of it.) Together, Liddle and Roy's probation officer set the limits on his life. ''I was sentenced,'' Roy continued with his introduction, ''to 20 years suspended after 30 days, with 35 years probation. My offense behaviors I engaged in were touching my wife's daughter and her best friend sexually, touching them through their clothing between their legs, around their waist, moving my hand into the top of their waistband. I also moved my hand under their shorts up to their panty lines. I used games that were called 'Chase' and 'Spider' to manipulate them into feeling safe with me.'' His voice quieted as he hurried on toward the end, toward the part of his story that holds echoes of recent, well-publicized cases -- like that of John Dexter, the headmaster for a quarter-century at the Trevor Day School in Manhattan, until his arrest in 2003 and guilty plea last year -- of apparently ordinary men going online to seek out sexual conversations and often to arrange to have sex with adolescents, with children. With more detail than he gives in group, Roy has told his story as he and I have sat together at his home and at his job. He is still a supervisor at the telecommunications repair company. In a bland suburban building just off a highway, at worktables in vast, orderly rooms, he and his team lean over high-tech consoles with exposed intricate wiring and microprocessors with multicolored flashing diodes. They fix circuitry or, if he deems it necessary, redesign it. With the permission of Liddle and the probation department, Roy is allowed to work around computers as long as he never goes online outside the watch of a colleague. Everyone at his job is aware of his crime. He has made a point of answering everyone's questions. The company's owner, who has known Roy for five years, testified on his behalf at his sentencing. ''You're talking about a person I know,'' the owner said to me. ''If you told me about a stranger I would write them off, I wouldn't talk to them, I wouldn't see them -- if they did one-tenth of what he did.'' At Roy's job, the element of personal forgiveness goes beyond employment. As I drove with him to work after one of my first sessions with the group, he said that he was engaged to be married again -- to a bookkeeper at the company, a colleague since before his offense. When Roy has spoken with me about his crime at the well-burnished kitchen table in his small, neatly kept wooden house or in an empty conference room across from the repair stations at work, he starts with the words of his stepdaughter's mother at the beach. No matter how common -- ''Look at my daughter, how pretty she's going to be when she grows up; I'm going to have problems with her when she grows up''- they have a serpentlike quality as he tries to sort out what followed. They were ''the first trigger,'' he has said. Before, he doesn't think he saw his stepdaughter in any erotic way. He had known her and her older brother from the time they were born; he had been with their mother since they were around 4 and 6. (He has no kids of his own.) The children lived with their father, an executive, a man Roy grew up with. But they spent a fair amount of time at the home Roy shared with their mother, and after that vacation at the shore, the games Roy played with his stepdaughter, and frequently with her best friend, grew sexualized -- at some level -- in his mind. During ''Chase,'' they would turn off most of the lights. Often they plugged in a strobe light from his band equipment or a lamp that cast the shapes of moons on the walls, in blues and yellows and greens. His marriage, at that point, was falling apart. Sometimes his wife was home, having shut herself in their bedroom for the evening. Sometimes she was out on her own. He raced after the girls through the house, through the colored beams. In ''Spider,'' each player had to sit motionless; if you moved at all you got pinched. The touching occurred during the games. The confessional -- and dutiful -- introduction Roy delivers to the group implies that the touching was blatantly, consciously sexual on his part, but though he is obsessively introspective about all that took place, he can't seem to figure out whether this is true. He remembered, with me, his anger at his wife, the fleeting thought that if she was going to leave him taking care of her kids, then he was ''going to get something out of this, too.'' Yet he recalled that there was no real sexual intent at that stage, not even any dalliance with fantasy, that often he didn't want to deal with the girls and their demands that he try to catch them; he didn't want to be bothered. ''I don't think I ever touched them in their private areas,'' he said, making a distinction between those areas and the edges of underwear. ''Grabbing them, pulling them, knocking them down. Them jumping on me. It was still just teasing and playing with them. It wasn't like I wanted to have sex with them. Is there a difference?'' How much of the touching was errant, inadvertent, amid playful mauling? To what degree do normal games of chase played with 11- or 12-year-old girls hold an erotic element? How far beyond the normal did things go, at that stage? These kinds of questions reel through his memories. He can't settle on single answers. ''But was there sexuality behind it?'' he asked once while we talked. He replied immediately, ''Yes.'' The erotic became explicit, Roy said, when they were in separate rooms, at separate computers. The layout of the house mirrored the one he owns now, many towns away. There was a series of rooms along a narrow hall. The basement was crowded with his guitars and keyboards and recording equipment. His stepdaughter was 12 -- though he doesn't face up to reality easily on this point. The first few times he came to this part of his story, he told me that she was by then 14, maybe 13. During his introductions in group, he doesn't mention how old she was; for a short while I didn't know her true age. When I read an old article from a local newspaper about the case and told him that it put her age at 12, he insisted that the article was mistaken. Only after I had asked him repeatedly did he call me one morning: he had just phoned his sister and ''found out'' that the newspaper was right. When she was 12, then, one evening she sent him an instant message. She asked what he was doing. He was in his office; she was in her bedroom down the hall. He told her he was working on band contracts. She wrote that she was bored, that none of her friends were online. He responded that her brother had been giving their mother trouble, that she was completely different, that she was ''a really good little girl.'' According to Roy, ''she came right back to me and said: 'Roy, you don't know me. I'm not a good girl, I'm a bad girl.''' She wouldn't tell him what she meant, but he had been smitten with what he had seen as the wild streak in her mother, back when she had left her husband for Roy, and now, right away, his imagination ran along sexual lines. ''Oh, God, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree,'' he recalls thinking; he told me, regarding the effect of that instant-message exchange with his stepdaughter: ''You couldn't have drawn me in any faster. I still remember it. Not excited as arousal excited, but excited as I gotta know more. Major adrenaline rush. I felt myself go flush. I was already overloaded. I finished the contracts I was doing, but I got off the computer right after that, and I went immediately downstairs and started playing. That's what I always do when something's really got me; I need to shut it off. I had to shut that off at that moment. I had to calm it down. Put my headphones on. Had my guitar. I have this jazz routine I like doing. I do a jazz version of 'Blue Skies.' 'Polka Dots and Moonbeams' -- it's a slow jazz tune. I have about an hour's worth of music, and I just have to concentrate on the chord changes and the progressions, and it clears my mind. The only problem is,'' he raised his voice, almost shouting to me across the kitchen table, ''it didn't help.'' Soon he loaded his computer with a software program that would allow him, because of the way his and his stepdaughter's computers were interlinked, to monitor her online conversations. That day, alone in the house, he stepped back and forth along the hall, between rooms, between PC's, making sure his system worked, that she wouldn't be able to detect his lurking. And the next time she came over and logged on and started chatting with her best friend (the same girl he had chased through the house), their words ran across his screen. His stepdaughter's romantic explorations, confided to her friend, became his pornography. Each time he monitored her conversations (about 7 to 10 times over several months, he thinks), he would have a soda and popcorn and ''put my feet up on the desk, and I watched this thing unfold. 'Cause you have to understand, it's not something I would masturbate to while she was on the Internet. It would almost be like an aftermath of it. 'Cause it had your mind so cranked you had to have some relief. At any point I thought this girl was going to have sex with this boy. That's how intense this was.'' He didn't worry that she would walk down the hall and find him reading her words. ''Impossible, because my computer didn't face the door, and it would have taken a split second to shut it off, literally,'' he said. ''Nobody could catch me, nobody. I'm too good. I'm too good with computers, trust me. I set up that PC so that when I shut the computer off everything was erased. So there was no trackable record on those PC's. It was wrong. So wrong. I put myself in such a bad situation, and I just fell into it. I guess that's how a drug addict gets. Once you've fallen into that, and you've gone in, it's almost like that's it: now you've got it in your head, and it's not going to go away.'' The direct instant-message exchange between him and his stepdaughter continued every so often during the period of his monitoring. ''She would sign on and say something to me, and that's when the conversation started. And I would flip it. She didn't start it sexually. I always flipped it. Just so you know. She didn't do it. She was a kid.'' He would ask her to ''show me something.'' She would refuse. He asked her to have sex with him. She told him no. He wrote to her, in one of their final Internet conversations, months before her 13th birthday, that he was going to step out of his office and into the kitchen to get a soda. He wrote that if she wanted to see what he wished to do with her, she should walk into his office and click on a window that would be on his screen. She left her computer and walked to his. When the window opened, a video showed ''a man rubbing his penis on a girl's vagina that's been shaved,'' he said. A moment later, they passed in the hall. He remembers her calling him ''disgusting'' and each of them going quickly back to their own PC's. Petrified that she would report him, he begged her over the Internet to meet him on the stairs to the basement music room, promising that he would stay at the bottom. He pled his apology as she sat at the top of the stairs. Then she was gone. Soon afterward, I learned recently from her father, she told her stepmother for the first time about Roy's ongoing solicitations. (Her father had just left on a business trip.) Her stepmother then sent her to Roy's house so that, assuming he would proposition her yet again, she could print out his words for evidence. She did. He was swiftly arrested. It had been about a year and a half since that trip to the beach. In court, he pled under the Alford Doctrine -- a legal acknowledgment that the evidence against him was sufficient to prove his guilt -- to the charges he lists each time he gives his introduction. He has been in treatment now for around 17 months. ''I'm so embarrassed,'' he said to me at the kitchen table. ''I can't believe I did this. You know, I just don't know how I got myself there, I really don't. It makes me sick.'' Roy looks that way -- ill, aghast, mortified -- whenever he finishes his account. His full cheeks appear almost gaunt, as though he has just emerged, barely, from the siege of some terrible infection. To see him like this is to feel that he would never allow himself to come anywhere close to repeating his crime. It is to understand what the owner of the telecommunications repair company -- where Roy's existence can seem so ordinary as he goes about his work -- once told me about his wife's opinion of Roy: their own children are grown, but she would have him in their house even with kids around. ''That,'' the owner said, ''is the confidence that he gives you.'' Yet to think back over Roy's shadings of his stepdaughter's age and to hear his explanation that he wasn't lying to me but somehow no longer knew that she had been 12 is to feel less confident. Whether he has tried to deceive me or himself, this is exactly the kind of evasion, the kind of diminishment of hard truth, that would worry Liddle; it's a sign that Roy may not be capable of self-confrontation and self-control. And then I discovered, in a statement his stepdaughter made to the police, that some of the troubling touches, through clothes, began when she was in second grade. To have heard his consistent denials about this, his certainty that back then there had been only innocent games, is not only to wonder if she has imposed the taint of recent events on earlier moments but also to wonder if anything Roy says can be believed. And then when I learned, from the transcript of his sentencing hearing, that he used Freekypeephole as his Internet screen name, I could see him, simply, as a dangerous creep -- except that when I asked him about this, he recited the lyrics of a disco song he wrote and recorded back in the late 70's, a song called ''Freaky People,'' about the drug use he observed at Studio 54. (His father was an alcoholic, and Roy has never been much for drugs or alcohol.) He recounted that the song got some airtime on a major radio station, that because of this he wanted ''Freaky People'' as his screen name, that it was already taken, and that his server supplied the alternative, Freekypeephole, which he accepted well before his crime as a joke. My sense of Roy shifts back and forth ceaselessly, from perceptions of basic normality to those of extreme aberrance, from guarded trust to deep unease. But one constant is the reverberation of his words: ''I just don't know how I got myself there.'' How did he get there? What are the causes of child sexual molestation, which is committed against perhaps 20 percent of girls and 5 to 10 percent of boys under the age of consent in the United States, according to David Finkelhor, the director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. (Finkelhor, who has examined the studies extensively, added that the numbers range widely from 10 to 40 percent for girls and 2 to 15 percent for boys, depending on definitions and methods. The victims are preadolescents about as frequently as they are older. Most are abused by someone they know, often by a member of their family.) What parts are played by biology, by an abuser's own childhood, by aspects of isolation in his (for males make up around 90 percent of offenders) current life -- or by the powerful arrival of the Internet into the world of Eros? Calling psychiatrists and psychologists, researchers and clinicians, who have been working in the field for decades and asking about origins and explanations, I have heard in response regret and laughter. The laughter came from Dr. Martin Kafka, senior clinical associate in psychiatry at the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., where he studies and treats sexual disorders. ''I'll give you a quick answer,'' he said, cutting me off at the word ''causes.'' ''We don't know.'' A much longer answer followed, his words propelled at high speed by his fascination with the subject: studies of sexually deviant brains have scarcely been done; there is ''one suggesting hypothalamus abnormality, but really, the research is in infancy.'' The data show that sexual abusers of children are more likely than the general population to have been child sexual-abuse victims themselves but ''most pedophiles have not,'' he emphasized, ''been sexually abused.'' (And here I thought of Roy talking about the men in group who were ''abused as kids something fierce, so I must be a real piece of crap, because I was never abused.'') Research indicates that ''social skills deficits'' can be a factor. Kafka's voice rushed on as he tried to construct for me some sense of coherence from what scattered scraps of knowledge exist. ''There is nothing coherent that's been established,'' Dr. Robert Prentky, a forensic psychologist at the graduate school of criminal justice at Northeastern University, told me. ''Frankly, in my opinion, there has been very, very little progress in the area of etiology.'' And Dr. Fred Berlin, associate professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, talked about society's discomfort with any scientific inquiry into sexuality, let alone into the causes of pedophilia. ''There is inadequate funding, too little support for this kind of research,'' he said. ''We can't get beyond the moral to the scientific. These are considered vile people. There is an aversion to studying them.'' I asked about the Internet, whether it may bear any causal responsibility along the path toward offending. ''It's a fairly complicated issue,'' Berlin said, and one for which there appears to be, again, no solid research. ''I wouldn't go so far as to say that the Internet creates desire, but I do think it is creating significant difficulties.'' To some extent, he explained, it is merely a ''new and different vehicle'' for those who would offend against children anyway. But it ''provides temptation for some who might not otherwise have crossed the line.'' He added: ''There are three areas of concern. First, the illusion of anonymity -- an illusion because Internet use can be easily tracked -- leads to disinhibition. Second, there's a blurring of fantasy and reality. There's someone at the other end of the Internet conversation, but it's not quite a real person; there's a feeling of playing a game that can lead to actually doing what one otherwise wouldn't. Third, the easy accessibility can facilitate'' moving over boundaries. Over the past decade, with the surge in Internet use, there has been no spike in the overall number of cases of sexual abuse against children. (There has been, it appears, a significant decrease, attributed by some to the success of harsher sentences and offender registries and by others, in part, to the possibility that those sentences and registries discourage victims, who tend to know their abusers, from reporting the crimes.) But Berlin's concern was echoed by Prentky when he described the Internet as ''a catalyst for fantasy and dangerous if the control over behavior is markedly impaired.'' And by David D'Amora, Patrick Liddle's boss and the head of the Center for the Treatment of Problem Sexual Behavior, who has about 800 child sexual abusers under his watch in Connecticut, when he talked about the Net's abundant porn and disembodied chat-room conversation as a ''disinhibitor.'' And by Liddle himself, whose normally tempered voice nearly rose to a yell when I asked whether online porn might provide a safe outlet for otherwise destructive erotic drives: a man masturbates; the craving subsides. ''No!'' he replied. He was thinking of the men in that back room at the probation building. ''That's like an alcoholic saying I'll only have a couple of drinks, I'll only have low-alcohol beer.'' And then he was thinking of everyone when he said that pornography ''desensitizes people so extraordinarily.'' When Roy tells his story, he insists that he never visited any Web sites of child porn. He doesn't think there is much relevance in the mainstream porn that he did view -- and it doesn't seem to have had, for him, the erotic impact of his stepdaughter's conversations with her best friend. But he claims (perhaps too self-servingly) that he would never have propositioned his stepdaughter had it not been for the Internet's unique, oddly dehumanized form of communication. In the ultimate moments, he beckoned her to his computer. He beckoned her, physically, into his space. But before then, his lust gained much of its unbearable power, and found its most intense expression, screen to screen. One day this fall, Roy sat behind a gray laptop that rested on a metal desk. Martina Kardol, one of Liddle's colleagues, stood over him in a small office in the probation building, reading aloud from a set of instructions. He would be shown 160 images on the laptop screen, she informed him. Her voice stayed level; her face, expressionless. She has long blond hair and wore a loose sweater with black stretch pants. (Not all the therapists adhere to D'Amora's dress code.) ''You will see people of varying ages.'' Roy had on a black blazer, a tie and sharply pressed khakis. From here he was headed straight to an important meeting at work. ''Imagine being sexual with the models in the slides.'' Kardol told him to score each picture for sexual interest, hitting 1 for ''disgusting'' up through 7 for ''highly sexually arousing.'' He should advance through the images by clicking the return key. He was shown a practice set. A blond woman in somewhat prim white lingerie; then a clean-cut man in a plaid shirt and khakis; then a boy, who looked to me around 12, straddling a bicycle with a book bag over his shoulder; then a girl around the same age wearing a straw hat and eating strawberries; then a pudgy little girl of maybe 4 in a blue one-piece swimsuit. Kardol asked Roy if he was ready. Sitting upright, ever compliant, he said that he was. We left him alone with the photographs. He was taking the Abel Assessment for Sexual Interest, as all the men do at some point during their treatment. It offers a gauge of erotic preference measured not by the 1 to 7 ratings but by the length of time a man lets his eyes linger on each image. The photos are fairly demure. Legally, the test can't show pornographic images of minors, so to keep things balanced, even the adult pictures are less than revealing. And when, later, I clicked through a sampling, the distinction between age categories sometimes eluded me. The subjects in the pictures are supposed to represent four plainly separate age groups so that areas of attraction can be clearly measured. There are children of 2 to 4, children between 8 and 10, adolescents between 14 and 17 and adults at least 22. But some of the 8-to-10's looked to me almost like young adolescents. And some of the adolescents appeared more like young fresh-faced adults, with the kinds of faces and bodies you might see on billboards selling underwear, before I reminded myself about the likely ages of the models in some of those ads. Still, the Abel Assessment is widely considered a strong diagnostic tool, and when Roy came to Kardol's office door a half-hour later to say that he was finished, he looked faintly shellshocked, like a patient who had been through an arduous diagnostic exam. The information was sent down to the Abel offices in Atlanta, Ga., and Kardol soon got the results. Roy's attractions were for adult females and -- very slightly more so -- for females in the adolescent category. This put him, Liddle explained to me, within the realm of ordinary male sexuality. The minimal preference for adolescents over adults was, he said, a cause for some worry, given Roy's crime. But in itself the strong erotic response to adolescents was entirely normal. Along the circle, during my time with Roy's group, there have been a few whose Abel results were plainly aberrant: men drawn above all to preadolescent boys and men drawn powerfully and almost equally to disparate categories, adults and young children, boys and girls. Until his term of probation ended, there was a retired accountant who met the psychiatric definition of a ''fixated,'' or exclusive, pedophile. He had coached sports and built a clubhouse on his property in order to lure the neighborhood boys; he had spanked and groped many over a period of many years. Yet most of the group tends to fall somewhere closer to the middle of a continuum -- a continuum on which normal occupies a broad and blurry sector. With most of the men he has worked with over the past 14 years, Liddle says, ''the difference between me and my guys is a very thin line.'' He doesn't mean that he's on the edge of doing what they have done, only that the potential may lie within all of us. ''We want there to be the clear line; we want there to be the sloped forehead,'' David D'Amora has said, summarizing society's thinking about the men in groups like Liddle's, men D'Amora has been watching over for the state since 1986. Before that, he was a therapist for adult and child victims of sexual assault. ''It just doesn't exist. We want them to be the few, the perverted, the far away. Most are not.'' What research has been done seems to back this up. Dr. Richard Green, a psychiatrist at the Imperial College School of Medicine in London and professor emeritus of psychiatry at U.C.L.A., wrote two years ago in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior about a 1989 study: the psychologists John Briere and Marsha Runtz found that ''in a sample of nearly 200 university males, 21 percent reported some sexual attraction to small children.'' Specifically, ''9 percent described sexual fantasies involving children, 5 percent admitted to having masturbated to sexual fantasies of children and 7 percent indicated they might have sex with a child if not caught. Briere and Runtz remarked that 'given the probable social undesirability of such admissions, we may hypothesize that the actual rates were even higher.''' Green wrote as well of the work done in 1970 by the researchers Kurt Freund and R. Costell. Forty-eight Czech soldiers were hooked to a ''penile responsivity'' meter known as a plethysmograph. Viewing a series of slides, ''28 of 48 showed penile response to the female children age 4-10.'' And to count Web sites or consider legal history is to sense that the results of these studies may represent an unspeakable reality. Type in ''preteen porn'' on AOL's search engine and the list of sites covers thousands of pages. Until the late 19th century in England, the legal age of sexual consent was 10. ''They are not monsters,'' Joan Tabachnick told me. ''They are us.'' Tabachnick is the director of public education for Stop It Now!, which was founded by a sexual-abuse survivor and which is among the most prominent national organizations devoted to the prevention of child sexual abuse. ''It's so much easier,'' she said about the prevailing public vision, ''to think only of the most sadistic, most dangerous pedophile,'' the predator who kidnaps and abuses and kills. ''It's very comfortable. We can say, They're not who we are.'' But they're also not, she pointed out, the typical offender. They are the rare extreme. ''It's very uncomfortable,'' she went on, ''to say, I know what it means to look at my child as a sexual being -- I know what it means to want to touch my child.'' She was not excusing molestation; she was calling for a complex understanding of a widespread and often devastating crime, because without it, she said, efforts at prevention are crippled. She drew a comparison with adults' acknowledging their wish to hit their children in moments of rage -- mere acknowledgment can make the impulse easier to quell, and those drawn hard to such violence can seek help. ''It's far more difficult to be candid about sexual urges,'' she said, and so it's far more difficult for those on the edge of offending -- those for whom cultural taboos, legal prohibitions and empathy for the child aren't powerful enough to keep desire deeply submerged or to choke it off if it rises to the surface -- to find a way to stop themselves. After the relaxation exercise and after the introductions on days when they are given, the men lift their loose-leaf binders from the floor beside their chairs. The books are filled with the homework they've done and the handouts they've been given, with ''feelings journals'' and instructional sheets on methods like ''Thought Broadcasting'': ''If you get a deviant thought, imagine that your thought is being broadcast from your mind over a loudspeaker system.'' Roy's binder is the thickest of all. He tries to think of treatment like ''a normal college class,'' as if to convince himself that diligence will guarantee graduation. Not only does he have a jumbo white plastic binder with labeled dividers that he brings to group; he has another that he keeps at home. He throws away nothing. His homework and ''action plans'' -- his applications to do what his basic restrictions don't allow -- are composed at length and always neatly typed out. But lately, for Roy, things have not been going well. The counseling takes what is known as a cognitive-behavioral approach. Back in the early to mid-1970's, D'Amora has recounted to me, when the field of child-molester treatment was just developing, the typical strategy was more psychoanalytic and individualized -- profound insight into the disinterred past was supposed to change behavior and reduce recidivism. It didn't, and by the early 80's, therapy shifted toward behavior modification, with offenders instructed to inhale noxious odors during deviant fantasies. Here there were signs of ''fair success,'' D'Amora said, followed by signs that the effect was often short-lived. The method has mostly faded from the field. Meanwhile, the cognitive-behavioral model began to be used more and more -- Liddle's sessions can seem as much like classes in coping skills as anything that might be called treatment. With a creased, stoic face and a manner that is habitually restrained, he keeps the fluorescently lighted room sedate. He asks the men to open their binders to a handout on ''dynamic risk factors,'' and they go over a list, from ''victim access'' to ''intimacy deficits,'' of things they need to avoid or try to overcome. Or he asks what deviant thoughts they've had over the previous week. To Liddle's question, I have never heard the men speak more than a very few words about children. Roy has told me that he's fantasized about his stepdaughter a good deal since his arrest, but he has never brought it up in group. (By court order, he hasn't seen her since then.) One man has said to me, ''If we talked in there about what was really going through our minds, we'd all be wearing ankle bracelets.'' Liddle takes what modest fantasies the men are willing to mention -- one morning, it's about a young-looking gas-station attendant someone has glimpsed -- and he reviews ''Thought Broadcasting.'' Liddle never presses hard toward the darkest truths. His approach is full of paradox. He explained to me that he aims to elicit candor -- but candor that is delicately calibrated. Detailed and wrenching confessions of illegal acts or illicit desire could destroy the composure and dignity he wants to instill in the men, partly through the air of unbreachable calm in the room. (Too much communal honesty could also stoke their fantasies. For this reason, the men are forbidden to talk with one another outside the meetings.) Liddle hopes to ''build up their sense of decency.'' He wants them to leave the program, which they usually do after about three years, believing in their own capacity for restraint. This kind of treatment may work. The recidivism rate for child molesters is around 17 percent, according to Dr. Karl Hanson, a psychologist with the Office of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness in Canada and a leading researcher in the field. Already far lower than the public tends to think, the rate may drop by as much as seven points with the completion of a cognitive-behavioral program like D'Amora's. Yet Liddle knows enough to feel uneasy, almost always, as the men move on. He is uneasy about Roy -- and Roy is nowhere close to moving on. For a time, all looked positive. Roy's diligence seemed to signify honesty and control. The privileges he applied for were steadily granted. He could drive over the state line to visit his parents; he could fly his kites on his town beach. He was told that he might eventually be allowed to play music at a local bar. But not long ago Roy and his new bride, the bookkeeper from work, put in a request with Liddle that she be allowed to take a special training course the next time it is offered and that she then be appointed an ancillary, probation-approved supervisor so that the couple could have more freedom. Yet it turned out that Roy and his wife haven't told her parents about his crime. And Roy didn't make this clear to Liddle. Hiding his past from his in-laws may be entirely understandable: should he be expected to tell them? Have any of us constructed our lives without concealing portions of ourselves? But his not coming clean about this to Liddle is considered unacceptable. If Roy's wife wants to be in a supervisory role, her first concern has to be with keeping him away from trouble, like family situations that might involve contact with girls; to do that she needs to tell her parents the truth. When his in-laws' ignorance emerged, indirectly, during a later discussion in group, Liddle started to worry about the way Roy had deceived him. Then Roy took a polygraph test, as the men generally do twice a year. One of the most powerful parts comes not when the machine is running but, beforehand, when the nervous offender fills out a wide-ranging questionnaire. Here Roy admitted, for the first time to anyone in the program, that he fantasized about his stepdaughter. Earlier, telling me about these erotic thoughts, which he seemed desperate to exorcise, he said that his treatment prevented him from putting them in the past. The thoughts were ''burned'' into his mind because he had to sit every week in that circle, and he could not bring himself to confess them in the carefully subdued atmosphere of the back room. Liddle, he said, ''asks for deviant fantasy but he doesn't really want it.'' Liddle didn't see it that way. He saw a man in denial, a man trying to deflect responsibility for the force of his lust, a man who should have delivered, in group, a simple acknowledgment of his desires, just as he should have been clear about his in-laws. Other deceptions glimmered. In the evasion of truth Liddle saw the threat of chaos. He saw a man unable to confront himself or ask for help, a man who might unravel and repeat the past, if for example, his marriage were to deteriorate, if he were to have access to girls. In mid-January, he moved Roy to a newly created group for higher-risk offenders. He had already taken away all Roy's privileges -- the kite flying, the visits to his parents. Roy has to start from scratch. Except for work, he is more or less housebound. At his house, one recent evening, I met the woman who has married him. She is a few years older than Roy, but young-looking and trim, with brown bangs and a kind of Caroline Kennedy smile. This is her first marriage; she has no children. She and Roy sat side by side on a new couch with matching end tables. Outside, there were cute wooden shutters on the windows. She wore white socks on her shoeless feet. They had just finished their ritual Friday-night meal of pizza and eggplant sandwiches. In certain ways, the domestic scene couldn't have been more unremarkable. They started dating a few months after his arrest but before his plea; probation's rules hadn't yet defined what he could and could not do. They went to the movies and bowled and flew his gigantic kites. He confided in her about his crime. ''In my heart I didn't think he was this monster that he was portrayed as in the paper,'' she told me, referring to the articles in the small newspaper of his suburban town at the time of his arrest. ''I didn't know what to believe.'' On the couch, they reminisced about the purple-and-aqua stunt kite that she flew and couldn't manage on their first date. They laughed about the way it tugged her down the beach. He remembered her once saying to him, ''When we go out flying, it's like an entire new day.'' She recalled, ''One of the nicest things he ever said to me was that when he met me, God was giving him a second chance.'' Her voice was sweet yet scarcely gave way to emotion. She could seem keenly realistic, as if she had thought everything through. But Roy had spoken in group about the meeting the two of them had with her family priest, who was about to marry them. They told the priest about his crime. When the priest asked her whether she was really prepared for a life with a convicted child molester serving 35 years probation, suddenly ''she cried hysterically.'' ''I think,'' she said on the couch, ''I know Roy well enough'' to be sure that he won't ever do again what he did. ''I think with Roy things just got out of hand.'' She talked of hoping still to take the course for family members who wish to act as supervisors, so she could learn how to be on guard, how to save him. ''People can stumble,'' she said. ''I want to be able to recognize the signs, to know what to look for.'' Then, for a few seconds, her voice sharpened severely. ''To this day'' -- she spoke partly to me but partly to her husband -- ''I can't understand how he could write crap like that to a little girl.'' She said she told him this frequently. ''She does,'' he mumbled, looking stricken. One night, shortly before his privileges were taken away, Roy and his wife launched a vast, luminous gold-and-red kite at the town beach. Usually after dusk the beach was empty. But a group of kids came running toward them, boys and girls who looked, in his eyes, to be between 4 and 12. By his agreement with Liddle and the probation department, he was simply supposed to tell the kids to keep their distance, to tell them they might get tangled in the heavy lines. The mere presence of minors didn't mean he had to leave the waterfront. But he panicked, and whether fleeing some imagined legal transgression or terrified by something within himself, he left the unwieldy lines to his wife. He raced away. He rushed for the waist-high fence that divides the sand from the parking lot. He couldn't get his bearlike body over it cleanly; he wound up stuck, sitting on it and crushing it. Sometime later he showed me the place of his flight, where the fence remained bent. It wasn't hard for me to picture him caught there, between the safe and the terrifying. Daniel Bergner is the author of ''In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black in West Africa.'' His last article for the magazine was about cannibalism during the civil war in the Congo. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/magazine/23PEDO.html From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 23 18:19:56 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 13:19:56 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Yorker: (Galton) Jim Holt: Measure for Measure Message-ID: Jim Holt: Measure for Measure http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?critics/050124crbo_books Issue of 2005-01-24 and 31 The strange science of Francis Galton. In the eighteen-eighties, residents of cities across Britain might have noticed an aged, bald, bewhiskered gentleman sedulously eying every girl he passed on the street while manipulating something in his pocket. What they were seeing was not lechery in action but science. Concealed in the man's pocket was a device he called a "pricker," which consisted of a needle mounted on a thimble and a cross-shaped piece of paper. By pricking holes in different parts of the paper, he could surreptitiously record his rating of a female passerby's appearance, on a scale ranging from attractive to repellent. After many months of wielding his pricker and tallying the results, he drew a "beauty map" of the British Isles. London proved the epicenter of beauty, Aberdeen of its opposite. Such research was entirely congenial to Francis Galton, a man who took as his motto "Whenever you can, count." Galton was one of the great Victorian innovators. He explored unknown regions of Africa. He pioneered the fields of weather forecasting and fingerprinting. He discovered statistical rules that revolutionized the methodology of science. Yet today he is most often remembered for an achievement that puts him in a decidedly sinister light: he was the father of eugenics, the science, or pseudoscience, of "improving" the human race by selective breeding. A new biography, "Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton" (Bloomsbury; $24.95), casts the man's sinister aspect right in the title. The author, Martin Brookes, is a former evolutionary biologist who worked at University College London's Galton Laboratory (which, before a sanitizing name change in 1965, was the Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics). Brookes is clearly impressed by the exuberance of Galton's curiosity and the range of his achievement. Still, he cannot help finding Galton a little dotty, a man gripped by an obsession with counting and measuring that made him "one of the Victorian era's chief exponents of the scientific folly." If Brookes is right, Galton was led astray not merely by Victorian prejudice but by a failure to understand the very statistical ideas that he had conceived. Born in 1822 into a wealthy and distinguished Quaker family-his maternal grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, a revered physician and botanist who wrote poetry about the sex lives of plants-Galton enjoyed a pampered upbringing. As a child, he revelled in his own precocity: "I am four years old and can read any English book. I can say all the Latin Substantives and Adjectives and active verbs besides 52 lines of Latin poetry. I can cast up any sum in addition and multiply by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10. I can also say the pence table. I read French a little and I know the Clock." When Galton was sixteen, his father decided that he should pursue a medical career, as his grandfather had. He was sent to train in a hospital, but was put off by the screams of unanesthetized patients on the operating table. Seeking guidance from his cousin Charles Darwin, who had just returned from his voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle, Galton was advised to "read Mathematics like a house on fire." So he enrolled at Cambridge, where, despite his invention of a "gumption-reviver machine" that dripped water on his head, he promptly suffered a breakdown from overwork. This pattern of frantic intellectual activity followed by nervous collapse continued throughout Galton's life. His need to earn a living, though, ended when he was twenty-two, with the death of his father. Now in possession of a handsome inheritance, he took up a life of sporting hedonism. In 1845, he went on a hippo-shooting expedition down the Nile, then trekked by camel across the Nubian Desert. He taught himself Arabic and apparently caught a venereal disease from a prostitute-which, his biographer speculates, may account for a noticeable cooling in the young man's ardor for women. The world still contained vast uncharted areas, and exploring them seemed an apt vocation to this rich Victorian bachelor. In 1850, Galton sailed to southern Africa and ventured into parts of the interior never before seen by a white man. Before setting out, he purchased a theatrical crown in Drury Lane which he planned to place "on the head of the greatest or most distant potentate I should meet with." The story of his thousand-mile journey through the bush is grippingly told in this biography. Improvising survival tactics as he went along, he contended with searing heat, scarce water, tribal warfare, marauding lions, shattered axles, dodgy guides, and native helpers whose conflicting dietary superstitions made it impossible to settle on a commonly agreeable meal from the caravan's mobile larder of sheep and oxen. He became adept in the use of the sextant, at one point using it to measure from afar the curves of an especially buxom native woman-"Venus among Hottentots." The climax of the journey was his encounter with King Nangoro, a tribal ruler locally reputed to be "the fattest man in the world." Nangoro was fascinated by the Englishman's white skin and straight hair, and moderately pleased when the tacky stage crown was placed on his head. But when the King dispatched his niece, smeared in butter and red ochre, to his guest's tent to serve as a wife for the night, Galton, wearing his one clean suit of white linen, found the naked princess "as capable of leaving a mark on anything she touched as a well-inked printer's roller . . . so I had her ejected with scant ceremony." Galton's feats made him famous: on his return to England, the thirty-year-old explorer was celebrated in the newspapers and awarded a gold medal by the Royal Geographical Society. After writing a best-selling book on how to survive in the African bush, he decided that he had had enough of the adventurer's life. He married a rather plain woman from an intellectually illustrious family, with whom he never succeeded in having children, and settled down in South Kensington to a life of scientific dilettantism. His true m?tier, he had always felt, was measurement. In pursuit of it, he conducted elaborate experiments in the science of tea-making, deriving equations for brewing the perfect cup. Eventually, his interest hit on something that was actually important: the weather. Meteorology could barely be called a science in those days; the forecasting efforts of the British government's first chief weatherman met with such ridicule that he ended up slitting his throat. Taking the initiative, Galton solicited reports of conditions all over Europe and then created the prototype of the modern weather map. He also discovered a weather pattern that he called the "anti-cyclone"-better known today as the high-pressure system. Galton might have puttered along for the rest of his life as a minor gentleman scientist had it not been for a dramatic event: the publication of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," in 1859. Reading his cousin's book, Galton was filled with a sense of clarity and purpose. One thing in it struck him with special force: to illustrate how natural selection shaped species, Darwin cited the breeding of domesticated plants and animals by farmers to produce better strains. Perhaps, Galton concluded, human evolution could be guided in the same way. But where Darwin had thought mainly about the evolution of physical features, like wings and eyes, Galton applied the same hereditary logic to mental attributes, like talent and virtue."If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvements of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create!" he wrote in an 1864 magazine article, his opening eugenics salvo. It was two decades later that he coined the word "eugenics," from the Greek for "wellborn." Galton also originated the phrase "nature versus nurture," which still reverberates in debates today. (It was probably suggested by Shakespeare's "The Tempest," in which Prospero laments that his slave Caliban is "A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick.") At Cambridge, Galton had noticed that the top students had relatives who had also excelled there; surely, he reasoned, such family success was not a matter of chance. His hunch was strengthened during his travels, which gave him a vivid sense of what he called "the mental peculiarities of different races." Galton made an honest effort to justify his belief in nature over nurture with hard evidence. In his 1869 book "Hereditary Genius," he assembled long lists of "eminent" men-judges, poets, scientists, even oarsmen and wrestlers-to show that excellence ran in families. To counter the objection that social advantages rather than biology might be behind this, he used the adopted sons of Popes as a kind of control group. His case elicited skeptical reviews, but it impressed Darwin. "You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense," he wrote to Galton, "for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work." Yet Galton's labors had hardly begun. If his eugenic utopia was to be a practical possibility, he needed to know more about how heredity worked. His belief in eugenics thus led him to try to discover the laws of inheritance. And that, in turn, led him to statistics. Statistics at that time was a dreary welter of population numbers, trade figures, and the like. It was devoid of mathematical interest, save for a single concept: the bell curve. The bell curve was first observed when eighteenth-century astronomers noticed that the errors in their measurements of the positions of planets and other heavenly bodies tended to cluster symmetrically around the true value. A graph of the errors had the shape of a bell. In the early nineteenth century, a Belgian astronomer named Adolph Quetelet observed that this "law of error" also applied to many human phenomena. Gathering information on the chest sizes of more than five thousand Scottish soldiers, for example, Quetelet found that the data traced a bell-shaped curve centered on the average chest size, about forty inches. As a matter of mathematics, the bell curve is guaranteed to arise whenever some variable (like human height) is determined by lots of little causes (like genes, health, and diet) operating more or less independently. For Quetelet, the bell curve represented accidental deviations from an ideal he called l'homme moyen-the average man. When Galton stumbled upon Quetelet's work, however, he exultantly saw the bell curve in a new light: what it described was not accidents to be overlooked but differences that revealed the variability on which evolution depended. His quest for the laws that governed how these differences were transmitted from one generation to the next led to what Brookes justly calls "two of Galton's greatest gifts to science": regression and correlation. Although Galton was more interested in the inheritance of mental abilities, he knew that they would be hard to measure. So he focussed on physical traits, like height. The only rule of heredity known at the time was the vague "Like begets like." Tall parents tend to have tall children, while short parents tend to have short children. But individual cases were unpredictable. Hoping to find some larger pattern, in 1884 Galton set up an "anthropometric laboratory" in London. Drawn by his fame, thousands of people streamed in and submitted to measurement of their height, weight, reaction time, pulling strength, color perception, and so on. Among the visitors was William Gladstone, the Prime Minister. "Mr. Gladstone was amusingly insistent about the size of his head . . . but after all it was not so very large in circumference," noted Galton, who took pride in his own massive bald dome. After obtaining height data from two hundred and five pairs of parents and nine hundred and twenty-eight of their adult children, Galton plotted the points on a graph, with the parents' heights represented on one axis and the children's on the other. He then pencilled a straight line though the cloud of points to capture the trend it represented. The slope of this line turned out to be two-thirds. What this meant was that exceptionally tall (or short) parents had children who, on average, were only two-thirds as exceptional as they were. In other words, when it came to height children tended to be less exceptional than their parents. The same, he had noticed years earlier, seemed to be true in the case of "eminence": the children of J. S. Bach, for example, may have been more musically distinguished than average, but they were less distinguished than their father. Galton called this phenomenon "regression toward mediocrity." Regression analysis furnished a way of predicting one thing (a child's height) from another (its parents') when the two things were fuzzily related. Galton went on to develop a measure of the strength of such fuzzy relationships, one that could be applied even when the things related were different in kind-like rainfall and crop yield. He called this more general technique "correlation." The result was a major conceptual breakthrough. Until then, science had pretty much been limited to deterministic laws of cause and effect-which are hard to find in the biological world, where multiple causes often blend together in a messy way. Thanks to Galton, statistical laws gained respectability in science. His discovery of regression toward mediocrity-or regression to the mean, as it is now called-has resonated even more widely. Yet, as straightforward as it seems, the idea has been a snare even for the sophisticated. The common misconception is that it implies convergence over time. If very tall parents tend to have somewhat shorter children, and very short parents tend to have somewhat taller children, doesn't that mean that eventually everyone should be the same height? No, because regression works backward as well as forward in time: very tall children tend to have somewhat shorter parents, and very short children tend to have somewhat taller parents. The key to understanding this seeming paradox is that regression to the mean arises when enduring factors (which might be called "skill") mix causally with transient factors (which might be called "luck"). Take the case of sports, where regression to the mean is often mistaken for choking or slumping. Major-league baseball players who managed to bat better than .300 last season did so through a combination of skill and luck. Some of them are truly great players who had a so-so year, but the majority are merely good players who had a lucky year. There is no reason that the latter group should be equally lucky this year; that is why around eighty per cent of them will see their batting average decline. To mistake regression for a real force that causes talent or quality to dissipate over time, as so many have, is to commit what has been called "Galton's fallacy." In 1933, a Northwestern University professor named Horace Secrist produced a book-length example of the fallacy in "The Triumph of Mediocrity in Business," in which he argued that, since highly profitable firms tend to become less profitable, and highly unprofitable ones tend to become less unprofitable, all firms will soon be mediocre. A few decades ago, the Israeli Air Force came to the conclusion that blame must be more effective than praise in motivating pilots, since poorly performing pilots who were criticized subsequently made better landings, whereas high performers who were praised made worse ones. (It is a sobering thought that we might generally tend to overrate censure and underrate praise because of the regression fallacy.) More recently, an editorialist for the Times erroneously argued that the regression effect alone would insure that racial differences in I.Q. would disappear over time. Did Galton himself commit Galton's fallacy? Brookes insists that he did. "Galton completely misread his results on regression," he argues, and wrongly believed that human heights tended "to become more average with each generation." Even worse, Brookes claims, Galton's muddleheadedness about regression led him to reject the Darwinian view of evolution, and to adopt a more extreme and unsavory version of eugenics. Suppose regression really did act as a sort of gravity, always pulling individuals back toward the average. Then it would seem to follow that evolution could not take place through a gradual series of small changes, as Darwin envisaged. It would require large, discontinuous changes that are somehow immune from regression to the mean. Such leaps, Galton thought, would result in the appearance of strikingly novel organisms, or "sports of nature," that would shift the entire bell curve of ability. And if eugenics was to have any chance of success, it would have to work the same way as evolution. In other words, these sports of nature would have to be enlisted to create a new breed. Only then could regression be overcome and progress be made. In telling this story, Brookes makes his subject out to be more confused than he actually was. It took Galton nearly two decades to work out the subtleties of regression, an achievement that, according to Stephen M. Stigler, a statistician at the University of Chicago, "should rank with the greatest individual events in the history of science-at a level with William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of blood and with Isaac Newton's of the separation of light." By 1889, when Galton published his most influential book, "Natural Inheritance," his grasp of it was nearly complete. He knew that regression had nothing special to do with life or heredity. He knew that it was independent of the passage of time. Regression to the mean held even between brothers, he observed; exceptionally tall men tend to have brothers who are somewhat less tall. In fact, as Galton was able to show by a neat geometric argument, regression is a matter of pure mathematics, not an empirical force. Lest there be any doubt, he disguised the case of hereditary height as a problem in mechanics and sent it to a mathematician at Cambridge, who, to Galton's delight, confirmed his finding. Even as he laid the foundations for the statistical study of human heredity, Galton continued to pursue many other intellectual interests, some important, some merely eccentric. He invented a pair of submarine spectacles that permitted him to read while submerged in his bath, and stirred up controversy by using statistics to investigate the efficacy of prayer. (Petitions to God, he concluded, were powerless to protect people from sickness.) Prompted by a near-approach of the planet Mars to Earth, he devised a celestial signalling system to permit communication with Martians. More usefully, he put the nascent practice of fingerprinting on a rigorous basis by classifying patterns and proving that no two fingerprints were exactly the same-a great step forward for Victorian police work. Galton remained restlessly active through the turn of the century. In 1900, eugenics received a big boost in prestige when Gregor Mendel's work on heredity in peas came to light. Suddenly, hereditary determinism was the scientific fashion. Although Galton was now plagued by deafness and asthma (which he treated by smoking hashish), he gave a major address on eugenics in 1904. "What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly," he declared. An international eugenics movement was springing up, and Galton was hailed as its hero. In 1909, he was honored with a knighthood. Two years later, at the age of eighty-eight, he died. In his long career, Galton didn't come close to proving the central axiom of eugenics: that, when it comes to talent and virtue, nature dominates nurture. Yet he never doubted its truth, and many scientists came to share his conviction. Darwin himself, in "The Descent of Man," wrote, "We now know, through the admirable labours of Mr. Galton, that genius . . . tends to be inherited." Given this axiom, there are two ways of putting eugenics into practice: "positive" eugenics, which means getting superior people to breed more; and "negative" eugenics, which means getting inferior ones to breed less. For the most part, Galton was a positive eugenicist. He stressed the importance of early marriage and high fertility among the genetic ?lite, fantasizing about lavish state-funded weddings in Westminster Abbey with the Queen giving away the bride as an incentive. Always hostile to religion, he railed against the Catholic Church for imposing celibacy on some of its most gifted representatives over the centuries. He hoped that spreading the insights of eugenics would make the gifted aware of their responsibility to procreate for the good of the human race. But Galton did not believe that eugenics could be entirely an affair of moral suasion. Worried by evidence that the poor in industrial Britain were breeding disproportionately, he urged that charity be redirected from them and toward the "desirables." To prevent "the free propagation of the stock of those who are seriously afflicted by lunacy, feeble-mindedness, habitual criminality, and pauperism," he urged "stern compulsion," which might take the form of marriage restrictions or even sterilization. Galton's proposals were benign compared with those of famous contemporaries who rallied to his cause. H. G. Wells, for instance, declared, "It is in the sterilisation of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies." Although Galton was a conservative, his creed caught on with progressive figures like Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, George Bernard Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. In the United States, New York disciples founded the Galton Society, which met regularly at the American Museum of Natural History, and popularizers helped the rest of the country become eugenics-minded. "How long are we Americans to be so careful for the pedigree of our pigs and chickens and cattle-and then leave the ancestry of our children to chance or to 'blind' sentiment?" asked a placard at an exposition in Philadelphia. Four years before Galton's death, the Indiana legislature passed the first state sterilization law, "to prevent the procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists." Most of the other states soon followed. In all, there were some sixty thousand court-ordered sterilizations of Americans who were judged to be eugenically unfit. It was in Germany that eugenics took its most horrific form. Galton's creed had aimed at the uplift of humanity as a whole; although he shared the prejudices that were common in the Victorian era, the concept of race did not play much of a role in his theorizing. German eugenics, by contrast, quickly morphed into Rassenhygiene-race hygiene. Under Hitler, nearly four hundred thousand people with putatively hereditary conditions like feeblemindedness, alcoholism, and schizophrenia were forcibly sterilized. In time, many were simply murdered. The Nazi experiment provoked a revulsion against eugenics that effectively ended the movement. Geneticists dismissed eugenics as a pseudoscience, both for its exaggeration of the extent to which intelligence and personality were fixed by heredity and for its na?vet? about the complex and mysterious ways in which many genes could interact to determine human traits. In 1966, the British geneticist Lionel Penrose observed that "our knowledge of human genes and their action is still so slight that it is presumptuous and foolish to lay down positive principles for human breeding." Since then, science has learned much more about the human genome, and advances in biotechnology have granted us a say in the genetic makeup of our offspring. Prenatal testing, for example, can warn parents that their unborn child has a genetic condition like Down syndrome or Tay-Sachs disease, presenting them with the agonizing option of aborting it. The technique of "embryo selection" affords still greater control. Several embryos are created in vitro from the sperm and the eggs of the parents; these embryos are genetically tested, and the one with the best characteristics is implanted in the mother's womb. Both of these techniques can be subsumed under "negative" eugenics, since the genes screened against are those associated with diseases or, potentially, with other conditions that the parents might regard as undesirable, such as low I.Q., obesity, same-sex preference, or baldness. There is a more radical eugenic possibility on the horizon, one beyond anything Galton envisaged. It would involve shaping the heredity of our descendants by tinkering directly with the genetic material in the cells from which they germinate. This technique, called "germline therapy," has already been used with several species of mammals, and its proponents argue that it is only a matter of time before human beings can avail themselves of it. The usual justification for germline therapy is its potential for eliminating genetic disorders and diseases. Yet it also has the potential to be used for "enhancement." If, for example, researchers identified genes linked with intelligence or athletic ability, germline therapy could give parents the option of souping up their children in these respects. Galtonian eugenics was wrong because it was based on faulty science and carried out by coercion. But Galton's goal, to breed the barbarism out of humanity, was not immoral. The new eugenics, by contrast, is based on a relatively sound (if still largely incomplete) science, and is not coercive; decisions about the genetic endowment of children would be left up to their parents. It is the goal of the new eugenics that is morally cloudy. If its technologies are used to shape the genetic endowment of children according to the desires-and financial means-of their parents, the outcome could be a "GenRich" class of people who are smarter, healthier, and handsomer than the underclass of "Naturals." The ideal of individual enhancement, rather than species uplift, is in stark contrast to the Galtonian vision. "The improvement of our stock seems to me one of the highest objects that we can reasonably attempt," Galton declared in his 1904 address on the aims of eugenics. "We are ignorant of the ultimate destinies of humanity, but feel perfectly sure that it is as noble a work to raise its level . . . as it would be disgraceful to abase it." Martin Brookes may be right to dismiss this as a "blathering sermon," but it possesses a certain rectitude when set beside the new eugenicists' talk of a "posthuman" future of designer babies. Galton, at least, had the excuse of historical innocence. From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 23 18:20:56 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 13:20:56 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: Even Two Days Inactivity May Be Unhealthy Message-ID: Even Two Days Inactivity May Be Unhealthy http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2005-01-19-5 Lack of exercise appears to quickly decrease insulin sensitivity, a possible precursor to diabetes Betterhumans Staff 1/19/2005 2:52 PM As little as two days physical inactivity appears to decrease the body's efficient use of insulin, a possible precursor to diabetes and related diseases. Professor [8]Frank Booth and doctoral student David Kump of the [9]University of Missouri-Columbia made the discovery by simulating a sudden drop in activity in rats. The researchers allowed the rats to run on an exercise wheel for three weeks and then locked the wheel for two days. They found that [10]insulin sensitivity decreased the longer the rats stayed inactive. "Everyone is looking at the benefits of exercise, but we are looking at the consequences of stopping that exercise," says Kump. "People already know that exercise is good for them. This shows that within a very short time frame of inactivity, the insulin does not work as well and might have negative effects." Increased risk Decreased insulin sensitivity is thought to put people at greater risk of such conditions as diabetes, heart disease, obesity and hypertension. Insulin moves sugar from the blood into muscles for energy. In people who are active, this process and the process of turning the sugar into energy is more efficient. In people who are inactive, less so. But what about people who are active and then take a break? The researchers found that, at least in rats, just two days of inactivity causes the amount of sugar taken into muscles in response to insulin to be reduced by about a third. Booth says that the research shows that such changes can occur earlier than thought. The research is reported in the [11]Journal of the Physiological Society ([12]read abstract). References 8. http://www.cvm.missouri.edu/vbms/faculty/booth.html 9. http://www.missouri.edu/ 10. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin 11. http://jp.physoc.org/ 12. http://jp.physoc.org/cgi/content/abstract/jphysiol.2004.073593v1 From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 23 18:21:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 13:21:43 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: Middle Age Spread 50% Genetic Message-ID: Middle Age Spread 50% Genetic http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2005-01-20-1 Twin study shows why weight loss can be so hard for some Betterhumans Staff 1/20/2005 12:40 PM Genes account for about 50% of adult-onset weight change, the gain that leads to so-called middle age spread. So found researchers from [8]Saint Louis University School of Public Health in studying sets of identical and fraternal twins who served in the military during the Vietnam War. In total, principal investigator [9]James Romeis and colleagues studied nearly 8,000 male twins. In early adulthood, more than 75% were of normal weight. Twenty years later, more than 55% were overweight or obese. Analyzing the data--identical twins share all their genes while fraternal share half--the researchers found that about 50% of the weight change was genetic. Environmental variables such as diet and exercise accounted for the rest. "We're not acknowledging the strength of genetic factors in our weight loss strategies," says Romeis. "You've got this genetic thing working against you that helps to explain why you're so heavy and why you may fail at diets and weight loss programs." For the participants in the study, weight gain appeared to hit at about 30. "Your behavior changes at 30; you become more sedentary," says Romeis. "At some point they tip into being overweight. Those who are overweight tip into becoming obese. It's slow, incremental change. At the same time, we didn't see much evidence that they lost weight during the same time period." The findings are reported in the journal [10]Twin Research ([11]read abstract). References 8. http://publichealth.slu.edu/ 9. http://publichealth.slu.edu/faculty/romeis.html 10. http://www.australianacademicpress.com.au/Publications/Journals/Twin_R/TResearch.htm 11. http://iris.ingentaselect.com/vl=1533029/cl=34/nw=1/rpsv/cw/aap/13690523/v7n6/s9/p596 From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 23 18:23:56 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 13:23:56 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wired News: No Magic for Older Moms Message-ID: Wired News: No Magic for Older Moms http://wired.com/news/print/0,1294,66322,00.html By [22]Kristen Philipkoski 02:00 AM Jan. 19, 2005 PT When a 66-year-old Romanian woman on Sunday became the oldest woman ever to give birth, the news may have wrongly comforted many women who want to postpone childbearing. If technology could help the mature Romanian [24]get pregnant, the thinking goes, surely having a baby at 40 is a piece of cake. Unfortunately, fertility technologies are not quite keeping up with the modern woman's reproductive demands. What is often overlooked in stories like Adriana Iliescu's is the fact that the woman's own eggs were not used in the procedure. Both the eggs and the sperm used were donated. Iliescu was essentially a surrogate for strangers' DNA. "What we're seeing here is a pregnancy, but not a woman giving birth to a biological child," said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. "Which raises the question: Why would anyone put a 66-year-old woman through pregnancy?" News reports about Iliescu's pregnancy revealed that donor eggs and sperm made the pregnancy possible, although that fact could escape headline skimmers. And many famous [27]women who gave birth in their 40s and 50s, including Joan Lunden, Geena Davis, Cheryl Tiegs and Jane Seymour, welcome press coverage of their new children, but won't answer questions about donor eggs. "They are not always forthcoming, and it sends the wrong message," said Dr. Alan DeCherney, a reproductive endocrinologist at the University of California at Los Angeles and editor in chief of the journal [28]Fertility and Sterility. These stories convey to women: "It is never too late. You are never too old. It is just in your mind." That's a quote from [29]Aleta St. James, a self-described celebrity "healer" who gave birth to twins in November 2004, three days before her 57th birthday. Do these women have, besides wealth and fame, superhuman fertility? Not likely, experts say. Tiegs has said in interviews that she used her own eggs and a surrogate at 52. But studies have found that just 0.2 percent of women at that age, supermodel or not, can produce viable eggs. "I think it is really borderline unethical because so many young women look up to these women," said Cara Birrittieri, author of [30]What Every Woman Should Know about Fertility and Her Biological Clock. "If you walk into a clinic at 45 or 50 you might be able to have babies but you can't use your own eggs, and that's the part that's missing in a lot of these stories." In her mid-30s, Birrittieri found herself single and staring at a magazine cover featuring a 52-year-old celebrity proudly displaying her newborn twins. Birrittieri tucked away the reassuring thought that modern medicine would provide her plenty of time to have kids. Just one year after having her first child at 40 with no problems, in vitro fertilization attempts ended in using a donor egg to conceive her second child, born seven months ago. Birrittieri writes: "Don't be misled, enjoy the news these celebrity older moms impart, be happy for them, and at the same time, be mindful of separating their reported miracle or good fortune from your biological clock." Celebrities do have one advantage over mere mortals: huge bank accounts. In vitro fertilization runs about $12,400 a pop in the United States, according to the [31]American Society for Reproductive Medicine. And even if a woman can afford it, her success is far from certain. The procedure's success rate -- 30 percent -- is not stellar. There are also potential complications to consider. The risks for a 66-year-old woman in the finest health, as well as for her unborn children, are going to be great, Caplan said. Indeed, Iliescu carried twins, but one, which weighed just less than two pounds at the time of Iliescu's Caesarean section, did not survive, according to the Associated Press. The surviving twin weighed just three pounds at birth. "It is as experimental as anything in medicine, and one death is inexcusable," Caplan said. Women over 50 are at increased risk for [32]preeclampsia and gestational diabetes, and the majority will require a Caesarean delivery, according to a 2002 [33]study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Nevertheless, the researchers also said age alone was not reason enough to prevent older women from attempting pregnancy. Reproduction clinics are not regulated by any government agency in the United States, so they are free to set their own age limits. Other high-tech options for older mothers-to-be have seen some success in recent years. More than 100 children have been born using frozen eggs. Egg freezing's success rates are increasing, but they are still much lower compared to in vitro fertilization with fresh eggs. In one of the most recent studies reported on the technology, 237 of 737 eggs survived after thawing. The Italian researchers achieved fertilization with 123 of the eggs, transferred embryos into 104 wombs, and achieved 15 pregnancies and 13 births. That's a success rate comparable to in vitro fertilization for a 42-year-old woman using unfrozen eggs. Still, some women (the company will not reveal how many) are so confident in the promise of this research that they pay $400 per year for [34]Extend Fertility's egg-freezing services. Extend Fertility's officials purport to help women "stop the ticking biological clock." In other experiments, doctors have frozen ovarian tissue from women faced with radiation or chemotherapy for cancer, treatments that typically leave women infertile. When the women are in remission, researchers can implant the ovarian tissue in the women's arms or other parts of their bodies where, if all goes well, it will produce eggs. Researchers using this technique have reported one pregnancy. Researchers are making progress in extending women's fertility, but technology still lags behind many women's expectations, Birrittieri said, especially professional women striving for certain career goals before starting a family. "They're trying to make a difference and they're excited about their careers and they're doing it for great reasons," Birrittieri said. "But the fact of the matter is there does come a time when they're going to be extremely disappointed and traumatized by not being able to have their own genetic children." References 22. http://wired.com/news/feedback/mail/1,2330,0-31-66322,00.html 24. http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050116/od_uk_nm/oukoe_odd_romania_pregnancy_2 27. http://www.mothersover40.com/celebrities.html 28. http://www.asrm.org/Professionals/Fertility&Sterility/fspage.html 29. http://www.energytransformations.com/ 30. http://knowyourbioclock.com/ 31. http://www.asrm.org/ 32. http://www.preeclampsia.org/about.asp 33. http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/288/18/2320 34. http://www.extendfertility.com/ From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 23 18:26:30 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 13:26:30 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC: The future of lying Message-ID: The future of lying http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4169313.stm By Chris Summers BBC News 5.1.14 As the British government unveils plans to make lie detector tests mandatory for convicted paedophiles, some scientists in the US are working on more advanced technology which might be better equipped at detecting deception. Imagine the Pentagon equipped with a machine which can read minds. Sound like the plot of a Hollywood thriller? Well, it might not be that far away. The US Department of Defense has given Dr Jennifer Vendemia a $5m grant to work on her theory that by monitoring brainwaves she can detect whether someone is lying. She claims the system has an accuracy of between 94% and 100% and is an improvement on the existing polygraph tests, which rely on heart rate and blood pressure, respiratory rate and sweatiness. Her system involves placing 128 electrodes on the face and scalp, which translate brainwaves in under a second. Subjects only have to hear interrogators' questions to give a response. But the system has a long way to go before it replaces polygraphs, which were invented almost a century ago and remain a tried and tested system of deception detection. Paedophile tests On Thursday the UK government unveiled its Management of Offenders and Sentencing Bill. POLYGRAPH PILOT AREAS West Midlands Thames Valley Northumbria Northamptonshire Greater Manchester London Leicestershire and Rutland Lancashire Devon and Cornwall Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire A key plank of the bill is increasing the use of polygraph tests for convicted paedophiles who have been released on licence. A voluntary scheme has been running in 10 pilot areas in England since September 2003. But under the new bill the tests will become compulsory for paedophiles in the 10 pilot areas. They are asked whether they have had contact with children, while having their anxiety levels measured. But some critics believe the polygraph is flawed. "The idea with polygraphs is that there is a tell-tale physical response associated with deception and I just don't accept that is true. "Even if it were true for the normal person then I don't think it's true for psychopaths, or others with mental abnormalities," says Steven Aftergood, of the Federation American Sciences. The mouth may lie, but the face it makes nonetheless tells the truth Friedrich Nietzsche Philosopher Mr Aftergood says he doesn't know about Dr Vendemia's invention but "if there was a machine which was able to read people's minds, it would give greater urgency to questions of people's privacy. "In the United States it could even be unconstitutional because, under the Fifth Amendment, citizens have a right not to self-incriminate themselves." In the US a specific piece of legislation, the Employee Polygraph Protection Law, forbids firms from using lie detectors to vet workers. The one exception is the intelligence community, where polygraphs are a ubiquitous form of checking on existing and potential employees. Dr Vendemia says her system would be an improvement on polygraphs. "If you are examined by a good interrogator a polygraph will be 85 to 90% accurate," she says. "But others have less than 50% accuracy. My technology has levels of accuracy around 94 to 100%." Dr Vendemia says her research has found it takes longer for the brain to process lies, than to process the truth and this, she says, can be tested by monitoring the brainwaves. Her work is funded by US government grants but she says there were ethical questions which arose from it. Could it be used, for example, to help in the interrogation of innocent people accused of being al-Qaeda terrorists? "Anything can be misused. As a researcher working with technology which has huge implications you have a responsibility to make sure that what you are doing is ethical and make sure there is someone more objective than you looking at what you do," says Dr Vendemia. Professor Paul Matthews, a neuroscientist at Oxford University, says a mind-reading machine is pure science fiction. "There is no technology which can tell somebody what you are thinking. But you can see what sort of areas of the brain are active. It is the same sort of technology which is used in hospitals with MRI and EEG scanners." Tor Butler-Cole, a philosopher and ethicist from King's College, London, thinks we should be wary of allowing this technology to be used if it is not 100% accurate. "The recent controversy with cot deaths has taught us that we should be aware of relying on science which may turn out to be wrong," she says. Ms Butler-Cole believes there is also the danger jurors would give it a lot of credibility simply because it was "scientific evidence". Dr Vendemia was one of a number of experts discussing the subject of "Criminal Memories" in a special debate at the Dana Centre in London on Thursday. The event will be shown on a webcast next week. HOW A LIE DETECTOR WORKS A polygraph works on principle that a person who is lying will show signs of stress Pneumographs (1) measure breathing rate Galvanometers (2) test how much the subject is sweating by measuring skin's electrical resistance Cuff (3) measures heart rate and BP which increase under stress The results from each instrument appear as wave patterns By comparing the patterns with those when the subject was definitely telling the truth, the examiner can spot a potential lie From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 23 18:29:54 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 13:29:54 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Gary North: Chips, Dips, And Red Ink Message-ID: Chips, Dips, And Red Ink Gary North's REALITY CHECK Issue 401 December 2, 2004 The unfunded liability of Medicare and Social Security is in the range of $45 trillion. By 2008, it will be over $51 trillion. (See Table 1 at the bottom of this testimony: http://snipurl.com/b0ls.) Most of this shortfall -- 86% -- is Medicare-related. Congress is doing nothing to deal with this looming crisis. The Bush Administration pushed through a huge prescription benefit law, which will speed up the fiscal erosion process. Meanwhile, as a people, we are eating our way to national bankruptcy. The holiday season is the time to consider this problem. Call it a pre-emptive attack against January's guilt. DIET WARS "Frontline" recently re-ran a show that it first broadcast on PBS in April, 2004: "Diet Wars." (http://snipurl.com/b0nb) It surveyed the various popular weight-loss diets, which are in conflict: Atkins, Pritikin, South Beach, Weight Watchers, the U.S. government's food group pyramid, and a few others. They all have one thing in common: most fat people do not stick with them. According to one of the physicians interviewed, a Pritikin man, between 80% and 95% of people who lose weight gain it back in five years. So, Pareto's 20-80 law rules in weight-loss, too. The statistical range of those who keep the weight off is between 20% and 20% of 20% (4%). The narrator of the show was also the central figure. He had been a child actor on "Leave It to Beaver." He was putting on weight. His wife had been nagging him to change his eating habits for years. At the time the taping began, he was age 55, 5-11, and 210 pounds. A physician told him he was borderline obese. Well, he was not waist-line obese. You would not have noticed him in a crowd. There was only a trace of belly on him. This leads me to a preliminary conclusion: nutritionists are making it up as they go along. They don't know. When I was a child, physicians had no training in nutrition. They ignored the subject. When I was in my twenties, they were dead set against the health food industry. They were insistent that the Shute brothers, the two Canadian physicians/nutritionists, were all wrong about vitamin E vs. heart disease. Today they recommend E, but none of them seems to remember the Shutes and the war against them. (http://snipurl.com/b0nk) In short, physicians get caught up in fads, just like millions of other Americans do. Fads come and go. One of the experts interviewed insisted that there is an epidemic of obesity among Americans. (This phrase has become a rhetorical epidemic.) She said that increased weight "is associated with" -- note: she did not say "causes" -- heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. She warned that this epidemic will overwhelm the health care delivery system. I have no doubt that she is correct. The American health-care system is increasingly funded by, and regulated by, the U.S. government. It is slowly turning into something resembling the Post Office. What is going to overwhelm the system is extended old age. Americans -- victims of a pandemic -- are living far longer than ever before. Degenerative diseases rather than pneumonia are killing us. Unlike pneumonia, which would come without warning and kill an old person within a few days, degenerative diseases cost a fortune to treat over long periods of time. The government has promised to pick up the tab. That means you and I will write the checks. Anyway, you will. At my age, I'm planning to be the middleman between you, the government, and my physician. Years ago, the late Redd Foxx made a sagacious observation: "I feel sorry for all those health food people. Someday, they will be lying in a hospital bed, dying of nothing." His point was on target: something is going to kill us. It's not that we willingly "give up the ghost." Something kills us: a fall, a disease, an auto accident, re-runs of "That 70s Show." This raises three statistically inevitable political questions: (1) Will the onslaught against all of us by microbes, known and unknown, bankrupt the government? (2) Will it instead produce a political transformation that saves the government's budget by requiring oldsters to die at home in their beds at their families' expense? (3) First one, then the other? Government is reactionary. It changes only when change is forced on it, either by voters or special- interest groups. So, for as long as the post-64 voting bloc gets out the vote in statistically significant numbers, Congress is not going to change Medicare. But, at some point, in a fiscal crisis, the other voting blocs will unite, show up at the polls, and send Granny home to her bed to die. It will take a very severe fiscal crisis to produce this transformation. I may not live to see it. I hope I do. We are eating our way to national bankruptcy. Those who eat, drink, and are merry, for tomorrow Medicare picks up the tab, are going to be sorely tried. MURDER ON AISLE 6 The medical refrain today is this: "America is suffering from an epidemic of obesity." The experts don't want to put the blame where the blame is: the enormous productivity of capitalism. Americans have a lot of money, and food is cheap. The restraining factor of economic scarcity, which kept most people slim from the dawn of the human race, is being rolled back. We can afford to eat what we like, and what we like is not good for a lot of us. If you want a symbol of this, think of Wal-Mart's masked smiley face. He is rolling back prices. But that round face is a tip-off. This guy is fat. Why, that's not Don Diego behind the mask. It's Sergeant Garcia! The biggest profit in groceries is in the packaged, processed foods. Here's the rule: "If it's in a brightly colored package, it's going to make you fat." In the supermarket, stick with the food that is uncovered -- fruits, vegetables -- or packaged in undistinguished plastic or cardboard: meats, dairy products, eggs. Stay away from the aisles with food types listed on overhead signs. These aisles will kill you. Will the State protect us? Hardly. The public schools make a bundle of money from the sale of soft drinks. They refuse to remove the soda pop dispensers. The government's number-one agency in our lives, kindergarten through graduate school, has put cash flow above service to the people. Somehow, I am not surprised. The problem is, the foods that are best for us are bland, common, and very price competitive -- low profit margins per sale. The tasty foods are fattening. So it has always been. But in eras gone by, people were not productive enough and therefore rich enough, to indulge their tastes. Henry VIII was, but that was because he was the king. Today, we eat like kings. We are beginning to look like them, too. In 1981, I heard a speech by John Noble. Noble had been visiting his family in Germany in December, 1941, when Hitler declared war on the United States, so Noble was unable to return to the United States. He was in Dresden in 1945 during the horrendous allied firebombing. In that year, the Soviets sent him to Siberia. Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time! He said the Russians fed the inmates mostly bread and water, but the bread was Russian black bread. The inmates were put to work in the mines. He said that when he was released in 1955, he was in the best health of his life. He was slim. He was in shape. The cheap, unprocessed bread had sustained him. So had the work in the mines. He complained in 1981 about putting on weight. That's what the free market does to people. It lets them eat what they want. One of the experts interviewed on "Frontline" said that nothing is going to change in the fast food industry until the government forces companies to serve food that is good for us. What we need, obviously, is black bread and daily exercise. There are those who would support such legislation. If you want one memorable image of what has happened to us, think back three decades, if you are old enough. There was a TV commercial for Lays potato chips. Burt Lahr, once the cowardly lion, was dressed in a devil's suit. He held a bag of Lays potato chips in one hand and a single chip in the other. He uttered the classic line: "Betcha can't eat just one!" He has won the bet. Millions of Americans have lost it. HOW SWEET IT ISN'T The Atkins people tell you to cut back on carbs. The Pritikin people tell you to cut back on fats. The Weight Watchers people tell you to cut back on calories. But there is universal agreement on one thing: cut back on sugar. Dr. Arthur Robinson is famous for his home school curriculum and his opposition to the Kyoto Treaty on carbon dioxide emissions. Three decades ago, he was Linus Pauling's senior researcher and fund-raiser. He is a gifted direct-mail marketer. He ran a small display ad in "The Wall Street Journal" with a great headline: "We're bearish on sugar and bullish on Vitamin C." He is a fanatic about sugar. He never fed his children refined sugar. All of them are grown. They all avoid it today. All of them are slender. All of them are healthy. So is he. He let them eat unprocessed grains. He developed a multi-grain bread recipe for maximum nutrition and minimum cost. The family runs a sheep ranch, along with running a biological research center and a publishing mini-empire: CD-ROM curriculum, "Access to Energy" newsletter, and G. A. Henty's books for boys. The Robinsons are not vegetarians. But they are absolute abstainers when it comes to anything with processed sugar. In 1948, I was a sickly child. I suffered from chronic bronchitis. My mother took me to a clinic run by the first prominent nutritionist physician, Francis Pottenger. He put me on a diet that he had developed. His diet fattened up scrawny people, and it slimmed down fat people. It was heavy on beef, unprocessed grains, and vegetables. Processed cereals were out; wheat cereal cooked overnight was in. The diet also included certified raw whole milk with cream on the top: fat city! But Pottenger was death on sugar. He got me to shake hands on a deal. I agreed not to eat sweets, except for one scoop of ice cream per week. He was no fool. He knew that no kid was likely to go cold turkey on all sweets. No mother could police a child that closely. So, he left me an out: that lonely scoop of ice cream. He got me to promise to keep to the schedule: self- discipline. I kept my end of the bargain. I would not eat cake at birthday parties. I would eat one scoop of ice cream. He also put me on an exercise program. My parents bought me barbells and a back-yard jungle gym. I had to do chin-ups every other day and lift barbells on the other days. It was an Atkins-type diet: lots of red meat, dairy fat allowed. It allowed carbs, but they had to be natural grains -- no processed flour. I did get a little unpackaged brown raw sugar for my cereal. I know my mother did keep raw sugar around. But no white sugar for me. In 18 months, I got well. The coughing went away. I gained weight. Basically, I have never been seriously sick again, except for a gall bladder flare-up in 2001. I have never again had a weight problem, thin or fat. My diet at ages 6 and 7 set my eating habits for a lifetime: little sugar, very few processed grains, and meat -- mainly beef and chicken. I eat two eggs a day. I have not been good about eating vegetables, although I've begun to change that. As for exercise, I'm a bona fide couch potato. It's not good for me, I'm sure. I'm going to start an exercise program. Real Soon Now. FATS GOLDBERG'S SOLUTION Larry "Fats" Goldberg wrote a diet book, "Controlled Cheating" in 1985. Alzheimer's killed him at age 69 in 2003. Weight didn't. He was 160 pounds. For 5 feet 6, that's not too bad. But it was half his weight at the time when he finally decided he was going to die if he didn't change his eating habits. He had tried diets. They had failed. He just could not bring himself to give up the foods he loved. But then he got a flash of insight. He would not give them up. He would postpone them. So, he went on a crash diet. After three weeks, he went off the diet for one day. He ate whatever he wanted. Then, the next day, he went back on his diet. He continued this pattern for the rest of his life. One day a week, he would eat anything he liked. He would gain five pounds. Then he would quit. Twice a year, he left New York City, where he ran Goldberg's Pizzeria, to go home: Kansas City, Kansas. There, for one glorious week, he would eat. And eat. And eat. He would gain up to 17 pounds. Then he would fly back to New York. New York was not fat city for Fats. He was made famous by humorist Calvin Trillin's book, "American Fried." The book was about great places to eat, all over America. Trillin had known Fats from his youth. He described one day of Fats' week off. Here is a selection from "American Fried." " 'Just what did you eat on a big day in Kansas City the week you gained seventeen pounds?' I asked. I was prepared to make a list. 'Well, for breakfast I'd have two eggs, six biscuits with butter and jelly, half a quart of milk, six link sausage, six strips of bacon, and a couple of homemade cinnamon rolls,' Fats said. 'Then I'd hit MacLean's Bakery. They have a kind of fried cinnamon roll I love. Maybe I'd have two or three of them. Then, on the way downtown to have lunch with somebody, I might stop at Kresge's and have two chili dogs and a couple of root beers. . . . Then I'd go to lunch.'" http://snipurl.com/axaz And so on. For a week. At the end of his section on Goldberg, and what he ate for six days a week -- boiled skinned chicken -- Trillin ended with Goldberg's overall assessment of his diet. Goldberg spoke of the pain, the terrible pain. "I can't emphasize this enough." That, of course, is the famous bottom line. For the person addicted to anything, there is great pain in giving it up. This is why 80% to 95% of everyone who loses weight gains it back. Goldberg controlled his pain with controlled cheating. He had to allow himself some of the things he loved. Otherwise, he would eat himself to death. This option is not open to alcoholics. But alcoholics can live without drinking. No one can live without eating. WHO'S FAT? WHO ISN'T? We are told that Americans are gaining weight. But which Americans? When it's Americans in general, then there is pressure on Congress to pass laws to save Americans from themselves. People are different. To imagine that the same diet works equally well with all overweight people is naive. The biochemist and nutritionist Roger Williams discovered pantothenic acid. His bibliography, much of it on vitamins and nutrition, stretched from 1919 to 1987. (snipurl.com/b0qc) He wrote a book, "Biochemical Individuality." It's a warning against universal dietary cures. Nutritional science needs data from cooperating control groups in order to survey long-term trends in weight, health, and life expectancy. These groups should be (separate categories) racial, economic, and cultural. Are there racial groups that resist the trend? Asians seem to. Is this genetic? Is it cultural? It surely isn't money. They have plenty of money. Are they getting fatter at the same percentage rate as the general population? Are some Asian groups significantly different from others? Chinese food in restaurants is heavy on oil and fat. Does this support Pritikin or Atkins? Are American Chinese gaining more weight than American Japanese, who eat sushi and octopus? What about on campus? Does college dorm food fatten up Asians the way it fattens up the rest of us? College dorms are ideal dietary laboratories. There is no marginal cost of food. Everyone pays a flat fee. It's all you can eat, no extra charge, day after day, for a year or two. Does this affect different groups differently? It seems to me that genetics could be involved. Williams thought so. But more important is future- orientation. As children, we establish eating habits. Children are notoriously present-oriented. They discount the future. This is the outlook of the addict. It is difficult to break our eating habits. I was fortunate that I got sick young, my mother found Pottenger, and I decided to cooperate. Another segregating factor, usually ignored, is confessional. If I had a research grant of millions of dollars to spend on a dietary study, I would target religious groups. I would see if there is a connection between confession and shape. I would begin with Orthodox Jews. Judaism uses diet and circumcision to screen access to membership, and this works. ("You're going to do WHAT?") You must be future- oriented to join. Jews don't eat pork but do eat beef: Atkins types. Are Orthodox Jews more or less fat than the general public? What about heart disease? Then I would survey Seventh Day Adventists, who tend to be vegetarians but who eat grains; Mormons, who don't consume alcohol; and Baptists, who say they don't consume alcohol. I would survey white Baptists and black Baptists. Black Baptists have weight problems. One of the people interviewed on "Frontline" said that black churches had come to him to develop a weight-loss program involving diet and exercise. Obesity is a major problem in black churches. As for white Baptists, I don't know. Are they the norm -- gaining weight along with the general population? Is the genetic difference a distinguishing feature, assuming that Baptist confessions are similar? Someone ought to find out. I would study the Reformed Episcopal Church, the one Protestant denomination that has had racial equality since 1873, but whose congregations are not racially mixed. By equality, I mean governmentally: black bishops are equal in authority in church councils to white bishops, and the numbers are similar. Catholics are also mixed racially, but there are too many cultural and racial groups who are American Catholics, and too many recent immigrant groups. The REC would be an ideal test: same confession, same liturgy, different income, different races. What about weight? I am a Presbyterian. Presbyterians have money, behind Jews and Episcopalians. We can afford to eat as much as we like. This has been true for generations. We are highly educated -- probably the most formally educated of all Protestant groups. It's built into our form of government: an educated clergy is required by church law. There are very few overweight people in theologically conservative Presbyterian denominations. (I have no experience inside mainline Presbyterianism.) When I say Presbyterian, I include Dutch Reformed, who don't call themselves Presbyterians. Both groups are Calvinistic and bureaucratically hierarchical. The rural Dutch are dairymen, and they are famous for their pastries. Three decades ago, I lived in a semi-rural Dutch community, and I don't recall that the men were overweight. The women tended toward plumpness, but they were rarely fat. (The teenage girls tended toward Kim Novak fatness, which repulsed none of the boys.) Yet, in terms of their favorite foods, the Dutch should have been fat. You can't solve a problem if you don't ask the right questions. If we get a legislated solution, we will get worse problems, plus we will still be fat. NO SWEAT, MORE POTATOES If we were Israelites in David's day, walking to and from Jerusalem three times a year, we could afford some extra weight. Fat is desirable, says the Old Testament. It's a sign of God's blessing. Priests ate meat all the time. It was their portion of the sacrifices. The priests were Atkins people, not Pritikin people. But they were physically active, all day long. They were not couch potatoes. We are. In the second half of the twentieth century, most Americans overcame this curse: In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return (Genesis 3:19). McCormick invented the reaper. Then Edison and Westinghouse delivered electricity. Then Carrier invented air conditioning. So, we no longer sweat to eat our bread. We sit. We make deals. We worry. We eat. Our stomachs, not our sweat glands, are today the battleground in which the curse wrecks havoc. Lesson: we will one day be lying in bed, dying of something. We are losing the battle of the bulge. We hate to say no, and we can afford not to. We no longer stink. Instead, we bulge. A century ago, they could smell us coming. Now, they can see us coming before we turn the corner. There is a solution to the weight problem: When thou sittest to eat with a ruler, consider diligently what is before thee: And put a knife to thy throat, if thou be a man given to appetite (Proverbs 23:1-2). The free market has given us low-cost lunches, but we prefer "dainties" -- refined sugar and refined flour. We have not put a knife to our throats. Whose fault is that? There are well-organized political pressure groups that plan to have the U.S. government put a knife to our throats for our own good. The debate rages as to who should control the menu. But when all the rhetoric is stripped away, it's the same old menu: a Stalin sandwich -- black bread -- and water. Then it's off to the mines. CONCLUSION It's the holiday season. Some of you had better not participate in a feast. If you were following Fats Goldberg's plan, and if you had been on schedule for the past six months, you could make December 25 to January 1 your week in Kansas City. But you're not a Goldberg disciple. So, the feast is your enemy. My family will celebrate Christmas as we have for two decades: at a Chinese restaurant, just like in "A Christmas Story." For my personal response to the menu-Stalinists, I shall use my rice to soak up any excess garlic sauce. But, in honor of Dr. Pottenger, it will be brown rice. From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 23 18:30:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 13:30:27 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] spiked: The dismal quackery of eco-economics Message-ID: The dismal quackery of eco-economics http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CA750.htm 4.10.22 The dismal quackery of eco-economics The notion that economic growth has to be curtailed is tragic when billions still live in dire poverty. by Daniel Ben-Ami The World Wildlife Fund warns that we are consuming 20 per cent more natural resources a year than the planet can provide. Are we living beyond our ecological means? One of the most striking but least noticed aspects of the rise of environmentalism is the way that it has helped to redefine economics. Economic production and consumption are viewed in a fundamentally different way than they were before environmentalism became central to the dominant worldview. Environmentalist assumptions that, at the very least, should be the subject of debate are unquestioningly accepted. Environmentalism has become central to the mainstream outlook, rather than the particular property of green parties or organisations. This development isn't just important at the level of ideas. A gloomy view of economic development plays an important role in holding back human potential. At its starkest, the acceptance of the idea that economic growth has to be curtailed is a tragedy in a world where billions of people still live in dire poverty. According to the latest available figures from the World Bank, 2.7 billion were living on less than $2 (?1.10) a day in 2001 of which 1.1 billion lived on less than a dollar (1). The discussion of global warming provides a striking example of how this works. Almost everyone accepts that climate change means that the world needs to cut back on emissions of greenhouse gases. Yet this would almost certainly mean holding back economic growth, meaning that a large part of the global population will remain poor. There is hardly any discussion of how to deal with global warming while generating substantial economic growth at the same time. Indeed it will be argued that economic growth, far from being the problem, is central to humanity's capacity to handle climate change. There are two recurring themes running through the environmentalist approach to economics. First, an obsession with the need for limits. The environmentalist debate, in numerous different ways, assumes that strict limits must be put on economic activity. Such premises ignore or at least downplay the power of human creativity. Economic activity does indeed often throw up problems - such as pollution - but it also, it will be argued, provides the means to overcome them. Second, the idea of precaution has more recently become more central to the debate. The prevalent assumption is that people need to be cautious about economic development because it could have harmful unintended consequences in the future. Often such fears are expressed in the language of 'sustainability'. The precautionary approach, unlike earlier forms of environmentalism, acknowledges the power of human creativity. But advocates of precaution tend to see such creativity as a source of problems, usually in the form of risk, rather than a positive attribute of human beings. Underlying both assumptions is a misanthropic view of humanity (2). Environmentalism can be seen as a counterattack against a key premise of the Enlightenment: that a central part of progress consists of increasing human control over nature. Instead, environmentalists argue that humans should accept their place as a mere subsidiary of the natural world (3). In practice this means reconciling humanity to poverty, disease and natural disasters. There is environmentalist confusion between the mastery over nature and the destruction of nature. Control over nature means reshaping the natural world to meet human needs - for example, developing medicines to fight against disease or building dams to prevent flooding or generate electricity. This is not the same as destroying rain forests or making animal species extinct. Nature has sometimes been destroyed as a side-effect of economic growth. But the aim of economic development is to benefit humanity rather than to destroy the natural world. It is important to remember that richer societies are in a much stronger position to create a positive environment for human beings than poor ones. The remainder of this essay will examine the key tenets of environmentalist economics in more detail. It will argue that, in addition to being undesirable, the environmentalist worldview is based on fatally flawed assumptions. Natural limits to growth? A large part of environmentalist discourse is about the biophysical, social and ethical limits that are supposedly a brake on economic activity (4). Some of the limits they raise are metaphors while others are meant literally. If only they put such creativity into pondering how to generate growth rather than restrain it, the world would be better off. Reverend Robert Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) is in many ways the intellectual godfather of environmentalism. It's striking that the ideas of a long-dead English country parson have now come back in radical clothes. In his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Malthus famously argued that the world was doomed to mass starvation since population inevitably grew far more rapidly than food supply. In mathematical terms, he argued, the population grew geometrically while agricultural production grew arithmetically. Malthus' views led Thomas Carlyle, a nineteenth century historian and philosopher, to dub economics 'the dismal science'. Fortunately Malthus' predictions proved entirely wrong. Food production has easily outstripped population growth. Starvation is mercifully the exception rather than the rule - when it still exists, it is the result of social inequality rather than an absolute failure to produce food. The solution to this is more extensive economic growth, to help the poorest parts of the world to reach the living standards of the richest. It is only in recent decades that Malthus' concerns about natural limits have had such a broad resonance. Until relatively recently, the benefits of industrialisation were widely appreciated, and the prospect of economic growth prompted more hope than anxiety. But in the 1960s a new breed of intellectuals started to emerge who were influenced by Malthusianism - some explicitly supported Malthus while others were more generally influenced by his approach. Often they argued that Malthus was right in principle but he had got his timing wrong, or that his approach needed to be made more sophisticated (5). What they shared was an emphasis on the importance of limits on economic activity (6). By the mid-1970s their view was getting widespread popular support. Strongly Malthusian texts such as the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth (1972) and EF Schumacher's Small is Beautiful (1973) were both worldwide bestsellers (7). As Schumacher noted at the time: 'We do well to ask why it is that all these terms - pollution, environment, ecology, etc - have so suddenly come into prominence. After all, we have had an industrial system for quite some time, yet only five or ten years ago these words were virtually unknown.' (original emphasis) (8) A combination of factors help to explain the popularisation of environmentalist thought. The world economy experienced severe problems as the long boom that followed the Second World War came to an end. The Arab oil boycott that followed the 1973 Arab-Israeli war also focused attention on the vulnerability of natural resources. More generally, a mood of social pessimism began to take hold over Western societies. Environmentalists began to argue that society needed to curb economic growth (9). Kenneth Boulding, one of the most prominent American economists of the mid-twentieth century, used the metaphor 'spaceship earth' to express the need for limits (10) Writing in the mid-1960s, it is not surprising that he should choose a space metaphor. But rather than referring to the unlimited frontier popularised in fiction such as Star Trek, he meant to convey an earth running short of resources. This was in contrast to the 'cowboy economy' of an earlier era when, according to Boulding, there was no problem of scarcity. Another expression of scarcity was the 'tragedy of the commons' that was popularised by Garrett Hardin, a prominent biologist (11). Hardin acknowledged his intellectual debt to William Forster Lloyd (1794-1852), an obscure British economist who originated the idea in a pamphlet in 1833. Lloyd began with the idea of a common pasture on which villagers could graze their cattle. At first there was no problem, since the land area was ample to support a relatively small number of cattle. But as the number of cattle grew larger it became impossible for the land to support them all. Hardin used this metaphor to illustrate the broader need for limits on economic growth, and this idea has become widely accepted by environmentalists (12). Others expressed the idea of limits more literally. The Limits To Growth report of 1972 estimated that the world's gold would run out in nine years, mercury in 13, natural gas in 22, petroleum in 20, silver 13 and zinc 18 years (13). With the benefit of hindsight it is clear that all its forecasts were hopelessly wrong. But the supporters of the report still claimed that the general approach was right, even if specific predictions were incorrect (14). Other environmentalist predictions have been disproved. Paul Ehrlich, still a highly respected environmentalist and biology professor at Stanford University, predicted in The Population Bomb in 1968 that: 'The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.' (15) Other environmentalist figures have wisely avoided specific predictions. One popular approach was to argue that economic growth is limited by the amount of energy in the world. The idea was developed by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, an American economist of Romanian origin, in the 1970s and has more recently been taken up by the likes of Elmar Altvater, Herman Daly and Jeremy Rifkin (16). This idea was expressed in scientific terms as a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the useful forms of energy in any closed system decline over time. An alternative way of expressing the same idea is that the entropy (disorder) in a closed system increases over time (17). But as previous articles on spiked have argued, environmentalists grossly underestimate the amount of energy available on earth (18). In any case, the earth is not a closed system - it receives an enormous amount of energy from the sun every day (19). So the idea that the availability of energy limits economic activity has no basis in science. The concept of 'natural capital' is another way of arguing that there are scarce resources (20). Advocates of this approach argue that natural resources should be seen as a form of 'capital', by which they mean wealth, rather than as in traditional economics, a way of generating income. For instance, conventional economists assume that iron ore is essentially provided free by nature, and should therefore be valued according to the revenue it generates each year to the mining company. Environmentalists counter that it is not free because it involves a drain on the environment - and that the amount of iron ore used up each year should be deducted from the wealth of the country in which it is produced. But this approach produces some perverse results. From the perspective of 'natural capital', a pristine country, in which hardly anyone lived, would be wealthy. But one that was highly developed and industrialised would have suffered a severe loss of natural capital (21). By these counts, Antarctica could well be richer than America. As it happens, neither approach is adequate. The value of a natural resource cannot be assessed independently of the human labour used to retrieve it. For instance, bauxite or uranium have no value in a primitive society where they cannot be utilised, but in an economy that produces aluminium or harnesses atomic power they become valuable resources. Another way of expressing limits is by developing measures such as 'carrying capacity'. This is defined in A Dictionary of Biology as: 'The maximum population of a particular species that can be supported indefinitely by a given habitat or area without damage to the environment.' (22) But this is a tautology. For example, the carrying capacity of the earth in relation to humans is its productive capacity divided by one person's basic needs. But the productive capacity of the earth has grown enormously as the world has become more efficient economically. So 'carrying capacity' is not a fixed quantity but at most a statement of a particular ratio at a particular time (23). The assumption that there is a looming oil shortage illustrates this point. It is mathematically true that if there is a finite supply of oil and a growing economy, sooner or later supplies will run out. But this ignores the ways that we can tackle such problems. In the short term, this can include the discovery of new oil fields or harnessing existing ones more efficiently. In the medium term, new ways of utilising oil, such as harnessing the vast reserves found in tar sand, are likely to be discovered. Longer term, new forms of energy are likely to be utilised that may not have even been thought of yet. As Sheikh Yamani, the Saudi oil minister in the 1970s, has argued: 'The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.' (24) There is likely to be more than enough oil to meet humanity's needs over the next few years, and long before it runs out new forms of energy generation are likely to be discovered and existing ones utilised far more efficiently. Underlying environmentalist confusion on limited resources is a deeply pessimistic view of human ingenuity. Environmentalists tend to project the current level of human know-how and skills in the future. Yet historically humans have proved adept at developing their capabilities over time. From an environmentalist perspective, human beings are merely vast consumers of scarce resources. What this view overlooks is humans' immense capabilities as producers. Humans are capable of using reason and ingenuity to overcome formidable barriers - which is why what seem like insurmountable limits to the environmentalists are almost always overcome. Precaution and sustainability The other central concept of contemporary environmentalism is precaution. The key idea is that modern technological societies bring the risk of severe unintended consequences in the future. In the past, natural risks were the most important, but today 'manufactured risks' predominate. The argument is that a particular technology may appear safe, but currently unknown problems may become apparent at some point in the future. Sociologists such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens - a key influence over New Labour - have developed the idea of 'risk society' (25). But it isn't possible to make a clear distinction between natural and manufactured risks. For instance, a hurricane may be seen as a pure 'natural disaster', but the impact it has on humanity depends on the level of human development. Florida, in the prosperous USA, is in a far better position to deal with an extreme weather event than, say, Haiti or Jamaica. Americans can afford to build better quality buildings and defences against hurricanes than their poorer neighbours. The concept of the 'precautionary principle' is the way that the ideas of risk society have become embodied in law. For instance, it is central to the working of the European Union (EU) and its member states. As a result, scientists are expected to show beyond reasonable doubt that their discoveries will not be dangerous in the future (26). This principle puts an impossible burden of proof on scientists. It is not possible to have that degree of certainty about the future implications of any scientific development. As a result, it imposes a cautious approach on science that holds back advance. The precautionary principle is applied to economics in terms of the idea of 'sustainability' (27). This emphasises the danger that economic development could pose to future generations - and advocates a cautious approach towards economic development. This idea embodies low expectations about economic development. To understand this point, it is worth examining the definition of 'sustainable development' in the United Nation's 1987 Brundtland Report. According to the report: 'Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts: ' -- the concept of 'needs', in particular the essential needs of the world's poor, to which the overriding priority should be given; and; ' -- the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs.' (28) Several elements of this definition are worth examining. First, its emphasis on 'future generations', which expresses a fear and uncertainty about what lies ahead. It also assumes there must be a trade-off between meeting present and future needs. The idea that development today aids future societies is ruled out. Yet in reality, restricting growth today means leaving future generations with many of the same problems that we suffer from. In contrast, more economic growth puts them in a far better position to enjoy a better future. More growth means - among other things - less poverty, less disease and more time away from the drudgery of routine work. In addition, the concept of 'needs' is drawn narrowly. So although the definition does refer to development, its primary goal is to meet the essential needs of the world's poor. Presumably the non-essential needs of the poor or the essential needs of the wealthy are not on the agenda. Global warming The discussion of how to respond to global warming embodies both the idea of limits and of precaution. Most of the debate assumes that it is necessary to hold back on economic growth because of the negative implications it could have for the future of the planet. It should be emphasised that what is being referred to here is the economic response to global warming. The science of climate change is an immensely complicated topic that is best left to scientists who specialise in the area. Indeed, part of the problem with discussion of the topic is that non-scientists are often too willing to pontificate about matters of climatology. It is wrong to assume that the appropriate economic response to the problem is necessarily to hold back on development (29). If, as the scientists argue, global warming is happening and that human activity is at least partly responsible, it does not automatically follow that restricting greenhouse gas emissions is the best way to respond. At the very least, the dangers of greenhouse emissions have to be set against the problem of restricting economic growth. Since widespread industrialisation is likely to mean more emissions overall - even if industry becomes more environmentally efficient - curbs on greenhouse gases necessarily involve restraining economic growth. The approach embodied in the Kyoto protocol is likely to mean consigning billions of people to poverty (30), as well as restricting the extent to which living standards in the developed world can be improved. It is wrong to see dealing with climate change and alleviating poverty as a trade-off. Richer, more developed societies are in a better position to deal with the impact of climate change. For instance, a low-lying country like Bangladesh would be in a far better position to deal with rising sea levels if it could afford to build up its flood defences. It has been argued on spiked that in the longer term it is likely that more high-technology ways will be found to control the climate - for example, it may be possible to divert a portion of the sun's rays away from the earth (31). Rather than holding back, the answer is likely to lie in bold imaginative solutions to the problem. Yet the current climate of restraint militates against exploring such alternatives. Indeed even existing forms of energy generation that don't emit greenhouse gases, such as hydroelectric and atomic power, are often rejected by environmentalists. Against progress Underlying environmentalist economics is a profound hostility towards progress. Human advance is seen as inextricably linked to social inequality and war, and scientific experimentation is viewed with suspicion. Environmentalist ideas are a direct attack on the outlook of the Enlightenment. Supporters of the Enlightenment, which reached its peak in the eighteenth century, saw science and reason as indispensable forces in human progress (32). Thinkers such as Condorcet, Denis Diderot, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were key representatives of the Enlightenment. Their ideas helped to inspire the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789. More generally their outlook played a key role in the development of the modern world. From the start the Enlightenment had its opponents. An Essay on the Principle of Population by Malthus was itself a response to the ideas of William Godwin (1756-1836). Godwin's 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice saw reason as a central force in human progress. From the start, environmentalist thinkers attacked the central principles of the Enlightenment. For instance, Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring (1962), generally regarded as the founding text of environmentalism, was opposed to the Enlightenment project of increasing human control over nature. In an American television programme in 1963 she stated that: 'We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man's attitude to nature is today critically important because we have acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature.' (33) No serious scientist would dispute that the earth is a tiny part of an almost unimaginably massive universe. But in relation to the future of humanity, the development of human organisation is a key factor. Humanity has benefited enormously from its increasing capacity to interact and shape the natural world to meet its own ends. Carson's hostility to increasing human control over nature is expressed in many different ways by her successors. Schumacher, for instance, linked it to what he describes as 'human wickedness'. For him the idea that 'the problem of production has been solved' through the emergence of modern industrial society is an abomination. 'The arising of this error, so egregious and so firmly rooted, is closely connected with the philosophical not to say religious, changes during the last three or four centuries in man's attitude to nature... Modern man does not experience himself as part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it' (34). But it is Schumacher who makes an 'egregious' error by collapsing man into nature. It is precisely by striving to overcome natural forces that humanity has advanced. Economic activity is central to separating human beings from mere animals, since it enables us to go far beyond meeting our most basic needs for subsistence. Without a developed economic infrastructure, we wouldn't be able to produce fine art, explore science or indeed write books on the environment. A particular hate figure for environmentalists is Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the earliest advocate of the notion that man should attempt to take control over nature. For Vandana Shiva, one of India's leading environmentalists, his views are akin to rape and torture. She argues that: 'His was not a "neutral", "objective", "scientific" method. Rather it was a peculiarly masculine mode of aggression and domination over women and non-Western cultures. The severe testing of hypotheses through controlled manipulations of nature, and the necessity of such manipulations if experiments are to be repeatable, were formulated by Bacon in clearly sexist metaphors. Both nature and the process of scientific enquiry appear conceptualized in ways modelled on rape and torture - on man's most violent and misogynous relationship with women.' (35) Shiva isn't on the fringes of environmentalist thinking - in 2000 she gave a prestigious BBC Reith lecture as part of a series on 'respect for the earth' (36). Neither is she alone in castigating Bacon in such extreme terms. For instance, a collection edited by Herman Daly includes a 1947 essay in which the author CS Lewis compares Bacon to Marlowe's Faustus - selling his soul to the devil (37). For environmentalists, there is no difference between control over nature and the destruction of the Earth. Mastery of nature is, in this view, synonymous with its obliteration. But for the supporters of the Enlightenment there is a fundamental difference between conquest and destruction. Human mastery of nature means controlling disease, averting natural disasters and above all overcoming scarcity. Conquest of nature is fundamental to human progress, and at the centre of the development of civilisation. Breeding confusion The mainstream advocates of environmentalist economics are wary of launching a full-frontal attack on economic growth. Only the Deep Greens, who represent a small minority, are willing to do so. Instead the normal procedure is to express 'scepticism' about growth. Growth is therefore linked to all sorts of maladies such as environmental damage, social inequality and unhappiness. It is also associated with potential problems in the future such as global warming. If all else fails the deliberately ambiguous concept of 'sustainability' is there to fall back on. There is good reason why environmentalists are coy about attacking growth directly. For they realise that the benefits of economic growth - including better living standards, better health and greater longevity - are enormously popular with the public. Few individuals are likely to welcome a sustained cut in their standard of living. The implementation of environmentalist economics means consigning most of the world's inhabitants to poverty. Even in the developed world there is still a long way to go before material want can be abolished. In the third world the consequences of 'sustainable development', holding back economic growth, are even starker. Carlyle's description of Malthus's approach to economics as 'the dismal science' is only half true when it comes to contemporary environmentalists. It is certainly right to see environmentalism as deeply pessimistic in its perception of human beings. That is why it has so often been proved wrong in its frequent predictions of imminent doom. But it should be seen as a form of quackery rather than dignified with the title of science. Its gross underestimation of human potential, with people being viewed as parasites on the planet, inevitably leads to a misunderstanding of the social world. Daniel Ben-Ami is the author of Cowardly Capitalism: The Myth of the Global Financial Casino, John Wiley and Sons, 2001 (buy this book from [2]Amazon (UK) or [3]Amazon (USA)). Read on: [4]Beyond the Growth Fetish, by Daniel Ben-Ami [5]JK Galbraith goes mainstream, by Daniel Ben-Ami (1) [6]Global Poverty Down By Half Since 1981 But Progress Uneven As Economic Growth Eludes Many Countries, World Bank news release, 23 April 2004 (2) For a more general defence of humanism see Kenan Malik Man, Beast and Zombie London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson 2000 (3) For example, Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation argues that: 'The economy is a 'wholly owned subsidiary' of the environment'. Andrew Simms 'Real world environmental outlook' in Ann Pettifor (ed) Real World Economic Outlook, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p60. (4) Herman Daly makes this distinction. See Herman E Daly (ed) Toward A Steady-State Economy San Francisco: WH Freeman: 1973 (5) See, for example, Joseph J Spengler 'Was Malthus Right?' in Thomas Robert Malthus An Essay on the Principle of Population, Norton Critical Edition.: New York: Norton 1976 (6) For a useful brief discussion of these trends see Vernon W Ruttan '[7]Can economic growth be sustained? A post-Malthusian perspective', Staff Paper P02-2, February 2002. Department of Applied Economics, College of Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Sciences, University of Minnesota (7) The Limits to Growth sold nine million copies in 13 languages, according to Paul Hawken et al Natural Capitalism London: Earthscan 1999, p145 (8) EF Schumacher, Small is Beautiful London: Vintage 1993, p6 (9) For a discussion of growth scepticism see [8]Beyond the growth fetish, by Daniel Ben-Ami (10) See Kenneth Boulding 'The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth' in Thomas Robert Malthus An Essay on the Principle of Population, Norton Critical Edition. Norton: New York 1976 (11) See Garrett Hardin 'The Tragedy of the Commons' in Thomas Robert Malthus An Essay on the Principle of Population, Norton Critical Edition New York: Norton 1976 (12) For example, a section of the influential 1987 Brundtland report on sustainable development was on the 'commons'. Our Common Future, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1987. For a discussion of the commons in relation to intellectual property see [9]The Creative Commons, by Sandy Starr (13) Donella H Meadows et al, The Limits to Growth, New York: Potomac Associates 1972, table 4 p64-7 (14) For a defence of The Limits to Growth see Paul Hawken et al, Natural Capitalism London: Earthscan 1999, p144-146 (15) Paul R Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, New York: Buccaneer 1968, p1 (16) Georgescu-Roegen's book on the subject is The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Harvard 1971. A version of the introduction is available as 'The Entropy Law and the Economic Problem' in Herman E Daly (ed) Toward A Steady-State Economy, San Francisco: WH Freeman 1973. Daly also discusses his work and that of others on the subject in Beyond Growth Boston: Beacon 1996. For a discussion of the idea from a critical perspective see John Gillott and Manjit Kumar, Science and the Retreat from Reason, London: Merlin 1995, p188-191 (17) John Gillott and Manjit Kumar, Science and the Retreat from Reason, London: Merlin 1995,p189. (18) See, for example, [10]Inflaming the oil crisis, by Joe Kaplinsky (19) John Gillott and Manjit Kumar, Science and the Retreat from Reason, London: Merlin 1995,p190 (20) See, for example, EF Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, London: Vintage 1993 (21) For such an approach see 'Partha Dasgupta' 'Economic growth often accompanies a decline in a poor country's wealth' New Statesman 3 November 2003 (22) A Dictionary of Biology, Market House Books 2000 (23) For an environmentalist discussion of 'carrying capacity' see Herman E Daly Beyond Growth Boston: Beacon 1996. For critical views see Frank Furedi Population and Development Cambridge: Polity 1997, p35-6 and James Heartfield 'The Economics of Sustainable Development' in Ian Abley and James Heartfield Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-Machine Age, Chichester: Wiley-Academy, p101 (24) Quoted in [11]The end of the Oil Age, Economist 23 October 2003 (25) See, for example, Ulrich Beck Risk Society, London: Sage 1992 and Anthony Giddens Beyond Left and Right Cambridge: Polity 1994 (26) See, for example, [12]Challenging the precautionary principle, by Helene Guldberg (27) This point is made by JC Hanekamp et al 'The historical roots of precautionary thinking' Journal of Risk Research (forthcoming). The authors argue that The Limits to Growth embodies a precautionary approach even though it does not use the term (28) Our Common Future, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1987, p42 (29) It should be noted that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report, [13]Climate Change 2001: Mitigation, is largely based on social science literature that is heavily influenced by environmentalism (30) See the [14]text of the Kyoto Protocol (31) See [15]Bring back the weathermen, by Joe Kaplinsky (32) See Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment London: Penguin 1982 (33) Quoted in [16]Rachel Carson dies of cancer: 'Silent Spring' author was 56, obituary in New York Times, 15 April 1964 (34) EF Schumacher Small is Beautiful, London: Vintage 1993, p2-3 (35) Vandana Shiva 'Resources' in Wolfgang Sachs (ed), The Development Dictionary London: Zed, p209 (36) See [17]Reith lectures 2000. Other lecturers that year included Gro Harlem Brundtland and Prince Charles. (37) CS Lewis 'The abolition of man' in Herman E Daly (ed) Toward A Steady-State Economy, San Francisco: WH Freeman 1973, p330. Lewis himself was an evangelical Anglican rather than an environmentalist in the later sense References 2. http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471899631/spiked 3. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471899631/spiked-20 4. http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA483.htm 5. http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA64E.htm 6. http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:20194973~menuPK:34463~pagePK:64003015~piPK:64003012~theSitePK:4607,00.html 7. http://agecon.lib.umn.edu/cgi-bin/pdf_view.pl?paperid=3905&ftype=.pdf 8. http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/0000000CA483.htm 9. http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA401.htm 10. http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA562.htm 11. http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?Story_ID=2155717 12. http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000006DE2F.htm 13. http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg3/index.htm 14. http://unfccc.int/resource/convkp.html 15. http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA3F0.htm 16. http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0527.html 17. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/reith_2000/default.stm From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 23 18:30:54 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 13:30:54 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Scientist: Time for Linnaeus to leave the stage Message-ID: Time for Linnaeus to leave the stage http://archive.newscientist.com/secure/article/article.jsp?rp=5&id=mg18324641.800 New Scientist vol 183 issue 2464 - 11 September 2004, page 12 Rethinking the names of every organism on the planet is a radical step but it might be worth the upheaval A BAND of renegade biologists is taking on a mammoth task that threatens to upset a status quo that has been unchallenged for almost 250 years. Put simply, they want to change the way scientists name every living organism on the planet. These rebels say that our system of naming plants, animals, fungi and bacteria, famously introduced by Linnaeus in 1758, is frustrating efforts to understand the living world. They want to replace it with a more rational scheme they call the PhyloCode. Critics have slammed their proposal, arguing that it will be a waste of time and effort that will hinder the urgent task of cataloguing the thousands or even millions of as yet undiscovered species before they go extinct. It could also compromise laws designed to protect biodiversity, placing endangered species at unnecessary risk. Linnaeus developed the now familiar binomial system of nomenclature, in which the name of each species includes its genus. This identifies Homo sapiens, for example, as a member of the genus Homo. That system has since been expanded, so that every identified living species is also placed in a hierarchy that stretches from phylum at the top, down through class, order, family and genus. For instance, the genus Homo belongs to the family Hominidae, which is part of the order Primates, which in turn belongs to the class Mammalia, which is a member of the phylum Chordata. Because this scheme sorts organisms loosely into just a few hierarchical divisions, it tells us relatively little about how they are related in evolutionary terms. And that, advocates of the new naming scheme say, is hindering our understanding of the natural world. "The whole endeavour of trying to understand and communicate about the diversity of life is being compromised by a naming system that is outdated and has bad consequences," says Michael Donoghue, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University. Under the Linnaean system, a taxonomist who wishes to name a group of organisms must also assign that group a rank, such as genus or family. But there are not enough of these to cope with the increasingly complex branching of the evolutionary tree now being discovered. To keep up, taxonomists have been inventing a confusing raft of new ranks, such as phalanxes, infracohorts and supertribes. Even worse, biologists who identify a new group may find they have to change the ranks - and therefore the names - of several other groups in order to maintain some semblance of consistency. This, Donoghue claims, discourages people from naming groups as they are discovered, and thus limits the progress we can make in our understanding of how different groups of animals or plants are related to each other. For example, Donoghue and his colleagues have recently discovered that the genus Potentilla, which belongs in the rose family, does not form a natural evolutionary group, technically known as a clade. A clade is made up of an ancestral species and all its descendants; think of it as that part of an evolutionary tree that would fall off with a single saw cut. One subset of Potentilla does form a clade, but other Potentilla species arise elsewhere in the tree, while plants placed in other genera lie on intermediate branches. To fix the problem, taxonomists would either have to group these other genera within Potentilla - which would mean renaming hundreds of species, including familiar ones such as the strawberry - or restrict the name Potentilla to members of the smaller clade and find new genus names for the rest. Either option involves a huge amount of work shuffling species in and out of genera. The PhyloCode would eliminate the need for that by abolishing genera, families and every other rank above the level of species. Instead, taxonomists would be free to define and name any clade they discover. Donoghue's team could assign a name to the clade they found in Potentilla, but they would be under no obligation to name or rename any other clades at the same time. That will allow naming to track our understanding of biodiversity more closely, says Philip Cantino, a botanist at Ohio University in Athens. Cantino and Kevin de Queiroz, a lizard expert at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, have drafted a set of rules governing PhyloCode names ([11]www.ohiou.edu/phylocode). At a meeting in Paris in July, PhyloCode proponents began the task of applying this code to the Earth's living things. The meeting will form the basis of a book to be published in two or three years' time that will mark the official beginning of PhyloCode names - "the way Linnaeus was the starting point for the other codes," as Donoghue puts it. Though the new system will change the way taxonomists name organisms, PhyloCoders hope that everyone else - even other biologists - will notice little difference. Today's familiar names should still apply. Humans, for example, would be a species called sapiens in a clade called Homo, so we would continue to call ourselves Homo sapiens. The only change is that the clade would no longer have the rank of genus. As innocuous as it sounds, the idea has provoked angry protests from most taxonomists. Taxonomists, already thin on the ground, are frantic to catalogue as much of the world's biodiversity as they can before it disappears. "We're the last generation that will have access to this enormous diversity of species, and to piddle away our time implementing a new system is a tragic waste," says Quentin Wheeler, an insect taxonomist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The implications are more than just academic. The machinery of conservation, from laws like the US Endangered Species Act to international agreements such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, is based on the existing system of names. "Trying to change that system of naming right now would be utter chaos," says John Kress, a botanist at the Smithsonian Institution who works extensively with government agencies on biodiversity issues. Savvy traders in endangered species would be quick to exploit any ambiguities during the changeover, says Dennis Stevenson of the New York Botanical Garden, who serves on the cycad specialist group for the World Conservation Union (IUCN). Donoghue concedes that the transition may bring some uncertainties. "The prudent thing to do is to experiment with this," he says. "Then we'll understand the pros and cons much better and we can either modify things or decide not to do it at all. But my guess is that once we've done the experiment we'll end up strongly preferring the PhyloCode." Given the hostile reception PhyloCode has received so far, they have a lot of convincing to do. Bob Holmes References 11. http://www.ohiou.edu/phylocode From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 23 18:31:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 13:31:27 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Scientist: Simon Blackburn: The world in your head Message-ID: The world in your head http://archive.newscientist.com/secure/article/article.jsp?rp=1&id=mg18324645.100 New Scientist vol 183 issue 2464 - 11 September 2004, page 42 Are you a qualia freak? A zombie? Can our inner world of sensation, colour and subjective experience ever be completely explained? Simon Blackburn weighs up three attempts to reconcile the mystery that is consciousness with a scientific world view NEAR enough 300 years ago, the great Gottfried Leibniz said two interesting things about consciousness. One was that if there were a machine for producing conscious experiences such as perceptions, then even if it were as big as a mill so that we could walk around among the wheels we would find "nothing but pieces which push one against the other and never anything to account for a perception". His other remark was by way of rebuke to John Locke. Locke thought that it was just "God's good pleasure" to "annex" different sensations, such as pain, to various processes of brain and body, such as those caused by a pinprick. Leibniz insisted that it was "not God's way to act in such an unruly and unreasoned fashion". Rather the relation between the "motions" that being pricked by a pin produces in the body, and the felt pain, must be open to understanding and reason: in Leibniz's own analogy, it should be something like the relation between a circle and its projection onto a plane at an angle to it. Stripped of the theological dressing, the point is that we do not understand the relation between mind and body if their connection might as well be pure happenstance, luck or accident, rather than understood necessity. Part of the interest of Leibniz's two remarks is that they fit together uncomfortably. If delving into fine physical and neurological detail is not going to explain the emergence of consciousness, as the first remark suggests, then how will we reach the eureka moment that the second remark promises, the illumination when the relationship between brain and consciousness becomes as obvious and open to rational understanding as that between a circle and a projected ellipse? Leibniz seems to have combined a stringent condition on solving the problem with pessimism about our only avenue to satisfying it. We have not got brains as big as mills, but we have made up for that by inventing a plethora of tools for discriminating events in the brain at ever-increasing levels of detail. Scientists can locate synaptic connections in space and time, and plot families of pathways between areas of brain activity. Each of the works under review delights in the complexities that are uncovered almost daily. They savour the staggering numbers: 30 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex alone; a million billion synapses. They go on to describe two-way interconnections, simultaneous activations of different areas, as well as the surprising examples of functions taking place without conscious experience at all, as in the famous cases of blindsight, and other clinical surprises. It is tempting to hope that with all these new facts at our disposal, we can prove Leibniz's pessimism unfounded. Plenty of writings promise us that we can. The problem of consciousness, if there is one, arises acutely within a framework that almost all scientists and philosophers of mind share. This is the view that all conscious processes, and indeed all mental processes of any kind, are dependent upon the activity of the brain and central nervous system. In modern debates, this is not open to dispute. But within that consensus, there is still the question of just how the dependency works. Are there laws that relate the physical and the mental, and if so, why? A century ago people talked of "emergence": mental activity somehow emerged out of brain activity, like Venus popping out of the sea. But that sounds mysterious, little better than Ren? Descartes' speculation that there was a window between the body and the soul located in the pineal gland. More recent philosophers talk of mental processes as "supervening" on physical processes. Supervenience sounds soothing. It is supposed to be an intelligible version of emergence - Leibniz-friendly emergence, as it were, although not everyone believes it deserves that reputation. In his 1996 book The Conscious Mind, the philosopher David Chalmers felicitously distinguished between problems of consciousness that might be solved by relatively normal science, and what he called "the hard problem", the problem that bothered Locke and Leibniz. The problems accessible to normal science are all those about mental functioning. How does the brain integrate data from different sources? How do long-term and short-term memory interact? What are the effects of damage here or there in the brain? What are the causes and limits of blindsight or of synaesthesia? Any question framed in terms of human perceptual functioning, or motor or other functions, is in principle accessible to scientific understanding, just as the engineer can relate the functioning of the computer chip to its internal architecture. Here, Leibniz's demand for an intelligible relationship is satisfied. By contrast, the hard problem is variously phrased in terms of inner life, the phenomenological feel of things, or the "what it is like" of philosopher Tom Nagel's famous question, "What is it like to be a bat?" It tries to get a grasp on private experience itself, the river that stops only with dreamless sleep, anaesthesia or death. It says that there is an inner dimension to our lives, which is of fundamental importance. Indeed it makes up our whole awareness of ourselves and our world. But the hard problem is to integrate that inner dimension into the scientific world view. Philosophers (and lay people) thinking about this tend to divide into two camps. There are those who take the hard problem seriously. And then there are those dismissive, harder-headed theorists who believe the whole idea of a hard problem is a kind of illusion. Once we have done what the computer engineer can do, and have explained everything about human functioning and the mechanisms on which it depends, we have explained everything. Hard-headed types come in different flavours: reductionists, functionalists or mind-brain identity theorists. Whatever their differences, they join in dismissing the first group as qualia freaks (qualia are the felt or phenomenal properties of conscious events: the painfulness of my pain, felt only by me, for example). Qualia freaks reply that reductionists are insensitive to the difference between a normal person and a zombie, thought of as an unconscious physical duplicate, a thing whose functioning is fine but whose awareness is zero. Here are some diagnostics for whether you believe in the hard problem. Do you find it completely mysterious that the grey brain can produce the yellow perceptual experience? Do you wonder if a sufficiently large piece of visual cortex alive in a Petri dish might be producing such experience? Do you think that although there are conscious experiences, perhaps they are causally inert, having no effect on bodies and brains? Do you think it a bare possibility, even if unlikely, that you are the only conscious agent on Earth, and that other people are all zombies? If you are tempted to answer yes to most of these questions, you believe in the hard problem. A generation ago, most scientists would not have done so. They would have thrown in their lot with reductionism of one kind or another. Science deals with what can be observed, measured and repeated. Human reactions, and their neurophysiological bases, can be operationalised. So the line of least resistance is to deny anything further, anything subjective, which cannot. In psychology, this attitude characterised behaviourism, although more sophisticated functionalist views have now overtaken it. Curiously enough, however, recent neuroscience has tended to sympathise with qualia freaks, as the titles or subtitles of these books illustrate. Each writer believes that there is a hard problem, although Christof Koch holds that we can eventually make it disappear by solving enough easy problems. Each hopes that science can at least creep up on it. A number of developments help to explain this change. One is our increased awareness of the sheer amount of brain activity, and sometimes personal activity, that bypasses consciousness altogether. Many complex sensory-motor reactions are not conscious, and many precede any conscious awareness of the environmental cause that triggered them. So it becomes impossible simply to equate conscious processes with complex functional states of brain and body, for we know of too many such states that have nothing to do with consciousness, and work well enough or better without it. Over most of its activities, a brain is a cluster of small zombies, so we have to postulate something beyond mere function in cases where it is not. A second development is our increased awareness of possible dissociations between events giving rise to conscious experience, and behaviour expressive of that experience. This makes it attractive to think of the conscious experience as something over and above whatever it does, for it may exist without doing anything much at all. This kind of problem is particularly prominent in Jeffrey Gray's book, where the dissociation between visual experience and its normal function is highlighted in experiments on synaesthesia. There are difficulties ahead, however, if you believe in the hard problem. A satisfactory theory of consciousness should protect the idea that consciousness is a good thing. Consciousness makes human life possible. It makes us do things that we might otherwise not have done, and its utility presumably provides the rationale for its evolutionary development. Gerald Edelman is the most forthright of these writers to deny this. He argues that conscious states lie outside the causal order altogether. Physics says that it takes a physical cause to produce a physical effect, and in Edelman's picture the "phenomenal transform" or conscious discriminations that are themselves the result of underlying neural events can have no effects of their own; in the tradition, this is called epiphenomenalism. It is natural to worry that in that case they are just paint on the machinery, and might as well not exist. But in Edelman's view they have to exist although they do nothing: they are "entailed" by sufficiently complex underlying neural states. Entailment here means that there is no possibility of the underlying neural states existing without the supervening consciousness: there is no possibility of zombies. There was, as it were, no remaining Lockean act of "God's good pleasure" to superadd the conscious events on top of the physical events, or to paint the machinery. In the philosophical literature, there are two models of how to understand such an entailment, or in other words to get rid of the idea of any disturbing Lockean remainder. One, made famous by Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam (both these philosophers oppose identity materialism), is to assimilate the case to the identity of water and H[2]O: God or nature had only to make H[2]O (at the right temperature). It took no further dispensation to make water. The other is the Leibnizian model of rational or intelligible analysis, enabling us to see conscious activity as somehow implicit in the right kind of physical activity. The first of these suggests that there is no hard problem at all: there is only the embodied brain and its physical properties. The second seems equally to require a functionalist dismissal of the hard problem, since it is precisely the hard problem that stands in the way of an intelligible relationship between conscious events and others. Readers will need to decide for themselves whether Edelman's approach fits either model, or whether instead, by first cherishing the hard problem, and then helping itself to unexplained entailment, it really suggests only a new name for old-fashioned emergence: magic tissue secreting a magical effect. A related difficulty is that Edelman is suspiciously silent about another classic problem for qualia freaks: if conscious processes have no causal consequences, it remains very obscure how we could know about them, and still more how we could remember them. Indeed, these problems lie at the heart of Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous "private language argument" against the cluster of ideas that animate qualia freaks and motivate the hard problem. Each of these books is stimulating and provoking, and contains a mine of information. The book by Koch, a collaborator of the late Francis Crick, is the heaviest, both in the sense of the largest and the one that goes furthest into neurological and biological detail; his index alone occupies 60 dense pages. Edelman's Wider Than the Sky, as already hinted, is the most forthright and confident. But Jeffrey Gray's Consciousness: Creeping up on the hard problem is remarkable both for the clarity of its expositions, and for the patience with which he explores the prospects for integrating the hard problem into normal science. He does not shrink from counterintuitive conclusions: one of the sections is called "the world is inside the head", and goes on to defend the philosophically unfashionable view that the consciously perceived world is not the real world. We should applaud the sensitivity to philosophical issues that each of these writers shows. They illustrate that just as philosophers of mind must know outlines of the latest scientific thinking, so scientists wrestling with these matters do well to cultivate a philosophical sensitivity. As Koch admits, scientists need to listen to the questions philosophers pose, even if they don't listen to the answers they give. One question we need to prioritise is whether there is a hard question or only a plethora of moderately difficult ones. Here, as scientists like to say, more money is needed for further research. Simon Blackburn Simon Blackburn is professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 23 18:33:22 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 13:33:22 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Tongue Who Would Be King by Dennis Baron Message-ID: The Tongue Who Would Be King by Dennis Baron http://science-spirit.org/articles/printerfriendly.cfm?article_id=450 There are those who believe English could achieve what no other language has: global domination. But our linguistic history shows preeminence leads to resistance, then ruinwhich means English should be looking over its shoulder. At every stage of its history, English has been a borrowing tongue. It adapted the Latin of Irish monks, the Norse of Viking raiders, and the French of Normans bent on regime change. During the Renaissance, English went on a word-coining rampage and swelled its hoard with terms from Greek and Italian. Modern English has absorbed words from just about every language its speakers have encountered: Arabic, Hebrew, Navajo, Yiddish, Polish, Hindi, Bantu, and Japanese, to name but a few. English also affects the languages it touches, and the fact that English is now an exporter causes fear and resentment in some quarters. In the 1930s and 1940s, Germany sought to purify its language along with its population and banned English words. More recently, the French, historically one of English's biggest suppliers, enacted a law to protect their language from the inroads of English, particularly in the areas of commerce and technology, where English is so dominant. During World War II, Japan also tried to purify its tongue, but contemporary Japanese continues to absorb massive amounts of English without much fuss, nativizing the words it borrows, sometimes to the point where English speakers no longer recognize them. Japan has nego, for "negotiation"; kono, for "connection"; and sekuhara, for "sexual harassment." Most cars in the country have English model names that are easily understood, like Toyota's classic sedan, the Toyopet, or the Daihatsu Naked, a far-from-daring minivan. The car names are written in English too, even though Japanese has three writing systems--including one, katakana, designed especially for foreign words. Sing at a karaoke bar in Tokyo, and native patrons will swoon over English smoothly and properly pronounced. And it's not just Japan; around the world, more people are signing up for English lessons than ever before. Travel almost anywhere and you'll find English on signs, on T-shirts, on tips of tongues. Historically, however, the reception of English on the world stage has been mixed. If Shakespeare and the King James Bible solidified the power of English at home, it took the age of exploration and colonization to move English across the border. It was then that the real line was drawn: If you were a colonizer, bringing trade to the impoverished and civilization to the unwashed, English was the language of capital and enlightenment; if you were being colonized, English simply appeared as the language of oppression. While the first protests against English took the form of "Brits out," today the "ugly American" still inspires strident graffiti of the "Yanqui go home" variety. In the eighteenth century, John Adams predicted it would be America, not England, that would catapult English to world-class status, but it wasn't until the twentieth century, after two world wars and the rise of American political and economic influence, that English finally took steps in that direction. Its success has led some to hope, and others to fear, that English may one day be the only language the world will need. Humans are hardwired to learn language, but we don't all learn the same language, and many of us learn more than one. Bilingualism is a fact of life for threequarters of the world. One Renaissance commentator, a Swede, even insisted that Eden was a polyglot paradise where God spoke to Adam in Swedish, Adam replied in Danish, and the serpent tempted Eve in French. And at least one contemporary theorist, French sociolinguist Louis-Jean Calvet, supports the view that humans are naturally bilingual animals and have been from the start. Still, at the turn of the twentieth century, many Americans considered non-English speakers to be less than human. According to a story recounted by the English language specialist Daniel Shanahan, a railroad president told a 1904 congressional hearing on the mistreatment of immigrant workers, "These workers don't suffer--they don't even speak English." Such opposition to nonanglophones and bilinguals has never quite gone away. In June 1995, for example, a district court judge in Amarillo, Texas, accused a mother of child abuse for speaking Spanish to her five-year-old daughter, who would enter kindergarten that year. English, the judge ruled, was necessary to do well in school and without English, he warned, the girl would be condemned to life as a maid. In response to a national outcry over the cruelty of his decision, the judge sensed that some fence-mending was in order and apologized--to maids. He held resolutely to his English-only order, one that many well-meaning people might find appropriate. After all, ninety-seven percent of U.S. residents speak English, and non-English immigrants are picking up English faster than earlier generations did. The Amarillo mother spoke Spanish to her daughter because she knew that as soon as the child entered kindergarten, the girl would lose whatever Spanish she had acquired, and switch entirely to English. Around the physical and virtual world, English is spreading rapidly, which leads many to worry that other languages will decline. Clearly, English is the most powerful and successful language on Earth--synonymous with profit, multinational commerce, international relations, science, rock 'n' roll, and most recently, the Internet. It makes sense that knowing English might facilitate fuller participation in society, might better enable a person to enter into the governmental, economic, academic, and scientific mainstreams. But even though about three-quarters of the world speaks more than one language, getting everybody to speak the same language--even with the best of intentions--proves problematic. Think back to any high school language class and remember how difficult it is to get large groups of people to learn a new tongue. Most people who willingly study English don't ever achieve fluency. Even in India, where English has official status, only five percent of the people actually speak the language. Then there are the psychological effects: Enforcing English on the national or global level sends a negative message, making non-English speakers feel both inferior and unwelcome. And finally, establishing English as the only language would mean deciding that the natural condition of the world is not bilingualism or multilingualism, but rather one language, for one and all. The biblical story of the Tower of Babel laid the groundwork, at least in the West, for the belief that a single language equals a united humanity, and that a reunified humanity might once again reach the heavens. While the search for a Proto- World language, the ancestor of all today's languages, has occupied philologists and theologians for centuries, it remains elusive. Perhaps there wasn't one single language that kicked things off for the human species, and it's not clear that we should end up with a single world language either--English, or otherwise. English started as an obscure language on a small island off the coast of Europe. The nineteenthcentury essayist Thomas De Quincey once sniffed that in its earliest form, English had a vocabulary of only 800 words, most of them having to do with war--a nasty and brutish assessment, but a believable one to anybody who has slogged through Beowulf. Currently, however, English has the largest vocabulary of any language--close to half a million words. The number of English speakers is strong and growing. According to one estimate, 514 million people speak English as their first language. Yes, there are more than a billion speakers of Mandarin Chinese and another half billion who use either Hindi or Urdu, but none of those languages has the international reach of English, which enjoys widespread acceptance as a second or auxiliary language. English has official status in former British colonies like India and Nigeria, and all around the globe it's the most common lingua franca, a third language to be used when two people who don't share a common first language need to communicate. About 400 million people speak reasonably fluent English as their second language, and as many as another billion have learned some English as a foreign language. In contrast, French, which not that long ago was the preferred language of diplomacy, war, and high society, not to mention haute cuisine, has only 129 million speakers today. There are fewer speakers of French in the world than of Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, or even Bengali. But real evidence of the decline of French is the fact that its orbit has shrunk: French remains a second language in some former colonies, but it has lost its ?clat in the councils of power, in the foreign language classroom, and even on the menu. Now English is the foreign language everyone must learn if they want to communicate beyond their borders, beyond their neighborhoods, or beyond their labs. Scientists around the world who don't read and publish in English risk becoming marginalized: They will be unable to take advantage of the latest findings in their fields, and their own work will go unread and unrecognized by the international scientific community. Writers in nonanglophone countries agonize over their own literary dilemma: whether to publish in their national or local language to reach their compatriots and keep their culture vital and productive, or to write in English to secure an international audience and the stature that may come along with it. For some, the fact that English is the international language of science is reason enough to promote it globally; the further advance of the language would be a natural and rational process. Agree or not, is it even possible for English to become the only language people learn, eventually displacing the other 6,800 languages currently being used and turning the planet into a monolingual Brave New World? By virtue of its global sway, could English push all other languages to the brink, much in the way that Wal-Mart drives out mom-and-pop stores? Using history as a guide, we know that every language that has so far qualified as universal has not been able to make the leap to world domination; rather, all of these languages have receded or disappeared. Latin, which came from a few dusty Italian farms and cities, was the language of politics and government, of law and education, of science and religion, from the time of the Roman Empire through the Renaissance. As late as the eighteenth century, to be literate meant to know Latin. If your universe was Western Europe, Latin was the universal language-- so much so that we still honor it on our money. We just don't speak it anymore. French, which actually grew out of Latin, had a brief turn as the world language, but in the end it was English that took Latin's place as master of the linguistic universe. Of course, as nations continue to jockey for political and economic power, and the linguistic influence that flows from it, there's always the chance that English will share the fate of French and Latin. After all, no language has been the master of the universe for very long. Some are prepared for such a case, having already designated a replacement for English were it to disappear. Hawaiian has its supporters as a candidate for the next world language, as does Finnish. The desire to return to the pre-Babel days, when a single language was spoken and no translation was necessary, prompted several hundred visionaries over the years to invent languages that would be immediately understandable by anyone who encounters them. The most famous of these artificial languages is Esperanto, which claims about 2 million speakers worldwide. Its creator had two goals: to produce an auxiliary language that would let people communicate easily across cultures and to promote world peace. The creators of languages like Volapuk, Ido, Novial, and Solresol (the last based on the musical scale) were similarly optimistic about furthering international accord through mutual understanding. So far as international cooperation goes, however, the two Irelands, the two Koreas, and India and Pakistan (India's Hindi and Pakistan's Urdu use different writing systems but the spoken languages are mutually intelligible), show us that having a common language doesn't necessarily lead to either mutual understanding or peaceful coexistence. In any case, the small number of speakers adopting these artificial languages isn't enough to move the world toward peace. If sweet reason hasn't converted the world, let alone a single nation, to one language, neither has the use of force. For many years in America, young speakers of Spanish, Navajo, Chinese, and other minority languages were beaten, humiliated, or given detention if they used their first language in the classroom or on the schoolyard. Around the same time an Amarillo judge accused a Spanish-speaking mother of child abuse, a small Texas insurance agency fired two women bilingual in English and Spanish, hired for their ability to speak to Hispanic customers, because these women spoke Spanish rather than English to each other. Knowing English is one thing; forcing people to use it is quite another. As any student failing a language requirement knows, you can't make a person speak a "foreign" language. If English can't be enforced at home, it certainly couldn't be required abroad. For a good part of the twentieth century, Russia tried to force its language on a huge expanse of Europe and Asia, and we know how that turned out. Latin may not have fallen in a day, but with the rapid collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian lost most of its clout almost overnight. The truth is that when one language begins to dominate, and its presence is felt internationally, resistance movements stimulate a resurgence of local language vitality. The Internet provides a perfect example of what happens: In its first decade, Web life was almost entirely in English, and when computer users in other countries began to log on, they found an English monopoly. But this was only temporary; while it's estimated that over half of all Internet Web sites are still in English, the percentage of other languages on the Web is growing as more and more countries acquire computer technology. On the world scene, language loyalty trumps the incursion of English every time. So while English plays an important role in the increasingly multilingual, globalizing world, global language is not following rapidly on the heels of multinational corporations. Rather than imposing a standard language on an unwilling world, English itself is going native, forming local varieties with distinctly local forms and flavors wherever it lands. Because of this, sociolinguists have begun speaking not of English, but of Englishes, the plural emphasizing the increasing diversity that English experiences as it shows up in new places and contexts. We call Latin a dead language because there haven't been native speakers of Latin for centuries, but the language didn't actually die. Instead, the Latin spoken in different parts of Europe gradually differentiated to form what we now call the Romance languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian being the most familiar. The process took several centuries. With English differentiating as it spreads across the planet, it could meet Latin's fate and morph into new tongues. This kind of language birth isn't likely to happen though--in fact it hasn't happened on any large scale since Latin made like a noun and declined. The centripetal force of global communications and international travel works against that outcome. But if--or when, as some would say--the English-speaking world loses its political and economic hegemony to Europe or the Pacific Rim, the power of the English language will be relaxed and the world's Englishes will be left free to diverge from one another. The future of English is tricky to predict. Will it unite the world and take us back to Eden, or divide the world even further and lead us to a new Babel? Or will it simply lose its vitality and shuffle off this mortal coil, leaving the stage to a yetto- be-named player? For now, though, Finnish and Hawaiian must wait in the wings, for barring nuclear disaster, it looks as if English will remain the 800-pound gorilla of the world's languages for a little while yet. Related stories: [3]Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave [4]Lost In Translation [5]Something New Under the Sun References 3. http://science-spirit.org/articles/Articledetail.cfm?article_ID=452 4. http://science-spirit.org/articles/Articledetail.cfm?article_ID=461 5. http://science-spirit.org/articles/Articledetail.cfm?article_ID=454 From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 23 18:34:46 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 13:34:46 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave by David Crystal Message-ID: Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave by David Crystal http://science-spirit.org/articles/printerfriendly.cfm?article_id=452 The Internet has proven itself to be the next leg of a linguistic revolution that began with the slow, steady spread of English and the death of other languages. by David Crystal Linguistics used to be a much simpler affair: There was American English and there was the Queens English. There was speech and there was writing. There were thousands of languages, none of them global in stature. There were certainly no smileys. Those days are gone. Now, with a sequence of characters on the computer keyboard, we can tack happy little faces onto the end of our sentences (a colon represents the eyes, a dash the nose, and the right parenthesis the mouth:-). We can cut and paste by taking words from one place in an e-mail and adding them somewhere else. Web pages change in front of our eyes: Words appear and disappear in varying colors, sentences slide onto the screen and off again, letters dance around. Its revolutionary, the Internet. Any linguists worth their salt cant help but be impressed. If nothing else, the Internet deserves great credit for granting us a mode of communication more dynamic than traditional writing and more permanent than traditional speech. In fact, electronic communication is neither writing nor speech per se. Rather, it allows us to take features from each medium and adapt them to suit a new form of expression. The way we use language is changing at breakneck speed. It has often been said that the Internet is a social revolution. Indeed it is, but it is a linguistic revolution as well. Consider traditional writing, which has always been permanent; you open a book at page six, close the book, then open it at page six again, and you expect to see the same thing. You would be more than a little surprised if the books page had changed in the interim. But on Web pages, this kind of impermanence is perfectly normal. Then there are the hypertext links, the basic functional unit of the Web. These are the links you click on in order to go from one part of a page to another, from one page to another, or from one site to another. The nearest thing we have in writingthe footnote or the cross-referenceis always an optional extra, and there is nothing like this in speech. Real-time Internet discussion groups, or chat rooms, allow a user to see messages coming in from all over the world. If there are thirty people in the chat room, its possible to see thirty different messages, all making various contributions to a theme. In a unique way, you can listen to thirty people at once, or have a conversation with them all at the same time; you can monitor what each one of those people is saying, and respond to as many of them as your mental powers and typing speed permit. This too is a revolutionary state of affairs, as far as speech is concerned. What so many people now understand is that there are very specific ways in which the Internet is changing our linguistic experience. There are symbolic ways as well. The Internet is part of a larger revolution, with two other major trends working in tandem. For one, English has emerged as a global language. For another, we are in the midst of a creeping crisis: Thousands of languages are dying out. When the World Wide Web came along, it offered a home to all languagesas soon as their communities had functioning computer technology, of course. While the Internet started out as a totally English medium, its increasingly multilingual character has been its most notable change. To get a sense of just how radical this change has been, consider the fact that in the mid-1990s, it was widely quoted that eighty percent of Internet pages were in English. By 1998, however, the number of newly created Web sites not in English was greater than the total number of newly created sites that were in English. Since then, estimates for how much information on the Web is in English have fallen steadily. Already, some have put the amount at less than fifty percent. On the other hand, the presence of other languages has steadily increased. Its estimated that about one-quarter of the worlds languages have some sort of cyber existence now, and as communications infrastructure expands in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America, the Internet as a whole will soon be significantly non-English. The Internet has turned out to be the ideal medium for minority languages. If you are a speaker or supporter of an endangered languagean aboriginal language, say, or one of the Celtic languagesyoure keen to give the language some publicity, to draw the worlds attention to its plight. Previously, this was very difficult to do. It was hard to attract a newspaper article on the subject, and the cost of a newspaper advertisement was prohibitive. It was virtually impossible to get a radio or television program devoted to it. Surely, by the time someone wrote a book about one of these languages, got it published, and everyone read it, the language might well be uttering its last words. But now, with Web pages and e-mail, you can get your message out in next to no time, in your own languagewith a translation as well, if you want. Chat rooms are a boon to speakers of minority languages who live in isolation from each other, as they can now belong to a virtual speech community. The Web offers a World Wide Welcome for global linguistic diversity. And in an era when so many languages of the world are dying, such optimism is truly revolutionary. It is a real art to be able to make sense of a revolution as its happening, to not leave it up to the historians to later analyze its impact and effects. Revolutions are fast and dynamic by nature, radical shifts that take place in a short period of time. We are now at a transformative step in the evolution of human language. The linguistic originality and novelty of the Internet should make our hearts beat faster. It is offering us a future of communication radically different from that of the past. It is presenting us with styles of expression that are fundamentally unlike anything we have seen before. It is revising our cherished concepts of the way we think about the life of a language. Electronic communication has brought us to the brink of the biggest language revolution ever, and it is exciting to be in at its beginning. Related stories: [3]The Tongue Who Would Be King [4]Lost In Translation [5]Something New Under the Sun References 3. http://science-spirit.org/articles/Articledetail.cfm?article_ID=450 4. http://science-spirit.org/articles/Articledetail.cfm?article_ID=461 5. http://science-spirit.org/articles/Articledetail.cfm?article_ID=454 From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 23 18:36:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 13:36:12 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Lost In Translation by Soo Ji Min Message-ID: Lost In Translation by Soo Ji Min http://science-spirit.org/articles/printerfriendly.cfm?article_id=461 Billions of people on this Earth collectively speak thousands of languages, many of which are endangered. As each tongue slips into extinction, a unique way of viewing the world goes with it. Along with the words and sounds, entire traditions and the cultural fabric they weave may disappear in the process. Vassilij Gabov leans forward to address the ninety-six-year-old woman on the other side of the couch. In gravelly Russian, the native Siberian asks Varvara Budeeva where she's from. There's no answer. Gabov repeats the question. Still unable to provoke a response, the heavy-set man moves across the couch and sits directly beside Budeeva. Seamlessly switching to a different language, he shouts into her ear: "Where were you born? What clan are you from?" Had Gabov been wearing a black suit, dark sunglasses, and shiny wingtip shoes, he might be mistaken for a mobster interrogating a recalcitrant witness. But his weathered face and soft eyes convey only the best of intentions. In reality, Gabov lives in Tegul'det, a remote village in central Siberia. The former truck driver has been hired as a guide and translator for American linguists spending ten days on a pilot language expedition in southwestern Siberia. K. David Harrison, a specialist in Tuvan and other Siberian languages, is searching for native speakers of Middle Chulym (chew-LIM), a language on the brink of extinction. Harrison is having trouble getting started. The first Chulym speaker he and Gabov located was completely deaf; the second was incoherent. Budeeva was next on the list, and while she never does answer Gabov's questions--because, as luck would have it, she too is totally deaf--she becomes the fourth recorded speaker of Middle Chulym when she steps outside to wave goodbye to her visitors and speaks the Chulym word for "dog" while pointing at her pet. But it is Gabov, whose shift from Russian to Chulym surprises everyone in the room, who reveals himself as the third, and most intriguing, of thirty-five native speakers Harrison will find concentrated in six isolated villages in southwestern Siberia. Just two days earlier, Gabov spoke only Russian to Harrison. Fearing that his Chulym was deficient, Gabov kept his knowledge of his native tongue hidden, leading Harrison to a pair of older Chulym speakers instead. But spurred as much by Harrison's quest as by the researcher's video camera and voice recorder, Gabov reached out to Budeeva, and made a connection through a shared language that had retreated as much from his mind as from his tongue. And in that instant he became, at fifty-two years old, the youngest known speaker of Middle Chulym. "The way you talk identifies the group you belong to," says David Lightfoot, dean of Georgetown University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a professor of linguistics. "A language essentially disappears because people choose at some level of consciousness to adopt another group's language ... it's an act of allegiance to one culture and a rejection of another culture." But more than the rejection of a culture, the death of a language can be a step toward the death of the culture it expresses and embodies. Encoded in Middle Chulym, and in every language, are clues to how people lived--kinship systems, economies, livelihood, and leisure. "Language conveys evidence of cultural phenomena," says Lightfoot. "If a language disappears then the cultural evidence disappears also, because it was only embedded in the language." Nearly 3,500 of the world's languages are at risk of extinction in one lifetime--roughly half the world's total. And there's little stopping the dissolution of the Turkic language that originated on the upper reaches of the Chulym River in the district of Tomsk. In a community of 426, only thirty-five elders are fluent speakers. The rest speak Russian only. "It's a moribund language," says Harrison. Until he arrived last summer, Harrison, who spends the school year teaching at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, says the Chulym people had not been visited by a scientist since a group of Soviet linguists came through in 1972. Even then, their language had only been written down by the scientists in a few notebooks and locked away in an archive. Unless something is done to revive the language and cultivate it within the younger generation, Chulym, and much of the culture it reflects, will completely vanish over the next thirty to forty years. "A working language conveys so much about a culture-- ethics, history, love, family dynamics--in short: the whole life of a people," says Diane Ackerman, a visiting professor at Cornell University and author of An Alchemy of the Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain. "To lose a single language is like watching a species of animal go extinct and know it will never occur again on the planet." Already starting to fade from the Chulym cultural landscape are ancestral hunting stories that once were verbally shared, retold, and embellished. Tales about bears, for example, never mentioned the word "bear" directly, explains Harrison. "They would say `furry one' or `brown animal.'" For the Chulym, the bear is a mystical animal to be both feared and respected. It is a powerful symbol, one that demands special rituals be performed to assuage the bear's spirit. These rituals formed part of an animistic belief system, which holds that spirits inhabit inanimate objects--rocks, trees, bodies of water--as well as living creatures. But these same tales, told in Russian, are mere skeletons of the originals. As the Russian language absorbed the Chulym speakers, these stories were relegated to the recesses of the Chylum minds and culture, weakening their animistic religious beliefs. At one time, special practitioners called qam were prevalent in traditional society. Similar to shamans, they functioned as experts at interacting with the spirit world, and were called upon in dire situations, such as serious illness or death. Harrison discovered that at most, only two people still alive in the community might actually have seen a shamanic ritual with their own eyes--one of them being Varvara Budeeva. Shamans disappeared long ago from Chulym society because native Siberians and Russians were converted to Orthodox Christianity, which forbade Shamanic practices. "We feel that [animism and Shamanism] are two really essential elements in their culture and even though they've mostly been forgotten, there are little scraps left that you can look at," says Harrison. Recording these ancient tales on paper, however, may produce nothing more than additional cultural remnants. Lost in the transition from the spoken word to the written word is the vibrant history and oral traditions encoded in the Middle Chulym language. These codes, according to Harrison, survive only through speech. "The great majority of the world's languages have no writing system at all, and they do just fine without it," he says. "No writing system has ever been devised that is capable of capturing the full complexity and richness of language." So when a language draws its last breath and disappears, Harrison worries that a unique way of seeing the world dies with it--an extinction of ideas. how the mind produces, processes, and understands language is severely compromised as languages wither and fade. In order for linguists to answer the question posed by Noam Chomsky: "What is a possible human language?" they must examine all human languages. To many linguists, the question is simply unanswerable if one looks only at major world languages like Chinese, Russian, or Spanish. Smaller, local languages often provide evidence of new types of linguistic structures or typologies. In all languages, for example, a sentence may contain a subject, object, and a verb--of which six possible configurations exist. Until recently, Harrison says, linguists had found only five of the six combinations employed in human language. The discovery of the missing link--object, verb, then subject--was made by Desmond Derbyshire, who found this usage in the endangered Amazonian language Hixkaryana. "The languages that are disappearing are most unusual in their structures compared to the majority languages that are displacing them," says Doug Whalen, president of the Connecticut-based Endangered Language Fund. "There is a global tendency for [majority languages] to be less complicated than [smaller languages] morphologically. English has been simplifying its morphology for centuries ... `Thou,' for example, has disappeared from modern usage." If these smaller languages go extinct without being documented, warns Harrison, "we simply will never know the full range of human cognitive capacity because many of the less likely and rarer types of complex structures will have disappeared." Some language experts offer translation as a modern antidote to language loss. "After all, we can translate pretty well from one language to another," says Steven Pinker, a linguist and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. "During World War II, the Navajo Code Talkers managed to transfer pretty arcane modern military secrets using the Navajo language." But, argues Harrison, specialized knowledge encoded in a native language and used in a particular context or setting can be lost when speakers shift from one language to another, more dominant tongue. The Middle Chulym, for example, once relied on fishing as their primary means of subsistence. Their language would have reflected this--using detailed words to describe fishing nets and traps, a fish's lifecycle, behaviors, body parts--and would have had a fairly complex classification system. "When the Middle Chulym switch over to speaking Russian, they lose some of this knowledge," argues Harrison. "It's very hard to prove, but that's my starting hypothesis--that there are complex knowledge systems in any language, but especially in languages where people live very closely to the land and are dependent on it." Even in situations where a language's structure remains, the way the native language is used changes, often taking on the speaking style and attitudes of the more dominant language. "The way we experience language is not through its structure directly, but the way its structure gets used in making continuous discourse," explains Michael Silverstein, Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor in the departments of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology at the University of Chicago. As a native language group shifts to acquiring a more dominant one, the replacing language can, over time, wreak havoc on the weaker language. "It's the subtle ways in which a culturally distinctive communicative perspective emerges in the process of actually using language that gets very much transformed and frequently destroyed over a couple of generations." After recording a Chulym bear story, for example, Harrison played it back to a sixteen-year-old with some knowledge of Chulym. The young listener understood that the story had something to do with a bear, but nothing more. The key to accessing the rich meaning and history locked behind a simple tale was lost with the demise of the Chulym language. "The kids know their grandparents speak some funny other language, but they don't know what it is," Harrison says, noting he found just four "passive speakers" of the language-- all in their mid-thirties--in addition to the thirty-five fluent speakers. "It's hard to imagine what it would take exactly to get them interested enough to learn it." Once marginalized, a language often struggles to survive, but bringing a language back from the brink of extinction takes intensive effort, money, and community support. Because the Chuylm community is impoverished and small, the chances are good that its native language will die. "When that particular mode of communication disappears, they will be completely deprived of their own history and culture," says Naoki Sakai, a professor of Japanese history and literature at Cornell University. The Soviet Union's role in the gradual demise of the Chulym language began in the 1940s when Joseph Stalin ordered Chulym and other Siberian children to attend boarding schools and prohibited the instruction of any non-Russian language. As children, Gabov and other Chulym speakers were effectively forced to abandon their mother tongue. "Chulym was viewed as a gutter language," explains Gabov, reverting back to the Russian he is more comfortable speaking. Chulym, if spoken at all, was confined to the privacy of individual homes. Ashamed and afraid to speak Chulym in public, many hid their knowledge of their native tongue, as Gabov did when he first met Harrison. The plight of the language worsened in the 1970s as the Soviet government implemented its "village consolidation program," forcibly relocating the Chulym into larger, Russianspeaking settlements--further diluting the population base and thinning the concentration of native speakers. [nov04_lost.jpg] To some linguists, the shift from Chulym to Russian is as much evidence of a natural evolution as it is a result of sociopolitical pressure. While lamenting the potential loss of subject matter and culture, Lightfoot maintains a scholarly distance. "I don't think linguists are in a position to say to people, `You should do all you can to preserve your language.' It's an individual choice and a Darwinian process. There's not much we [as linguists] should do about it." But sometimes the true preferences of native speakers are not readily apparent to the linguistic community at large. When he found Gabov last summer, Harrison not only located a driver and a guide, he discovered a living reminder that language may be banished from the tongue, but not necessarily from the mind. Growing up in the shadow of the linguistic repression imposed by the Soviet Union, Gabov had every reason to completely discard his native tongue--fully and finally forgetting that part of his heritage. But for a three-year period in the late 1980s, he did just the opposite. Each day during the winter hunting season, Gabov made entries into a journal. A written journal. Developing an orthography adapted from the Russian alphabet, the same man who for days hid his knowledge of the language Harrison was seeking actually devised a system of writing it down. Sadly, the linguistic insecurities Gabov displayed when Harrison first met him are deep-seated. When Gabov shared his creation with a Russian acquaintance, he was promptly ridiculed for his attempts. At that point, Gabov says, he threw away his journal and did not write again. Any possibility of a written record of the fading language would likely have died with Gabov's entries had it not been for his chance meeting with Harrison. Gabov was able to reproduce his system for Harrison, who, in turn, plans to publish both a children's storybook and an elementary primer--both written in Middle Chulym, and both at the request of the Chulym tribal council. When the storybook is printed next year, it will include an encounter between Gabov and a moose, along with a bearhunting story and a tale of a Shamaness, as told by Varvara Budeeva. The text will be augmented with illustrations drawn by Middle Chulym children who listened to the stories as read to them in Russian. While it may be too late to preserve the Chulym language as a medium for daily communication and repository of traditional knowledge among the Chulym people, it is not too late to record it, and in so doing make at least some small part of the knowledge available to future generations--particularly the young Chulym. "These languages need to be documented for science," Harrison says, "and for the native community itself." Related stories: [3]The Tongue Who Would Be King [4]Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave [5]Something New Under the Sun [6]Vanishing Voices: What Else is Lost References 3. http://science-spirit.org/articles/Articledetail.cfm?article_ID=450 4. http://science-spirit.org/articles/Articledetail.cfm?article_ID=452 5. http://science-spirit.org/articles/Articledetail.cfm?article_ID=454 6. http://science-spirit.org/articles/Articledetail.cfm?article_ID=453 From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sun Jan 23 19:55:23 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 11:55:23 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] hate In-Reply-To: <200501231948.j0NJmRC29170@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050123195523.23230.qmail@web30805.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>Many of us feel that the election was stolen (again) and that Bush is a war criminal. How can we make peace with that? This is a time for conflict, not peace-making.<< --Hate attracts hate, love attracts love. It is a psychological law and one of the driving forces in history. I cannot hate Bush and claim to be a person of peace. Hating anyone drives them further away from understanding. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - Get yours free! http://my.yahoo.com From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Jan 23 20:56:00 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 12:56:00 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] hate Message-ID: <01C5014A.E4105350.shovland@mindspring.com> Why should I love someone who has gone out and killed thousands of people for no reason? I am not interesting in understanding him, only in seeing him brought to justice. I am not in this case a man of peace, but rather a psychic warrior :-) In general, I think conservatives tend to have rigid minds, which makes them prone to shattering when they are effectively challenged. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2005 11:55 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] hate >>Many of us feel that the election was stolen (again) and that Bush is a war criminal. How can we make peace with that? This is a time for conflict, not peace-making.<< --Hate attracts hate, love attracts love. It is a psychological law and one of the driving forces in history. I cannot hate Bush and claim to be a person of peace. Hating anyone drives them further away from understanding. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - Get yours free! http://my.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sun Jan 23 23:32:43 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 15:32:43 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] failure of the system In-Reply-To: <200501231948.j0NJmRC29170@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050123233243.3969.qmail@web30806.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>I am sure there are as many people who got easy money on a free market and are living off that without producing anything. Isn't that a failure of that system?<< --Interesting question. In the biological model, that would have to be "yes". Cells that store up energy and don't release it, are useless to the organism. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sun Jan 23 23:34:20 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 15:34:20 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] confessional In-Reply-To: <200501231948.j0NJmRC29170@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050123233420.37336.qmail@web30801.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>Another segregating factor, usually ignored, is confessional. If I had a research grant of millions of dollars to spend on a dietary study, I would target religious groups. I would see if there is a connection between confession and shape.<< --Why just religious groups? Unburdening yourself is a healthy thing, regardless of dogma. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - Get yours free! http://my.yahoo.com From waluk at earthlink.net Mon Jan 24 19:10:25 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 11:10:25 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] failure of the system References: <20050123233243.3969.qmail@web30806.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <00b401c50248$5d56aef0$1e03f604@S0027397558> Where I come from (out west in California) it is called Freeloader. Gerry ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Christopher" To: Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2005 3:32 PM Subject: [Paleopsych] failure of the system > >>>I am sure there are as many people who got easy > money on a free market and are living off that > without > producing anything. Isn't that a failure of that > system?<< > > --Interesting question. In the biological model, that > would have to be "yes". Cells that store up energy > and > don't release it, are useless to the organism. > > Michael > > > > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. > http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 24 21:29:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:29:19 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Tech. Rev.: (de Grey) Do You Want to Live Forever? (w. replies) Message-ID: Do You Want to Live Forever? http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/02/issue/feature_aging.asp?p=0 By Sherwin Nuland Febuary 2005 [replies beneath, including one by de Grey himself] Wandering through the quadrangles and medieval bastions of learning at the University of Cambridge one overcast Sunday afternoon a few months ago, I found myself ruminating on how this venerable place had been a crucible for the scientific revolution that changed humankinds perceptions of itself and of the world. The notion of Cambridge as a source of grand transformative concepts was very much on my mind that day, because I had traveled to England to meet a contemporary Cantabrigian who aspires to a historical role similar to those enjoyed by Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and William Harvey. Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey is convinced that he has formulated the theoretical means by which human beings might live thousands of yearsindefinitely, in fact. Perhaps theoretical is too small a word. De Grey has mapped out his proposed course in such detail that he believes it may be possible for his objective to be achieved within as short a period as 25 years, in time for many readers of Technology Review to avail themselves of its formulationsand, not incidentally, in time for his 41-year-old self as well. Like Bacon, de Grey has never stationed himself at a laboratory bench to attempt a single hands-on experiment, at least not in human biology. He is without qualifications for that, and makes no pretensions to being anything other than what he is, a computer scientist who has taught himself natural science. Aubrey de Grey is a man of ideas, and he has set himself toward the goal of transforming the basis of what it means to be human. For reasons that his memory cannot now retrieve, de Grey has been convinced since childhood that aging is, in his words, something we need to fix. Having become interested in biology after marrying a geneticist in 1991, he began poring over texts, and autodidacted until he had mastered the subject. The more he learned, the more he became convinced that the postponement of death was a problem that could very well have real solutions and that he might be just the person to find them. As he reviewed the possible reasons why so little progress had been made in spite of the remarkable molecular and cellular discoveries of recent decades, he came to the conclusion that the problem might be far less difficult to solve than some thought; it seemed to him related to a factor too often brushed under the table when the motivations of scientists are discussed, namely the small likelihood of achieving promising results within the period required for academic advancementcareerism, in a word. As he puts it, High-risk fields are not the most conducive to getting promoted quickly. De Grey began reading the relevant literature in late 1995 and after only a few months had learned so much that he was able to explain previously unidentified influences affecting mutations in mitochondria, the intracellular structures that release energy from certain chemical processes necessary to cell function. Having contacted an expert in this area of research who told him that he had indeed made a new discovery, he published his first biological research paper in 1997, in the peer-reviewed journal BioEssays (A Proposed Refinement of the Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging, de Grey, ADNJ, BioEssays 19(2)161166, 1997). By July 2000, further assiduous application had brought him to what some have called his eureka moment, the insight he speaks of as his realization that aging could be described as a reasonably small set of accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular changes in our bodies, each of which is potentially amenable to repair. This concept became the theme of all the theoretical investigation he would do from that moment on; it became the leitmotif of his life. He determined to approach longevity as what can only be called a problem in engineering. If it is possible to know all the components of the variety of processes that cause animal tissues to age, he reasoned, it might also be possible to design remedies for each of them. All along the way, de Grey would be continually surprised at the relative ease with which the necessary knowledge could be masteredor at least, the ease with which he himself could master it. Here I must issue a caveat, a variant of those seen in television commercials featuring daredevilish stunts: Do not attempt this on your own. It is extremely hazardous and requires special abilities. For if you can take a single impression away from spending even a modicum of time with Aubrey de Grey, it is that he is the possessor of special abilities. As he surveyed the literature, de Grey reached the conclusion that there are seven distinct ingredients in the aging process, and that emerging understanding of molecular biology shows promise of one day providing appropriate technologies by which each of them might be manipulatedperturbed, in the jargon of biologists. He bases his certainty that there are only seven such factors on the fact that no new factor has been discovered in some twenty years, despite the flourishing state of research in the field known as biogerontology, the science of aging; his certainty that he is the man to lead the crusade for endless life is based on his conception that the qualification needed to accomplish it is the mindset he brings to the problem: the goal-driven orientation of an engineer rather than the curiosity-driven orientation of the basic scientists who have made and will continue to make the laboratory discoveries that he intends to employ. He sees himself as the applied scientist who will bring the benisons of molecular biology to practical use. In the analogous terminology often used by historians of medicine, he is the clinician who will bring the laboratory to the bedside. And so, in order to achieve his goal of transforming our society, de Grey has transformed himself. His day job, as he calls it, is relatively modest; he is the computer support for a genetics research team, and his entire official working space occupies a corner of its small lab. And yet he has achieved international renown and more than a little notoriety in the field of aging, not only for the boldness of his theories, but also because of the forcefulness of his proselytizing on their behalf. His stature has become such that he is a factor to be dealt with in any serious discussion of the topic. De Grey has documented his contributions in the scientific literature, publishing scores of articles in an impressive array of journals, including those of the quality of Trends in Biotechnology and Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, as well as contributing commentary and letters to other publications like Science and Biogerontology. De Grey has been indefatigable as a missionary in his own cause, joining the appropriate professional societies and evangelizing in every medium available to him, including sponsoring his own international symposium. Though he and his ideas may be sui generis, he is hardly an isolated monkish figure content to harangue the heavens and desert winds with his lonely philosophy. In addition to everything else, he has a remarkable talent for organization and even for his own unique brand of fellowship. The sheer output of his pen and tongue is staggering, and every line of that bumper crop, whether intended for the most scientifically sophisticated or for the general reader, is delivered in the same linear, lucid, point-by-point style that characterizes all his writings on life prolongation. Like a skilled debater, he replies to arguments before they arise and hammers at his opposition with a forceful rhetoric that has just enough dismissivenessand sometimes even castigationto betray his impatience with stragglers in the march toward extreme longevity. De Grey is a familiar figure at meetings of scientific societies, where he has earned the respect of many gerontologists and that new variety of theoreticians known as futurists. Not only has his work put him at the forefront of a field that might best be called theoretical biogerontology, but he swims close enough to the mainstream that some of its foremost researchers have agreed to add their names to his papers and letters as coauthors, although they may not agree with the full range of his thinking. Among the most prominent are such highly regarded figures as Bruce Ames of the University of California and the University of Chicagos Leonid Gavrilov and S. Jay Olshansky. Their attitude toward de Grey is perhaps best expressed by Olshansky, who is a senior research scientist in epidemiology and biostatistics: Im a big fan of Aubrey; I love debating him. We need him. He challenges us and makes us expand our way of thinking. I disagree with his conclusions, but in science thats okay. Thats what advances the field. De Grey has by his vigorous efforts brought together a cohort of responsible scientists who see just enough theoretical value in his work to justify not only their engagement but also their cautious encouragement. As Gregory Stock, a futurist of biologic technology currently at UCLA, pointed out to me, de Greys proposals create scientific and public interest in every aspect of the biology of aging. Stock, too, has lent his name to several of de Greys papers. De Grey enjoys increasing fame as well. He is often called upon when journalists need a quote on antiaging science, and he has been the subject of profiles in publications as varied as Fortune, Popular Science, and Londons Daily Mail. His tireless efforts at thrusting himself and his theories into the vanguard of a movement in pursuit of a goal of eternal fascination to the human mind have put him among the most prominent proponents of antiaging science in the world. His timing is perfect. As the baby boomersperhaps the most determinedly self-improving (and self-absorbed) generation in historyare now approaching or have reached their early 60s, there is a plenitude of eager seekers after the death-defiant panaceas he promises. De Grey has become more than a man; he is a movement. I should declare here that I have no desire to live beyond the life span that nature has granted to our species. For reasons that are pragmatic, scientific, demographic, economic, political, social, emotional, and secularly spiritual, I am committed to the notion that both individual fulfillment and the ecological balance of life on this planet are best served by dying when our inherent biology decrees that we do. I am equally committed to making that age as close to our biologically probable maximum of approximately 120 years as modern biomedicine can achieve, and also to efforts at decreasing and compressing the years of morbidity and disabilities now attendant on extreme old age. But I cannot imagine that the consequences of doing a single thing beyond these efforts will be anything but baleful, not only for each of us as an individual, but for every other living creature in our world. Another action I cannot imagine is enrolling myselfas de Grey haswith Alcor, the cryonics company that will, for a price, preserve a customers brain or more until that hoped-for day when it can be brought back to some form of life. With this worldview, is it any wonder that I would be intrigued by an Aubrey de Grey? What would it be like to come face to face with such a man? Not to debate hima task for which, as a clinical surgeon, I would in any case be scientifically unqualifiedbut just to sound him out, to see how he behaves in an ordinary situation, to speak of my concerns and his responsesto take his measure. To me, his philosophies are outlandish. To him, mine would seem equally so. With all of this in mind, I contacted de Grey via e-mail this past fall, and received a response that was both gracious and welcoming. Addressing me by first name, he not only had no hesitation in offering to give up the better part of two days to speak with me, but moreover suggested that we spend them close to the lubricating effects of invigorating fluids, as follows: I hope you like a good English beer, as that is one of the main (open) secrets of my boundless energy as well as a good part of my intellectual creativity (or so I like to think...). A good plan (by which I mean a plan that has been well tested over the years!) is to meet at 11:00 a.m. Monday 18th in the Eagle, the most famous pub in Cambridge for a variety of reasons which I can point out to you. From there we may (weather permitting) be able to go punting on the Cam, an activity with which I fell in love at first sight on arriving here in 1982 and which all visitors seem to find unforgettable. We will be able to talk for as long as you like, and if there is reason to meet again on the Tuesday I can arrange that too. The message would prove to be characteristic, including its hint of immodesty. And in a similar vintage was his response when I expressed hesitation about punting, based on friends tales of falling into the Cam on a chilly autumnal day: Evidently, your friends did it without expert guidance. As I learned, de Grey is not a man who allows himself to be less than expert at anything to which he decides to devote those prodigious energies so enthusiastically trumpeted in the e-mail, nor does he allow himself to hide his expertness under a bushel. Of course, to conceive of oneself as the herald and instrument of the transformation of death and aging requires a supreme self-confidence, and de Grey is the most unabashedly self-confident of men. Soon after we met, this unexampled man told me that One must have a somewhat inflated opinion of oneself if success is to crown such great endeavors. I have that! he added emphatically. By the time he and I had said our good-byes after a total of 10 hours together over a period of two days, I was certain many would accept his self-estimate. Whether one chooses to believe that he is a brilliant and prophetic architect of futuristic biology or merely a misguided and nutty theorist, there can be no doubt about the astonishing magnitude of his intellect. De Grey calls his program Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, which permits him to say that it makes SENS to embark upon it. Here, in no particular order, follow his seven horsemen of death and the formulations for the breaking of each animal and its rider. (Those seeking more detailed information might wish to consult de Greys website: http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/index.html.) 1. Loss and atrophy or degeneration of cells. This element of aging is particularly important in tissues where cells cannot replace themselves as they die, such as the heart and brain. De Grey would treat it primarily by the introduction of growth factors to stimulate cell division or by periodic transfusion of stem cells specifically engineered to replace the types that have been lost. 2. Accumulation of cells that are not wanted. These are (a) fat cells, which tend to proliferate and not only replace muscle but also lead to diabetes by diminishing the bodys ability to respond to the pancreatic hormone insulin, and (b) cells that have become senescent, which accumulate in the cartilage of our joints. Receptors on the surface of such cells are susceptible to immune bodies that de Grey believes scientists will in time learn how to generate, or to other compounds that may make the cells destroy themselves without affecting others that do not have those distinctive receptors. 3. Mutations in chromosomes. The most damaging consequence of cell mutation is the development of cancer. The immortality of cancer cells is related to the behavior of the telomere, the caplike structure found on the end of every chromosome, which decreases in length each time the cell divides and therefore seems to be involved with the cells mortality. If we could eliminate the gene that makes telomerasethe enzyme that maintains and lengthens telomeresthe cancer cell would die. De Greys solution for this problem is to replace a persons stem cells every 10 or so years with ones engineered not to carry that gene. 4. Mutations in mitochondria. Mitochondria are the micromachines that produce energy for the cells activities. They contain small amounts of DNA, which are particularly susceptible to mutations since they are not housed in the chromosomes of the nucleus. De Grey proposes copying the genes (of which there are 13) from the mitochondrial DNA and then putting those copies into the DNA of the nucleus, where they will be far safer from mutation-causing influences. 5. The accumulation of junk within the cell. The junk in question is a collection of complex material that results from the cells breakdown of large molecules. Intracellular structures called lysosomes are the primary microchambers for such breakdown; the junk tends to collect in them, causing problems in the function of certain types of cells. Atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries, is the biggest manifestation of these complications. To solve this difficulty, de Grey proposes to provide the lysosomes with genes to produce the extra enzymes required to digest the unwelcome material. The source of these genes will be certain soil bacteria, an innovation based on the observation that ground that contains buried animal flesh does not show accumulation of degraded junk. 6. The accumulation of junk outside the cell. The fluid in which all cells are bathedcalled extracellular fluidmay come to contain aggregates of protein material that it is incapable of breaking down. The result is the formation of a substance called amyloid, which is the material found in the brains of people with Alzheimers disease. To counter this, de Grey proposes vaccination with an as-yet undeveloped substance that might stimulate the immune system to produce cells to engulf and eat the offending material. 7. Cross-links in proteins outside the cell. The extracellular fluid contains many flexible protein molecules that exist unchanged for long periods of time, whose function is to give certain tissues such qualities as elasticity, transparence, or high tensile strength. Over a lifetime, occasional chemical reactions gradually affect these molecules in ways that change their physical and/or chemical qualities. Among these changes is the development of chemical bonds called cross-links between molecules that had previously moved independently of one another. The result is a loss of elasticity or a thickening of the involved tissue. If the tissue is the wall of an artery, for example, the loss of distensibility may lead to high blood pressure. De Greys solution to this problem is to attempt to identify chemicals or enzymes capable of breaking cross-links without injuring anything else. It must be obvious that, even condensed and simplified as they are here, these seven factors are enormously complex biological problems with even more complex proposed solutions. At least some of those solutions may prove inadequate, and others may be impossible to implement. Moreover, de Greys descriptions are sprinkled with such vague phrases as growth factors and stimulate the immune system, which might prove to be little more than slogans, as when he invokes yet-to-be-discovered chemicals or enzymes capable of breaking cross-links without injuring anything else. In addition, it must be emphasized that researchers have not come close to solving a single one of the seven problems. In the case of several, there have been promising results. Indeed, research on extracellular cross-links has already yielded several drug candidates: a company called Alteon, in Parsippany, NY, has begun clinical trials of molecules that it says can reverse the effects of some conditions associated with age. In the cases of some of the other problems de Grey identifies, howeversuch as the prevention of telomere lengthening or the transfer of mitochondrial DNA to the nucleusit is fair to say that molecular biologists can only speculate about the day, if ever, when these attempts will come to fruition. But de Grey is unfazed by this incompleteness. It is his thesis that time is being lost, and nothing is accomplished by pessimism about possibilities. For de Grey, pie in the sky, as one biogerontologist I consulted called his formulations, is a tasty delicacy whose promise already nourishes his soul. But others can challenge de Greys science. My purpose was something else entirely. I found myself wondering what sort of man would devote the labors of an incandescently brilliant mind and a seemingly indefatigable constitution to such a project. Not only does the science seem more than a little speculative, but even more speculative is the assumption on which the entire undertaking is basednamely, that it is a good thing for the men and women now populating the earth to have the means to live indefinitely. I arrived at the Eagle a few minutes early on the appointed day, which gave me time to record some of the words on the memorial plaque near the entryway, which read An inn has existed at this site since 1667, called Eagle and Child....During their research in the early 1950s, Watson and Crick used the Eagle as a place to relax and discuss their theories whilst refreshing themselves with ale. Thus properly steeped in history and atmosphere, I entered the pub just in time to see de Grey through the window, parking his ancient bicycle across the narrow street. Narrow, in fact, precisely describes the man himself, who stands six feet tall, weighs 147 pounds. His spareness is accentuated by a mountain-man chestnut beard extending down to mid-thorax that seems never to have seen a comb or brush. He was dressed like an unkempt graduate student, uncaring of tailoring considerations of any sort, wearing a hip-length black mackinaw-type coat that was borderline shabby. Adorning his head was a knitted woolen hat of a half-dozen striped transverse colors, which he told me had been crafted by his wife 14 years ago. As if to prove its age, the frazzled headgear (which was knitted with straplike extensions that tied under the chin) was not without a few holes. When he removed it, I saw that de Greys long straight hair was held in a ponytail by a circular band of bright red wool. But in spite of the visual gestalt, de Grey cannot disguise the fact that he is a boyishly handsome man. As for his voice, being the product of a private school followed by Harrow and then Cambridge, it hardly needs to be described. To an American, he is of rare fauna, and his distinctiveness was catch-your-eye apparent even among his Cambridge colleagues. Having seen a photo of de Grey on his website, I was prepared for his beard, spareness, and even his laissez-faire attitude toward externals. But I was not prepared for the intensity of those keen blue-gray eyes, nor for the pallor of the face in which they are so gleamingly set. His expression was one of concentrated zeal, even evangelism, and it never let up during our subsequent six hours of nonstop conversation across the narrow pub table that separated us. In the photo, his eyes are so gently warm that I had commented on them in one of my e-mails. But I would see none of that warmth during the 10 hours we spent together, though it reappeared in the 15 minutes during which we chatted with Adelaide de Grey in a courtyard between laboratory buildings after our Monday session at the Eagle. Adelaide de Grey (n?e Carpenter) is a highly accomplished American geneticist and an expert electron microscopist who, at 60, is 19 years older than her husband. They met early in 1990, midway through her Cambridge sabbatical from a faculty position at the University of California, San Diego, and were married in April 1991. Neither of them has ever wanted to have children. There are already lots of people who are very good at that, explained Aubrey when the subject came up. Its either that or do a lot of stuff you wouldnt do if you had children, because you wouldnt have the time. Raised as the only child of an artistic and somewhat eccentric single mother, already at the age of eight or nine he had determined to do something with his life that would make a difference, something that he and perhaps no one else was equipped to accomplish. Why fritter away resources in directions that others might pursue just as well or better? With that in mind no less now than when he was a child, de Grey has trimmed from his days and thoughts any activity he deems superfluous or distracting from the goals he sets for himself. He and Adelaide are two highly focusedsome would say drivenpeople of such apparent similarity of motivation and goals that their work is the overwhelming catalytic force of their lives. And yet, each member of this uncommon pair is touchingly tender with the other. Even my brief 15 minutes with them was sufficient to observe the softness that comes into de Greys otherwise determined visage when Adelaide is near, and her similar response. I suspect that his website photo was taken while he was either looking at or thinking of her. Adelaide, although at five foot two much shorter than her husband, looks his perfect sartorial partner: she dresses in a similar way and is apparently just as uncaring about her appearance or grooming. One can easily imagine them on one of their dates, as described by Aubrey. Walking from the small flat where they have lived since they married almost 14 years ago, entering the local laundromat, talking science as the machines beat up on their well-worn clothes. They are hardly bons vivants, nor would they want to be; they quite obviously like things just the way they are. They appear to care not at all for the usual getting and spending, nor even for some of the normative emotional rewards of living in our worldall at a time when the name of Aubrey de Grey has become associated with changing that world in unimaginable ways. But six uninterrupted hours of compelling talk (most of it pouring out of him in floods of volubility let loose by intermittent questions or comments) and the consumption of numerous pints of Abbots ale still awaited us before I would meet Adelaide and be taken to the laboratory where de Grey performs the duties of his day job. Very soon after we began speaking, an hour before noon on that first day, I asked him why his proposals raise the hackles of so many gerontologists. And right there, at the very outset of our discussions, he replied with the dismissive impatience that would reappear whenever I brought up one or another of the many objections that either a specialist or layperson might have regarding the notion of extending life for millennia. Pretty much invariably, he curtly told me, their objections are based on simple ignorance. Among the bands of that spectrum that de Grey will not confine to a bushel is his feeling that his is one of the few minds capable of comprehending the biology of his formulations, the scientific and societal logic upon which they are based, and the vastness of their potential benefits to our species. I wanted de Grey to justify his conviction that living for thousands of years is a good thing. Certainly, if one can accept such a viewpoint, everything else follows from it: the push to research beyond the elucidation of the aging process; the gigantic investment of talent and money to accomplish and apply such research; the transformation of a culture based on the expectation of a finite and relatively short lifetime to one without horizons; the odd fact that every adult human being would be physiologically the same age (because rejuvenation would be the inevitable result of de Greys proposals); the effects on family relationshipsit goes on and on. De Greys response to such a challenge comes in the perfectly formed and articulated sentences that he uses in all his writings. He has the gift of expressing himself both verbally and in print with such clarity and completeness that a listener finds himself entranced by the flow of seemingly logical statements following one after the other. In speech as in his directed life, de Grey never rambles. Everything he says is pertinent to his argument, and so well constructed that one becomes fascinated with the edifice being formed before ones eyes. So true is this that I could not but fix my full attention on him as he spoke. Though many possible distractions arose during the hours in which we confronted each other across that pub table, as people came and went, ate and drank, talked and laughed, and smoked and coughed, I never once found myself looking anywhere but directly at him, except when going to fetch fooda full lunch for me and only potato chips for himor another pint. It was only when reflecting upon the assumptions on which his argument is based that a listener discovers that he must insert the word seemingly before logical in the second sentence of the present paragraph. Here follows an aliquot of de Greys reasoning: The reason we have an imperative, we have a duty, to develop these therapies as soon as possible is to give future generations the choice. People are entitled, have a human right, to live as long as they can; people have a duty to give people the opportunity to live as long as they want to. I think its just a straightforward extension of the duty-of-care concept. People are entitled to expect to be treated as they would treat themselves. It follows directly and irrevocably as an extension of the golden rule. If we hesitate and vacillate in developing life-extension therapy, there will be some cohort to whom we will deny the option to live much longer than we do. We have a duty not to deny people that option. When I raised the question of ethical or moral objections to the extreme extension of life, the reply was similarly seemingly logical and to the point: If there were such objections, they would certainly count in this argument. What does count is that the right to live as long as you choose is the worlds most fundamental right. And this is not something Im ordaining. This seems to be something that all moral codes, religious or secular, seem to agree on: that the right to life is the most important right. And then, to what would seem the obvious objection that such moral codes assume our current life span and not one lasting thousands of years: Its an incremental thing. Its not a question of how long life should be, but whether the end of life should be hastened by action or inaction. And there it isthe ultimate leap of ingenious argumentation that would do a sophist proud: by our inaction in not pursuing the possible opportunity of extending life for thousands of years, we are hastening death. No word of the foregoing quotes has been edited or changed in any way. De Grey speaks in formed paragraphs and pages. Many readers of Technology Review are all too familiar with how garbled we often sound when quoted directly. Not so de Grey, who speaks with the same precision with which he writes. Admittedly, some may consider his responses to have the sound of a carefully prepared sermon or sales pitch because he has answered similar questions many times before, but all thought of such considerations disappears when one spends a bit of time with him and realizes that he pours forth every statement in much the same way, whether responding to some problem he has faced a dozen times before or giving a tour of the genetics lab where he works. His every thought comes out perfectly shaped, to the amazement of the bemused observer. De Grey does not fool himself about the vastness of the efforts that will be required to make the advances in science and technology necessary to attain his objective. But equally, he does not seem fazed by my suggestion that his optimism might simply be based on the fact that, having never worked as a bench researcher in biology, he may not appreciate or even understand the nature of complex biological systems, nor fully take into account the possible consequences of tinkering with what he sees as individual components in a machine. Unlike engineers, the adoption of whose methodology de Grey considers his main conceptual contribution to solving the problems of aging, biologists do not approach physiological events as distinct entities that have no effect on any others. Each of de Greys interventions will very likely result in unpredictable and incalculable responses in the biochemistry and physics of the cells he is treating, not to mention their extracellular milieu and the tissues and organs of which they are a part. In biology, everything is interdependent; everything is affected by everything else. Though we study phenomena in isolation to avoid complicating factors, those factors come into play with a vengeance when in vitro becomes in vivo. The fearsome concerns are many: a little lengthening of the telomere here, a bit of genetic material from a soil bacterium there, a fistful of stem cellsthe next thing you know, it all explodes in your face. He replied to all this as to so much else, whether it be the threat of overpopulation, the effect on relationships within families and whole societies, or the need to find employment for vibrantly healthy people who are a thousand years old: we will deal with these problems as they come up. We will make the necessary adjustments, whether in the realm of potential cellular havoc or of the tortuosities of economic necessity. He believes that each problem can be retouched and remedied as it becomes recognized. De Grey has some interesting notions of human nature. He insists that, on the one hand, it is basic to humankind to want to live forever regardless of consequences, while on the other it is not basic to want to have children. When I protested that the two most formative instincts of all living things are to survive and to pass on their DNA, he quickly made good use of the one and denied the existence of the other. Bolstering his argument with the observation that many peoplelike Adelaide and himselfchoose not to have children, he replied, not without a hint of petulance and some small bit of excited waving of his hands, Your precept is that we all have the fundamental impulse to reproduce. The incidence of voluntary childlessness is exploding. Therefore the imperative to reproduce is not actually so deep seated as psychologists would have us believe. It may simply be that it was the thing to dothe more traditional thing. My point of view is that a large part of it may simply be indoctrination....Im not in favor of giving young girls dolls to play with, because it may perpetuate the urge to motherhood. De Grey has commented in several fora on his conviction that, given the choice, the great majority of people would choose life extension over having children and the usual norms of family life. This being so, he says, far fewer children would be born. He did not hesitate to say the same to me: We will realize there is an overpopulation problem, and if we have the sense well decide to fix it [by not reproducing] sooner rather than later, because the sooner we fix it the more choice well have about how we live and where we live and how much space we will have and all that. Therefore, the question is, what will we do? Will we decide to live a long time and have fewer children, or will we decide to reject these rejuvenation therapies in order that we can have children? It seems pretty damn clear to me that well take the former option, but the point is that I dont know and I dont need to know. Of course, de Greys reason for not needing to know is that same familiar imperative he keeps returning to, the imperative that everyone is entitled to choice regardless of the possible consequences. What we need to know, he argues, can be found out after the fact and dealt with when it appears. Without giving humankind the choice, however, we deprive it of its most basic liberty. It should not be surprising that a man as insistently individualisticand as uncommon a sortas he would emphasize freedom of personal choice far more than the potentially toxic harvest that might result from cultivating that dangerous seed in isolation. As with every other of his formulations, this onethe concept of untrammeled freedom of choice for the individualis taken out of the context of its biological and societal surroundings. Like everything else, it is treated in vitro rather than in vivo. In campaigns that occur across the length of several continents, de Greys purpose is only secondarily to overcome resistance to his theories. His primary aim is to publicize himself and his formulations as widely as possible, not for the sake of personal glory but as a potential means of raising the considerable funding that will be necessary to carry out the research that needs to be done if his plans are to stand any chance of so much as partial success. He has laid out a schedule projecting the timeline on which he would like to see certain milestones reached. The first of these milestones would be to rejuvenate mice. De Grey would extend the life span of a two-year-old mouse that might ordinarily live one more year by three years. He believes funding of around $100 million a year will make this feasible 10 years from now; almost certainly not as soon as seven years; but very likely...less than 20 years. Such an accomplishment, de Grey believes, will kick-start a war on aging and be the trigger for enormous social upheaval. In an article for the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences [de Grey et al., 959: 452462, 2002], which lists seven coauthors after his own name, de Grey writes, We contend that the impact on public opinion and (inevitably) public policy of unambiguous aging-reversal in mice would be so great that whatever work remained necessary at that time to achieve adequate somatic gene therapy would be hugely accelerated. Not only that, he asserts, but the public enthusiasm following upon such a feat will cause many people to begin making life choices based on the probability that they, too, will reach a proportional number of years. Moreover, when death from a disease like influenza, for example, is considered premature at the age of 200, the urgent need to solve the problems of infectious disease will massively increase government and drug company funding in that area. In addition to accelerating demand for research, the tripling of a middle-aged mouses remaining life span would bring in entirely new sources of funding. Because governments and drug companies tend to favor research that promises useful results in a relatively short time, de Grey is not counting on them as a source. He is relying on an infusion of private money to supply the funds (significantly more than the cost of reversing aging in mice) that it will take to successfully fight his war against aging in humans. De Grey believes that once aging has been reversed in mice, billionaires will come forward, intent on living as long as possible. Is it likely that the photograph of a long-lived mouse on the front page of every newspaper in the world would be greeted with the unalloyed enthusiasm of a unanimous public? I doubt it. More probably, acclaim would be balanced by horror. Ethicists, economists, sociologists, members of the clergy, and many worried scientists could be counted on to join huge numbers of thoughtful citizens in a counterreaction. But of course, if we are to accept de Greys first principle, that the desire to live forever trumps every other factor in human decision-making, then self-interestor what some might call narcissismwill win out in the end. De Grey projects that 15 years after we have rejuvenated mice we might begin to reverse aging in humans. Early, limited success in extending the human life span will be followed by successive, more dramatic breakthroughs, so that humans now living could reach what de Grey calls life extension escape velocity. De Grey concedes that it might be 100 years before we begin to significantly extend human life. What he does not concede is that it is more likely not to happen at all. He cannot seem to imagine that the odds are heavily against him. And he cannot imagine that not only the odds but society itself may be against him. He will provide any listener or reader with a string of reasons that are really rationalizations to explain why most mainstream gerontologists remain so conspicuously absent from the ranks of those cheering him on. He has safeguarded himself against the informed criticism that should give him cause to rethink some of his proposals. He has accomplished this self-protection by constructing a personal worldview in which he is inviolate. He refuses to budge a millimeter; he will not give ground to the possibility that any of the barriers to his success may prove insuperable. All this makes de Grey sound unlikable. But a major factor behind his success at attracting a following has less to do with his science than with himself. As I discovered during our two sessions at the Eagle, it is impossible not to like de Grey. Despite his unhesitant verbal trashing of those who disagree with him, there is a certain untouched sweetness in the man, which, combined with his lack of care for outward appearance and the sincerity of his commitment to the goals that animate his life, are so disarming that the entire picture is one of the disingenuousness of genius, rather than of the self-promotion of the remote, false messiah. His likability was pointed out even by his detractors. It is a quality not to be expected in such an obviously odd and driven duck. But the most likable of eccentrics are sometimes the most dangerous. Many decades ago in my na?vet? and ignorance, I thought that the ultimate destruction of our planet would be by the neutral power of celestial catastrophe: collision with a gigantic meteor, the burning out of the sunthat sort of thing. In time, I came to believe that the end of days would be ushered in by the malevolence of a mad dictator who would unleash an arsenal of explosive or biological weaponry: nuclear bombs, engineered micro?rganismsthat sort of thing. But my notion of that sort of thing has been changing. If we are to be destroyed, I am now convinced that it will not be a neutral or malevolent force that will do us in, but one that is benevolent in the extreme, one whose only motivation is to improve us and better our civilization. If we are ever immolated, it will be by the efforts of well-meaning scientists who are convinced that they have our best interests at heart. We already know who they are. They are the DNA tweakers who would enhance us by allowing parents to choose the genetic makeup of their descendants unto every succeeding generation ad infinitum, heedless of the possibility that breeding out variety may alter factors necessary for the survival of our species and the health of its relationship to every form of life on earth; they are the biogerontologists who study caloric restriction in mice and promise us the extension by 20 percent of a peculiarly nourished existence; they are those other biogerontologists who emerge from their laboratories of molecular science every evening optimistic that they have come just a bit closer to their goal of having us live much longer, downplaying the unanticipated havoc at both the cellular and societal level that might be wrought by their proposed manipulations. And finally, it is the unique and strangely alluring figure of Aubrey de Grey, who, orating, writing, and striding tirelessly through our midst with his less than fully convinced sympathizers, proclaims like the disheveled herald of a new-begotten future that our most inalienable right is to have the choice of living as long as we wish. With the passion of a single-minded zealot crusading against time, he has issued the ultimate challenge, I believe, to our entire concept of the meaning of humanness. Paradoxically, his clarion call to action is the message neither of a madman nor a bad man, but of a brilliant, beneficent man of goodwill, who wants only for civilization to fulfill the highest hopes he has for its future. It is a good thing that his grand design will almost certainly not succeed. Were it otherwise, he would surely destroy us in attempting to preserve us. Sherwin Nuland is clinical professor of surgery at Yale Universitys School of Medicine and teaches bioethics. He is the author of How We Die, which won the National Book Award in 1994, and Leonardo da Vinci. He has written for many magazines, including the New Yorker. Over three decades, he has cared for around 10,000 patients. ------------- Aubrey de Grey Responds http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/01/wo/wo_degrey0101805.asp?p=0 By Aubrey de Grey January 18, 2005 [Several e-messages added beneath.] From the Forums: There has been [3]a long discussion about Technology Review's column by Editor-in-Chief Jason Pontin. You can also view his open letter to those who objected to the coverage of de Grey. Related Stories: Jason Pontin, Technology Review's Editor-in-Chief, and Brad King, Technology Review's Web editor, have invited me to respond to the trio of articles about me and my work that appear in the February 2005 issue of Technology Review with this online-only piece, in addition to a short "letter to the editor" from me that will appear in the print edition. Dr. Sherwin Nuland's article covers three topics: (a) me, (b) the desirability of greatly postponing aging, and (c) the feasibility of doing so. In the time he and I spent together we discussed (c) very little indeed, not least because, as a physician rather than a biologist, Nuland well appreciated that he is not equipped to evaluate the difficulty of developing technologies that even I do not expect to be available to humans for at least 20 years. He notes this as follows: "But others can challenge de Grey's science. My purpose was something else entirely.". For reasons that remain obscure, however, Nuland later changes his mind and takes it upon himself to give a reason (not mentioned during our discussions, needless to say) why we will probably never postpone aging much: "Unlike engineers, the adoption of whose methodology de Grey considers his main conceptual contribution to solving the problems of aging, biologists do not approach physiological events as distinct entities that have no effect on any others. Each of de Grey's interventions will very likely result in unpredictable and incalculable responses the next thing you know, it all explodes in your face." Engineers reading his article may beg to differ concerning whether they can successfully manipulate systems consisting of mutually interacting subsystems, and the briefest consultation of my publications will reveal that it is precisely the management of those interactions, by the judicious choice of which places to intervene, that defines my approach. Most upmarket writers, having hit belatedly on a new reason why their subject is deluded, might have thought to raise it with that subject before risking committing such a serious error -- by some way the worst in his article, overshadowing a variety of overstatements of how far we currently are from developing some of the components of my SENS scheme. Or if not the writer, at least the magazine's staff. By contrast, the Technology Review staff instead chose to use this offhand evaluation as the foundation for a commentary piece. They first compliment Nuland's ability to judge my science even more effusively than Nuland compliments my intellect: "Sherwin Nuland would not be satisfied by anything less than rigorous scientific reasoning and evidence. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a writer more qualified to profile the eccentric de Grey." And then, overlooking the facts that Nuland noted just the opposite (see above) and that his article duly offers no specifics whatsoever to back up his view that aging is essentially immutable, they buy his assertion of the impossibility of major life extension as uncritically as a child buys an ice cream -- not quite what one would expect from the staff of a serious technology publication. Nuland is amply qualified, however, to comment on the desirability of defeating aging -- but, curiously, he doesn't do so. He notes that he raised most of the usual concerns with me, but rather than provide or comment on my responses (which the reader can find [5]here) he merely describes the style in which I deliver them. The only aspect of my views on this that appears in the article is the ethical one (we have a duty to save lives). He makes only two errors in this part of the article (I, in fact, regard the choice of future global society, not the individual, as paramount and I view the role of philanthropy in advancing this work as relevant mainly to research on mice); thus, his only major failure is to recognize the contradictions inherent in his own position. Here is a telling quote: "I am committed to the notion that both individual fulfillment and the ecological balance of life on this planet are best served by dying when our inherent biology decrees that we do. I am equally committed to making that age as close to our biologically probable maximum of approximately 120 years as modern biomedicine can achieve, and also to efforts at decreasing and compressing the years of morbidity and disabilities now attendant on extreme old age. "But I cannot imagine that the consequences of doing a single thing beyond these efforts will be anything but baleful, not only for each of us as an individual, but for every other living creature in our world." I trust that if Nuland's goals are achieved soon enough for him, such that he reaches the age of 119 in the same fine shape that he is in today, he will not mysteriously forget to buy that cyanide pill to place at his bedside for the fateful moment when he wakes to find himself transformed, Cinderella-like, into a 120-year old and thus a burden on society and on himself -- but I'm not holding my breath. Comment on February's editorial is superfluous. Pontin is as desperate as Nuland and the Technology Review staff are to put the real issues out of his mind, but unlike them he does not take the trouble to cloak this in careful words; the editorial speaks for itself all too well. What can we conclude, observing three such egregious departures from normal logical standards by educated adults? I can identify only one explanation: most of society is in a pro-aging trance. This is no surprise: after all, aging is extremely horrible and until a few years ago could indeed be regarded as probably immutable for a very long time indeed. Hence, a reasonable tactic was to put its horror out of one's mind, however absurd the logical contortions required. Just as stage hypnotists' subjects provide sincere and lucid justifications for any false statement that they have been instructed is true, so most of us (not having dared to consider in detail whether aging might recently have come within our technological range) energetically defend the indefinite perpetuation of what it is in fact humanity's primary duty to eliminate as soon as possible. Some people find stage hypnotists highly entertaining. I don't -- not any more, at least. References 3. http://www.technologyreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forumid=1001 ------------- http://www.technologyreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forumid=1001 Against Transcendence When technology appropriates the transcendental it becomes science fiction. Technology is most useful when it is most human. _________________________________________________________________ Posted 1/21/2005 7:12:43 AM by [33]C Wade Subject: Disappointed After reading your editorial, and your apology where yet again you haven't got your facts right re de Gray, I'm seriously questioning the credibility of this publication. If you are so free to make claims that are monumentally incorrect (several times!) or have nothing to do with the agenda of this publication how can you possibly guarantee that other articles etc are not bias or factually flawed. Readers like myself rely on publications such as Technology Review to provide them an accurate insight into a world I don't have time to research. That's why I pay Tech Review a subscription. I don't pay for such crass bias, and I don't pay for personal attacks or conjecture. I must concur with an earlier post in this Forum... I suggest (Jason Pontin) you resign. Perhaps a Tabloid, or the Fox Network will pick you up. Posted 1/16/2005 8:32:38 AM by [34]Aubrey de Grey Subject: Some corrections Jason Pontin writes: > 3. Finally, and I write this with a little trepidation, many > of your posts reveal a degree of misinformation about > Mr. de Grey's accomplishments and publications. His trepidation is justified. For the record: - My Ph.D. (yes, I do have one) was awarded for my biogerontology work. - Both my articles in Trends in Biotechnology, like all papers in that journal, were peer-reviewed by any definition. - My role at Genetics is 40% computer support, 60% gerontologist, as is described in more detail at http:// www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/funding.htm For my view of the care with which Mr. Pontin, Dr. Nuland and TR staff have reached their conclusions regarding my scientific views, I refer readers to the piece Mr. Pontin mentions at the top of his letter, as I see he says it will appear shortly. Further comment from me on the rest of Mr. Pontin's editorial and open letter is clearly unnecessary. Aubrey de Grey Posted 1/16/2005 3:37:56 AM by [35]Samuel H. Kenyon Subject: aging doesn't just happen Mr. Pontin's quick response and apparently serious reply is appreciated. I just want to say (and I'm not making a personal attack, this just glared out at me) his opinion that human cellular aging can not be reversed is best summarized by this quote in his letter: "All organisms--indeed, all things in creation--age." This is stubborn traditional thinking about life and aging as something mysterious or divine. It is no longer a mystery, it is a problem to be solved. All things in "creation" (whatever that word may mean to you) do not age--they change over time. The entities that do age can be changed to not age. The concept is not that difficult. Even if biogerontologists don't get positive results, even if Aubrey de Grey has missed important pieces of the problem definition, there are other potential technologies for life extension and immortality of humans; really I just see it as a matter of time and funding. Posted 1/16/2005 12:52:06 AM by [36]adam parker Subject: re: current editorial Dear Sir, I speak with brevity, as others have already made the salient points regards ad hominem attacks. I simply propose an appropriate, honorable course of action for you. Resign forthwith. Such attacks are unacceptable in any publication, least of all from the editorial. ____________________________________ Adam Parker RMIT University Posted 1/16/2005 12:24:22 AM by [37]Harold Brenner Subject: Dr. de Grey Despite the welcome acknowledgment of your failure to properly communicate with your readers, once more Mr. Pontin, you are motivated to cast a dubious shadow on Dr. de Grey's career and consequently further sink the reputation of your magazine in the quagmire of sensationalist and ill-founded standing. 1. Most who are familiar with Dr. de Grey's publications and activities recognise him to be a theoretical biologist focused on biogerontology. You have also failed to mention that he is the editor of the Mary Ann Liebert published, peer reviewed academic journal, Rejuvenation Research (formerly journal of Anti-Aging Research). 2. You would do well to know that not all biological discovery is practiced using agarose gels and bacterial plasmids. 3. One cannot help but think that following your feature on de Grey (particularly the caption and photo on your front cover) you are setting him up to be either an unintended fraud or a fool - either of which had you the foresight to directly communicate with him you would discover he is not. 4. All those who have been disgusted by the position of your editorial are not necessarily "transhumanists". I do not consider myself a "transhumanist", but the privilege of my education and professional experience indicate to me that the aging process has a biological solution. 4. Finally, attack the science if you must and if you can - not the man. You are clearly not scientifically qualified, nor have you been properly briefed to determine the validity of the science behind de Grey's assertions. I and my colleagues will be closely watching for a response of more substance in your following issue prior to making a decision as to the standing of your publication. Posted 1/15/2005 10:03:36 PM by [38]Jason Pontin Subject: A Open Letter to the Transhumanists Dear transhumanists, Thank you for your posts to the technologyreview.com site. I've read them all with great interest. You're a passionate group! Let me begin by writing: as many of you suggested, we will invite Aubrey de Grey to reply to Dr. Nuland's article, the leader "Be Sane about Anti-Aging Science," and my editorial "Against Transcendence." You can read Mr. de Grey on www.technologyreview.com early next week. That said, when an editor so completely fails to express his meaning to his readers, he may be tempted to try again. A few notes to that end. 1. I recognize the anger in many of your posts, and apologize if I have offended any of you. When I called Mr. de Grey a "troll" it was of course a literary device: a reference to a line earlier in my editorial where I quoted the writer Bruce Stirling about the paradox that those who were most intersted in using technology to transcend human nature often lived circumscribed lives that seemed anything but transcendent when viewed from the outside. Stirling says that people who take transcendence seriously "end up turning into trolls." This is my personal view. However, neither Dr. Nuland's article, which I commissioned, nor our leader on anti-aging, which I edited, made this point. 2. My list of the ways that Mr. de Grey seemed circumscribed by his humanity was not intended as an ad hominem attack on de Grey. An hominem attack seeks to discredit an argument by attacking the person who makes it. As many of you noted, I did not seriously grapple with Mr. de Grey's views in my editorial. This is because my editorial was written as an introduction, by the editor-in-chief, to the print edition of Technology Review. An exhaustive list of all the reasons why I think de Grey mistaken in his confidence that human cellular aging can be reversed would have been redundant. The two other articles on biogerontology, in addition to a synopsis of a scholarly publication on the role of mitochondria in the diseases of aging, expressed all I believe about biogerontology. Those views, in short, are as follows: while I am fascinated by the study of how and why human tissues age, I think it exceedingly unlikely that human aging can be "defeated" in any meaningful sense. All organisms--indeed, all things in creation--age. I think it possible that we might one day extend human lifespan significantly, and I am reasonably sure that in the next 50 years we will "compress the morbidity" of the elderly to a brief period before death. I have to note that most serious, working, responsible biogerontologists published regularly by peer review journals would agree with me--with the possible exception of Cynthia Kenyon at UCSF, who entertains dramatic hopes for human life extension, and who has significantly extended the life span of nemotodes. My editorial was about what it said it was about: it was written "against transcendence." It was not written about Aubrey de Grey. 3. Finally, and I write this with a little trepidation, many of your posts reveal a degree of misinformation about Mr. de Grey's accomplishments and publications. I would not accuse Mr. de Grey, whom I have never met, of being a charlatan. But there is a certain vaguness in the transhumanist community about his role in the Department of Genetics at Cambridge University. Mr. de Grey is not an academic biogerontologist. He is the computer support for a research team in Cambridge's Genetics Department. His formal academic background is in computer science. If you consult Mr. de Grey's publications in a resource like PubMed, you will see they vary more than glowing profiles of de Grey sometimes imply. For instance, his contributions to Science and Biogerontology are commentary and letters. His publications in Tends in Biotechnology and Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences were not, strictly speaking, peer reviewed. That said, Mr de Grey's paper, "A Proposed Refinement of the Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging," (de Grey, ADNJ, BioEssays 19(2) 161-166, 1997) is, I am told, genuinely original, and he is, obviously, a fascinating, charismatic, and provocative figure. My assessment of Aubrey de Grey would be that of the biogerontologist Jay Olshansky: "I am a big fan of Aubrey. We need him. I disagree with some of his conclusions, but in science that's OK. That's what advances the field." In sorrow and contrition, Jason Pontin Editor-in-Chief Technology Review Posted 1/15/2005 7:49:54 PM by Andrew Subject: Mr. Pontin Attacking a respected and reputable biogerontolgist for not having kids and actively pursuing a goal shows how narrow-minded and void of imagination Mr. Pontin is, not to mention venomous towards those who choose not to slowly shuffle along the road of uniformity to the slaughterhouse of involuntary death. Posted 1/15/2005 6:03:47 PM by [39]Harold Brenner Subject: Pro Longevity It is the year 2005 and the respected science technology magazine, Technology Review viciously attacks a peer respected and numerously published biogerontologist. The basis for the attack: - dress style - beard - no children - dedicated to his profession - drinks too much beer - at 41, is looking old in the face I am concerned for the future of your magazine if such absurd and inane drivel can bypass your editorial process since it irrevocably compromises the integrity of all other articles published. Dr. de Grey, and your readers deserve an apology from your magazine and its editorial contributor, Jason Pontin. Posted 1/15/2005 4:34:17 AM by Vadim Antonov Subject: disgusting Well... Mr. Aubrey de Grey is an alleged troll, according to Mr. Jason Pontin. What we now know for sure is that Mr. Jason Pontin is a confirmed troll, condemned by his own words. The trolls are, basically, demagogues, and what can be more demagogic than ad hominem attacks (referring to appearance and personal hygiene of the opponent), then insinuating that anyone thinking differently from Mr. Demagogue must be a nut, ascribing made-up thoughts to opponents, and, finally appealing to some higher sacral knowledge of how things should be? This is precisely what Mr. Pontin did in his editorial. He is a demagogue, plain and clear. He made it equally obvious that he has no grasp of scientific ethics whatsoever, and his knowledge of history of science is demonstrably non-existant, or he would know that at least some people the later generations came to think of as geniuses were in their time considered nuts (and some actually _were_ mentally disturbed... Goedel, Nash, the list goes on). Some famous scientists held decidedly cooky opinions (Newton on alchemy, for example). This does not diminish the value of their work, because ideas and opinions must be judged on their own merits, not on the merits of people expressing them. This is exactly what prevents science from degrading into yet another cult, and in doing otherwise from the pulpit of science Mr. Pontin is making science a grave disservice. What Mr. Pontin could do is to present rational arguments against the technological trancendence, but, judging by his dabbling in pop psychology instead, he is too dim to think of any; and they're not that hard to come by. I think it is a disgrace that a person of such demonstrated shallowness is holding an editorial position in a respected scientific magazine. Posted 1/14/2005 6:10:05 PM by [40]Samuel H. Kenyon Subject: Mixing Modes Mr. Pontin's point of view established in this editorial can be summarized by his use of the quote: "Aging is the condition on which we are given life," which is to say a muddled mixing of modes. He seems to have the average mystical reverence for the term "life" as if it is a permanent mystery beyond the realm of human understanding. Albeit this is an editorial, but the mixing of modes of secular and religio-cult terms like "transcendence" reeks of a writer-editor who cannot bother to logically think about the canned memes he dumps on a page, including that of the science fiction "geek" who is will never contribute to society and lives in a fantasy world. I suppose that means the company iRobot who sells hundreds of thousands of Roombas and makes the packBot military robot are a bunch of trolls because they were inspired by science fiction, indeed have a poster of the recent movie of the same name on their hallway. "Trolls," whatever that means to Mr. Pontin, exist regardless of science fiction--there is no bidirectional relationship. He probably thinks Linus Torvalds was a troll too, and that Linux is just a fad. The kind of thinking promoted in the editorial is that of people who think the moon landings were filmed on sound stages; after all, leaving the planet is transcendence. What in science and engineering is not transcendence beyond a situation in which a person is born? References 33. mailto:chwade at nesta.org.uk 34. mailto:ag24 at gen.cam.ac.uk 35. mailto:flanneltron at flanneltron.com 36. mailto:adam.parker at rmit.edu.au 37. mailto:theoharis at gmail.com 38. mailto:jason.pontin at technologyreview.com 39. mailto:theoharis at gmail.com 40. mailto:flanneltron at flanneltron.com --------------- http://www.technologyreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forumid=1001&iPage=2 [More responses.] 1/14/2005 3:49:01 PM by [33]Ronald K. Edquist Subject: IS HE NUTS Speaking as Editor of Technology Review, Mr. Pontin in Against Transcendence engages in a bizarre smear, bordering on defamation. He warps de Greys ideas into a psudeo-religious quest for transcendence in order to ridicule and discredit the ideas and de Grey. This is not science or technology, but ideology at work. Dr. de Grey may be a character, but he is clearly also a remarkably talented person probing an important area. Mr. Pontin has discredited and disgraced himself and Technology Review. Mr. Pontin should be removed from his position in order to restore credibility to Technology Review. A man that would stoop, for ideological reasons, to the snarling viciousness and vacuous sociology of this piece simply cannot be trusted to be an honest broker in providing technical information. I can respect, while disagreeing, with Mr. Pontins position that life extension is terrible and that it shouldnt be done. Its debatable. But it should be unacceptable to Technology Review that in order to advance those feelings, he engaged in ad hominem fallacies to discredit a technical proposal and its proponent. Technology Review could and should do something useful on this topic. Constructive criticism and comment on de Greys proposals are not, to my knowledge, publicly available. Each of de Greys seven proposed initiatives could be addressed by several experts in the relevant area. The issues are whether the proposals are feasible, would they have the desired effect and are they worthwhile in and of themselves, in that they would treat a disease. The final global question is whether the combined success of these initiatives would result in life extension. Allow de Grey to respond. Meaningful life extension is coming, sometime. The only question is which age cohort will be the last to suffer under the ancient r?gime. Ron Edquist Posted 1/14/2005 3:28:54 PM by [34]Tom FitzGerald Subject: Transcending bigotry Thank you for your fine piece by Dr. Nuland on Aubrey de Grey. While Dr. Nuland disagrees forcefully with Mr. de Grey's goals, his profile was insightful and sympathetic--a model of evenhanded journalism. Sadly, the same cannot be said of the accompanying editorial by Jason Pontin, which is little more than a mass of non sequiturs and ad hominem attacks. In particular, I am troubled by Mr. Pontin's implication that being childless is one of Mr. de Grey's character flaws. Does this magazine really wish to inform the myriad childless couples in this country that their lifestyle is "trollish" in the eyes of The Technology Review? Perhaps Mr. Pontin feels that female professionals like Adelaide de Grey belong in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. While the pursuit of extreme longevity is currently controversial in our culture, the idea that marriage has purposes beyond child-rearing is not. Mr. Pontin's implication that this is otherwise is an insult to childless couples generally, and plays right into the hands of those bigots who oppose civil unions and marriage for gays and lesbians on similarly retrograde moral scruples. That "An MIT Enterprise" should publish such bigotry is shameful. As the holder of such bigoted views, Mr. Pontin's views on aging amelioration are rendered suspect. To those like Mr. Pontin who couple their disdain for childless couples with a view that the elderly are not fit to live, I ask two questions: 1) When a people live to be 121 years old, will they no longer have the right to live? Will Mr. Pontin murder them en masse on behalf of the "greater good" of his economic, demographic, ecological, or perhaps religious beliefs? 2) Will those like Mr. Pontin who oppose Mr. de Grey's potentially life-saving research be content to stop at character assassination, or is this "MIT Enterprise" calling for a ban on all biogerontological research not in keeping with their own bigoted disdain for the world's elderly? In respectful disagreement, Tom FitzGerald Portland, OR Posted 1/14/2005 2:07:56 PM by [35]Thomas L Caylor Subject: Beyond Expandence Due to my particular nature, Im more interested in the principles than the people involved here. I think there is an illuminating analogy in mathematics and engineering. Math provides ideas like the transcendental numbers to develop tools of thought. Engineering takes those tools and approximates them in the real world with rational numbers, bits, and discrete time steps to produce technology that would be inconceivable without the transcendental ideas of math. There are the thinker types that live more in the transcendental realm, like mathematicians, and there are the doer types that live more in the real world, like engineers. Thats OK. We need both. (Actually I am both, hence my choice of the analogy.) I agree that the border to the transcendental changes, at least for all practical purposes. This is because the border is between the transcendental and the real world AS WE SEE IT. To say that the transcendental is outside of all reality (as Pontin stated) is really making a Platonic statement about a reality that is outside of our experience. This itself is a transcendental statement. Im not against such statements, Im for them. Im just saying that the transcendental is inescapable. When we try to ignore it, we are denying something that is so close to us that we hurt ourselves. But theres something that I think de Grey doesnt get either. Transcendence is more than a tool for expansion. The root of the problem is how to be content. (That Woody Allen quote is great.) As long as we are the center of our universe, the source of our own purpose, the only conceivable path to happiness is to expand. In this configuration, the best tool we have is simply a proof by induction. But its a circular argument. 1) If taking this step gives me a momentarily good feeling, then taking an indefinite number more of these steps is the road to happiness. 2) If Im going on the road to happiness, this means that this good feeling I have is something like happiness. So we end up in a pursuit of happiness defined by expanding on what we have and are now because we have an insatiable hunger for something that we arent getting. Thus technology, being the means of expansion, which is the only conceivable end, becomes synonymous with the end itself. Thus the treadmill syndrome. On the other hand, transcendence can be a means to 1) seeing that we can be (and should be) totally content with where we are right now, and at the same time a means to 2) seeing where we should go from here. This can be called seeing our purpose. Doesnt it ring true to our common sense that this is how things should be instead? Posted 1/14/2005 12:15:43 PM by [36]Michael LaTorra Subject: Transcending smallmindedness There seems to be a feeling abroad in the land among some people that having modest goals and cramped ambitions is the only morally acceptable position. Jason Pontin apparently holds such a view. Inside his cramped box, people live their allotted span then die, and they should not wish for or try to achieve more. Its time to think outside that box. Aubrey de Grey has set his sights on the problem of achieving longer lifespan and how this might be accomplished. Of course, this goal is as unacceptable to the conventional box-people as is de Greys lifestyle and his mode of dress. People who judge a scientist by his clothing are unlikely to be open to truly radical ideas. We do not have a duty to die. We do not have a duty to live only so long and no longer. The immorality of claiming otherwise cannot be hidden by engaging in silly and dismissive talk about trolls. No can one claim science fiction writer Bruce Sterling as an authority, unless one is also willing to grant at least equal authority to other science fiction authors who hold diametrically opposite views. The fair thing to do in the matter of this debate is for Technology Review to offer the other side an equal chance to state why they believe that technology both can and should be used to extend human lifespan as much as possible. Michael LaTorra New Mexico State University Posted 1/14/2005 10:02:11 AM by [37]J. Hughes Subject: Astonishingly Offensive and Inappropriate Your editorial calling Aubrey de Grey a troll is astonishingly offensive and inappropriate ad homininem. Is this the new loyalty oath in Bush's America: "I have not, and never have, believed technology will radically change the human condition, and anyone who does is an idiot"? Are you that desperate to reassure the Christian Right that better technology will only bring better toasters and not radically longer lives? De Grey deserves an apology. ----------------------------------------- James J. Hughes Ph.D. Public Policy Studies Trinity College Posted 1/14/2005 8:04:32 AM by [38]Kip Werking Subject: Ad Hominem This was one of the most disgustingly ad hominem passages I've ever read in a mainstream magazine: "But what struck me is that he is a troll. For all de Greys vaulting ambitions, what Sherwin Nuland saw from the outside was pathetically circumscribed. In his waking life, de Grey is the computer support to a research team; he dresses like a shabby graduate student and affects Rip Van Winkles beard; he has no children; he has few interests outside the science of biogerontology; he drinks too much beer. Although he is only 41, the signs of decay are strongly marked on his face. His ideas are trollish, too. For even if it were possible to perturb human biology in the way de Grey wishes, we shouldnt do it. Immortality might be okay for de Grey, but an entire world of the same superagenarians thinking the same kinds of thoughts forever would be terrible." If you can't argue with de Grey's ideas, you shouldn't resort to insulting him personally. Some of these are just tasteless ("he is a troll"). Others aren't even insults ("he has no children"). Others are just false ("he has few interests outside of biogerontology"--besides his expertise in computer science and biogerontology, de Grey is an tournament player of the boardgame Othello). Posted 1/14/2005 3:47:31 AM by MarcG Subject: Pioneers have always aimed high... A meaningful life by definition requires that people have interesting goals to pursue. And these goals have to be challenging. The pioneering spirit of pushing boundaries and doing things that have never been done before has always been an important part of human history. What goal could be more inspiring or challenging than trying for longer healthier lives? As I understand it, Mr. de Grey was never suggesting an end to all limits. The quest for immortality is quite likely to prove to be a way of life - a journey not a destination. Mr de Grey is simply offering the inspiring task of working towards radically extending healthy life-spans. Why knock this vision? What one would call 'transcendent' from one perspective, is ordinary reality from another perspective. Many of the things we now take for granted such as air-travel, radio and T.V would have seemed 'transcendent' to a cave man. But to modern man the goal post has shifted. The pioneering spirit is not a desire to end all limits or throw away human nature. On the contrary is the desire to positively expand what it means to be human. There is no clear-cut distinction between aging and disease. The incidence of many kinds of disease increases with age. If one believes that healthy life is a good, it seems that one is led towards the conclusion that the best way to achieve it is to directly attack the aging process itself. This is simply a natural extension of what human healers through out history have always aspired to: working towards healthier , longer lives. It's the essence of the Hippocratic oath. If there are ethical or rational arguments against life extension, by all means lets air them. But none are presented in the editorial. Posted 1/14/2005 2:40:57 AM by [39]Giulio Prisco Subject: Aging IS an engineering problem You say: [de Grey] believes he can defeat death by treating human aging as an engineering problem Aging is not a disease. Aging is the condition on which we are given life. Think of how the word disease is formed: dis - ease. Now ask anyone who has been reduced to a poor shadow of her/himself by age, if aging is a disease or not. Of course aging is a disease. Medical science is about curing diseases, and has already defeated many diseases on its march. There are diseases that todays medicine cannot cure yet, and that is why we must develop tomorrows medicine. This is common sense. Since the discovery of fire to the development of the Internet, the history of the evolution of our species has been marked by those moments where a condition on which we are given life has been attacked as an engineering problem. We would still be living in caves of our ancestors had considered living in caves as an inalterable condition in which they were given life. Fortunately our cave dwelling ancestors were saner than todays bioethicists. You say: For even if it were possible to perturb human biology in the way de Grey wishes, we shouldnt do it. Immortality might be okay for de Grey, but an entire world of the same superagenarians thinking the same kinds of thoughts forever would be terrible. The possibility to perturb human biology in the way de Grey wishes is an engineering problem. Todays medical science has started developing the necessary detailed understanding of human biology, and based on this understanding, tomorrow medical science will permit, I believe, improving it (an engineer does not say perturb a device, (s)he says improve a device). Please try explaining to me what is wrong with this. All humans who have lived so far have been forced to consider aging as a condition on which we are given life, because the engineering problem of aging was not operationally solvable at their time. Todays life extension science is about solving this engineering problem. I have no doubt that it will be solved like other engineering problems of the past. The impossibility of talking to someone far away used to be a condition on which we are given life, now we have the phone. Please try understanding that we want to improve neurology as well as biology. A world with operational life extension technology will not be populated by superagenarians thinking the same kinds of thoughts forever, but by smart, youthful, ever changing and evolving human beings. Posted 1/14/2005 1:02:18 AM by [40]Giulio Prisco Subject: I expected better from TR By adopting this pro-death and anti-science political agenda, Technology Review has lost its credibility as an objective scientific information source. Besides personal attacks on de Grey, your editorial contains no rational argument and no falsifiable scientific statement in support of your points. At least from my point of view, the only way for Technology Review to recover its lost credibility is publishing another article or editirial covering the opposite point of view which, as you can see from readers' comments to Nuland article, is shared by many TR readers. Posted 1/14/2005 1:00:06 AM by [41]Thomas L Caylor Subject: Expandence From the article it sounds like we have only two choices: either sludge apathetically through boring projects our whole life or turn into trolls. The first choice is a common reality: Without vision the people perish. Regarding the second choice, the reality is that we all deteriorate into pasty-faced trembling people if we live long enough. But with vision we live, even though our bodies decay. This is what makes us different from robots. (See my post as TLC on the article Adroit Droids, November 2004.) Even our self-labeled boring problems have to originate from somewhere. Someone somewhere had a vision that resulted in the boring project we are working on. What is all this stuff for that we are working on? You say its for making our lives more expansive. What does that mean? That sounds like the Woody Allen quote in the Technology and Happiness article, January 2005. (See my post there as BeHappy.) Technology only adds quantity, even in the area of longevity, but it is only the transcendent that tells us if we have quality, whether we call it that or not. In other words, it is only the transcendent that tells us if we ourselves have a life worth living. In reality we are all not more than a masquerade away from looking like Aubrey de Grey ourselves, on the outside. But is that really where happiness comes from, the outside? If we really are alone with ourselves, why cant we be happy with ourselves? The transcendent isnt any of the deprecating caricatures that weve run away from in our past. The transcendent is so omnipresent, offering to infuse every cell and action with their purpose and meaning, that it is easy for us to take it for granted. When we do that we end up having to fabricate false meanings. When we do that, we choose a truly tortuously gradual road to death, for ourselves and for the society that is made up of ourselves. References 33. mailto:RedQ at ATT.Net 34. mailto:tomfitzgerald at hotmail.com 35. mailto:daddycaylor at aol.com 36. mailto:mike99 at lascruces.com 37. mailto:james.hughes at trincoll.edu 38. mailto:n at n.com 39. mailto:pgptag at gmail.com 40. mailto:pgptag at gmail.com 41. mailto:daddycaylor at aol.com From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 24 21:31:31 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:31:31 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Front Page: Free Mumia? Message-ID: Free Mumia? http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=3642 [This is a little old, but support for Mumia rages on.] By [1]Paul Mulshine [2]FrontPageMagazine.com | August 1, 1995 [3]Heterodoxy | August 1995 SEVERAL YEARS AFTER THE MURDER of her husband, Maureen Faulkner moved to Southern California. It was as complete a change as she could imagine, from the confined rowhouse neighborhoods of Philadelphia to the wide-open beaches of the Pacific. She wanted to get away from it all, but the horror of his death has followed her. "I had a very interesting experience the other day," she told me. "I was pumping gas and I saw this guy get out of his car and he had on a 'Free Mumia' T-shirt. I went over to him and I said, 'Excuse me. Where did you get that shirt?' " 'At a rally at UCLA,' he said. " 'Tell me about the case,' I said. " 'It's about a Black Panther and the police framed him,' he said. "I said, 'Who do you really think shot the cop?' " 'Some other guy did it and ran away,' he said. "I said, 'You better get your facts straight, because the next time you walk around wearing a shirt like that the widow of the officer may come up to you.' "He said, You mean you're the widow?' "I said, 'If you give me your name and address, I'll send you the facts of the case! "He said, 'No, thanks. " Maureen Faulkner wasn't surprised by this response. Those who worship in the cult of Mumia Abu-Jamal are allergic to the facts. In fact, ignorance is a precondition for the religious experience. Far better to restrict oneself to the experience of Jamal's cuddly image as an existential dreadlocked intellectual and of his voice, a wonderful, mellifluous instrument familiar to listeners of National Public Radio's All Things Considered. In a gesture reminiscent of the Ayatollah's communiqu?s from Paris during the years of his exile, Jamal regularly sends out from death row cassettes that teach the hands of the faithful in faraway places. In Pennsylvania, where people know about him, Jamal is a nonentity, but in California he's a star. TV actors like Ed Asner and Mike Farrell preach his gospel, And college students in Los Angeles wear T-shirts emblazoned with his image and reject any invitation to learn the facts about his case. The University of California has done some amazing things over the years, but perhaps its most remarkable accomplishment has been to make available to the masses the sort of high-minded ignorance that used to be the sole province of Ivy League alumni. It produces an amazing type of person, superficially educated yet totally devoid of the type of intellectual curiosity that the university education is supposed to engender. When I covered the wars in Central America in the 1980s, I was amazed at the number of University of California students I'd run into in places like Nicaragua and Guatemala. I'd hear these people making huge, sweeping statements about local politics that had absolutely no basis in fact. I'd offer to show them some writings and documents that might alter their views, but theylike the guy Maureen Faulkner met in the gas stationwould decline. Thought to them was not a matter of dry facts and boring theories; it was a question of consciousness. Once one's consciousness was raised about a given question, that was that. Though I grew up and live in the East, I attended the University of California in the 1960s, so I'm not unaware of the roots of this phenomenon. It's what could be called the California Fallacy: that high moral authority derives from living in a beautiful place. When you're up in the eucalyptus groves above Berkeley, gazing at a panorama of the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean beyond, it's easy to believe that your thoughts are as wonderful as the view. This isn't true, but it has one major advantage from my point of view: Practitioners of the California Fallacy rarely show up where I live, just outside Philadelphia. So it was a bit of a shock when, upon emerging from the dingy, gray Philadelphia courtroom in which the case of Mumia Abu Jamal was being argued, I found myself surrounded by a handful of University of California types who had caravanned east to chant on behalf of their favorite political prisoner. It was only a little more shocking whenfifteen minutes laterI was being assaulted by two of them on the street in broad daylight. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I was at the hearing in August 1995 because I was trying to discover just what it is about Jamal that has made him into an international celebrity. His fame is certainly a mystery to the working journalists of Philadelphia who have covered his case since the beginning. The evidence against Jamal at his trial was so conclusive that no one, not even those who are Philadelphia's politically liberal equivalent of the conservative, wealthy Main Line residents, doubts that Jamal shot police officer Daniel Faulkner. One of the journalists who knows the case best is David Holmberg, who covered it for the Philadelphia Daily News. At the time of the trial in 1982, he was a committed liberal who was very skeptical of the Philadelphia police. He was prepared to give Jamal the benefit of the doubt. "It was just one of those things where the whole tone was, hey, this is a black guy. This is the Philadelphia police. If you were there at the time, your first inclination was to identify with Jamal," says Holmberg. "But the evidence was just so overwhelming. The testimony was so convincing." Not only that, but Jamal also sabotaged his own defense by demanding to act as his own attorney. The crusty old judge, Albert Sabo, granted that request but refused to grant a further request that Jamal be aided in his defense by John Africa, leader of a weird back-to-nature cult called MOVE that Jamal had embraced. Mumia's ties with the cult had become so strong, in fact, that he had left his part-time job as a correspondent for public radio. Although in late 198 1, the time of the killing, Jamal was the head of the local chapter of the National Association of Black journalists, by then he had only a tenuous connection to the journalism profession. He made his living by driving a cab. When Judge Sabo refused to permit John Africa to join the defense team, Jamal responded by disrupting the trial and playing to the audience, which was composed largely of MOVE members. A pattern developed. After warning him several times to cease disrupting the proceedings, Sabo would have Jamal removed from the courtroom and let his backup attorney, Anthony Jackson, handle the defense. Then Jamal would return for a while, until his next disruption. After the jury returned a guilty verdict on first-degree murder, Jamal sealed his fate by choosing to address the jury during the penalty phase. He began a long political harangue during which he openly insulted the jurors, two of whom were black. They responded by sentencing him to death. Jamal's behavior was so bizarre that a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter speculated in print that the defendant was suicidal. David Holmberg, now with a Florida newspaper, says he can't understand how the pathetic character on display at the trial metamorphosed into the cult hero of an international movement. "It's amazing the way these people come out of the woodwork for Mumia," he says. That's what I figured and that's why I was in the courtroom when Jamal was brought into Philadelphia for hearings on the appeal of his death sentence. I wanted to find out just who was behind the Mumia phenomenon. One day, after the hearing ended, I went into the plaza to interview the demonstrators who'd been showing up faithfully for several weeks. A rather pleasant looking young woman handed me a "Free Mumia" pamphlet. I asked if I could interview her. It began well enough. She gave her name as Karla and her age as twenty-three. A graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, she was looking for something to do during the summer, so she joined a six-car "caravan for justice" that began in Santa Cruz and eventually brought twenty-seven people to Philadelphia. She was a very nice, very sincere person whoin the great University of California traditionwas innocent of any knowledge of the case that she had traveled three thousand miles to protest. I knew a lot more about the case than she did, and not simply because I'm a journalist. By pure coincidence I happened to be what might be called an "earwitness" to the crime. On December 9, 1981, 1 was living just two blocks from 13th and Locust streets in Philadelphia. I was up late that night writing. I was still awake when, just before 4:00 A.M., I heard a quick burst of what sounded like gunfire. I heard five or six shots, and it was over almost as soon as it began. Then I heard sirens. The next morning, the newspapers said that a twenty-five-year-old cop by the name of Daniel Faulkner had been shot to death. Jamal was also shot, apparently by the cop. The facts were not controversial. Faulkner had stopped Jamal's brother, William Cook, for a traffic violation. Jamal happened, by what appears to have been pure coincidence, to have been driving a cab nearby. He observed Faulkner and Cook struggling. He ran across the street toward them and shot Faulkner in the back, according to the police account. Faulkner got off one shot and hit Jamal in the chest. Jamal then stood over the fallen officer and fired four more shots. When police arrived on the scene they found Faulkner dying from a bullet between the eyes and Jamal sitting on a curb nearby. A .38 caliber Charter Arms revolver registered to Jamal was at his feet with five spent cartridges in it. Jamal was wearing a holster. I asked Karla to explain to me how Jamal could possibly have been innocent. Why was he wearing a holster? What happened to Jamal's five bullets? Had he, in a burst of compassion, fired them into the air while some Good Samaritan came to his aid and shot the officer? "I don't know," Karla said. "There's a big possibility that another person shot him." "Give me a scenario," I said. "Just one." At this point she became a bit confused. She fetched another Mumiaite. He gave his name as Dan. .Did you graduate from UCSC?" I asked. "I went there," he said. "Give me a scenario." "There's a lot of scenarios" he said. "There were 125 eyewitnesses who claim they saw what happened, and the defense didn't get a chance to question them." "Wait a minute," I said. "One hundred and twenty-five eyewitnesses at Broad and Locust at 4:00 A.M. on a December night? Have you ever been to Broad and Locust?" Dan admitted he hadn't. I pointed out to him that, having traveled three thousand miles, he might want to walk three blocks to visit the murder scene. This might aid him in realizing that the intersection of Broad and Locust was certainly not the type of place where hundreds of people congregate at 4:00 A.M. He backpedaled: "I'm not saying 125 people saw who did what." "What are you saying? You mean you came all this distance and you've never even thought of a scenario by which your man could possibly be innocent?" At this point Dan and Karla seemed to realize that, unlike most of the out-of-town journalists who had descended on Philadelphia for the Jamal hearings, I was not a fan. "I don't want you to quote me," said Karla. "I want my quotes back." "I'll consider it," I said. "Me too," said Dan. "I don't want you to quote me." I began to walk away. The City Hall courtyard was filled with Mumiaites, and I didn't want to attract a crowd of them. They were the usual collection of clueless Quakers, burned-out sixties radical women, and rasta-dressed middle-class black people. They'd been having their little party out there for days, and it was a pathetic sight. A woman who identified herself as the Socialist candidate for New York City Council took the megaphone to praise Cuba as "the only revolutionary free nation on the earth." At another point, a young black man who might have been a college student actually smashed a black-and-white TV with a crowbar to show his contempt for the media. I hadn't the heart to tell him that that particular piece of guerrilla theater had become a clich? before he was born. No, I didn't want to get mau-maued by that crew. So I tucked my notebook in my back pocket and melted into the midday crowd. It was when I was a block away from City Hall that it happened. I felt a tug. I turned and saw Karla trying to escape with my notebook. I grabbed it back. Karla, to give credit where it's due, had a hell of a strong grip. Before I could work my notebook free, I felt someone grabbing me from behind. It was a tall Jamal supporter whom I'd seen back at City Hall. "Call the police!" I began to yell at bystanders. The thought of an imminent arrest by the Philadelphia police instantly inspired a burst of rationality in the Mumiaites. The tall guy let go, and Karla surrendered the notebook. I stuck my finger in the tall guy's chest. "Listen, bozo, I could have you arrested for assault!" "I am not a bozo!" he replied. "Can't we compromise?" said Karla. "Those are my quotes. I don't want them used." "Well, if you don't want your quotes used, don't talk to journalists," I told her. "This is the East. We play for keeps." I went looking for a pay phone to dial 911 and have the two arrested. But by the time I found one, I began to appreciate the humor in the incident. "I am not a bozo!"they should print that up on the back of all those T-shirts that say "Free Mumia!" in front. The next night I attended a panel discussion on the Jamal case. By coincidence, the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists was in town. Security was heavy. The Mumiaites were out in force, picketing at the entrance to the hotel where the convention was being held. The panel featured attorneys on opposite sides of the case. For Jamal, there was Leonard Weinglass, the leftwing lawyer who has represented everyone from the Chicago Seven to the men who bombed the World Trade Center. The anti-Jamal side was represented by Joseph McGill, who had prosecuted Jamal in the original trial in 1982. McGill had since left the district attorney's office and gone into private practice, but he retained an interest in the Jamal case. He was fond of telling the media that the case was a prosecutor's dream, with every base coveredfrom motive to physical evidence to eyewitness testimony. The panel discussion promised great drama, tremendous tension. The room was packed with the cream of the nation's black journalists, hundreds of reporters and editors from all over the country who were eager to examine the racially charged case of a black journalist on death row for killing a white policeman in a city that had had a history of bad relations between the races. As it began, the principals fiddled with their microphones and talked nervously. Then an amazing thing happenednothing. Weinglass got a bit of a charge out of the audience by bringing up every possible racial aspect of the case. He hit hard on the idea that the Philadelphia police were out to get Jamal because he had been a Black Panther in his youth. But McGill pointed out the simple facts of the case. Even if the police had been out to get Jamal, there is no way they could have arranged for him to show up at that particular intersection, armed, at the exact moment his brother was being arrested. "It is almost beyond belief to imagine a conspiracy so wide and so deep as to get all this evidence together:' McGill said. He pointed out that the defense had failed to come up with any challenge to the fact that Jamal's gun was found at his feet with five spent casings in it. As for Jamal's political involvement, it was more likely to prove his guilt than his innocence, McGill argued. Jamal's obsession with the MOVE cult had led him to grow dreadlocks and become an advocate of the group, if not a member. Shortly before the Faulkner shooting, Jamal had covered a trial at which MOVE members were convicted of killing a white policeman during a siege at one of their fortified houses. "Abu-Jamal indicated he was just overwhelmed with anger in 1981 when the MOVE members were sentenced," said McGill. Shortly after this statement I first noticed a curious phenomenon: The black journalists in the audience were filing out. Discreetly, in ones and twos, they began making their way to the back of the room. Elsewhere in the hotel were hospitality suites, recruiters from major newspapers, all kinds of attractions for the young, well-dressed, upwardly mobile cream of the African-American journalistic establishment. Inside was a debate between white people about what, when you got right down to it, was the sort of local crime story that most reporters have seen enough of. The question-and-answer session began. A Jamal supporter, one of those aging-hippie types with long hair on the sides but none on top, began a tirade on the subject of how unfair it was to call Jamal a "convicted cop-killer." This characterized Jamal as someone who habitually killed police officers, when, in fact, he was accused of having done it only once. The moderator cut him off after a minute or so: "Do you have a question?" "Yes," the man said. "Mr. McGill, how can you call Mumia Abu Jamal a cop-killer?" "He killed a cop," McGill replied. "That doesn't make him a cop-killer!" the guy yelled. This dialogue caused the remaining black journalists to look at each other. The movement toward the doors became less discreet. There were still some unfortunates left, however, when Pam Africa got to the microphone. She had wild dreadlocks and a child, also in dreadlocks, on her hip. The assembled black journalists seemed appalled. Unlike us white male journalists, who generally dress only slightly better than carpenters, black journalists tend to have a sense of style. Pam Africa was a living stereotype of every upwardly mobile black professional's nightmare. In a guttural voice, Ms. Africa began a tirade on the innocence of Jamal. The trickle to the exits became a flood. After the panel discussion ended, a few black journalists whom I knew came over and discussed the Jamal case with me. They knew I was covering the case, and they were being polite. But to them, it was a non-story. And for good reason. Leonard Weinglass has done an admirable job of fooling the national media into thinking there is some doubt about who shot Faulkner. But he's up against a problem often cited by a football coach at my old high school: You can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit. Jamal's decision to act as his own attorney at his 1982 trial left Weinglass with a trial record that is extremely damaging to his client. Weinglass can nibble at the edges of the evidence all he wants, but he can't get rid of that Charter Arms revolver found at Mumia Abu-Jamal's feet. Weinglass concedes there were five spent casings in the gun, but he criticizes the police for not testing the gun to see if it had been fired recently. "How do you do that?" someone asked. Weinglass said, "You just smell it." Wonderful: His client was literally caught with a smoking gun, so he criticizes the police for not smelling the smoke. The other objections raised by Weinglass and the Jamal supporters have little coherence. The objections represent at least four separate and mutually exclusive theories of what happened that night. The theories get more and more fantastic as the case progresses. In this latest hearing, the defense one day produced a witness who said Faulkner was shot by a passenger in William Cook's car and on another day produced a witness who said Faulkner was shot by a guy with "Johnny Mathis hair" who drove up to the scene in the middle of the action and fired the coup de grace into Faulkner's face. The press reported these scenarios as if they might have had validity. This is nonsense. The media haveamazinglyfailed to report the most salient fact about the Jamal case: Jamal has never once said he didn't shoot Faulkner. A Time magazine article, for example, repeated the oft-stated contention that Jamal has denied shooting Faulkner. But in fact, he's never made such a statement. At his trial, he divided his time between political tirades about the MOVE organization and questioning that seemed to indicate a mild endorsement of the mystery-gunman theory. This strategy backfired when Jamal, acting as his own attorney, challenged the testimony of a prosecution witness, a cabdriver named Robert Chobert, who said, "I saw you, buddy. I saw you shoot him and I never took my eyes off you." Jamal didn't take the stand at that trial to give his story. Nor did he call as a witness his brother, who presumably could have identified the mystery gunman. In all public statements since the trial, he has studiously avoided any discussion of the events of December 9, 1981. Reporters who get jailhouse interviews with him are told in advance they can't ask about the only moment in Jamal's life that is in any way newsworthy. All the various fantastic scenarios involving mystery gunmen come not from Jamal, but from his acolytes. What we have here is a first in historya debate in which one of the participants holds up his end without talking. Why the silence? On two separate occasions I asked Weinglass if he intends to stick to the mystery-gunman theory in the event Jamal wins a retrial. On both occasions he declined to comment. I upped the ante. "You're going to plead self-defense, right?" I asked. At this point he got a bit testy and called me a "prosecuting journalist." The reason for his testiness is obvious. The search for a mystery gunman is a charade, a fund-raising stunt, a way of getting a new trial. In the event that he and his supporters outside the courtroom manage to win a retrial, Weinglass is likely to admit the obvious: that Jamal shot Faulkner. He could then claim that Jamal acted only to save his brother from a beating like that Rodney King received. (This isn't trueCook sucker-punched Faulkner, eyewitnesses said.) He could stage a defense of the variety pioneered by Huey Newton in 1967a political extravaganza of white guilt, inquiries into American racism, and cop-baiting. Putting the nation on trial, Weinglass might well create doubt about a few very hectic seconds of violence. The advantage to this strategy is that Weinglass doesn't have to win an acquittal. Under Pennsylvania law, any verdict below first-degree murder would permit Jamal to walk out of the courtroom the next day by virtue of time served. This is the long-range strategy. For now, Mumia must remain silent. If he were to deny right now that he shot Faulkner, the political defense would be sidetracked because his statements could be used against him in a retrial. "You lied about shooting the officer," the prosecutor could ask. "What else are you lying about?" Weinglass's plan may be a good one for his client, but it's an awful one for the United States. People around the world are being told that Jamal is a political prisoner who is on death row for a murder that someone else committed. It isn't true, but it's a compelling story, and he's a compelling character. On several occasions I've seen Mumia Abu-Jamal in the flesh, and he isand this is a strange thing to say about a convicted murderercute. The dreadlocks, the granny glasseshe looks like a white hippie in racial drag. He reminds me not of any black person I've ever known but of my organic-farmer friend, George (who, coincidentally, is also a graduate of UCSC). The Jamal people make a lot out of the racial nature of the case, but in fact few blacks in Philadelphia give a damn about Mumia. The MOVE group has zero popularity in the black community. The 1985 siege in which eleven MOVE members died was prompted because the neighbors of MOVE, virtually all of them black, demanded that the police do something about the noise and filth at the compound. Among the black journalists in Philadelphia, support tends to be limited to those who were friends of Jamal before the shooting. The crowds outside the courtroom are made up almost entirely of non-Philadelphians. No, the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal does not strike a chord with most black Americans. In fact, his support comes almost exclusively from white Americans who are stuck in the sixties. These people, like the Santa Cruz students, hate the idea that actions have consequences, that a man can, in a few seconds, embark on a path that will put a permanent stain on his life. The ethos of the sixties was "If it feels good, do it." And perhaps it felt good, that night, for Mumia Abu-Jamal to take out a gun and even the score for what he perceived to be three centuries of racism. In the minds of the Jamal supporters, a balance has been struck. The racism of the Philadelphia police cancels out whatever happened the night Daniel Faulkner was shot. In the middle of researching the Jamal case and reading his book, Live from Death Row, I happened to come upon a book by another black journalist/convict. The title is Makes Me Wanna Holler, and the author is Nathan McCall, who now writes for the Washington Post. McCall describes a life growing up in a solid, lower-middle class family. In his early teens, he joined a gang. Soon he participated in the gang-rape of a scared young virgin. Then he graduated to burglaries, holdups, and gang fights; on several occasions, he shot a pistol at other teenagers who were unarmed. Eventually, his political consciousness was awakened by the Black Panthers. He drove to a suburb and walked up to the picture window of a home where a white family was watching TV. He aimed his sawed-off shotgun at the window, fired, and ran away. He never learned whether he hit anyone. He tells these stories in a bragging tone, full of the hip slang of the black underculture. He gives the standard dissection of that underculture and shows why it was racism that caused him to commit his crimes. By the end of the book, when McCall is safely at the Washington Post, he clearly wants the reader to be impressed by his generosity in coming to forgive white people. He's still upset, though, by the way some white folks act. When he enters elevators alone with middle-aged white women, they shrink defensively into a corner. This he ascribes to racism. Perhaps. But perhaps these women are just good judges of character. Perhaps they sense intuitively that they are in an extremely confined space with someone who has proven himself capable of gang-raping a child, shooting at a family, and robbing people at gunpoint. The progressive theory of criminal justice holds that the past can be eradicated. No act is irrevocable. Given enough time, evil acts stop being evil acts and become something elsematerial for a best-seller. Rape a child? Shoot a cop? Write a book. The problem of Nathan McCall, and of Mumia Abu-Jamal, is the same problem Herman Melville delineated in Billy Buddwho was, however, a far more sympathetic character. Budd was by all accounts a wonderful fellow. Even the naval officers who sentenced him to death realized that he struck and killed a superior in a moment of inarticulate rage caused by that man's unfair harassment of him. Billy Budd apologized from the heart for his crime. But that didn't make the crime go away. His execution was necessary to maintain the ritual of order on a ship in wartime. "With mankind, forms, measured forms, are everything," says Captain Vere, who reluctantly orders the execution. Melville was one of the first to be skeptical of the modem notion that human nature could be changed by the great burst of rationality that shaped the nineteenth century. You wonder what he would make of the example of novelist E. L. Doctorow. Doctorow has come to Jamal's defense not out of any understanding of the case, but out of an amorphous, damp feeling that the matter should be discussed into eternity. Doctorow wrote a piece in the New York Times based solely on the many distortions in Weinglass's petition for a new trial. In the piece, he refers to "Jamal's own account"which does not exist"that he was shot first by the officer as he approached." He concludes that a retrial should be granted. There are several amazing things about Doctorow's piece. A man who has written extensively about crime, Doctorow didn't bother to call the Philadelphia district attorney's office and get the other side of the story. But even more amazing is that he seems to be building a theory that Jamal, having just been shot by a cop, somehow managed to get off five shots without hitting anyone while someone else came along in that same brief moment and shot the officer. Doctorow concludes, unctuously, "Will the pain of Faulkner's widow, who supports Jamal's execution, be resolved if it turns out that the wrong man has been executed and her husband's killer still walks the streets?" If Doctorow were really concerned about "the pain of Faulkner's widow," he could simply call Maureen Faulkner and discuss it. Then he'd learn that this pain is greatly exacerbated by foolish people like him who take the side of her husband's killer without learning the facts. But few of the people who follow Mumia Abu-Jamal seem to want to think too much about the facts. They're happy with hints of a mystery gunman, and they'd like to leave it at that, floating in the air. What they hate more than the police, more than racism, is the idea that some acts are irreversible, that a cute, reasonable-sounding guy like Mumia Abu-Jamal could have held a gun eighteen inches from the head of a man who was lying helpless on the sidewalk, pulled the trigger, and sent a hollow-point bullet into his brain, where it proceeded to expand to many times its original size. (The gun-shop owner who sold Jamal the hollow-point bullets testified at the trial as well.) Well, tough luck, boys and girls. Jamal did it. Worse, he did it and he never once expressed any remorse, any sadness for anyone but himself Sorry, Karla, we can't compromise. Some things are irreversibletrivial things like quotes given to a reporter and big things like a bullet in the brain. Sorry E. L., this isn't one of those Random House novels where the identity of the mystery gunman is revealed at the end. This is real life in a bad part of town. If there's a better candidate for the death penalty than a man who kills in cold blood and shows not the slightest regret, we Philadelphians haven't heard of him. The great irony here is that if Jamal had simply told the truth at his trial and let his lawyer do his job, he probably would have been convicted of manslaughter or third-degree murder. He would have served his time by now and been released. He appears to have learned his lesson. These days, he sits quietly in court while his defense team does the talking. He is evolving. "You wait," says Maureen Faulkner. "if he ever gets a retrial, you're gonna see Jamal in a buzz haircut and a suit." A safe bet. But its also a safe bet Jamal will never get another trial. The rules for appeals call for the defendant to show not only that an issue was wrongly decided at trial, but also that if the decision had gone the other way, the verdict might have been reversed. In Jamal's case, that's a stiff burden. Throw out any one piece of evidence and there are still a dozen more. And the smoking gun simply won't go away. As a radio journalist, Jamal was a failure. As a writer, he's a mediocrity. It is often said of bad writers, "He couldn't write a ransom note." That can't be said of Jamal. His entire book is a ransom note, a cleverly disguised plea to raise the ransom to get him off death row. So far it's brought in at least $800,000. But as literature, it's laughable. In life, Mumia Abu-Jamal was little more than a sixties social experiment that failed. It's only in death that he will finally be able to do something for his fellow man. His departure, if it ever comes, will signal to all Americans-from the most august professor at the University of California to the lowliest TV star-that we human beings are irrevocably tied to our actions. It will mean that we are not condemned to frolic forever clueless among the redwoods, but that we do indeed have a civilization, and that civilization has certain rules that protect us from the whimsies of our barbaric nature. MORE ON MUMIA ABU JAMAL: * [4]International Concerned Family & Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal * [5]ABC News 20/20, "Hollywoods Unlikely Hero" * [6]Justice for Daniel Faulkner * [7]FrontPage Black Panther archive References 1. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.asp?ID=343 2. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=3642 3. http://cspc.org/het/index.htm 4. http://www.mumia.org/ 5. http://www.frontpagemag.com/panthers/unlikely12-14-98.htm 6. http://www.justice4danielfaulkner.com/ 7. http://www.frontpagemag.com/panthers/index.htm From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 24 21:32:30 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:32:30 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Gray Matter and the Sexes: Still a Scientific Gray Area Message-ID: Gray Matter and the Sexes: Still a Scientific Gray Area NYT January 24, 2005 By NATALIE ANGIER and KENNETH CHANG When Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, suggested this month that one factor in women's lagging progress in science and mathematics might be innate differences between the sexes, he slapped a bit of brimstone into a debate that has simmered for decades. And though his comments elicited so many fierce reactions that he quickly apologized, many were left to wonder: Did he have a point? Has science found compelling evidence of inherent sex disparities in the relevant skills, or perhaps in the drive to succeed at all costs, that could help account for the persistent paucity of women in science generally, and at the upper tiers of the profession in particular? Researchers who have explored the subject of sex differences from every conceivable angle and organ say that yes, there are a host of discrepancies between men and women - in their average scores on tests of quantitative skills, in their attitudes toward math and science, in the architecture of their brains, in the way they metabolize medications, including those that affect the brain. Yet despite the desire for tidy and definitive answers to complex questions, researchers warn that the mere finding of a difference in form does not mean a difference in function or output inevitably follows. "We can't get anywhere denying that there are neurological and hormonal differences between males and females, because there clearly are," said Virginia Valian, a psychology professor at Hunter College who wrote the 1998 book "Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women." "The trouble we have as scientists is in assessing their significance to real-life performance." For example, neuroscientists have shown that women's brains are about 10 percent smaller than men's, on average, even after accounting for women's comparatively smaller body size. But throughout history, people have cited anatomical distinctions in support of overarching hypotheses that turn out merely to reflect the societal and cultural prejudices of the time. A century ago, the French scientist Gustav Le Bon pointed to the smaller brains of women - closer in size to gorillas', he said - and said that explained the "fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason" in women. Overall size aside, some evidence suggests that female brains are relatively more endowed with gray matter - the prized neurons thought to do the bulk of the brain's thinking - while men's brains are packed with more white matter, the tissue between neurons. To further complicate the portrait of cerebral diversity, new brain imaging studies from the University of California, Irvine, suggest that men and women with equal I.Q. scores use different proportions of their gray and white matter when solving problems like those on intelligence tests. Men, they said, appear to devote 6.5 times as much of their gray matter to intelligence-related tasks as do women, while women rely far more heavily on white matter to pull them through a ponder. What such discrepancies may or may not mean is anyone's conjecture. "It is cognition that counts, not the physical matter that does the cognition," argued Nancy Kanwisher, a professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When they do study sheer cognitive prowess, many researchers have been impressed with how similarly young boys and girls master new tasks. "We adults may think very different things about boys and girls, and treat them accordingly, but when we measure their capacities, they're remarkably alike," said Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. She and her colleagues study basic spatial, quantitative and numerical abilities in children ranging from 5 months through 7 years. "In that age span, you see a considerable number of the pieces of our mature capacities for spatial and numerical reasoning coming together," Dr. Spelke said. "But while we always test for gender differences in our studies, we never find them." In adolescence, though, some differences in aptitude begin to emerge, especially when it comes to performance on standardized tests like the SAT. While average verbal scores are very similar, boys have outscored girls on the math half of the dreaded exam by about 30 to 35 points for the past three decades or so. Nor is the masculine edge in math unique to the United States. In an international standardized test administered in 2003 by the international research group Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to 250,000 15-year-olds in 41 countries, boys did moderately better on the math portion in just over half the nations. For nearly all the other countries, there were no significant sex differences. But average scores varied wildly from place to place and from one subcategory of math to the next. Japanese girls, for example, were on par with Japanese boys on every math section save that of "uncertainty," which measures probabilistic skills, and Japanese girls scored higher over all than did the boys of many other nations, including the United States. In Iceland, girls broke the mold completely and outshone Icelandic boys by a significant margin on all parts of the test, as they habitually do on their national math exams. "We have no idea why this should be so," said Almar Midvik Halldorsson, project manager for the Educational Testing Institute in Iceland. Interestingly, in Iceland and everywhere else, girls participating in the survey expressed far more negative attitudes toward math. The modest size and regional variability of the sex differences in math scores, as well as an attitudinal handicap that girls apparently pack into their No. 2 pencil case, convince many researchers that neither sex has a monopoly on basic math ability, and that culture rather than chromosomes explains findings like the gap in math SAT scores. Yet Dr. Summers, who said he intended his remarks to be provocative, and other scientists have observed that while average math skillfulness may be remarkably analogous between the sexes, men tend to display comparatively greater range in aptitude. Males are much likelier than females to be found on the tail ends of the bell curve, among the superhigh scorers and the very bottom performers. Among college-bound seniors who took the math SAT's in 2001, for example, nearly twice as many boys as girls scored over 700, and the ratio skews ever more male the closer one gets to the top tally of 800. Boys are also likelier than girls to get nearly all the answers wrong. For Dr. Summers and others, the overwhelmingly male tails of the bell curve may be telling. Such results, taken together with assorted other neuro-curiosities like the comparatively greater number of boys with learning disorders, autism and attention deficit disorder, suggest to them that the male brain is a delicate object, inherently prone to extremes, both of incompetence and of genius. But few researchers who have analyzed the data believe that men's greater representation among the high-tail scores can explain more than a small fraction of the sex disparities in career success among scientists. For one thing, said Kimberlee A. Shauman, a sociologist at the University of California, Davis, getting a high score on a math aptitude test turns out to be a poor predictor of who opts for a scientific career, but it is an especially poor gauge for girls. Catherine Weinberger, an economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has found that top-scoring girls are only about 60 percent as likely as top-scoring boys to pursue science or engineering careers, for reasons that remain unclear. Moreover, men seem perfectly capable of becoming scientists without a math board score of 790. Surveying a representative population of working scientists and engineers, Dr. Weinberger has discovered that the women were likelier than the men to have very high test scores. "Women are more cautious about entering these professions unless they have very high scores to begin with," she said. And this remains true even though a given score on standardized math tests is less significant for women than for men. Dr. Valian, of Hunter, observes that among women and men taking the same advanced math courses in college, women with somewhat lower SAT scores often do better than men with higher scores. "The SAT's turn out to underpredict female and overpredict male performance," she said. Again, the reasons remain mysterious. Dr. Summers also proposed that perhaps women did not go into science because they found it too abstract and cold-blooded, offering as anecdotal evidence the fact that his young daughter, when given toy trucks, had treated them as dolls, naming them "Daddy truck" and "baby truck." But critics dryly observed that men had a longstanding tradition of naming their vehicles, and babying them as though they were humans. Yu Xie, a sociologist at the University of Michigan and a co-author with Dr. Shauman of "Women in Science: Career Processes and Outcomes" (2003), said he wished there was less emphasis on biological explanations for success or failure, and more on effort and hard work. Among Asians, he said, people rarely talk about having a gift or a knack or a gene for math or anything else. If a student comes home with a poor grade in math, he said, the parents push the child to work harder. "There is good survey data showing that this disbelief in innate ability, and the conviction that math achievement can be improved through practice," Dr. Xie said, "is a tremendous cultural asset in Asian society and among Asian-Americans." In many formerly male-dominated fields like medicine and law, women have already reached parity, at least at the entry levels. At the undergraduate level, women outnumber men in some sciences like biology. Thus, many argue that it is unnecessary to invoke "innate differences" to explain the gap that persists in fields like physics, engineering, mathematics and chemistry. Might scientists just be slower in letting go of baseless sexism? C. Megan Urry, a professor of physics and astronomy at Yale who led the American delegation to an international conference on women in physics in 2002, said there was clear evidence that societal and cultural factors still hindered women in science. Dr. Urry cited a 1983 study in which 360 people - half men, half women - rated mathematics papers on a five-point scale. On average, the men rated them a full point higher when the author was "John T. McKay" than when the author was "Joan T. McKay." There was a similar, but smaller disparity in the scores the women gave. Dr. Spelke, of Harvard, said, "It's hard for me to get excited about small differences in biology when the evidence shows that women in science are still discriminated against every stage of the way." A recent experiment showed that when Princeton students were asked to evaluate two highly qualified candidates for an engineering job - one with more education, the other with more work experience - they picked the more educated candidate 75 percent of the time. But when the candidates were designated as male or female, and the educated candidate bore a female name, suddenly she was preferred only 48 percent of the time. The debate is sure to go on. Sandra F. Witelson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said biology might yet be found to play some role in women's careers in the sciences. "People have to have an open mind," Dr. Witelson said. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/science/24women.html From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 24 21:34:45 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:34:45 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Safire: A Columnist's Farewell Message-ID: Safire: A Columnist's Farewell (Op-Ed Quartet) Op-Ed Columnist: 'Never Retire' January 24, 2005 By WILLIAM SAFIRE The Nobel laureate James Watson, who started a revolution in science as co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, put it to me straight a couple of years ago: "Never retire. Your brain needs exercise or it will atrophy." Why, then, am I bidding Op-Ed readers farewell today after more than 3,000 columns? Nobody pushed me; at 75, I'm in good shape, not afflicted with political ennui; and my recent column about tsunami injustice and the Book of Job drew the biggest mail response in 32 years of pounding out punditry. Here's why I'm outta here: In an interview 50 years before, the aging adman Bruce Barton told me something like Watson's advice about the need to keep trying something new, which I punched up into "When you're through changing, you're through." He gladly adopted the aphorism, which I've been attributing to him ever since. Combine those two bits of counsel - never retire, but plan to change your career to keep your synapses snapping - and you can see the path I'm now taking. Readers, too, may want to think about a longevity strategy. We're all living longer. In the past century, life expectancy for Americans has risen from 47 to 77. With cures for cancer, heart disease and stroke on the way, with genetic engineering, stem cell regeneration and organ transplants a certainty, the boomer generation will be averting illness, patching itself up and pushing well past the biblical limits of "threescore and ten." But to what purpose? If the body sticks around while the brain wanders off, a longer lifetime becomes a burden on self and society. Extending the life of the body gains most meaning when we preserve the life of the mind. That idea led a lifetime friend, David Mahoney, who headed the Dana Foundation until his death in 2000, to join with Jim Watson in forming the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives. They roped me in, a dozen years ago, to help enliven a moribund "decade of the brain." By encouraging many of the most prestigious neuroscientists to get out of the ivory tower and explain in plain words the potential of brain science, they enlisted the growing public and private support for research. That became the program running quietly in the background of my on-screen life as language maven, talking head, novelist and twice-weekly vituperative right-wing scandalmonger. I had no pretensions about becoming a scientist (having been graduated near the bottom of my class at the Bronx High School of Science) but did launch a few publications and a Web site - www.Dana.org - that opened some channels among scientists, journalists and people seeking reliable information about the exciting field. Experience as a Times polemicist made it easier to wade into the public controversies of science. Dana philanthropy provides forums to debate neuroethics: Is it right to push beyond treatment for mental illness to enhance the normal brain? Should we level human height with growth hormones? Is cloning ever morally sound? Does a drug-induced sense of well-being undermine "real" happiness? Such food for thought is now becoming my meat. And what about what the cognition crowd calls "executive transfer" in learning? Does an early grasp of the arts - music, dance, drama, drawing - affect a child's ability to apply that cognitive process to facility in math, architecture, history? New imaging techniques and much-needed longitudinal studies may provide answers rather than anecdotes and affect arts budgets in schools. So I told The Times's publisher two years ago that the 2004 presidential campaign would be my last hurrah as political pundit, and that I would then take on the full-time chairmanship of Dana. He expressed appropriate dismay at losing the Op-Ed conservative but said it would be a terrible idea to abandon the Sunday language column. That's my scholarly recreation, so I agreed to continue. (Don't use so as a conjunction!) Starting next week, working in an operating and grant-making foundation, I will have to retrain parts of my brain. That may not make me a big man on hippocampus, but it means less of the horizon-gazing that required me to take positions on everything going on in the world; instead, a welcome verticalism will drive me to dig more deeply into specific areas of interest. Fewer lone-wolf assertions; more collegial dealing. I hear that's tough. But retraining and fresh stimulation are what all of us should require in "the last of life, for which the first was made." Athletes and dancers deal with the need to retrain in their 30's, workers in their 40's, managers in their 50's, politicians in their 60's, academics and media biggies in their 70's. The trick is to start early in our careers the stress-relieving avocation that we will need later as a mind-exercising final vocation. We can quit a job, but we quit fresh involvement at our mental peril. In this inaugural winter of 2005, the government in Washington is dividing with partisan zeal over the need or the way to protect today's 20-somethings' Social Security accounts in 2040. Sooner or later, we'll bite that bullet; personal economic security is freedom from fear. But how many of us are planning now for our social activity accounts? Intellectual renewal is not a vast new government program, and to secure continuing social interaction deepens no deficit. By laying the basis for future activities in the midst of current careers, we reject stultifying retirement and seize the opportunity for an exhilarating second wind. Medical and genetic science will surely stretch our life spans. Neuroscience will just as certainly make possible the mental agility of the aging. Nobody should fail to capitalize on the physical and mental gifts to come. When you're through changing, learning, working to stay involved - only then are you through. "Never retire." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/opinion/24safire2.html --------------------------------- Op-Ed Columnist: How to Read a Column NYT January 24, 2005 By WILLIAM SAFIRE At last I am at liberty to vouchsafe to you the dozen rules in reading a political column. 1. Beware the pundit's device of using a quotation from a liberal opposition figure to make a conservative case, and vice versa. Righties love to quote John F. Kennedy on life's unfairness; lefties love to quote Ronald Reagan. Don't fall for gilding by association. 2. Never look for the story in the lede. Reporters are required to put what's happened up top, but the practiced pundit places a nugget of news, even a startling insight, halfway down the column, directed at the politiscenti. When pressed for time, the savvy reader starts there. 3. Do not be taken in by "insiderisms." Fledgling columnists, eager to impress readers with their grasp of journalistic jargon, are drawn to such arcane spellings as "lede." Where they lede, do not follow. 4. When infuriated by an outrageous column, do not be suckered into responding with an abusive e-mail. Pundits so targeted thumb through these red-faced electronic missives with delight, saying "Hah! Got to 'em." 5. Don't fall for the "snapper" device. To give an aimless harangue the illusion of shapeliness, some of us begin (forget "lede") with a historical allusion or revealing anecdote, then wander around for 600 words before concluding by harking back to an event or quotation in the opening graph. This stylistic circularity gives the reader a snappy sense of completion when the pundit has not figured out his argument's conclusion. 6. Be wary of admissions of minor error. One vituperator wrote recently that the Constitution's requirement for a president to be "natural born" would have barred Alexander Hamilton. Nitpickers pointed out that the Founders exempted themselves. And there were 16, not 20, second inaugural speeches. In piously making these corrections before departing, the pundit gets credit for accuracy while getting away with misjudgments too whopping to admit. (Note: you are now halfway down the column. Start here.) 7. Watch for repayment of favors. Stewart Alsop jocularly advised a novice columnist: "Never compromise your journalistic integrity - except for a revealing anecdote." Example: a Nixon speechwriter told columnists that the president, at Camp David, boasted "I just shot 120," to which Henry Kissinger said brightly "Your golf game is improving, Mr. President," causing Nixon to growl "I was bowling, Henry." After columnists gobbled that up, the manipulative writer collected in the coin of friendlier treatment. 8. Cast aside any column about two subjects. It means the pundit chickened out on the hard decision about what to write about that day. When the two-topic writer strains to tie together chalk and cheese, turn instead to a pudding with a theme. (Three subjects, however, can give an essay the stability of an oaken barstool. Two's a crowd, but three's a gestalt.) 9. Cherchez la source. Ingest no column (or opinionated reporting labeled "analysis") without asking: Cui bono? And whenever you see the word "respected" in front of a name, narrow your eyes. You have never read "According to the disrespected (whomever)." 10. Resist swaydo-intellectual writing. Only the hifalutin trap themselves into "whomever" and only the tort bar uses the Latin for "who benefits?" Columnists who show off should surely shove off. (And avoid all asinine alliteration.) 11. Do not be suckered by the unexpected. Pundits sometimes slip a knuckleball into their series of curveballs: for variety's sake, they turn on comrades in ideological arms, inducing apostasy-admirers to gush "Ooh, that's so unpredictable." Such pushmi-pullyu advocacy is permissible for Clintonian liberals or libertarian conservatives but is too often the mark of the too-cute contrarian. 12. Scorn personal exchanges between columnists. Observers presuming to be participants in debate remove the reader from the reality of controversy; theirs is merely a photo of a painting of a statue, or a towel-throwing contest between fight managers. Insist on columns taking on only the truly powerful, and then only kicking 'em when they're up. In bidding Catullus's ave atque vale to readers of this progenitor of all op-ed pages (see rule 10), is it fair for one who has enjoyed its freedom for three decades to spill its secrets? Of course it's unfair to reveal the Code. But punditry is as vibrant as political life itself, and as J.F.K. said, "life is unfair." (Rules 1 and 5.) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/opinion/24safire1.html --------------------------------- Op-Ed Columnist: Win Some, Lose Some NYT January 24, 2005 By WILLIAM SAFIRE Here's how some of my journalistic crusades turned out: Winner: Baltic freedom. My most provocative dateline in the 80's put the story ahead of the lede: "Riga, Soviet-occupied Latvia." Because the U.S. never recognized the Hitler-Stalin pact, in 1991 we encouraged the Baltic "captive nations" to become the wedge that began the breakup of the Soviet Union. Al Gore and Strobe Talbott later backed up that breakaway by proposing NATO expansion, despite Moscow's protests - the good deed of Clinton foreign policy. Loser: State-sponsored gambling. For years I railed against the deceptive and regressive taxation and something-for-nothing morality perpetrated by state lotteries, as well as the state deals with sometimes phony Indian tribal leaders to victimize the gullible in glitzy casinos. But gambling, euphemized as "gaming," is booming, enriching the sleazy while preying on the addicted and corrupting slots-happy governors. Winner: Israel's security. Some of us backed Ariel Sharon and Israeli realists for a generation, while State Department "evenhandedness" was all thumbs in failing to come to grips with Arafat's aim of conquest. In the future, if Palestinians confront their terrorist minority and get realistic about borders, Israel will relocate some of its settlers, forcibly if necessary, to secure the peace settlement. Loser: Media competition. Merger mania and antitrust wimps have allowed a dangerous giantism to bestride the worlds of media, energy and finance. Our voices calling for competition in the massive-media wilderness go unheeded; only some monopoly scandal or derivatives-driven collapse will awaken the public to the need to "break up the Yankees." Winner: Kurdish autonomy. Kurds say "the Kurds have no friends," but their legendary chieftain, Mustafa al-Barzani, was my friend. His oft-betrayed people, who suffered poison-gas attacks under Saddam, have built a safe, prosperous democracy in Iraqi Kurdistan, an inspiration to Iraqis and Muslims around the world. (Shortchanged Kurds tipped me to the U.N. oil-for-food scandal.) Although I underestimated the staying power of terrorists and Baathists, I believe Kurds will be part of the Iraqi majority that will rule, and history will judge our blow for freedom to be a winner. Loser: Privacy. Civil libertarians were fighting the good fight against computer stalkers; insurance, medical and banking intruders; and government snoops who wanted to merge F.B.I. files with credit-card tracking. But after 9/11 and the terrorist threat, plain fear overrode concerns about freedom from surveillance by ubiquitous cameras, digital recorders and computer cookies. Because politicians don't want to appear "soft on security," personal privacy is on the ropes. Winner: My good fortune. I was propelled to this point by three remarkable bosses: the columnist Tex McCrary, tough but fair taskmaster ("nobody ever drowned in his own sweat"); the unforgettable Richard Nixon, who gave me the chance to participate in history, observe great moments and learn from great mistakes; and the courageous publisher Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger, who in 1973 said he wanted "another point of view" on this page, and who stuck loyally with me when he got it. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/opinion/24safire3.html --------------------------------- Op-Ed Columnist: First Lady Follies January 24, 2005 By WILLIAM SAFIRE My relationships with first ladies were varied. Pat Nixon was a pal; we were both volunteers during her husband's first comeback in the 60's, sometimes working at adjoining desks in the Nixon, Mudge law offices. She answered the phone as the receptionist "Pat Ryan," her maiden name, and assured political callers she knew Mr. Nixon well enough to get through to him with a complete message. Her daughter Julie inherited that cheery sang-froid: "My father does not get angry, or blow up, or anything like you read about him," Julie Eisenhower would insist. "Of course, there was the time when Mother dropped the bowling ball on his toe. ..." Barbara Bush was the warmest politician among the first ladies. Her husband consigned me to a deep freeze after he urged Ukraine to stick with Moscow and I labeled his gaffe "Chicken Kiev," but on social occasions ever since, Barb would toss me an understanding wave and wink as Bush 41 grimly stared straight ahead. My first-lady difficulties began with Nancy Reagan. She was discovered to be taking free dresses for six years from the nation's most expensive designers in exchange for the publicity she gave them, and at first falsely claimed they were purchases. I beat a spoon on my highchair about this ethical breach, which put me in the Oval Office doghouse. Later, when I criticized her for abusing unelected power by giving the bum's rush to White House Chief of Staff Don Regan, President Reagan gallantly blasted any columnist who would dare to chastise "another man's wife." Then came Hillary Clinton. In citing three examples that I thought showed habitual mendacity through 15 years of commodities trading, Travelgate and Whitewater, I concluded with feigned sadness that our talented first lady, a role model to many, was also a "congenital liar." Gallant husband Bill Clinton had his spokesman say "the president, if he were not the president, would have delivered a more forceful response to that - on the bridge of Mr. Safire's nose." Hundreds of requests came in for ringside seats to witness the presidential punch on my proboscis. Tim Russert presented me with a pair of large red boxing gloves on "Meet the Press." Pat Oliphant drew a cartoon showing "Crusher Clinton" in the ring with "Slugger Safire" and a referee holding us apart, saying "Boys, boys," and a spectator shouting "Gummint doesn't get any better than this!" President Clinton's reaction had made me the envy of every columnist. The teapot tempest was tempered by the humorist Mark Russell. He explained that what I had written was not "congenital liar" but "congenial lawyer" and that the innocent phrase must have been garbled in transmission. This fanciful excuse cooled everybody off. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/opinion/24safire4.html From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 24 21:35:20 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:35:20 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: The Next Plague (and related) Message-ID: The Next Plague The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.28 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i21/21a03601.htm As spyware and adware invade campus computers, officials ponder what to do By VINCENT KIERNAN Kerry McQuade knew something was amiss when ads started appearing on her computer screen every time she started it. First Ms. McQuade, a public-affairs assistant at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., was subjected to the ads when she visited certain Web sites. She had to click through and close three or four of the ads before being able to view the site. Then they became more frequent. "I got pop-ups every time I tried to access pretty much any Web site," recalls Ms. McQuade. Finally, they started surfacing even without a Web browser open. Marist's information-technology staff found that her computer was infested with more than 900 pieces of spyware and adware -- programs installed without her knowledge, which covertly monitored her Web usage or dispensed pop-up advertisements. After the spyware and adware were removed, all seemed fine. Then, she says, "a scantily clad woman popped up on my screen." She summoned the IT staff again, and they removed an additional 200 pieces of spyware and adware and installed two anti-spyware programs. Her computer today appears to be free of the demons. Like Ms. McQuade, untold numbers -- probably tens of thousands -- of students, professors, and staff members at colleges have discovered that their computers are riddled with adware and spyware. For example, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville estimates that 25 percent of the computers on its residence-hall network are infected, Scott Fendley, a senior security analyst there, said during an online discussion sponsored by the SANS Institute, of Bethesda, Md., which promotes computer security. "This is the next plague," says Kathleen L. LaBarbera, manager of information-technology operations at Marist. More than simply annoying, the unauthorized software can proliferate like a virus, forcing individual computers and even whole networks to their knees. And the worst of the spyware secretly records private information, such as Social Security numbers and passwords typed into an infected computer. Security officials worry that individuals could be vulnerable to identity theft and institutions could be open to hacking attempts. There appears to be no reliable estimate of identity thefts linked to spyware, either in academe or more generally. But the Federal Trade Commission told a Congressional committee that "spyware appears to be a new and rapidly growing practice that poses a risk of serious harm to consumers.'' "With PC users unknowingly running these programs, I believe that there is a real connection between spyware and identity theft," says Ms. LaBarbera. Campus computing officials are scrambling to stop, or at least contain, that plague. Some have installed anti-spyware software, others have imposed new limits on campus networking in an attempt to stem the flow of the software from one computer to another, and many have begun to educate users about safe computing practices that can minimize the chances that a scantily clad woman will appear unbidden on their computer screens. But many officials fear the problem is likely to get worse before it gets better. The malicious software used to be the province of lone hackers, but experts believe that adware and spyware increasingly are being quietly sold as services to individuals and companies that seek to advertise online or steal private information. The Problem Computing officials often discuss spyware and adware together because both creep onto computers in similar ways -- furtively piggybacking on free software downloaded online, or secretly inserted on a computer by a Web site. Spyware silently monitors and records a user's online activities. By contrast, adware often is annoyingly evident, as it displays advertisements based on the user's purchases and other online behavior (although not all pop-up ads are the product of adware). Some adware can also change a user's home page or even direct the computer's modem to make calls to telephone numbers that then charge fees to the user's phone bill. File-sharing programs, which are so popular with students, often bear spyware. Pornographic Web sites are also common carriers. Whether such programs are illegal is unclear. The Federal Trade Commission in October asked a federal court to order one alleged purveyor from distributing spyware, on the grounds that the spyware was an unfair trade practice because the company also sold software to remove the spyware. This month the company agreed to stop distributing spyware. A bill pending in the U.S. House of Representatives, [3]HR 29, would ban adware and spyware altogether, with violations subject to fines of up to $3-million. Some free programs actually disclose that they incorporate adware -- in the licensing terms that users commonly ignore when installing software. "People have gotten in the habit of clicking next, next, next, next, next, without reading" when they install software, said Joseph Telafici, director of operations on the Antivirus Emergency Response Team at McAfee Inc., which tracks spyware and adware as well as viruses. In one recent demonstration at Marist College, a staff member used a computer that was known to be free of spyware and adware to visit Web sites that are known purveyors of spyware. Within minutes, the machine was laden with hundreds of pieces of spyware. Even instant-messaging programs can transmit spyware and adware. Marist's Ms. McQuade recalls that her problems with pop-ups got much worse after she used AOL's AIM Express instant-messaging software. "I won't even go near that now," she says. (Andrew Weinstein, an AOL spokesman, says that AOL's instant-messaging software does not include adware and that the unwanted software is more likely to be distributed through other channels, but acknowledges that adware and spyware can be secretly attached to instant messages.) 'A Very Big Deal' Infections by adware and spyware are on the rise, both in academe and elsewhere, many officials say. "There is actually probably more adware on people's computers than there is viruses," says McAfee's Mr. Telafici. The surge is placing new demands on already-overloaded campus IT staffs. For example, at Hollins University, in Roanoke, Va., about 80 percent of the calls to the help desk over the past two years have been related to spyware, says Greg Henderson, director of computing and systems at the institution. Spyware and adware often are so poorly written that they interfere with a computer's functioning. And they can burrow so deeply into a computer's software that they can be nearly impossible to remove. In such cases, the hard drive needs to be erased and new copies of the operating system and applications programs installed, which can take hours and erase data. At Temple University, for example, "hundreds and hundreds" of students have had their computers rendered virtually inoperable by spyware and adware, says Timothy C. O'Rourke, vice president for computer and information services there. At Metropolitan Community College, in Omaha, Neb., more than 200 computers have had to have their software reinstalled during the last 18 months because of spyware, says Christopher C. Vaverek, director of network services. "It's gotten to be a very big deal," he says. Many other campus officials report similar problems. Some spyware and adware transmit information that they gather to their authors or handlers elsewhere on the Web. If many computers at a college are infected, the transmissions can clog the campus network. "When it's bad, it brings the network to a halt," says Paul V. LaClair, associate director of computer services at Franklin Pierce Law Center, in Concord, N.H. Mr. LaClair says that Franklin Pierce's network was so overloaded toward the end of the last semester that downloads happened at about half the speed of a typical dial-up connection. Once students with their spyware-laden laptops went home for the holidays, download speeds jumped tenfold, he says. The increase was too big to be accounted for by the fact that there were fewer users on the network, he says. The Software Solution To protect themselves, many colleges are turning to software that can purge a computer of adware and spyware and even prevent some from being deposited on the computer in the future. A popular strategy relies on two programs: Ad-Aware SE and Spybot Search and Destroy. Site licenses for the former are available at modest cost, and the latter can be used free. The University of Pittsburgh is one institution that has taken this route. In two months, more than 4,200 copies of Ad-Aware were downloaded to computers there, says Jinx P. Walton, director of computing services and systems development. Colleges commonly provide the software for faculty and staff members, and point students to Web sites where they can download Spybot and a free version of Ad-Aware. (A spokeswoman for Lavasoft Inc., which makes Ad-Aware, says her company has no information on its academic use. A spokeswoman for Spybot declined comment on the number of colleges using its product.) Austin Community College spends about $3,000 annually for a site license for Ad-Aware for its 2,000 college-owned computers, says William E. Carter, its associate vice president for information technology. Before the software was available, cleaning a single infected computer manually took one of his staff members as much as two hours. The new program "probably paid for itself within a couple of months," he says. Others have reached the same conclusion. The athletics department at Cornell University, which has about 250 computers, spent about $3,500 for a site license for Pest Patrol. That program, sold by Computer Associates, allows a central administrator to scan other computers on the network for spyware and to remove any that is found. "It's freed me up," says Ricky Stewart, the department's information-technology director. "It really has cut down on a lot of the labor hours." The University of Vermont's business school bought about 60 licenses for Pest Patrol, at $20 apiece, for use by faculty and staff members. The college also bought one "traveling license," so one copy of the software can be easily moved from one computer to another for use in disinfecting student machines. That license cost less than $1,000, he says. Some products cost more. Webroot Software Inc. charges $12 to $15 per computer for 2,500 or more copies of its anti-spyware software, says Richard Stiennon, vice president of threat research. This month the Microsoft Corporation released a test version of anti-spyware software. The test version is free, but the company has not said whether it plans to charge for the final version. Many college computing officials say they would prefer not to have to buy software separate from the antivirus programs they have already bought. But, so far, antivirus software hasn't been up to the task. "They've been slow to include the level of functionality that we need," says H. Morrow Long, the director of Yale University's information-security office. That is changing, however. McAfee recently announced that it will add optional anti-spyware capabilities to its VirusScan Enterprise 8.0i product, which is in use at many campuses. The list price will be as low as $4.95 per computer for purchases of more than 10,000, says John Bedrick, the company's group product-marketing manager for system security. The Symantec Corporation, another major vendor of antivirus software to colleges, has not yet announced an increased anti-spyware capability but is expected to soon. File Sharing Under Fire One question is whether colleges should act more forcefully to stem the spread of spyware by severely restricting one major conduit, file-sharing software. H. Jacob Picart, a junior majoring in political science at San Jose State University who also runs a computer network for a nonprofit organization, says that public institutions should restrict file sharing in the interest of making campus networks function better. "It's taxpayers' money that's paying for the connection," he says. Indeed, Temple University has taken that route by forbidding music downloads on its network. "When we find it, we stop it," says Mr. O'Rourke, the vice president. Moreover, the university has notified students that its technical-support staff will not help students whose computers are infected with spyware if the computer contains illegally downloaded music. But security experts note that restricting file sharing is no cure-all for spyware, because that move does not, for example, block spyware that is silently dispensed by Web sites. Bentley College, for example, shut down illegal peer-to-peer networking from the campus to the Internet even before the surge in spyware and adware. Nevertheless, the programs have made their way onto the campus network, says Jonathan Everett, Bentley's director of client services. Other colleges have taken a different approach. Worcester Polytechnic Institute encourages faculty and staff members to use Spybot and students to use Ad-Aware. But in addition, the college has configured its network to block the downloading of specific files that college officials have decided are spyware. The college adds a couple of files to that list every month, says Jon E. Bartelson, assistant director of computing services. Some institutions are focusing on educating users about how to avoid spyware and how to remove it if it appears. For example, Marist held a series of workshops on computer security issues, including one on spyware. It has made a video recording of the sessions available on DVD. At Hollins University, Erin Adams, a freshman, was frustrated by the unreliability of her network connection, due to stresses caused by spyware on students' computers. The university's IT help staff was not able to keep pace with the burgeoning spyware infections, she says, so she formed the Student Coalition Against Viruses, Adware, and Spyware, a group of about two dozen volunteers who check students' computers for adware and spyware. "The vast majority of the problems are very, very easily solved," says Ms. Adams, a psychology major. Mr. Henderson, the computing director, says he appreciates the help. "I've got staff actually doing their jobs again," he says. Many officials at colleges and anti-spyware companies believe that, as with computer viruses, the prognosis is bleak. Adware and spyware will increase, forcing campus officials to devote more time and money to fighting it. "It's only going to get worse," says Mr. Stiennon, of Webroot. Glenn Taylor, director of academic sales at Symantec, predicted that spyware increasingly will be part of "blended threats" incorporating components such as spyware, spam e-mail, and viruses. "On the Internet, anytime people can make a buck, they're going to do it," says Temple's Mr. O'Rourke. "That's what this is all about." References 2. http://chronicle.com/infotech/ 3. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:H.R.29: --------------- Checking Your Computer for Spyware The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.28 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i21/21a03702.htm By VINCENT KIERNAN Worried that your computer might have adware or spyware? Free resources are available online for checking a computer running Microsoft Windows. Experts recommend using at least two products because each detects different types of infections. Many antivirus programs also assert that they detect spyware and adware, but college computing officials generally discount their capabilities. There are few free resources for use with Apple and Linux computers, but spyware and adware are not thought to be a major problem for these types of computers, both for technical reasons and because their market share is so small that they are singled out less frequently. Here are free resources for Windows: * Ad-Aware SE Personal is a free program distributed by Lavasoft Inc. ([3]http://www.lavasoft.com), which can detect and remove adware and spyware on Windows computers. The company does not allow its use on machines owned by businesses or colleges, so the free version can be used by professors and staff members on their home machines, but not on computers in their offices. For those computers, a college must purchase a site license to Ad-Aware SE Professional or Ad-Aware SE Plus, which offer more capabilities. * Computer Associates, which sells Pest Patrol anti-spyware software, offers a free online scan for spyware ([4]http://www.pestpatrol.com). The site does not remove any infections. * Microsoft AntiSpyware ([5]http://www.microsoft.com/spyware) is a free test version of software that Microsoft recently acquired in its purchase of another company. The program, which can detect and remove spyware and adware on Windows computers, can be scheduled to scan your computer regularly, and it also can be set to block new infections. * Spy Audit is a free Web-based scan by Webroot Software ([6]http://www.webroot.com) that does not require any software to be downloaded. The company also sells Webroot Spy Sweeper, which can find and remove spyware and adware on Windows computers. * Spybot Search and Destroy ([7]http://www.safer-networking.org) is a free program that detects and removes adware and spyware on Windows computers. It also can block new adware or spyware from being downloaded. Unlike Ad-Aware SE, Spybot can be used on both personal computers and machines that are owned by a college. References 3. http://www.lavasoft.com/ 4. http://www.pestpatrol.com/ 5. http://www.microsoft.com/spyware 6. http://www.webroot.com/ 7. http://www.safer-networking.org/ From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 24 21:38:03 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:38:03 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Choosing Their Flock Message-ID: Choosing Their Flock The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.20 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i21/21a03301.htm [There will be an online discussion on Thursday, Jan. 27, at 1 EST. Go to http://chronicle.com/colloquy to send in your questions now.] Conservative Christian groups have forced colleges to allow them to bar gay students and nonbelievers. Some institutions are finally ready to fight back By BURTON BOLLAG In the fall of 2003, two law students at Ohio State University's main campus complained to the administration that the campus chapter of the Christian Legal Society, a student group, was violating the institution's nondiscrimination rules. Those rules stated that all officially recognized student organizations -- which are eligible to use meeting rooms and receive university funds -- could not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, and a number of other factors. Recognized student groups each had to sign a form promising to respect those requirements. Yet the two students said the society would not let them join because one of them was not an evangelical Christian and the other was gay. The group said it would not accept students who did not share its religious views, or those who engaged in "homosexual conduct," which, it held, is condemned in the Bible. It is not clear whether the two students, whom the university declines to name, ever tried to join the group or had just inquired about its membership requirements. But they succeeded in making their point: The Christian group was thumbing its nose at campus rules. The administration agreed to investigate. The Christian group "couldn't hold this position with regards to race," asserts Cherish L. Cronmiller, co-president of the Outlaws, an association of gay law students at Ohio State. "Gays are unfortunately the last group on the totem pole." In the bitter controversy that followed, the Christian Legal Society sued Ohio State, charging that the university's nondiscrimination policy violated the group's First Amendment right to freedom of religion by forcing it to accept unwanted members. This past fall, without ever going to court, the group won a complete victory when Ohio State changed its policy to exempt student groups formed to promote "sincerely held religious beliefs." That pattern has been repeated at several dozen institutions in the last few years. In virtually every case, Christian groups have won the right to restrict membership or leadership to heterosexual students who share their evangelical religious beliefs. But now, after several years in which one college after another has caved when faced with an actual or threatened lawsuit, the dispute may have finally begun moving toward a resolution. Three of the four institutions with lawsuits pending against them -- Arizona State University at Tempe, the University of California's Hastings College of Law, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hillare determined to fight the legal challenge, despite considerable costs. A spokesman for the fourth, Pennsylvania State University at University Park, declined to speculate on its intentions. "We're definitely going to court on this matter," says Elise K. Traynum, general counsel for Hastings. "We think we can win it." Although Ms. Traynum concedes that the constitutional issues and legal precedents are, at best, unclear, she notes that several alumni have offered to help the institution fight the lawsuit on a pro bono basis. And a recent judicial decision seems to strengthen Hastings' position. In December a federal appeals court ruled that colleges may bar military recruiters since the military discriminates against gay people ([3]The Chronicle, December 10, 2004). David A. French, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the Philadelphia-based watchdog group for free speech on college campuses, has provided legal advice to Christian student groups at several dozen institutions. "It looks like we're coming to the moment of truth on this," he says. "If three universities from widely divergent regions intend to contest this issue, it's very possible that within the next three or four years we might have some definitive rulings. "And if the courts of appeal are split in their decisions, that is typically seen as an invitation to the Supreme Court to act." Principles at Odds Meanwhile, the two sides continue battling. Proponents of nondiscrimination policies, including college administrators and gay-rights advocates, say Christian student groups that flout the rules should forfeit the subsidies that officially recognized groups receive. "Public funds should not be used to sponsor discrimination," says Elizabeth A. Seaton, deputy legal director of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay and lesbian organization. "Recognized student groups should be held to the same standards on sexual orientation as they would be with regard to race or disability." Indeed, in almost all the cases, the Christian groups could have chosen to operate without official recognition, but they would have lost their financial support, preferential access to campus facilities, and the right to use their college's name. However, the groups and their supporters say there is a higher principle at stake. Requiring a Christian-student association to admit non-Christians or gay people, "would be like requiring a vegetarian group to admit meat eaters," asserts Jordan Lorence, a senior lawyer at the Alliance Defense Fund, which is based in Scottsdale, Ariz. "It would be like forcing the College Democrats to accept Republicans." In most of the campus disputes, the Christian student organizations have been assisted by outside Christian legal groups, the largest of which are the Alliance Defense Fund and the Christian Legal Society, of Annandale, Va. In at least eight of the cases, the student groups have sued, though no case has gone to trial. Two major developments helped set the stage for the recent spate of confrontations. Since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, colleges and universities have moved steadily to strengthen protections against discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex, disability, and other factors. Hundreds of colleges have adopted their own nondiscrimination rules, and many institutions include "sexual orientation" on that list. At the same time, conservative Christian groups on campuses have been demanding the right to operate according to their own religious beliefs. A Thorny Issue Emotionally charged conflicts like the one at Ohio State have forced colleges to choose which of two basic principles is more important: freedom of religion, guaranteed by the First Amendment, or equal protection under the law, as established by the 14th Amendment. "There are times when constitutional rights come into conflict with one another," says Jeffrey Gamso, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. The chapter's board has scheduled a meeting for February to discuss whether to get involved in the continuing dispute over the Ohio State case, and if so, which side to support. The ACLU is not alone in grappling with that question. William H. Hall, Ohio State's vice president for student affairs, who ended the lawsuit by granting the Christian group an exemption from the university's nondiscrimination rules, says the case was "one of the most difficult decisions I've had to make." He insists that the policy change was the result of a principled consideration of the issue. But he also concedes that the legal challenge forced the university to decide the issue faster than it would have otherwise. "When the lawsuit got filed," he says, "it curtailed the plans for an open debate that we had." Many Ohio State law professors are unhappy with Mr. Hall's decision. Half of them signed a petition asserting that the change of policy "will make our gay, lesbian, and bisexual students second-class citizens." Critics of the change are particularly concerned that the settlement exempts only religious student groups from nondiscrimination rules, which may represent an unconstitutional favoring of religious groups over nonreligious ones, says Ruth Colker, a professor of constitutional law at Ohio State. She predicts that the decision could lead to future lawsuits if nonreligious groups are denied recognition because they practice some form of discrimination. Those concerns do not sway David A. Goldberger, another constitutional-law professor at Ohio State. A former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, Mr. Goldberger successfully represented a neo-Nazi group that had sued for the right to march in Skokie, Ill., in the late 1970s. Mr. Goldberger says he abhorred the neo-Nazis he defended, and he does not like the Christian Legal Society's views on gay people. But in both cases, he says, the legal principles he defended were paramount. At Ohio State, students who form an association for religious purposes should have the right to determine how they will worship and who may join them, he says. "I believe the role of the university is to be a forum for all views, beliefs, and perspectives," says Mr. Goldberger. "Students need to be exposed to differences as part of learning about tolerance." That view is shared by George M. Marsden, a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and an expert on religion in America. "If you want to have religious pluralism," he asks, "does it make sense to force all groups to have the same norms of behavior?" For now the answer is complicated by the absence of a clear legal precedent. Two rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court bear only indirectly on the issue. In Widmar vs. Vincent, a 1981 case, the court ruled for the first time that a college -- the University of Missouri at Kansas City -- could not deny recognition to a Christian student group simply because it was religiously oriented. In Rosenberger vs. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia, a 1995 case, the court ruled that the institution could not deny funds to a Christian student newspaper on the basis of its religious content. Those two rulings put an end to the argument that the constitutional separation of church and state prevented public institutions from recognizing or supporting religious student groups. But "the absence of a slam-dunk, drop-dead precedent" as to whether institutions can require all recognized student groups to respect college nondiscrimination rules has kept the controversy alive, says Gregory S. Baylor, director of the Center for Law and Religious Freedom, a division of the Christian Legal Society. Striking A Balance? Mr. French, of FIRE, estimates that since 2000 there have been about 50 cases in which colleges have first told a Christian student group it had to comply with nondiscrimination rules, only to relent after the group resisted. Nearly all of those cases have been at public universities. Typically, colleges fight attempts to weaken their nondiscrimination policies by arguing that the policies are necessary to protect the rights of all students. For instance, last August the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was sued by Alpha Iota Omega, a seven-member fraternity that the university refused to recognize because it bars non-Christian and gay students from joining. In a letter to FIRE, which is supporting the fraternity in its lawsuit, James C. Moeser, Chapel Hill's chancellor, wrote that the institution "strikes a proper balance between the interests of nondiscrimination and free association." He explained that under Chapel Hill's policy, student groups may not discriminate on the basis of "status" -- for example, requiring prospective members to be Presbyterian or male -- but may require them to support the group's aims. "So for example," wrote Mr. Moeser, "Baptist student groups are open to Presbyterian students ... and the Black Student Movement is open to white students." But groups may require prospective members to pass "an objective test," Mr. Moeser continued, to prove they support the group's mission, and may require their officers to "subscribe to the tenets of the organization." Mr. Moeser's reasoning did not convince the fraternity or its backers. The arguments are "meaningless," says Mr. French, of FIRE. "The University of North Carolina is saying the nondiscrimination policy really means something different than what it says on its face." A Key Distinction The flood of recent cases started with a well-publicized conflict at Tufts University, a private institution, in 2000. That year a student panel withdrew its recognition of the Tufts Christian Fellowship after the group told one of its members, Julie Catalano, a gay student, that she could not become an officer. Ms. Catalano, then a junior, had told the fellowship about her sexual orientation when she joined, in her freshman year. The group had accepted her and told her that prayer could make her a heterosexual. But after grappling with the issue for two years, she decided her sexual orientation was neither sinful nor changeable. Curtis Chang, area director for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, a national organization, helped the Tufts student group appeal the decision. In defending the group's policy, Mr. Chang used an argument that would be frequently repeated by other Christian groups. In an April 2000 letter to Bruce H. Reitman, then Tufts' acting dean of students, Mr. Chang wrote that the Christian group "does not and has never discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation." Ms. Catalano, he explained, was penalized not for being gay, but for asserting that her being gay was an acceptable lifestyle for a Christian. A Tufts review panel nullified the earlier decision, which it said had been too hasty, and passed the case back to the original student panel. In a rather muddled decision, that body then re-recognized the Christian student group, but said it must avoid future confrontations. FIRE's Mr. French says the case woke campuses up to the issue. Christian student groups began checking whether they had been unwittingly signing on to nondiscrimination policies they did not support, and colleges started looking at whether any campus groups were violating those rules. Sensing an opportunity to rectify what they had considered unfair treatment of Christian student associations, evangelical advocacy groups urged students to demand their rights. In 2003 the Alliance Defense Fund ran half-page ads in student newspapers at five colleges. The headline read, "Are You Experiencing Anti-Christian Bigotry on Campus?" The text began, "In the name of 'diversity' and 'tolerance,' schools are systematically violating the rights of students who follow Jesus." At two of the institutions, Ohio State University and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Christian legal groups soon filed lawsuits on behalf of student groups. Both institutions ultimately agreed to change their rules to allow religious groups to discriminate in admitting members. At some universities, including Minnesota, an unofficial policy was already in place under which conservative Christian groups signed the annual commitment to honor campus nondiscrimination rules, but were allowed informally to choose members or officers according to their own principles. Evangelical activists warned that such an arrangement was dangerous because it could be withdrawn at any time, leaving the groups potentially vulnerable. "Many of these Christian groups feel they're targets for infiltration and takeover," says Mr. Lorence, of the Alliance Defense Fund. "That's why we're filing these lawsuits." Supporters of campus nondiscrimination policies say such problems have never come up. Indeed Nancy E. Tribbensee, Arizona State's associate vice president for legal affairs, goes further, arguing that it is a good thing for white students to have the right to join a black-student association, and for Jewish students to be able to join a Christian group. "One of the values of university student organizations," she says, "is to allow students to join groups they may not fully agree with and be exposed to new ideas." Ms. Tribbensee says Arizona State will stand up for that principle, and intends to fight the lawsuit filed against it. But until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the issue, the conflict appears likely to spread to more campuses. A new publicity campaign by the Alliance Defense Fund calls on Christian students to oppose nondiscrimination policies. The group's brochure states, "Americans will no longer tolerate the systematic stripping away of our constitutional rights on college campuses." 'We Still Care About Each Other' Despite tensions, a few students on opposing sides of the issue are trying to overcome their differences. After Ohio State's decision in the fall, members of the Outlaws, the association of gay law students on the campus, were angry. The group sold T-shirts and buttons protesting, "My tuition funds discrimination." There were also ugly incidents of name-calling between them and members of the Christian Legal Society. But even before the university changed its policy, Ms. Cronmiller, the Outlaws' current co-president, had reached out to the leader of the Christian group. When she won a cup of coffee with a law professor at a fund-raising auction last April, for instance, she invited Alexis V. Andrews, president of the local Christian Legal Society, to join them. Ms. Andrews accepted. "We just decided we weren't going to let this be taken out of our hands and turned into a gay-versus-Christian issue," Ms. Cronmiller says. Ms. Andrews says she considers Ms. Cronmiller's lifestyle "sinful." Nonetheless, the two women have been trying to build a good relationship. To that end, Ms. Andrews says, she plans to visit Ms. Cronmiller's Jewish congregation. "We can disagree," says Ms. Andrews, "but we still care about each other." The two women are also trying to organize joint charitable and social events that would allow members of their respective organizations to get to know each other. Yet both of them say they haven't gotten very far. Most of the students in each group consider their counterparts little better than the incarnation of evil on campus. From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 24 21:38:18 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:38:18 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Intellectual Property and the New Class Divisions Message-ID: Intellectual Property and the New Class Divisions The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.28 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i21/21a01402.htm By PETER MONAGHAN The concept of intellectual property has created a class division between "hackers" -- producers of information, be they academics, creative artists, or others -- and a suffocating "new ruling class" that has seized ownership of this property via patents, copyrights, and trademarks. So argues McKenzie Wark, a professor of media and cultural studies at New School University, in A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press). Q. What's new about what this so-called ruling class is doing? A. Until the late 60s, one thought of copyright or patent as a kind of limited device, in the context of thinking of knowledge as something that should be shared. Intellectual property turns it into the equivalent of a private-property right. That's equivalent to the enclosure of the commons, in my view. Q. But why should information differ from any other good? A. Information has really peculiar qualities. My possession of some piece of it does not deprive you of it. So the usual laws of scarcity don't apply. With the rise of digital technology, for the first time we have something that can, at least in part, really escape from scarcity. Economic logic usually starts by saying desires are infinite but means are scarce, therefore we need resource allocation. Here we have a nonrivalrous good. We have something that challenges the whole notion of scarcity. That presents a utopian possibility that one should explore to the limit. But what one finds is that we are increasingly shoving information back into the logic of the old economy of scarce things by legal and technical means. Q. And the new intellectual-property regime prevents "hackers" from building on or toying with products that in essence are cultural artifacts? A. Exactly. We have the beginnings of whole new kinds of what I would call abstract-gift economy. That would include the free-software movement, for example, and the rise of listservs, and the file-sharing ... movement, which is really a social movement in all but name that is creating pressure for change ... embodied in a movement around sharing information as a gift. Q. How can we construe intellectual property more expansively? A. If you're a programmer, or a musician, or a philosopher, or a biologist, or a chemist -- those tend to be fairly separate cultural worlds. But all that we make is now rendered equivalent in the marketplace by the privatizing of information, by intellectual property. So the first thing is to see a common interest that isn't really addressed by completely privatizing information. It's not in the interest of the United States or any country to make information available only to those who can pay for it. That's not how you advance science. That's not how you advance democracy. From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 24 21:40:04 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:40:04 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Michio Kaku: Escape from the universe Message-ID: Escape from the universe http://prospectmagazine.co.uk/printarticle.php?id=6701&category=138&issue=499&author=&AuthKey=6980b9de52579f3b22057c19594e76c9 Issue 107 / February 2005 Escape from the universe The universe is destined to end. Before it does, could an advanced civilisation escape via a "wormhole" into a parallel universe? The idea seems like science fiction, but it is consistent with the laws of physics and biology. Here's how to do it Michio Kaku The author is professor of theoretical physics at City University of New York. This article is adapted from his book "Parallel Worlds" (Allen Lane) _________________________________________________________________ The universe is out of control, in a runaway acceleration. Eventually all intelligent life will face the final doom?the big freeze. An advanced civilisation must embark on the ultimate journey: fleeing to a parallel universe. In Norse mythology, Ragnarok?the fate of the gods?begins when the earth is caught in the vice-like grip of a bone-chilling freeze. The heavens themselves freeze over, as the gods perish in great battles with evil serpents and murderous wolves. Eternal darkness settles over the bleak, frozen land as the sun and moon are both devoured. Odin, the father of all gods, finally falls to his death, and time itself comes to a halt. Does this ancient tale foretell our future? Ever since the work of Edwin Hubble in the 1920s, scientists have known that the universe is expanding, but most have believed that the expansion was slowing as the universe aged. In 1998, astronomers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Australian National University calculated the expansion rate by studying dozens of powerful supernova explosions within distant galaxies, which can light up the entire universe. They could not believe their own data. Some unknown force was pushing the galaxies apart, causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Brian Schmidt, one of the group leaders, said, "I was still shaking my head, but we had checked everything?? I was very reluctant to tell people, because I truly thought that we were going to get massacred." Physicists went scrambling back to their blackboards and realised that some "dark energy" of unknown origin, akin to Einstein's "cosmological constant," was acting as an anti-gravity force. Apparently, empty space itself contains enough repulsive dark energy to blow the universe apart. The more the universe expands, the more dark energy there is to make it expand even faster, leading to an exponential runaway mode. In 2003, this astonishing result was confirmed by the WMAP (Wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe) satellite. Orbiting at a million miles from earth, this satellite contains two telescopes capable of detecting the faint microwave radiation which bathes the universe. It is so sensitive that it is able to photograph in exquisite detail the afterglow of the microwave radiation left over from the big bang, which is still circulating the universe. The WMAP satellite, in effect, gave us "baby pictures" of the universe when it was a mere 380,000 years old. The WMAP satellite settled the long-standing question of the age of the universe: it is officially 13.7bn years old (to within 1 per cent accuracy). But more remarkably, the data showed that dark energy is not a fluke, but makes up 73 per cent of the matter and energy of the entire universe. To deepen the mystery, the data showed that 23 per cent of the universe consists of "dark matter," a bizarre form of matter which is invisible but still has weight. Hydrogen and helium make up 4 per cent, while the higher elements, you and I included, make up just 0.03 per cent. Dark energy and most of dark matter do not consist of atoms, which means that, contrary to what the ancient Greeks believed and what is taught in every chemistry course, most of the universe is not made of atoms at all. As the universe expands, its energy content is diluted and temperatures eventually plunge to near absolute zero, where even atoms stop moving. One of the iron laws of physics is the second law of thermodynamics, which states that in the end everything runs down, that the total "entropy" (disorder or chaos) in the universe always increases. This means that iron rusts, our bodies age and crumble, empires fall, stars exhaust their nuclear fuel, and the universe itself will run down, as temperatures drop uniformly to near zero. Charles Darwin was referring to this law when he wrote: "Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress." And one of the most depressing passages in the English language was written by Bertrand Russell, who described the "unyielding despair" he felt when contemplating the distant future: "No fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought or feeling, can preserve a life beyond the grave?? all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system; and the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins." Russell wrote this passage in an era before space travel, so the death of the sun does not seem so catastrophic today?but the death of the entire universe seems inescapable. So on some day in the far future, the last star will cease to shine, and the universe will be littered with nuclear debris, dead neutron stars and black holes. Intelligent civilisations, like homeless people in rags huddled next to dying campfires, will gather around the last flickering embers of black holes emitting a faint Hawking radiation. String theory to the rescue? Although thermodynamics and cosmology point to the eventual death of all lifeforms in the universe, there is still one loophole. It is a law of evolution that, when the environment changes radically, life must adapt, flee or die. The first alternative seems impossible. The last is undesirable. This leaves us with one choice: leave the universe. Although the concept of leaving our dying universe to enter another seems utterly mad, there is no law of physics forbidding entering a parallel universe. Einstein's general relativity theory allows for the existence of "wormholes" or gateways connecting parallel universes, sometimes called "Einstein-Rosen bridges." But it is still unknown whether quantum corrections make such a journey possible or not. Although once considered a preposterous idea, the concept of the "multiverse"?that our universe coexists with an infinite number of parallel universes?has recently generated much interest among physicists from several directions. First, the leading theory consistent with the WMAP data is the "inflationary" theory, proposed by Alan Guth of MIT in 1979. It postulates a turbo-charged expansion of the universe at the beginning of time. The inflationary universe idea neatly explains several stubborn cosmological mysteries, including the flatness and uniformity of the universe. But since physicists still do not know what drove this rapid inflationary process, there remains the chance that it could happen again, in an endless cycle. This is the chaotic inflationary idea of Andrei Linde of Stanford University, in which "parent universes" bud "baby universes" in a continuous, neverending cycle. Like soap bubbles which split into two smaller bubbles, universes can constantly sprout from other universes. But what caused the big bang and drove this inflation? The question remains unanswered. Since the big bang was so intense, we have to abandon Einstein's theory of general relativity, which forms the underlying framework for all of cosmology. Einstein's theory of gravity breaks down at the instant of the big bang, and hence cannot answer the deep philosophical and theological questions raised by this event. At these incredible temperatures, we must incorporate quantum theory?the other great theory to emerge in the 20th century?which governs the physics of the atom. Quantum theory and Einstein's relativity theory are opposites. The former governs the world of the very small, the peculiar subatomic realm of electrons and quarks. Relativity theory rules the world of the very large?of black holes and expanding universes. Relativity, therefore, is not suited to explaining the instant of the big bang, where the universe was smaller than a subatomic particle. At this moment we would expect radiation effects to dominate over gravity, and hence we need a quantum description of gravity. Indeed, one of the greatest challenges facing physics is to unify these theories into a single, coherent theory of all the forces in the universe. Physicists today are groping for this "theory of everything." Many proposals have been made over the past half century, but all have been shown to be inconsistent or incomplete. So far, the leading?in fact, the only?candidate is string theory. The latest incarnation of string theory, M-theory, may answer a question which has dogged advocates of higher dimensions for a century: where are they? Smoke can expand and fill up an entire room without vanishing into hyperspace, so higher dimensions, if they exist at all, must be smaller than an atom. If higher-dimensional space were larger than an atom, then we should see atoms mysteriously drifting and disappearing into a higher dimension, which we do not see in the laboratory. In the older string picture, one had to "curl" or wrap up six of the ten original dimensions, leaving the four-dimensional universe of today. These unwanted dimensions were squeezed into a tiny ball (called a Calabi-Yau manifold) too small to be seen. But M-theory adds a new twist to this: some of these higher dimensions can be large, or even infinite, in size. Imagine two parallel sheets of paper. If an ant lived on each sheet, each would think that its sheet was the entire universe, unaware that there was another universe close by. In fact, the other universe would be invisible. Each ant would live out its life oblivious to the fact that another universe was only a few inches away. Similarly, our universe may be a membrane floating in 11-dimensional hyperspace, while we remain oblivious of the parallel universes hovering nearby. One interesting version of M-theory cosmology is the "ekpyrotic" (from the Greek for "conflagration") universe, proposed by Paul Steinhardt, Burt Ovrut and Neil Turok. It assumes that our universe is a flat, infinite membrane floating in higher-dimensional space. But occasionally, gravity attracts a nearby membrane. These two parallel universes race towards each other until they collide, releasing a colossal amount of energy (the big splat). This explosion creates our known universe and sends the two parallel universes flying apart in hyperspace. Searching for higher dimensions The intense interest in higher dimensions generated by string theory has slowly spilled over into the world of experimental physics. Idle dinner-table chatter is being translated into multimillion-dollar physics experiments. At the University of Colorado in Denver, the first experiment was conducted to search for the presence of a parallel universe, perhaps only a millimetre away. Physicists searched for tiny deviations from Newton's inverse square law for gravity. The light from a candle is diluted as it spreads out, decreasing at the inverse square of the distance of separation. Similarly, according to Newton's law, gravity also spreads out over space and decreases in the same way. But in a four-dimensional universe, there is more room for light or gravity to spread out, so they decrease at the inverse cube of the distance. Hence, by searching for tiny deviations from the inverse square law, one may pick up the presence of the fourth dimension. Newton's inverse square law is so precise that it can guide our space probes throughout the solar system. But no one knows if it holds down to the millimetre level. At present, only null results have been found in these experiments. Other groups are searching for even smaller deviations. Physicists at Purdue University in Indiana are trying to test the law down to the atomic level, using nanotechnology. Other avenues are also being explored. In 2007, the large hadron collider (LHC), capable of blasting subatomic particles with a colossal energy of 14 trillion electron volts (10 trillion times the energy found in a typical chemical reaction) will be turned on outside Geneva. The world's largest atom smasher, this huge machine, 27km in circumference, straddling the French-Swiss border, will probe into places 10,000 times smaller than a proton. Physicists expect to find an entire zoo of new subatomic particles not seen since the big bang. Physicists predict that the LHC may create exotic particles like mini-black holes and supersymmetric particles, dubbed "sparticles," which would provide indirect evidence for string theory. In string theory, every particle has a super-partner. The partner of the electron is the "selectron," the partner of the quark is the "squark," and so on. Furthermore, around 2012, the space-based gravity wave detector Lisa (laser interferometer space antenna) will be sent into orbit. Lisa will be able to detect the gravitational shockwaves emitted less than a trillionth of a second after the big bang. It will consist of three satellites circling the sun, connected by laser beams, making a huge triangle in space 5m km on each side. Any gravitational wave which strikes Lisa will disturb the lasers, and this tiny distortion will be picked up by instruments, signalling the collision of two black holes or the big bang aftershock itself. Lisa is so sensitive?it can measure distortions a tenth the diameter of an atom?that it may be able to test many of the scenarios being proposed for the pre-big bang universe, including string theory. Steps to leave the universe Unfortunately, the energy necessary to manipulate these higher dimensions, rather than just observe them, is far beyond anything available to us in the foreseeable future: 10^19bn electron volts, or a quadrillion times the energy of the large hadron collider. To operate here one needs the technology of a super-advanced civilisation. In order to organise a discussion of advanced extraterrestrial civilisations, astrophysicists often use the classification of Type I, II and III civilisations introduced by Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev in the 1960s, who ranked them by their energy consumption. One might expect that a Type III civilisation, using the full power of its unimaginably vast galactic resources, would be able to evade the big freeze. The bodies of its citizens, for example, might be genetically altered and their organs replaced by computerised implants, representing a sophisticated merger of silicon and carbon technologies. But even these superhuman bodies would not survive the big freeze. This is because we define intelligence as the ability to process information. According to physics, all machines, whether they are computers, rockets, locomotives or steam engines, ultimately depend on extracting energy from temperature differences: steam engines, for example, work by extracting energy from boiling water. But information-processing, and hence intelligence, requires energy supplied by machines and motors, which will become impossible as temperature differences drop to zero. According to the laws of physics, in a uniformly cold universe where temperature differences do not exist, intelligence cannot survive. But since the big freeze is probably billions to trillions of years away, there is time for a Type III civilisation to plot the only strategy consistent with the laws of physics: leaving this universe. To do this, an advanced civilisation will first have to discover the laws of quantum gravity, which may or may not turn out to be string theory. These laws will be crucial in calculating several unknown factors, such as the stability of wormholes connecting us to a parallel universe, and how we will know what these parallel worlds will look like. Before leaping into the unknown, we have to know what is on the other side. But how do we make the leap? Here are some of the ways. Find a naturally occurring wormhole An advanced civilisation which has colonised the galaxy may have stumbled during its past explorations upon exotic, primordial left-overs from the big bang. The original expansion was so rapid and explosive that even tiny wormholes might have been stretched and blown up into macroscopic size. Wormholes, cosmic strings, negative matter, negative energy, false vacua and other exotic creatures of physics may be relics left over from creation. But if such naturally occurring gateways are not found, then the civilisation will have to take more complex and demanding steps. Send a probe through a black hole Black holes, we now realise, are plentiful; there is one lurking in the centre of our own milky way galaxy weighing about 3m solar masses. Probes sent through a black hole may settle some unsolved questions. In 1963, the mathematician Roy Kerr showed that a rapidly spinning black hole will not collapse into a dot, but rather into a rotating ring, which is kept from collapsing by centrifugal forces. All black holes are surrounded by an event horizon, or point of no return: passing through the event horizon is a one-way trip. Conceivably, two such black holes would be needed for a return trip. But to an advanced civilisation fleeing the big freeze, a one-way trip may be all that is required. What happens if one falls through the Kerr ring is a matter for debate. Some believe that the act of entering the wormhole will close it, making it unstable. And light falling into the black hole would be blue-shifted, giving rise to the possibility that one might be fried as one passed into a parallel universe. No one knows for sure, so experiments must be done. This controversy heated up last year when Stephen Hawking admitted that he had made a mistake 30 years ago in betting that black holes gobble up everything, including information. Perhaps the information is crushed forever by the black hole, or perhaps it passes into the parallel universe on the other side of the Kerr ring. Hawking's latest thinking is that information is not totally lost. But no one believes that the final word on this delicate question has been spoken. To gain further data on space-times which are stretched to breaking point, an advanced civilisation might create a black hole in slow motion. In 1939, Einstein analysed a rotating mass of stellar debris which was slowly collapsing under its own gravity. Although Einstein showed that this rotating mass would not collapse into a black hole, an advanced civilisation may duplicate this experiment in slow motion by collecting a swirling mass of neutron stars weighing less than about 3 solar masses and then gradually injecting extra stellar material into the mass, forcing it to undergo gravitational collapse. Instead of collapsing into a dot, it will collapse into a ring, and hence allow scientists to witness the formation of a Kerr black hole in slow motion. Create negative energy If Kerr rings prove to be too unstable or lethal, one might also contemplate opening up wormholes via negative matter/energy. In 1988, Kip Thorne and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology showed that if one had enough negative matter or negative energy, one could use it to create a transversable wormhole?one in which you could pass freely back and forth between your lab and a distant point in space (and even time). Negative matter/energy would be sufficient to keep the throat of the wormhole open for travel. Unfortunately, no one has ever seen negative matter. In principle, it should weigh less than nothing and fall up, rather than down. If it existed when the earth was created, it would have been repelled by the earth's gravity and drifted off into space. Negative energy, however, has been seen in the laboratory in the form of the Casimir effect. Normally, the force between two uncharged parallel plates should be zero. But if quantum fluctuations outside the plates are greater than the fluctuations between the plates, a net compression force will be created. The fluctuations pushing the plates from the outside are larger than the fluctuations pushing out from within the plates, so these uncharged plates are attracted to each other. This was first predicted in 1948 and measured in 1958. However, the Casimir energy is tiny?proportional to the inverse fourth power of the separation of the plates. To make use of the Casimir effect would require advanced technology to squeeze these parallel plates to very small separations. If one were to reshape these parallel plates into a sphere with a double lining, and use vast amounts of energy to press these spherical plates together, enough negative energy might be generated for the interior of the sphere to separate from the rest of the universe. Another source of negative energy is laser beams. Pulses of laser energy contain "squeezed states," which contain negative as well as positive energy. The problem is separating the negative from the positive energy within the beam. Although this is theoretically possible, it is exceedingly difficult. If a sophisticated civilisation could do this, then powerful laser beams might generate enough negative energy for the sphere to peel from our universe. Even black holes have negative energy surrounding them, near their event horizons. In principle, this may yield vast quantities of negative energy. However, the technical problems of extracting negative energy so close to a black hole are extremely tricky. Create a baby universe According to inflation, just a few ounces of matter might suffice to create a baby universe. This is because the positive energy of matter cancels out the negative energy of gravity. If the universe is closed, then they cancel out exactly. In some sense, the universe may be a free lunch, as Guth has emphasised. Strange as it may seem, it requires no net energy to create an entire universe. Baby universes are in principle created naturally when a certain region of space-time becomes unstable and enters a state called the "false vacuum," which destabilises the fabric of space-time. An advanced civilisation might do this deliberately by concentrating energy in a single region. This would require either compressing matter to a density of 10^80g/cm3, or heating it to 10^29 degrees kelvin. To create the fantastic conditions necessary to open up a wormhole with negative energy or to create a false vacuum with positive energy, one might need a "cosmic atom-smasher." Physicists are attempting to build "table-top" accelerators that can, in principle, attain billions of electron volts on a kitchen table. They have used powerful laser beams to attain an energy acceleration of 200bn electron volts per metre, a new record. Progress is rapid, with the energy growing by a factor of ten every five years. Although technical problems still prevent a true table-top accelerator, an advanced civilisation has billions of years to perfect these and other devices. To reach the Planck energy (10^28eV) with this laser technology would require an atom-smasher ten light years long, beyond the nearest star, which would be well within the technological capabilities of a Type III civilisation. Since the vacuum of empty space is better than any vacuum attainable on the earth, the beam of subatomic particles may not need light years of tubing to contain it; it could be fired in empty space. Power stations would have to be placed along the path in order to pump laser energy into the beam, and also to focus it. Another possibility would be to bend the path into a circle so that it fits within the solar system. Gigantic magnets could be placed on asteroids to bend and focus the beam in a circular path around the sun. The magnetic field necessary to bend the beam would be so huge that the surge of power through the coils might melt them, meaning that they could only be used once. After the beam had passed, the melted coils would have to be discarded and replaced in time for the next pass. Build a laser implosion machine In principle, it might be possible to create laser beams of limitless power; the only constraints are the stability of the lasing material and the energy of the power source. In the lab, terawatt (trillion watt) lasers are now common, and petawatt (quadrillion watt) lasers are slowly becoming possible (in comparison, a commercial nuclear power plant generates only a billion watts of continuous power). One can even envisage an X-ray laser powered by the output of a hydrogen bomb, which would carry unimaginable power in its beam. At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a battery of lasers is fired radially on a small pellet of lithium deuteride, the active ingredient of a hydrogen bomb, in order to tame the power of thermonuclear fusion. An advanced civilisation might create huge laser stations on the asteroids and then fire millions of laser beams on to a single point, creating vast temperatures and pressures unimaginable today. Send a nanobot to recreate civilisation If the wormholes created in the previous steps are too small, too unstable, or the radiation effects too intense, then perhaps we could send only atom-sized particles through a wormhole. In this case, this civilisation may embark upon the ultimate solution: passing an atomic-sized "seed" through the wormhole capable of regenerating the civilisation on the other side. This process is commonly found in nature. The seed of an oak tree, for example, is compact, rugged and designed to survive a long journey and live off the land. It also contains all the genetic information needed to regenerate the tree. An advanced civilisation might want to send enough information through the wormhole to create a "nanobot," a self-replicating atomic-sized machine, built with nanotechnology. It would be able to travel at near the speed of light because it would be only the size of a molecule. It would land on a barren moon, and then use the raw materials to create a chemical factory which could create millions of copies of itself. A horde of these robots would then travel to other moons in other solar systems and create new chemical factories. This whole process would be repeated over and over again, making millions upon millions of copies of the original robot. Starting from a single robot, there will be a sphere of trillions of such robot probes expanding at near the speed of light, colonising the entire galaxy. (This was the basis of the movie 2001, probably the most scientifically accurate fictional depiction of an encounter with an extraterrestrial lifeform. Instead of meeting aliens in a flying saucer or the USS Enterprise, the most realistic possibility is that we will make contact with a robot probe left on a moon from a passing Type III civilisation. This was outlined by scientists in the opening minutes of the film, but Stanley Kubrick cut the interviews from the final edit.) Next, these robot probes would create huge biotechnology laboratories. The DNA sequences of the probes' creators would have been carefully recorded, and the robots would have been designed to inject this information into incubators, which would then clone the entire species. An advanced civilisation may also code the personalities and memories of its inhabitants and inject this into the clones, enabling the entire race to be reincarnated. Although seemingly fantastic, this scenario is consistent with the known laws of physics and biology, and is within the capabilities of a Type III civilisation. There is nothing in the rules of science to prevent the regeneration of an advanced civilisation from the molecular level. For a dying civilisation trapped in a freezing universe, this may be the last hope. From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 24 21:42:24 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:42:24 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Alister McGrath: (KJV) Something New Under the Sun Message-ID: Alister McGrath: (KJV) Something New Under the Sun http://science-spirit.org/articles/Articledetail.cfm?article_ID=454 The King James Bible, published in the seventeenth century, had an immense impact on Modern English, expanding the breadth and depth of the language. Enter the Hebrew idiom. by Alister McGrath Have you ever fallen flat on your face? Can you read the writing on the wall? Do you ever think about escaping, perhaps by the skin of your teeth before it's too late? When things are going well, do you look for the fly in the ointment? If you answered "Yes" to these questions, you are in good company. Shakespeare, however, never fell flat on his face. He couldn't read the writing on the wall, never once escaped by the skin of his teeth, and his ointment was always free of flies. The Bard, that great master of vocabulary and wordplay, could do none of these things, for these metaphors did not enter the English language until close to the time of his death in 1616. Like so much of the English language, these quaint and timeless expressions were borrowed from another tongue--in this case, Hebrew. The introduction of classical Hebrew phrases into the language--one of the most interesting developments in the shaping of Modern English--dates from the early seventeenth century with the arrival of the King James Bible. King James I, anxious to ensure religious stability in England, agreed to the production of this new English translation of the Bible. It was expected to be the best ever, drawing on a translation team of about fifty leading scholars. Six teams were assembled at Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster, and each was entrusted with the task of translating part of the work. The authors of The Story of English, a companion to the PBS television series on the history of the English language, point out that, "The King James Bible was published in the year Shakespeare began work on his last play, The Tempest. Both the play and the Bible are masterpieces of English, but there is one crucial difference between them. Whereas Shakespeare ransacked the lexicon, the King James Bible employs a bare 8,000 words--God's teaching in homely English for everyman." True, the Bible used plain and common words, but as American Rabbi William Rosenau observes, it took those words and "molded new forms and phrases, which, while foreign to the English, became with it flesh and bone." Here's what happened: The translators believed the best way of ensuring accuracy was to translate each and every word of the original, one by one. This literal translation of the Old Testament's Hebrew introduced a large number of new, and somewhat unusual, phrases into the English language. "The [King James Bible] is an almost literal translation of the Masoretic text, and is thus on every page replete with Hebrew idioms," writes Rosenau in Hebraisms in the Authorized Version of the Bible, a careful study of the way in which the King James Bible translated Hebrew expressions. "The fact that Bible English has to a marvellous extent shaped our speech, giving peculiar connotations to many words and sanctioning strange constructions, is not any less patent." Because the Bible's publicly accessible style could be widely imitated, the new phrases were easily absorbed, often unconsciously, within everyday language. Soon, without anyone completely appreciating what was happening, they began to shape written and spoken English. "The [King James Bible] has been--it can be said without any fear of being charged with exaggeration--the most powerful factor in the history of English literature," Rosenau claims. "Though the constructions encountered in the [King James Bible] are oftentimes so harsh that they seem almost barbarous, we should certainly have been the poorer without it." Initially, the language of the King James Bible might have seemed odd. We know that some people found it unnatural, artificial, and stilted. John Selden, a seventeenth-century Hebrew scholar of considerable distinction, doubted whether the widespread use of Hebrew idioms would make sense to the unlearned English public. He insisted that translation required conversion of Hebrew idioms into real English, not Hebraised English. "If I translate a French book into English, I turn it into English phrase and not into French English. `Il fait froid': I say `it is cold,' not `it makes cold,'" he explained. "But the Bible is translated into English words rather than English phrases. The Hebraisms are kept and the phrase of that language is kept. As for example, `he uncovered her shame,' which is well enough so long as scholars have to do with it, but when it comes among the common people, Lord what gear do they make of it." It is interesting to note that Selden's English makes perfect sense to modern readers until he lapses into the slang of his period. ("Gear" is here best translated as "nonsense"!) Selden's fears proved unfounded. Continuity of usage, through private and public reading of the King James Bible, soon diminished the apparent strangeness of the translation. Hebraic phrases--initially regarded with some amusement-- became standard parts of the English language. English is remarkable in its willingness to invent new words and borrow existing words. Again and again, linguists find changes that reflect encounters with other cultures, so that studying the history of the language is a bit like looking into a verbal melting pot. Hebrew idioms, for example, were easily absorbed into Modern English, even while their origins lay at the dawn of civilization in the Ancient Near East. So today, when we remind our colleagues that pride goes before a fall, or from time to time accuse them of sour grapes, or pour out our hearts to them about everything under the sun, let us remember that we are using the vocabulary of ancient Israel, given a new lease on life. Maybe there is nothing new under the sun after all. Now wouldn't that be a fly in our ointment. [31]List of Hebrew idioms welcomed into Modern English Related stories: [32]The Tongue Who Would Be King [33]Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave [34]Lost In Translation References 31. http://science-spirit.org/idioms.html 32. http://science-spirit.org/articles/Articledetail.cfm?article_ID=450 33. http://science-spirit.org/articles/Articledetail.cfm?article_ID=452 34. http://science-spirit.org/articles/Articledetail.cfm?article_ID=461 From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 24 21:43:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:43:43 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Editorial Observer: What's New in the Legal World? A Growing Campaign to Undo the New Deal Message-ID: Editorial Observer: What's New in the Legal World? A Growing Campaign to Undo the New Deal NYT December 14, 2004 By ADAM COHEN [But do we need a Posner Court to reverse the New Deal Court?] The New Deal made an unexpected appearance at the Supreme Court recently - in the form of a 1942 case about wheat. Some prominent states' rights conservatives were asking the court to overturn Wickard v. Filburn, a landmark ruling that laid out an expansive view of Congress's power to legislate in the public interest. Supporters of states' rights have always blamed Wickard, and a few other cases of the same era, for paving the way for strong federal action on workplace safety, civil rights and the environment. Although they are unlikely to reverse Wickard soon, states' rights conservatives are making progress in their drive to restore the narrow view of federal power that predated the New Deal - and render Congress too weak to protect Americans on many fronts. We take for granted today the idea that Congress can adopt a national minimum wage or require safety standards in factories. That's because the Supreme Court, in modern times, has always held that it can. But the court once had a far more limited view of Congress's power. In the early 1900's, justices routinely struck down laws protecting workers and discouraging child labor. The court reversed itself starting in 1937, in cases that led to Wickard, and began upholding these same laws. States' rights conservatives have always been nostalgic for the pre-1937 doctrines, which they have lately taken to calling the Constitution-in-Exile. They argue - at conferences like "Rolling Back the New Deal" and in papers like "Was the New Deal Constitutional?" - that Congress lacks the power to do things like forcing employers to participate in Social Security. Given how entrenched New Deal programs have become in more than half a century, these plans for reversing history have always seemed more than a bit quixotic. But that may be about to change. The attacks on the post-1937 view of the Constitution are becoming more mainstream among Republicans. One of President Bush's nominees to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Janice Rogers Brown, has called the "revolution of 1937" a disaster. And last month in the Supreme Court - in a case about medical marijuana - the justices found themselves having to decide whether to stand by Wickard. In that case, two Californians who use marijuana for medical reasons argued that Congress, which passed the Controlled Substances Act, did not have the constitutional power to stop them. To pass a law, Congress needs a constitutional hook, and the Controlled Substances Act relied on one of the most important ones, the Commerce Clause, which authorizes Congress to "regulate Commerce ... among the several States." The Californians argued that their marijuana did not involve interstate commerce because it never left their state. That is where Wickard v. Filburn comes in. Roscoe Filburn was a farmer who argued that his wheat crop should not fall under federal production quotas because much of it was consumed on his own farm. The Supreme Court held that even if that wheat did not enter interstate commerce, wheat grown for use on a farm altered supply and demand in the national market. The decision gave Congress broad power to regulate things that are located in one state, like factories and employer-employee relationships. Some leading conservatives want the court to overturn Wickard and replace it with a pair of decisions from the 1800's that one brief filed in the case said would return "Commerce Clause jurisprudence to its settled limits prior to the New Deal." That would be a bold move, but the court has already been heading down this path. In recent years, it has struck down the Gun-Free School Zones Act and a crucial part of the Violence Against Women Act for exceeding Congress's power. If the Supreme Court drifts rightward in the next four years, as seems likely, it could not only roll back Congress's Commerce Clause powers, but also revive other dangerous doctrines. Before 1937, the court invoked "liberty of contract" to strike down a Nebraska law regulating the weight of bread loaves, which kept buyers from being cheated, and a New York law setting a maximum 10-hour workday. Randy Barnett, the law professor who represented the medical marijuana users, argues in a new book that minimum wage laws infringe on "the fundamental natural right of freedom of contract." In pre-1937 America, workers were exploited, factories were free to pollute, and old people were generally poor when they retired. This is not an agenda the public would be likely to sign onto today if it were debated in an election. But conservatives, who like to complain about activist liberal judges, could achieve their anti-New Deal agenda through judicial activism on the right. Judges could use the so-called Constitution-in-Exile to declare laws on workplace safety, environmental protection and civil rights unconstitutional. Getting rid of Wickard would be an important first step. At last month's argument, that did not appear likely. Justice Antonin Scalia, a leading states' rights champions, said he "always used to laugh at Wickard," but he seemed prepared to stick with it. It may be, however, that the justices are quicker to limit Congress's power when it does things they don't like (like gun regulation) than when it does things they do (like drug regulation). They may be waiting for a more congenial case. The court will not return to the pre-1937 Constitution in a single case, but it seems likely to keep whittling away Congressional power and federally protected rights. If it does, what President Franklin Roosevelt declared in 1936 - after two key New Deal programs were struck down - will again be true: "It was not the wage earners who cheered when these laws were declared invalid." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/14/opinion/14tue4.html From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 24 21:44:23 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:44:23 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: The Last Time You Used Algebra Was... Message-ID: The Last Time You Used Algebra Was... NYT December 12, 2004 By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. IN the 1986 movie, "Peggy Sue Got Married," Kathleen Turner, an unhappily married wife and mother, magically returns to relive her senior year as the most popular girl at Buchanan High. She leaves a math test blank, and when her teacher (described in the screenplay as "an officious little creep") demands an explanation, answers: "Mr. Snelgrove, I happen to know that in the future, I will never have the slightest use for algebra. And I speak from experience." Audiences and critics loved the line, presumably because they too rejoiced in knowing that they had never, ever used the quadratic formula again. (Disclosure: I squeaked by in calculus while never really grasping it, and can no longer help my ninth-grade daughter solve equations with two variables. The toughest math I tackle now is calculating a tip in a moving taxi.) Last week, the United States proved, yet again, that its mathematical literacy is abysmal. In a survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, it ranked 28th out of 40 countries in mathematics, far below Finland and South Korea, and about on a par with Portugal. The survey tested simple, "everyday" skills like estimating the size of Antarctica or footsteps in the sand. Nonetheless, as in past comparisons, American 15-year-olds did rather better than students in Mexico, Indonesia and South Africa, and substantially worse than those in rich countries, especially Asian ones. These annual humiliations produce two consistent reactions. One set of experts grouses that the surveys are unfair: average American students are compared to distant elites; Americans play sports and hold jobs; foreign countries impose national standards while America believes in local school boards. Another set gloomily predicts that math malaise will ultimately gut the economy, frequently citing an estimate that American businesses waste $30 billion a year on remedial training. (In 1990, the elder President Bush announced an expensive plan to have American students lead the world in math by the year 2000.) But there is also the Peggy Sue school of thought, which asks: So what? In all but the most arcane specialties (like teaching math), the need for math has atrophied. Electronic scales can price 4.15 pounds of chicken at $3.79 a pound faster than any butcher. Artillerymen in Iraq don't use slide rules as their counterparts on Iwo Jima did. Cars announce how many miles each gallon gets. Some restaurant bills calculate suggested tips of 15, 18 or 20 percent. Architects and accountants now have spreadsheets for everything from wind stress to foreign tax shelters. The new math is plug-and-play. True, those calculators and spreadsheets and credit card machines need to be programmed. But, in between bouts of visa restrictions, American universities successfully import thousands of math whizzes each year because jobs await them, and the tiny percentage of American-born students who do Ph.D. work equal the world's best. In math, as in chess, countries that produce the most grandmasters per capita - like Hungary and Iceland - not only don't rule the world, they don't even rule chess. Sheer power counts, as it did in chess for the Soviets. America may lose math literacy surveys, but it dominates number-crunching in every sphere from corporate profits to supercomputers to Nobel prizes. So is it necessary that the average high-schooler spend years nailed to the axes of x and y? Maybe not, said Robert L. Park, former director of the American Physical Society, an independent group of physicists, who teaches at the University of Maryland. "As a teacher, I'd like to think it's going to have a huge payoff," he said. "But I'd like to know the answer." He once calculated that a third of the Americans who won Nobel prizes were born abroad, and said that an open-door policy benefited both sides: American universities get well-trained, driven students, and they in turn flourish in the more creative atmosphere here. Bob Moses, who developed the Algebra Project in Cambridge, Mass., focuses on the other end of the spectrum: poor blacks and Hispanics who are the first in their families to aspire to college. "No one is going to pay you because you can do division," he said, but added that without a grasp of the concepts his students would be "serfs in the new information age," stuck in dead-end jobs as surely as illiterate Europeans were forced to the bottom of the job heap by the Industrial Revolution. Most experts point out that careers in science or computers require mathematics, even when it is not a real job skill but a filter for the lazy or stupid, as passing freshman physics is for pre-med students. (Disclosure: me, for example.) Physics requires calculus, calculus requires algebra and trigonometry, and so on. One must start early. In the age of Googling and spell-checking, noted Diane Ravitch, the education historian, the "so what?" question could be asked about learning virtually any subject. "But a democratic society demands an educated populace," she said. "Why spend hundreds of billions on public education if we're going to sling it over our shoulder?" But the best defense - the first to get beyond the utilitarian argument - came from a certain Miss Collins. She is my daughter's math teacher at a school where there are no boys to distract or intimidate calculating young women. "If you ask the girls," she said, "they'll say it's another hoop they have to jump through to get into a good college." She feels otherwise. "What we do isn't exactly what mathematicians do," she explained. "And I know more alums here become artists than become mathematicians. But kids don't study poetry just because they're going to grow up to be poets. It's about a habit of mind. Your mind doesn't think abstractly unless it's asked to - and it needs to be asked to from a relatively young age. The rigor and logic that goes into math is a good way for your brain to be trained." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/weekinreview/12mcne.html From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 24 21:45:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:45:21 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Paul Edwards, Professor and Editor of Philosophy, Dies at 81 Message-ID: Paul Edwards, Professor and Editor of Philosophy, Dies at 81 NYT December 16, 2004 By JENNIFER BAYOT [Did you know there is a supplemental volume? Cost a hundred dollars or so.] Paul Edwards, a professor of philosophy who edited The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, an enduring and authoritative reference work covering topics from "the absolute" to Zoroastrianism, a Persian religion, died on Dec. 9 at his home in Manhattan. He was 81. The cause apparently was heart failure, said a friend, Aleksander Shlahet. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published by Macmillan in 1967 and still in print, was written by more than 500 contributors, many of them prominent philosophers. It devotes eight volumes to nearly 1,500 theories, thinkers and ideologies of all eras and continents. Professor Edwards, a longtime instructor at the New School and at Brooklyn College, wanted the encyclopedia to be comprehensive even at the risk of creating controversy. The entries related to existentialism, for example, "point out confusion and lack of clarity in some of the ideas," he told The New York Times upon the encyclopedia's publication. A wry and caustic critic of religion, he wrote many of the entries on atheists. "It seems to be agreed that an atheist can be a good man, and that his oaths and promises are no less trustworthy than those of other people," Professor Edwards wrote. In 1957, he edited a compilation of essays by Bertrand Russell, including "Why I Am Not a Christian," which became the anthology's title. One of his own books, "Reincarnation: A Critical Examination" (1996), criticized religious beliefs in rebirth "There is no God, there is no life after death, Jesus was a man, and, perhaps most important, the influence of religion is by and large bad," he wrote in the current issue of Free Inquiry, a magazine about secular humanism, a school of thought that emphasizes values based on experience rather than religion. Professor Edwards was born to Jewish parents in Vienna on Sept. 2, 1923. His family immigrated to Australia during Hitler's rise to power, and he received bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Melbourne. He later moved to Manhattan and, in 1951, received a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia. He taught at New York University in the 1960's, at Brooklyn College from 1966 to 1986, and at what is now the New School from the 1960's to the late 1990's. "Heidegger's Confusions," a collection of Professor Edwards's scholarly articles, was published last month by Prometheus. "God and Philosophers," also to be published by Prometheus, is a chronicle of various thinkers' approaches to the question of God. No immediate family members survive. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/16/obituaries/16edwards.html From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 24 21:45:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:45:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] =?iso-8859-1?q?CHE=3A_G=F6del_and_Einstein=3A_Frien?= =?iso-8859-1?q?dship_and_Relativity?= Message-ID: G?del and Einstein: Friendship and Relativity The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4.12.17 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i17/17b00901.htm By PALLE YOURGRAU In the summer of 1942, while German U-boats roamed in wolf packs off the coast of Maine, residents in the small coastal town of Blue Hill were alarmed by the sight of a solitary figure, hands clasped behind his back, hunched over like a comma with his eyes fixed on the ground, making his way along the shore in a seemingly endless midnight stroll. Those who encountered the man were struck by his deep scowl and thick German accent. Speculation mounted that he was a German spy giving secret signals to enemy warships. The dark stranger, however, was no German spy. He was Kurt G?del, the greatest logician of all time, a beacon in the intellectual landscape of the last thousand years, and the prey he sought was not American ships bound for Britain but rather the so-called continuum hypothesis, a conjecture made by the mathematician Georg Cantor about the number of points on a line. G?del was spending the summer vacationing at the Blue Hill Inn with his wife, Adele, although fellow visitors at the inn rarely saw either of them. They materialized for dinner but were never observed actually eating. To the locals G?del's scowl betrayed a dark disposition, but the inn-keeper saw things differently. For her it was the expression of a man lost in thought. His last word to Blue Hill would not decide the issue. He sent a letter accusing the innkeeper of stealing the key to his trunk. The place G?del would return to in the fall was a long way from Blue Hill -- the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J. There he would no longer have to walk alone, arousing the suspicions of neighbors. He had a walking companion, a colleague at the institute and his best friend. There was no danger that G?del's reputation would intimidate his companion. For his friend, another German-speaking refugee with a mathematical bent, was the most famous scientist of all time, Albert Einstein, whose own meditative strolls already irritated the residents of Princeton. "From a distance," a biographer wrote, "the [residents of Princeton] chuckled discreetly over [Einstein's] habit of licking an ice cream on Nassau Street on his way home from Fine Hall and were astonished by his utterly un-American long walks through the streets of Princeton." Indeed, toward the end of his career, when he was more or less retired, Einstein commented that his own work no longer meant much to him, and that he now went to his office "just to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt G?del." Ironically, it was not the scowling G?del but his smiling companion who had once given indirect aid to the German U-boats, when, during World War I, although a courageous and committed pacifist, Einstein had helped improve the gyroscopes used by the German navy. G?del's research would also, in the end, relate to gyroscopes, but these spun in the center of the universe, not in the dank bowels of submarines. Washed up onto America's shores by the storm of Nazism that raged in Europe in the 1930s, the two men awakened to find themselves stranded in the same hushed academic retreat, the Institute for Advanced Study, the most exclusive intellectual club in the world, whose members had only one assigned duty: to think. But G?del and Einstein already belonged to an even more exclusive club. Together with another German-speaking theorist, Werner Heisenberg, they were the authors of the three most fundamental scientific results of the century. Each man's discovery, moreover, established a profound and disturbing limitation. Einstein's theory of relativity set a limit -- the speed of light -- to the flow of any information-bearing signal. And by defining time in terms of its measurement with clocks, he set a limit to time itself. It was no longer absolute but henceforth limited or relative to a frame of measurement. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics set a limit on our simultaneous knowledge of the position and momentum of the fundamental particles of matter. This was not just a restriction on what we can know: For Heisenberg it signified a limit to reality. Finally, G?del's incompleteness theorem -- "the most significant mathematical truth of the century," as it would soon be described in a ceremony at Harvard University -- set a permanent limit on our knowledge of the basic truths of mathematics: The complete set of mathematical truths will never be captured by any finite or recursive list of axioms that is fully formal. Thus, no mechanical device, no computer, will ever be able to exhaust the truths of mathematics. It follows immediately, as G?del was quick to point out, that if we are able somehow to grasp the complete truth in this domain, then we, or our minds, are not machines or computers. (Enthusiasts of artificial intelligence were not amused.) Einstein, G?del, Heisenberg: three men whose fundamental scientific results opened up new horizons, paradoxically, by setting limits to thought or reality. Together they embodied the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Mysteriously, each had reached an ontological conclusion about reality through the employment of an epistemic principle concerning knowledge. The dance or dialectic of knowledge and reality -- of limit and limitlessness -- would become a dominant theme of the 20th century. Yet G?del's and Einstein's relation to their century was more uneasy than Heisenberg's. The zeitgeist took root most famously in quantum mechanics. Here G?del and Einstein would find themselves in lonely opposition to Heisenberg, who, on the wrong side in the war of nations, chose the winning team in the wars of physics. Heisenberg was champion of the school of positivism, known in quantum physics as the Copenhagen interpretation, in deference to Heisenberg's mentor, Niels Bohr. What had been a mere heuristic principle in Einstein's special relativity -- deducing the nature of reality from limitations on what can be known -- became for Heisenberg a kind of religion, a religion G?del and Einstein had no wish to join. Some, however, claimed to see in G?del's theorem itself an echo of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The group did not include G?del. Einstein, himself one of the great pioneers of quantum mechanics, had known and inspired Heisenberg in Germany. In 1911 in Prague, years before Heisenberg came on the scene, Einstein once pointed out to his colleague Philipp Frank the insane asylum in the park below his study and remarked, "Here you see that portion of lunatics who do not concern themselves with quantum theory." By Einstein's lights, a bad situation became even worse after Heisenberg. In an early encounter, Heisenberg, on the defensive against Einstein's harangue against quantum mechanics, fought back: "When I objected that in [my approach] I had merely been applying the type of philosophy that he, too, had made the basis of his special theory of relativity, [Einstein] answered simply: 'Perhaps I did use such philosophy earlier, and also wrote it, but it is nonsense all the same.'" The two parted before the war, Einstein emigrating to the United States, Heisenberg remaining in Germany, to which he would remain loyal to the end. In Princeton, Einstein -- pacifist, bohemian, socialist, and Jew -- was a man apart. To be sure, he found G?del, but together they remained isolated and alone, not least because of their opposition to Heisenberg's positivist worldview, which ruled the intellectual scene even as Heisenberg's fatherland was attempting to dominate the world. G?del and Einstein were not merely intellectual engineers, as so many of their brethren, inspired by positivism, had become, but philosopher-scientists. Ironically, while their stars had begun to wane, the sheer size of their reputations made them unapproachable. Not to each other, however. "G?del," wrote their colleague Freeman Dyson, "was the only one of our colleagues who walked and talked on equal terms with Einstein." Their tastes, however, remained distinct. Einstein, a violinist, could never bring his friend to subject himself to the likes of Beethoven and Mozart. G?del, in turn, had no more success in dragging Einstein to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, his favorite movie. History, sadly, does not record which of the seven dwarfs was G?del's favorite, but we do know why he favored fairy tales: "Only fables," he said, "present the world as it should be and as if it had meaning." (That meaning, of course, may be dark. It is not known whether Alan Turing acquired an affection for Snow White from G?del when visiting the institute in the 1930s, but some have heard an echo of the dark side of Snow White in Turing's decision to end his life by eating a poisoned apple when, as a reward for his having broken the "Enigma" code of the German navy, the British government ordered him to receive hormone injections as a "cure" for his homosexuality.) Einstein, before fleeing Germany, had already become a refugee from mathematics. He later said that he could not find, in that garden of many paths, the one to what was fundamental. He turned to the more earthly domain of physics, where the way to the essential was, he thought, clearer. His disdain for mathematics earned him the nickname "lazy dog" from his teacher, Hermann Minkowski, who would soon recast the "lazy dog's" special relativity into its characteristic four-dimensional form. "You know, once you start calculating," Einstein would quip, "you shit yourself up before you know it." G?del's journey, by contrast, was in the opposite direction. Having befriended G?del, Einstein commented that he knew now, at last, that in mathematics, too, one could find a path to the fundamental. In befriending Einstein, G?del was reawakened to his early interest in physics. On their long walks home from the office, Einstein, forever cheerful, would attempt to raise the spirits of the gloomy and pessimistic G?del by recounting his latest insights into general relativity. Sadly, however, pessimism blossomed into paranoia. The economist Oskar Morgenstern, calling one day on his good friend, was shocked to find the great G?del hiding in the cellar behind the furnace. From their long walks together, from their endless discussions, something beautiful would soon be born. The scene was pregnant with possibility. Time, which has taunted thinkers from Plato to St. Augustine to Kant, had finally met its match in Einstein. While the U-boats of his former fatherland were stalking the Allied fleet, this most un-German of Germans was hunting a more elusive prey. He had amazed the world decades earlier when he alone succeeded in capturing and taming time itself in the equations of relativity. "Every boy in the streets of G?ttingen," his countryman David Hilbert wrote, "understands more about four-dimensional geometry than Einstein. Yet, in spite of that, Einstein did the work and not the mathematicians." Relativity had rendered time, the most elusive of beings, manageable and docile by transforming it into a fourth dimension of space, or rather, of relativistic space-time. Sharing with G?del his latest thoughts on the four-dimensional universe of space-time that he himself had conjured into being, Einstein was sowing the seeds of relativity in the mind of a thinker who would later be described as a combination of Einstein and Kafka. If Einstein succeeded in transforming time into space, G?del would perform a trick yet more magical: He would make time disappear. Having already rocked the mathematical world to its foundations with his incompleteness theorem, G?del now took aim at Einstein and relativity. Wasting no time, he announced in short order his discovery of new and unsuspected cosmological solutions to the field equations of general relativity, solutions in which time would undergo a shocking transformation. The mathematics, the physics, and the philosophy of G?del's results were all new. In the possible worlds governed by these new cosmological solutions, the so-called "rotating" or "G?del universes," it turned out that the space-time structure is so greatly warped or curved by the distribution of matter that there exist timelike, future-directed paths by which a spaceship, if it travels fast enough -- and G?del worked out the precise speed and fuel requirements, omitting only the lunch menu -- can penetrate into any region of the past, present, or future. G?del, the union of Einstein and Kafka, had for the first time in human history proved, from the equations of relativity, that time travel was not a philosopher's fantasy but a scientific possibility. Yet again he had somehow contrived, from within the very heart of mathematics, to drop a bomb into the laps of the philosophers. The fallout, however, from this mathematical bomb was even more perilous than that from the incompleteness theorem. G?del was quick to point out that if we can revisit the past, then it never really "passed." But a time that fails to "pass" is no time at all. Einstein saw at once that if G?del was right, he had not merely domesticated time: He had killed it. Time, "that mysterious and seemingly self-contradictory being," as G?del put it, "which, on the other hand, seems to form the basis of the world's and our own existence," turned out in the end to be the world's greatest illusion. In a word, if Einstein's relativity theory was real, time itself was merely ideal. The father of relativity was shocked. Though he praised G?del for his great contribution to the theory of relativity, he was fully aware that time, that elusive prey, had once again slipped his net. But now something truly amazing took place: nothing. Although in the immediate aftermath of G?del's discoveries a few physicists bestirred themselves to refute him and, when this failed, tried to generalize and explore his results, this brief flurry of interest soon died down. Within a few years the deep footprints in intellectual history traced by G?del and Einstein in their long walks home had disappeared, dispersed by the harsh winds of fashion and philosophical prejudice. A conspiracy of silence descended on the Einstein-G?del friendship and its scientific consequences. An association no less remarkable than the friendship of Michelangelo and Leonardo -- if such had occurred -- has simply vanished from sight. To this day, not only is the man on the street unaware of the intimate relationship between the two giants of the 20th century, even the most exhaustive intellectual biographies of Einstein either omit all mention of this friendship or at best begrudge a sentence or two. Whereas a whole industry has grown up in search of Lieserl, the "love child" of Einstein's first marriage, the child of the imagination that was born of the friendship of Einstein and G?del has been abandoned. Only in the last few years has this child, the G?del universe, received any glimmer of recognition. This comes from the redoubtable Stephen Hawking. Revisiting the rotating G?del universe, Hawking was moved to deliver the highest of compliments. So threatening did he find G?del's results to the worldview of sober physicists that he put forward what amounts to an anti-G?del postulate. If accepted, Hawking's famous chronology-protection conjecture would precisely negate G?del's contribution to relativity. So physically unacceptable did Hawking find conclusions like G?del's that he felt compelled to propose what looks like an ad hoc modification of the laws of nature that would have the effect of ruling out the G?del universe as a genuine physical possibility. Hawking's attempt to neutralize the G?del universe shows how dangerous it is to break the conspiracy of silence that has shrouded the G?del-Einstein connection. Not only does this mysterious silence hide from the world one of the most moving and consequential friendships in the history of science, it also keeps the world from realizing the true implications of the Einstein revolution. It is one thing to overturn, as Einstein did, Newton's centuries-old conception of the absoluteness and independence of space and time. It is quite another to demonstrate that time is not just relative but ideal. Unlike Einstein, a classicist who forever sought continuity with the past, G?del was at heart an ironist, a truly subversive thinker. With his incompleteness theorem he had shaken the foundations of mathematics, prompting the great mathematician Hilbert to propose a new law of logic just to refute G?del's results. The G?del universe, correctly understood, shares with his incompleteness theorem an underlying methodology and purpose. It is a bomb, built from cosmology's most cherished materials, lobbed into the foundations of physics. In the footsteps of G?del and Einstein, then, can be heard an echo of the zeitgeist, a clue to the secret of the great and terrible 20th century, a century that, like the 17th, may well go down in history as one of genius. The residents of Blue Hill, preoccupied with war and the enemy out at sea, had failed to take the full measure of their man. Palle Yourgrau is a professor of philosophy at Brandeis University. This essay is from his new book, A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of G?del and Einstein, to be published next month by Basic Books. From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 24 21:51:01 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:51:01 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Parked in Desert, Waiting Out the Winter of Life Message-ID: Parked in Desert, Waiting Out the Winter of Life NYT December 17, 2004 By CHARLIE LeDUFF [Continuing in my coverage of ways to keep down the cost of providing for those made unemployable by robots. I still want to know what standard of living social justice requires that productive pay the unproductive.] SLAB CITY, Calif. - Directions to purgatory are as follows: from Los Angeles drive east past Palm Springs into the bowels of the Mojave Desert. Turn south at the stench of the Salton Sea. Proceed down Highway 111 to the town of Niland, a broken-down place of limited possibilities. Turn left on Main Street and head down the road to the railroad tracks where the law sometimes waits, as though the tracks were an international boundary. "Where you going?" asked the deputy, Frank Lopez, on a recent night, even though the road leads to just one place. The Slabs. Bored stiff, the deputy spun a ghost story about drugged-out crazies, a cult in a blue bus, a child molester, a man who sleeps with rattlesnakes, a mobster on the lam, and old people, flocks of old people who have traded in their picket fences for a mobile home and a life on the drift. "The best thing to do," he said, "is to turn around." Five miles down is the sign, "Welcome to Slab City," marking the entrance of this former World War II military base. The only suggestion of life this night was the flickering of campfires. At a makeshift mission, some men stood around a fire, casting silhouettes with a vaguely sinister feel. Among them was the pastor, Phil Hyatt, who shared some coffee and a few paraphrased biblical passages. The Pentecostal preacher excused himself and shambled back to his trailer. First the shoes came off, then the coins went on the nightstand. The bedsprings creaked and then he cried. Pastor Hyatt, at 69, has inherited the burden of living. His wife, Audrey, died this year after suffering a stroke here in the desert wasteland. The memory of her scent is everywhere. "Ah, he's lonely, and it's tough to see it," said Rusty, 73, who sat at the pastor's fire, warming himself. Rusty looked and smelled like a bum - the price paid, he said, for freedom. "Nobody particularly wants to die out here in the desert, but the living's free." Slab City is not so sinister as it is a strange, forlorn quarter of America. It is a town that is not really a town, a former training grounds with nothing left but the concrete slabs where the barracks stood. Gen. George S. Patton trained troops here. Pilots of the Enola Gay practiced their atomic mission, dropping dummy bombs into the sea. The land belongs to the state, but the state, like the law, does not bother, and so the Slabs have become a place to park free. More than 3,000 elderly people settle in for the winter, in a pattern that dates back at least 20 years. They are mostly single, divorced or widowed - a whole generation on the road, independent, alone. In this place, to be 55 years old is to be young. There are no amenities; no potable water, no electricity, no sewerage. Groceries can be picked up in town at the grubby market whose managers do not seem to mind that hundreds of people fill their jugs from the water tap. Mail is routed to a post office box - Niland, CA 92257. Gasoline is bought in distant towns like Brawley; prescriptions and liquor are bought in Mexico. Sewage is held in storage tanks or holes in the ground. The north side of Main Street is Poverty Flats. The south side, the suburbs, where the relatively well-to-do motorhomies have their dinner dances and clubhouse trailers. Cole Robertson lives in the Flats with his wife, Mabel. Mr. Robertson, 72, is a retired construction worker from East Texas who cuts an intimidating figure, sitting shirtless, with one rheumy eye, a watermelon physique and a cotton fields vocabulary. An argument with a neighbor last year ended with one of the Robertsons' trailers in flames. That is how law is dispensed in the Flats, vigilante style. One man was dragged to death a few years ago, another shot in the kneecap last year. Occasionally, the deputies do come around, usually in the day to exercise a warrant or to remove children who have not been seen in school for months. But normally, justice comes at the end of a matchstick in the Flats. "There ain't no rules," Mr. Robertson said. He told of his neighbors, an aging man who lives with his voices in the rundown bus, a geriatric transvestite, a no-good who strapped his kid to a tree and left him in the sun. A few years ago, a man tried making scrap metal from an unexploded aluminum shell he found at the bombing range in the nearby Chocolate Mountains. He succeeded but at the cost of his own life. His legs had to be picked from a tree. It was in this anarchy, eight years ago, that Pastor Hyatt stumbled upon his life's purpose. He discovered the Slabs quite by accident. He and Audrey had packed up their whole life, sold the house in Lebanon, Ore., left their jobs at the titanium plant where he was a shift foreman, said goodbye to their children and to their obligations and struck out on the road. He was not always a good man, he admits that. He had a temper and hard fists. But he came across a band of rolling revivalists that first year on the road, and followed them to Minnesota. He was ordained by the World Wide Ministries without ever studying at seminary and seems a little embarrassed by this. Stuck near Niland, the pastor inquired about a place to camp in an R.V. for the evening. A stranger told him about the Slabs, five miles down the road. Upon seeing the privation and sadness and isolation, the preacher and his wife believed that the Creator had given them a second life. They built the Slab City Christian Center out of modular housing and began to preach and feed October through April, when the weather is clement and the Slabs come to life. When people were found dead in their trailers, the pastor and his wife were there with a Psalm. They gave children rides to the hospital. The Hyatts paid for the work from their life savings. But Audrey was felled by a stroke in February and passed in May. When she died, the pastor's self-assurance faltered and he found that he had become one of the lost, emotionally stranded with one foot in hell and the other on an ice cube. "I didn't really understand before how much I needed this place," the pastor said. "I need it especially this year. Rusty. Rusty's been a good man to me." The pastor and Rusty make the most unlikely of friends. The pastor, a clean-cut man with a bristly haircut and clean strong hands. Rusty, the doubter who cleans his shirt once a week in a bucket. Rusty, who tells about a prepubescent military career. Rusty, whose smell and language come from the stables. Rusty, who came in on a bus and says he ran a militia out of this camp for 12 years in case the Mexicans invaded from the south or the F.B.I. from the east. "Everybody can't fit in to the middle-class life," said Rusty, who wore a military shirt and cap, military boots and long fingernails as thick as seashells. Suffice it to say, Rusty does not want people to know him and does not disclose his last name. The evening was cold and dark, the air thick with the smells of burning salt oak as Slab City went to sleep. A Frank Sinatra record played somewhere across the salt flats. The thunder of bombs clapped on the far side of the Chocolate Mountains. Rusty smoked by himself in his broken-down camper with the flat wheels and camouflage netting. A lamp burned in the pastor's trailer. Rusty talked about a daughter who did not want anything to do with him; a wife he reckoned was working a truck stop somewhere between California and Texas. But Rusty is human. He dreams of a rich woman from the south side of the Slabs. They wear makeup, those girls over there in the R.V.'s. They use toilets instead of buckets. They have class. It's never going to happen, he says. "I'd love to have company, but I can't dance anymore," he said. "I got old legs, but I'm a good conversationalist. But those women over there, they're stuck up. Middle-class stuck up." The senior citizens on the south side of town travel in a sort of lonely-hearts club tailgate. They are alone, having suffered a late-life divorce or the death of a longtime partner. Their vehicles are big, expensive Coachmen and Fleetwoods and Ramblers and the like. They work as a sort of neighborhood watch, and the denizens of the Flats do not cross the imaginary line. The majority of the society is women. They come to the Slabs because it is free and close to Mexico, where liquor and prescription medicine can be bought cheap. They are educated, savvy about life and competent mechanics. Donna Lee Cole is a member of Loners on Wheels, a rolling singles club with chapters across the United States. Mrs. Cole says there are at least 10,000 people who belong to this subsociety of aged hobos, people who drive around in search of nothing except tomorrow. They tend to be women, she said, because women live longer than men. Her first marriage ended in a bad divorce. Her second husband, David, died of cancer 11 years ago. She waited for the children to insert her in their lives, but the children were living their own. She waited for the telephone to ring and it never did. So she cashed it in and hit the road. "I decided I wasn't going to watch my life waste away," she said as the afternoon social began to congeal and the old men emerged from their trailers hitching their belts over their navels, wiping their lips with their forearms, coming on with dopey smiles as they approached Mrs. Cole for their daily squeeze. Though the group's motto is where singles mingle, there is little physical love, much to the complaint of the men. "Most of us are from a family that used to be," explained Mrs. Cole, 61, a petite widow from Alpena, Mich., with bobbed blond hair. "I'm thankful for a place to go, but I'm sad to end up like this," she said at the club's evening happy hour, where two ladies were playing a guitar and an accordion. She eats dinner alone in her own R.V. with all the amenities, the water and septic tanks, the stove, solar panels, television. She is never home for Christmas, and the children receive a check that says "Love Grandma." She never drives in neighborhoods with houses that have bars on the window, and if things get especially tough, she parks at the local police station. Her life is her own, she says. Generally, it is good. "We women aren't looking for a man," she explained. "The divorcees walked away from a bad situation and don't want another one. The widows draw Blue Cross and their husband's Social Security and would lose it if they married a new man. So you don't bother. You're just looking for some company." Besides, Mrs. Cole says, look at the quality of men, no offense. "They're bald and paunchy and toothless. I'm old, but I'm not dead. "If a Mr. Right came along, well then, I suppose." The lonely-hearts clubs have happy hour and social mixers, dances twice a week and trips to town for steak dinners. Still, the Elvis generation goes to bed early and goes to bed alone. "I was married 46 years," says Tina Faye at the afternoon mixer at the L.O.W. slab. At 80, Mrs. Faye strikes an exotic figure, lean, rouged, coiffed, with a voice as thick as apricot nectar. "My man told me to go on if I was to outlive him. So I took to the road. But I feel him sitting there right next to me. I can't let him go." The mood is a bit sad until Ruth Halford, a 74-year-old-widow with a silver permanent, pipes up. "I'm not sad about anything. I don't owe nobody nothing. I scratch my plans in the dirt. I'm not looking for anybody. The only person I'm in love with is me. Right, girls?" This is maddening to the eligible bachelor, like a dog chasing a pork chop on a string. A waste of a perfectly beautiful woman. "Those girls, they get to being independent and they don't need men," said John Clairmont, 77, a retired truck driver. "You can never get them to come home with you." The evening dissipated. The sun set a violent red. The lonely hearts played cards and listened to the old records. The gossip went around the tables. The pastor's wife was one topic. Mrs. Cole promised to go see the pastor on Sunday and take him soup. "Such a shame," she said. "They were together a long time." Mrs. Cole and the pastor would make a handsome couple, someone said with real feeling. The others agreed. In the morning, Pastor Phil awoke alone, put his change in his pocket, put on his shoes and shared coffee around his fire. Rusty was there. So were others from the north side, the stumblebums and the alkies. The pastor talked about random things from his life with his wife. The snowstorms and eggs in a rooming house. The smell of her hair. Ceramic snowmen she collected. Her face lighted by the dashboard lights. Recipes the children do not ask for. Grandchildren who, chances are, will not remember her name. Death in the desert in some nameless place without longitude or shade. "That's the tragedy of old age," the pastor said as his eyes welled once again. "I'm alone. I'm derelict without her." Rusty stared at his feet. One guy asked for 20 bucks. An old transvestite drove by and waved. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/17/national/17slab.html From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 24 21:52:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:52:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wayne Lutton: James Knox Polk: Forgotten as One of Our 'Greatest' Presidents Message-ID: Wayne Lutton: James Knox Polk: Forgotten as One of Our 'Greatest' Presidents http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?print=yes&id=5875 Posted Nov 24, 2004 This past year's election campaign and the death of President Ronald Reagan prompted journalists and scholars to once again rate our Presidents. Aside from George Washington, "greatness" tends to depend on a particular commentator's ideological bent. Next to our first President, Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy are most often cited as "great"--perhaps reflecting the bias of those participating in the surveys. If you believe presidential "greatness" should be based upon personal character, the attainment of a positive agenda for the country, and the ability to lead during wartime, then our 11th President, James Knox Polk, surely deserves to be ranked among the very greatest. In a recent addition to the American Presidents Series, [1]James K. Polk: 1845-1849, John Seigenthaler, former editorial director of USA Today and founder of the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, has written a concise and highly readable biography of this shrewd and decisive commander in chief. Polk was born in Mecklenburg County, N.C., and grew up in Tennessee, where his grandfather and father "imbued him with the principles of Jefferson," as famed historian George Bancroft, who served in his cabinet, pointed out. His mother, Jane Knox Polk, was a descendant of the same John Knox who launched the Reformation in Scotland and her piety was an enduring force in his life. He was sober, honest, and hardworking. Later, after his marriage to Sarah Childress, James Polk and his wife paid for a pew in the Presbyterian Church and throughout his years in public life they regularly attended Sunday services. James nearly died at the age of 17, when forced to undergo emergency surgery for urinary stones. The author describes the operation he endured, without general anesthesia or antiseptics to prevent infection. In Seigenthaler's estimation, "the boy became a man on Dr. McDowell's operating table. Here, for the first time, were evidences of the courage, grit, and unyielding iron will that Whigs, the British Crown, and the Mexican army would encounter once he became President." After his recovery, James attended a series of Presbyterian academies, where he excelled in Latin, Greek, literature, logic, philosophy and geography. He entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1816, at a time when it was dominated by its Presbyterian president, Rev. Robert Chapman. Polk was an outstanding student and earned the privilege of giving the commencement address at graduation. Polk then studied law in the office of Felix Grundy, a noted criminal lawyer who had served as a state legislator and chief justice of the state supreme court, passing the bar exam in June of 1820. As a young man, Polk rose rapidly from the Tennessee legislature to the U.S. House of Representatives. There he was twice elected speaker as a principal supporter of "Old Hickory" Andrew Jackson, his political mentor. Polk returned home to run for governor of Tennessee. This was seen as a springboard for a future run for the presidency. However, he served only one two-year term in the statehouse, being twice narrowly defeated for re-election. By early 1844, James Polk was considered to be politically dead. No one would have bet that by the end of the year he would be the newly elected President. The author is at his best when describing how Polk became the surprise candidate of the Democratic Party. Former President Martin Van Buren was favored to run against the Whig candidate Henry Clay. At the time, American public opinion overwhelmingly favored admitting the Republic of Texas to the United States. But in an amazing misreading of popular sentiment, both Van Buren and Clay issued official statements declaring their opposition to welcoming Texas into the Union. "Remember the Alamo!" still reverberated in the hearts of American patriots and Texas President Sam Houston was a revered figure. Dubbed "Young Hickory" by former President Andrew Jackson's supporters, who managed his campaign, Polk won his party's nomination and defeated Clay in the general election. At the time, he was the youngest man ever elected to our highest public office. Polk pledged to serve only one term. This freed him to push ahead without focusing on re-election. He had four goals: To fund the federal budget while lowering tariffs (then the main source of revenue); to restore an independent national treasury, taking public deposits out of the too often corrupt hands of private banks; acquire the Oregon Territory from Britain; and welcome Texas and California into the Union. He achieved the first three objectives in his first year and a half in office, a truly remarkable accomplishment. Liberals have sought to define Polk's presidency by the Mexican War of 1846-1848. Then and now, his critics claimed that Polk deliberately provoked war with Mexico in order to acquire Texas, New Mexico, and California. Seigenthaler tends to take a middle view. It may simply be that he is less familiar with this chapter of American history. There is no doubt that Polk wanted to extend American sovereignty from coast to coast. However, there is no evidence that he started a war with Mexico to get it. By 1846 Texas's independence had been recognized by the United States, England, France, and other nations. California was already lost to Mexico. The real question was which country would control it: England, France, or the United States. Polk, trying to avoid war, dispatched John Slidell to Mexico City with an offer to purchase New Mexico and California. War broke out in 1846 primarily because Mexican President Mariano Paredes, who seized power in a military coup in early 1846, thought a war with the United States could be easily won. The Mexican Army dwarfed that of the U.S., with 27,000 regular troops against an American army numbering only 7,200. The Mexicans were better armed and better trained. President Paredes boasted that he would see the "Eagle and Serpent" of Mexico floating over the White House. British and French military observers predicted an easy victory for Mexico. In April 1846, President Paredes ordered his commander of the Army of the North to "commence hostilities, yourself taking the initiative against the enemy [the U.S.]." On April 24, 1846, General Mariano Arista sent 1,600 cavalry across the Rio Grande to attack American forces on the northern side of the river. Later that day, a Mexican force cut down Captain William Thornton and 60 American dragoons, and "American blood was shed on American soil." (For those interested, the best treatment of this period remains Seymour V. Conner and Odie B. Faulk, North America Divided: The Mexican War, 1846-1848, Oxford University Press, 1971.) Seigenthaler relates how President Polk had to battle not only the Mexican Army but his leading generals, Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor. Both were outspoken Whigs who would themselves run for President (Taylor was elected after Polk). Fighting against the Mexicans with a small army of regulars and state militia volunteers across broad deserts, where problems of supply hampered operations, America's armed forces performed brilliantly--including our Pacific Naval Squadron, which kept the British Navy from seizing Northern California. Polk spearheaded America's westward expansion, while securing his domestic agenda. Despite his achievements, Polk left office amid a firestorm of antiwar attacks. The stress took such a physical toll that he died just three months after the end of his term. Today, few Americans can even identify James Knox Polk. We can thank John Seigenthaler for writing an admirable portrait of a President who deserves to be far better known and appreciated. References 1. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=humaneventson-20&path=tg%2Fdetail%2F-%2F0805069429%2Fqid%3D1101228315%2Fsr%3D1-1%2Fref%3Dsr_1_1%3Fv%3Dglance%26s%3Dbooks From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Mon Jan 24 23:36:50 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 15:36:50 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] love, hate In-Reply-To: <200501241942.j0OJfsC15802@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050124233650.59827.qmail@web30809.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>Why should I love someone who has gone out and killed thousands of people for no reason?<< --Because hating them implicates you in their actions. Hate attracts hate, love attracts love. Hating anyone drives them further into their hate, reduces the likelihood of them listening and responding to the truth in what you say. If you cannot love your opponent, simply speak truth, without hate. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Jan 25 02:24:59 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 18:24:59 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] love, hate Message-ID: <01C50242.0398F4A0.shovland@mindspring.com> I think trying to "understand" him implicates us in his actions. I think hate for the perpetrators is the emotion we should feel when confronted by evil deeds. At least enough hate to punish them appropriately. My Jesus is the one who drove the money-changers from the temple :-) Can you imagine Hitler calling Churchill in the Fall of 1944 and saying "Let's make a deal." Can you imagine Churchill saying, "I know you killed all those Jews, but you know, that's all in the past, so let's just try to get along." Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Jan 25 02:36:32 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 18:36:32 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Worth the cost? Message-ID: <01C50243.A1252E40.shovland@mindspring.com> 100,000 Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq By Rob SteinWashington Post Staff Writer Friday, October 29, 2004; Page A16 One of the first attempts to independently estimate the loss of civilian life from the Iraqi war has concluded that at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have died because of the U.S. invasion. The analysis, an extrapolation based on a relatively small number of documented deaths, indicated that many of the excess deaths have occurred due to aerial attacks by coalition forces, with women and children being frequent victims, wrote the international team of public health researchers making the calculations. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Tue Jan 25 02:35:15 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 19:35:15 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] failure of the system In-Reply-To: <00b401c50248$5d56aef0$1e03f604@S0027397558> References: <20050123233243.3969.qmail@web30806.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <00b401c50248$5d56aef0$1e03f604@S0027397558> Message-ID: <41F5B063.9050909@solution-consulting.com> Actually, I view this a bit differently. Chris Rauh's question about people who 'got easy money on a free market' may be an artifact of too much socialism in his education . In economics, people who get money through the free market are offering a socially useful service. Generally they work very hard at that for that money. Michael Milliken, for example, was loathed for his work in junk bonds, yet some economists praised him as helping the market be more efficient. The free market almost never gives money away easily. The other angle is when wealthy families let non-working members benefit, such as the wasted life of Paris Hilton. Here is an interesting article about that. Here I agree completely with Rauh; unearned income is a socially destructive force. Michael's phenomenon is called apoptosis or programmed cell death, and it occurs when the cell is 'not useful.' My Scotch Pines do that because they have grown too close together and the needles that cannot get sun die off. Cargill, it appears, tried to convert the parasitic members of the family into productive forces. See also the book, The Millionaire Next Door and especially the chapter on giving children unearned income. Bread And Circuses Brigid McMenamin, Forbes Magazine , 12.25.00 Family members who work in the business tend to view nonworking shareholders as parasites, explains Michael Horvitz, a partner at Cleveland law firm Jones Day Reavis & Pogue who helps rich families with such problems. Shunted aside, the nonworking shareholders, often younger, can't understand why their paper wealth doesn't mean more cash. They tend to suspect their elders of cheating them to protect their own positions, perks, progeny and estate plans. "It's really an attitude problem," says Horvitz. Here are how some companies besides Milliken have quelled potential uprisings. Company Est. size Founder(s) Notes Belk Inc. est. 1888 retail $2.1 b (sales) William Belk & John M. Belk Since 1997 the Belk empire has been run by three third-generation men in their 40s, answering to an uncle who is still chairman. Though the family has had control issues in the past, they are running more smoothly these days. They bought out one dissident son of the founder in 1996. Other family members sold some of their shares back, in connection with the 1998 consolidation of 112 corporations into Belk Inc. Cargill Inc. Minneapolis agriculture $48 b (rev.) William W. Cargill In the mid '90s, nonworking cousins in their 40s, irked at poor dividends, threatened to sue Cargill. Their elders appeased them by guaranteeing a certain level of earnings paid as dividends and putting four younger relations on the board. The company also agreed to buy back shares at a price set by an independent appraisal and began holding regular family meetings, offering jobs, resume help and business seminars. Cleveland Group Atlanta est. 1925 electrical equipment & aviation $160 m (sales) Ras H. Cleveland The Cleveland Group is run by third-generation James Jr. with some fourth and fifth generation help. In 1990 the company asked 20-plus nonworking family shareholders to sell out at 40% less than fair market value. All agreed. Freedom Communications Irvine, Calif. est. 1927 newspapers & tv & magazines & Internet $775 m (sales) R.C. Hoiles Freedom Communications has been in the founder's family for four generations. It is 100% family owned but since 1992 has had outside CEOs, and half its board members have been outsiders. In effort to keep young shareholders happy, starting in 1996 the company has offered internships and a training program. They also hold special meetings for all fourth-generation members and an intergenerational family council with traditions like "passing the microphone" a la TV talk shows. Founder's 29-year-old great grandson Raymond C. H. Bryan serves on board. Laird NortonCo. Seattle lumber, real est. fin. svcs est 1885 $652 m (sales) Matthew G. Norton & William H. Laird Laird Norton has more than 200 shareholders, all heirs of two clans who have owned the company for seven generations. They make no promise of jobs for young shareholders, but keep them happy by helping them find their own careers with resume advice and by making investments in their new businesses. So, though the firm began offering to redeem shares in 1996, it has had few takers. Sources: Cleveland Group; 2000 Dun & Bradstreet's America's Corporate Families; Freedom Communications; Dennis T. Jaffe of Aspen Family Business Group; Joseph Astrachan, Family Business professor at Atlanta's Kennesaw State University; Hoover's; 2000 Directory of Corporate Affiliation; Forbes' Statistics 1 of 1 Send comments E-mail story Request a reprint Print story G. Reinhart-Waller wrote: > > Where I come from (out west in California) it is called Freeloader. > > Gerry > > ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Christopher" > > To: > Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2005 3:32 PM > Subject: [Paleopsych] failure of the system > > >> >>>> I am sure there are as many people who got easy >>> >> money on a free market and are living off that without >> producing anything. Isn't that a failure of that >> system?<< >> >> --Interesting question. In the biological model, that >> would have to be "yes". Cells that store up energy and >> don't release it, are useless to the organism. >> >> Michael >> >> >> >> >> __________________________________ >> Do you Yahoo!? >> Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. >> http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Tue Jan 25 04:05:41 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 21:05:41 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] love, hate In-Reply-To: <20050124233650.59827.qmail@web30809.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20050124233650.59827.qmail@web30809.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <41F5C595.1040000@solution-consulting.com> Michael gives an inspiring -- even transcendental -- reply here. Thanks. Lynn Michael Christopher wrote: >>>Why should I love someone who >>> >>> >has gone out and killed thousands >of people for no reason?<< > >--Because hating them implicates you in their actions. >Hate attracts hate, love attracts love. Hating anyone >drives them further into their hate, reduces the >likelihood of them listening and responding to the >truth in what you say. If you cannot love your >opponent, simply speak truth, without hate. > >Michael > > > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. >http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Jan 25 04:35:02 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 20:35:02 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] love, hate Message-ID: <01C50254.2EEC8C90.shovland@mindspring.com> How do you deal with someone who is not listening, which appears to be the case with the President? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Monday, January 24, 2005 8:06 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] love, hate Michael gives an inspiring -- even transcendental -- reply here. Thanks. Lynn Michael Christopher wrote: >>>Why should I love someone who >>> >>> >has gone out and killed thousands >of people for no reason?<< > >--Because hating them implicates you in their actions. >Hate attracts hate, love attracts love. Hating anyone >drives them further into their hate, reduces the >likelihood of them listening and responding to the >truth in what you say. If you cannot love your >opponent, simply speak truth, without hate. > >Michael > > > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. >http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > << File: ATT00003.html >> << File: ATT00004.txt >> From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Tue Jan 25 06:01:38 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 23:01:38 -0700 Subject: [Fwd: [Paleopsych] Front Page: Free Mumia?] Message-ID: <41F5E0C2.80009@solution-consulting.com> Frank, thanks again. There is a gem for me almost every day in your articles. I hadn't see this and found it fascinating and quite apropos for Paleopsych, speaking as it does to blind adherence to group norms that are counter productive. It illustrates the worst features of religion, although the partisans would be horrified if I mentioned to them they were quite religious. Lynn -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Paleopsych] Front Page: Free Mumia? Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:31:31 -0500 (EST) From: Premise Checker Reply-To: The new improved paleopsych list To: WTA-Politics , paleopsych at paleopsych.org, Human Biodiversity Free Mumia? http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=3642 [This is a little old, but support for Mumia rages on.] By [1]Paul Mulshine [2]FrontPageMagazine.com | August 1, 1995 [3]Heterodoxy | August 1995 SEVERAL YEARS AFTER THE MURDER of her husband, Maureen Faulkner moved to Southern California. It was as complete a change as she could imagine, from the confined rowhouse neighborhoods of Philadelphia to the wide-open beaches of the Pacific. She wanted to get away from it all, but the horror of his death has followed her. -snip- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: file:///C|/DOCUME%7E1/ADMINI%7E1/LOCALS%7E1/TEMP/nsmail-1.txt URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Tue Jan 25 05:58:11 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 22:58:11 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] love, hate In-Reply-To: <01C50254.2EEC8C90.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C50254.2EEC8C90.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <41F5DFF3.5080609@solution-consulting.com> You know I am not wild about Bush but: - He got over 62 million votes, the most in history - he was elected with a majority, something Clinton never had - he was clear about his goals, such as social security reform and constructionist judges - he was elected in the middle of a very ugly and messy war, in spite of people not being supportive of what he is doing there. I think it is we who need to listen. I intend to. I mentioned I would try to influence pro-life people who characterize abortion as murder. I can do that because I am part of the in-group, someone who is horrified by the notion of abortion. The only way to do that is through persuasion and reason, through joining and then influencing. An historian in my home town said if you want to influence a herd of cattle, you cannot ride in the middle, and you cannot ride far away. You have to ride on the edge. I don't view abortion as equal to murder, and talk of that disturbs me, but I am on the edge, where I can say, Let's put ourselves in the shoes of a desperate woman. She needs choices, not condemnation. Let's give her choices, including some attractive adoption possibilities. The people have spoken, and as a Democrat, you ought to follow Jefferson's direction and honor the voice of the people. I ask you to join with me and influence through kindness and understanding. It is a better way. Search your heart and ask yourself if I am not inviting you to a better way of life. Lynn Steve Hovland wrote: >How do you deal with someone who is >not listening, which appears to be the >case with the President? > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Monday, January 24, 2005 8:06 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] love, hate > >Michael gives an inspiring -- even transcendental -- reply here. Thanks. >Lynn > >Michael Christopher wrote: > > > >>>>Why should I love someone who >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>has gone out and killed thousands >>of people for no reason?<< >> >>--Because hating them implicates you in their actions. >>Hate attracts hate, love attracts love. Hating anyone >>drives them further into their hate, reduces the >>likelihood of them listening and responding to the >>truth in what you say. If you cannot love your >>opponent, simply speak truth, without hate. >> >>Michael >> >> >> >> >> >>__________________________________ >>Do you Yahoo!? >>Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. >>http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> >> >> > << File: ATT00003.html >> << File: ATT00004.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From paul.werbos at verizon.net Tue Jan 25 13:06:56 2005 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Paul J. Werbos, Dr.) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 08:06:56 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] fate of Iraq Message-ID: <6.2.0.14.0.20050125075604.01e52ac8@incoming.verizon.net> Tho I don't have time this AM to do it justice, I owe SOME elaboration of quick comments on Iraq -- Before, I sent..... Colin Powell has said that we are indeed well on the road to a true Vietnam-style disaster in Iraq. (Though I am tempted to revisit aspects of the Vietnam history that few are aware of.) Rice says no. Whom should we believe? NEITHER. Powell knows traditional war-fighting stuff better, but this is a kind of complex socio-historical thing that no one I know really has a right to predict with confidence. But it's clear that Bush WANTS a credible exit... that the plan is rooted in accepting a new elected government in which the Shia play a dominant role.. that Sistani fully understands this, and will be happy to make it pleasant for Bush to go... that Bush will accept this... Bush has stated very clearly that the protection of minorities (like Sunni and Kurds and others) is an important goal of US policy, but if Sunnis keep killing everyone else and trying to revive Saddam Hussein, he will not stay longer for the sake of protecting them more effectively. He would have responded to other things... but in any case, it's a muddle, but not a very changeable muddle, and it is at least plausible that the US will be out of Iraq by the end of the term of this Administration. Who knows? At a minimum, this is Bush's intent and it doesn't seem impossible. ------- I forwarded this to a friend who would have more of a basis than Powell OR Rice to predict what really will happen... but none of us really know. There is no real equivalent in war-and-peace of what econometrics offers for the economy. No time to elaborate on why. But some folks really have worked to learn what can be learned from lessons of history and generalization. Free will is more problematic in war-and-peace than in econometrics -- but "character is fate" and a few of us actually have learned a bit about how consciousness operates. (Sorry to be so blunt without details, but I have gives references and URLs here on occasion.) --- And now... the latest feedback from the Sunni lands has shown a kind of clarification of thought as the election approaches. Spokesmen for the pro-violence group have stated clearly and openly that they are opposed to democracy BECAUSE they don't want Shia ruling over Sunnis. This is a very important clarification. It is almost as good as the patient in the psychiatrists' office who learns to articulate his or her real subconscious fears/motivations. But then comes the question -- what is the alternative? Are they syaing that an elite cadre of Sunni theologists (really a wahabe extremist faction) has the right to oppress everyone else, rule them by minority oppression of majority (as in Iraq's recent past), but this time truly oppressing everyone BUT those Wahabe activists -- oppressing sufis (who hide form the reality of what they are facing), even universalists of other kinds, as well as Shia and all else? Violence by the minority to control the majority? There is another way -- the effort to guarantee minority rights. Ironically, this has been a major US goal from the start, but the folks assigned the job didn't really know how to reconcile their various goals. They were a bit clumsy, shall we say. And OK, there is such a thing as criminal incompetence, all over the world. But -- it is very hard to guarantee the rights of a minority committed to murdering the majority. They need to relinquish that particular weird commitment. --- I had some ideas about federalism before that I think the ideologues underetsimated. "Make peace by putting two wolves the same room with one piece of meat." Thagt's not empirical political scinece, shall we say. Best of luck to us all... must run.. Paul From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Jan 25 14:12:38 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 06:12:38 -0800 (GMT-08:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] love, hate Message-ID: <12381683.1106662359371.JavaMail.root@wamui04.slb.atl.earthlink.net> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Tue Jan 25 14:17:20 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 09:17:20 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] [Fwd: [PRESENCE-L] Army prepares 'robo-soldier' for Iraq] Message-ID: <41F654F0.703@uconn.edu> Imagine the disaster when millions of those are mass produced... Christian -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Matthew Lombard Subject: [PRESENCE-L] Army prepares 'robo-soldier' for Iraq Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 09:01:05 -0500 Size: 10365 URL: From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 25 14:52:56 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 09:52:56 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Common-place: Toward a Pacific World Message-ID: Toward a Pacific World http://common-place.org/vol-05/no-02/intro/ [I give only the introduction to Vol. 5, No. 2 (2005.1).] First: News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.25 A glance at the January issue of "Common-Place": Approaching American history from the Pacific Some historians are approaching American history from a new direction -- from the West, via the Pacific Ocean. >From that perspective, the cast of characters in the nation's past is less familiar, say Edward G. Gray, an associate professor of history at Florida State University, and Alan Taylor, a professor of history at the University of California at Davis, in an introduction to an issue on the topic. Instead of the Pilgrims and colonists of the Atlantic Coast, Pacific history is peopled by "Russian fur traders, Spanish missionaries, Japanese fishermen, French and Spanish explorers, British naval officers, American travelers, German naturalists, Tahitian translators, Aleutian hunters, Polynesian navigators, Yankee merchants, and that peculiar species of Pacific go-between, the beachcomber," they write. Such figures were relatively obscure for too long, but they are now starting to get their due, says Peter A. Coclanis, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in an essay. "Scholars have begun to take seriously, really for the first time, historical actors, actions, and processes both on the ocean itself and around and along the entire Pacific Rim," Mr. Coclanis writes. "Almost 500 years after Balboa," he says, "American historians have themselves discovered the Pacific." ---------------- Edward G. Gray teaches early American history at Florida State University and is writing a biography of John Ledyard. Alan Taylor teaches early American history at the University of California at Davis. He is the author of American Colonies: The Settlement of North America (New York, 2001), William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York, 1995), and Liberty-Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier (Chapel Hill, 1990). Edward G. Gray and Alan Taylor Introduction Toward a Pacific World Discovery, exploration, conquest. Settlers, pilgrims, natives. Colonies, plantations, empires. These are the terms we associate with the beginnings of American history. They bring to mind those early "plantations," as the English called them: Jamestown, Plymouth Colony, the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In these fragile settlements, we are often taught, English men and women planted the seeds of what would become the United States. They discovered new lands; they explored seas and rivers and backcountry; they conquered, they settled, and then they made a nation. How curious it is, for those of us reared on these old maxims of U.S. history, to contemplate parts of the present-day United States--the West Coast, Hawaii, and Alaska--where the story of our national origins is much less familiar. Approached from the Pacific (which, as [4]Mark Peterson's essay tells us, has not always been just the Pacific), our past has an unfamiliar cast of characters. There is no clear, dominant settler population and no distinct class of mariners maintaining communication with the so-called Old World. There are no familiar Native American heroes--no Squanto or Pocahontas--and there are no harassed religious pilgrims, fleeing the corruptions of the Old World for the promise of the New. There are swashbuckling Renaissance men: Sir Francis Drake, Thomas Cavendish, Magellan, and others. But at least in the case of the Englishmen Cavendish and Drake, they tend to be better known for their Atlantic exploits than their late-sixteenth-century voyages across the Pacific. The cast of characters who populate Pacific history includes [5]Russian fur traders, [6]Spanish missionaries, [7]Japanese fishermen, [8]French and [9]Spanish explorers, [10]British naval officers, [11]American travelers, [12]German naturalists, [13]Tahitian translators, [14]Aleutian hunters, [15]Polynesian navigators, [16]Yankee merchants, and that peculiar species of Pacific go-between, [17]the beachcomber. Some traveled in huge [18]treasure ships. Some rode in small seal-skin kayaks, others in grand outrigger canoes. And still others traveled overland along the coastal regions that form a massive arc from Cape Horn north to the Bering Strait and then south again toward China. Their purposes were as varied as their methods of travel. Some came seeking knowledge, others to settle new lands, some in search of game, and some to trade. Their routes were also widely varied. Some came across the vast middle of the Pacific, traveling between the Philippines and Mexico. Some traveled the Polynesian archipelago as if it was all one giant landmass. Others sailed from the Atlantic through the treacherous waters around Cape Horn. Some crossed the Bering Strait or hopscotched across the Aleutian Island chain and still others came from the Indian Ocean and the East China Sea. For those of us interested in the early history of the United States, these Pacific communities may not be as well known or as influential as their Atlantic counterparts, but their stories still have much to teach us. These travelers did not come in one, continuous wave. Their journeys are separated by years and, in some cases, millennia. And, unlike the more familiar characters in the story of America's beginnings, these travelers often ended their travels where they began them. How different from the Pilgrims of Plymouth or many of the young gentlemen of Jamestown. For all these differences from the stories and characters who populate the well known ground of America's early history, there are striking parallels. As we have learned in recent years, the history of the earliest European settlements in America can no longer be told as the history of small, isolated bands of desperate women and men, struggling against nature and themselves to survive. These European colonizers, their servants and slaves, and the Indians with whom they came into contact were in fact drawn into processes that far transcended their tiny American settlements. Those processes--including the movement of goods, of disease, of biota, of cultures, of free and unfree people--drew together a diverse array of people from throughout the Atlantic basin. Over the previous two decades, scholars have begun to focus on this remarkable Atlantic World as a discreet area of study. And they have found that in the age of sail, oceans often did more to unite than to separate. They have also raised important questions about the tendency to divide people according to readily identified nations--with clear boundaries and distinct governments. For the people of the early Atlantic World, we now know, such divisions were often arbitrary. What those people did, where they traveled, with whom they did business, against whom they waged war--all often had little at all to do with the conventions of political geography. Who they were was as often a function of what language they spoke or how they made their living as it was of the government that ostensibly ruled them. This sort of insight proves especially valuable when we approach Pacific history. There we find few of the nation-states that once defined European and American history. To be sure, some of the players in the Pacific sailed under European flags, but until the late eighteenth century few of them made any serious claim to territory abutting the Pacific. Relative to the Atlantic, then, the European presence there was paltry in every way. But it is precisely this fact that makes Atlantic studies so useful for understanding Pacific history. If we continue to move beyond nations and states as the defining subjects of historical understanding, turning instead to large scale processes, we can begin to see in Pacific history a vital analog to the much better known history of the Atlantic. As the essays in this issue of Common-place make clear, disease, migration, trade, and war effected the Pacific in much the way they effected the Atlantic: they drew together vast, diverse collections of human beings, whether stretching from Easter Island west to New Zealand, or from coastal California north and then west to the Kamchatka Peninsula. For those of us interested in the early history of the United States, these Pacific communities may not be as well known or as influential as their Atlantic counterparts, but their stories still have much to teach us. At the very least, they invite us to contemplate exactly what American history is and where it began. Hence, the double entendre of this issue's title: Pacific Routes. The stories told here deal as much with historical roots as they do the routes their subjects traveled. And we invite readers to carry this sense with them, as they make their way into the lives and stories of the Pacific. References 4. http://common-place.org/vol-05/no-02/peterson/index.shtml 5. http://common-place.org/vol-05/no-02/miller/index.shtml 6. http://common-place.org/vol-05/no-02/hackel/index.shtml 7. http://common-place.org/vol-05/no-02/benfey/index.shtml 8. http://common-place.org/vol-05/no-02/mapp/index.shtml 9. http://common-place.org/vol-05/no-02/igler/index.shtml 10. http://common-place.org/vol-05/no-02/frost/index.shtml 11. http://common-place.org/vol-05/no-02/gray/index.shtml 12. http://common-place.org/vol-05/no-02/liebersohn/index.shtml 13. http://common-place.org/vol-05/no-02/newell/index.shtml 14. http://common-place.org/vol-05/no-02/namias/index.shtml 15. http://common-place.org/vol-05/no-02/dening/index.shtml 16. http://common-place.org/vol-05/no-02/demos/index.shtml 17. http://common-place.org/vol-05/no-02/salesa/index.shtml 18. http://common-place.org/vol-05/no-02/coclanis/index.shtml From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 25 14:53:49 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 09:53:49 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Brace Yourself! Here Comes Einstein's Year Message-ID: Brace Yourself! Here Comes Einstein's Year NYT January 25, 2005 By DENNIS OVERBYE "What are you up to, you frozen whale, you smoked, dried, canned piece of soul?" So did Albert Einstein, then a 26-year-old patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, begin a letter to his pal Conrad Habicht in the spring of 1905. Whatever Habicht, a math teacher in Schaffhausen, had been up to was not much compared to his irreverent friend, who had been altering the foundations of physics during the few free hours left to a young father, husband and government worker. As he related to Habicht, Einstein had just finished writing three major physics papers. One showed how the existence of atoms, still a debatable proposition, could be verified by measuring the jigglingof microscopic particles in a glass of water, a process known as Brownian motion; in another, his doctoral dissertation for the University of Zurich, he deduced the size of molecules. In still another, which he described as "very revolutionary," Einstein argued that light behaved as if it were composed of particles, rather than the waves that most physicists thought. That paper, which won him the 1921 Nobel Prize, helped lay the foundation for quantum theory, a paradoxical statistical description of nature on the smallest subatomic scales that he himself later rejected, saying that God did not play dice with the universe. But he wasn't done. There was a fourth paper, he told Habicht, still just a rough draft that employed "a modification of the theory of space and time." That, of course, was relativity, the theory that set the speed of light as the universal speed limit and loosened space and time from their Newtonian rigidity, allowing them to breathe, expand, contract and bend, and led to the expanding universe and the apocalyptic marriage of energy and mass in the famous equation E=mc2. Any of those papers would have made a young man's reputation, or even a career. Taken together they amounted to an "annus mirabilis" or miracle year for the young physicist, a remaking of physics at the beginning of the still-young century. Einstein has been dead for 50 years this April, but he is still the scientist most likely to have his picture on the front page of the newspaper, perhaps famously sticking out his tongue. It is still Einstein's universe, and in honor of his "miracle year" in 1905, physicists, universities and governmental organizations have laid on a gantlet of celebrations, conferences, books, concerts, contests, Web sites, lectures, games and a controversial intercontinental light show. As Dr. Gerald Holton, a professor of physics and the history of science at Harvard who is the dean of Einstein scholars, put it, "There's a typhoon headed our way" before heading off to Berlin to give the keynote address at a conference last week called "Einstein for the 21st Century" - the first of many stops on his itinerary this year. The International Year of Physics, as the United Nations has officially designated 2005, has already had its zany moments of physics fun, with more to come. This month, Ben Wallace, 18, a professional stunt cyclist, flew off a ramp in the London Science Museum and did a back flip 12 feet in the air while folding his bicycle sideways - a maneuver designed by a Cambridge physicist who said she was inspired by a tale that the 26-year-old Einstein had invented his theory of relativity while riding a bicycle. Never mind that there is no evidence that Einstein even had a bicycle as a young man. Never mind that the "Einstein flip" itself, as complicated and carefully plotted as it was, relies strictly on the old-fashioned laws of Isaac Newton. If bicycle stunts aren't your cup of tea, perhaps you would take in "Constant Speed," a ballet inspired by relativity, which the Rambert Dance Company will perform in London starting May 24. Maybe you would like to download the rap song "Einstein (Not Enough Time)" by DJ Vader, adopted by Britain's Institute of Physics for an educational computer game, or the Einstein at Home screen saver, which will allow your computer to process signals from the cosmos for the twitches and vibrations of space-time known as gravitational waves. Or maybe you would like to try the Pirelli Group's contest for the best five-minute multimedia explanation of relativity. (The prize is 25,000 euros, or about $32,500.) The point of all this, physicists freely admit, is not to glorify Einstein, who hardly needs it, but to promote physics and impress its importance and relevance to young people who have been drifting off into other pursuits even as physics becomes more and more essential to grapple with problems like climate change, nuclear proliferation, a looming energy crisis and missile defense. "The great contributions of physics to the development of science and technology and its impact on our society might still be evident to us physicists, but no longer to everybody," Dr. Martial Ducloy, a physicist at the University of Paris and the chairman of the physics year steering committee, said in an e-mail message. He noted that the number of physics students had declined drastically worldwide. The party has actually been going for a while. A museum exhibition organized by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, repository of Einstein's papers and artifacts; the American Museum of Natural History; and the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles has been touring the world since 2002. In August the Aspen Institute summoned academics, thinkers and writers like the Caltech Nobelist Murray Gell-Mann and the author E. L. Doctorow to the Rockies for a three-day exploration of Einstein and his legacy, from physics and arms control to morality and spirituality and even modern art. Festivities kicked into higher gear this month with Mr. Wallace's safe landing and a conference titled "Physics for Tomorrow" at the Paris headquarters of Unesco. It continued in Berlin, where last week Chancellor Gerhard Schr?der pronounced 2005 "Einstein Year" in Germany, a nice twist of fate, since, although Einstein was born in Germany, he had been chased out by the Nazis in 1933. The party will move on to London, Tenerife, Tel Aviv, Munich, Vienna, Bern and Durban, South Africa, among other places. Much of the action, however, will happen on a smaller scale, at universities and schools and museums. "We're reaching out to the 10-year-olds and 14-year-olds who don't know what physics is," said Helen Czerski, the Cambridge physics graduate student (and springboard diver) who designed the Einstein flip. On April 18, the 50th anniversary of Einstein's death, Princeton, N.J., where he lived for his last 22 years, will unveil a new statue of him by the sculptor Robert Berks. (A listing of events, country by country, can be found at www.wyp2005.org.) The Einstein year is also likely to mean a surge in sales of T-shirts, mugs, calendars, action figures and the like, to the benefit of Hebrew University. Einstein left his papers and his copyright to the university, which he helped found, and which licenses the use of Einstein's image through the Roger Richman Agency of Beverly Hills, Calif., famous for representing dead celebrities. Dr. Menachem Magidor, president of the university, said that Einstein royalties had brought in more than $10 million to the university over the years. Presumably the amount could have been even greater, but the university is mindful of Einstein's image and so, for example, recently turned down a proposal for an Einstein vodka, Dr. Magidor said. Einstein's miracle year was only the beginning of his legend. Einstein topped himself in 1915 when he extended relativity to gravity in his general theory of relativity, which predicted the expansion of the universe and black holes (somewhat to his befuddlement). When the theory was supported by observations of light bending during a solar eclipse in 1919, he became an international celebrity. By then, Einstein, who was born in Ulm, Germany, in 1879, was living in Berlin, but he fled Hitler in 1933 and took a post at the new Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where he wandered the streets, a sockless living legend and reminder of cosmic mystery. A lifelong pacifist, he lent his prestige to the development of an atomic bomb only to see it dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to his lasting dismay. He spent much of his later years campaigning for nuclear disarmament and civil liberties. By the time he died in 1955, he had gone from being the human face of mystery and science to being the human face of humanity. This year's festivities are the biggest planned since the centennial of his birth, and since then much has been learned about Einstein, the man and the physicist, partly as a result of a vast effort by Hebrew University and Princeton University Press to collect and publish Einstein's 50,000 pieces of correspondence and other papers. The first of a projected 30 volumes, which was published in 1987, contained newly discovered love letters that the young Einstein had written during his college years to his classmate, sweetheart and future wife, Mileva Maric, disclosing, among other things, the existence of an illegitimate daughter, Lieserl, now lost to history. The letters showed scholars a side of Einstein they hadn't seen before, as a passionate and energetic young man, a flirt and a poet. "We hadn't thought of Einstein as a gorgeous sort of fellow in that sense," Dr. Holton said. The result has been a wave of new biographies in recent years (including one by this writer). Dr. Ducloy said he had proposed making 2005 the World Year of Physics back in 2000, when he was elected president of the European Physical Society. The proposal was formally approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations last July. As with the Einstein flip, however, success has its price. Take, for example, the Einstein light relay. The idea, as developed by Dr. Max Lippitsch and Dr. Sonja Draxler of Karl-Franzens University Graz in Austria, is an illuminated version of the wave made familiar by sports fans. On the night of April 18, the 50th anniversary of Einstein's death, lights are to go on in Princeton and then in a sequence, like the bulbs on a Christmas tree, all the way across the United States. The lights will then the leap the Pacific to Japan and China and follow a pair of tracks, north and south, across Asia, reconnecting in Austria, crossing Europe and then jumping across the ocean to arrive in back in Princeton 24 hours after it left: a sort of cosmic cheer for the memory of Einstein. The proposal was opposed, however, by astronomical groups like the International Dark Sky Association, dedicated to fighting light pollution that can ruin deep space observations. While harmless in itself, the light relay would set a bad precedent, they say. "We think it is a bad thing for people to splash light around without considering the consequences," said Dr. Robert Kirshner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and president of the American Astronomical Society. In response the light relay has been modified. The new rules specify that participants turn off the lights 10 minutes before the light arrives so that a "flash of darkness" accompanies the flash of light, and to make sure they point their lights along the path of the relay and not into the sky. Dr. Lippitsch said he thought emotions had calmed. "In the U.S.A., the number of registered participants is rather low so far," he admitted in an e-mail message, "but we are confident that a project designed to overcome the vastness of Siberia or the deserts of Iran will not break down in the country with the best infrastructure and the highest number of physicists." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/25/science/25eins.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 25 14:55:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 09:55:21 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTDBR: 'No Place to Hide': Nonstop Scrutiny, as Orwell Foresaw Message-ID: 'No Place to Hide': Nonstop Scrutiny, as Orwell Foresaw New York Times Daily Book Review, 5.1.25 By MICHIKO KAKUTANI NO PLACE TO HIDE By Robert O'Harrow Jr. 348 pages. Free Press. $26. Picture "Minority Report" combined with Orwell's "1984" and Francis Ford Coppola's "Conversation": in an effort to prevent future crimes and predict what certain individuals are likely to do, the government has begun working with high-tech titans to keep tabs on the populace. One company has come up with a digital identity system that has tagged every adult American with a unique code. Another company is intent on gaining control of all records - including state and local files, financial information, employee dossiers, DNA data and criminal background checks - that define our identity. In addition to iris scanners, voice analyzers and fingerprint readers, there now exist face recognition machines and cameras that can identify an individual by how he or she walks. One government group is working on infrared detectors that could register heat signals around people's eyes, indicating an autonomic "fight or flight" response; another federal agency has floated a proposal to assess risk by examining airline passengers' brain waves with "noninvasive neuro-electric sensors." This surveillance state is not a futuristic place conjured in a Philip K. Dick novel or "Matrix"-esque sci-fi thriller. It is post-9/11 America, as described in Robert O'Harrow Jr.'s unnerving new book, "No Place to Hide" - an America where citizens' "right to be let alone," as Justice Louis Brandeis of the Supreme Court once put it, is increasingly imperiled, where more and more components of our daily lives are routinely monitored, recorded and analyzed. These concerns, of course, are hardly new. Way back in 1964, in "The Naked Society," Vance Packard warned about encroachments on civil liberties and the growing threat to privacy posed by new electronic devices, and in 1971, in "The Assault on Privacy," Arthur R. Miller warned that advances in information technologies had given birth to "a new social virus - 'data-mania.' " The digital revolution of the 1990's, however, exponentially amplified these trends by enabling retailers, marketers and financial institutions to gather and store vast amounts of information about current and potential customers. And as Mr. O'Harrow notes, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, "reignited and reshaped a smoldering debate over the proper use of government power to peer into the lives of ordinary people." Some of the material in "No Place to Hide" is familiar from news coverage (most notably, the author's own articles about privacy and technology for The Washington Post), from a recent ABC News special (made in conjunction with Mr. O'Harrow's reporting) and from recent books like Jeffrey Rosen's "Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age" and Christian Parenti's "Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror." Still, Mr. O'Harrow provides in these pages an authoritative and vivid account of the emergence of a "security-industrial complex" and the far-reaching consequences for ordinary Americans, who must cope not only with the uneasy sense of being watched (leading, defenders of civil liberties have argued, to a stifling of debate and dissent) but also with the very palpable dangers of having personal information (and in some cases, inaccurate information) passed from one outfit to another. Mr. O'Harrow also charts many consumers' willingness to trade a measure of privacy for convenience (think of the personal information happily dispensed to TiVo machines and Amazon.com in exchange for efficient service and helpful suggestions), freedom for security. He reviews the gargantuan data-gathering and data-mining operations already carried out by companies like Acxiom, ChoicePoint and LexisNexis. And he shows how their methods are being co-opted by the government. The Privacy Act of 1974, enacted in the wake of revelations about covert domestic spying by the F.B.I., the Army and other agencies, gave individuals new rights to know and to correct information that the government was collecting about them, but the government's current predilection for outsourcing data-gathering to private companies has changed the rules of the game. As Mr. O'Harrow notes: "Among other things, the law restricted the government from building databases of dossiers unless the information about individuals was directly relevant to an agency's mission. Of course, that's precisely what ChoicePoint, LexisNexis and other services do for the government. By outsourcing the collection of records, the government doesn't have to ensure the data is accurate, or have any provisions to correct it in the same way it would under the Privacy Act. There are no limits on how the information can be interpreted, all this at a time when law enforcement, domestic intelligence and foreign intelligence are becoming more interlinked." Privacy and civil liberties advocates have put the brakes on some government projects, like the Total Information Awareness initiative promoted by John Poindexter, the former vice admiral (of Iran-contra notoriety), and a surveillance engine known (half jokingly) as the Matrix (for the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange) that would combine criminal and commercial records in one blindingly fast system. Yet Mr. O'Harrow points out: "The drive for more monitoring, data collection, and analysis is relentless and entrepreneurial. Where one effort ends, another begins, often with the same technology and aims. Total Information Awareness may be gone, but it's not forgotten. Other kinds of Matrix systems are already in the works." Even now, one mini-me version of Big Brother or another is monitoring Americans' daily lives, from the computer "cookies" that map our peregrinations around the Net, to the MetroCards, E-ZPasses and car-installed Global Positioning System devices that track our travels, to the security cameras that eyeball us at banks and stores. Mr. O'Harrow writes that RFID (radio frequency identification) tags will be attached soon to credit cards, bank passbooks and "anything else that will enable businesses to automatically 'know you' when you arrive," and that several organizations "are working on a standard that would enable every manufactured item in the world to be given a unique ID, at least theoretically." "Before long," he adds, "our phones, laptop computers, Palm Pilots, watches, pagers and much more will play parts in the most efficient surveillance network ever made. Forget dropping a coin into a parking meter or using a pay phone discreetly on the street. Those days are slipping by. The most simple, anonymous transactions are now becoming datapoints on the vast and growing matrix of each of our lives." It is an alarming vision of the future uncannily reminiscent of the world imagined by Orwell in "1984": a world where "you had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized." It just arrived some two decades later than Orwell predicted. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/25/books/25kaku.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 25 14:56:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 09:56:11 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: It Can Be Done: Scientists Teach Old Dogs New Tricks Message-ID: It Can Be Done: Scientists Teach Old Dogs New Tricks NYT January 25, 2005 By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Old beagles, like old humans, act younger and smarter when they get the right diet and plenty of intellectual stimulation. A report published in the January issue of Neurobiology of Aging found that a diet rich in antioxidants combined with a stimulating environment slowed the canine aging process. The scientists divided the 48 beagles, ages 8 to 11, into four groups, giving them an enriched diet, an enriched environment, neither or both. The diet was fortified with vitamin E, vitamin C and other antioxidants. The dogs in the enriched environment group were housed with kennel mates, exercised twice a week for 15 minutes and challenged with tasks like learning to distinguish between a white box and a black box. By the end of the two-year trial, it was clear that the enriched diet alone and the enriched environment alone were each helpful in preventing decline. But the mental functioning of the dogs given a combination of enriched diet and stimulating environment was considerably higher than that of the dogs in the other three groups, the researchers found. One author of the paper works for the company that sells the dog food used in the study. Dr. William Milgram, the paper's lead author and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, said that one of the dogs, Scamps, "was basically a stupid dog." "He did about as poorly on our cognitive tasks as any of the dogs in the study," Dr. Milgram said. Fortunately for Scamps, he was in the group that got the combination of enriched food and enriched environment. By the end of the study, Scamps was about average compared with the other dogs - but not because he had gotten smarter. "What happened," said Dr. Milgram, "was that he remained the same, while the dogs in the other groups showed expected deterioration." What the study's findings mean for humans remains unclear, but Dr. Milgram believes the work may have important implications. "We're not going to 'fix' old age by discovering the magic anti-aging potion," he said. "We have to look very carefully at our living environment, and at mental stimulation." Dogs, he said, are good models for the study of human aging. While they "are obviously not people," he added, "they have similar brain structures, develop similar brain pathologies, have similar nutritive requirements, and live in similar environments." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/25/science/25beag.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 25 14:57:14 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 09:57:14 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Aging and Infirmity Are Twinned No Longer Message-ID: Personal Health: Aging and Infirmity Are Twinned No Longer NYT January 25, 2005 By JANE E. BRODY Nathan Rowman was in his late 80's when he was hospitalized for a suspected heart problem. Seemingly overnight, Mr. Rowman, who had been running his own business and going to work every day, became so confused that his children considered putting him in a nursing home. But before that happened, the family consulted a geriatric specialist who suspected that the medication given to him in the hospital, and not any organic brain deterioration, might be causing his confusion. When the drug was discontinued, Mr. Rowman became his old self again, and after being discharged from the hospital, he returned to work. Is Something Really Wrong? Many things occur as people age. As Dr. Elaine J. Amella noted in a recent issue of The American Journal of Nursing, "Heart muscles thicken, arteries stiffen, lung tissues diminish, brain and spinal cord degenerate, kidneys shrink, and bladder muscles weaken." But - and this is a big "but" -the changes occur at different rates in different organs and in different people. One person's lungs may function fully while the kidneys fail. One 85-year-old's brain may fire on all cylinders while another person of the same age cannot remember anyone or anything. As the Baltimore Longitudinal Study on Aging has shown by tracking over 1,000 people since 1958 from age 20 to past 90, "No single chronological timetable of human aging exists." One consequence of these varying changes with age is difficulty in determining whether an older person has an ailment that requires diagnosis and treatment or is merely experiencing the gradual physiological shutdowns associated with growing old. Too often, older people and their relatives dismiss or ignore early symptoms of what may very well be a correctable problem, because they wrongly assume that the changes are to be expected as one grows old. The symptoms I'm referring to include a diminished appetite, a change in mental functioning, incontinence, falls, dizziness, pain and a loss of functional abilities like dressing oneself or negotiating stairs. "These problems aren't inherent to aging," Dr. Amella pointed out, adding that failing to check into their causes can result in a missed opportunity to treat a health problem while it is still possible to correct it. One of the most common correctable problems is drug toxicity. As people age, body fat is gained at the expense of lean muscle, resulting in less body fluids to dilute water-soluble drugs and more fat tissue for storing fat-soluble ones. Loss of body fluids allows certain drugs to reach toxic levels when given in doses appropriate for younger adults. At the same time, an older person's kidney and liver function declines, so that drugs are not cleared from the body as quickly. Yet higher levels of body fat may mean that the usual dose of a drug is inadequate to treat the problem. Complicating matters further is the fact that symptoms of an illness in older adults can differ from those in younger people. For example, a young adult may run a high fever with a serious infection, but the naturally lower body temperature of an older person, along with a diminished ability to mount an immunological attack against an invading organism, may result in no noticeable rise in body temperature. Rather than experiencing fever and chills, an older person with an infection may become confused or lose functional abilities. For example, an 80-year-old with pneumonia may experience a more rapid breathing rate with decreased appetite and functioning, and someone with a urinary tract infection may become incontinent and confused and suffer falls. When such symptoms are ignored, an infection can rage undetected until it reaches a very serious, even life-threatening, stage. The Meanings of Symptoms In her report, Dr. Amella, an associate dean for research at the Medical University of South Carolina College of Nursing, describes a host of possible explanations for changes that commonly occur in older adults. These are some possibilities: CHANGE IN MENTAL STATUS This is "a common harbinger of disease, drug toxicity or psychological trauma in older adults," she stated. A deterioration in mental function that occurs over days or weeks is often a result of a change in medication or the aftermath of anesthesia. FALLS A long list of ailments can cause an older person to fall, among them heart problems, osteoporosis, vertigo, a slowly leaking blood vessel in the brain, a loss of hearing or vision, incontinence prompting a rush to the bathroom and even a fear of falling. A toxic buildup of a drug is a common cause. Particular attention should be paid to psychoactive drugs like sedatives, drugs that lower blood pressure and those that may cause low blood sugar. "Those who fall will fall again until the cause is found and corrected," Dr. Amella wrote. DIZZINESS This can be a symptom of a wide range of problems, including anemia, abnormal heart rhythm, drug toxicity, depression, infection, ear disease, eye problems, stroke, heart attack, a brain tumor or simply impacted wax in the ears. It can also result from drug toxicity. DIMINISHED APPETITE This may be a sign of worsening heart failure or the beginnings of pneumonia, as well as depression or simply loneliness. DELIRIUM In addition to drug toxicity, delirium can result from dehydration, low levels of oxygen in the blood, untreated anemia, nutritional deficiencies, infections and untreated thyroid disease. Other factors include vision or hearing loss, which can usually be corrected simply with eyeglasses or hearing aids. INCONTINENCE Dr. Amella says the onset of incontinence in older people should always be investigated: it often has reversible causes, including urinary tract infections, limited mobility and metabolic abnormalities, as well as the use of medications like diuretics and sedatives. PAIN An increase in aches is common as people age, and it can result in a loss of mobility and functioning. Although pain is often treatable, many older people are reluctant to use pain medicine because they harbor unjustified fears of addiction. They may not realize that there are often ways other than drugs to relieve pain. LOSS OF FUNCTIONAL ABILITY A decline in activity can be a consequence of anemia, thyroid disease, infection, cardiac insufficiency or a diminished lung capacity. In addition to correcting underlying conditions, rehabilitation programs can often restore an older person's vitality. Finally, a word about depression, the most common mental health problem in older people. Many lay people and health professionals alike expect the elderly to feel tired, sad and show little interest in life. But, in fact, most older people enjoy life, and failing to recognize and treat depression can deprive the elderly of continued joy and satisfaction. Dr. Amella lists many conditions that can lead to depression - alcohol or substance abuse and disorders like dementia, stroke, cancer, arthritis, hip fracture, heart attack, chronic lung disease and Parkinson's disease. Depression can also result from the loss of a spouse, functional disability or the unrelenting demands of giving care to someone. The bottom line? Do not assume that a symptom is a normal sign of aging. Get it checked out without delay. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/25/health/25brod.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 25 14:58:26 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 09:58:26 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Really?: The Claim: Wearing Glasses Can Weaken Your Eyes Message-ID: Really?: The Claim: Wearing Glasses Can Weaken Your Eyes NYT January 25, 2005 By ANAHAD O'CONNOR THE FACTS Glasses can bring a blurry world into focus, but some people suspect that by doing all the heavy lifting the glasses may speed the natural decline of vision. But ophthalmologists say this is an illusion. How well a person can see is largely determined by the size of the eyeball, something a pair of glasses cannot change. The average eye is about an inch from the cornea, in the front, to the retina, in the back. When the eyes are either too large (shortsightedness) or too small (farsightedness), the cornea cannot properly focus images on the retina, and glasses can help compensate. Dr. Robert Cykiert, an ophthalmologist at New York University Hospitals Center, said the contrast between poor and normal vision becomes more obvious when people wear glasses for a while and then take them off. But glasses have no lasting effect on eyesight. Reading in the dark won't damage your eyes either, Dr. Cykiert said, though you may get a headache from all the squinting and straining. THE BOTTOM LINE Glasses will not make your vision deteriorate more quickly. scitimes at nytimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/25/health/25real.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 25 15:01:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 10:01:25 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wired: Robots of science fiction have not arrived yet, but ethicists are gearing up Message-ID: Robots of science fiction have not arrived yet, but ethicists are gearing up http://www.newstarget.com/z003664.html >From http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/view.html?pg=1?tw=wn_tophead_5 Monday, January 24, 2005 Humanity is still far away from creating a world that is overrun -- or served well -- by robots like those portrayed in science fiction. But some people are already busy considering the ethical questions that robot fantasies demand. Should robots eat? Should robot labor be regulated? Are robots entitled to intellectual property rights? Those are just some of the interesting, if not strange, issues that scientists and scholars are seriously discussing these days. To learn more on this topic, be sure to also read the related article, [2]U.S. Army tests battlefield robot armed with pump action shotgun; bring on the Terminators!. Overview: * Should we treat bots like the rest of us? * These marvelous machines, optimists hope, will follow Moore's law, doubling in quality every 18 months, and lead to a Jetsonian utopia. * Or, as pessimists fear, humanoid bots will reproduce, increase their [3]intelligence, and wipe out humanity. * The artificial intelligence to animate robots remains several orders of magnitude less than what's needed. * We have to master either software engineering or self-organization before our most intelligent designers can dare play in the same league as Mother Nature. * They cannot comprehend Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics to protect and obey humans before preserving themselves. * In case you missed them, today's most popular robots are ATMs and computer printers. * While our hopes for and fears of robots may be overblown, there is plenty to worry about as automation progresses. * The risk is not humanoids running amok, but that as these electronic puppets become more lifelike, they become door-to-door spambots who trick people into buying snake oil and junk bonds. * We are nearing an age in which humans and [4]computers may be connected via direct neural interfaces, technology indistinguishable from telepathy and telekinesis. * In the output direction, humans might be trained to think in distinct ways so that sensors and software could classify thoughts into signals to control equipment. * When cars were invented, no one imagined that hundreds of millions of them would spew carbon monoxide into [5]the atmosphere. * A telerobot is an electronic puppet controlled across a wire by a human using a PC and devices like joysticks and gloves. [6]Source: References 1. http://www.newstarget.com/index.html 2. http://www.newstarget.com/002080.html 3. http://www.Newstarget.com/001331.html 4. http://www.ComputerTechNews.com/002984.html 5. http://www.Newstarget.com/001398.html 6. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/view.html?pg=1?tw=wn_tophead_5 From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 25 15:03:46 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 10:03:46 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Steve Sailer: Baby Gap: How birthrates color the electoral map Message-ID: Baby Gap: How birthrates color the electoral map http://amconmag.com/2004_12_20/cover.html December 20, 2004 issue (note date) By Steve Sailer Despite the endless verbiage expended trying to explain America's remarkably stable division into Republican and Democratic regions, almost no one has mentioned the obscure demographic factor that correlated uncannily with states' partisan splits in both 2000 and 2004. Clearly, the issues that so excite political journalists had but a meager impact on most voters. For example, the press spent the last week of the 2004 campaign in a tizzy over the looting of explosives at Iraq's al-Qaqaa munitions dump, but, if voters even noticed al-Qaqaa, their reactions were predetermined by their party loyalty. The 2000 presidential election, held during peace and prosperity, became instantly famous for illuminating a land culturally divided into a sprawling but thinly populated "red" expanse of Republicans broken up by small but densely peopled "blue" archipelagos of Democrats. Four years of staggering events ensued, during which President Bush discarded his old "humble" foreign policy for a new one of nearly Alexandrine ambitions. Yet the geographic and demographic profiles of Bush voters in 2004 turned out almost identical to 2000, with the country as a whole simply nudged three points to the right. Only a few groups appeared to have moved more than the average. The counties within commuting distance of New York's World Trade Center became noticeably less anti-Bush. Yet even the one purported sizable demographic change--the claim by the troubled exit poll that Bush picked up nine points among Hispanics--appears to be an exaggeration caused by small sample sizes and poor survey techniques. In the real world, Hispanic counties swung toward Bush only about as much as everybody else did. That the president launched a war under false pretenses no doubt caused a few highly-informed constituencies, such as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the subscribers to this magazine, to shift many of their votes, but almost every group large enough to be measurable by exit polling was relatively stable. If they supported Bush's foreign policy in 2000, they supported his contrary stance in 2004 and vice versa. Still, this doesn't mean voters are choosing red or blue frivolously. Indeed, voters are picking their parties based on differing approaches to the most fundamentally important human activity: having babies. The white people in Republican-voting regions consistently have more children than the white people in Democratic-voting regions. The more kids whites have, the more pro-Bush they get. I'll focus primarily on Caucasians, who overall voted for Bush 58-41, in part because they are doing most of the arguing over the meaning of the red-blue division. The reasons blacks vote Democratic are obvious, and other racial blocs are smaller. Whites remain the 800-pound gorilla of ethnic electoral groups, accounting for over three out of every four votes. The single most useful and understandable birthrate measure is the "total fertility rate." This estimates, based on recent births, how many children the average woman currently in her childbearing years will have. The National Center for Health Statistics reported that in 2002 the average white woman was giving birth at a pace consistent with having 1.83 babies during her lifetime, or 13 percent below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. This below-replacement level has not changed dramatically in three decades. States, however, differ significantly in white fertility. The most fecund whites are in heavily Mormon Utah, which, not coincidentally, was the only state where Bush received over 70 percent. White women average 2.45 babies in Utah compared to merely 1.11 babies in Washington, D.C., where Bush earned but 9 percent. The three New England states where Bush won less than 40 percent--Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhode Island--are three of the four states with the lowest white birthrates, with little Rhode Island dipping below 1.5 babies per woman. Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility (just as he did in 2000), and 25 out of the top 26, with highly unionized Michigan being the one blue exception to the rule. (The least prolific red states are West Virginia, North Dakota, and Florida.) In sharp contrast, Kerry won the 16 states at the bottom of the list, with the Democrats' anchor states of California (1.65) and New York (1.72) having quite infertile whites. Among the 50 states plus Washington, D.C., white total fertility correlates at a remarkably strong 0.86 level with Bush's percentage of the 2004 vote. (In 2000, the correlation was 0.85.) In the social sciences, a correlation of 0.2 is considered "low," 0.4 "medium," and 0.6 "high." You could predict 74 percent of the variation in Bush's shares just from knowing each state's white fertility rate. When the average fertility goes up by a tenth of a child, Bush's share normally goes up by 4.5 points. In a year of predictably partisan books, one lively surprise has been What's the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank, a left-wing journalist from Kansas who, after a sojourn in Chicago, now lives with his wife and single child in the Democratic stronghold of Washington, D.C. Frank is puzzled by why conservative Republicans in his home state are obsessed with cultural issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and teaching evolution in the schools instead of the leftist economic populism that Frank admires in Kansas's past. While the Christian Right in Kansas doesn't much hold with Darwin, they are doing well at the basic Darwinian task of reproducing themselves: pro-life Kansas has the fourth-highest white fertility in the country at 2.06 babies per woman, and the birthrate of the conservative Republicans that Frank finds so baffling is likely to be even higher. On the crucial question of whether a group can be bothered not to die out, "What's the Matter with Massachusetts?" would be a more pertinent question. Massachusetts's whites are failing to replace themselves, averaging only 1.6 babies per woman, and the state's liberal Democrats are probably reproducing even less than that. So white birthrates and Republican voting are closely correlated, but what causes what? The arrow of causality seems to flow in both directions. To understand what's driving this huge political phenomenon, you have to think like a real-estate shopper, not like an intellectual. Everybody loves to talk real estate, but the sharp insights into how the world works that you hear while shooting the breeze about houses and neighborhoods seldom work their way into prestigious discourse about public affairs. As you've seen on all those red-blue maps, most of America's land is red, even though Kerry won 48 percent of the vote. Even excluding vast Alaska, Bush's counties are only one-fourth as densely populated on average as Kerry's counties. Lower density helps explain why red regions both attract the baby-oriented and encourage larger families among those already there. A dozen years ago, University of Chicago sociologist Edward O. Laumann and others wrote a tome with the soporific postmodern title The Social Organization of Sexuality. I wrote to them and suggested a follow-up called The Sexual Organization of Society because, in my experience with Chicago, where people lived coincided with their sexual status. In 1982, when I moved to Chicago as a young single man, I sought out detailed advice on where the greatest density of pretty girls lived and there rented a 21st-floor apartment with a stunning view of Lake Michigan. I became engaged three years later, and so, mission accomplished, I moved to a less chic neighborhood with more affordable rents. Two years later, when my bride became pregnant, we relocated to an even more unfashionable spot where we could buy ample square footage. (To my satisfaction, Laumann's team just this year published a categorization of Chicago's neighborhoods entitled The Sexual Organization of the City.) My experience is hardly unusual. Singles often move to cities because the density of other singles makes them good places to become unsingle. But singles, especially women, generally vote Democratic. For example, in the 2002 midterm elections, only 39 percent of unmarried women and 44 percent of unmarried men voted for a GOP candidate for the House of Representatives. In contrast, 56 percent of married women voted for the GOP, similar to their husbands' 58 percent. The celebrated gender gap is, in truth, largely a marriage gap among women. When city couples marry, they face major decisions: do they enjoy the adult-oriented cultural amenities of the city so much that they will stick it out, or do they head for the suburbs, exurbs, or even the country to afford more space for a growing family? Couples attempting to raise children in a big blue city quickly learn the truth of what bond trader Sherman McCoy's father told him in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities: "If you want to live in New York, you've got to insulate, insulate, insulate." Manhattan liberals all believe in celebrating diversity in theory but typically draw the line at subjecting their own offspring to it in the public schools. With Manhattan private K-12 school tuitions now approaching $25,000, insulating multiple children rapidly becomes too expensive for all but the filthy rich. In tempting contrast, the cost-of-living calculator provided by Realtor.com says that a $100,000 salary in liberal Manhattan buys only as much as a $38,000 salary in conservative Pinehurst, North Carolina. Likewise, a San Francisco couple earning $100,000 between them can afford just as much in Cedar City, Utah if the husband can find a $44,000-a-year job--and then the wife can stay home with their children. Moreover, the culture of Cedar City is more conducive to child rearing than San Francisco. Having insulated themselves through distance rather than money, they can now send their kids to public schools. (Among red states, the South has lower white fertility than the northern Great Plains and Great Basin, perhaps because many Southern conservatives, like many Manhattan liberals, prefer private schools, which makes children more expensive than out in Lewis & Clark Country, where the public schools are popular because they aren't terribly diverse.) In Cedar City, the wife won't feel as unprestigious for being a stay-at-home mom as she would in San Francisco. And mom won't have to chauffeur the kids everywhere because traffic and crime are light enough that they can ride their bikes. With more children, the couple will have less money per child to buy insulation from America's corrosive media culture, so they are likely to look to the government for help. Typically, red-region parents don't ask for much, often just for quasi-symbolic endorsements of family values, the non-economic gestures that drive Thomas Frank crazy. But there's nothing irrational about trying to protect and guide your children. As the socially conservative black comedian Chris Rock advises fathers, "Your main job is to keep your daughter off The Pole" (i.e., to keep her from becoming a stripper). That red-region parents want their politicians to endorse morality does not necessarily mean that red staters always behave more morally than blue staters. While there are well-behaved red states such as Utah and Colorado, hell-raising white Texans are 3.4 times more likely than white New Yorkers to be behind bars. Similarly, whites in conservative Mississippi and South Carolina are one-sixth as likely as blacks in those states to be imprisoned, compared to the national average of one-ninth. By contrast, in ultra-liberal Washington D.C., whites are only one-fifty-sixth as likely to be in the slammer as blacks. The late socialist historian Jim Chapin pointed out that it was perfectly rational for parents with more children than money to ask their political and cultural leaders to help them insulate their kids from bad examples, even, or perhaps especially, if the parents themselves are not perfect role models. Focusing on children, insulation, and population density reveals that blue-region white Democrats' positions on vouchers, gun control, and environmentalism are motivated partly by fear of urban minorities. In 2001, the Wall Street Journal's favorite mayor, Brett Schundler, ran for governor of New Jersey on a platform of vouchers to help inner-city children attend better schools in the suburbs. The now notorious Democrat Jim McGreevey beat him badly because white suburban moderates shunned this Republican who put the welfare of urban minority children ahead of their own. These homeowners were scraping together big mortgage payments precisely to get their kids into exclusive suburban school districts insulated from what they saw as the ghetto hellions that Schundler hoped to unleash on their children. They had much of their net worths tied up in their homes, and their property values depended on the local public schools' high test scores, which they feared wouldn't survive an onslaught of slum children. So they voted Democratic to keep minorities in their place. The endless gun-control brouhaha, which on the surface appears to be a bitter battle between liberal and conservative whites, also features a cryptic racial angle. What blue-region white liberals actually want is for the government to disarm the dangerous urban minorities that threaten their children's safety. Red-region white conservatives, insulated by distance from the Crips and the Bloods, don't care that white liberals' kids are in peril. Besides, in sparsely populated Republican areas, where police response times are slow and the chances of drilling an innocent bystander are slim, guns make more sense for self-defense than in the cities and suburbs. White liberals, angered by white conservatives' lack of racial solidarity with them, yet bereft of any vocabulary for expressing such a verboten concept, pretend that they need gun control to protect them from gun-crazy rural rednecks, such as the ones Michael Moore demonized in "Bowling for Columbine," thus further enraging red-region Republicans. Likewise, liberals in blue areas such as Northern California pioneer environmental restrictions on development in part to keep out illegal immigrants and other poor minorities. Thinly populated Republican areas are pro-development because increasing density raises property values as once remote regions obtain roads, sewer hookups, cable television, local shopping, and nice restaurants. If poorly planned, however, overcrowding causes property values to lag, allowing poor people to move in. Conservative Southern California, home to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, was traditionally more laissez faire than liberal Northern California, ultimately allowing itself to be inundated by poorly educated illegal aliens, wrecking the public schools. In contrast, environmentalist--and thus expensive--Northern California attracted a variety of skilled immigrants. Eventually, many Los Angeles Republicans either fled inland or decided that those San Francisco Democrats had the right idea all along. Now illegal immigrants are flocking to other pro-growth red states, such as North Carolina and Georgia, and may eventually turn those states Democratic due both to the Democratic-voting immigrants' very high birthrates and to a California-style drift toward environmentalism among its white voters as laissez faire proves inadequate to keep out illegal aliens. Nobody noticed that the famous blue-red gap was a white baby gap because the subject of white fertility is considered disreputable. But I believe the truth is better for us than ignorance, lies, or wishful thinking. At least, it's certainly more interesting. _________________________________________________________ Steve Sailer is TAC's film critic. He also writes for VDARE.com and iSteve.com. From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 25 15:09:17 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 10:09:17 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] (no subject) Message-ID: Arbus Reconsidered New York Times Magazine, 3.9.14 (note date) By Arthur Lubow; Arthur Lubow is a contributing writer for the magazine and last wrote about the Spanish chef Ferran Adria. Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby," Norman Mailer said after seeing how she had captured him, leaning back in a velvet armchair with his legs splayed cockily. The quip was funny, but a little off base. A camera for Arbus was like a latchkey. With one around her neck, she could open almost any door. Fearless, tenacious, vulnerable -- the combination conquered resistance. In an eye-opening sequence in "Revelations," the compendious new book that is being published in tandem with a full-scale retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, you discover with a start the behind-the-scenes drama that produced her famous photograph of "A Naked Man Being a Woman." As her title indicates, it is a portrait of a young man standing naked in his apartment, genitals tucked out of sight, in a Venus-on-the-half-shell pose. First she photographed him as a bouffant-haired young matron on a park bench; then at home in a bra and half slip; unwigged and unclothed a few moments later, with legs demurely crossed; up posing for the prized shot; and finally, as a seemingly ordinary fellow back on a park bench. Somehow, she had persuaded him to take her home and expose a secret life. It's what she did again and again. "She got herself to go up to people on the street and ask if she could photograph them," recalls her former husband, Allan Arbus. "One thing she often said was, 'I'm just practicing."' He chuckles. "And indeed, I guess she was." During her lifetime, Arbus was lionized, but she was also lambasted for being exploitative. Her suicide in 1971 seemed to corroborate the caricature of her as a freaky ghoul. The critic Susan Sontag divined that Arbus photographed "people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive," from a vantage point "based on distance, on privilege, on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other." Patricia Bosworth's biography in 1984 took the suicide as an emblem of the life and told a lurid tale that is neatly summarized by the tag line on the paperback edition: "HER CAMERA WAS THE WINDOW TO A TORTURED SOUL." In The New York Review of Books, Jonathan Lieberson eviscerated Bosworth 's book but also deprecated Arbus's pictures as "mannered, static snapshots" that were "chaste, icy, stylized." Chaste, icy, stylized? Arbus's friend Richard Avedon, maybe. Not Diane Arbus. Doon Arbus was 26 when Diane died. As the older daughter of a divorced mother, she took on the responsibility of managing the estate. Her response to the critics was to clamp the spigot shut. Arbus's letters, journals and diaries could not be examined. Anyone wishing to reproduce Arbus photographs would have to submit the book or article for Doon's vetting; any museum contemplating a retrospective had to enlist her active collaboration. In almost all cases, permission was denied. Unsurprisingly, critics and scholars fumed. As Anthony W. Lee, the co-author of a new academic treatise, "Diane Arbus: Family Albums," puts it in an acid footnote, "Those familiar with the writings on Arbus's photographs will recognize a common thread that joins them all, which this essay also shares: nearly all are published without the benefit of reproductions of some of her most famous work." That work now appeared in three handsome, meticulous monographs, which over the last three decades Doon has compiled and released. So it comes as a shock to see -- in the first full-scale museum retrospective since 1972 and in the book -- that Diane Arbus at long last is presented whole. Together with the pictures that have become icons (the Jewish giant and his bewildered parents, the disturbingly different identical twins, the in-process transvestite in hair curlers, etc.), there are many of her photographs that have never been seen (or even, in some cases, printed). Better still, there is a rich assortment of extracts from her letters and journals that reveal her to be a quirky, funny, first-rate writer, an extraordinarily loving mother and an empathetic observer of her photographic subjects. More than 30 years after her death, a new portrait is emerging of one of the most powerful American artists of the 20th century, in the style that she favored. Uncropped. Allan, who is now a trim and graceful white-haired man of 85, gave Diane her first camera soon after they married in 1941. She was 18, and they had met five years earlier, when he started working at Russek's department store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the fur and clothing emporium founded by her grandfather and run by her father, David Nemerov. Diane was the second of three children (her older brother, Howard, became a prize-winning poet). She was named for a character in a play her mother enjoyed; as with her fictional namesake, it was pronounced "Dee-ann." During Diane's childhood, the Nemerovs lived in large apartments on Central Park West and on Park Avenue. "The family fortune always seemed to me humiliating," she told the journalist Studs Terkel. "It was like being a princess in some loathsome movie" set in "some kind of Transylvanian obscure Middle European country." The public rooms were filled with reproduction French furniture in slipcovers. In the Nemerovs' home life, as in their ritzy clothing store, everything was for show. Diane attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in the leafy Riverdale section of the Bronx, where the student body was composed largely of the children of affluent, liberal Jews. In art class, her renderings stood apart. "She would look at a model and draw what none of us saw," recalls her classmate, the screenwriter Stewart Stern. Yet she mistrusted her facility with a paintbrush. "As soon as she finished something, she'd show it and they'd say, 'Oh, Diane, it's marvelous, it's marvelous,"' Allan recounts. Diane told Terkel that praise of that sort "made me feel shaky." Her father enlisted the Russek's fashion illustrator to give her lessons, but Diane lost interest in painting, perhaps because it was easy for her. "I had a sense that if I were terrific at it, it wasn't worth doing, and I had no real sense of wanting to do it," she said. She felt otherwise about the Graflex, a smaller version of the classic newsman's camera, that she received from Allan. Photography suited her. She had a sharp eye. "We once visited a cousin of mine," Allan recalls. "He had a large bookcase, which extended -- " He indicates a span of 8 or 10 feet. "We sat on a couch opposite the bookcase. Some weeks later, we visited him again, and Diane said, 'Oh, you have a new book."' The newlyweds would study photographs in galleries, especially Alfred Stieglitz's American Place, and in the Museum of Modern Art. The Park Avenue apartment building in which Diane's parents lived had a darkroom for the use of tenants. The young Arbuses appropriated it. David Nemerov, who was wondering how his son-in-law intended to earn a living, happily hired the couple to do advertising shoots for Russek's. "We were living, breathing photographyat every moment," Allan says. "This was a way to get paid for it." Although he and Diane admired the photojournalism of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the heyday of the pictorial newsmagazine was about to fade before the allure of television, and the excitement -- along with the opportunity -- was in fashion magazines. The Second World War delayed until 1946 the debut of their fashion photography studio, which operated under the joint credit "Diane & Allan Arbus." Diane came up with the ideas; Allan set up the lights and camera, clicked the shutter, developed the film and printed the proofs. The business was a success but unremittingly stressful. "We never felt satisfied," Allan explains. "There was that awful seesaw. When Diane felt O.K., I would be in the dumps, and when I would be exhilarated, she would be depressed." In retrospect, he says he thinks it was a mistake to demand a concept for each shoot rather than simply photograph models in front of white no-seam paper, as Avedon did in Harper's Bazaar to great acclaim. "I guess we figured if we photographed the way Dick did, it wouldn't come out," he says. "We were afraid to try it. I remember one day Dick just popped into the studio. We were talking back and forth. I said, 'When we started in this, I thought it would be so easy.' He said, 'Isn't it?"' In 1951, they closed down the studio and escaped to Europe with their 6-year-old daughter, Doon. (Their second child, Amy, would be born three years later.) But the respite lasted only a year. Once back, it was the same grind for four more years until, one night in 1956, Diane quit. "I can't do it anymore," she told Allan unexpectedly one evening. Her voice rose an octave. "I'm not going to do it anymore." Although unprepared, Allan understood. "At a fashion sitting, I was the one operating the camera," he says. "I was directing the models on what to do. And Diane would have to go in and pin the dress if it wasn 't hanging right. It was demeaning to her. It was a repulsive role." At first he was terrified of operating without her. "But it came out all right," he says. "In some ways, it was easier to work, because I didn't have that load of Diane's dissatisfaction to deal with." Soon after Arbus's death, the art director Marvin Israel -- who was her lover, colleague, critic and goad -- told a television journalist: "It could be argued that for Diane the most valuable thing wasn't the photograph itself, the art object; it was the event, the experience. . . . The photograph is like her trophy -- it's what she received as the reward for this adventure." Today, when you shuffle through the lifeless photos by imitators in the Arbus idiom, you are reminded of how much time Arbus spent with so many of her subjects and of how fascinated she was by their lives. She invested the energy in them that a painter like Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon would devote to repeated portrait sittings; but unlike Freud or Bacon, who chose their intimates as their subjects, Arbus picked strangers and, through her infectious empathy, was able to transform these subjects into intimates. "She was an emissary from the world of feeling," says the photographer Joel Meyerowitz. "People opened up to her in an emotional way, and they yielded their mystery." Without sentimentalizing them or ignoring their failings, she liked and admired her freaks. She first met Eddie Carmel, the Jewish giant, almost a decade before she took her extraordinary photograph of him with his parents. You feel that had she never gotten the picture, Arbus still would have considered the time with Carmel well spent. Robert Brown, a neighbor and friend who often breakfasted with the Arbuses when they lived on East 72nd, recalls a Sunday morning, probably in 1957, when Allan showed Diane a newspaper item that he knew would interest her: the circus was coming to town. The troupe would be debarking from a train early the next morning and parading to Madison Square Garden. "Let's go!" Diane said. Allan was too busy, but Brown, who is an actor, accompanied her to the parade and then drove her to Madison Square Garden. Coming to pick her up three hours later, Brown asked the backstage doorman where she was. "Oh, the photographer?" the man answered. "She never got very far." He pointed. She was sitting on the floor with the midgets. "I don't think she was snapping," Brown says. "She was getting involved." Arbus trawled the city, getting deeply involved with the people who caught her eye: the sideshow performers at Hubert's Dime Museum and Flea Circus, the cross-dressers at Club 82, the moonstruck visionaries with handmade helmets and crackpot theories, the magicians and fortunetellers and self-proclaimed prophets. But she also pursued more "ordinary" types -- the swimmers at Coney Island, the strollers down Fifth Avenue, the people on benches in Central Park. At first, she was shy about getting too close. Sometimes she would catch her quarry unawares, from a distance, and then crop the image to give a close-up effect. But she wasn't happy doing that. "We were very against cropping," Allan says. She wanted to capture her subjects whole and unaltered, before adding them to her "butterfly collection." Many of her pictures from the 50's are grainy, in the style of Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank and other documentary photographers of the time. "The reduced tonal scale makes it seem like a copy of a copy, like an old record that's faded and a lot of the information is gone," says John Szarkowski, curator emeritus of photography at the Museum of Modern Art. "Which is fine for a certain kind of description, where you know you're not getting everything." In the late 50's, however, something mysterious transformed Arbus's work. "I don't think there is any development," Szarkowski says. "It happened all at once. Basically, it was like St. Paul on the road to Damascus." Allan is more specific: "That was Lisette. Three sessions and Diane was a photographer." Diane took her first course with Lisette Model in 1956. Earlier she had studied briefly with Berenice Abbott and Alexey Brodovitch, but Model had a far greater impact on her artistically and personally. "Model was able to instill in Arbus a self-confidence of approach and engagement that really released her," says Peter C. Bunnell, curator emeritus of photography at Princeton University. "Arbus in her own personality was rather shy. Not what Lisette was, in a European tradition, an independent, aggressive woman." Model's great influence on Arbus came through their conversations about the art of photography. "After three months, her style was there," Model told the writer Phillip Lopate. "First only grainy and two-tone. Then perfection." Arbus, shortly before her death, told her own class of students, "It was my teacher, Lisette Model, who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it'll be." The Arbuses' professional split was followed in 1959 by a personal one. Diane and the girls moved to a converted stable in the West Village. It was a subtle separation. Allan maintained the fashion photography business under the joint credit. He continued to test Diane's new cameras and to have his assistants develop her film. She printed her photos in his darkroom. He managed their joint finances, and he often came for Sunday breakfast. However, despite the persistence of their bond, the separation and eventual divorce forced -- and liberated -- Diane to step out on her own. "I always felt that it was our separation that made her a photographer," Allan says. "I couldn't have stood for her going to the places she did. She'd go to bars on the Bowery and to people's houses. I would have been horrified." ???Certainly, Diane was traveling far from the white seamless world of fashion photography. Because so many of her subjects lived on the fringes of polite society, her pictures provoked a controversy that has yet to die down. Most people today who are familiar with the name "Diane Arbus" would probably identify her as "the photographer of freaks." This stereotype insulates them from the power of the photographs. Portraits of sideshow freaks constitute a small portion of Arbus's output. On the other hand, it is true that she adored them. "There's a quality of legend about freaks," she told a Newsweek reporter. "Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle." She said that she would "much rather be a fan of freaks than of movie stars, because movie stars get bored with their fans, and freaks really love for someone to pay them honest attention." But the word "freak" is so vague and charged that it can be misleading. Arbus did not photograph people who were disfigured by calamity -- fire, toxic poisoning, war. She was not a photojournalist like W. Eugene Smith. She did not chase after victims. The pacifist Paul Salstrom once traveled with her to a motel that his aunt managed near Los Angeles. After the aunt agreed to be photographed, Salstrom inquired if Arbus would also like to photograph his uncle, but she declined. "My uncle had a large growth on the back of his neck," Salstrom explains. "She said, 'I'm not going to ask him, because I feel sorry for him."' ???Arbus regarded circus freaks as "aristocrats" and female impersonators as gender-barrier pioneers. To her, there was nothing pathetic or repulsive about them. One of her most famous pictures is "A Young Brooklyn Family Going for a Sunday Outing, N.Y.C., 1966." With teased black hair and heavily outlined eyebrows, the woman is made up to look like Elizabeth Taylor, an aspiration that, inevitably, she has not quite achieved. Her arms are overburdened with a large pocketbook, a camera in its case, a leopard-patterned coat and a big baby girl, and although she is looking straight ahead, she seems preoccupied. Her baby's arms and face are extended forward, as is the honest, open gaze of her husband. The only off-kilter figure in this upstanding group is their son, a mentally retarded boy, his eyes, head and body all askew, his small hand held by his father. Unlike the mother, the father is grasping onto nothing else but his son, whose crooked body fills the gap between the parents. As another photo in "Revelations" establishes, Arbus spent some time in this family's home. She later wrote, "They were undeniably close in a painful sort of way." ???Arbus's choice of subject matter was not especially novel. From the transvestites of Brassai to the circus dwarf of Bruce Davidson, odd-looking and socially transgressive people have always attracted the attention of photographers. But even when those photographers took you backstage, you still felt that you were at a performance. Arbus went home with her subjects, literally and emotionally. That's why her portraits of a young man in hair curlers or a half-dressed dwarf in bed retain the power to shock. It's not the subjects that unnerve us: her photographs of a middle-class woman in pearls or a pair of twins with headbands can be just as startling. What shocks is the intimacy. "I don't like to arrange things," she said. "If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself." When she took a picture, she instinctively found the right place to stand. Her vantage point denied the viewer any protective distance. ???Once she parachuted out of fashion photography, Arbus relied on magazine editors for assignments. Her empathetic curiosity and undivided focus -- "whatever the moment presented, she was in it," says her friend Mary Sellers -- made her a remarkable reporter. On a trip Arbus took to Los Angeles in 1964, Robert Brown, who by then was living there, chauffeured her to Mae West's house on two successive days. When he picked her up the first night, she was bubbling with excitement. "You know what we did most of the time?" she told him. "She's got a locked room with models in plaster of all the men she's had sex with -- of their erections." Reminiscing about her former lovers, West had waxed rhapsodic: "Each one is different: the way they sigh, the way they moan, the way they move; even the feel of them, their flesh is just a little different. . . . There's a man for every mood." Arbus took it all down for the article she would write. She probably waited until the next day, by which point West would have been completely charmed and relaxed, to take the visual record of the septuagenarian sexpot -- in negligee, backlighted by the merciless Southern California sun. "Mae West hated the pictures," Allan Arbus recalls. "Because they were truthful. " ???A waiflike figure with huge green eyes, a goofy grin and a girlish giggle, Arbus would roam the city, laden down with camera equipment. Her blend of whispery fragility and unstoppable tenacity was very seductive. "She had this little squeaky voice, completely unarming because she was so childlike and her interest so genuine," says the photographer Larry Fink, who observed her working in New York parks. "So she would hover there and smile and be a little embarrassed, with her Mamiyaflex going. She would wait for people to relax, or to get so tense that they would be the opposite of relaxed, with much the same effect." Sandra Reed, the albino sword swallower who is the subject of one of Arbus's most arresting late photographs, recalls Arbus, clad in denim, coming up to her before the circus opened. "I thought it was someone wanting an autograph, " Reed says. "She would get a rapport going between you and her. She asked me how it was to travel around, places I'd seen, things I'd done. She was very relaxed, a very ordinary person. She talked to me about the sword-swallowing, how I did it. We talked for quite some time, an hour, maybe two. She asked me if I would mind to be in full costume, and I said, 'No problem."' Reed performed her act, and Arbus photographed her. The shoot, Reed thinks, took about 45 minutes. ???"People were interested in Diane, just as interested in her as she was in them," Szarkowski says. He first met Arbus late in 1962. He had recently succeeded Edward Steichen as director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, and Arbus was picking up a portfolio of her work that she had dropped off for review. "It was an accident," he says. "I came out of my office, so my assistant introduced us somewhat embarrassedly. I liked her immediately. She was a person with a very lively intelligence. So the conversation went on, and it got to the point where she asked what I thought of the work." Arbus's portfolio consisted mostly of portraits of eccentric New Yorkers that she had done for Harper's Bazaar. Szarkowski remembers telling her: "'I don't find it quite right. It seems to me the photographs don't fit what your intention is."' ???They were grainy 35-millimeter pictures, the sort that photojournalists snapped on the fly. "Technically, they looked a little bit like Robert Frank, not quite like Bill Klein," Szarkowski says. "I said to her, 'It seems to me what you're interested in is much more permanent, ceremonial, eidetic."' He then pointed to an anomalous photograph she had taken with a large Rolleiflex camera that produces a more finely detailed, square negative. "'That's what you're looking for; it's like Sander,"' Szarkowski recalls saying to her. "Maybe it was my North Wisconsin accent. She said, 'Who's Sander?"' ???Perhaps it was his twang, or maybe Arbus was momentarily distracted, because she certainly was familiar by then with the work of the great German photographer August Sander. Shrewd as Szarkowski was to recognize the affinity, Sander had been brought to her attention two years earlier by Marvin Israel, who would prove to be the most astute and important champion of Arbus's work. Israel, like Arbus, was a person who thrived on contradictions. He was raised in a well-off New York Jewish family (the money came from a women's-clothing business) but affected a down-at-the-heels bohemian style. A protege of Alexey Brodovitch, who galvanized American magazine design with the electric energy of the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism, Israel was art director of Seventeen in the late 50's and then himself became the art director of Brodovitch's baby, Harper's Bazaar. He worked in a dusty, cluttered three-floor studio in the cupola of a building on lower Fifth Avenue, amid the cacophony of birdcalls (a parrot and a caged crow being the loudest) and the barking of a vicious adopted stray mongrel, named Marvin. "Shut up, Marvin," he would bark back. ???In late November 1959, a few months after moving into the West Village carriage house, Arbus met Israel, and they became lovers. Their intense friendship and professional collaboration would continue until the end of her life. ???Israel gave Arbus a portfolio of Sander photographs from a 1959 issue of the Swiss magazine Du, seeing immediately that Sander was the photographer whose ambition and perspicacity most resembled her own. Sander set himself a monumental task -- "to see things as they are and not as they should or might be "; by so doing, he thought he could provide a "physiognomic image of an age." In his Teutonic thoroughness and anthropological zeal, Sander was a creature of his place and time; as an artist, however, he transcends those categories. Sander was after clarity. He printed on the shiny smooth paper normally used for technical illustrations, and he ignored the introduction of panchromatic glass plates that would obscure blemishes. He typically spent an hour or more talking with his subject before taking the photograph, and whenever possible, he scheduled the sitting in the subject's home, not in a studio, to capture more of the truth. ???In the next generation, Bernd and Hilla Becher took up Sander's typological mania and ran with it. What fascinated Arbus about Sander was the psychological inquiry, which she adopted and pushed as far as she could. Arbus photographed many of the same subjects as Sander (carnival performers, midgets, women in slinky dresses, blind people, twins). Comparing their work is instructive. For example, Sander's portrait of fraternal twins, from 1925, shows a timid, eager-to-please girl and a dour, conventional little boy; you can see, as in embryo, the roles in society that they are preparing to play. In contrast, there is nothing sociological about Arbus's 1967 portrait of identical twin girls in Roselle, N.J. Instead, she has taken a kind of psychological X-ray. The girl on the right smiles angelically and trustingly. The one on the left is slightly off: her eyes are misaligned, her mouth is suspiciously pursed, her stockings are bunched at the knees, even the bobby pins on her white headband have slipped below her eyes. Wearing identical frocks, the girls are standing so close that they seem to be joined in one body, two aspects of the same soul. "What's left after what one isn't is taken away is what one is," Arbus wrote in a notebook in 1959. That aphorism could be the caption to this picture. ???Marvin Israel said that when he was at Bazaar, he wanted to assign Arbus to photograph every person in the world. In the early heady days of their affair, when she was peppering Israel with almost daily postcards, Arbus once wrote him that "everyone today looked remarkable just like out of August Sander pictures, so absolute and immutable down to the last button, feather, tassel or stripe. All odd and splendid as freaks and nobody able to see himself, all of us victims of the especial shape we come in." By the time Arbus picked up a camera, the termite-riddled social order of Sander's day had crumbled. She was fascinated by people who were visibly creating their own identities -- cross-dressers, nudists, sideshow performers, tattooed men, the nouveau riche, the movie-star fans -- and by those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort. Arbus's friend Adrian Allen, who began her career as an assistant to the legendary Brodovitch, recalls going through the layout of the posthumous monograph that Doon and Israel put together and seeing with shock the image of a woman she had known, seated on a park bench. In her three-strand necklace and helmetlike bouffant hairdo, Arbus's subject seems riven by secret hopelessness. "I had never seen this woman look like that before," Allen says. "She was always laughing, smiling, covering up what was underneath." Somehow, like a dowser of despair, Arbus had picked up the signal of misery. Not long after the picture was taken, the woman in the bouffant hairdo committed suicide. ???Because Arbus took her own life, many people assume that she was constantly grim. Actually, she was an enthusiastic woman with a highly honed sense of the absurd, who was afflicted by blasts of bleakness. "She was a very lively person, " Szarkowski says. "She had a very vivacious mind. She was never a depressed person in my presence." Allan Arbus, who knew her as well as anyone did, saw a fuller picture. "I was intensely aware of these violent changes of mood," he says. "There were times when it was just awful, and there were times. . . . " His expression mimics fizzy exhilaration. Diane preferred receiving confidences to giving them, one reason photography was her natural medium. "She wanted to contend with something else, not express herself," Doon says. ???The relationship with Israel was painful for Arbus. Married to Margie Ponce Israel, a brilliant but emotionally troubled artist, he was not as reliably available or emotionally supportive as Arbus wished. "Diane made no secret of the fact that she was waiting and waiting for Marvin's attention," says Elisabeth Sussman, co-curator of the show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who has gone through Arbus's journals, letters and date books. Arbus did not talk to most of her friends about Israel. Unusually, the artist Mary Frank knew them both independently. "A desire to be cared for is a very human instinct," Frank says. "Marvin could not have given Diane that feeling. He was a very complicated person, and interested in his own powers. He was capable of kindness, but then there was this explosive aspect." Frank says that she saw Arbus despondent a couple of times, and "it definitely had to do with Marvin." Where Allan gave Diane technical advice and emotional bolstering, Israel excited her to take on new projects and challenges. "He was always interested in artists pushing as hard as they could toward their own obsessions or perversities," says the writer Lawrence Shainberg, who was a close friend. ???Like Arbus, Israel loved to explore the seamier precincts of New York. They didn't have to go far. Forty-Second Street was very different then: "everyone winking and nudging and raising their eyebrows and running their hands through their marcelled hair and I saw one of your seeing blind men and a man like you have told me about with the pale ruined face-that-isn't-there and a thousand lone conspirators," Arbus wrote Israel. Some of those trophies appeared publicly when she agreed with much trepidation to be included, along with Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, in an exhibition, "New Documents," that opened at the Museum of Modern Art in February 1967. Like the contemporaneous "New Journalists " in Esquire and New York (Arbus worked for both magazines), the newfangled documentary photographers in this show made the seeing eye a part of the picture. To her relief, Arbus adored the way her work looked hanging in the museum galleries. "I've been here as many times as I can get here -- I love it," she told a reporter. However, her ambivalence about presenting her photographs as art objects remained. In March 1969, in Midtown New York, Lee Witkin opened the first commercially viable gallery devoted to photography. Arbus agreed to let him display some of her pictures, but she declined his offer of a large exhibition. Although she accepted offers to lecture and sold prints to museums, she always voiced her doubts about whether she was ready for this attention. ???In the months after the New Documents show, she bristled with new ideas. "She would have 30 projects at once," Allan says. But then she would fall into funks that were harder and harder for her to pull out of. "She was in so much pain, and really struggling with what the meaning of her life was," Mary Sellers says. "I had never felt her to be as fragile and unsure." ???When the lease came up on the carriage house, Arbus was forced to move, in January 1968, to a less attractive apartment in the East Village. She had had a serious bout of hepatitis two years earlier; in 1968, she suffered a relapse. Maybe most unsettling to her was Allan's decision to move to Los Angeles in June 1969 to pursue an acting career. "I guess it was oddly enough the finality of Allan leaving (for Calif.) that so shook me," she wrote to her friend Carlotta Marshall. "He had been gone somewhat for a hundred years but suddenly it was no more pretending. This was it. . . . I am learning all over again it seems how to live, how to make a living, how to do what I want and what I don't, all sorts of commonsensical things I have tended to make a big deal about." One of the things that she had to learn was how to develop film, because Allan was closing his darkroom. Although she had always made her own prints, she relied on his assistants for processing film. "It was hard for her to take over this part of photography," he says. The technical aspects never appealed to her. "She was very funny about her cameras," he continues. "If one didn't work, she would put it aside and then pick it up the next day to see if it had gotten better." Yet she knew precisely what look she was after, and she would improvise technically to achieve it. In 1965, she began printing her negatives with the black border exposed -- as if to emphasize both that this image was uncropped and thus unaltered, and also (sabotaging its pretensions to truth) that in the end it was only a photograph. "For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture," she once said. "And more complicated." ???In the last two years of her life, she was working on a project that delighted her deeply. Through a relative of Adrian Allen, she obtained permission to photograph at institutions for the severely retarded in New Jersey. These pictures, which Doon posthumously labeled the "Untitled" series, represent a sharp departure from Arbus's previous work. Combining flash unpredictably with daylight and catching her subjects on the move, she was relinquishing control and embracing the accidental. She wrote Allan that the photographs "are very blurred and variable, but some are gorgeous. FINALLY what I've been searching for, and I seem to have discovered sunlight, late afternoon early winter sunlight. It's just marvelous. In general I seem to have perverted your brilliant technique all the way round, bending it over backward you might say till it's JUST like snapshots but better." In her notebook, she devoted five pages to individual descriptions of her retarded subjects. Writing to Amy, she explained: "Some of them are so small that their shoulder would fit right under my arm and I would pat them and their head would fall on my chest. They are the strangest combination of grown-up and child I have ever seen. One lady kept saying over and over: 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' After a while one of the staff said, 'That's all right but don't do it again' and she quieted down. . . . I think you'd like them." ???Adrian Allen went to see the photographs in the Westbeth artist-housing complex in the West Village, which is where Arbus moved from East 10th Street in January 1970. "The whole floor was filled with that project," Allen recalls. "At first I found it kind of awful to look at these people. Then, as I started to look at the larger prints and found how the people connected with her -- they were the sort of people who couldn't connect with anybody, but that quality she had of getting people to let her in, even if they were mad or retarded -- in those pictures, I sensed her presence." Allen understood that Arbus's excitement arose from her attachment to her retarded subjects. "She loved the photographs because they illustrated the connection." She had devoted so much energy to getting people to doff their masks. Now, with these mentally impaired people, she found a transparency of expression. Oddly, in many of her most famous photographs of them, they are wearing masks for Halloween. ???Sometimes the work would buoy her spirits, but not for long. "She was always, always both devoted to and loathing of photography," Mary Sellers says. "She was always wondering not was it good enough, but was it true enough." ???In many of her late photographs, she returned to her early practice of capturing people who were unaware of her camera. But the effect was different now. She was a mature artist, and she could find the intimacy she wanted in unexpected ways. So that in "A Woman Passing, N.Y.C., 1971," the determined hunch of the walk, the proudly chic uplift of the hat and the liver-spotted hand gripping the pocketbook make us feel we know this woman as well as if we had read a novel about her. As early as 1967, Diane wrote to Amy: "I suddenly realized that when I photograph people I don't anymore want them to look at me. (I used nearly always to wait for them to look me in the eye but now it's as if I think I will see them more clearly if they are not watching me watching them.) " ???One of the many misperceptions about Arbus is that her work, in its emotional toll and immersion in the "dark side," contributed to a fatal despair. In fact, her work elated her. "She made it seem like a lark," says Michael Flanagan, a friend of hers and Israel's, who worked for a time as Allan's assistant and developed her negatives. "The pictures were sometimes dark and scary, but she was lighthearted, like it was an adventure for her." The doubts and depressions were triggered by other causes, sometimes by a sense of abandonment, at times by an internal biological flux she could neither understand nor control. "I go up and down a lot," she wrote Carlotta Marshall in late 1968. "Maybe I've always been like that. Partly what happens though is I get filled with energy and joy and I begin lots of things or think about what I want to do and get all breathless with excitement and then quite suddenly either through tiredness or a disappointment or something more mysterious the energy vanishes, leaving me harassed, swamped, distraught, frightened by the very things I thought I was so eager for! I'm sure this is quite classic." She went to visit Allan and his new wife, Mariclare Costello, in Los Angeles in the fall of 1970. He remembers that once, while driving in the car, she told him: "I took a pill before we left and I feel much better. It's all chemical." ???Marshall saw her several times in mid-July 1971, on a visit to New York from Holland, where she now lived. At their last get-together, they stayed up late, talking. "We talked about suicide and death, but we talked about everything," Marshall says. "I just didn't pay special attention to the fact that she brought it up. It wasn't a morbid discussion." On July 26, when Marshall was on a ship heading back to Europe, Allan was acting in a movie in Santa Fe, Doon was working on a book in Paris, Amy was attending summer school in Massachusetts and Israel was weekending with his wife at Avedon's house on Fire Island, Arbus swallowed a number of barbiturates, climbed fully dressed into her bathtub and cut her wrists with a razor blade. Two days later, Israel went to her apartment and found the body. ???Arbus was 48 when she died. In the autopsy report, the Medical Examiner's Office left this tantalizing observation: "Diary suggestive of suicidal intent, taken on July 26th, noted." The on-the-scene medical investigator's report refers to a "'Last Supper' note," and Lawrence Shainberg, one of three friends whom Israel called to wait with him for the police to arrive, recalls seeing the words "Last Supper" written on a page of her open diary. What could she have meant? At the Last Supper, Jesus said that the wine and unleavened bread were his blood and body, containing eternal life -- a black-humor analogy for someone slashing her wrists and gulping fatal tablets. He also said that he would be betrayed by someone very close to him. ???Did Arbus leave other clues in her date book? We don't know. The diary page for the 26th, and for the two pages following, have been neatly excised. "I've stared at that book for I can't say how long," says Sussman, the co-curator. That Arbus took secrets with her to the grave is completely in character. She collected other people's mysteries and divulged few of her own. "I never thought that I knew all her secrets," Allan says. (Asked if she knew all of his, he says, "Probably.") The diaries, notebooks and letters that are included in the museum retrospective and in "Revelations" enable us to come closer to seeing Arbus in the way that she saw her subjects -- with an unexpected, even unsettling, intimacy. Never for a second, however, do we feel that we have exhausted the mystery. GRAPHIC: Photos: Diane Arbus in Washington Square Park, April 2, 1967 (Photograph by Fred Gurner); Family business: Diane and her husband, Allan, in a 1947 Glamour article, top; and their work in Vogue in 1953 and '54, bottom. (Photographs by Diane And Allen Arbus); ' 'A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y., 1970.' ' (Photograph by Diane Arbus); Left: Diane with her daughters, Doon (left) and Amy, on Shelter Island in 1956. Right: Diane with her mentor and lover Marvin Israel at Westbeth around 1971. (Photographs by left: Allan Arbus, right, Cosmos Savage); "Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967. "; A picture from the "Untitled" series Arbus worked on during the last two years of her life. (Photographs by Diane Arbus) From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 25 15:13:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 10:13:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Safire: Strait and Narrow Message-ID: Strait and Narrow On Language by William Safire, New York Times Magazine, 4.12.19 [Note the date. The column is really called "Channel," but I changed it to its most important topics. I have been boldly marking any book I read that gives "straight and narrow" out of ignorance. Ditto for miniscule, when it should be minuscule. I can't recall other cases where I'm a grammar hound. Safire will be missed, for both his political and language columns.] In the transcript of a spirited conversation between The Times's chief film critics . . . (wait -- should that be with an apostrophe followed by an s to indicate possession, or with an apostrophe alone? The British royals won't let you into the Court of St. James's without the final s -- and the name is pronounced James-ziz. But more Americans are dropping both the final s in print and the ziz in pronunciation. The usage called for by The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage is ''Almost all singular words ending in s require a second s as well as the apostrophe,'' with the ''almost'' allowing exceptions for Jesus, Moses, Achilles and other ancients, as well as for other occasions when two sibilant sounds are separated by a vowel sound -- you can't write Texas's because that's three zizes, which can put you to sleep). We had better begin today's linguistic harangue again. In the transcript of a spirited conversation between two film critics of The Times (heh!), A.O. Scott observed to Manohla Dargis about Pedro Almodovar that the Spanish director ''has been channeling [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder and Douglas Sirk in a really beautiful, interesting way.'' The channeling has been getting a lot of use lately. After a recent fracas on the basketball court, The Times reported that one university president ''condemned the behavior of the Gamecocks who channeled Ron Artest against Clemson.'' Evan Thomas of Newsweek wrote that the presidential aide Karen Hughes ''had a knack for parroting Bush's tone and voice, for 'channeling' him.'' Time noted that in a costume contest, ''the weatherman Al Roker channeled a pre-diet Oprah Winfrey.'' And coming back to film criticism, it was Oprah who hailed the actor Jamie Foxx in the movie ''Ray'' with ''I swear he channeled Ray Charles.'' ''My understanding of that use of channel,'' writes Tony Scott in response to my query, ''which is based more on vague intuitions than on hard philological data, is that it has been employed by spiritualists who claim to communicate with the dead. When they go into a trance and speak in the voice of a departed spirit, they are said to be 'channeling' that spirit, which is what I said Almodovar was doing with the shades of Fassbinder and Sirk.'' He used it in conversation; ''because of its connotation of superstitious hocus-pocus, I don't think I would use it as readily in writing.'' The growing popularity of the spirtualist sense of the verb has spilled over into the general sense of ''convey, transmit, direct toward a center,'' extended to ''serve as an intermediary.'' In U.S. News and World Report, Kenneth Walsh wrote about the swift Cabinet changes made by President Bush, ''He is consolidating power at the White House, channeling ever more influence to Vice President Dick Cheney, his closest confidant, and counselor Karl Rove.'' In the same sense, Charles Duelfer, consultant to the C.I.A., told the Senate, ''Saddam channeled some of the best and brightest Iraqi minds and a substantial portion of Iraq's wealth toward his W.M.D. program.'' The hot new word is rooted in the Latin canalis, ''pipe, groove, channel,'' which led to the Old French chanel, giving it that nice aroma today. STRAIT SCOOP In an article titled ''Bush Administration's Biblical Exodus,'' I wrote that I had long tried to keep the departing Secretary of State, Colin Powell, ''on the grammatical strait and narrow.'' ''Straight and narrow, surely,'' e-mailed Lorcan Folan. ''A strait, being narrow, makes 'narrow' redundant.'' Others were suspicious of a trick. ''I wouldn't put it past you,'' wrote Bruce Drysdale, a copy editor of The Tacoma News Tribune, in Washington, ''to be intentionally (with a sly smile on your face) mixing words. . . . Did you mean to write 'strait and narrow'? (After all, the entire lede revolves around butchered words.) It's that way on the wire, with no cq or sic anywhere. . . . I feel compeled to ask you to cq it -- or correct it.'' (In journalese, CQ, usually in caps, means ''print as is; it's not a mistake,'' and its origin is a mystery.) [Sic] is Latin for ''thus; so'' and means ''I'm not correcting his mistake,'' and I did not use it after the friendly copy editor's misspelling of compelled, above, because I'm a softie.) But a few correspondents, such as Walter Naumer, got my drift: ''May I thank you for the correct quote of Jesus' admonition. Strait it is.'' In the 1611 King James Version of Matthew 7:13-14, following the Golden Rule, Jesus says, ''Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.'' That word, and its spelling, was picked up by John Bunyan in his 1678 ''Pilgrim's Progress,'' as Goodwill warns Christian to avoid the ''crooked and wide; and thus thou mayst distinguish the right from the wrong: the right only being strait and narrow.'' The poet William Ernest Henley, in his ''Invictus,'' played off this with, ''It matters not how strait the gate . . . I am the master of my fate.'' I immediately went to the delicious www.testycopyeditors.org to see if anybody took the bait. Sure enough, under the heading ''Am I ready for a 'straight' jacket?'' there were complaints about my strait along with the warning: ''It's a trap!'' Straight means ''unbending; without curves.'' Strait means ''narrow'' -- used mostly today to describe tight space, as in the Straits of Gibraltar -- and thus makes its placement next to that word seemingly redundant. Standing alone, strait, meaning ''narrow,'' is archaic if not obsolete, and the modern spelling is straight. But -- and here's what I was getting at in consciously using the old spelling -- when used in the phrase with ''narrow,'' the phrase's meaning is ''a morally upright, ethically unwavering and law-abiding way of life, sometimes derogated as merely 'conventional.''' http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/magazine/19ONLANGUAGE.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 25 15:16:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 10:16:02 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Anthropologists Act to Revoke 1919 Censure of Franz Boas Message-ID: Anthropologists Act to Revoke 1919 Censure of Franz Boas, a Key Figure in the Field News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 4.12.17 (note date) http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2004/12/2004121701n.htm [45]By DAVID GLENN The American Anthropological Association moved on Thursday to right an 85-year-old wrong done to a pioneer in the field and a founder of the association. At its annual meeting, the group voted to rescind its censure of Franz Boas. The controversy dates from December 1919 when, amid a bitter dispute about patriotism, espionage, and scientific ethics, the group's governing council censured Boas, then a professor at Columbia University and probably the country's best-known scholarly anthropologist. He had been among the association's founders, in 1903. But in the aftermath of World War I, he angered many of his peers by making sharp-tongued criticisms of anthropologists who had covertly served as U.S. spies in Latin America. Now the association would like to make posthumous amends. On Thursday afternoon, scholars attending its conference here provisionally voted to renounce the 1919 censure. In a nonbinding 59-to-0 vote, they approved a resolution that removes the censure and affirms that it is "immoral for scientists to use their professional identity as cover for governmental spying activities." "This is an issue that has to be revived from generation to generation," Leni M. Silverstein, one of the resolution's authors, said in an interview on Wednesday. Ms. Silverstein, a visiting scholar at Northwestern University, pointed out that similar debates arose during the Vietnam War and are likely to arise again in relation to the conflicts in Iraq and Central Asia. (The association's 1970 meeting was riven by allegations that American anthropologists had secretly provided guidance to U.S. military operatives in Thailand.) Thursday's vote was only advisory because the business meeting lacked a quorum. It is likely that the association's executive board will put the question to the entire membership in a mail ballot next year. The resolution is expected to win by a comfortable margin. The immediate cause of Boas's censure was a letter that he published in the December 20, 1919, issue of The Nation. In his letter he announced that he had learned that "a number of men who follow science as their profession, men whom I refuse to designate any longer as scientists, have prostituted science by using it as a cover for their activities as spies." Boas did not name names, but among the small circle of American anthropologists it was clear that he was referring to an espionage ring organized in 1917 by Sylvanus G. Morley, a leading Maya scholar who was then affiliated with Harvard University's Peabody Museum. The ring's primary task was to search for reputed German submarine bases in Mexico and Central America, but it also developed hundreds of pages of intelligence on Mexican political figures and German immigrants in the region. On December 30, two weeks after Boas's letter appeared, the association's council -- meeting, as it happened, in the Peabody Museum -- voted, 20 to 10, to censure him. Among the complaints raised at the meeting was that Boas had endangered field researchers around the world by revealing that some of them worked as spies. That particular allegation enraged Boas, who believed that it was spies like Morley and his colleagues, not their critics, who were actually casting a shadow on field researchers. In an interview on Wednesday, David H. Price, an associate professor of anthropology at St. Martin's College, said two distinct but overlapping questions are at stake here. The first is whether anthropologists should ever use their scholarly credentials as cover for covert espionage. That question, Mr. Price believes, is clear-cut: It should never be done. The second question, Mr. Price said, is whether anthropologists should ever offer their expertise, even openly and transparently, on behalf of a war effort. Mr. Price is writing a book on the roles played by American anthropologists during World War II, and he said that this question is much more complex. Even on behalf of a war widely regarded as just, Mr. Price said, anthropologists should think very carefully about the ethical implications of working with government agencies. At least one anthropologist who had conducted fieldwork in Japan in the 1920s, for example, later offered his insights on Japanese society to U.S. military planners. The war against Japanese imperialism may have been justified, Mr. Price said, but that scholar's informants of the 1920s did not invite him into their homes with the expectation that he would be gathering information about how to kill them more efficiently 20 years later. Mr. Price said that he was pleased by the resolution to renounce Boas's censure, but he also hopes that the association will take up the question of espionage in a more direct, less symbolic way. The group could strengthen its ethical regulations against espionage, he said. "I've done fieldwork in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East," Mr. Price said. "And people often ask me who I'm really working for. I would like to be able to tell them that not only am I not a spy, but that it would be against my organization's principles for me to be a spy." Some historians have suggested that the censure of Boas was only nominally about his letter to The Nation. In a 1968 essay, George W. Stocking Jr. of the University of Chicago argued that the censure should be understood as the product of a decades-long dispute between physical anthropologists and Boas's subfield of cultural anthropology. In 1919 that quarrel was especially heated. Baldly racist biological anthropologists -- including Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916) -- then sat on the National Research Council's Committee on Anthropology, and they regarded themselves as bitter enemies of Boas and his relatively left-wing disciples. There may also have been a degree of anti-German prejudice at work. Boas was a German immigrant, and several of the 10 scholars who voted against his censure in 1919 were of German and/or Jewish ancestry. The 20 scholars who voted for the censure, by contrast, included some with close ties to Grant's "Galton Society," a eugenicist organization whose membership was restricted to "native Americans." But the picture was actually more complicated, and morally ambiguous, than that, according to David L. Browman, a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Mr. Browman, who is skeptical of the effort to "uncensure" Boas, suggests, in a letter to be published in a forthcoming issue of Anthropology News, that in 1919 Boas was skillfully jockeying to win research funds for his department at Columbia. Boas actually knew of 10 anthropologists who had acted as World War I spies, not just the 4 he mentioned in his Nation letter, Mr. Browman alleges. Moreover, Mr. Browman says, Boas had known of the spying since 1917 but had chosen not to make a fuss until it served his political purposes. Mr. Browman concludes by pointing out that Boas remained an important leader of the association for many years after 1919, and yet his peers did not choose to renounce the censure. "They understood the real issues involved," he writes. "Far be it for us, nearly a century later ... to rewrite history to suit our own current political biases." Most members of the group, however, appear to be pleased with the effort to rehabilitate Boas. "Many people in the association feel that the reasons Boas spoke out are reasons they might want to speak out about contemporary issues," said Regna Darnell, a professor of anthropology at the University of Western Ontario and the author of a book about Boas, in an interview on Tuesday. "Therefore we should go back and look at the political activism of our founders," she said. "There's a tradition of courage." _________________________________________________________________ Background article from The Chronicle: * [53]Recognition for a World War I Archeologist-Spy (4/11/2003) References 45. mailto:david.glenn at chronicle.com 53. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i31/31a03001.htm E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles. From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 25 15:18:13 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 10:18:13 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] National Press Club Newsmaker Luncheon with Brian Lamb Message-ID: National Press Club Newsmaker Luncheon with Brian Lamb, President and Founder of C-Span December 6, 2004 Monday Moderator: SHEILA CHERRY PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL PRESS CLUB LOCATION: THE NATIONAL PRESS CLUB, WASHINGTON, D.C. ???MS. CHERRY: Good afternoon, and welcome to the National Press Club. My name is Sheila Cherry. I'm a reporter with the Bureau of National Affairs and president of the National Press Club. ???I'd like to welcome club members and their guests in the audience today, as well as those of you watching on C-SPAN or listening to this program on National Public Radio. Please hold your applause during the speech so that we have time for as many questions as possible. And for our broadcast audience, I'd like to explain that if you hear applause, it may be from the guests and members of the general public who sometimes attend our luncheons. ???The video archive of today's luncheon is provided by ConnectLive and is available to members only through the National Press Club website at www.press.org. For more information about joining the National Press Club, please contact us at 202-662-7511. Press Club members may also access transcripts from our website, and non-members may purchase luncheon transcripts, audio and video tapes by calling 1- 888-343-1940. ???Before introducing our head table, I would like to remind our members of some upcoming speakers. ???On December 14th, David Eisner, CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service, will be here to discuss "National Service at 10 Years: Lessons Learned and Future Directions." On Wednesday, January 12th, Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts will be here. And on February 4th, in 2005, Hank McKinnell, chairman and CEO of Pfizer, Incorporated, will be our speaker. ???If you have any questions for our speaker, please write them on the cards provided at your table and pass them up to me. I will ask as many as time permits. ???I'd now like to introduce our head table guests and ask them to stand briefly when their names are called. Please hold your applause until all head table guests have been introduced. And I will tell you, today our head table is primarily the officers and governors of the National Press Club Board. ???First is Governor Mark Hamrick of the Associated Press Broadcast; Jonathan Salant, reporter for Bloomberg News and National Press Club treasurer; Susan Swain, executive vice president and co-chief operating officer, C-SPAN, and a guest of our speaker; Sylvia Smith, bureau chief for the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, and secretary of the National Press Club; Steve Janger, president and CEO of the Close Up Foundation, and a guest of our speaker; Clayton Boyce, a former National Press Club president, and the vice chair of the National Press Club Speakers Committee. Skipping over our speaker momentarily, Doris Margolis, president of Editorial Associates, and the National Press Club Speakers Committee member who arranged today's luncheon. Thank you, Doris. Rob Kennedy, executive vice president and co-chief operating officer for C-SPAN, and a guest of our speaker; Rick Dunham, White House correspondent for Business Week Magazine, and vice president of the National Press Club; Governor John Gallagher, associate editor for Traffic World Magazine; Governor Alison Bethel, Washington bureau chief for The Detroit News; and Governor Gerry Bastarache, a former naval officer and a member of the National Press Club Board of Governors. Thank you. (Applause.) ???Our speaker today is the founder, chairman and CEO of C-SPAN. He has done for journalism, through his vision and his allegiance to its highest ideals, what he's done is nothing short of revolutionary. He has transformed the face of modern-day journalism, and we are at his debt. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of C-SPAN, the acronym for Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network. Brian Lamb has been its leader and its guiding light ever since its creation in 1979. Officers and governors of the National Press Club have gathered today at our head table to celebrate this very meaningful anniversary, and especially to pay homage to the remarkable man who made it happen. ???We have also mounted a commemorative exhibit in the National Press Club lobby showcasing the first 25 years of C-SPAN's bountiful gifts to the American public. ???The concept of a public affairs network that provides in-depth coverage of national and international issues was a natural for Mr. Lamb, who has been both a journalist and a political press secretary. Interested in broadcasting from childhood, he worked at Indiana radio and TV stations while attending high school and college, spinning records, selling ads, and eventually hosting the locally popular, "Dance Date" TV program. (Laughter, applause.) ???After graduating from Purdue University, Mr. Lamb joined the Navy. His tour included White House duty in the Johnson administration, and a stint at the Pentagon Public Affairs Office during the Vietnam War. He later worked as a freelance reporter for UPI, a Senate press secretary, and a White House telecommunications policy staffer. In 1974, he began publishing a bi-weekly newsletter called "The Media Report." He also covered communications issues as Washington bureau chief for Cable Vision Magazine. It was from this vantage point that the idea of a public affairs network delivered by satellite began to take shape. ???His work for the Navy and the White House had convinced him that there was a significant information gap between the government and the American public with the media serving as the transmitter of this limited communication. The 1970s deregulation of satellite and cable television industry offered him an opportunity to rectify this situation. With the financial support of cable systems operators, Mr. Lamb succeeded in negotiating the right to cable-cast live coverage of the sessions of the U.S. House and Senate. Organizing C-SPAN as a not-for-profit company, the group built one of Washington's first satellite uplinks just in time to deliver the first televised session of the United House of Representatives to 3.5 million cable households on March 19, 1979. And the rest, as they say, is history. ???Today, C-SPAN employees 275 people, and offers three 24-hour television networks: C-SPAN, C-SPAN2, and C-SPAN3. C-SPAN is the flagship network and provides a gavel-to-gavel coverage of the U.S. House of Representatives. It also offers coverage of daily political events from Washington, including congressional hearings, White House briefings, news conferences, policy seminars, and more. C-SPAN2 was created in 1986 to cover U.S. Senate proceedings. On weekends, C- SPAN2 features Book TV -- 48 hours of non-fiction book programming from 8:00 a.m. on Saturday through 8:00 a.m. on Monday. C-SPAN3 was launched on a 24-hour basis in January, 2001, and is available to systems offering digital cable packages. ???C-SPAN also carries our National Press Club speakers luncheons, such as the one today, plus, many of our club newsmaker programs and other events. ???C-SPAN has been an extensive presence on the Internet that can be accessed at www.c-span.org. In addition, C-SPAN programs WCSP, an FM radio station serving the Washington-Baltimore area, and nationally on satellite radio. ???While we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the birth of C-SPAN, we also note another milestone that occurred yesterday -- the 800th Booknotes program, created and hosted by Mr. Lamb since its founding in 1989. Sadly for its many, many fans, yesterday's was the last installment in that popular series. I know our audience will want the inside scoop here, and I'm sure Mr. Lamb will not disappoint. ???So I am pleased to turn the microphone over to the gentleman who has most inspired that phrase from incoming callers, "Thank you, C- SPAN." ???Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the officers and governors of the National Press Club, I present Brian Lamb, chairman and CEO of C- SPAN. (Applause.) ???MR. LAMB: Thank you very much, Sheila. I'm glad to be here, especially to commemorate your year, which is about over, and Rick Gunner (sp) if he gets elected -- there's nobody opposed to him -- as the new president. God, I hope he gets elected after -- with that kind of a slate. (Laughter.) He goes back with us to the very early days when he used to be a guest on our network, which is fun to have him rise to this position. ???Clayton, who used to be the president, we used to see him on C- SPAN all the time, just handed me the first question I'm supposed to answer. ??? It's a brilliant question. "How did you come up with the name for C- SPAN3? " (Laughter.) I want to put all this into perspective for you. I came down the short ride in a cab, and a very nice cab driver. As we're riding down here, about half-way down, he said -- he said, "It's been about a year since I had a VIP in my cab." And I said, "When was the last VIP?" He said, "Well, I have one right now." And I said, "Who do you think I am?" (Laughter.) They always get it wrong. And he said, "Well, I can't -- I can't remember the name." He says, "Is it Daschle?" (Laughter.) That's brand new. I've never heard that one before. (Laughter.) I said, "No, but if it was par for the course, it would be, Are you Senator --" No, he said to me, he said, "You know, I see you giving speeches all the time in the Senate." (Laughter.) So I -- I mean, I've told this story so many times. It still happens. "No, I'm not Senator John McCain." (Laughter.) They all think that. ???It's particularly, I think, important for everybody to know a couple things about the National Press Club, because we have been here -- this is our 1,670th luncheon that we're covering today. We've covered every one since January the 2nd, 1980, Paul Volcker. And we have no contract with the Press Club. We have really no conversation with the Press Club. They do their thing, and we do ours. And I think people outside of Washington don't understand how it works. They have a committee that chooses speakers. And as a matter of fact, when they called me about three or four months ago and said they'd like to have me come do this, I kept saying no. And I finally asked Carol Toohey (sp), who I work with, I said, "Carol, tell those nice folks down there, I don't have anything to say." (Laughter.) And the word came back as, "We don't care whether you have anything to say or not." (Laughter.) ???So if this thing is a bust today, I am really sorry. (Laughter.) ???I want to spend a little time today talking about people. I did this -- I was here eight years ago, January 6th. And I talked a lot about my chairman of my board then, the people who have really made a difference in making this work from the cable television industry who started with us from the very beginning. But I left out a lot of people, because I think the great story about C-SPAN is that it's not me. I've loved what I've done. I've gotten an enormous amount of attention. I've begged reporters, please talk about some of these other people, because that's what the story's about. It's about a lot of people building something, almost like a Legos thing. I mean, this thing came together, it evolved, it was built step by step. And along the way, there were people that you've never heard of that, had they not been there, we wouldn't be here today. ???I'm going to go back for a little bit, way back, to the 1970s, and the revolution in communications started in 1975, when Home Box Office went up on the satellite. And where we are today almost 30 years later is about where I thought we'd be. We're a little bit behind. I thought it would be just a little farther along, but not much farther along. And I think that's the toughest thing for people in the news business to understand, especially in the television news business, people I've known for years. But it's painful for them, especially the old-timers. I read in USA Today a quote this morning by Andy Rooney, and I'm just going to read it: Andy Rooney says, "CBS Evening News has been an important factor in life in these United States. There is no sense in having a democracy unless you have an informed electorate. The evening news on the three networks has been a vital element in the education of the American public. As the evening news diminishes, the information that the public has to make intelligent decisions in diminished." ???Yes, and a big no. When he says that CBS News being watched less and less diminishes the information flow for the American people, I think he misses a tremendous amount of stuff that's happened in the last 25 years. ???Today, we have 23 C-SPAN employees in the audience that are participating in what we call our C-SPAN Week, where we bring them together for a week, and we just talk about the background. Now, this is a two-fer today for me. Normally, I speak to these folks, and give them the so-called big picture, or really, it's "bring the geezer in, and let him talk about the past so we can start from the beginning." (Laughter.) "We'll get rid of him, and then go on with today." ???But those 23 folks are in the audience, and so I'm going to give you a little bit of the same stuff that I give our C-SPAN Week people, because I think it's really important for people to know it. ???If you go back to about 1974, I got out of the government. I was in the Office of Telecommunications Policy. I worked for a terrific guy named Clay Whitehead. I learned a tremendous amount from those folks, and I was out on my own, writing a newsletter about the media. And I needed work, but more than anything else, I wanted to start something that would add to the information flow in the United States. I had no money. I didn't have a sophisticated plan. And I went to the National Cable Television Association meeting in New Orleans by myself and found myself at a luncheon just like this. Senator Hathaway of Maine was speaking. And I found it -- I just happened on a chair -- there were a couple of very attractive young ladies sitting there, and I sat between them. (Laughter.) On one side, was Judy Lockland (sp) and on the other side was Barbara Reuger (sp). And they said, what are you doing here? And I told them my story. And they didn't say much, and we had a nice conversation, and they said, well, if you're every in Denver, let us know. The magazine was based in Denver. ???A couple months later, I went to Denver to visit my friend, Paul Fitzpatrick, and I called Barbara Reuger, and I said, "I'm here. I'd like to come over and see your magazine operation." I arrived at the magazine. Totally unbeknownst to me, Barbara said, "How would you like to be our Washington bureau chief? We 'll pay you a thousand dollars a month. You can write a column. You can do some interviewing." And I was an amateur photographer; I could do a little bit of that. And she knew what I wanted to do, and she said, "You know, we'll put your picture in the magazine, and every week, the industry will start to get to know who you are. And then if you really have a good idea, some day, you can present it to them." ???It never occurred to me. I went to work for them. It lasted about eight months. I needed more money. I needed more opportunities to build this thing. The fellow that ran the company called me in one day, and he said, "We just can 't afford you." It wasn't a lot of money. I just needed -- $1,000 a month isn 't exactly making a lot of money. He said, "We can't afford you, and really, we don't think your idea makes a lot of sense. And so, if you want to do this, you better think about some other place." ???So I just said, you know, it's probably time for me to go. Thanks for what you did. Have a nice life. I walked out the door. And the next day, I got a call from somebody by the name of Bob Tisch (sp). Not the Bob Tisch (sp) you might be thinking of. Not the Bob Tisch (sp) of New York. The Bob Tisch (sp) of Denver Colorado. Bob called me up, and he said, "I've heard what you want. I'll pay you what you need to work for, and I will do what I can to help you build this idea. And we want to put you on the payroll and put you in Washington as -- to work with Pat Gooshman (sp) out there as a national editor." ???I went to work for Bob. The first think that impressed me was the first paycheck came overnight mail to my home. That'd never happened to me before. (Laughter.) But Bob said to me -- I said, "Here's what I want to do," and he said, "I'll tell you what. I'm going to get on the phone. I'm going to call 15 cable television executives, and I'm going to ask them for a thousand dollars. And with that $15,000, we'll go out and buy a camera and a tape recorder and we 'll promise them only one thing: an interview with some figure from their cable television district that they can run on their local access." ???So, Pat Gooshman (sp) and I went all over Capitol Hill. We sat down with members of the House and Senate. One of the first ones was Andrew Young of Georgia. Another one was Jack Danforth from Missouri, and lots of others. We shipped the tapes to their district. They ran the tape, and that was real beginning of C-SPAN. Nobody asked about content. Nobody told me what to ask. Nobody cared about that. These 15 people ended up supporting the very, very beginning. ???Once we started in 1979, we had no cameras except that little camera, which we couldn't use. We flipped the switch on the House of Representatives. ??? And a young fellow came to see me by the name of Tom Gerrard (sp). Tom Gerrard (sp) worked for Steve Janger, who's sitting here at the dais. He was a consultant. He was an old friend of mine. Unfortunately this year he passed away at a young age of 58. He said that Steve is interested in figuring out some way to get the kids that they bring to Washington on television, having that experience. And I said I don't have any cameras, I don't have any microphones, I haven't got anything, I haven't got any money. (Laughter.) Before it was over, Steve agreed to buy two RCA TK-76 cameras and a tape recorder for $162,000. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. (Laughter.) And the only deal was they would own them, you could use them -- C- SPAN could use them -- and we would cover about four events every week with high school students. ???That was the beginning of us covering hearings. That was the beginning of us covering not the Press Club because Forrest Boyd's little camera came up here every week to do that, but we started our first-ever call-in show and the first-ever national television call-in show right over there in the back room with those two cameras on October the 7th, 1980. We've been doing it every since, and we do three hours of calls every day, seven days a week. ???Now I'm going to do something that I've wanted to do for a long time. I'm going to talk about Steve Janger. ???(To Mr. Janger.) Put your hand up, Steve. Let everybody know who you are. ???This man is retiring next year after an incredible 35 years of bringing high school students and teachers to this town for their first-ever one-week experience in civics in this town. He is not getting -- has not gotten the slightest bit of needed credit for what he has done. He's never asked for it. But listen to this. We hear all the things that people do for others. Listen to this. ???Since 1971, when he started his company with six people, he has brought to this town 620,000 young people in high school, including 75,000 teachers. (Applause.) And 180,000 of those students came on fellowships; they didn't have to pay for the trip. The most important part about this is, and we see a lot of this around town, I would have been able to come on his program because I was not a great student, I was not an elite student -- I didn't make those As, wasn 't the valedictorian of the class. And that's the way Steve set up his organization; he wanted people to be able to come who were interested and maybe weren't the A-students to have the experience. ???I've never heard of anybody in this country doing more for civic education than Steve Janger and his people. Some of them are here. Tom Milewski I see, Kathy McNamara and others are here today that work for that great organization. ???And since then, we've had a relationship. Eventually we got those cameras. (Laughter.) They were ours. ???Today we own about a hundred cameras. One of them is permanently on the back wall. The way this thing has gone over the years, the way it's moved is that now our director sits at C-SPAN at 400 North Capitol Street. All they have to do is when the lights come on is -- (makes noise). The camera is already on. They sit there and they move a little joystick and they can do all the stuff here in this room from 400 North Capitol Street, and that's one of the big changes that's happened in the last 25 years. ???You know, the other thing is we cover a lot of events from this National Press Club. I've asked Robert Browning, who is the director of our archive out in Indiana, how many times -- since '87 the archive's been there. We've covered 2,730 Press Club events over those years. Our cameras are down here all the time. ???Some of the other folks that I want to talk about are people in our industry because the one thing that has made C-SPAN a success is around the country individuals in these communities say put C-SPAN1 on, put C-SPAN2 on, and, Clayton, even C-SPAN3. (Scattered laughter.) And that's the part you don't see because we don't make a dime for anybody. We don't have any stock. Nobody owns it. It's guided by the cable television industry that started it. And the strength of it comes from people, American citizens, who believe that this openness in communications is absolutely necessary for a society. ???That's -- when I hear what Andy Rooney is saying, I almost want to say, hey, Andy, what about C-SPAN1, 2 and 3, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, Discovery, Arts and Entertainment? Go down the list of all of these. Fox News, it doesn't matter. A tremendous amount of additional material. Even though people get upset with some of the stuff these networks do, there is a tremendous amount that they do that is incredibly positive, interesting, and I know everybody in this room finds themselves watching it. You might be criticizing it, but that's television. Television is criticized all the time and always will be because it 's in the home. ???I didn't experience -- I can show you how tough it is to sell something like C-SPAN. All of us have tried to sell it. Back in about 1983 or (198)4, I was frustrated because The Washington Post wouldn't carry our listings. And so I called -- one day I was talking to Bob Rosencrans, who was our first-ever cable operator to give me a check for $25,000 to start it. And I said, you know, "Bob, The Washington Post won't even carry our listings down here. How do you expect anybody to know we're even around?" ???He said, "Well, I'm a personal acquaintance of Katherine Graham. I'll call her. We'll set up a meeting. We'll go in and talk to her." ???And my -- Bob's a really nice guy, but the last thing I expected Katherine Graham to do is to pick up the phone and say put C-SPAN's listings in the paper. It just didn't work that way. But I said, "If you want me to meet with her, I'd be glad to." ???So he came down here. We were having a meeting over at her office and we went into The Washington Post. And as we came in, we said -- you know, Bob Rosencrans said, "I'm here to see Katherine Graham, an appointment at noon." ???And the word came down from up top, "Katherine Graham is not here. She expected to meet you in New York at the Newsweek office." (Laughter.) ???So Bob and I looked at each other, I mean, and he said, "Are you game?" ???I said, "Sure." ???He said, "Let's go." (Laughter.) ???So we went out to the airport, got on an airplane, flew to New York, got there about 1:30, something like that. Mrs. Graham graciously brought us into her office. And as I walked in the door, she didn't pay a whole lot of attention to me. I'm used to that, so it didn't surprise me. She was glad to see Bob Rosencrans, and they sat down. And I sat over in a chair and they sat on the couch, and she basically didn't look at me for 30 minutes. (Scattered laughter.) ???And she said, "Bob, why can't I get my company into cable television? My people won't let me buy cable systems." And I'm sitting there going, this is amazing. This is one of the most powerful women in the world and she's saying her people won't let her into cable television. ???Well, Bob was giving her advice. Finally she turned to me and she said, "Now, who are you again?" (Laughter.) And I told her who I was. And she said, "Now, what do you do?" And she said, "What is that?" ???And I realize that in 1983 or (198)4, Katherine Graham had no idea what C-SPAN was, but I thought a little bit longer and realized that there was no cable in Washington. It didn't happen in her home, so why should she know what we are? Well, I explained it to her and told her how frustrated we were with the listings, and she nodded and thanked me and everything else. Well, here we are 20 years later; The Washington Post still doesn't list C-SPAN. (Laughter.) ???However, Mrs. Graham's company bought cable television. They own close to a million subscribers. Tom Might is on our board of directors. They have 100 percent carriage of C-SPAN. And they have got these little systems all over the United States and almost 80 percent of coverage of C-SPAN2. And he has systematically been putting -- it's actually more than that; it's about 88 percent -- C- SPAN2 on all the systems. ???And it's just always interesting to me how hard a sell this is based on the fact that good people don't understand it. They don't understand -- for instance, I'll tell you right now a lot of people in the audience are saying how do you get your money? We had Tom Wolfe on a program yesterday for three hours and I was fortunate enough to host it. And first thing he said to me, he says "How does this work? Explain to me. How do you get your money?" ???We don't have any advertising. We don't have ratings. We don't have personalities. We get our money simply this way: we get a nickel every month from every customer that sees C-SPAN in their home. Our budget for a year is somewhere around $45 million. Our industry's been very generous with us. We have plenty of money to do our job. We don't need a whole lot more than that to do our job. We have not 275 employees; we're down to 256 and doing quite well with 256 employees. It's a simple place with a simple mission: let the American people have the opportunity to watch public events in their entirety and make up their own mind. It works. ??? And it works because of Bob Tisch (sp) and Barbara Reuger (sp) and Steven Janger and a guy named Bill Bresnan. ???Bill Bresnan is 71 years old, I think, today. Happy Birthday, Bill, if you 're out there. One of the great people ever in our industry. I met him 30 years ago. And over the years -- he used to run Teleprompter, one of the biggest, and then he got out. And then he bought cable up in the upper part of Michigan, and then he got out. And now he's back. ???And this time, though, he did serious civic work for this network and this country. He bought systems out in Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and Montana. And he called me the day after he bought them and he said -- because it was a disaster area for us. The previous owners in many of those areas didn't have the same civic responsibility. And he said, I'm going to put C-SPAN1 and 2 and 3 on all those systems out there in those four states. And today we're 100 percent C-SPAN. We're in the 90 percentile for C-SPAN2, and he just announced nine systems will have C-SPAN3. That's all because one guy who lives up in Westchester County and has been a committed civics and government- interested individual for all these years made the difference. ???So as I stand here -- and I'm going to open this up to questions, because I could go on for a long time -- as I stand here, we're pretty lucky -- and as we go through the questions, I'll get into some of the other things -- we're pretty lucky that here we are 25 years later, we're in business, we're at our 1,670th Press Club luncheon -- which is one of my favorite things. ???And I'll give you an example. Ross Perot has spoken here nine times. He started in 1970. He last spoke, I think, in 1998. When he went on the Larry King show and everybody went crazy, back before the '92 election, anybody that ever watched C-SPAN and anybody that was from the Press Club knew that wasn't the first time he was introduced to America. We knew because, like the Press Club, we sell tapes of these occasions, and it still is today the largest-selling tape ever in the history of the Press Club, Ross Perot. It was not a surprise to us when he ended up on that show. We knew that there was something about him that was connecting. And it's hard to get through that glass tube back there. There was something that was connecting. ???So as I say as I stand here on this 25th anniversary, I want to show you two things. This is how far it's all come. This is brand new. It's called MyFi. This is brand new. It just came out on December the 1st. I can walk out of this building, plug this into my ear, anywhere in the United States this is all I need to listen to C- SPAN Radio. It comes off of XM Radio. All 130 channels. ???And we have one other little thing that is so clever. Where is that, Robert? Have you got it yet? When you get it, we'll come back to you. ???It' changed so dramatically over the years. And there are a lot of other things we can talk about, but this is the latest, your ability -- and our industry -- and it's easy for me to say this -- our industry has led us to basically provide the C-SPAN services to all the competitors -- to the satellite folks, 30 percent of our businesses now. ???Here it is. (The sound from a C-SPAN broadcast is heard.) That's C-SPAN2, and that's a phone. You can watch it anywhere you want to go on Sprint. You can call up C-SPAN1 and C-SPAN 2if you're that connected. Now, that would be what we would call a super-strangely-positioned -- (laughter) -- C-SPAN junkie. But we'll take them any way we can get them. ???Anyway, love to take your questions. Thanks for having me. (Applause.) ???MS. CHERRY: Thank you, Mr. Lamb. ???The first question is, what do you see as the future of public- interest programming? ???MR. LAMB: Well, one of the difficulties is that when people have a clicker and 330 channels choice, and all the new technologies, and they don't choose, for instance, the evening news shows, it's tough on the folks that work in journalism, but it's freedom. And it's up to us to provide the best public-service programming we can. And we have a model, an economic model, and you can't tell, might last longer than the others because we don't have to earn, every quarter, a significant amount of additional money for anybody. We have to do our job, stay within our budget. ???And that provides us with an opportunity that the others don't have. I wouldn't want the pressures that are on at NBC, ABC and CBS. And the market -- the Wall Street requirements are going to drive it more than anything else. So with this thing called the Internet and lots of other technologies that are going to come along we don't even know about, public-service programming is going to be there. Whether or not the American people choose to watch it is the bigger question, it seems to me. ???MS. CHERRY: That said, do you think network news is an endangered species? if so, what are the major contributors to that evolution? ???MR. LAMB: Well, if the network news folks don't change their economic model, it could be an endangered species. But I think, again, business people have a way of finding a market, and if there is a marketplace out there for a news show, they'll figure out a way to do it. The trouble we have now are a lot of older folks in our business who are in love with the romance of 30 years ago. I understand it. I'm from that era. I understand how strongly they feel about it. But they defined what they thought was network news and what was important for people to see. ???The public now is defining what they want. And that's tough on people who have created something. I mean, someday I may be somewhere saying, "Well, C-SPAN was a great idea or a while, but people proved they didn't care about this stuff and we're no longer in business." I think if you protest too long that you're the only way that people can get information, it makes it even tougher when people being to choose other places to go. ???MS. CHERRY: Have the call-in questions that you receive changed in quality or tone in the past 25 years? ???MR. LAMB: There's been a seismic shift in the political discourse in this country in the last 25 years, primarily because of all the new outlets. If you had watched yesterday afternoon for three hours with Tom Wolfe, your reaction would be I can't imagine a more intelligence audience asking more interesting questions. In the morning between 7:00 and 8:00 seven days a week on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal," we have an open forum where the public can call up and say almost anything. And we get almost anything. (Laughter.) ???I love it. It's my favorite hour of the day. In spite of the fact that sometimes people say, "Who was that wack job that just called?" the strange thing about it is that "wack job" is behind you at the supermarket. (Laughter.) You're surrounded by people who don't -- you should be -- who don't think and talk and act just like you. And the thing we've done by having this open forum is that we don't take a right or left side; we don't challenge the audience to be thinking like everybody else. And you listen to any of these interesting call-in shows that are on some of the radio networks, they have a point of view. So they either exclude people from calling in who they don't agree with, or if they let them in, they beat the living daylights out of them. And we take a different course. We let people say exactly what they want to say, and sometimes it just doesn't sound like the way you think normal people ought to talk. But let me tell you something. More than once they've been right. (Laughter.) ???MS. CHERRY: How concerned should Americans be about the First Amendment; specifically, as this person puts it, erosions contained in the Patriot Act and the intelligence bill that Congress is finalizing? And another question asks, what is the current state of First Amendment freedoms in our country? Do you think that we are better or worse off than when C-SPAN first started? ???MR. LAMB: I think the First Amendment is in incredibly strong position in this country in spite of what people write and think about. And I don't want to comment on the Patriot Act and all that. It's really easy to get in trouble on that one. ???But here's why I say what I say. We have been through a lot of difficulty since the Vietnam -- Vietnam, that's my era -- since the Iraq war. From the time period before we went to Iraq in March of 2003, all through the voting period, all to now, we have had our phone lines divided. ??? And leading up to that war, we had people vociferously against the war calling in every other call, screaming they were against the war, critical of George Bush, saying very strong things about the president of the United States; and then the next call would come in very much for him. Never once has anybody called us and said, "You can't do that"; suggested that the criticism was too harsh. ???And if your First Amendment's in trouble, the first thing you have happen is somebody makes a visit to your office and says, you know, that's entirely too harsh. I think the biggest problem you have is that people -- and it also, by the way, works when you -- and there's nothing wrong with this because I think it's very healthy, when you start to suggest the First Amendment's in trouble. I wouldn't want to have a vote on the part of the public. The good news is we do not have to have a vote on the part of the public because the First Amendment is a very -- but you know, if we had a debate for a year, I guarantee you that at the end of that year, this public would vote for it because they would start talking about freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of the press. And most people forget it; they think it's only freedom of the press. The press is as free today as it wants to be. I've never seen any indication whatsoever that we were in any kind of trouble. And people say stronger things on C-SPAN than I've heard anywhere else in the media. ???MS. CHERRY: Now that Booknotes have come to an end, is there an author that you wish that you had interviewed? Who was the most interesting person you have interviewed? And how do you prepare for an interview? Do you read the author's latest book? Do you read what others have said about the author? Put differently, how do you go about getting into his or her head? ???MR. LAMB: Well, I'm not really particularly interested in getting inside their head. I'm really -- when I interview -- and the best way to prepare for a Booknotes interview -- which there will be no more, but there will be a lot of interviews -- is to just read the book. It's that simple. You don't have to do anything else. The worst thing you can have is somebody prepare questions for you or do research. It's better when you feel what you've read and you have it first-hand, because tucked away, buried in Chapter 7 on page 123 is a nugget that you can't get and some researcher may not notice because it may not be of interest to them. ???I got to share a couple of e-mails with you that I got today. They've been coming in from the day we announced Booknotes was going away, and people say some really interesting things. This is my favorite this morning. It comes from Frank, Frank Arundel (sp) says, "Subject: Adieu." This is short. "I wish you might have ended your series, which I have followed religiously, on a better note. Thank you for your time. Frank." (Laughter.) ???Brad Weiner (sp) of Mt. Kisco, New York, says, "I just read The New York Times" -- there was a story on Saturday. He said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no! I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! What am I supposed to do now?! You're only 62" -- wrong! I'm 63. "You're in your prime. Think of what Beethoven did at your age." (Laughter.) "Okay, he was dead for five years. Bad example!" (Laughter.) "If I was a famous name, I'd do it for nothing. I'd even pay to do it. See what Rather or Brokaw plan. They don't need money. Maybe Hillary Clinton; give her something to do besides run for president. Wait! How about her husband recovering from surgery? It will be perfect. He's a Rhodes scholar. Maybe he wouldn't give an author a chance to speak." ???He goes on. He goes on. That's the kind of -- ???We're going to start a new show. And most people who have heard us say Booknotes is over, haven't listened to what we're doing. And that's our fault because we haven't been very clear. First of all, we ended Booknotes at 15 years and three-quarters because I was just tired of spending 20 hours a week on my own time, mornings and weekends, reading a book. It was just time; I needed that time back. And it had been a great run, but it seemed like a good time to do it. ???We took the same concept -- and no one ever hears this part of it -- and have moved it over to Book TV. It's a little different in the sense that we're asking guest interviewers to interview book authors every week. The first program, which I think will be interesting to watch, and we'll have all kinds of combinations, is Norman Ornstein interviewing Newt Gingrich. Now, they both are at AEI, but it will be very interesting because Norman Ornstein says things that don't track with what Newt Gingrich says. And so it will be fun to watch. ???And there will be all kinds of combinations as we test this thing to see if it's fun. It will be on every Sunday night at 6:00 and at 9:00. And it is exactly the same concept as Booknotes. ???The Sunday night show at 8:00, which I'll host a lot, not every week, is called Q&A. Very, very interesting, well thought-out name for a show. (Laughter.) And the first guest is a man named David Levin (sp) who's 34 years old. He, 10 years ago, started the (KIP ?) Schools. There's one here, there are three in New York, there are 38 in the United States. These are kids age 5 to 8 that they are teaching who are basically from families that don't have a lot of money. And it's an interesting story. I've taped them already. I taped three of them in New York last week. He was the first. The second one is Roger Ailes of Fox News. And the third one is Brian Williams. And the fourth one is Ron Peterson, who runs Johns Hopkins Hospital. And the fifth one is Shirley Ann Jackson, the president of Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute, and I know when I interview her on Friday, she's going to be talking way over my head because it's all about science, and she's a well-known figure in that world. ???So we're going to try to find people and interview them a little bit differently than other places. We have an hour. We want to know more about them and their lives and what they've built. And that will start next Sunday night at 8:00. ???I didn't answer the last one, but I'll let you go ahead and ask another one. ???MS. CHERRY: Well, you did answer one, and that was will there ever be a C-SPAN4. So thank you for that. ???What -- (laughter). What did the media learn from the 2004 elections? Should the news programs and networks do away with exit polls? ???MR. LAMB: The exit poll business is their business. We don't participate in it. It's very expensive. I think it's -- what happened this year kind of speaks for itself. And they're going to fool with it and talk about it, and when all is said and done, they'll do what's in their best interest. We'll live through it as a country. Even with the exit polls mistakes were made in 2000, a lot of people voted -- a lot more people voted this time since I think about 1960. ???I think the media -- and I may even hear some groans on this. I think the media did a great job covering the 2004 elections. Ask yourself this question: What more could they have done? We had thousands of hours with all these characters on our network. They bird-dogged them all over the United States. I would say that in the end, they did come to the debates and those debates made a difference, I think. ???But in the end, you almost have to ask yourself, did the candidates give of themselves? Were they willing to be cross-examined during the process? This is probably the most interesting story of what's happened over the last 25 years, is how people who are in public life have really gamed the television industry, partly because it's our fault and partly because they want to control their image; that's the interesting question, is if you won't open up to questions and won't be cross-examined, and the public doesn't care, then what are you going to do? I think the -- I don't know how you better do it. ???The websites alone, the fabulous amount of information -- you could go on the website and put in a zip code and find out everybody in the neighborhood that gave to a candidate. You could get on every day and find out all 13 or 14 polls that are being conducted around the United States and compare them one against the other. ???You could get on our networks -- and one of the most interesting statistics for me in the entire year was during the Republican and Democratic Conventions -- and we are the largest streamer on the networks of anybody in the business, we stream three networks, you can watch them anywhere in the world -- we had 4,000 people in China who watched the Republican and Democratic Conventions. And it's -- he says 4,000 people out of 1.3 billion -- that's not the issue. We keep hearing that in China you're blocked, you can't get to this information. And it would be really interesting to know who those 4,000 people are. But, you know, we went around -- 20 percent of our streaming on the website came from people who live outside this country. ???So this world is changing phenomenally and quickly, and this whole business of how the campaigns were covered, you can talk about it till you're blue in the face, but I think our industry has done a very poor job in criticizing so strongly, but that's what we do. I mean, we spend more time talking about ourselves than anybody in the world -- the media business. We got people studying from one point of view or the other point of view. In the end, the public will decide who they watch, who they read. ??? It's a marketplace decision. You can't force them to do it. And neither can the Federal Communications Commission or the Congress pass laws that will force people to watch or not watch anything. They may do some damage -- my suspicion on a long-run basis they won't be able to, through the court system -- some damage to the over-the-air licensed television stations and radio stations, but in the end the public will watch what it wants to watch. The genie's out of the bottle. You can't put it back in. The thing that people in this country want more than anything in the world -- and this is true of everybody in the world, and it sounds like a cliche but it's true -- it's freedom and it's choice. (Applause.) ???MS. CHERRY: Should the Supreme Court open its arguments to C- SPAN? (Laughter.) ???MR. LAMB: No. (Laughter.) ???They have not asked me. They doubt if they ever will ask me. Someday the Supreme Court will go on television. The group that's there now won't put it on television. It'll take a new generation. ???And it's always intrigued me as to why they don't want television cameras. One, the oral -- there are only 75 oral arguments a year. Two, most of those decisions are made on briefs, not made on oral argument. Three, they make the decision behind closed doors in a conference back in the back. No one ever sees that. There aren't any minutes of those meetings. And that's where they make the decisions and have their discussion. ???It's the informing function of the Supreme Court on television that matters. And, interesting, Bill Rehnquist has sat down with us four times for one hour each to talk about the court, talk about his books, more than he has anywhere else. We've had nothing but a positive relationship with Chief Justice Rehnquist. Now the other side of that is Antonin Scalia, who, if a camera comes near a room where he is speaking, he'll either order the camera out or he won't talk. Those are the extremes. ???And at some point in this process the Supreme Court will decide that it's better to have the public understand what they do and be able to see all these arguments, and when that comes is anybody's guess. I just hope, for the fun of it, it's in my lifetime. ???MS. CHERRY: Speaking of extremes, can you comment on the jail sentence imposed on Judith Miller, the reporter with The New York Times? ???MR. LAMB: We had Judith Miller on our program on Friday morning and I asked her if she doesn't win this appeal this week on Wednesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals, will she go to jail, and she said yes. It's a bit daunting to think that Judith Miller or Matt Cooper or others will go to jail over this issue. ???I personally think it's outrageous. I think the idea of putting somebody in jail because they won't cough up who their sources are about an article that they haven't written is crazy. I'm talking as a generalist. I don't know the details on it. But even if I did know, I think I would find it to be ridiculous. This country operates on a First Amendment that requires this kind of back and forth. ???The leaking of information in this town is in the interests of people in this country. I used to be one of the great leakers of all time. (Laughter.) And one of the men I leaked to is sitting right over here, the wonderful Dawson B. Tacknell (ph). And we did it, rightly or wrongly, because of the way the whole system works. We have $2.2 trillion of your money being spent by people in this town, and you see how haphazard it can be when you pass bills in the middle of the night and you bring in stacks of the bill that nobody ever reads and it's got something like 11,000 items in there worth 20-some billion dollars, money is being spent. This is the way the system has to work. ???And if Judith Miller and Matt Cooper go to jail, you're -- I think you'll see somewhat of a firestorm in the entire country. They don't realize it now. They might say, yeah, got 'em. Some people on one or the other side might say that's the good thing; we finally put those reporters away. But you know, reporters aren't of any value to anyone until their side's being gored, and then all of a sudden you love the fact that somebody has written an article to expose either the corruptness or the malfeasance or whatever it is. So hold on for dear life, but my guess is that either this court or the next one will throw this thing out. ???MS. CHERRY: Mr. Lamb, as I'll ask our officers and governors to join me at the podium, I'd like to present to you the much-coveted National Press Club mug. (Laughter.) ???MR. LAMB: It's simply gorgeous. (Laughter.) ???MS. CHERRY: (Laughs.) We aim to please. ???And -- everybody's here -- on behalf -- oh, we're supposed to squeeze in closer, I'm told. It's my great honor to give this to you, this token of our appreciation. And it reads: "National Press Club, In Appreciation and Recognition to C-SPAN for 25 Years of Service to the American Public from 1979 to 2004," serving the journalism community -- that's "The National Press Club, Serving the Journalism Community Since 1908." Thank you. (Applause.) ???MR. LAMB: Actually, if we were in the plaque-giving business, we'd turn it right around on the National Press Club. I think if the public understood the value based on the amount of work -- volunteer work that these folks do, of having the ability to have a forum where a human being can stand up and say exactly what they want to say, they would grow to appreciate the value of 1,670 speeches over the last 25 years. It's a very, very important part of what we do, and it made a statement early in our network that we were going to let others decide who was of value and who was of value to be heard. And that works pretty well, except in my case. (Laughter.) ???MS. CHERRY: Thank you. And again, we do appreciate you being here, and also to the members of C-SPAN. And if you would stand up and be recognized, we'd like to thank you for all of your efforts as well. We've got shy C-SPAN people. (Applause.) ???Now for the last question. It is knowing there was once a bar called "Lamb's Place," where did you park the beer truck? (Laughter.) ???MR. LAMB: If you've been around as long as I have, if this isn't Tak Nailes (ph) -- (laughter) -- you got caught, Nail (ph). We parked the beer truck right behind the bus. (Laughter, applause.) ???MS. CHERRY: Thank you so much. ???And I would like to thank National Press Club staff members Melinda Cooke, Jo Anne Booz, and Howard Rothman for arranging today's luncheon. And thanks to the National Press Club library for their research. And with that, ladies and gentlemen -- (sounds gavel) -- we are adjourned. (Applause.) From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 25 15:20:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 10:20:25 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Boston Globe: Weary of the leisure class Message-ID: Weary of the leisure class http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/12/12/weary_of_the_leisure_class?mode=PF What would Thorstein Veblen, who took no prisoners in his 'Theory of the Leisure Class,' make of today's consumer culture? By Matthew Price | December 12, 2004 NEW YORK -- Last Friday, a group of liberal academics and writers gathered amidst Manhattan's holiday shopping frenzy to ponder an urgent question: Would Thorstein Veblen have shopped at Wal-Mart? Actually, the group assembled at the New School for Social Research -- which included Harper's editor Lewis Lapham, political journalist Michael Lind, and sundry Veblen scholars -- convened to debate a more sober matter: whether the insights of the maverick economist, best known for giving the world the enduring phrase "conspicuous consumption," could help revive the Progressive tradition in the age of NASDAQ, branding, and bling-bling. There was much talk about community organizing, the ills of suburbia, and the rise of red-state America, along with a good deal of earnest hand-wringing and general gloom about our crassly material ways. Veblen would have been right at home with the griping. Perhaps best known for "The Theory of the Leisure Class," his withering 1899 classic of social criticism, Veblen was an arch and savage critic of modern capitalism who influenced such thinkers as Lewis Mumford (who said of Veblen's books that they "reflect the personality of a stick of dynamite wrapped up to look like a stick of candy") and John Kenneth Galbraith, whose seminal 1958 work, "The Affluent Society," bears the imprint of Veblen's notions about wealth and status. Veblen minted the term "conspicuous consumption" to describe the profligacy of the turn-of-the-century rich, who used ornament and glitz to signal their class and wealth to others. To the wealthy, uselessness was all. As Veblen summed up their glitter, "In order to be reputable it must be wasteful." Today's pundits and scolds use "conspicuous consumption" more generally to describe the spending habits of a country awash in easy credit, mass-marketed luxury goods, and gas-guzzling SUVs. But Veblen's ideas went far beyond that one phrase. His collected works survey the "imbecile institutions" of American capitalism, including the academy itself (which he skewered in "The Higher Learning in America," published in 1918, a canny prophecy of today's McUniversity). If the conference panelists displayed scant interest in the full range of Veblen's thought, his brooding estrangement from (and condescension toward) mainstream American life echoed in their comments. Born to Norwegian immigrants on a Wisconsin farm in 1857, Veblen was a precocious boy. After graduating from Carleton College in Minnesota, he went on to Johns Hopkins and then Yale, where he took a doctorate in philosophy and political economy in 1884, and eventually to the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1892. In his bohemian habits, Veblen was something of a nutty professor. His own consumption was conspicuously inconspicuous: He refused to have a telephone and made his furniture out of burlap sacks and wood boxes. He mumbled his way through lectures, and once posted his office hours as "Mondays 10 to 10:05." His libertine carousing also raised eyebrows. After seducing the wife of a colleague in 1906, Veblen was promptly fired. He moved on to Stanford, where he also fell afoul of administrators for his philandering ways. (Legend has it that after Chicago's chancellor worried for the "moral health" of faculty wives, Veblen responded, "I've tried them all. They are no good.") Veblen was equally unorthodox in his thinking, arguing that neither Marxism nor neoclassical economics adequately explained the workings of modern capitalism. "The Marxian system is not only not tenable, but it is not even intelligible," Veblen wrote in 1906 (though he would later write approvingly of the Bolshevik Revolution). But he reserved his most fiery scorn for the haute bourgeoisie and the modern businessman. If laissez-faire economists lauded them as forward looking harbingers of progress and civilization, Veblen argued their showy displays of wealth and status owed more to marauding, booty-seeking barbarian hordes and primitive tribes than to the cultivations of the Enlightenment. Where the economists of his day deployed charts and graphs, Veblen turned to anthropology and the study of Icelandic clans and Polynesian islanders to expose the atavistic, irrational essence of capitalism -- a system, Veblen concluded, driven by the extravagant wastefulness of the rich and the rapacious habits of "pecuniary experts." Though he formulated his ideas at a time of great populist ferment, Veblen was deeply skeptical that capitalism could ever be reformed. His infamously knotty, convoluted style (try getting your head around "the taxonomy of a monocotyledonous wage-system") is studded with gems of satirical wit, but he offers little in the way of constructive policy. H.L. Mencken dismissed Veblen's theories as nonsense, and thought him afflicted by "a sort of progressive intellectual diabetes, a leprosy of the horse sense." According to John Dos Passos (whose "USA" trilogy was in part inspired by Veblen's work), Veblen was a compulsive debunker who "could never get his mouth round [sic] the essential yes." In the 1920s, Veblen turned his venomous pen on the money-mad Calvin Coolidge era, where smiling, glad-handing capitalists plundered the assets of common people and got away with it. Long before Thomas Frank, Veblen zeroed in on what was the matter with Kansas, writing with bitter sarcasm of the "captains of solvency": "The larger the proportion of the community's wealth and income which he has taken over, the larger the deference and imputation of merit imputed to him. . .." What little faith he had Veblen put in scientists and engineers, the true creators of wealth. The strange man who owned no telephone and proposed making clothes out of paper extolled the clarifying "discipline of the machine," which would rid the mind of superstition and ground it in "opaque, impersonal cause and effect." At the New School, Veblen's gloom suited the panelists' own views of American consumerism. As Lewis Lapham, himself a scourge of upper-class foibles, put it, "Once you get into him, things become wonderfully clear." Whereas Veblen wrote about the affluent habits of a single class, Lapham noted, today conspicuous consumption is practically the American way of life. Donald Trump -- a "savage and a cheat" -- is a pop star while the lavishly funded Democratic Party itself is "a form of conspicuous consumption." (Earlier, Michael Lind pointed out that John and Teresa Heinz Kerry, with their six mansions, are far more conspicuous in their consumption than Lind's fellow Texan George W. Bush.) Lapham decried the effects of our "leisure state," denouncing the Vietnam and Iraq wars as geopolitical examples of the wasteful dissipation Veblen attributed to the wealthy classes. "You have to be a rich nation," said Lapham, "to think you can afford that stupidity." Vassar political scientist Sidney Plotkin went so far as to call Veblen "the first theorist of red-state America." Indeed, the specter of Veblen's elitist suspicion of the average American hung over the proceedings, and at times seemed to confirm the paradoxical situation of an academic left that wants to speak for ordinary people but seems baffled by -- and disdainful of -- their habits. Veblen, Michael Lind reminded his fellow panelists, "may have had sympathy for common people, but he portrayed them as dupes." And yet this elitist who hated elites might have been more a man of the people than his latter-day admirers. After all, Lind noted, "In Veblen's world, Wal-Mart is a rational distribution of goods." Matthew Price is a regular contributor to the Globe. From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 25 15:29:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 10:29:38 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Ubiquity: Reflections on the Limits of Artificial Intelligence Security Message-ID: Reflections on the Limits of Artificial Intelligence Security http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v5i38_tugui.html Ubiquity - The ACM IT Magazine and Forum Reflections on the Limits of Artificial Intelligence[i] Nature is very simple and efficient in everything she makes. We, humans, complicate things. By Alexandru Tugui[ii] Abstract: Nature is very simple and efficient in everything she makes, and is extremely obvious. We humans like to simulate in an extremely complicated manner what exists quite simply in nature, and what we succeed in simulating falls in the category of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence has limits of scope, but they fade away when compared with the performances of natural intelligence. In this study, we undertake to outline some limits of artificial intelligence compared to natural intelligence and some clear-cut differences that exist between the two. Keywords: intelligence, limits, artificial, robots, digit, law of entropy, ABAC. Man has always had nature and environment as models for his various achievements, and using those models he succeeded in making machines, tools, and robots with impressive performances. It's been speculated that in the next 40 - 45 years computers could reach the performance of the human brain, and that achievements in the field of artificial intelligence will be quite amazing, even to the extent of making synthetic workers (humanoid robots) with performances very much like a human's. Could all this be really possible? We shall live (some of us by our offsprings) and ... we shall see! Communication leads to intelligence The basic idea of the living world consists in transmitting to future generations what is considered important for survival. Over time, a collective memory was created. The modality of transmitting information was complex: from signs to body language, from drawings to speaking as such, from chopped stone to magnetic support. Communication eventually reached various performances: 1. From simple to simple, for instance: speaking - speaking, seeing - speaking, speaking - seeing; 2. from simple to complicated, for instance: speaking - representing, seeing - representing; 3. from complicated to complicated, for instance: representing - representing. Note: Representing is a codification approach according to a certain algorithm. The last two variants of communication always assumed a certain technology by means of which communication as such could be made: seeing, speaking, writing, reading. Under such circumstances, we should notice the fact that whereas some people had direct access to this collective memory, other people had an indirect access by traditions and habits. It is common knowledge that an immediate connection between natural intelligence and the modality of transmitting information and knowledge among the members of a community is made directly. Consider, for instance, the situation of children raised in the wild, who take over the collective memory of the animals with which they live. In other words, from the beginnings of mankind to the present, people tackled the issue of sharing information among the members of the same community or of different communities, of the same times or of different times. A first stage consisted in the communication based on simple drawings. This communication modality was simple and accessible to all people without needing additional training, because everything was visual! Then the period of using certain symbols followed, symbols that are hard to understand by those who are unskilled, which limited the access to the transmitted/communicated information. This stage also comprises the period of alphabet use. The information period assumed the complication of the modality of transmitting data, information, knowledge. At first sight, everything seems very simple, but data digitizing assumes a set of operations that would eventually lead to the representation as strings of 0 and 1. We show this with the following example: we find by sheer accident a magnetic support on which data and information are stored. To know (see) such data and information, we have to access them with a specialized peripheral depending on the magnetic support, to manage them with a utilitary program, and finally to process them with specialized software. All these steps are necessary because simply seeing such data and information is of no help. Considering the above, we may synthetize communication between two individuals into one of the following three variants: Man (1) - Man (1) Man (1) - MMMan (natural) (1) Man (1) - intermediary - Man (2) Man (1)- peripheral - MMMan (radio, TV, phone, computer peripheral) (2) Note: MMMan - many men. The index 1 accounts for the fact that the communication process is simultaneous, whole index 2 gives us the clue that there is a discrepancy between the two moments. We think that artificial intelligence must take into account the communication modalities and the coupling of the intelligent entities to the collective memory of every community. When will a computer "grow up"? As we consider the evolutionary character of artificial intelligence, we naturally wonder When will a computer "grow up"? -- when we could speak of an "artificial intelligence" of matter, and have contextual procedures that cover most circumstances that occur. In other words, we speak of a transmitted intelligence based on limited, difficult-to-generalize case studies. Anyway, there are situations of denial of natural intelligence -- and we have to acknowledge that, once "formatted," the raw matter of natural intelligence can hardly ever be recovered. We are speaking of children grown in the wild, who lose some of the partial characteristics of their natural intelligence -- for example the capacity of formulating sentences even if they have a quite rich vocabulary. People start learning when they are young! They learn from others' experience (by the rules transmitted via various modalities); they learn from their own experience (by the rules they compile). We all accept the idea that natural intelligence is specific to the living world, and from this perspective we cannot imagine that humankind will ever reach that level of development that would enable the simulation of natural intelligence in full detail. We think this could be possible only to a certain extent, only if a hybrid system between the living cell and the technical system is made -- the so-called bio-techno-system. But one should not misunderstand this idea! The bio-techno-system does not assume the achievement of a technical system having incorporated a sequence of software procedures to simulate the biological system, but the coupling of a living organism and of a technical system where the informational interaction is made by means of the computer system. The answer to the question above is the more obvious the closer we are to a success in the bio-techno-system field. Some limits of artificial intelligence We see on various Internet sites posted discussions, courses and opinions on the future performance of artificial intelligence application fields. Nevertheless, the specialists in the field are challenged to create equipment and software able to cope with the performance of the human brain. There are assessments of time and memory requirements, operation speed, ethics regarding how such an artificial intelligence system should look and operate. There are even worries that humankind will have to face an additional risk if some intelligent informatic entities are not restricted in running processes and in making major decisions, if they can program themselves (re-writing codes, re-compiling), etc. Nevertheless, at this point we should take into account certain restrictions and limitations pertaining to artificial intelligence that we will not succeed in overcoming. These are some of these limits: 1. Artificial intelligence must take into account the law of entropy. At this point, the relevant achievements do not take them into account and do not succeed in simulating them. In nature, the law of entropy leads to the stabilization of any type of system. The passage from a high level of entropy to a low one and vice-versa consumes energy. Most common movements in nature are the result of applying the law of entropy to a given system. We think that by the symbiosis between the living cell (living organism) and the technical systems, the intelligent control of matter could be achieved; 2. The entire foundation of artificial intelligence is based on informatic procedures that mean to circumscribe the intelligent behaviour of a human being, although experts never succeeded in simulating the behaviour of an ape with an ABAC. As we saw previously, the human being has the quality of complicating things very much when he knows what he must do but mostly when he does not know where he is heading. Therefore, we consider that when the goal is not known very well, the human brain both functionally and structurally will complicate even further the solution procedures, which consumes time and considerable information resources. We strongly believe that bio-techno-systems can be a solution to this problem; 3. The two pillars of computer science, "0" and "1" together with the truth values "True" and "False" are major borders in artificial intelligence. Any intelligent information procedure is decomposed eventually in strings of "0" and "1", which leads us to the fundamental objection that intelligent machines will never be like humans. We have to consider that bio-systems also work with intermediary values; 4. Artificial intelligence is based very much on symbolic logic, and has not succeeded in involving so-called affective logic. In affective logic, combinations of truth values may lead to different evaluations. A possible solution could be obtained by using affective computing [1], which undertakes to model affective behavior in various situations. Conclusion We believe that we will make considerable progress in the applicative and theoretical fields of artificial intelligence. The limits we synthetized are and will be felt for a long time, yet they will decrease as new materials and new technologies are discovered. At the same time, bio-techno-systems will be solution with a particular technological impact on the evolution of artificial intelligence. Footnotes 1. [8]http://www.bartneck.de/link/affective_portal.html Bibliography 1. Bergeron, B. (2002) Dark Ages II. When the Digital Data Die, Prentice Hall PTR, New Jersey, 2002 2. Denning, P. J., Metcalfe, R.M. (eds.) (1997) Beyond Calculation. The Next Fifty Years of Computing, Copernicus, Springer-Verlag, New York 3. Mesarovic, M., Pestel, E. (1975) Mankind at the Turning Point: The Second Report to the Club of Rome, Reader's Digest Press, New York 4. Moore, A.D. (1969) Invention, Discovery and Creativity, Anchor Books, New York 5. Tugui, A., Fatu, I. (2004) What is the Globally Information Based Society Followed By? in Cyber Society Forum, at [9]http://www.wfs.org/04tuguifatu.htm 6. Tugui, A. (2004) Calm Technologies in a Multimedia World, in Ubiquity, ACM, Vol. 5, Issue 4, 17-23 March. *** 1.[10]http://www.computergames.ro/forum/archive/index.php/t-54808.html 2. [11]http://alicebot.sourceforge.net/alice_page.htm 3. [12]http://www.bartneck.de/link/affective_portal.html 4. [13]http://www.abelard.org/turing/tur-hi.htm Alexandru TUGUI, Ph.D., is a Senior Lecturer at "Al. I. Cuza" University, Iasi, Romania Source: Ubiquity, Volume 5, Issue 38, December 1 - 7, 2004, http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/ References 7. http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/bk_ex.html 8. http://www.bartneck.de/link/affective_portal.html 9. http://www.wfs.org/04tuguifatu.htm 10. http://www.computergames.ro/forum/archive/index.php/t-54808.html 11. http://alicebot.sourceforge.net/alice_page.htm 12. http://www.bartneck.de/link/affective_portal.html 13. http://www.abelard.org/turing/tur-hi.htm 14. http://campus.acm.org/forums/ubiquity/messageview.cfm?catid=1&threadid=355 From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Tue Jan 25 19:42:32 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 12:42:32 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] love, hate In-Reply-To: <12381683.1106662359371.JavaMail.root@wamui04.slb.atl.earthlink.net> References: <12381683.1106662359371.JavaMail.root@wamui04.slb.atl.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <41F6A128.6030909@solution-consulting.com> Steve, you have not worked around cattle, I have. I have never seen a cowboy carry a bullwhip in my life. You persuade cows that they want to cooperate with you. shovland at mindspring.com wrote: > I think that in November more computers voted for Bush, > and the voice of the people was not heard. > > When cowboys ride the edge of the herd, one of their > tools is the bullwhip. > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: "Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D." > Sent: Jan 24, 2005 9:58 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] love, hate > > You know I am not wild about Bush but: > - He got over 62 million votes, the most in history > - he was elected with a majority, something Clinton never had > - he was clear about his goals, such as social security reform and > constructionist judges > - he was elected in the middle of a very ugly and messy war, in > spite of people not being supportive of what he is doing there. > > I think it is we who need to listen. I intend to. I mentioned I > would try to influence pro-life people who characterize abortion as > murder. I can do that because I am part of the in-group, someone who > is horrified by the notion of abortion. The only way to do that is > through persuasion and reason, through joining and then influencing. > An historian in my home town said if you want to influence a herd of > cattle, you cannot ride in the middle, and you cannot ride far away. > You have to ride on the edge. I don't view abortion as equal to > murder, and talk of that disturbs me, but I am on the edge, where I > can say, Let's put ourselves in the shoes of a desperate woman. She > needs choices, not condemnation. Let's give her choices, including > some attractive adoption possibilities. > The people have spoken, and as a Democrat, you ought to follow > Jefferson's direction and honor the voice of the people. I ask you to > join with me and influence through kindness and understanding. It is a > better way. Search your heart and ask yourself if I am not inviting > you to a better way of life. > Lynn > > Steve Hovland wrote: > >>How do you deal with someone who is >>not listening, which appears to be the >>case with the President? >> >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >> >>-----Original Message----- >>From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >>Sent: Monday, January 24, 2005 8:06 PM >>To: The new improved paleopsych list >>Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] love, hate >> >>Michael gives an inspiring -- even transcendental -- reply here. Thanks. >>Lynn >> >>Michael Christopher wrote: >> >> >> >>>>>Why should I love someone who >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>has gone out and killed thousands >>>of people for no reason?<< >>> >>>--Because hating them implicates you in their actions. >>>Hate attracts hate, love attracts love. Hating anyone >>>drives them further into their hate, reduces the >>>likelihood of them listening and responding to the >>>truth in what you say. If you cannot love your >>>opponent, simply speak truth, without hate. >>> >>>Michael >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>>__________________________________ >>>Do you Yahoo!? >>>Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. >>>http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo >>>_______________________________________________ >>>paleopsych mailing list >>>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >> << File: ATT00003.html >> << File: ATT00004.txt >> >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Tue Jan 25 23:57:55 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 15:57:55 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] channeling In-Reply-To: <200501251916.j0PJGgC08595@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050125235755.53652.qmail@web30809.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>The growing popularity of the spirtualist sense of the verb has spilled over into the general sense of ''convey, transmit, direct toward a center,'' extended to ''serve as an intermediary.''<< --That meshes with a lot of things I've been thinking about lately. Someone mentioned seeing Bush's face light up when Billy Graham spoke but not during other sermons. I didn't see it so I don't know if that's true, but I can imagine that sort of thing happening, males imprinting more on other males as father figures and not as conveyors of information. For someone who makes decisions out of his feelings and not from research and analysis, that might be a problem, especially if he is locked into a small peer group. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Jan 26 04:48:41 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 20:48:41 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] fate of Iraq Message-ID: <01C5031F.40CE7970.shovland@mindspring.com> I think we are on the way to some kind of disaster in Iraq, but not a replica of Viet Nam. It's a different set of circumstances, but disaster is likely because the Administration made strategic mistakes in intelligence, planning, weather, distance, and force. I think our troops will be under fire when they withdraw from Baghdad. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Paul J. Werbos, Dr. [SMTP:paul.werbos at verizon.net] Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2005 5:07 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] fate of Iraq Tho I don't have time this AM to do it justice, I owe SOME elaboration of quick comments on Iraq -- Before, I sent..... Colin Powell has said that we are indeed well on the road to a true Vietnam-style disaster in Iraq. (Though I am tempted to revisit aspects of the Vietnam history that few are aware of.) Rice says no. Whom should we believe? NEITHER. Powell knows traditional war-fighting stuff better, but this is a kind of complex socio-historical thing that no one I know really has a right to predict with confidence. But it's clear that Bush WANTS a credible exit... that the plan is rooted in accepting a new elected government in which the Shia play a dominant role.. that Sistani fully understands this, and will be happy to make it pleasant for Bush to go... that Bush will accept this... Bush has stated very clearly that the protection of minorities (like Sunni and Kurds and others) is an important goal of US policy, but if Sunnis keep killing everyone else and trying to revive Saddam Hussein, he will not stay longer for the sake of protecting them more effectively. He would have responded to other things... but in any case, it's a muddle, but not a very changeable muddle, and it is at least plausible that the US will be out of Iraq by the end of the term of this Administration. Who knows? At a minimum, this is Bush's intent and it doesn't seem impossible. ------- I forwarded this to a friend who would have more of a basis than Powell OR Rice to predict what really will happen... but none of us really know. There is no real equivalent in war-and-peace of what econometrics offers for the economy. No time to elaborate on why. But some folks really have worked to learn what can be learned from lessons of history and generalization. Free will is more problematic in war-and-peace than in econometrics -- but "character is fate" and a few of us actually have learned a bit about how consciousness operates. (Sorry to be so blunt without details, but I have gives references and URLs here on occasion.) --- And now... the latest feedback from the Sunni lands has shown a kind of clarification of thought as the election approaches. Spokesmen for the pro-violence group have stated clearly and openly that they are opposed to democracy BECAUSE they don't want Shia ruling over Sunnis. This is a very important clarification. It is almost as good as the patient in the psychiatrists' office who learns to articulate his or her real subconscious fears/motivations. But then comes the question -- what is the alternative? Are they syaing that an elite cadre of Sunni theologists (really a wahabe extremist faction) has the right to oppress everyone else, rule them by minority oppression of majority (as in Iraq's recent past), but this time truly oppressing everyone BUT those Wahabe activists -- oppressing sufis (who hide form the reality of what they are facing), even universalists of other kinds, as well as Shia and all else? Violence by the minority to control the majority? There is another way -- the effort to guarantee minority rights. Ironically, this has been a major US goal from the start, but the folks assigned the job didn't really know how to reconcile their various goals. They were a bit clumsy, shall we say. And OK, there is such a thing as criminal incompetence, all over the world. But -- it is very hard to guarantee the rights of a minority committed to murdering the majority. They need to relinquish that particular weird commitment. --- I had some ideas about federalism before that I think the ideologues underetsimated. "Make peace by putting two wolves the same room with one piece of meat." Thagt's not empirical political scinece, shall we say. Best of luck to us all... must run.. Paul _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Jan 26 04:50:02 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 20:50:02 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] channeling Message-ID: <01C5031F.7141E2E0.shovland@mindspring.com> One of my current goals is to do more by channeling increasing amounts of transpersonal energy without being inflated or damaged by it :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2005 3:58 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] channeling >>The growing popularity of the spirtualist sense of the verb has spilled over into the general sense of ''convey, transmit, direct toward a center,'' extended to ''serve as an intermediary.''<< --That meshes with a lot of things I've been thinking about lately. Someone mentioned seeing Bush's face light up when Billy Graham spoke but not during other sermons. I didn't see it so I don't know if that's true, but I can imagine that sort of thing happening, males imprinting more on other males as father figures and not as conveyors of information. For someone who makes decisions out of his feelings and not from research and analysis, that might be a problem, especially if he is locked into a small peer group. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From HowlBloom at aol.com Wed Jan 26 06:21:05 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 01:21:05 EST Subject: [Paleopsych] re: the paper Message-ID: <1de.33749129.2f2890d1@aol.com> re: Please look at my new paper at a site of French AI specialists: http://www.admiroutes.asso.fr/larevue/2005/61/pavel.htm hb: I read it, admired it, wished I'd been able to complete it with you, wished I'd had have my name up there with yours and George's, and wrote you a long email. I've just looked to see if the email was sent and it's disappeared without a trace. All thanks for citing me when the information or ideas I've provided prove useful. Meanwhile I tried to send you an idea that Lee Smolin has been developing, one that relates to our conversations on quantum particles, ants, and bees. It's his notion of loop quantum gravity: "One competing theory to string theory is called loop quantum gravity, pioneered by, among others, Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada. It proposes that space-time is constructed of loops even smaller than strings. Joining loops together creates a mesh of nodes and branches called a spin network. The advantage of this model is that space-time itself can be built out of these networks instead of having to be assumed, as it is in string theory." (JR Minkel Black holes, but not as we know them 22 January 2005, NewScientist.comRetrieved January 20, 2005, from the World Wide Web _http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524836.500_ (http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524836.500) ) A mesh can be a universal communication device, one in which each loop is in touch with all the others via their grand gestalt, their overarching shape. Tug one corner of a sweater and it can effect every other loop--instantaneously. Could a mesh with a shifting topology convey information to each corner and nano-twist? Howard ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Wed Jan 26 15:30:51 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 10:30:51 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] love, hate In-Reply-To: <41F5DFF3.5080609@solution-consulting.com> References: <01C50254.2EEC8C90.shovland@mindspring.com> <41F5DFF3.5080609@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <41F7B7AB.2040108@uconn.edu> Lynn and friends, Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. wrote: > The people have spoken, and as a Democrat, you ought to follow > Jefferson's direction and honor the voice of the people. Democracy... IF Bush's actions are global then the voice of the world should be heard: "The Globescan-PIPA poll was generally consistent with another survey the two groups released last September on global attitudes about the U.S. presidential election. Carried out in 35 countries in July and August, that poll found that Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry was favoured over Bush by pluralities or majorities in 30 countries and by an average of 46 to 20 percent." http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=27098 Or, if elected by the US people, he should restrict his actions and influence to the borders of this country. I am in favor of a global government structure in these days of global economy. Christian From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 26 15:43:36 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 10:43:36 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 038: When do anomalies begin? Message-ID: Meme 038: When do anomalies begin? by Alan Lightman and Owen Gingerich Science, Feb 7, 1992 v255 n5045 p690(6). sent 5.1.26 [This is one of my all-time favorites.] Abstract: An anomaly in science is an observed fact that is difficult to explain in terms of the existing conceptual framework. Anomalies often point to the inadequacy of the current theory and herald a new one. It is argued here that certain scientific anomalies are recognized as anomalies only after they are given compelling explanations within a new conceptual framework. Before this recognition, the peculiar facts are taken as givens or are ignored in the old framework. Such a "retrorecognition" phenomenon reveals not only a significant feature of the process of scientific discovery but also an important aspect of human psychology. ----------- IN ANY EXAMINATION OF HOW SCIENTIFIC THEORIES CHANGE over time, "anomalies" enter the discussion. The word anomaly has a venerable astronomical usage, going back to the Greek, meaning a celestial motion that deviates from simple uniformity. In Latin, it frequently designated any deviation from a regular law of grammar. In English, the word gradually took on the meaning of any deviation from the expected natural order, well exemplified by the Oxford English Dictionary's 1873 citation from Charles Darwin: "There is no greater anomaly in nature than a bird that cannot fly." Anomalies are particularly helpful in understanding the scientific process, for they point to the inadequacies of an old model and emphasize the merits of the new. In these terms, an anomalous fact is one that is unexpected and difficult to explain within an existing conceptual framework. For example, the inadequacy of classical electrodynamics in the atomic domain was indicated by a number of anomalies found in the early 1990s, such as the behavior of electrons in metals, and the stability and emission of electron shells in Rutherford's nuclear model of the atom. These phenomena were later given compelling explanations by the new quantum theory. In his seminal study of the scientific process, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn described scientific discovery as a complex process in which an "anomalous" fact of nature is recognized and then followed by a change in conceptual framework (paradigm) that makes the new fact no longer an anomaly. As Kuhn described it, "Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, that is, with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the pre-induced expectations that govern normal science" (1, pp. 52-53). But when do anomalies begin? We will argue that certain scientific anomalies are recognized only after they are given compelling explanations within a new conceptual framework. In some cases, an anomalous fact may be unquestioned or accepted as a given in the old paradigm. In others, the anomaly may be noted by a small segment of the scientific community but not widely regarded as important or legitimized until a good explanation is at hand in a new paradigm. The development of this class of anomalies we call the "retrorecognition" phenomenon. We will give several examples of retrorecognition. The Flatness Problem According to the Big Bang model, the leading theory of modern cosmology, the universe began in an explosion about 10 billion years ago. Since that violent beginning, the universe has been expanding and cooling. As it expands, its parts attract each other gravitationally, and that attraction slows down the expansion. The competition between the outward motion of expansion and the inward pull of gravity leads to three possibilities. The universe may expand forever, with its outward motion always overwhelming the inward pull of gravity. Such a universe is called "open." A second possibility is that the inward force of gravity is sufficiently strong to halt and reverse the expansion. Such a universe is called "closed." The final possibility, a "flat" universe, lies exactly midway between a closed and open universe and is analogous to a rock thrown upward with precisely the minimum speed that ensures its escape from the pull of Earth. (In Einstein's theory of gravity, open and closed universes have curved, non-Euclidean geometries, whereas a flat universe has a noncurved, Euclidean geometry.) The Big Bang model allows any of the three possibilities. Which one holds for our universe depends on the manner in which the cosmic expansion began, or, in particular, the initial gravity relative to the initial rate of expansion. In other terms, the fate of the universe was determined by its initial gravitational energy relative to its initial kinetic energy of expansion. Even without knowledge of these initial conditions, we can infer the fate of our universe by comparing its present gravitational energy with its present kinetic energy of expansion. If the magnitude of the first of these two energies is greater, the universe is closed, fated to collapse at some time in the future. If the second is greater, the universe is open, fated to expand forever. If the magnitudes of the two energies are precisely equal, the universe is flat. The ratio of magnitudes of the two energies is [omega] = (gravitational energy)/(kinetic energy). Thus, the universe is closed, flat, or open depending on whether [omega] is greater than one, equal to one, or less than one, respectively. Current measurements of [omega] give it a value of about 0.1 (2). Although the measurements are difficult and may be revised, cosmologists feel certain that the value of [omega] lies between 0.1 and 10. As we will see, such a range is surprisingly close to unity. Now comes the flatness problem: Whyi is [omega] so close to one so long after the universe began? It follows from the Big Ban model that, as time goes on, [omega] differs more and more from one, unless it started out exactly one. In an open universe, [omega] begins less than one and gets smaller in time; in a closed universe, [omega] begins bigger than one and gets larger in time. Only in a flat universe does [omega] begin and remain one. Finding the universe today with its gravitational energy so closely balanced with its kinetic energy of expansion is analogous to finding a rock thrown upward from Earth, far from Earth, still moving outward but at a tiny speed, having neither fallen back to Earth nor escaped Earth altogether. Such a situation would require the rock's initial kinetic energy of motion to have been extraordinarily close to its initial gravitational energy at launch. The real issue behind the flatness problem is the value of [omega] in the early universe. Physicists believe that the initial conditions of the cosmos were set when the universe was about [10.sup.-43] s old, the era of "quantum gravity." In order for the value of [omega] to lie between 0.1 and 10 today, 10 billion years after the quantum era, after the universe has expanded in size by a factor of more than [10.sup.30], the initial value of [omega] had to lie between about 1 + [10.sup.-59] and 1 - [10.sup.-59]. Equivalently, the kinetic energy of expansion and the gravitational energy of the cosmos had to be initially balanced to within one part in [10.sup.59]. It is important to add that the Big Bang model has nothing to say about the initial conditions of the universe. In particular, the model does not require any special value for the initial ratio of gravitational energy to kinetic energy. yet to many scientists today, it seems unlikely that so fine an initial balance, as required by the observations, could have been merely an accident. Thus, there is no "natural" explanation for the balance in the Big Bang model. The extremely close balance of the two energies is an anomaly. The flatness problem was first raised by Robert Dicke of princeton University in 1969 [3]. For a number of years afterward, however, few cosmologists considered the observed value of [omega] a serious anomaly, an observed fact that required a physical explanation. Some scientists, for example, regarded the initial value of [omega] as a given or accidental property of our universe and saw no difficulty with the near flatness of the cosmos; it was perhaps a philosophical enigma but certainly not a legitimate scientific problem. Typifying this viewpoint are Margaret Geller of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Robert Wagoner of Stanford University. According to Geller, "the flatness problem has always seemed to me like an argument of religion rather than an argument of science. Because the universe is one realization. It's one system. So how can you talk about a priori probabilities?" (4, p. 368). Wagoner says, "I don't think any of these arguments [for or against the naturalness of [omega] being so close to one] are relevant because I think they are philosophical. Let observation decide what [omega] is" (4, p. 181). Other cosmologists paid no attention at all to the flatness problem, and some briefly considered it but then dismissed it because they had no good solutions to it. The attitude of many scientists toward the flatness problem changed after 1981, when Alan Guth of Massachusetts Institute of Technology proposed a significant addition to the Big Bang model called the inflationary universe model [5]. According to calculable physical processes described by new "grand unified" theories of physics, the matter and energy in the infant universe existed in a peculiar state, behaving as if they had repulsive gravity and resulting in a very brief period of extremely rapid cosmic expansion. One of the consequences of the inflationary epoch expansion was that, whatever its initial value, [omega] would have been driven to a value extremely close to one. Thus, the inflationary universe model gives a natural solution to the flatness problem. The inflationary expansion, and the physics underlying it, provided a mechanism to achieve an extremely close balance between the kinetic and gravitational energies of the infant universe. The questionable status of the flatness problem before the inflationary universe model is evident in Guth's paper, where he devotes an entire appendix to arguing that the problem is real and significant. According to astrophysicist Marc Davis of Berkeley, "I have to say that I was so impressed with the inflationary model because it had promoted the horizon [and flatness] problems to tractable problems. . . . The reason that the flatness problem wasn't wholly compelling [before the inflationary model] was that we couldn't really justify why [omega] started off [near] one in the first place. . . . Unless you have a dynamical argument, you're arguing about nonphysical questions" (4, pp. 352 and 354). In the words of physicist Charles Misner at the University of Maryland, "I just couldn't see how to play with those equations, and so I didn't come on board thinking [the flatness problem] was serious until the inflationary models came out. later, I developed a strong preference for the flat universe, feeling that the Dicke paradox [the flatness problem] suggested it. The key point for me was that inflation offers an explanation. . . . What was crucial was that the inflationary universe [model] provided an example that turned the Dicke paradox into a standard physics problem" (4, pp.240-241). Today, Misner and many other cosmologists consider the close balance of kinetic and gravitational energies to be one of the most significant observational facts of the universe, whether or not the inflationary universe model itself survives the test of time. Before the new paradigm of the inflationary universe model, only a handful of cosmologists considered the close balance of energies to be a serious anomaly in the standard Big Bang model. The Perigee-Opposition Problem The contemporary reactions to the flatness problem have a fascinating parallel with a cosmological revolution that took place four and a half centuries ago, when Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) introduced the heliocentric planetary system. The principal challenge for the astronomers of antiquity and the Renaissance was to account for the seemingly irregular motions of the planets among the stars, especially the so-called retrograde motion, in which a planet appears temporarily to reverse its eastward motion against the background of stars as seen from Earth. In the sun-centered system of Copernicus, this phenomenon is easily explained. When the swifter moving Earth bypasses the slower moving Mars, for example, Mars temporarily appears to move backward. Precisely the same observed phenomenon was explained 1400 years earlier in the geocentric system of Claudius Ptolemy (A.D. 140). To account for the retrograde motion, Ptolemy proposed that each planet moved in a small circle, called the epicycle, with in turn rode on a larger circle centered on Earth (Fig. 1A). The compounded circles produced an occasional reverse motion. But there is more. It is a basic observational fact, known since antiquity, that retrograde motion occurs only around the time when the sun is in a direct line with the planet. For the superior planets, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, the sun must lie opposite the planet in the sky, hence the designation "opposition." In particular, and this was especially obvious for Mars, the planet was observed to be brightest, and therefore presumably closest to Earth, during the time of retrogression. In a sun-centered system, it is a simple geometrical truth that the middle of the retrograde motion, and the planet's closest approach, must coincide with opposition, when the sun, Earth, and planet lie in a straight line. But in an Earth-centered system, such a coincidence is not required by the geometry. A planet at the moment of opposition could, a priori, lie at any position on its epicycle (Fig. 1B). (Only at perigee, at the bottom of the epicycle, would the planet be in retrogression.) Alternatively, in the middle of retrograde motion, the planet-Earth line and the sun-Earth line could a priori form any angle at all (Fig. 1C). To explain the observations, Ptolemy had to assume that each superior planet revolved in its epicycle at just the right rate so that it reached perigee at the moment of opposition on every orbit (Fig. 1D). We know that pre-Copernican astronomers were aware of these observational facts because the Alfonsine planetary tables, made early in the 14th century, took advantage of the solar connections, even though astronomers rarely mentioned the fact explicitly. Thus, a striking observational fact that would later have a completely natural explanation in the heliocentric system of Copernicus had to be accepted as a given, without explanation, in the geocentric system of Ptolemy. For centuries, no one, not even Copernicus, remarked on the oddness of Ptolemy's tacit assumption regarding perigee and opposition. It was an astronomer in the generation after Copernicus, Gemma Frisius (1508-1555), who first recognized the assumption as a problem. Gemma wrote (6, p. 42): While a first glance the Ptolemaic hypotheses may seem more plausible than Copernicurs', nevertheless the former are based on not a few absurdities, not only because the stars are understood to be moved nonuniformly in their circles, but also because they do not have explanations for the phenomena as clear as those of Copernicus. For example, Ptolemy assumes that the three superior planets in opposition--diametrically opposite the sun--are always in the perigees of their epicycles, that is, a "fact-in-itself." In contrast, the Copernican hypotheses necessarily infer the same thing, but they demonstrate a "reasoned fact." The perigee-opposition phenomenon was recognized as an anomaly in the Earth-centered framework only after it was given a "reasoned" explanation in the new sun-centered framework. The Continental-Fit Problem As a third example of the retrorecognition phenomenon, consider the remarkable similarity of shapes of the opposite coasts on the two sides of the Atlantic. South America and Africa, in particular, are shaped as if they were two fitting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. We believe today that the two continents were once joined and part of a single landmass, which subsequently split and drifted apart. In such a framework, the good fit of continents on opposite sides of the Atlantic is easy to explain. However, the fit is without explanation in the previous conceptual framework, which held that landmasses could move only vertically. The remarkable fit of the continents could have been noticed soon after the Atlantic Ocean had been mapped, certainly by the early 17th century [7]. Around 1800, the German naturalist and geographer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) proposed that the lands bordering the Atlantic were once joined. His suggestion was not taken seriously. Half a century later the French scientist Antonio Snider-Pellegrini, using fossil evidence as well as the fit of the shapes, claimed that the continents were once joined. Again, the proposal, which in this case was accompanied by a rather preposterous mechanism, was not taken seriously by the majority of scientists. In 1881, Reverend Osmond Fisher, English scientist and author of perhaps the earliest textbook on geophysics, discussed a geological mechanism to explain the good fit of the continents. He was largely ignored. Belief in the fixity of continents held fast. In 1912, the German geophysicist Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) analyzed the situation much more carefully and included geological and fossil evidence to argue for an ancient continuity of the landmasses, which then broke apart and drifted away from each other [8]. Wegener called his theory "continental drift." Although additional evidence for continental drift began accumulating, the hypothesis was highly controversial until the mid-1960s, when patterns of magnetism in rocks on the ocean floor became convincing. Then, in the late 1960s, the theory of plate tectonics was developed. This theory, for the first time, provided a persuasive mechanism by which the continents could move horizontally, namely, the existence of a series of "plates" on which the continents sit. The slow, convective flows within Earth's mantle force neightorinb plates apart, carrying along the continents piggyback. Given the mechanism provided by the theory of plate tectonics and the evidence for that theory, the framework of continental drift has become accepted and has replaced the previous framework of the fixity of continents. What was for Wegener a clear anomaly in need of a reasoned explanation had been for the great majority of geologists just a curiosity, scarcely even a puzzle awaiting a solution. Only after the paradigm changed was the fit of the continents seen as an anomaly pointing toward a major new way of looking at the stability of continental arrangements. The Adaptation-of-Organism Problem As a fourth example, we turn to biology. For centuries, naturalists have marveled at the exquisite specificity and adaptation of organisms to their environment. Camels carry their energy-storing fat all in one place, on their backs; thus, the rest of their bodies are not blanketed by a thick layer of fat and so can efficiently cool off in the arid deserts where camels live. The long necks of giraffes allow the animals to eat from the high trees in their environment. pandas have a thumb-like sixth digit, which they use for stripping the leaves off the bamboo shoots in the mountains of western China. And so on. Before the mid-19th century, most naturalists and many others took such adaptation as evidence of a grand design, evidence of an intelligent and powerful creator, and they explained the situation accordingly. For example, in his The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation British naturalist John Ray (1627-1705) wrote "because it is the great design of providence to maintain and combine every Species, I shall take notice of the great Care and abundant Provision that is made in securing this End" (9, p. 133). A clear statement of this view can be also found in Jean Jacques Rousseau's (1712-1778) Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar (10, pp. 259 and 261): How much sophistry does it not require to disavow the harmony of created beings and that admirable order in which all the parts of the system concur to the preservation of each other? . . . it is impossible for me to conceive that a system of beings can be so wisely regulated, without the existence of some intelligent cause which effects such regulation. . . . I believe, therefore, that the world is governed by a wise and powerful Will. In this prevailing "creationist" framework, which included belief in the fixity of species, the perfect adaptation of organisms to their environment was both natural and expected. However, some organisms are not so adapted. Charles Darwin (1809-1882), in The Origin of the Species, cited a number of examples. There are the ducks with feet designed for swimming that do not swim (11, p. 177): He who believes that each being is created as we now see it must have occasionally felt surprise when he has met with an animal having habits and structure not in agreement. What can be plainer than that the webbed feet of ducks and geese are formed for swimming? Yet there are upland geese with webbed feet which rarely go near the water. There are the many animals that live in dark caves and are blind. Why should these animals have eyes if they are not needed? The cave rat (Neotoma), for example, has (blind) eyes that are lustrous and large. There are the birds, like the 300-pound ostrich or the penguin, that do not fly. Why have wings and not fly? And there are so many perfect habitats that are uninhabited (11, p. 401): The general absence of frogs, toads, and newts on so many true oceanic islands cannot be accounted for by their physical conditions: indeed it seems that islands are peculiarly fitted for these animals; for frogs have been introduced into madeira, the Azores, and Mauritius, and have multiplied so as to become a nuisance. . . . But why, on the theory of creation, they should not have been created there, it would be very difficult to explain. At the end of the last passage, Darwin pointed out that nonadaptations are anomalies in the creationist framework. Yet, these anomalies went unrecognized until Darwin's new theory of adaptation, natural selection. Because natural selection requires the evolution of organisms, it explains both adaptation and nonadaptation. Organisms with traits suitable for survival in a particular environment live to yield offspring, continue their line, and produce a descendant population adapted to that environment. But organisms continue to evolve and change habitats, so that a particular trait that was formerly beneficial, like the webbed feet of upland ducks, may be no longer beneficial, although still inherited. Traits not important for survival are not as strongly subject to the forces of natural selection and thus may appear unsuited to a particular environment at a particular time. The Equality of Inertial and Gravitational Mass As our final example, we consider the equality of inertial and gravitational mass. The first mass resists a body's change in motion whereas the second determines its gravitational force. It is the equality of these two masses that causes bodies of different masses or different materials to fall with the same acceleration in a gravitational field, a long-observed fact. Indeed, in 1592 Galileo wrote in his De Motu (12, p. 48): The variation of speed in air between balls of gold, lead, copper, porphyr, and other heavy material is so slight that in a fall of 100 cubits [about 46 m] a ball of gold would surely not outstrip one of copper by as much as four fingers. Having observed this, I came to the conclusion that in a medium totally void of resistance all bodies would fall with the same speed. In Newtonian physics, the inertial mass and gravitational mass are regularly canceled against each other. Newton himself was perplexed by this extraordinary equality between quantities that seemed conceptually very different, and he went to considerable lengths to establish their experimental equivalence. For example, Newton recognized that a pendulum was a case in which both types of mass played a role and that the equality of swings of pendula with different bobs would measure the equality of the two masses to high accuracy. Referring to his experiments timing the periods of pendula of different materials, Newton says in his System of the World (13, p. 568): I tried the thing in gold, silver, lead, glass, sand, common salt, wood, water, and wheat. I provided two equal wooden boxes. I filled the one with wood, and suspended an equal weight of gold (exactly as I could) in the center of oscillation of the other. The boxes, hung by equal threads of 11 feet, made a couple of pendulums perfectly equal in weight and figure, and equally exposed to the resistance of the air: and, placing the one by the other, I observed them to play together forwards and backwards for a long while, with equal vibrations. And therefore the quantity of matter [inertial mass] in the gold was to the quantity of matter in the wood as the action of the motive force [gravitational mass] upon all the gold to the action of the same upon all the wood; that is, as the weight of the one to the weight of the other. In his law for the gravitational force, Newton simply equated the inertial and gravitational masses without anything other than observational justification. There was no essential reason within the theory itself as to why these two quite different masses should be equal. They were simply assumed to be so, much as Ptolemy had assumed that the epicyclic and orbital phases would be exactly synchronized for the three superior planets or modern cosmologists had assumed that the value of [omega] started off extremely close to one. After Newton, the equality of inertial and gravitational mass was verified with greater and greater accuracy. In the late 19th century, Lorant Eotvos, a Hungarian baron, announced that his studies with plumb bobs showed that the acceleration of gravity on different objects could not differ by more than a few parts in a billion [14]. Despite the extraordinary accuracy with which the equality of the two masses was verified, scientists continued to accept that equality as a given, without recognizing it as an anomaly in Newton's theory of gravity. It was not until Albert Einstein's new theory of gravity, general relativity, that a fundamental explanation was given for the equality of inertial and gravitational mass. Indeed, Einstein saw this equality, which was a part of his "equivalence principle," as a profound statement about the naure of gravity, and he constructed his entire theory around it. In the resulting theory, gravity is understood as a geometrical phenomenon, with the equality of the two masses a fundamental and necessary part of that picture. General relativity was an entirely new theory, with new predictions. For example, as a consequence of the equivalence principle, the bending of light by a gravitating body may be quantiatively explained. And, for the first time, it was realized that Newton's theory, and indeed all previous theories, had failed to account adequately for the equality of inertial and gravitational mass. As Einstein wrote in 1911, while struggling to develop his new theory of gravity (15, p. 100), This experience, of the equal falling of all bodies in the gravitational field, is one of the most universal which the observation of nature has yielded; but in spite of that the law has not found any place in the foundations of our edifice of the physical universe. Characterization of the Retrorecognition Phenomenon The five examples given above follow a similar pattern: 1) A fact of nature is observed in the context of an existing explanatory framework. 2) The fact does not have a logical explanation in the existing framework but is nevertheless unquestioned and ignored, or accepted as a given property of the world, or simply postulated to be true. 3) A new theory or model is advanced in which the observed fact now has a compelling and reasoned explanation. At the same time, the fact is retroactively recognized as an anomaly in the context of the old theory or model. We might borrow the language of Gemma Frisius [6] by referring to facts taken as givens as "facts-in-themselves" and to facts logically explained as "reasoned facts." In this language, step 2 involves understanding the observed fact as a fact-in-itself, whereas in step 3, with the emergence of a new paradigm, the fact-in-itself is transformed into a reasoned fact. For the class of anomalies that we are considering, it is only in step 3 that the anomaly is recognized. Of course, in the new paradigm, the fact in question is no longer an anomaly. The terms "fact-in-itself" and "reasoned fact" used by Gemma Frisuis were actually taken from Aristotle's system of logic, the Posterior Analytics, where Aristotle distinguishes between the to oti (fact-in-itself) and the di oti (reasoned fact) [16]. The assumptions that the coincidence of retrograde motion and opposition of planets is an accident or that the fit of the continents is an accident might be regarded as "explanations" of these observed facts. But these assumptions are not reasoned explanations--they do not have the logical force of the explanations easily provided by the sun-centered astronomical system or the principle of natural selection. And the anomaly in the old framework is not recognized as an anomaly until the reasoned explanation of the new. The term "retrorecognition" actually stands for recognition after a reasoned explanation. We have described a special class of scientific anomalies. In fact, there is a continuum of kinds of scientific anomalies, ranging from those that initially draw no concern whatever, like the perigee-opposition problem, to those that are soon recognized as serious and perhaps fatal to the existing model, such as Ernest Rutherford's discovery that alpha particles shot at atoms sometimes scatter backwards, thus demolishing the "plum pudding" atomic model in which the positive and negative charges are distributed diffusely throughout the same volume. Even within the class of anomalies discussed here, the situations are not identical. No explanation at all was initially proposed for the perigee-opposition problem or for the equality of intertial and gravitational mass. For the continental-fit problem, between 1800 and 1960 some scientists proposed various theories of continental drift, but in the absence of a mechanism the proposals were not taken seriously. Not surprisingly, scientists strongly prefer explanations that are mechanistic, logical, and calculable. The flatness problem is perhaps the most complicated of the examples we have considered. Unlike the other examples, the new paradigm, the inflationary universe model, is by no means universally accepted among practicing cosmologists, nor is the legitimacy of the flatness problem. However, since the inflationary universe model was proposed, many more cosmologists recognize the peculiarity of the observational facts. Discussion There are several factors at work in the retrorecognition phenomenon, their relative importance varying with the specific example and the particular group of scientists reacting to that example: (i) the intellectual difficulty of recognizing anomalies initially, (ii) the tendency to ignore a problem when one has no idea how to solve it, and (iii) the conservatism of science. By definition, many retrorecognition anomalies go unnoticed initially, are not seen as requiring explanation, and are not appreciated as anomalous. Thus, it is hard to document them. In the case of the flatness problem, for example, some scientists (exemplified by the comments of Misner) did not regard the problem as serious because they had no good ideas about how to solve it. By contrast, the perigee-opposition problem was not recognized as a problem to begin with. Science is a conservative activity, and scientists are reluctant to change their explanatory frameworks. As discussed by sociologist Bernard Barber, there are a variety of social and cultural factors that lead to conservatism in science, including commitment to particular physical concepts, commitment to particular methodological conceptions, professional standing, and investment in particular scientific organizations [17]. Although such conservatism may seem inflexible and ultimately destructive, it has the short-term asset of allowing each current conceptual framework to be articulated so clearly that it is well understood and can serve as an organizing principle for the multitude of facts that scientists observe. Furthermore, it may be intellectually difficult to recognize the importance of each of these multitude of facts and to spot the one peculiar fact that heralds a fundamental flaw with the current theory. Scientists may also be reluctant to change paradigms for the purely psychological reasons that the familiar is often more comfortable than the unfamiliar and the inconsistencies in belief are uncomfortable. In his Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, psychologist Leon Festinger says that "the existence of dissonance [inconsistency], being psychologically uncomfortable, will motivate the person to try to reduce the dissonance and achieve consonance [consistency]. When dissonance is present, in addition to reducing it, the person will actively avoid situations and information which would likely increase the dissonance" (18, p. 3). We suggest that the phenomenon discussed here--the recognition of some anomalies only after they are given reasoned explanations by a new conceptual framework--is in some cases an extreme example of the conservatism of science. At times, scientists may be so resistant to replacing their current paradigm that they cannot acknowledge certain facts as anomalous. To be sure, such facts are observed and recorded. The ancient Greeks duly noted that the superior planets were in retrograde motion and brightest at opposition; naturalists cataloged the many varied characteristics of animals and plants; astronomers in this century carefully measured the close balance between expansion energy and gravitational energy of the cosmos; geographers noted the remarkable fit of the continents; physicists measured the equal rates of acceleration of falling bodies. But these anomalous facts, and others like them, were not initially recognized as anomalies. If unexplained facts can be glossed over or reduced in importance or simply accepted as givens, the possible inadequacy of the current theory does not have to be confronted. Then, when a new theory gives a compelling explanation of the previously unexplained facts, it is "safe" to recognize them for what they are. REFERENCES AND NOTES [1] T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, ed. 2, 1970). [2] For a discussion of the standard Big Bang model, see S. Weinberg, The First Three Minutes (Basic Books, New York, 1977). For a review of new ideas in cosmology, including recent observational results, discussions of [omega], the flatness problem, and the inflationary universe model, see A. Lightman, Ancient Light (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991). [3] R. H. Dicke, Gravitation and the Universe: The Jayne Lectures for 1969 (American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1970), p. 62. [4] A. Lightman and R. Brawer, Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1990). [5] A. Guth, Phys. Rev. D 23, 347 (1981). [6] Reiner Gemma Frisius, in Johannes Stadius, Ephemerides Novae et Auctae (Cologne, 1560), si. b3-b3v; trans. by O. Gingerich and R. S. Westman, The Wittich Connection: Conflict and Priority in Late Sixteenth-Century Cosmology, Trans. Am. Philos. Soc. 78, part 7, 42 (1988). [7] Francis Bacon is often cited as having pointed out the unusually good fit of the continents, in a passage in The New Organon (1620), but a close examination of the passage suggests that Bacon was probably referring only to the similarity of shapes of two western coasts, rather than to the fit of an east coast with a west coast. [8] For a comprehensive history of the theory of continental drift, see U. B. Marvin, Continental Drift (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC, 1973). For a discussion of Wegener, see N. Oreskes, Hist. Stud. Phys. Biol. Sci. 18, 311 (1988). [9] J. Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1704) (Samuel Smith, London, 1704). [10] J. J. Rousseau, Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar (1765), trans. in Harvard Classics, C. W. Eliot, Ed. (P. F. Collier and Son, New York, 1910), vol. 34. [11] C. Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859) (Collier Books, New York, 1962). [12] Galileo, De Motu (1592), trans. in Galileo on Motion and on Mechanics by I. E. Drabkin and S. Drake (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1960). [13] I. Newton, System of the World, F. Cajori, Ed. (Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, 1934), sect. 19. [14] R. V. Eotvos, Math. Naturw. Ber. Ungarn 8, 65 (1889). [15] A. Einstein, Ann. Phys. 35, 898 (1911), trans. in The Principle of Relativity by H. A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, H. Minkowski, and H. Weyl (Dover, New York, 1952). [16] Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 1.13. In the Middle Ages the fact-in-itself was called a quia and the reasoned fact was called a propter quid. [17] B. Barber, Science 134, 596 (1961). [18] L. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford Univ. Press, Stanford, CA, 1957), p. 3. [19] For helpful discussion and comments we thank R. Brawer, S. Brush, P. Galison, S. J. Gould, G. Holton, H. Margolis, U. Marvin, A. Pickering, H. Ritvo, and F. Sulloway. A. Lightman is in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and in the Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139. O. gingerich is at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. [I am sending forth these memes, not because I agree wholeheartedly with all of them, but to impregnate females of both sexes. Ponder them and spread them. Meme 037 is "Frank's Continued Abandonment of Reality, sent 2004 Beethoven's Birthday. I forgot to call it a meme.] From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 26 15:44:10 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 10:44:10 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Medin et al. Are There Kinds of Concepts? Message-ID: Are There Kinds of Concepts? Annual Review of Psychology, Annual 2000 p121. by Douglas L. Medin, Elizabeth B. Lynch, and Karen O. Solomon Key Words categorization, cognitive processes, mental representation, domain specificity Abstract: Past research on concepts has focused almost exclusively on noun-object concepts. This paper discusses recent research demonstrating that useful distinctions may be made among kinds of concepts, including both object and nonobject concepts. We discuss three types of criteria, based on structure, process, and content, that may be used to distinguish among kinds of concepts. The paper then reviews a number of possible candidates for kinds based on the discussed criteria. INTRODUCTION Many years ago, the cryptic but pointed comment of a collegue on a book by one of the present authors (Smith & Medin 1981) said, "This is an excellent overview but you two seem to think that concept is spelled, noun." The commentator may have been generous at that, because natural object concepts were the focus (with attempts made to justify the reasons). In this paper, we do not distinguish questions about kinds of categories from questions about kinds of concepts. Although the distinction between concepts and categories is important (see Solomon et al 1999), where there are distinct kinds of categories, the associated concepts will also be distinct. Although the reviewer's barbed comment is still relevant today, since that time there has been a continuous and substantial volume of research on categories and concepts. This has served to greatly broaden the topic's empirical and theoretical base, so that today there is a lot more to say about different kinds of concepts than there was in 1981. Accordingly, this review is organized around the question of whether there are distinct kinds of concepts. On the surface it seems transparently true that there are kinds of concepts--notions like democracy seem different from things like party or from concepts such as "black-capped chickadee." But a little reflection suggests that the notion of kinds of concepts must be evaluated relative to the theoretical work a kind or domain is going to be asked to do. For example, if one is interested in concept learning, the relevant issue might be whether different kinds of concepts are acquired in the same way. Note that this shifts but does not remove the explanatory burden: For the question to be meaningful, criteria are needed for deciding whether concepts are "acquired in the same way." In brief, questions about kinds of concepts should be answered by theories rather than intuitions. In this paper, we attempt to bring together candidates for kinds of concepts that have emerged across the different theoretical perspectives of current research on concepts. One motivation for the interest in kinds is that a number of scientists, especially researchers in the area of cognitive development, have argued that cognition is organized in terms of distinct domains, each characterized by (usually) innate constraints or skeletal developmental principles (e.g. Hirschfeld & Gelman 1994a). That is, cognition is said to be domain specific. Some researchers object to the claims about innateness as well as the claims about domain specificity (e.g. Jones & Smith 1993). To evaluate this debate, one needs criteria for domains (or kinds). A less-contentious reason to worry about kinds concerns trade-offs between different levels of explanation and specificity or preciseness of generalizations. To use an analogy with biological kinds, there are interesting properties that all living things share, but there are further interesting generalizations that may hold only for mammals or only for primates or only for human beings. Treating all concepts as being of the same type may be useful for some purposes but we may be missing important principles that apply robustly only for subsets of concepts. Another reason to care about kinds of concepts is that even universal aspects of concepts may be more salient and easier to study in some concepts than in others. Neurologists study the squid axon not because squids are the only things that have axons but because the squid axon is large. Finally, the most obvious reason to worry about kinds is that exploring different kinds allows us to test the generality of our theories and models. The rest of this review is organized as follows. First, a variety of criteria for establishing distinct kinds of concepts is presented. Then some candidates for kinds are discussed and the corresponding literature is evaluated with respect to our criteria. Finally, a descriptive summary and prescriptive advice are presented. In evaluating the literature from a specific perspective, we take advantage of a number of other recent review papers and edited volumes (e.g. Nakamura et al 1993, Van Mechelen et al 1993, Lamberts & Shanks 1997, Ward et al 1997a, Medin & Heit 1999). Komatsu (1992) analyzes research on the role of intuitive theories and other forms of knowledge versus the role of similarity in categorization (for related analyses, see also Goldstone 1994a; Hahn & Chater 1997; Hampton 1997, 1998; Heit 1997; Malt 1995; Murphy 1993; Sloman & Rips 1998). Solomon et al (1999) focus on the role and implications of multiple conceptual functions for concept theories. A review by Medin & Coley (1998) traces relationships between laboratory studies using artificially created categories and research using natural (lexical) concepts (see also Estes 1994). CRITERIA FOR KINDS OF CONCEPTS We consider three types of interrelated criteria for distinguishing concept types: (a) structural differences, (b) processing differences, and (c) content-laden principles. Structural Differences A great deal of research on the psychology of concepts has been directed at their componential structure, especially as it relates to categorization. Virtually everyone believes that concepts should be analyzed in terms of constituent attributes or features. For example, the concept of stallion may be understood in terms of features such as animate, four-legged, male, adult, and so on. Thus, criteria for kinds of concepts based on structural differences would be based primarily on differences in the kinds of features in a concept and the relations among these features. The 1970s were characterized by a shift from the position that categories are organized in terms of defining (singly necessary and jointly sufficient) features (the so-called classical view) to the view that category membership is more graded and structured in terms of features that are only typical or characteristic of categories--the so-called probabilistic or prototype view (for seminal papers, see Rosch & Mervis 1975, Smith et al 1974; for an early general review, see Smith & Medin 1981). As noted earlier, much of the discussion and research on conceptual structure has employed object concepts (e.g. chair, bird, tool, etc). The possibility remains that other categories conform to a classical view structure or exhibit entirely novel structure. Processing Differences One might also distinguish among kinds of concepts based on the types of processing that are done to develop and maintain them. For example, categories formed through data-driven, bottom-up processes may be different from categories formed through top-down categorical processes. It is an obvious but important point that claims about either structure or processing cannot be evaluated in isolation, that structure-process pairs must be considered (e.g. Anderson 1978). For example, a hypothesis-testing mechanism for learning classical view categories would likely fail to acquire probabilistic categories. Researchers interested in processing principles have generally assumed that differences in structure are associated with processing differences. Of course, process may drive structure. For example, categories created in the service of goals may be fundamentally different from natural object categories. An alternative idea is that there may be multiple processes that operate on the same structure. It is fair to say that theories about conceptual structure and processing are based primarily on research with object categories, though the conclusions from this work are thought to apply to a wide range of concepts. Are object categories analogous to the squid axon mentioned above? That is, are object concepts just easy-to-study representatives of all concepts? One may also wonder whether object concepts are themselves uniform in kind. Below we discuss recent research that suggests that there are principles of conceptual structure and processing that cannot be generalized across all concepts. We then turn to the question of whether important variations exist among object categories. Content-Laden Principles In contrast to the view that there are general, abstract principles of conceptual structure and processing, advocates of domain specificity focus on principles that apply uniquely to concepts with specific contents. For example, in this view, kinds of concepts may be divided into domains of concepts, such as naive biology, naive psychology, and naive physics. Given that the contents of concepts in different domains are almost surely going to be different, it is tempting to conclude that these advocates have created kinds (or domains) simply by defining them into existence. As we shall see, the domain specificity view does have empirical content. First, however, we consider candidates for kinds based on structure and those based on processing. CANDIDATES FOR KINDS OF CONCEPTS BASED ON STRUCTURE Nouns Versus Verbs It appears that the distinction between nouns and verbs is universal (Sapir 1944). Gentner and colleagues (Gentner 1981, 1982; Gentner & France 1988; Gentner & Boroditsky 1999) have marshaled theoretical and empirical arguments for the view that nouns and verbs map onto ontologically distinct aspects of the environment (see also MacNamara 1972). Although the contrast is not without exception, the general idea is that nouns refer to clusters of correlated properties that create chunks of perceptual experience. Languages honor these perceptual discontinuities, as evidenced by good cross-cultural consistency in the presence of lexical entries corresponding to these chunks. In contrast, predicative concepts in general and verbs in particular focus on relations among these entities involving such things as causal relations, activity, or change of state. Given that relations presuppose arguments or objects, it would seem that nouns are conceptually simpler than verbs and, Gentner (1981) argues, more constrained by perceptual experience. If so, one might expect that (a) (concrete) nouns should be learned before verbs (see Bloom et al 1993, Choi & Gopnik 1995, Au et al 1994, Tardif et al 1999, Tomasello 1992, Waxman 1998, Waxman & Markow 1995, Woodward & Markman 1997; for review, see Gentner & Boroditsky 1999), (b) there should be more cross-linguistic variability in verbs than in nouns (see Bowerman 1996; Levinson 1994, 1999; Waxman et al 1997), and (c) linguistic (syntactic) structure should play a greater role in verb learning than in noun learning (see Naigles 1990, Choi & Bowerman 1991, Pinker 1994). Although there is not universal agreement on any of these claims, the weight of evidence appears to agree with each of them. The distinction between nouns and verbs no doubt needs to be somewhat nuanced. For example, motion is associated with both nouns and verbs (e.g. Kersten & Billman 1995), but there is a bias for nouns to be associated with motion intrinsic to an object and for verbs to be associated with motions involving relations between objects (Kersten 1998a,b). Count Nouns Versus Mass Nouns Another lexical distinction that reveals differences in conceptual structure is the mass/count distinction. For example, although you can say "a dog" (count noun), you cannot say "a rice" or "a sand." Wisniewski et al (1996) note that the mass/ count distinction applies to superordinate categories as well: Some superordinate concepts are mass nouns (e.g. "some" furniture), and others are count nouns (e.g. "an" animal). In a series of studies, Wisniewski et al demonstrate that the linguistic distinction between mass and count superordinates reflects conceptual differences as well. They found that members of mass superordinates tend to co-occur and people tend to interact with many members of a mass superordinate at one time, but they tend to only interact with single members of count-noun superordinates. Furthermore, they found that properties that characterize individuals are a more salient aspect of count superordinates. Wisniewski et al conclude that mass superordinates refer to unindividuated groups of objects, rather than to single objects, and that, unlike count superordinates, mass superordinates are not true taxonomic categories. Markman (1985) also noted conceptual differences between mass and count superordinates. Specifically, she found that across languages, terms for categories at more abstract levels of a hierarchy are more likely to be mass nouns than are terms for categories at low levels of a hierarchy. She also found that children learned concepts with the same extension faster when they were referred to by a mass noun than by a count noun (Markman et al 1980). Isolated and Interrelated Concepts The structural difference between noun and verb concepts in terms of clusters of features versus relational properties may also usefully distinguish among kinds of nouns. Some noun concepts are intrinsically defined, whereas others appear to be more relational in character (Barr & Caplan 1987, Caplan & Barr 1991). For example, the concept of grandmother seems to centrally involve the relational notion of being a female parent of a parent. Barr & Caplan (1987) found that relational concepts show more graded membership and smaller differences between gradients of typicality and membership judgments than do intrinsically defined concepts. Given that the literature has tended to focus on intrinsic concepts, perhaps other phenomena associated with categorization and other uses of concepts may not generalize to relational concepts. There is not sufficient evidence to hazard a guess with respect to this possibility. Goldstone (1996) has marshaled evidence for the distinction between isolated and interrelated concepts where a concept is interrelated to the extent that it is influenced by other concepts. He further showed that current models of categorization (e.g. exemplar models) can account for some but not all of the phenomena associated with interrelated concepts. However, he offers a recurrent network model that successfully describes varying amounts of intercategory influence. The fact that a unitary computational model accounts for both isolated and interrelated concepts undermines the view that these are distinct kinds of categories. Objects Versus Mental Events Although some researchers have focused on parallels between object and event concepts (e.g. Rifkin 1985; for social events, see Morris & Murphy 1990), Rips and his associates have demonstrated important differences between objects and mental events (e.g. Rips & Conrad 1989, Rips & Estin 1998). For example, part-whole relations seem to behave differently for objects and mental events. The steering wheel of a car is not a kind of vehicle but a part of planning, such as evaluating competing plans is a type of thinking (Rips & Estin 1998). Evidence from other experiments suggests that parts of mental events (and, to an intermediate degree, scripts) are less bounded (discriminable) and more homogeneous than parts of objects (Rips & Estin 1998). Finally, if the categories that describe mental events are less bounded, then they may be more difficult to learn than object categories (see Keil 1983). Artifacts Versus Natural Kinds Numerous studies have shown that different kinds of features are important to natural kind verses artifact categories (Barton & Komatsu 1989, Gelman 1988, Keil 1989, Rips 1989). These studies indicate that functional features are more important for artifacts, and features referring to internal structure are more important for natural kinds. For example, Barton & Komatsu (1989) presented participants with natural kind and artifact categories that had changes either in molecular structure (e.g. a goat with altered chromosomes or a tire not made of rubber) or in function (e.g. a female goat not giving milk or a tire that cannot roll). Changes in molecular structure were more likely to affect natural kind categories than artifact categories (e.g. a goat with altered chromosomes is less likely to be a goat), whereas changes in function were more likely to affect artifact categories (e.g. a tire that cannot roll is less likely to be a tire). Later research does suggest some ambiguity with regard to the criterial features of artifact categories. Malt & Johnson (1992) found that artifact category membership decisions were more influenced by physical than by functional features. (For another view on the nature of artifact categories see Bloom 1996, 1998; Malt & Johnson 1998.) Overall, these studies suggest that natural kind and artifact categories may differ on the basis of the kinds of features that are criterial for membership in the category. Research by Ahn (1998) may explain why different kinds of features are criterial for natural kind and artifact categories. Ahn claims that the centrality of a feature to a category depends on the causal status of that feature relative to the other features in the category (see also Ahn 1999, Sloman & Ahn 1999, Sloman et al 1998). Specifically, if a feature is thought to give rise to other features in the category, removing that causal feature affects category identity more than the removal of a noncausal feature does. Ahn showed that the causal status hypothesis accounted for the results of Barton & Komatsu (1989) and Malt & Johnson (1992). That is, the features in these studies that had been judged as criterial to their categories were also rated as the most causal. In artificial category studies, Ahn (1998) showed that regardless of whether the category was a natural kind or an artifact, when functional features caused compositional features, functional features were considered more essential to category membership, whereas when compositional features caused functional features, compositional features were considered more essential to category membership. This suggests that the differences between artifact and natural kind categories may result from the fact that different kinds of features are causal in natural kind and artifact categories (for further discussion, see Keil 1995). The original problem of determining whether artifacts and natural kinds constitute distinct kinds of categories thus becomes the problem of determining whether the causal status of the features of a category can be determined independently of its status as a natural kind or an artifact. Abstract Concepts Abstract concepts, such as truth and justice, seem different from object concepts, such as dogs and boats. Yet little work has addressed how we understand abstract concepts. One suggestion has been that abstract concepts are understood through conceptual metaphors (Gibbs 1997, Lakoff & Johnson 1980). During this process, representations of concrete concepts are mapped onto the abstract concepts to facilitate understanding. For example, justice might be understood through a conceptual representation of a scale, and anger might be understood through a conceptual representation of boiling water. If abstract concepts are understood via a metaphorical representation of an object concept, we might not expect to find structural differences between these two types of concepts. Clearly more work needs to be done on how abstract categories are formed and understood. Basic Level Versus Subordinate and Superordinate Concepts The observation by Markman (1985) that mass categories are likely to be superordinate categories suggests that differences in taxonomic level may correspond to differences in conceptual structure. Although most objects can be described or named at a number of different levels of abstractness (e.g. rocking chair, chair, furniture item, human artifact), the "best name" for objects (Brown 1958) is at one particular level. In a classic paper, Rosch et al (1976) argued that bundles of correlated properties associated with objects form natural discontinuities or chunks that create a privileged level of categorization. They showed that the basic level is the most inclusive level, at which many common features or properties are listed, the most abstract level at which category members have a similar shape (for a more detailed analysis of comparability and levels, see Markman & Wisniewski 1997), and the level above which much information was lost. Furthermore, the basic level is preferred in adult naming, first learned by children, and the level at which categorization is fastest. In short, these and other measures all converged on a single level as privileged. The findings by Rosch et al (1976) presented a powerful picture of a single taxonomic level as privileged across a wide range of conceptual measures. The authors suggested that the basic level is the level that provides the most cognitively accessible information about the correlational structure of the environment. Are basic-level categories different in kind from categories at other levels? Surprisingly, a number of lines of research suggest that this may not be the case. First of all, recent evidence suggests that, at least on some tasks, the basic level may change as a function of expertise (e.g. Tanaka & Taylor 1991; Palmer et al 1989; Johnson & Mervis 1997, 1998). For example, experts may prefer to name at subordinate levels, and they verify category labels equally fast at subordinate and basic levels. Although Rosch et al (1976) had contemplated this possibility, this evidence compromises their explanation of the basic level by suggesting that the cognitive accessibility of feature correlations is expertise dependent, rather than universal and absolute. An interesting possibility is that learning may modify the constituent features or attributes of a concept. A number of recent findings and models provide support for this possibility (e.g. Gauthier & Tarr 1997, Goldstone 1994b, Livingston et al 1998, Norman et al 1992, Schyns & Rodet 1997, Schyns 1998; for an overview and commentary, see Schyns et al 1998; for an edited volume, see Goldstone et al 1997). In short, the salience of feature clusters may not be absolute and invariant but rather variable as a function of learning. Another complication is that although ethnobiologists (Berlin 1992) and psychologists both find evidence for a privileged taxonomic level, they disagree about where in the taxonomy this level is located. Berlin (1992) pinpoints privilege at the level that would typically correspond to genus (e.g. blue jay, bass, beech), whereas Rosch et al (1976) found the privileged level to be a more abstract level, corresponding more nearly with class (e.g. bird, fish, tree). One explanation is that this represents an expertise effect. The people in traditional societies studied by ethnobiologists may be biological experts relative to undergraduates in a technologically oriented society--the population of choice for psychologists. Another possibility is that ethnobiologists and psychologists use different measures of basicness and that these measures do not converge (see also Barsalou 1991). Coley et al (1997; see also Atran et al 1997, Medin et al 1997) did direct cross-cultural comparisons of these two types of populations using a single measure, inductive confidence. They assumed that if the basic level is the most abstract level at which category members share many properties, then inductive confidence (reasoning from one member having some novel property to all members having that property) should drop abruptly for reference categories above the basic level. Surprisingly, both the Itzaj of Guatemala (members of a traditional society) and US undergraduates consistently showed the same level as privileged, and this level corresponded to genus, consistent with expectations derived from anthropology. This finding raises the possibility that different levels within an object hierarchy are useful for different kinds of tasks (different types of processing). At least for novices, there is a disparity between the level privileged for induction and that favored in naming and speeded category verification tests (though experts may show a convergence across these three tasks). Despite the admirable thoroughness of the original studies of Rosch et al (1976), evidence is increasingly challenging their claim that a single taxonomic level is privileged across the divergent processing demands of particular tasks. Although Rosch et al have claimed that informativeness determines the basic level, Barsalou (1991) has suggested that perceptual factors may be more central. Barsalou argues that entities are categorized first by shape, because the visual system extracts the low-spatial-frequency information that is used to recognize shape faster than it extracts the high-spatial-frequency information that is necessary to recognize more detailed information (e.g. texture). For example, shape has fairly low variance across birds, making shape a strongly predictive feature for the category bird. This argument is strengthened by the fact that entities that do not share the same shape as their fellow basic-level category members (defined by informativeness) are usually not categorized initially at the basic level but instead are categorized initially at the subordinate level (Jolicoeur et al 1984). For example, a chicken is first categorized as a chicken rather than a bird, presumably because it has an atypical shape for a bird. Barsalou (1991) suggests that there may be a perceptual basic level, based primarily on shape and used largely during perception, and a more informational basic level, carrying more conceptual information and used for secondary categorizations during reasoning and communication. This idea may help explain the discrepancy between the privileged level discovered by Rosch et al 1976) on perceptual tasks and that discovered by Coley et al (1997) on the induction task. Murphy & Wisniewski (1989) present further evidence that different taxonomic levels serve different functions. Specifically, superordinates may be used to conceptualize scenes or other types of schemas where interconceptual relations are important, whereas basic-level concepts may be used to conceptualize entities in isolation. (For a recent review of research on hierarchical category structure, see Murphy & Lassaline 1997.) Another claim by Rosch et al (1976) that is under examination is the idea that the basic level is the level at which categories are first learned by children. Specifically, recent studies have raised the possibility that superordinate categories may be learned as early as, or earlier than, basic-level categories. For example, Mandler et al (1991) found that children 18 months old were able to distinguish between members of the superordinate categories of animals and vehicles, but they were not able to distinguish between members within each of these categories (such as dogs and rabbits, and cars and boats). Mandler et al argued from this finding that children acquire certain kinds of superordinate categories, which they call global categories, prior to basic-level categories. Other evidence suggests that the categories that a child first acquires are not determined by their position within a taxonomic hierarchy but rather depend on the particular objects to which the child has been previously exposed. For example, infants 3-4 months old trained on domestic cats in a habituation paradigm dishabituate to members of contrasting basic-level categories (e.g. dogs, birds, tigers) but not to novel domestic cats. This suggests that during training, the infants formed a representation of the basic-level category "domestic cats" (Eimas & Quinn 1994, Eimas et al 1994). However, infants also appear to be facile at learning categories at superordinate levels. When infants 3-4 months old are trained on different members of the superordinate category "mammal" (e.g. dogs, cats, tigers, zebras), they dishabituate to nonmammal category members (birds, fish) but not to novel mammals (e.g. deer, beavers) (Behl-Chadha 1996). Apparently, the infants were able to form a representation of the superordinate category "mammal." These studies suggest that children can form both basic-level and global concepts depending on the stimuli presented (see also Quinn & Johnson 1997.) Although these findings appear to be robust, there may be less unanimity with respect to their interpretation. A critical question concerns the criteria for the claim that a child has learned a concept. For example, is sensitivity to perceptual discontinuities that correspond to concepts equivalent to having a concept? (For one point of view on this issue, see Mandler 1997, Mandler & McDonough 1998.) Overall, recent research tends to weaken the claim for a qualitative distinction between the different levels of a taxonomic hierarchy. The blurring of the distinction between levels undermines the notion that basic-level concepts are special kinds of concepts that reflect the structure of the world, independent of knowledge, expectations, goals, and experience. Hierarchies Versus Paradigms The previous discussion of levels is premised on categories being hierarchically organized. But social categories based on factors such as race, age, gender, and occupation (e.g. female teenager, Asian mail carrier) represent more of a cross-classification or paradigm than a taxonomy. Is there a notion of privilege for social categories, as there is for hierarchical categories? It appears that a key factor in social information processing is accessibility of categories (e.g. Smith & Zarate 1992, ER Smith et al 1996) and that some social categories may be accessed automatically (e.g. Bargh 1994, Devine 1989, Banaji et al 1993, Greenwald & Banaji 1995, Zarate & Smith 1990). Some intriguing evidence even suggests that the activation of one social category leads to the inhibition of competing social categories (Macrae et al 1995). Although the structural difference between paradigms and taxonomies is important, it is too early to tell if processing principles also differ between social categories and taxonomic categories, mainly because direct comparisons have not been done. Ross & Murphy (1999) studied categories associated with foods and their consumption, a context that is interesting because it allows one to study relations between taxonomic categories (e.g. breads, meats, fruits) and script categories that cut across taxonomic categories (e.g. snack foods, dinner foods, junk foods). They report evidence that script categories are less accessible than are common taxonomic categories. Both types of categories were used in inductive reasoning, but their use varied with the type of inference involved. This work points to the fact that even hierarchically organized object categories may admit to other organizations. Category Structure and the Brain Studies of patients with selective cognitive impairments have often provided important clues to normal functioning. One intriguing observation concerns category-specific deficits, where patients may lose their ability to recognize and name category members in a particular domain of concepts. Perhaps the most studied domain difference has been living versus nonliving kinds. For example, Nelson (1946) reported a patient who was unable to recognize a telephone, a hat, or a car but could identify people and other living things (the opposite pattern is also observed and is more common). These deficits raise the possibility that living and nonliving things are represented in anatomically and functionally distinct systems (Sartori & Job 1988). An alternative view (e.g. Warrington & Shallice 1984) is that these patterns of deficits can be accounted for by the fact that different kinds of information are needed to categorize different kinds of objects. For example, sensory information may be relatively more important for recognizing living kinds, and functional information more important for recognizing artifacts (for computational implementations of these ideas, see Farah & McClelland 1991, Devlin et al 1998). Although the weight of evidence appears to favor the kinds-of-information view (see Damasio et al 1996, Forde 1999, Forde & Humphreys 1999), the issue continues to be debated (for a strong defense of the domain-specificity view, see Caramazza & Shelton 1998). Summary Researchers are beginning to systematically explore a variety of structural principles according to which conceptual representations vary. There is fairly good support for the idea that nouns and verbs are different kinds of concepts, or at least that the distinction serves to organize an interesting body of research on linguistic and conceptual development. The lexical distinction between nouns and verbs appears to be mirrored in conceptual structure. Another factor that emerges across a number of candidates for kinds of concepts is the difference between those that are composed of clusters of features and those composed of relations. In the next section, we focus on processing-related differences, but given that processing affects structure, this can be seen as an addition to our list of structural distinctions. CANDIDATES FOR KINDS OF CONCEPTS BASED ON PROCESSING Common Taxonomic Versus Goal-Derived Categories Barsalou (1983, 1985) pointed out that many categories are created in the service of goals and that these goal-derived categories may differ in important ways from object categories. Examples of goal-derived categories include "things to take out of your house in case of a fire" or "foods to eat when on a diet." Goal-derived categories may activate context-dependent properties of category members. For example, the fact that a basketball is round is a stable property that should be accessed independent of context, but the fact that basketballs float may only be accessed in contexts where a goal relies on its buoyancy. Barsalou's research also shows that members of goal-derived categories are not especially similar to one another and, thus, that they violate the correlational structure of the environment that basic-level categories are said to exploit. In addition, Barsalou has determined that the basis for typicality effects differs for goal-derived versus common taxonomic categories. Typicality or goodness of example is generally assumed to be based on similarity relationships--a good example of a category (e.g. robin for the category "bird") is similar to other category members and not similar to nonmembers, whereas an atypical example (e.g. penguin as a bird) shares few properties with category members and may be similar to nonmembers. Barsalou (1985) found that typicality for goal-derived categories was based on proximity to ideals rather than on central tendency. For instance, the best example of diet foods is not one that has the average number of categories for a diet food but one that meets the ideal of zero categories. In short, it appears that goals can create categories and that these categories are organized in terms of ideals. Is this distinction between taxonomic and goal-derived categories fundamental? It is difficult to say. Barsalou notes that the repeated use of goal-derived categories (e.g. things to take on a camping trip for an experienced camper) may lead to them being well established in memory. Perhaps more surprising are recent observations that suggest that ideals play more of a role in organizing common taxonomic categories than previously had been suspected. Atran (1998) reports that for the Itzaj Maya of Guatemala, the best example of the category "bird" is the wild turkey, a distinctive bird that is culturally significant and prized for both its beauty and its meat. Lynch et al (1999) found that tree experts based judgments of tree typicality on the positive ideal of height and on the absence of undesirable characteristics or negative ideals--central tendency played at most a minor role. It may be that typicality is organized in terms of central tendency only for relative novices. Actually, Barsalou's original investigation (1985) found that although common taxonomic categories were most strongly based on central tendency, proximity to ideals made a reliable and independent contribution to goodness of example judgements. In short, common taxonomic and goal-derived categories may be more similar than is suggested by first appearance. Social Information Processing and Individuation One could make a case for the view that processing associated with social categories is different from the processing of object categories. For example, there is the intriguing observation by Wattenmaker (1995) that linear separability (separating categories by a weighted additive function of features) is important for social categories but not for object categories. More generally, people appear to be flexible in social information processing. Fiske et al (1987) proposed a continuum model whereby people may form impressions either by top-down, category-based processes or by bottom-up, data-driven processes. (For a parallel constraint satisfaction model of impression formation in which stereotypical and individuating information are processed simultaneously, see Kunda & Thagard 1996.) Factors such as the typicality of examples and the goals of the learner influence the relative prominence of these two processes. This general framework has held up well and serves to organize a great deal of research on social information processing (for a review, see Fiske et al 1999). It is not clear, however, whether there are corresponding processes that operate for nonsocial categories because this question has been relatively neglected. The only relevant study we know of (Barsalou et al 1998) did identify at least some conditions under which individuation of examples took place. The dearth of comparisons derives in part from the relative neglect of different kinds of processing associated with object categories. Stereotypes, Subtypes, and Subgroups Although people clearly rely on stereotypes based on categories such as race, gender, and age, increasing evidence suggests that people may be more likely to use more specific social categories in their daily interactions. For example, people appear to have and use several different subcategories for the elderly, such as grandmother-type and elder statesman (Brewer et al 1981). Do these subcategories share properties with subordinate object categories? Some kinds of subcategories may operate similarly to subordinate object categories, but others may operate differently. Fiske (1998) argues that social subcategories can be divided into two different kinds based on the goals of a perceiver. When a perceiver is trying to understand why a few individuals differ from her stereotype of a group, she might form a subtype to explain their aberrant behavior (Hewstone et al 1994, Johnston et al 1994). For example, a person may form a subtype for black lawyers to explain why several black individuals she knows speak differently and live in a different part of town than her stereotype of blacks. Notably, forming a subtype allows one to maintain his or her current stereotypes. Fiske (1998) points out that the amount of experience one has with a group also plays a role in whether a subtype is formed. When people have little experience with a group, they tend to perceive less variability among individuals, requiring subtypes to explain any aberrant behavior. With more knowledge about a group, however, people tend to perceive more variability among individuals, which in turn may lead them to form category subgroups. Subgroups consist of category members who are more similar to one another than category members of another subgroup. The key distinction between subgroups and subtypes is that subtypes are made up of a group of people who disconfirm the stereotype in some way, whereas subgroups are usually made up of people who are consistent with the stereotype but in a different way from another subgroup. For example, as Fiske (1998) notes, housewives and secretaries might both be consistent with the stereotype of female, but in different ways. The most common examples of subordinate object categories (e.g. rocking chair, kitchen chair; song birds, birds of prey) seem to be more analogous to subgroups than subtypes, although there may be some examples of subtype-like object categories as well (e.g. birds that do not fly). A question that needs to be addressed is why subtypes appear more common for social categories than for object categories. (For an analysis of motivational processes aimed at preserving stereotypes, see Kunda 1990.) Category Processing and the Brain Process dissociations have often been used as markers of distinct systems, and recently this logic has been applied to categorization. Specifically, Knowlton & Squire (1993; see also Squire & Knowlton 1995) have reported dissociations between categorization and recognition in amnesic and normal individuals, which they interpreted as indicating that multiple memory systems underlie these two tasks. These findings pose challenges for categorization models that assume that categorization and recognition are mediated by a common system. This challenge has not gone unanswered. Nosofsky & Zaki (1998) showed that an exemplar model of categorization can account for the Knowlton & Squire (1993) dissociations, and a strong methodological critique has been made of the Squire & Knowlton (1995) study (Palmeri & Flanery 1999). No doubt the debate will continue. Ashby et al (1998) offered a neuropsychological theory that assumes that category learning involves both an explicit verbal system and an implicit decision-bound learning system (see also Erickson & Kruschke 1998; for multi-strategy category learning models, see Nosofsky et al 1994). The Ashby et al model is promising in that it integrates neuropsychological and computational modeling, but it is premature to evaluate either its success or the illumination it might provide on kinds of categories. Other Distinctions We are necessarily limited in the scope and depth of our coverage; other reviewers would no doubt highlight other differences. One intriguing idea that should at least be mentioned is the proposition that categories are grounded by emotional responses and that stimuli that trigger the same emotion category are seen as similar and are categorized together (Niedenthal et al 1999). Another idea is that different kinds of categories may be represented in memory through different kinds of representational formats. For example, although object categories may be organized in memory in a spatial format, events may be organized in more of a temporal format (Barsalou 1999). Summary Our reading of the evidence is that the case for kinds of concepts based on processing is somewhat weaker than the case for kinds based on structure. In addition, the work on goal-derived categories serves to reinforce structural distinctions. It could also be said that we have imposed something of an artificial bound between structure and processing--the strongest case for distinct kinds will require computational models that make concrete assumptions about both structure and processing. We turn now to the third candidate for kinds of concepts, those based on content. CANDIDATES FOR KINDS OF CONCEPTS BASED ON CONTENT: DOMAIN SPECIFICITY A general trend in the cognitive sciences has been a shift from viewing human beings as general-purpose computational systems to seeing them as adaptive and adapted organisms whose computational mechanisms are specialized and contextualized to our particular environment (Tooby & Cosmides 1992). In this view, learning may be guided by certain skeletal principles, constraints, and (possibly innate) assumptions about the world (e.g. see Keil 1981, Kellman & Spelke 1983, Spelke 1990, Gelman 1990). In an important book, Carey (1985) developed a view of knowledge acquisition as built on framework theories that entail ontological commitments in the service of a causal understanding of real-world phenomena. Two domains can be distinguished from one another if they represent ontologically distinct entities and sets of phenomena. A criterion used to determine whether two concepts refer to ontologically distinct entities is that these concepts are embedded within different causal explanatory frameworks (Solomon et al 1996, Inagaki & Hatano 1993). These ontological commitments serve to organize knowledge into domains such as naive physics (or mechanics), naive psychology, or naive biology (see Wellman & Gelman 1992; Spelke et al 1995; Keil 1992, 1994; Au 1994; Carey 1995; Hatano & Inagaki 1994; Johnson & Solomon 1997; Gopnik & Wellman 1994). Researchers advocating domain specificity have suggested that concepts from different domains are qualitatively different. Although it is difficult to give a precise definition of domain (for a review, see Hirschfeld & Gelman 1994a), the notion of domain specificity has served to organize a great deal of research, especially in the area of conceptual development. For example, studies of infant perception and causal understanding suggest that many of the same principles underlie both adults' and children's concepts of objects (e.g. Baillargeon 1994, 1998; Spelke et al 1992). For example, common motion appears to be a key determinant of 4-month-old infants' notion of an object. The Gestalt principle of good continuation, however, plays no detectable role in the concepts of object for infants at that age. One of the most contested domain distinctions, and one that has generated much research, is that between psychology and biology (e.g. Carey 1991; Johnson & Carey 1998; Coley 1995; Hatano & Inagaki 1994, 1996, 1999; Inagaki 1997; Inagaki & Hatano 1993, 1996; Kalish 1996, 1997; Gelman & Wellman 1991; Rosengren et al 1991; Gelman & Gottfried 1996; Springer 1992, 1995; Springer & Keil 1989,1991; Simons & Keil 1995; Keil 1995; Keil et al 1999; Au & Romo 1996, 1999). Carey (1985) argues that biological concepts like animal are initially understood in terms of folk psychology. Others (Keil 1989, Springer & Ruckel 1992) argue that young children do have biologically specific theories, albeit more impoverished than those of adults. Ultimately, the question breaks down to whether one accepts the criterion used to define "ontologically distinct entities." For example, Springer & Keil (1989) show that preschoolers think biological properties are more likely to be passed from parent to child than are social or psychological properties. They argue that this implies that the children have a biology-like inheritance theory. Solomon et al (1996) claim that preschoolers do not have a biological concept of inheritance because they do not have an adultlike understanding of the biological causal mechanism involved. But is there really a single adult understanding of biology? To address this question, one would need to examine adult understandings from a variety of samples both within and across cultures (Keil et al 1999). What criteria should be used to define a particular domain? Domain-specificity theorists claim that domain-defining framework theories are qualitatively different from other theories in that "they allow and inspire the development of more specific theories but do so by defining the domain of inquiry in the first place" (Wellman & Gelman 1992:342). Do domains yield distinct kinds of concepts? Of necessity, our concepts refer to different kinds of things in the world. A fear is that domain-specificity theorists simply define kinds into existence by stating a priori that certain kinds of content (e.g. physics, biology, psychology) are important. In response, we point to the fact that claims about constraints or contents are always subject to skepticism and counter-attack in the form of both research and theory (e.g. for infant perception, see Cohen 1998, Cohen & Amsel 1999, Needham 1998, Needham & Baillargeon 1997, Xu & Carey 1996, Wilcox & Baillargeon 1998; for the role of conceptual knowledge in naming and linguistic development, see Jones & Smith 1993; Soja et al 1991, 1992; LB Smith et al 1996; Landau et al 1998; Landau 1996; Diesendruck et al 1999; Gelman & Eberling 1998). In short, claims about domains are anything but taken for granted. It is one thing to stake out a domain and quite another to work out the details of how the associated competencies develop, how they are manifest in adults, and how cross-domain interactions emerge. Addressing these questions sets a research agenda that promises to increase our understanding of concept formation and use. For example, Gelman and her associates have been studying the linguistic cues in parental speech that are correlated with distinct ontological kinds (Gelman et al 1999, Gelman & Tardif 1998). In addition, adult folkbiological models and associated reasoning strategies may differ substantially both within and across cultures (Lopez et al 1997, Coley et al 1999) in a way that sharpens discussions of universal principles of biological understanding (see Atran 1998). To briefly mention cross-domain interactions, one key idea and candidate for a universal principle in folkbiology has been psychological essentialism, the theory that people act as if biological kinds have a (hidden) essence that provides conceptual stability over changes in more superficial properties (e.g. Atran 1990, Hall 1998, Medin & Ortony 1989; see also Margolis 1998). But people also appear to essentialize social as well as biological categories (Rothbart & Taylor 1992, Miller & Prentice 1999, Hirschfeld 1996), which raises a number of further interesting questions. Does this essentialism bias arise independently in these two domains, does it start in one and transfer to the other, or is it possibly a bias that initially is highly general and only later on is restricted to biological and social kinds (see Atran 1995; Gelman et al 1994; Hirschfeld 1995; Gelman & Hirschfeld 1999; Kalish 1995; Gottfried et al 1999; Gelman 1999; Keil 1994; Braisby et al 1996; Malt 1994; Malt & Johnson 1992, 1998; Bloom 1998; Ghisilen 1999; Gelman & Diesendruck 1999; for a related discussion and debate, see Rips 1994)? 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Solomon Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208; e-mail: medin at nwu.edu, elynch at nwu.edu, k-solomon at nwu.edu From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 26 15:48:39 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 10:48:39 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Sci Am: Seeking Better Web Searches Message-ID: Seeking Better Web Searches http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=0006304A-37F4-11E8-B7F483414B7F0000 January 24, 2005 Deluged with superfluous responses to online queries, users will soon benefit from improved search engines that deliver customized results By Javed Mostafa In less than a decade, Internet search engines have completely changed how people gather information. No longer must we run to a library to look up something; rather we can pull up relevant documents with just a few clicks on a keyboard. Now that "Googling" has become synonymous with doing research, online search engines are poised for a series of upgrades that promise to further enhance how we find what we need. New search engines are improving the quality of results by delving deeper into the storehouse of materials available online, by sorting and presenting those results better, and by tracking your long-term interests so that they can refine their handling of new information requests. In the future, search engines will broaden content horizons as well, doing more than simply processing keyword queries typed into a text box. They will be able to automatically take into account your location--letting your wireless PDA, for instance, pinpoint the nearest restaurant when you are traveling. New systems will also find just the right picture faster by matching your sketches to similar shapes. They will even be able to name that half-remembered tune if you hum a few bars. Today's search engines have their roots in a research field called information retrieval, a computing topic tracing back nearly 50 years. In a September 1966 Scientific American article, " Information Storage and Retrieval," Ben Ami Lipetz described how the most advanced information technologies of the day could handle only routine or clerical tasks. He then concluded perceptively that breakthroughs in information retrieval would come when researchers gained a deeper understanding of how humans process information and then endowed machines with analogous capabilities. Clearly, computers have not yet reached that level of sophistication, but they are certainly taking users' personal interests, habits and needs into greater account when completing tasks. Prescreened Pages Before discussing new developments in this field, it helps to review how current search engines operate. What happens when a computer user reads on a screen that Google has sifted through billions of documents in, say, 0.32 second? Because matching a user's keyword query with a single Web page at a time would take too long, the systems carry out several key steps long before a user conducts a search. Efforts are under way to make it as easy to search the "hidden Web" as the visible one. First, prospective content is identified and collected on an ongoing basis. Special software code called a crawler is used to probe pages published on the Web, retrieve these and linked pages, and aggregate pages in a single location. In the second step, the system counts relevant words and establishes their importance using various statistical techniques. Third, a highly efficient data structure, or tree, is generated from the relevant terms, which associates those terms with specific Web pages. When a user submits a query, it is the completed tree, also known as an index, that is searched and not individual Web pages. The search starts at the root of the index tree, and at every step a branch of the tree (representing many terms and related Web pages) is either followed or eliminated from consideration, reducing the time to search in an exponential fashion. To place relevant records (or links) at or near the top of the retrieved list, the search algorithm applies various ranking strategies. A common ranking method--term frequency/inverse document frequency--considers the distribution of words and their frequencies, then generates numerical weights for words that signify their importance in individual documents. Words that are frequent (such as " or," " to" or " with") or that appear in many documents are given substantially less weight than words that are more relevant semantically or appear in comparatively few documents. In addition to term weighting, Web pages can be ranked using other strategies. Link analysis, for example, considers the nature of each page in terms of its association with other pages--namely, if it is an authority (by the number of other pages that point to it) or a hub (by the number of pages it points to). Google uses link analysis to improve the ranking of its search results. Superior Engines During the six years in which Google rose to dominance, it offered two critical advantages over competitors. One, it could handle extremely large-scale Web crawling tasks. Two, its indexing and weighting methods produced superior ranking results. Recently, however, search engine builders have developed several new, similarly capable schemes, some of which are even better in certain ways. Recently Amazon, Ask Jeeves and Google announced initiatives that would allow users to personalize their searches. Much of the digital content today remains inaccessible because many systems hosting (holding and handling) that material do not store Web pages as users normally view them. These resources generate Web pages on demand as users interact with them. Typical crawlers are stumped by these resources and fail to retrieve any content. This keeps a huge amount of information--approximately 500 times the size of the conventional Web, according to some estimates--concealed from users. Efforts are under way to make it as easy to search the " hidden Web" as the visible one. To this end, programmers have developed a class of software, referred to as wrappers, that takes advantage of the fact that online information tends to be presented using standardized " grammatical" structures. Wrappers accomplish their task in various ways. Some exploit the customary syntax of search queries and the standard formats of online resources to gain access to hidden content. Other systems take advantage of application programming interfaces, which enable software to interact via a standard set of operations and commands. An example of a program that provides access to the hidden Web is Deep Query Manager from BrightPlanet. This wrapper-based query manager can provide customized portals and search interfaces to more than 70,000 hidden Web resources. Relying solely on links or words to establish ranking, without placing any constraint on the types of pages that are being compared, opens up possibilities for spoofing or gaming the ranking system to misdirect queries. When the query " miserable failure," for example, is executed on the three top search engines--Google, Yahoo and MSN--a page from the whitehouse.gov site appears as the top item in the resulting set of retrieved links. Rather than providing the user with a list of ranked items (which can be spoofed relatively easily), certain search engines attempt to identify patterns among those pages that most closely match the query and group the results into smaller sets. These patterns may include common words, synonyms, related words or even high-level conceptual themes that are identified using special rules. These systems label each set of links with its relevant term. A user can then refine a search further by selecting a particular set of results. Northern Light (which pioneered this technique) and Clusty are search engines that present clustered results. Mooter, an innovative search engine that also employs clustering techniques, provides researchers with several additional advantages by presenting its clusters visually. It arrays the subcategory buttons around a central button representing all the results, like the spokes of a wheel. Clicking on a cluster button retrieves lists of relevant links and new, associated clusters. Mooter remembers the chosen clusters. By clicking on the " refine" option, which combines previously retrieved search clusters with the current query, a user can obtain even more precise results. A similar search engine that also employs visualization is Kartoo. It is a so-called metasearch engine that submits the user's query to other search engines and provides aggregated results in a visual form. Along with a list of key terms associated with various sites, Kartoo displays a " map" that depicts important sites as icons and relations among the sites as labeled paths. Each label can be used to further refine the search. Another way computer tools will simplify searches is by looking through your hard drive as well as the Web. Currently searches for a file on a computer user's desktop require a separate software application. Google, for example, recently announced Desktop Search, which combines the two functions, allowing a user to specify a hard disk or the Web, or both, for a given search. The next release of Microsoft's operating system, code-named Longhorn, is expected to supply similar capabilities. Using techniques developed in another Microsoft project called Stuff I've Seen, Longhorn may offer " implicit search" capabilities that can retrieve relevant information without the user having to specify queries. The implicit search feature reportedly harvests keywords from textual information recently manipulated by the user, such as e-mail or Word documents, to locate and present related content from files stored on a user's hard drive. Microsoft may extend the search function to Web content and enable users to transform any text content displayed on screens into queries more conveniently. Search Me Recently Amazon, Ask Jeeves and Google announced initiatives that attempt to improve search results by allowing users to personalize their searches. The Amazon search engine, A9.com, and the Ask Jeeves search engine, MyJeeves.ask.com, can track both queries and retrieved pages as well as allow users to save them permanently in bookmark fashion. In MyJeeves, saved searches can be reviewed and reexecuted, providing a way to develop a personally organized subset of the Web. Amazon's A9 can support similar functions and also employs personal search histories to suggest additional pages. This advisory function resembles Amazon's well-known book recommendation feature, which takes advantage of search and purchasing patterns of communities of users--a process sometimes called collaborative filtering. The search histories in both A9 and MyJeeves are saved not on users' machines but on search engine servers so that they can be secured and later retrieved on any machine that is used for subsequent searches. In personalized Google, users can specify subjects that are of particular interest to them by selecting from a pregenerated hierarchy of topics. It also lets users specify the degree to which they are interested in various themes or fields. The system then employs the chosen topics, the indicated level of interest, and the original query to retrieve and rank results. Although these search systems offer significant new features, they represent only incremental enhancements. If search engines could take the broader task context of a person's query into account--that is, a user's recent search subjects, personal behavior, work topics, and so forth--their utility would be greatly augmented. Determining user context will require software designers to surmount serious engineering hurdles, however. Developers must first build systems that monitor a user's interests and habits automatically so that search engines can ascertain the context in which a person is conducting a search for information, the type of computing platform a user is running, and his or her general pattern of use. With these points established beforehand and placed in what is called a user profile, the software could then deliver appropriately customized information. Acquiring and maintaining accurate information about users may prove difficult. After all, most people are unlikely to put up with the bother of entering personal data other than that required for their standard search activities. Web searchers will steer through voluminous data repositories using interfaces that establish broad patterns in information. Good sources of information on personal interests are the records of a user's Web browsing behavior and other interactions with common applications in their systems. As a person opens, reads, plays, views, prints or shares documents, engines could track his or her activities and employ them to guide searches of particular subjects. This process resembles the implicit search function developed by Microsoft. PowerScout and Watson are the first systems introduced capable of integrating searches with user-interest profiles generated from indirect sources. PowerScout has remained an unreleased laboratory system, but Watson seems to be nearing commercialization. Programmers are now developing more sophisticated software that will collect interaction data over time and then generate and maintain a user profile to predict future interests. The user-profile-based techniques in these systems have not been widely adopted, however. Various factors may be responsible: one issue may be the problems associated with maintaining profile accuracy across different tasks and over extended periods. Repeated evaluation is necessary to establish robust profiles. A user's focus can change in unpredictable and subtle ways, which can affect retrieval results dramatically. Another factor is privacy protection. Trails of Web navigation, saved searches and patterns of interactions with applications can reveal a significant amount of secret personal information (even to the point of revealing a user's identity). A handful of available software systems permit a user to obtain content from Web sites anonymously. The primary means used by these tools are intermediate or proxy servers through which a user's transactions are transmitted and processed so that the site hosting the data or service is only aware of the proxy systems and cannot trace a request back to an individual user. One instance of this technology is the anonymizer.com site, which permits a user to browse the Web incognito. An additional example is the Freedom WebSecure software, which employs multiple proxies and many layers of encryption. Although these tools offer reasonable security, search services do not yet exist that enable both user personalization and strong privacy protection. Balancing the maintenance of privacy with the benefits of profiles remains a crucial challenge. On the Road Another class of context-aware search systems would take into account a person's location. If a vacationer, for example, is carrying a PDA that can receive and interpret signals from the Global Positioning System (GPS) or using a radio-frequency technique to establish and continuously update position, systems could take advantage of that capability. One example of such a technology is being developed by researchers at the University of Maryland. Called Rover, it is a system that makes use of text, audio or video services across a wide geographic area. Rover can present maps of the region in a user's vicinity that highlight appropriate points of interest. It is able to identify these spots automatically by applying various subject-specific " filters" to the map. The system can provide additional information as well. If a Rover client were visiting a museum, for example, the handheld device would show the institution's floor plan and nearby displays. If the user stepped outside, the PDA display would change to an area map marking locations of potential interest. Rover would also permit an operator to enter his or her position directly and retrieve customized information from the networked database. In 2003 the group that created Rover and KoolSpan, a private network company, received funding from the Maryland state government to develop jointly applications for secure wireless data delivery and user authentication. This collaboration should result in a more secure and commercially acceptable version of Rover. Unfortunately, the positional error of GPS-based systems (from three to four meters) is still rather large. Even though this resolution can be enhanced by indoor sensor and outdoor beacon systems, these technologies are relatively expensive to implement. Further, the distribution of nontext information, especially images, audio and video, would require higher bandwidth capacities than those currently available from handheld devices or provided by today's wireless networks. The IEEE 802.11b wireless local-area network protocol, which offers bandwidths of up to 11 megabits per second, has been tested successfully in providing location-aware search services but is not yet widely available. Picture This Context can mean more than just a user's personal interests or location. Search engines are also going beyond text queries to find graphical material. Many three-dimensional images are now available on the Web, but artists, illustrators and designers cannot effectively search through these drawings or shapes using keywords. The Princeton Shape Retrieval and Analysis Group's 3-D Model Search Engine supports three methods to generate such a query. The first approach uses a sketchpad utility called Teddy, which allows a person to draw basic two-dimensional shapes. The software then produces a virtual solid extrusion (by dragging 2-D images through space) from those shapes. The second lets a user draw multiple two-dimensional shapes (approximating different projections of an image), and the search engine then matches the flat sketches to 13 precomputed projections of each three-dimensional object in its database. Theoretically, this function can be generalized to support retrieval from any 2-D image data set. The third way a person can find an image is to upload a file containing a three-dimensional model. The system, still in development, matches queries to shapes by first describing each shape in terms of a series of mathematical functions--harmonic functions for three-dimensional images and trigonometric ones for two-dimensional representations. The system then produces certain " fingerprinting" values from each function that are characteristic for each associated shape. These fingerprints are called spherical or circular signatures. Two benefits arise from using these descriptors: they can be matched no matter how the original and search shapes are oriented, and the descriptors may be computed and matched rapidly. What's That Song? Music has also entered the search engine landscape. A key problem in finding a specific tune is how to best formulate the search query. One type of solution is to use musical notation or a musical transcription-based query language that permits a user to specify a tune by keying in alphanumeric characters to represent musical notes. Most users, however, find it difficult to transform the song they have in mind to musical notation. The Meldex system, designed by the New Zealand Digital Library Project, solves the problem by offering a couple of ways to find music. First, a user can record a query by playing notes on the system's virtual keyboard. Or he or she can hum the song into a computer microphone. Last, users can specify song lyrics as a text query or combine a lyrics search with a tune-based search. To make the Meldex system work, the New Zealand researchers had to overcome several obstacles: how to convert the musical query to a form that could be readily computed; how to store and search song scores digitally; and how to match those queries with the stored musical data. In the system, a process called quantization identifies the notes and pitches in a query. Meldex then detects the pitches as a function of time automatically by analyzing the structure of the waveforms and maps them to digital notes. The system stores both notes and complete works in a database of musical scores. Using data string-matching algorithms, Meldex finds musical queries converted into notes that correspond with notes from the scores database. Because the queries may contain errors, the string-matching function must accommodate a certain amount of " noise." Searching the Future Future search services will not be restricted to conventional computing platforms. Engineers have already integrated them into some automotive mobile data communications (telematics) systems, and it is likely they will also embed search capabilities into entertainment equipment such as game stations, televisions and high-end stereo systems. Thus, search technologies will play unseen ancillary roles, often via intelligent Web services, in activities such as driving vehicles, listening to music and designing products. Another big change in Web searching will revolve around new business deals that greatly expand the online coverage of the huge amount of published materials, including text, video and audio, that computer users cannot currently access. Ironically, next-generation search technologies will become both more and less visible as they perform their increasingly sophisticated jobs. The visible role will be represented by more powerful tools that combine search functions with data-mining operations--specialized systems that look for trends or anomalies in databases without actually knowing the meaning of the data. The unseen role will involve developing myriad intelligent search operations as back-end services for diverse applications and platforms. Advances in both data-mining and user-interface technologies will make it possible for a single system to provide a continuum of sophisticated search services automatically that are integrated seamlessly with interactive visual functions. By leveraging advances in machine learning and classification techniques that will be able to better understand and categorize Web content, programmers will develop easy-to-use visual mining functions that will add a highly visible and interactive dimension to the search function. Industry analysts expect that a variety of mining capabilities will be available, each tuned to search content from a specialized domain or format (say, music or biological data). Software engineers will design these functions to respond to users' needs quickly and conveniently despite the fact they will manipulate vast quantities of information. Web searchers will steer through voluminous data repositories using visually rich interfaces that focus on establishing broad patterns in information rather than picking out individual records. Eventually it will be difficult for computer users to determine where searching starts and understanding begins. From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 26 15:53:53 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 10:53:53 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: (CATO) Report Blames Federal Student Aid for Rising Tuition and Urges Elimination of Aid Programs Message-ID: Report Blames Federal Student Aid for Rising Tuition and Urges Elimination of Aid Programs News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.26 http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/01/2005012602n.htm [CATO's own write-up beneath.] [45]By SILLA BRUSH Congress should gradually phase out federal student aid when it drafts legislation to renew the Higher Education Act this year because the act has driven up the cost of tuition since it was passed, in 1965, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Cato Institute. The report concludes that increased financial aid through Pell Grants and other federal assistance programs has led more students to attend college. That increase in demand has had the "unintended consequence" of increasing the price of higher education. The report does not specify to what degree tuition has increased because of the Higher Education Act, the federal law that governs most federal student-aid programs and is up for reauthorization this year. The author of the report is Gary Wolfram, a professor of political economy at Hillsdale College, an institution in Michigan that does not accept any federal money and does not allow its students to do so either. The Cato Institute is a research institution in Washington founded on what it describes as libertarian principles. The report echoes comments made during the 1980s by William J. Bennett, then the education secretary, about cutting federal student-aid programs. The report recommends phasing out federal assistance to higher education over a 12-year period. That would cut the price of tuition, the report says, and encourage the private sector to be more involved in tuition assistance. The full text of the report, "Making College More Expensive: The Unintended Consequences of Federal Tuition Aid," is available on the institute's [56]Web site. _________________________________________________________________ Background articles from The Chronicle: * [57]Public Colleges See a 10% Rise in Tuition for 2004-5 (10/29/2004) * [58]Hillsdale College Stands Out for Refusing Federal Money (3/1/1996) References 45. mailto:silla.brush at chronicle.com 50. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/01/2005012601n.htm 51. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/01/2005012602n.htm 52. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/01/2005012603n.htm 53. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/01/2005012604n.htm 54. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/01/2005012605n.htm 55. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/01/2005012606n.htm 56. http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3344 57. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i10/10a00101.htm 58. http://chronicle.com/che-data/articles.dir/art-42.dir/issue-25.dir/25a03001.htm E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles. ----------- Making College More Expensive: The Unintended Consequences of Federal Tuition Aid http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3344 by Gary Wolfram Gary Wolfram is George Munson Professor of Political Economy at Hillsdale College in Michigan. _________________________________________________________________ Executive Summary As Congress debates the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, it should heed Friedrich Hayeks warning that democracy is peculiarly liable, if not guided by accepted common principles, to produce over-all results that nobody wanted. One result of the federal governments student financial aid programs is higher tuition costs at our nations colleges and universities. Basic economic theory suggests that the increased demand for higher education generated by HEA will have the effect of increasing tuitions. The empirical evidence is consistent with thatfederal loans, Pell grants, and other assistance programs result in higher tuition for students at our nations colleges and universities. The diversity of objectives, resources, and types of governance among the thousands of colleges and universities makes it difficult to adequately measure the exact amount by which tuitions rise in response to federal student assistance. Therefore, estimates of the amount vary in the literature. Congress can at best know that its policies increase tuitions and that some portion of the federal assistance ends up being captured by state governments and by the colleges and universities. Also, when large numbers of students begin to rely on the federal government to fund their higher education, and the federal government uses this financing to affect the behavior of state and private institutions, we should be concerned about how the resulting loss of independence of our colleges and universities affects the ability of voters to form opinions about public policy that are independent of the governments position. Rather than expand the current system, Congress should consider a phase-out of federal assistance to higher education over a 12-year time frame. As the federal government removes itself from student assistance, we should expect several things to happen. First, sticker tuition prices should decline. Second, the private market should respond to the phase-out of federal assistance. That response would likely take three forms: additional private-sector loans, additional private scholarship funds, and perhaps most importantly, the expansion of human capital contracts. Human capital contracts, first suggested 40 years ago by Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, would allow students to pledge a portion of future earnings in return for assistance in paying their tuition. Full Text of Policy Analysis no. 531 (PDF, 333 KB) http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa531.pdf From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 26 15:59:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 10:59:27 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Star-Telegram (Dallas-Fort Worth): (Oscars) Insipid and out of Touch Message-ID: Insipid and out of Touch http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/entertainment/10737475.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp Posted on Wed, Jan. 26, 2005 [Thanks to Sarah for this and a related article beneath by Michael Medved.] Nominations push the Oscars toward irrelevancy By Christopher Kelly Star-Telegram Film Critic Oscar voters played it safe Tuesday -- extremely safe -- with an almost entirely predictable slate of nominations for the 77th annual Academy Awards. Those of us who crawled out of bed early hoping for a wake-up jolt had to settle for the sight of Adrian Brody threatening to plant a wet one on Academy President Frank Pierson. And even that wasn't surprising. Martin Scorsese's handsomely mounted, well-acted, but ultimately bland Howard Hughes biopic led the nominations with 11, including Best Picture and Best Actor, for Leonardo DiCaprio. The Aviator nods were both expected and a little puzzling: It's hard to think of another Oscar front-runner in recent memory that has been greeted with such polite indifference by critics and audiences. (After a month in theaters, it has grossed a modest $58 million.) Clint Eastwood's boxing drama Million Dollar Baby came up a winner with seven nominations. Any doubts that this grim, gorgeously made movie can overcome The Aviator on Oscar night should be quelled by a closer look at the Best Actor category. A directing nomination for Eastwood's work on Million Dollar Baby was a gimme. His surprise acting nod suggests that Academy voters, like many critics, regard the film as a career high point for Eastwood, both in front of and behind the camera. Still in limited release, Million Dollar Baby remains untested. But if it connects with audiences when it opens wide Friday and if Eastwood campaigns with his characteristic grace and ease, we could be looking at a sweep on Feb. 27. To score that Best Actor nomination, Eastwood had to knock the superb Paul Giamatti (Sideways) out of the race. It is Giamatti's second consecutive Academy snub (he was just as terrific last year in American Splendor), and it hints that support for Sideways, the critics' darling, might not be quite so widespread among Oscar voters. Some people will try to convince you that the nominations for Hotel Rwanda's Don Cheadle (Best Actor) and Sophie Okonedo (Best Supporting Actress) come out of left field -- but don't believe that bluster. The real surprise is that this well-liked, very earnest drama about the 1994 Rwandan genocide didn't make its way into the Best Picture or Best Director categories. Cheadle's presence will liven up the Best Actor race considerably. He's a beloved journeyman actor and could prove a viable alternative if voters decide they've had enough of the overwhelming favorite, Ray's ubiquitous Jamie Foxx. Foxx also scored a supporting-actor nod for his role as the beleaguered cabbie in Michael Mann's Collateral, though he has no chance of winning. Morgan Freeman's aging boxing in Million Dollar Baby will square off against Thomas Haden Church, Sideway's incorrigibly randy groom-to-be, with four-time nominee Freeman the sentimental favorite. The nominations in the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories were especially predictable, with Maria Full of Grace's Catalina Moreno Sandido the only mild eyebrow raiser (though some of us were making that call as early as last January, when the film premiered at Sundance). More than just being predictable, this year's Oscar nominations seemed out of touch with the movies that touched us most in 2004. Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 turned the mass culture on its ear and changed the way we talk and think about movies. But Gibson's passion play had to settle for three entirely deserved technical nominations -- for cinematography, score and makeup -- while Fahrenheit 9/11 came up blank. (Moore took himself out of the running for Best Documentary in hopes of competing in the Best Picture category.) Even Kinsey, a sure-footed portrait of the famed sex researcher that dove headlong into our ongoing culture wars, was almost completely ignored. (Laura Linney landed that film's only nomination, for Best Supporting Actress.) In a year where the movies seemed to matter more than ever, the Academy gave us a slate of coddling and unimaginative choices that has pushed Oscar dangerously close to irrelevancy. 77th annual Academy Awards The nominations in major categories: Picture The Aviator, Finding Neverland, Million Dollar Baby, Ray, Sideways. Director Martin Scorsese, The Aviator; Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby; Taylor Hackford, Ray; Alexander Payne, Sideways; Mike Leigh, Vera Drake. Actor Don Cheadle, Hotel Rwanda; Johnny Depp, Finding Neverland; Leonardo DiCaprio, The Aviator; Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby; Jamie Foxx, Ray. Actress Annette Bening, Being Julia; Catalina Sandino Moreno, Maria Full of Grace; Imelda Staunton, Vera Drake; Hilary Swank, Million Dollar Baby; Kate Winslet, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Supporting actor Alan Alda, The Aviator; Thomas Haden Church, Sideways; Jamie Foxx, Collateral; Morgan Freeman, Million Dollar Baby; Clive Owen, Closer. Supporting actress Cate Blanchett, The Aviator; Laura Linney, Kinsey; Virginia Madsen, Sideways; Sophie Okonedo, Hotel Rwanda; Natalie Portman, Closer. Writing (adapted screenplay) Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke and Kim Krizan, Before Sunset; David Magee, Finding Neverland; Paul Haggis, Million Dollar Baby; Jose Rivera, The Motorcycle Diaries; Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, Sideways. Writing (original screenplay) John Logan, The Aviator; Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry and Pierre Bismuth, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Brad Bird, The Incredibles; Mike Leigh, Vera Drake; Keir Pearson and Terry George, Hotel Rwanda. Foreign film As It Is in Heaven (Sweden), The Chorus (Les Choristes) (France), Downfall (Germany), The Sea Inside (Spain), Yesterday (South Africa). Animated feature film The Incredibles, Shark Tale, Shrek 2. Documentary Born Into Brothels, The Story of the Weeping Camel, Super Size Me, Tupac: Resurrection, Twist of Faith. -- The Associated Press ------------- Oscar bids reflect industry's discomfort with religion http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-01-25-medved_x.htm By Michael Medved The Oscar nominations announced Tuesday illustrate Hollywood's profound, almost pathological discomfort with the traditional religiosity embraced by most of its mass audience. At the same time, the odd choices for major awards suggest the enormous distance the entertainment industry has traveled from its own populist past. By excluding Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ from all high-profile nominations, the Academy Awards voters shut out one of the year's biggest box-office hits that also won its share of enthusiastic critical praise -- and even swept to victory as "Favorite Drama" in the public voting for the People's Choice Awards. Industry apologists might explain the failure to acknowledge The Passion in any significant way (it did win well-deserved technical nominations for makeup, cinematography and musical score) as the result of the controversy the film provoked when some Jewish leaders denounced its allegedly anti-Semitic elements. But far greater religious controversy didn't scare away the Academy 16 years ago, when its members honored Martin Scorsese with a surprise best-director nomination for The Last Temptation of Christ, despite impassioned condemnation of the film by many of the same mainstream Catholic and Protestant groups that enthusiastically supported The Passion. Moreover, The Last Temptation made no impact on the moviegoing public to compel Oscar attention -- earning a paltry $8 million domestic gross compared with the staggering $370 million for The Passion. The popular success of Gibson's movie actually echoed an older tradition of biblical blockbusters: Between 1949 and 1959, six religious-themed pictures (Samson and Delilah, David and Bathsheba, Quo Vadis, The Robe, The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur) each became the nation's top box-office hit in the year of its release, while drawing significant Oscar attention. Ben Hur, in fact, set a record that lasted for nearly 40 years with its 11 Academy Awards. In other words, Hollywood once chose to praise movies that eloquently affirmed the religious convictions of the mass audience. But in 2005, top nominations went to films that went out of their way to assault or insult the sensibilities of most believers. Both Million Dollar Baby (nominated for seven awards, including best picture, best director, best actor and best actress) and The Sea Inside (nominated for best foreign-language film) portray assisted suicide as an explicitly and unequivocally "heroic" choice. Their success suggests that if Hollywood ever gets around to making "The Jack Kevorkian Story," it, too, would become an automatic candidate for major awards. Meanwhile, Vera Drake (nominated for best actress, best director and best original screenplay) portrays abortion in a positive, almost sacramental light, while Kinsey (nominated for best supporting actress) ridicules the religious orthodoxy of the main character's father and portrays all conventional inhibitions about sexuality as outmoded, ignorant and destructive. At the same time, the Spanish-language film The Motorcycle Diaries earned significant recognition for best adapted screenplay with its nostalgic, deeply affectionate portrayal of the idealistic young man who became the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara. For Hollywood, it seems, a murderous, anti-American Marxist guerrilla counts as less controversial than Jesus Christ. Most of the public debate about this batch of Oscar nominations will naturally center on the complete shutout of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 -- with the entertainment elite declining an obvious opportunity to assert their identification with the left side of the political spectrum. And this reluctance to celebrate the most unapologetically liberal film of the year may help the Academy avoid offending the majority who voted for President Bush, even while other Oscar nominations risk alienating that even larger segment of the public committed to faith-based values that have been needlessly ignored or assaulted by the most praised products of show business. Film critic and syndicated radio host Michael Medved is author of the newly published book Right Turns. He also is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors. From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 26 16:01:56 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 11:01:56 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Criterion: Summer reading by Stefan Beck Message-ID: Summer reading by Stefan Beck The New Criterion Vol. 23, No. 23, December 2004 http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/dec04/sbeck.htm [Why Summer reading is coming in December, I do not know.] The sortes Virgilianae is an old form of do-it-yourself divination: you open the Aeneid at random, put a finger on a verse, and therein find wisdom or solace tailored to your troubles. For the bored or "blocked" man of letters, Michael Dirda's collection Bound to Please has a similarly tonic effect. It includes a hundred-odd of Dirda's reviews--of books, yes, but also of the minds behind the books. Pick one at random. Depending on whether you know the work discussed, you'll receive a thoughtful reconsideration or, perhaps more fun, an enthusiastic introduction. Michael Dirda has reviewed books for The Washington Post Book World since 1978. Bound to Please represents, by Dirda's account, 20 percent of his output. This is an impressive amount of writing; it is the result of a downright alarming amount of reading. (When did he eat, sleep, or bathe?) He was spurred not by penury and deadlines but by his love of words. His first review, two hundred words on John Gardner's In the Suicide Mountains, took him a full day to write. "No prose since that on Trajan's column," he writes, "has been so carefully chiseled." Every reviewer loves to read and write, or says he does, but Dirda's joyful monomania goes beyond that, and it is a rare and wonderful thing. It's infectious. If literary reading is on the decline, as the NEA's recent "Reading at Risk" survey solemnly announced it is, Bound to Please ought to be required summer reading for high school students. One cannot browse in it without wanting to rush to a used bookstore and shell out for a stack. (I, for one, will be reading my wages at the Strand come next month. Thank you, Mr. Dirda.) Dirda is a great guide, a Virgil leading both novice and experienced readers on a tour of his own Reader's Paradise. His collection, promising to be a "literary education," moves effortlessly from age to age, style to style, genius to genius. Sections like "Romantic Dreamers," "Visionaries and Moralists," "Lovers, Poets, and Madmen," and "Writers of Our Time" organize this delightful embarrassment of riches. In "Old Masters," the first section, we find Herodotus, Ovid, and the Bible. There are surprises, too: an appreciation of the Bible is followed by an essay on William Tyndale, "the first translator, into English, of the New Testament from the Greek and of about half the Old Testament from the Hebrew." We miss Shakespeare, but shake hands with Christopher Marlowe, brawler, spy, and playwright-poet--by way of Anthony Burgess's Dead Man in Deptford. In a review of Robert Irwin's Arabian Nights: A Companion, we are tantalized with the following: Most of us, I suspect, know The Arabian Nights only from the simplified, bowdlerized versions found in the nursery. So to read the unexpurgated tales can be a revelation. First of all, they are quite exceptionally gripping. Two illicit lovers try desperately to convince a murderous demon that they are strangers to each other. The monster turns to the man and says, "`Take this sword and strike her head off, and I will believe that you do not know her and let you go free.' I replied, `I will do it,' and I took the sword and sprang toward her." In bits like this one, Dirda seizes upon one of the great rewards of reading: the odd scene or detail that lodges itself unshakably in the reader's imagination. Bound to Please is filled with such details; it whets one's appetite for them. Thus is Pepys's frenzied lechery evoked in one delightful, albeit barely intelligible, quotation: "mi mano was sobra her pectus, and so did hazer with grand delight." (Next thing you know, you're groping your shelves for a copy of his Diaries.) The ending of Borges's story "The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths," in which a vengeful Arab king leaves his Babylonian enemy to die in the vast "labyrinth" of the desert, conjures up in a single paragraph the writer's marvelous, byzantine imagination. Dirda is an expert at picking out these little reminders of why we love the writers we love to read. None of this is to say that Dirda focuses narrowly on literature as entertainment. His reviews are informed not only by his enjoyment, but also by stores of historical and critical knowledge. It is no small thing that almost every review of a foreign-language work includes a discussion of those translations considered best, and those to be avoided. (Dirda's review of Donald Frame's translation of the Complete Works of Fran?ois Rabelais, for instance, dilates on the relative merits of four other translations. Can he really have read all of them?) A four-page piece on Proust draws on a staggering wealth of materials: a biography by Jean-Yves Tadi?, a volume of Proust's letters, a "field guide" by Roger Shattuck, and an abridgment of A Remembrance of Things Past. Dirda, even in a brief essay, manages some sweeping gestures of appreciation: To those who respond to his sinuous prose--and many people don't--there is no more powerful hypnotic drug in all literature. In Search of Lost Time is no mere novel; it is a world, a universe that alternately expands into every layer of society and then contracts back into the Narrator's consciousness. Its author once compared his masterpiece to The Arabian Nights. But the book might also be likened to a modern Metamorphoses, for it depicts both public and personal life as restless, uncertain, and disheartening, a domain of constant transformation, of unceasing flux and shocking revelation. This is proof of Dirda's discipline, dedication, and craftsmanship. Few reviewers would take in so much to produce such short pieces. For Dirda, it's business as usual: he reads to discover, to add to the critical tools at his command. And anyone who raises a skeptical eyebrow at that abridgment of Proust should be advised: "During that gray and rainy fall of [Dirda's] junior year in college, [he] read Proust steadily for five, six, eight hours a day." It seems Dirda has heeded Balzac's dictum--noted in the introduction to the section titled "Professionals at Work"--that "[c]onstant work is the law of art as it is of life." Dirda's reviews please, as promised, but do they rise to the level of a permanent artistic contribution? Bound to Please is intelligent, comprehensive, and so indispensable to anyone who craves a real literary education. There's just one thing: it doesn't contain a single negative review. Not even any faint praise, really. On the first page of his introduction, Dirda explains, "By only the loosest definition ... can the contents of Bound to Please be regarded as criticism. Instead, think of these articles as old-fashioned appreciations, a fan's notes, good talk." So we have been warned. But simply pointing out a flaw doesn't correct it, and the total absence of vitriol from these pages is a flaw. After five-hundred-plus pages of loving praise, one yearns for nothing so much as Dale Peck's savage, occasionally foul-mouthed hatchet jobs, or James Wood's precise dismantlings. One wants to see clay feet in pieces. After all, to be educated is to be able to sniff out garbage as well as genius. Alas, Bound to Please cannot help one cultivate that discriminating nose. Hand in hand with this deficiency is Dirda's sometimes somewhat hokey literary populism. He writes, "Bound to Please will, I hope, encourage its readers to look beyond the boundaries of the fashionable, established, or academic. No cultivated person today should be hamstrung by unthinking prejudices about fantasy, crime fiction, or the literature of other times and places." (It is difficult to see where "the literature of other times and places" fits into that caveat, but we will let that be.) Preoccupation with low culture is fashionable and academic. Vladimir Nabokov once wrote of his distaste for professors who feign love for detective fiction. (He himself derided the genre as formulaic.) The point is not really whether there is good detective fiction, or fantasy, or sci-fi--certainly there is, on all counts--but that noisily proclaiming so is just a means of looking like a broad-minded literary omnivore, or, worse yet, a "man of the people." Can a man of Dirda's intellect really desire any of this? Does he truly want to write for "the semimythical common reader ... one who is sleepily flipping through the newspaper while sipping coffee on a Sunday morning"? Anyone who has devoted as much of his life to reading and study as Dirda has might reasonably prefer a reader with some of the mental equipment to appreciate that learning. Yet he is content to dwell in his Joe Paperback persona. That persona grates at times. Many of these reviews, no matter how deep their critical insight or thorough their research, end with embarrassing lines like: "You laugh, you get dizzy, you lose your bearings or even your lunch. But what a ride!" or "You gotta love a book like that!" or (of a study of the eighteenth-century "Lunar Men") "Start reading some night when the moon is full" or "What a love story! What a book!" Conclusions like these are lazy; they seem meant to distract that "common reader" from the uncommon brilliance of what he has just read--so that he scratches his head and says, "Gee, I guess he's just a reg'lar sorta feller, like me." There is something frightfully self-conscious, and yet un-self-confident, about this strategy. The problem is: one tends to be suspicious of a critic to whom this chipper positivity comes so easily. There are bad or overrated writers in what we think of as the "canon." Even the writers we love best stumble at times. Coming to grips with this is a necessary step in one's development as a reader, but Bound to Please doesn't adequately hint at it. It seems to say: Read, enjoy yourself, and you will have become a Reader. But Dirda doesn't believe that, does he? All told, however, none of these shortcomings ever quite overshadows the collection's fine points. It is a thorough and beautifully written document of the great pleasure reading can bring. So it makes one want to read, and to read a great variety of things--literature, history, poetry, commentary, and on and on. This encouragement by example should be welcomed by both new and veteran page-turners. _________________________________________________________________ Stefan Beck is the assistant editor at The New Criterion. References 1. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393057577/thenewcriterio 2. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ADD_ISBN_HERE/thenewcriterio From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 26 16:03:33 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 11:03:33 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Neil Gilbert: A New GOP?: What Do Women Really Want? Message-ID: Neil Gilbert: A New GOP?: What Do Women Really Want? http://www.thepublicinterest.com/current/article2.html Winter 2005 With journalists as well as social scientists continually on the lookout for new trends, the public is regularly treated to the discovery of social "revolutions." One of the latest concerns women and work. In October 2003, Lisa Belkin detected an "opt-out revolution" in her New York Times Magazine article about accomplished women leaving high-powered jobs to stay home with their kids. Six months later, reports on the revolution were still going strong. For example, the March 22, 2004 cover of Time showed a young child clinging to his mother's leg alongside the headline, "The Case for Staying Home: Why More Young Moms Are Opting Out of the Rat Race." But the evidence on this score is thin. Both the New York Times and Time stories are based mainly on evocative anecdotes. Princeton college graduates with law degrees from Harvard staying home to change diapers may be absorbing as a human-interest story. But as the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data. The limited empirical evidence offered in support of the opt-out revolution draws upon facts such as these: 22 percent of mothers with graduate degrees are at home with their children, one in three women with an MBA does not work full time, and 26 percent of women approaching the most senior levels of management do not want to be promoted. However, with information of this sort one needs a ouija board to detect a social trend, let alone a revolution. The fact that 57 percent of mothers from the Stanford University class of 1981 stayed home with their young children for at least a year gives no indication of whether the percentage of Stanford graduates remaining at home with their children has increased, decreased, or remained the same over time. But we know that some things have changed over time. The main difference between women in the 1970s and today is that a substantially higher percentage are currently receiving degrees in law or medicine, or obtaining graduate education in general. Between 1970 and 1997 the proportion of degrees awarded to women soared by almost 500 percent in medicine, 800 percent in law, and 1000 percent in business. Even if one-third of all the women currently receiving these degrees opt out of professional life, the remaining two-thirds amount to a significant increase in women's employment in these areas over the last three decades. At the moment, women opting out of high-powered careers to stay home with their children are a minor element in a profound life-style trend that has extended over the last several decades--a development deftly portrayed, some might say celebrated, in the media. After a six-year run, the popular HBO series "Sex and the City" ended in 2004 with what was widely reported as a happy ending. Each of the four heroines, in their late thirties and early forties, found partners and commitment, while also pursuing gratifying careers. The series finale was a paean to love and individual fulfillment. But as for family life, these four vibrant, successful women approaching the terminus of their childbearing years ended up with only two marriages and one child between them. As a mirror of society, the media shift from kids bouncing off the walls in the "Brady Bunch" to the .25 fertility rate in "Sex and the City" several decades later clearly reflects the cultural and demographic trends over this period. Today, a little over one in five women in their early forties are childless. That is close to double the proportion of childless women in 1976. Compared to a relatively few Ivy-League law graduates who have traded the bar for rocking the cradle, the abdication of motherhood poses an alternative and somewhat more compelling answer to the question: Who is opting out of what? Women are increasingly having fewer children and a growing proportion are choosing not to have any children at all. And those who have children are delegating their care to others. If there has been an "opt-out revolution," the dramatic increase in childlessness--from one in ten to almost one in five women--and the rise in out-of-home care for young kids would probably qualify more than the shift of a relatively small group of professional-class women from high-powered careers to childrearing activities. < The choices women make Talk of social revolutions conveys a sense of fundamental change in people's values--a new awakening that is compelling women to substitute one type of life for another. The "opt-out revolution" implies that whatever it is women really want, they all pretty much want the same thing when it comes to career and family. It may have looked that way in earlier times. Although the question of what women want has plagued men for ages, it became a serious issue for women only in modern times in the advanced industrialized countries. Before the contraceptive revolution of the mid 1960s, biology may not have been destiny, but it certainly contributed to the childbearing fate of women who engaged in sexual activity. Most women needed men for their economic survival before the equal-opportunity movement in the 1960s, which opened access to most all careers. Moreover, the expansion of white-collar jobs and jobs for secondary earners since the 1960s has presented women with a viable range of employment alternatives to traditional domestic life. Taken together, these advances in contraceptive technology and civil rights along with labor market changes have transformed women's opportunities to control and shape their personal lives. As Catherine Hakim, a senior research fellow at the London School of Economics, has pointed out, this historic shift allows modern women to exercise work and family choices that were heretofore unknown to all but a privileged few. And what are these preferences? Taking family size as a powerful indicator of life-style choice, we can distinguish at least four general categories that form a continuum of work-family preferences among women in the United States. At one end of the continuum are women with three or more children. Most of these women derive most of their sense of personal identity and achievement from the traditional childrearing responsibilities and from practicing the domestic arts. While all mothers tend to love their children, these women also enjoy being around kids on a daily basis. In 1976, about 59 percent of women over 40 years of age had three or more children. But as women gained control over procreation and employment opportunities opened, fewer of them took this traditional route. Today, only 29 percent of the women over 40 years of age have three or more children. At the other end of the continuum are women who are childless--often by choice. Here personal success tends to be measured by achievements in business, political, intellectual, and artistic life rather than in the traditional realms of motherhood and childrearing. This is a highly individualistic, work-centered group engaged in what might be called the "postmodern" life style. As already noted, since 1976 the proportion of childless women over the age of 40 has almost doubled, representing 18 percent of all the women in that age cohort today. In the middle of the life-style continuum, about 52 percent of women currently over 40 have either one or two children. These women are interested in paid work, but not so vigorously committed to a career that they would forego motherhood. Although a bare majority, this group is often seen as representative of all women--and of the women "who want it all." In balancing the demands of employment and family, women with one child normally tip the scales in favor of their careers, while the group with two children leans more toward domestic life. Thus the women clustered around the center of the continuum can be divided into two basic categories--"neo-traditional" and "modern"--that vary in degrees from the traditional and the postmodern life styles. The neo-traditional group contains families with two children whose working mothers are physically and emotionally invested more in their home life than their jobs, which are often part-time. Since 1976 the proportion of women over age 40 with two children has increased by 75 percent and currently amounts to about 35 percent of the women in that cohort. The modern family usually involves a working mother with one child; these women are more career-oriented and devote greater time and energy to their paid employment than neo-traditional women. The proportion of women over 40 with one child has climbed by almost 90 percent since 1976, and currently amounts to 17 percent of the women in that cohort. As general types, the traditional, neo-traditional, modern, and postmodern categories help draw attention to both the diversity of work and family choices and to how the size of these groups has shifted over the last three decades. Needless to say, in each group there are women who do not fit the ideal-type--childless women who do not work and women employed full-time with three or more children at home. Also, there are women in each group who would have preferred to have more or fewer children than they ended up with. And certainly some women who would prefer not to work and to have additional children are compelled out of economic necessity to participate in the labor force and have fewer children. However, for most people in the advanced industrial countries what is often considered economic "necessity" amounts to a preferred level of material comfort--home ownership, automobiles, vacations, cell phones, DVDs, and the like. The trade-off between higher levels of material consumption and a more traditional domestic life is largely a matter of individual choice. Health has also not played much of a role in these changing family patterns. There is no strong indication that the physical status of the U.S. population has deteriorated over the last three decades in any way that would systematically account for the increasing proportion of women with only one or two children. Many feminists like to portray women as a monolithic group whose shared interests are dominated by the common struggle to surmount biological determinism, patriarchal socialization, financial dependence on men, and workplace discrimination. And they would like public policies to reflect this supposed reality. However, in the course of exercising preferences about how to balance the demands of work and family, the heterogeneity of women's choices has become increasingly evident. This substantial variance has great importance for social policy. For it compels us to ask which groups of women--traditional, neo-traditional, modern, and postmodern--are really best served by today's so-called family-friendly policies. Family policy in the United States The conventional package of "family-friendly" public policies involves benefits designed to reduce the tensions between work and family life, such as parental leave, family services, and day care. For the most part these policies address the needs of women in the neo-traditional and modern categories--those trying to balance work and family obligations. The costs of publicly subsidized day care are born by all taxpayers, but the programs offer no benefits to childless women who prefer the postmodern life style and are of little use to traditional stay-at-home mothers. Indeed, with few exceptions, childless women in full-time careers and those who remain at home to care for children are not the subjects of family-related policy deliberations. Among the advanced industrial democracies the United States is considered a laggard in dispensing parental leave, day care, and other public subsidies to reduce the friction between raising a family and holding a job. The right to take 12 weeks of job-protected family leave was initiated in 1993. But the scope of coverage is limited to companies with 50 employees or more--and the leave is unpaid. Needless to say, unpaid leave is not a serious option for many low-income families. However, low-income families have benefited from the considerable rise in public spending for child care during the 1990s. Testifying before Congress in 2002, American Enterprise Institute scholar Douglas Besharov estimated that between 1994 and 1999 federal and state expenditures on child care programs climbed by almost 60 percent, from $8.9 billion to $14.1 billion, most of which served low-income families. About $2 billion of additional support was delivered to mainly middle- and upper-income families through the child-care tax credit. Although $16 billion in publicly subsidized care is no trivial sum, it amounts to less than $900 for each child under five years of age. The United States has moved slowly toward expanding conventional family-friendly arrangements in part because of ideological ambivalence in this area. Public sympathy for welfare programs that pay unmarried women to stay home and care for their children evaporated as the labor- force participation of married women with children younger than six years of age multiplied threefold, from under 20 percent in 1960 to over 60 percent in 2000. The increased public spending on day care is largely related to making it possible for welfare mothers to enter the labor force. Conservatives have long argued for strengthening work requirements in welfare programs. At the same time, many conservatives also support the idea of "putting less emphasis on policies that free up parents to be better workers, and more emphasis on policies that free up workers to be better parents"--a view expressed in the Report to the Nation from the Commission on Children at Risk. Liberals have traditionally resisted demands that welfare recipients should work for their benefits. But this position softens when feminists on the Left push for universal day care and other policies that encourage all mothers to enter the paid workplace. European family policy In contrast to the United States, Western European countries are well known for having a powerful arsenal of day care and other family-friendly benefits. For example, over 70 percent of the children from age three years to school age in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom are in publicly financed child care. Given the general direction of U.S. policy, it may be instructive to examine how motherhood and family life have fared in light of the changing levels of family-friendly benefits available in the industrialized countries of the European Union. The question is not simply are they "family friendly," but for what kinds of families and female life styles are they friendly? Overall, marriage and fertility rates have declined and female labor-force participation rates have increased throughout most of the European Union over the last few decades. In fact, the fertility rates are currently lower than in the United States, and the proportions of childless women aged 40 in Britain, Austria, Switzerland, and Sweden are about the same as that in the United States. Contrary to what one might expect, sociologist Gosta Esping-Andersen found that in 1992 European countries with high levels of female employment tended to have higher fertility rates than those with low levels of female employment. Based on the positive correlation from a cross-sectional analysis of 19 countries he concludes that in some contexts female careers and children can become fairly compatible. Similar moderately positive results emerge from a cross-sectional analysis of fertility rates and female employment in 12 European countries in 1997. These positive findings, however, say more about the limits of cross-sectional analysis than the empirical relation between fertility and labor-force participation rates. The limitation becomes apparent when these rates are analyzed over time. Here a completely different picture emerges, as illustrated in Figure 1, which shows a substantial inverse relationship between the average fertility and female employment rates for these 12 countries between 1987 and 1997. Although average rates, of course, could obscure different relationship patterns in the individual countries, analyses conducted on each country separately are highly consistent with the overall pattern based on averages. Following the downward trend in fertility, the decline in marriage rates between 1987 and 1998 also shows a strong inverse correlation with labor-force participation. As female labor-force participation rates rose, public efforts were made in many countries to reduce the friction between work and family life. One way to estimate the effects of these efforts is to ask: How did patterns of public spending on family-friendly services such as day care, household services, and other in-kind family benefits vary with marriage and fertility rates? Although the pattern of spending on family-friendly benefits rises and falls, overall the average rates of public expenditure on these benefits as a percent of GDP increased from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. This spending had an inverse correlation with fertility rates (as shown in Figure 2) and showed a similar relation to marriage rates. Analyses conducted separately on each country show some variance from the pattern that emerges when averaging results, particularly in regard to fertility rates that had positive correlations with spending on family benefits in five (four of which were statistically significant) of the fifteen countries. Family-friendly policies, of course, involve more than the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) categories of expenditure represented by family benefits. For example, over 70 percent of the employed women in the Netherlands work in part-time jobs that have benefits similar to those of full-time employment, and Dutch children spend more days per year in school than most elementary school students in the European Union. A thorough assessment of measures that weigh into efforts to balance work and family life would include parental leave, flexible work schedules, number and length of school days, paid vacation time, and family allowances. Some of these benefits are reflected in data on total public expenditures, analyses of which reveal patterns that parallel the findings noted above. That is, rates of total public expenditure between 1987 and 1997 are inversely related to both fertility (see Figure 3) and marriage rates. Still, even when total public expenditures are considered, there are many distinctions in the variety of measures that operate in different countries--which is to say the findings that fertility and marriage rates generally declined as spending on family benefits and total public expenditure have increased can only be taken as suggestive. But what do they suggest? Believers, skeptics, and disbelievers Overall, these findings lend themselves to at least three broad interpretations. Believers in the salutary effects of family-friendly policies would argue that although such policies did not appear to strengthen the formation of family life (by increasing the presence of children and marriage), in the absence of these benefits the declines would have been even sharper--that is, these benefits acted as a brake to slow things up. As evidence, they might point to the fact that in three of the countries--Denmark, Sweden, and Finland--that had significant positive correlations between fertility rates and public expenditure on family benefits, the rates of expenditure were proportionately more than twice as high as that of most of the other countries. This suggests that the decline can be diminished if significant resources are invested in family services. Invoking the mantra "correlation is not causality," skeptics find little reason to assume that these policies are either friendly or unfriendly to families, and read the results as confirming that family-friendly policies make no palpable difference. They point out that if indeed these benefits served as a brake on declining rates of fertility and marriage, then one would expect to find the lowest marriage and fertility rates in countries that lagged behind in the family-friendly benefits, of which the United States is a prime example--except that the American rates are higher than those of the European Union. Skeptics would no doubt refer to the history of children's allowances in France which were initiated under the Family Code of 1939 with the explicit goal of increasing the birthrate. Although the French birthrate increased considerably in the decades after World War II, during the same period the United States--with no children's allowance--also experienced a dramatic rise in the birthrate, while the birthrate in Sweden declined despite its allowance system. The skeptic argues that decisions concerning marriage and family size address fundamental conditions of human existence, which do not yield readily to social policy. Finally, disbelievers conclude that so-called family-friendly policies are not really family friendly at all. Rather, these theorists argue that although the inverse correlations between female labor-force participation and fertility and marriage rates, and between expenditures on family benefits and fertility and marriage rates, do not represent definitive explanations, they are indicative of two firm underlying realities. The first is an unyielding tension between a life centered on family--meeting the continuous demands of marriage, child rearing, and household management--and a life centered on paid employment and meeting the continuous demands of a full-time career. As any woman who has tried it can testify, balancing paid work and family life is extraordinarily difficult. Caring for young children is immensely labor intensive and relentless. A two-earner family with two children under five years of age hits the ground running by 6:30 a.m. The kids have to be washed, fed, dressed, and out the door in time to get to the day-care providers well before the parents are due at their jobs. At 5:00 p.m. the parents leave work and rush to pick up the kids, take them home to be fed, undressed, bathed, and put to bed. This tight daily routine can be further squeezed by jobs that require evening meetings, out-of-town travel, overtime, and take-home work. On top of the daily routine, there is weekly shopping for the household, buying children's clothes, cleaning, laundry, doctor appointments, haircuts, and coping with pinkeye, strep throat, and ear infections that strike without warning. It does not take much for things to spin out of control--a dead car battery, a broken washing machine, or a leaky roof will do it. Although many men have increased their involvement in domestic life, whether due to genetic indisposition, poor socialization, ineptitude, or some combination thereof, their participation in traditional female duties has fallen far short of a fair share. The reality is that most working mothers continue to assume the brunt of household and child-care responsibilities. And with all the working mother's efforts, at the end of each week her young children have spent the majority of their waking hours with their physical needs being met and personalities shaped by strangers. The second reality is that the main threads of family-friendly policies are tied to and reinforce female labor-force participation--and are more aptly labeled "market friendly." These policies are largely, though not entirely, associated with publicly provided care for children and supports for periods of parental leave. To qualify for parental-leave benefits it is necessary to have a job before having children. The incentive for early attachment to the labor force is bolstered by publicly subsidized day care. Child-care services both compensate for the absence of parental child care in families with working mothers and generate an economic spur for mothers to shift their labor from the home to the market. In Sweden, for example, free day-care services are state-subsidized by as much as $11,900 per child. They are free at the point of consumption, but paid for dearly by direct and indirect taxes--in 1990, Swedish taxes absorbed the highest proportion of the gross domestic product of any OECD country. Paying in advance for the "free" day-care service tends to squeeze mothers into the labor force, since the crushing tax rates make it difficult for the average family to get by on the salary of one earner. State-sponsored welfare activities accounted for about three-quarters of the net job creation in Sweden between 1970 and 1990, with almost all of these public-service positions being filled by women. Thus much of the voluntary labor invested in care for children, disabled kin, and elderly relatives was redirected to providing social care to strangers for pay. In sum, the disbeliever argues that a meaningful connection exists between the decline in marriage and fertility and increasing public investments in family benefits in recent decades. In the view of such critics, the quality of family life suffers when mothers with young children go to work; hence, policies that create incentives to shift informal labor invested in child care and domestic production to the realm of paid employment are not "family-friendly" in any genuine sense. Reframing the debate Seen in the context of women's diverse interests in work and family life, each of the interpretations outlined above frames a slice of reality. That is, the consequences of family-friendly policies vary in strength and direction for women with different life-style preferences. The skeptic is correct in the sense that these policies probably have little effect on women at the two ends of the work-family continuum--those who prefer the traditional and postmodern life styles. Just as the availability of subsidized child-care services is unlikely to redirect women who are career-centered and not inclined toward having children, it is doubtful that most women disposed toward rearing three or more children would be seriously influenced by the prospect of having their children cared for by other people on a daily basis. Although there is a degree of elasticity within each life-style category, the largest potential for movement is among those women somewhere in the middle. On one hand, the believer in such policies probably has a point in that child care and other family benefits facilitate the objectives of women in the modern group. In the absence of family benefits, fertility and marriage rates among these women might have declined, as some of them would adopt a postmodern life style. On the other hand, the disbelievers' view that most family-friendly policies undermine the institution they are purported to support probably resonates with many women in the neo-traditional group for whom work is secondary to child care. In the absence of family benefits that create incentives to work and lend impetus to the normative devaluation of childrearing and the domestic arts, fertility rates might rise, as some of the women disposed toward a neo-traditional life style would gravitate into the traditional category. The reality is that family policies can be friendlier to some life styles than to others. Recognizing this, we should explore alternatives to the conventional perspective on family policies designed to harmonize work and family life. The conventional approach is implicitly oriented toward helping mothers work while raising children. It is informed by male work patterns, which basically involve a seamless transition from school to the paid labor force along with a drive to rise as high as possible in a given line of work. This "male model" of an early start and a continuous work history imposes a temporal frame on policies to harmonize work and family life, and it stresses the idea of "balancing" the concurrent performance of labor-force participation and child-rearing activities. Child-care services, and even periods of parental leave, facilitate an ongoing and relatively stable work history--which is preferred by many, though clearly not all, women. But the male model offers a narrow perspective on family and career choices. Viewing the issue from a "life-course perspective" reframes and extends the choices by including the possibility that a "balance" between motherhood and employment might be achieved by sequential as well as concurrent patterns of paid and domestic work. Such a perspective encompasses not only women who want to combine work and family life at the same time, but also those who might envision investing all their resources in child care and domestic activities for 5 to 10 years and then spending the next 25 to 30 years in paid employment. There are good reasons why some women, particularly those in the traditional and neo-traditional categories, might prefer the trade-offs of the sequential approach to balancing motherhood and employment. The contributions of full- time homemakers to their families and to society vary according to different stages of the family life cycle. The early years of childhood are critical for social and cognitive development; some mothers want to invest more heavily in shaping this development than in advancing their employment prospects. Home care during the early childhood years is labor-intensive, which heightens the economic value of the homemaker's contribution during that period. Finally, as the span of life has lengthened, even after 10 years at home most women would still have more than 25 years to invest in paid employment. Of course, choosing to invest 5 to 10 years in child care and household management would cut off those careers that require early training, many years of preparation, or the athletic prowess of youth. And a later start lessens the likelihood of rising to the very top of the career ladder. Those are the trade-offs of pursuing two callings in life. Various measures could be initiated to support the choice of a sequential approach to balancing family and work. For example, we have seen that the federal government already provides about $16 billion in subsidies for a variety of cash and in-kind benefits to working parents who place their children in day care. The provision of similar supports through tax credits and home-care allowances to full-time homemakers with children under five years of age would afford parents greater freedom to choose between caring for children at home and consuming state subsidized day-care benefits. To guard against home-care benefits that would end up disproportionately subsidizing wealthy families, these schemes could be progressively indexed. In 1998, Norway initiated a policy to pay cash benefits to all families with children up to three years old as long as the child was not enrolled in a state-subsidized day-care center. Finland employs a similar policy, which was fully implemented in 1989. Between 1989 and 1995 labor-force participation of Finnish women with children under three years old declined from 68 to 55 percent. Direct child-rearing benefits are not the only way to recognize and support those women who choose home care during the early childhood years. Several European countries provide varying amounts of pension credits toward retirement to parents who stay home to care for young children. Family-friendly policies might even award "social" credits for each year at home with young children, which could be exchanged for benefits that would assist parents in making the transition from homemaker to paid employment. Such benefits could include tuition for academic and technical training, and preferential points on federal civil-service examinations. The social-credit scheme would be somewhat akin to certain veterans' benefits, which were granted in recognition of people who sacrificed career opportunities while serving the nation. In shaping the moral and physical stock of future citizens, the homemaker's contribution to national well-being is obviously quite different from, but no less important than, that of veterans. By recognizing this contribution the family social-credit scheme would elevate the sagging status of domestic activities and child-rearing functions as well as reinforce the thinning fabric of informal social support networks. The case for rethinking what we mean by "family-friendly" policies is put forth not to advance one pattern of motherhood and employment over another, but to give equal consideration to the diverse values that influence how women respond to the conflicting demands of work and family life. As things now stand, public policies are far from neutral on the question of whether parents should look after their children or go to work and outsource the job of caring for the kids. As seen in the growth of public child-care spending, children have become an increasing source of paid employment. There will always be a few women leaving well-paid jobs to care for their children. But as an avant garde of the opt-out revolution, this group is unlikely to draw many recruits in the face of current policies, the full thrust of which reinforce the abdication of motherhood. Copyright of The Public Interest, Issue #158 (Winter 2005), National Affairs, Inc. Neil Gilbert is Chernin Professor of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Transformation of the Welfare State: The Silent Surrender of Public Responsibility (Oxford University Press, 2002). From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 26 16:05:15 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 11:05:15 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Times: Paradise is paper, vellum and dust by Ben Macintyre Message-ID: Paradise is paper, vellum and dust by Ben Macintyre http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1068-1407490,00.html December 18, 2004 Libraries will survive the digital revolution because they are places of sensuality and power I HAVE a halcyon library memory. I am sitting under a cherry tree in the tiny central courtyard of the Cambridge University Library, a book in one hand and an almond slice in the other. On the grass beside me is an incredibly pretty girl. We are surrounded by eight million books. Behind the walls on every side of the courtyard, the books stretch away in compact ranks hundred of yards deep, the shelves extending at the rate of two miles a year. There are books beneath us in the subterranean stacks, and they reach into the sky; we are entombed in words, an unimaginable volume of collected knowledge in cold storage, quiet and vast and waiting. Perhaps that was the moment I fell in love with libraries. Or perhaps it was earlier, growing up in Scotland, when the mobile library would lurch up the road with stocks of Enid Blyton and bodice-rippers on the top shelf with saucy covers, to be giggled over when the driver-librarian was having his cup of tea. Or perhaps the moment came earlier yet, when my father took me into the bowels of the Bodleian in Oxford and I inhaled, for the first time, that intoxicating mixture of vellum, paper and dust. I have spent a substantial portion of my life since in libraries, and I still enter them with a mixture of excitement and awe. I am not alone in this. Veneration for libraries is as old as writing itself, for a library is more to our culture than a collection of books: it is a temple, a symbol of power, the hushed core of civilisation, the citadel of memory, with its own mystique, social and sensual as well as intellectual. Even people who never enter libraries instinctively understand their symbolic power. But now a revolution, widely compared to the invention of printing itself, is taking place among the stacks, and the library will never be the same again. This week Google announced plans to digitise fifteen million books from five great libraries, including the Bodleian. Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have declared their intention to collect all information online, an ambition that puts them up there with the Ptolomies, founders of the great library at Alexandria. What was once megalomaniac bibliomania is now a technological certainty. Some fear that this total library, vast and invisible, could finally destroy traditional libraries, which will become mere warehouses for the physical objects, empty of people and life. The advantages for researchers of a single scholarly online catalogue are incalculable, but will we bother to browse the shelves when we can merely summon up any book in the world with the push of a button? Are the days of the library as a social organism over? Almost certainly not, for reasons practical, psychological and, ultimately, spiritual. Locating a book online is one thing, reading it is quite another, for there is no aesthetic substitute for the physical object; the computer revolution rolls on inexorably, but the world is reading more paper books than ever. Indeed, so far from destroying libraries, the internet has protected the written word as never before, and rendered knowledge genuinely democratic. Fanatics always attack the libraries first, dictators seek to control the literature, elites hoard the knowledge that is power. Shi Huangdi, the Chinese emperor of the 3rd century BC, ordered that all literature, history and philosophy written before the founding of his dynasty should be destroyed. More books were burnt in the 20th century than any other -- in Nazi Germany, Bosnia and Afghanistan. With the online library, the books are finally safe, and the biblioclasts have been beaten, for ever. But the traditional library will also survive, because a library is central to our understanding of what it is to be human. Ever since the first clay tablets were collected in Mesopotamia, Man has wanted not merely to obtain and master knowledge, but to preserve it, to hold it in his hand. "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library," wrote Jorge Luis Borges, poet, writer and librarian, who understood better than most the essential physicality of books. Borges was appointed director of Argentina's National Library in the year that he went blind: No one should read self-pity or reproach Into this statement of the majesty of God, who with such splendid irony Granted me books and blindness in one touch Libraries are not places of dry scholarship but living sensuality. In Love Story Ali McGraw and Ryan O'Neal get together with the library as backdrop; in Dr Zhivago, Uri and Lara find one another in a library. I have a friend, now a well-known journalist, who became overcome by lust in the British Library and was discovered by a librarian making love behind the stacks in the empty quarter of Humanities with a woman he had met in the tearoom. The librarian was apparently most understanding, and said it happened quite a lot. Libraries are not just for reading in, but for sociable thinking, exploring, exchanging ideas and falling in love. They were never silent. Technology will not change that, for even in the starchiest heyday of Victorian self-improvement, libraries were intended to be meeting places of the mind, recreational as well as educational. The Openshaw branch of the Manchester public library was built complete with a billiard room. Just as bookshops have become trendy, offering brain food and cappuccinos, so libraries, under financial and cultural pressure, will have to evolve by more actively welcoming people in to wander and explore. Finding a book online should be the beginning, not the end, of the process of discovery, a peeling back of the first layer: the word library, after all, comes from liber, the inner bark of a tree. Bookish types have always feared change and technology, but the book, and the library, have adapted and endured, retaining the essential magic of these places. Even Hollywood understood. In Desk Set (1957) Katharine Hepburn plays a librarian-researcher whose job is threatened by a computer expert (Spencer Tracy) introducing new technology. In the end, the computer turns out to be an asset, not a danger, Tracy and Hepburn end up smooching, and everyone lives (and reads) happily ever after. The marriage of Google and the Bodleian is, truly, a Tracy and Hepburn moment. From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 26 16:06:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 11:06:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] spiked: Fundamentalism begins at home Message-ID: Fundamentalism begins at home http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CA816.htm 4.12.14 A French author on how new forms of Islam owe more to Western identity politics than to the Koran. by Josie Appleton After 9/11 the Koran became a bestseller in the West, as readers scoured the text for phrases that might explain the hijackers' actions. Some argued that violence is inherent in Islam; others said that Islam means peace. The 'understanding Islam' industry boomed, with debates, books and pamphlets professing to unearth the mysterious depths of Islamic culture, politics and history. In Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, the French sociologist Olivier Roy criticises this 'confused' and 'sterile' debate. 'It is based on an essentialist view', he tells me, 'the idea that Islam is this or that. But you can find anything in Islam. The problem is not what is in the Koran, but what people think is in the Koran'. His concern is to look at the lived reality of Islam, rather than its canonical or historical background. For example, in the book he argues that the idea that Islamic suicide attacks are an attempt to win virgins in paradise is 'not very helpful. Why should Muslims have discovered only in 1983 that suicide attacks are a good way to enter paradise?'. In a decade of research for the book, Roy travelled throughout the Middle East, searched Islamic websites on the internet, and studied Muslim immigrants in France. Far from having roots in the seventh century, he found that new religious forms are a response to Westernisation - to the modernisation of Muslim societies, and the migration of increasing numbers of Muslims to the West. Roy deals with everything from the nihilism of al-Qaeda to the French schoolgirls determined to wear veils; from personal Islamic webpages to Pakistan's madrasas (religious schools). What new breeds of Islam have in common is their focus on the fulfilment of the self, rather than on community obligations. In these terms, re-Islamicisation is the recourse of isolated, Westernised individuals seeking to find a spiritual pattern and meaning for their lives. In traditional Islamic societies, religion is tied up with culture: with the food people eat, the mosques at which they pray, their social and political networks. Modernisation has led to a weakening of family and community ties and the undermining of religious authorities. Increasingly Islam is becoming detached from Middle Eastern culture, and the Koran is being seen through the spectrum of individual needs and desires - in his book, Roy notes that cyberspace is full of people that could be 'Mr Anybody' pronouncing on what 'Islam means'. These more individualised forms of Islam are linked to fundamentalist violence. 'Dutch public opinion is blaming foreign culture for the murder of Theo van Gogh', Roy tells me, 'but if you look at the background of the guy who did that, he is fluent in Dutch, he is a Dutch citizen, and you even have two converts from an American father and a Dutch mother who played a big role in the plot. Clearly the more radical violence is linked to the deterritorialisation and globalisation of Islam'. Most of the 9/11 ringleaders were 'born again' Muslims, who went to secular schools, had spent time in the West, and had cut themselves off from their families and communities. Judging by the documents they left behind, they had invented a bizarre set of religious prescriptions for themselves - instructions for the attacks included to 'wear tight socks' and 'blow your breath on yourself and on your belongings' (1). Such nihilistic violence cannot be understood in conventional religious or political terms - instead, it seems to be an individual's demonstration of the strength of their faith. Neofundamentalists act in the name of a global ummah (community), but this is entirely an invention of their imagination. Roy writes that: 'Neofundamentalism provides an alternative group identity that does not impinge upon the individual life of the believer, precisely because such a community is imagined and has no real social basis.' Islamic militants tend to see both politics and community ties as a bit grubby, a distraction from the pure religious project of developing the self. The fact that radicals have made no attempt to win adherents at Mecca, Roy argues in his book, shows that they have 'no interest in the real ummah'. At the other pole we've seen the rise of Islam as a consumerist lifestyle choice. One American Muslim quoted in Globalised Islam says that 'Muslim preachers are salespeople, smiling and sweet-talking salespersons. If salespersons fight and argue with the customer, do you think people will buy the product'[?]. And there seems to be little to distinguish the customers of Islam from other customers. On internet chatrooms, Western Muslims ask whether 'body piercing is permissible in Islam' or whether they should marry their lover, a variation on advice columns in lifestyle magazines. As with crystals or yoga, Islam is presented as the cure for the ills of modern life: there are publications on 'Modern stress and its cure from Qur'an', 'Health and fitness in Islam', even on prayers as a breathing technique for better health. While the French press sees headscarves as the symbol of a foreign and patriarchal culture, the girls themselves put it in terms of personal choice: 'this is my right', or 'nobody can tell me what to wear'. If young Western Muslims use traditional greetings, wear traditional clothes or eat Halal food this is more the result of identity politics than a pristine cultural survival. When I recently attended a November meeting held by the Dialogue with Islam Forum in Whitechapel, London, many of the young Muslims in the audience - even recent converts - prefaced their comments with the greeting 'assalamu alaikum' (peace be upon you). Speaking from the panel, David Goodhart, editor of the British political monthly Prospect, argued that enduring Muslim identities showed the difficulty of social integration, which he put down in part to the 'low social class' of many Muslim immigrants. Yet the audience - educated, integrated and religious - refuted his theory. Roy gives a different view. 'To say assalamu alaikum in Afghan Persian is vernacular', he writes, 'but to use it when speaking French [or English] is to display an ostentatious, quite exotic and even provocative religious belonging'. This is about the projection of a confrontational identity against mainstream society, little different from gay/black/anti-globalisationist identities chosen by other young people. Changes in Islam parallel changes in other religions. 'We are in an age of fundamentalism', Roy tells me. 'In Christian religious revival we find the same basic tenants as in Islam - individualisation, the generational gap, "born again", bypassing religious authority.' Evangelicals also emphasise personal religious experience rather than community ties, and promise to mitigate people's dissatisfaction with modern life. New-style Islam can be seen everywhere from Turkish cities to Pakistani madrasas, but it is strongest among Muslim immigrants living in Western cities. In fact, far from fundamentalist Islam being a Middle Eastern import into the West, it is increasingly the other way around. Most of the jihadi websites, Roy reports, are based in the West. Omar Saeed Sheikh (of Wanstead, London) and Raed Hijazi (who studied business at Sacramento University, California) were arrested for fundamentalist attacks in Pakistan and Jordan respectively. The Islamic fundamentalist organisation Hizb-ut-Tahrir spread to Central Asia, Pakistan and the Middle East from its London hub. In April 2002, three Britons were arrested in Egypt accused of propagandising for Hizb-ut-Tahrir - none had any connection with Egypt, and two were converts. Roy cuts through the mystical veil of religion, and shows how new forms of religion relate to social changes. In this, he is heir to the classical sociologists of religion - Emile Durkheim's studies of primitive religion, and Max Weber and RH Tawney's work on Protestantism. But the task, Roy tells me, is more tricky today. 'We have a problem with using traditional sociological categories. We are in societies that are less socially integrated, so the social categories are not so strong.' While Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism showed Puritanism to be the religion of the rising bourgeoisie, things aren't so clear-cut with contemporary Islam. 'In today's societies people can build identities outside of socio-economic milieu', says Roy. 'There are more spaces to build imaginary and virtual communities. The problem is what to do with the traditional requirements of sociology, to assign a place in society for the people we are speaking about?' Fundamentalist networks are often composed of a ragbag of individuals. For example, one included an Algerian married to a Frenchwoman, a football player and petty drug dealer, a computing student, and four converts. Contemporary Islam doesn't seem to be concentrated in a specific social class, or have a particular functional role. In fact, it seems that rather than representing a social group or interest, religion expresses the breakdown of social ties. It is prompted by individuals' experience of dislocation - their search for a community and rules by which to live their life - which is something that seems to exist across society. So why is modern Islam viewed as an exotic, historical throwback? 'It is a way to defend an imaginary Western identity', Roy tells me. 'We are using Islam as the Other to avoid discussing the present crisis of identity in the West. Specifically in Europe, there is a crisis of the nation state, because of globalisation and European integration. What does it mean now to be Dutch, French or British? We are confronted with the crisis of national identity, and we tend to blame Islam.' These are points that could have been developed more in his book. By focusing almost exclusively on Islam, Globalised Islam neglects to analyse the important changes in the nature of Westernisation. At times, Roy risks implying that modernisation is always alienating and disorienting, and that it is natural for Muslims to want to hang on to their religion, to 'express [Islam] in a Western context'. But new forms of Islam were only really seen in the late twentieth century. Prior to that, the modernisation of Muslim societies had gone hand-in-hand with the adoption of Western ideologies, such as Marxism or nationalism, while Muslim immigrants to the West often joined left-wing movements or identified with national institutions. The new breeds of Islam are really just the shadows cast by the changing shapes of the West. Today, with the old political frameworks gone, the West is unable to furnish the ideologies to go along with the process of Westernisation. Islam is reached for as an age-old gel, to hold things together in a dislocated world. Iran is modernising in reality - the age of marriage is on the rise, as are female literacy rates - but in ideology it is going backwards, with the lowering of the legal marriage age to nine. Educated, well-off young men, with degrees and laptops, imagine that their box-cutters are the equivalent of seventh-century swords. The West tends to see Islam as exotic and foreign to assuage itself from blame, to avoid asking hard questions. Globalised Islam gets under the skin of today's quintessentially modern forms of Islam, and points the debate in a new direction. Globalised Islam, by Olivier Roy, is published by C Hurst and Co, 2004 (first published, Paris 2002). (1) See a translation of [4]the letter left by the hijackers, in the LA Times References 4. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-092901trans.story From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 26 18:09:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 13:09:38 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Although She Wrote What She Knew, She Says She Isn't What She Wrote Message-ID: Although She Wrote What She Knew, She Says She Isn't What She Wrote http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/26/books/26prep.html NYT January 26, 2005 [Book World review beneath.] By FELICIA R. LEE W ASHINGTON - Lee Fiora is an awkward Midwestern scholarship student who is cowed by the academics, the superior blondes and the rich "bank boys" at her elite Massachusetts boarding school, not to mention tormented by a crush. Curtis Sittenfeld is a Midwesterner who attended an elite Massachusetts boarding school and was tormented by a crush. And therein lies a tale. Ms. Sittenfeld is real, a 29-year-old writer whose debut novel, "Prep," stars the fictional Ms. Fiora. While Ms. Sittenfeld merely followed the time-honored advice to "write what you know," the question nibbling at her amid the novel's sweet reviews and media attention has been: How much of the first-person book is Curtis and how much is Lee? Not that Ms. Sittenfeld or her publisher, Random House, really mind. The 406-page novel, was officially released on Jan. 18, and Random House has printed 24,000 more books, adding to the 16,000-copy first run. Lee Fiora, according to at least one review, could be the 21st-century Holden Caulfield. While Ms. Sittenfeld used a recent interview here to talk about the novel and all the ways she is not Lee, her publisher's publicity machine is complicit in the tease. "Prep" press material includes Ms. Sittenfeld's Groton School class photograph, a shot of the cute boy who was her high school crush and her senior yearbook quote and list of activities. "In a way it's flattering that it seems so real," Ms. Sittenfeld said, adding that at Groton she was less an outsider than is Lee at the fictional Ault School, with more friends and more of an identity through writing. "But is it so easy to believe that I have no imagination and I can't invent dialogue or those scenarios?" Indeed, she spent three years writing what she calls a "very plotted" book, with files and charts to keep track of the scenes and the characters, Ms. Sittenfeld said over salad at the Cafe Deluxe, near St. Albans School, a private boys school here, where she teaches English part-time. "I do think I was trying to entertain the reader more than I was trying to purge myself," she said, raising her voice at the end of declarative sentences. "I don't see 'Prep' as cathartic. It was hard work to write it. I almost think some people think I went home one night, I had a glass of wine, pulled out my yearbook and got lost in my musings." Still, there are those reviews. In a [1]recent New York Times Book Review, Elissa Schappell wrote, "Sittenfeld's dialogue is so convincing that one wonders if she didn't wear a wire under her hockey kilt."The reviewer for The New York Observer even had advice for Lee, who he worried had succumbed to the same snobbery she so painfully documents: "Keep the gimlet eye, kiddo, but lose the snobbery. With heart and talent like yours, it's beneath you." Ms. Sittenfeld said she was surprised by the intensity of interest in the conflation of character and author, despite some similarities. After all, Lee is from South Bend, Ind., and Ms. Sittenfeld is from Cincinnati. They both have unisex names (she is officially the seventh Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld). Lee falters academically, and Ms. Sittenfeld struggled with Latin, French, math and science. But her own father (he is an investment adviser, Lee's is in the mattress business) asked if - like Lee - she ever cheated in high school. And he asked if a scene where Lee's dad slaps her is based on anything real. ("He was asking about his own life!" Ms. Sittenfeld said. ) Her older sister pulled her aside and asked if she went to Groton on scholarship. No, no and no. Ault is not Groton, and few of the characters are composites or based on real people, she said. And for the record, her own high school crush "was nothing like Lee's relationship." As for Groton, she said: "I'm sure there are people who are not pleased by the book. But the feedback I get is positive - people say 'we're so pleased for you.' The Groton Quarterly did a review that was incredibly nice." "It just seemed the subject matter was alive," Ms. Sittenfeld said of her decision to plumb life at an elite boarding school. "High school is very intense for everyone," she continued. "But at a boarding school, because you're there 24 hours a day, everything gets magnified." "It's a strange, distinct subculture," she said. "My boarding school experience was the only thing I had strong enough feelings to write about for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I can still smell the formaldehyde of the fetal pigs in biology." "I've been hearing from other boarding school graduates," she continued. "They say: 'I went to Exeter, did you do research at Exeter? Or Deerfield?'" Even with all the heady attention Ms. Sittenfeld seems not to have strayed too far into the stratosphere. At lunch, she blushed easily and apologized for the novel's graphic sex, which she said her parents thought was a bit too much. "I think the book is between PG-13 and R," she said earnestly, and therefore not for her students. "They're ninth graders and they're not fascinated by my life and they shouldn't be," Ms. Sittenfeld said after lunch, showing a visitor around the St. Albans campus. "They ask me questions like 'Does it have foreshadowing? Does it have symbolism?' One boy said, 'Is it about the loss of innocence?' " It is "weird," she said, that teaching at St. Albans puts her back in a prep school. "I see it as coincidental that I am here, which might sound delusional," she said. She was the writer in residence at the school in 2002-3. At one point, Ms. Sittenfeld showed off a grosgrain ribbon belt in shades of green and pink, exactly the same one embossed on the cover jacket of "Prep" and handed out at her readings. "I wonder if they would have thought of handing out yarmulkes for Philip Roth's new novel?" Ms. Sittenfeld asked with a smile. Speaking of writers, she said she was not a terribly disciplined one, but chained herself to her desk for "Prep." She has been writing since childhood. Like Sylvia Plath (to whom Ms. Sittenfeld compares herself in a recent article in The New York Observer) she won Seventeen magazine's annual fiction contest. That was in the summer of '92, before senior year. The story's protagonist was Leah Tappenreich and it was set - surprise - in a prep school. "Prep" is very much a novel about class. All in all, Ms. Sittenfeld comes from a more privileged family background than Lee. Ms. Sittenfeld's mother teaches art history at a private school, where she is also a middle-school librarian. All four Sittenfeld children went to private school, although only Ms. Sittenfeld attended boarding school. After Groton, Ms. Sittenfeld went to Vassar but transferred to Stanford because of "the slight dearth of cute boys" at Vassar. Then came the writing program at the University of Iowa, where she was enrolled in the master's program. The world probably has not heard the last of old Lee Fiora, who by the end of the fictional memoir has finished college, "I definitely have an idea for a sequel," Ms. Sittenfeld said. "But I definitely feel prep-schooled out right now." ------------- Book World: School Ties http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A25173-2005Jan20?language=printer Reviewed by Caitlin Macy Sunday, January 23, 2005; Page BW07 PREP By Curtis Sittenfeld Random House. 406 pp. $21.95 In a memorable passage near the opening of Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh's narrator, Charles Ryder, reflects on how "easy" it is, "retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or false innocence." The same double-edged temptation often derails first-time novelists, who end up enervating the protagonist-version of themselves with one or the other pretension. Not, however, Curtis Sittenfeld, whose gripping debut effort, Prep, gives us a more accurate picture of adolescence as an unlovely mix of utter cluelessness, extreme sensitivity and untempered drives. Set at a (remarkably thinly) veiled Groton School, which Sittenfeld has for some reason here given a stumbling-block of a name -- Ault -- Prep tells the story of Lee Fiora, a middle-class Midwesterner who, prompted by an idle comment of her father's about rich people sending their sons to boarding school, packs herself off to one of the most famous. White, unathletic, trust fund-less, possessed of no special qualification that might serve to legitimize her existence in Ault's breathtakingly rarefied milieu, Lee manages, just barely, to make a single friend by the end of her freshman year. The next three years of misery in paradise are hardly any better, as our heroine sits out soccer games and school dances and long weekends in her dorm room, all the while tormented by a killer crush on one Cross Sugarman, the embodiment of Ault-typical privilege and ease. Despite her day-to-day agony at Ault, the intensity of Lee's experience gives it from the outset its own throbbing, undeniable legitimacy. Effectively captured by Sittenfeld in a series of representative incidents -- parents' weekend, a school-wide game of "Assassin," a suicide attempt by a former roommate -- Lee's four years at the school she later recalls as "often unhappy . . . and yet my unhappiness was so alert and expectant; really, it was, in its energy, not that different from happiness." In a nice move that makes for pleasurable reading, Sittenfeld peoples Prep not only with Lee and her immediate circle of acquaintances but with the dozens of students, teachers and even dining-hall workers who make up boarding-school life and in some ways shape Lee's experience. We meet senior prefects Gates Medkowski and Henry Thorpe; Darden Pittard, "our class's cool black guy"; and Tullis Haskell, the guy who plays (naturally) James Taylor's "Fire and Rain" on guitar in the winter talent show. But the novel never slows, due to Sittenfeld's perfect pacing and almost reportorial knack for describing what it's like -- psychologically, logistically -- to be 15. Recounting a chance encounter with Cross Sugarman that leads to their seeing a film together, Lee extrapolates: "For the whole movie, I had that sense of heightened awareness that is like discomfort but is not discomfort exactly -- a tiring, enjoyable vigilance. I did not get a grasp on the movie's plot, or the names of any of the characters. Then it was over and the lights came on. . . . Maybe this was the place Cross and I would part ways, I thought. And maybe we wouldn't even say good-bye, now that he was with his friends again; maybe I was just supposed to know." Occasionally, Sittenfeld's eye for detail is a bit too literal: Anyone with more than a passing familiarity with Groton may endure a squirmy moment or two when particulars such as the school's setting on "the Circle," the green jacket worn to announce a surprise holiday or the newspaper gossip column, "Low Notes," are transplanted. Not to mention -- full disclosure -- having a character who is a dead ringer for your husband turn up on page 72. It seems likely that Lee Fiora will be compared to Holden Caulfield, and it is high time someone wrote the girl's boarding-school novel. But Lee is no disaffected Salingeresque anti-hero coolly outing phonies. Despite the novel's preppy setting (and cringe-worthy title -- an odd misstep), Sittenfeld's narrator, in her naked ambition, her unapologetic desire and moral ambivalence, has much more in common with, say, Neil Klugman of Goodbye, Columbus. This is a girl who lusts, cheats, trades up a loser friend for a better one and is embarrassed to be caught talking to a townie -- all, basically, to position herself for a chance to hook up with Cross Sugarman. And this is the great risk that Sittenfeld takes: It's comparatively easy to write a novel about a young man trying to be socially acceptable enough to get into a girl's pants. The neurotically self-aware, unrequited (or briefly requited) male lover has been a stock character since the 12th century. To put a teenage girl in the same position is a much bigger gamble because, even now, it defies our expectations. One of the most poignant moments in Prep comes when Sittenfeld's narrator articulates the other problem with being a girl who is not one of the rich beauties tying knots in their hair with pencils (or even an artsy, depressive type like Esther Greenwood of Plath's The Bell Jar) but a smart, self-conscious girl with ordinary looks and a sense of humor: It isn't, after all, simply that one wants to date the boys. As Lee explains, "The interest I felt in certain guys then confused me, because it wasn't romantic, but I wasn't sure what else it might be. But now I know: I wanted to take up people's time making jokes, to tease the dean in front of the entire school, to call him by a nickname. What I wanted was to be a cocky high-school boy, so [expletive] sure of my place in the world." It's this kind of insightful, unexpectedly candid observation that lends a dignity to Lee's time at Ault, enabling her in some way to transcend its social hierarchies -- not that she would ever want to. o Caitlin Macy is the author of the novel "The Fundamentals of Play" and is at work on a collection of short stories. From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 26 18:11:28 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 13:11:28 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: The Difference Between Politically Incorrect and Historically Wrong Message-ID: The Difference Between Politically Incorrect and Historically Wrong http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/26/opinion/26wed4.html January 26, 2005 [Is there a single thing Mr. Mencken would not have agreed with?] EDITORIAL OBSERVER The Difference Between Politically Incorrect and Historically Wrong By ADAM COHEN If you're going to call a book "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History," readers will expect some serious carrying on about race, and Thomas Woods Jr. does not disappoint. He fulminates against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, best known for forcing restaurants and bus stations in the Jim Crow South to integrate, and against Brown v. Board of Education. And he offers up some curious views on the Civil War - or "the War of Northern Aggression," a name he calls "much more accurate." The introduction bills the book as an effort to "set the record straight," but it is actually an attempt to push the record far to the right. More than a history, it is a checklist of arch-conservative talking points. The New Deal public works programs that helped millions survive the Depression were a "disaster," and Social Security "damaged the economy." The Marshall Plan, which lifted up devastated European nations after World War II, was a "failed giveaway program." And the long-discredited theory of "nullification," which held that states could suspend federal laws, "isn't as crazy as it sounds." It is tempting to dismiss the book as fringe scholarship, not worth worrying about, but the numbers say otherwise. It is being snapped up on college campuses and, helped along by plugs from Fox News and other conservative media, it recently soared to No. 8 on the New York Times paperback best-seller list. It is part of a boomlet in far-right attacks on mainstream history that includes books like Jim Powell's "FDR's Folly," which argues that Franklin Roosevelt made the Depression worse, and Michelle Malkin's "In Defense of Internment," a warm look back on the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. It is not surprising, in the current political climate, that liberal pieties are being challenged, and many of them ought to be. But the latest revisionist histories are disturbing both because they are so extreme - even Ronald Reagan called the Japanese internment a "grave wrong" and signed a reparations law - and because they seem intent on distorting the past to promote dangerous policies today. If Social Security contributed to the Depression, it makes sense to get rid of it now. If internment was a good thing in 1942, think what it could do in 2005. And if the 14th Amendment, which guarantees minorities "equal protection of the law," was never properly ratified - as Mr. Woods argues - racial discrimination may be constitutional after all. At the start of the "Politically Incorrect Guide to American History," Mr. Woods says he is not trying to offer "a complete overview of American history." That frees him to write a book in which major historical events that do not fit his biases are omitted, in favor of minutiae that do. The book has nothing to say about the Trail of Tears, in which a fifth of the Cherokee population was wiped out, or similar massacres, but cheerfully points out that "by its second decade Harvard College welcomed Indian students." The "Politically Incorrect Guide" is full of dubious assertions, small and large. It makes a perverse, but ideologically loaded, linguistic argument that the American Civil War was not actually a civil war, a point with which dictionaries disagree. More troubling are the book's substantive distortions of history, like its claim that the infamous Black Codes, passed by the Southern states after the Civil War, were hardly different from Northern anti-vagrancy laws. The Black Codes - which were aimed, as the Columbia University historian Eric Foner has noted, at keeping freed slaves' status as close to slavery as possible - went well beyond anything in the North. The book reads less like history than a call to action, since so many of its historical arguments track the current political agenda of the far right. It contends that federal courts were never given the power to strike down state laws, a pet cause of states' rights supporters today. And it maintains that the First Amendment applies only to the federal government, and therefore does not prohibit the states from imposing religion on their citizens, a view that Clarence Thomas has suggested in his church-state opinions. Most ominously, it makes an elaborate argument that the 14th Amendment was "never constitutionally ratified" because of irregularities in how it was adopted. This, too, is a pet cause of the fringe right, one the Supreme Court has rejected. If it prevailed, it would undo Brown v. Board of Education and many other rulings barring discrimination based on race, religion and sex. But Mr. Woods does not carry his argument to its logical conclusion. If the 14th Amendment was not properly ratified, neither, it would seem, was the 13th, which was adopted under similar circumstances, and slavery should be legal. These revisionist historians have started meeting pockets of resistance from those who believe they are rewriting reality to suit an ideological agenda. A group called Progress for America recently produced an ad that, incredibly, used Franklin Roosevelt's picture to support President Bush's plan to privatize Social Security. But Progress for America lost the public relations war when James Roosevelt Jr., F.D.R.'s grandson, announced that his grandfather "would surely oppose the ideas now being promoted by this administration." Then there was the large Christian school in North Carolina that assigned its students a booklet called "Southern Slavery: As It Was." At first, the school argued that the booklet - which describes slavery as "a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence" - simply provided a valuable "Southern perspective." But after North Carolina newspapers reported on its contents, and quoted local pastors expressing their concern, the school quietly withdrew the text last month, apologizing for the "oversight." From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 26 18:13:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 13:13:29 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTDBR: The Brain: False Assumptions and Cruel Operations Message-ID: The Brain: False Assumptions and Cruel Operations http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/26/books/26grim.html January 26, 2005 BOOKS OF THE TIMES The Brain: False Assumptions and Cruel Operations By WILLIAM GRIMES POSTCARDS FROM THE BRAIN MUSEUM The Improbable Search for Meaning in the Matter of Famous Minds By Brian Burrell Illustrated. 356 pages. Broadway Books. $24.95. THE LOBOTOMIST A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness By Jack El-Hai Illustrated. 362 pages. John Wiley & Sons. $27.95. In the summer of 1849, Walt Whitman walked into an office on Nassau Street in Manhattan to have his head read. Lorenzo Niles Fowler, a phrenologist, palpated 35 areas on both sides of the skull corresponding to emotional or intellectual capacities in the brain. Fowler rated each one on a scale of 1 to 7, with 6 representing the ideal (7 meant dangerous excess). Whitman received a perfect score in nearly every one of Fowler's categories, which bore such fanciful names as "amativeness," "adhesiveness" and "combativeness." Thrilled with his report card, he became an instant convert to phrenology, defined by Ambrose Bierce as "the science of picking a man's pocket through the scalp." Later he donated his magnificent brain to the American Anthropometric Society, which collected it on his death in 1892 and added it to its collection of elite brains. There are quite a few such collections, scattered around the globe, and Brian Burrell visits all of them in his offbeat scientific tour in "Postcards From the Brain Museum." His wanderings take him from the Mus?e de l'Homme in Paris and the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology in Philadelphia to the impressively stocked Institute of the Brain in Moscow, where the brains of Lenin, Stalin, Eisenstein and Pavlov lie in state, or states, having been sliced into thousands of paper-thin slices and stained for scientific study. But the study of what, exactly? Nothing at all, it turns out. The brains, many of them dried to the consistency of coal, or fraying badly in their formaldehyde baths, simply take up space in glass jars. In many cases they are inaccessible to the general public, relics of a bygone age when scientists believed that the brains of geniuses and criminals would certainly, when examined, display distinctive physical characteristics. They were wrong. But for most of the 19th century it seemed as if they might be right. Their doomed efforts provide Mr. Burrell with the material for his entertaining, tragicomic tale of scientific failure. Blame Byron. After his death in 1824, Greek doctors removed his heart, a common practice, but his brain as well. It was prodigious, weighing in at 6 pounds, at least 25 percent larger than the average, a striking confirmation of the theory linking brain size and genius. Three years later, Beethoven died. His brain too was examined, revealing convolutions twice as numerous and fissures twice as deep as the ordinary brain. These eminent and distinctive brains set scientists off and running to map the brain and the skull and thereby explain the workings of the mind. During what the author calls "the golden age of brain collecting," from 1880 to 1910, hundreds of eminent men and women joined autopsy societies and donated their brains, hoping to receive the kind of validation that Whitman received in 1849. Unfortunately, the brains did not cooperate. Some geniuses turned out to have unusually small brains. Criminals and social degenerates often showed the same folds as scientists and artists. Faced with conflicting evidence, leading theorists of the brain fudged, temporized or dug in their heels. Eventually, the entire jerry-built theoretical apparatus simply collapsed, although as a myth or symbol, the brain still retained considerable power. As the Germans closed in on Moscow, the high command drew up plans to seize Lenin's brain and take it back to Berlin. When Einstein died, an overeager pathologist in the hospital removed his brain and took it home, intent on discovering the secrets concealed within. Alas, there were none to be found. Walter Freeman worked on more brains than all the 19th-century phrenologists and "cranioscopists" put together. From the mid-1930's to the late 60's, he performed some 3,500 lobotomies on psychologically disturbed patients, a procedure that, thanks to his tireless crusading, became a standard method of treatment in mental hospitals across the United States before the advent of drugs like Thorazine and Prozac. In "The Lobotomist," Jack El-Hai's lively biography, Freeman comes across as a classic American type, a do-gooder and a go-getter with a bit of the huckster thrown in. Trained as a neurologist, he found a position at St. Elizabeths, a large mental hospital in Washington, D.C., which, like most institutions then simply warehoused the mentally ill. Freeman was appalled at this waste of human potential. Convinced that mental illness stemmed from organic causes, he searched for a neurological solution and found it in a new procedure, developed by a Portuguese doctor and eventual Nobel laureate, Egas Moniz, who simply cut through neural pathways in the frontal lobes that, he believed, produced harmful or obsessive behavior. Freeman, who dismissed psychoanalysis as a sheer waste of time, jumped at Moniz's new procedure. "Here was something tangible, something that an organicist like myself could understand and appreciate," he later wrote. "A vision of the future unfolded." He formed a partnership with a skilled neurosurgeon, James Watts, and very quickly developed his own procedure, prefrontal lobotomy, which entailed drilling two holes in the skull, above the left and right frontal lobes, and then removing a dozen cores of white neural fibers. From the beginning, results varied wildly. One early patient simply rose from his hospital bed on Christmas Eve, put on his hat over the bandages and headed straight for a local saloon to celebrate. Another patient, a 60-year-old woman suffering from agitated depression, became paralyzed on her left side a few hours after the operation, lost the ability to speak, and fell into a coma. She died six days later. More typical were patients who experienced temporary relief from anxiety, obsessions, or hallucinations but later slipped back into severe metal illness, or who became strangely apathetic and lacking in spontaneity. One of his less successful patients was Rosemary Kennedy, a sister of John F. Kennedy, who underwent a lobotomy for agitated depression in 1941 but remained institutionalized for the rest of her life. Freeman had a high tolerance for failure. He was taking difficult cases and, as often as not, making it possible for them to go home and put together some semblance of a normal life. In time, he developed a new technique, transorbital lobotomy, that eliminated many of the side effects of prefrontal lobotomy by entering the brain through the eye socket rather than the cranium. The new procedure was quick. In 1952, Freeman once performed 25 transorbital lobotomies in a single day. This was the sort of stunt that caused Freeman's professional colleagues to eye him suspiciously. "I thought I was seeing a circus act," a student nurse said, recalling a performance in which Freeman used both hands at once to cut nerve fibers on both sides of a patient's brain simultaneously. Psychoanalysts regarded Freeman with contempt, and many doctors recoiled at destroying healthy brain tissue. Freeman, a flamboyant figure who affected a cane, a broad-brimmed hat and a long goatee, invited controversy by his slapdash approach to research and his love of the spotlight. His enemies triumphed. By the mid-1950's, psychoanalysis and the appearance of new drugs like Thorazine spelled the end of the lobotomy in the United States. Freeman, once hailed as a visionary, now seems little more than a curiosity, another specimen in the brain museum. From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 26 18:14:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 13:14:19 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Old Law Shielding a Woman's Virtue Faces an Updating Message-ID: Old Law Shielding a Woman's Virtue Faces an Updating http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/26/national/26repeal.html January 26, 2005 By SARAH KERSHAW SEATTLE, Jan. 25 - It is about time, politicians here are saying, for the state of Washington to catch up with the rest of the world. Florida has struck down a law forbidding unmarried women from parachuting on Sundays. Michigan has done away with a law making it illegal to swear in front of women and children. Texas women no longer face 12 months in prison for adjusting their stockings in public. And the ladies of Maine can now legally tickle a man under the chin with a feather duster. But here in Washington, in 2005, it is still illegal, under a 1909 law, to bring a woman's virtue into question publicly, to call her a hussy or a strumpet. And now, a state senator from Seattle - who is not saying she supports attacking the chastity of Washington women - is, nevertheless, trying to overturn the state's "Slander of a Woman" law. The law was enacted here at a time when women could not vote, when they were viewed by society as delicate flowers to be kept in the kitchen, tending to wood-burning stoves for their genteel gentlemen, vulnerable maidens in need of legal protection from verbal assaults on their purity. It was upheld by the State Supreme Court in 1914, which researchers say was apparently the last time it was before the courts. Now, Senate Bill 5148, introduced this month by Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles, a Democrat, would repeal the law, which makes it a misdemeanor to slander any female older than 12 - other than prostitutes - by uttering "any false or defamatory words or language which shall injure or impair the reputation of any such female for virtue or chastity or which shall expose her to hatred, contempt or ridicule." If the bill becomes law, women will have the same protection as men under the other slander laws, which will remain in effect. Ms. Kohl-Welles - who lectures on women's studies at the University of Washington and admits there are more pressing priorities facing a state with a $1.8 billion deficit - said the old law was nonetheless a vestige of sexism, a "double standard" and an unconstitutional affront to free speech. "Even though one type of treatment can appear on the surface to be positive and complimentary, it's also being protective and patronizing," said Ms. Kohl-Welles, who has researched other old-fashioned laws and found that many states have done away with them. But Washington women are not the only ones who have such legal protections against dastardly assaults on their integrity. Eight other states, including New York, still have similar laws on their books, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, even if they have been rarely used since the days of horse drawn carriages. Michigan is one of those states. But in 2002 an appeals court there did strike down a separate 105-year-old law that made it illegal to swear in front of women and children, after a man dubbed by local media the "cussing canoeist," was punished with a $75 fine and ordered to perform four days of community service. His offense was uttering profanities in front of women and children in 1999, after he fell out of his canoe. Here in Washington, where Republicans and Democrats are deeply divided over a contested governor's election, the bill to repeal the law against slandering a woman seems to have unusual support from both sides of the aisle, from both Venus and Mars, with three Democrats and one Republican, two men and two women, sponsoring the bill. Ms. Kohl-Welles introduced the bill two years ago, but it died a fast death in the Republican-controlled Senate. This year, Democrats control both houses of the Legislature, and the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Adam Kline, is a Democrat and a cosponsor of the bill, leading to optimism that impugning a woman's virtue could become legal here. Mr. Kline said his interest in the bill was less about women's rights and more about purging the law books of anachronisms. "This was a simply an attempt to get rid of an anomaly, something that was enacted in 1909," he said. "It's archaic. It has no business being in the law in the year 2005." While most of the nation's laws prohibiting impugning a woman's chastity have not been used for decades - or longer - New York's law was cited in a lawsuit filed in 1996 by a Harlem teacher against Joe Klein, author of the 1995 novel "Primary Colors," and his publisher, Random House. The teacher said she was the basis for a character that had a sexual relationship with a fictional Southern governor. She claimed a violation of New York State Civil Rights Law, Article 7, Section 77, relating to "action of slander of a woman imputing unchastity to her." The case was dismissed in 2003. With all of Washington's political and financial troubles, Ms. Kohl-Welles's effort to strike down the 1909 law has drawn some criticism. "The last record of an appeal related to the crime was nine decades ago," said an editorial in the Seattle Times last Saturday, "which makes you wonder what is Senate Bill 5148's urgency, given the daunting challenges facing the Legislature." Ms. Kohl-Welles acknowledged that as the Legislature, torn apart by the tumultuous governor's race here, is tackling so many other things, the bill is not a high priority. Republicans have filed a lawsuit contesting the election won by only 129 votes of Christine O. Gregoire, the Democrat, who was sworn in this month. "On first blush, this could sound silly," she said. "I'm not fearful that women or men are going to be arrested and this has to be a big case for violations of this law. But let's just get rid of it." From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 26 18:15:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 13:15:47 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: Exercise Nearly Halves Depression Symptoms Message-ID: Exercise Nearly Halves Depression Symptoms http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2005-01-25-1 Thirty minutes a day has same effect as some antidepressants and psychotherapy Betterhumans Staff 1/25/2005 1:05 PM Thirty minutes of daily exercise can cut depression symptoms as much as some antidepressants and psychotherapy. "The effect you find using aerobic exercise alone in treating clinical depression is similar to what you find with antidepressant medications," says [8]Madhukar Trivedi of the [9]University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, coauthor of a new study on the mental benefits of physical activity. "The key is the intensity of the exercise and continuing it for 30 to 35 minutes per day. It's not for the faint of heart." The study, which also involved researchers from the [10]Cooper Institute in Dallas and the [11]Alberta Children's Hospital in Canada, involved 80 people aged 20 to 45 who had mild to moderate depression. Between July 1998 and October 2001, participants were randomly placed into the following five groups: * Moderately intense aerobics three days a week. * Moderately intense aerobics five days a week. * Lower-intensity aerobics three days a week. * Lower-intensity aerobics five days a week. * Stretching flexibility exercises 15 to 20 minutes three days per week. Participants in both moderately intense aerobics groups, who did such things as exercise on a treadmill, had an average 47% decline in depressive symptoms after 12 weeks. Those in the low-intensity exercise groups had a 30% reduction. Those in the stretching group had a 29% decline. The results, says Trivedi, are comparable to those from studies in which people with mild to moderate depression were treated with antidepressants or cognitive therapy. The researchers are planning a follow-up study combining aerobic exercise and antidepressant treatment. The research is reported in the [12]American Journal of Preventive Medicine ([13]read abstract). References 8. http://www8.utsouthwestern.edu/findfac/professional/0,2356,17410,00.html 9. http://www.swmed.edu/ 10. http://www.cooperinst.org/ 11. http://www.calgaryhealthregion.ca/ACH/ 12. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/07493797 13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2004.09.003 From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 26 18:16:48 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 13:16:48 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP Magazine: See No Bias Message-ID: See No Bias http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A27067-2005Jan21 Many Americans believe they are not prejudiced. Now a new test provides powerful evidence that a majority of us really are. Assu By Shankar Vedantam Sunday, January 23, 2005; Page W12 AT 4 O'CLOCK ON A RECENT WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, a 34-year-old white woman sat down in her Washington office to take a psychological test. Her office decor attested to her passion for civil rights -- as a senior activist at a national gay rights organization, and as a lesbian herself, fighting bias and discrimination is what gets her out of bed every morning. A rainbow flag rested in a mug on her desk. The woman brought up a test on her computer from a Harvard University Web site. It was really very simple: All it asked her to do was distinguish between a series of black and white faces. When she saw a black face she was to hit a key on the left, when she saw a white face she was to hit a key on the right. Next, she was asked to distinguish between a series of positive and negative words. Words such as "glorious" and "wonderful" required a left key, words such as "nasty" and "awful" required a right key. The test remained simple when two categories were combined: The activist hit the left key if she saw either a white face or a positive word, and hit the right key if she saw either a black face or a negative word. Then the groupings were reversed. The woman's index fingers hovered over her keyboard. The test now required her to group black faces with positive words, and white faces with negative words. She leaned forward intently. She made no mistakes, but it took her longer to correctly sort the words and images. Her result appeared on the screen, and the activist became very silent. The test found she had a bias for whites over blacks. "It surprises me I have any preferences at all," she said. "By the work I do, by my education, my background. I'm progressive, and I think I have no bias. Being a minority myself, I don't feel I should or would have biases." Although the activist had initially agreed to be identified, she and a male colleague who volunteered to take the tests requested anonymity after seeing their results. The man, who also is gay, did not show a race bias. But a second test found that both activists held biases against homosexuals -- they more quickly associated words such as "humiliate" and "painful" with gays and words such as "beautiful" and "glorious" with heterosexuals. If anything, both activists reasoned, they ought to have shown a bias in favor of gay people. The man's social life, his professional circle and his work revolve around gay culture. His home, he said, is in Washington's "gayborhood." "I'm surprised," the woman said. She bit her lip. "And disappointed." MAHZARIN BANAJI WILL NEVER FORGET HER OWN RESULTS THE FIRST TIME SHE TOOK A BIAS TEST, now widely known as the Implicit Association Test. But whom could she blame? After all, she'd finally found what she was looking for. Growing up in India, Banaji had studied psychophysics, the psychological representation of physical objects: A 20-watt bulb may be twice as bright as a 10-watt bulb, for example, but if the two bulbs are next to each another, a person may guess the difference is only 5 watts. Banaji enjoyed the precision of the field, but she realized that she found people and their behavior toward one another much more interesting. The problem was that there was no accurate way to gauge people's attitudes. You had to trust what they told you, and when it came to things such as prejudice -- say, against blacks or poor people -- people usually gave politically correct answers. It wasn't just that people lied to psychologists -- when it came to certain sensitive topics, they often lied to themselves. Banaji began to wonder: Was it possible to create something that could divine what people really felt -- even if they weren't aware of it themselves? The results of one of Banaji's experiments as a young scholar at Yale University encouraged her. She and her colleagues replicated a well-known experiment devised by psychologist Larry Jacoby. Volunteers were first shown a list of unfamiliar names such as Sebastian Weisdorf. The volunteers later picked out that name when asked to identify famous people from a list of famous and unknown names. Because they had become familiar with the name, people mistakenly assumed Sebastian Weisdorf was a famous man. The experiment showed how subtle cues can cause errors without people's awareness. Banaji and her colleagues came up with a twist. Instead of Sebastian Weisdorf, they asked, what if the name was Sally Weisdorf? It turned out that female names were less likely to elicit the false-fame error; volunteers did not say Sally Weisdorf was a famous woman. Women, it appeared, had to be more than familiar to be considered famous. Banaji had stumbled on an indirect measure of gender bias. She began scouting for other techniques. In 1994, Anthony Greenwald, Banaji's PhD adviser and later her collaborator, came up with a breakthrough. Working out of the University of Washington, Greenwald drew up a list of 25 insect names such as wasp, cricket and cockroach, 25 flower names such as rose, tulip and daffodil, and a list of pleasant and unpleasant words. Given a random list of these words and told to sort them into the four groups, it was very easy to put each word in the right category. It was just as easy when insects were grouped with unpleasant words and flowers were grouped with pleasant words. But when insects were grouped with pleasant words, and flowers with unpleasant words, the task became unexpectedly difficult. It was harder to hold a mental association of insects with words such as "dream," "candy" and "heaven," and flowers with words such as "evil," "poison" and "devil." It took longer to complete the task. Psychologists have long used time differences to measure the relative difficulty of tasks. The new test produced astonishing results. Greenwald took the next step: Instead of insects and flowers, he used stereotypically white-sounding names such as Adam and Chip and black-sounding names such as Alonzo and Jamel and grouped them with the pleasant and unpleasant words. He ran the test on himself. "I don't know whether to tell you I was elated or depressed," he says. "It was as if African American names were insect names and European American names were flower names. I had as much trouble pairing African American names with pleasant words as I did insect names with pleasant words." Greenwald sent Banaji the computer test. She quickly discovered that her results were similar to his. Incredulous, she reversed the order of the names in the test. She switched the left and right keys. The answer wouldn't budge. "I was deeply embarrassed," she recalls. "I was humbled in a way that few experiences in my life have humbled me." The Implicit Association Test is designed to examine which words and concepts are strongly paired in people's minds. For example, "lightning" is associated with "thunder," rather than with "horses," just as "salt" is associated with "pepper," "day" with "night." The reason Banaji and Greenwald still find it difficult to associate black faces with pleasant words, they believe, is the same reason it is harder to associate lightning with horses than with thunder. Connecting concepts that the mind perceives as incompatible simply takes extra time. The time difference can be quantified and, the creators of the test argue, is an objective measure of people's implicit attitudes. For years, Banaji had told students that ugly prejudices were not just in other people but inside themselves. As Banaji stared at her results, the cliche felt viscerally true. IN TIME, OTHER EXPERIMENTS WOULD SUPPORT THE IDEA THAT THESE TESTS WERE MORE THAN JUST AN INTERESTING EXERCISE: The tests were better predictors of many behaviors than people's explicit opinions were. They predicted preferences on matters of public policy -- even ideological affiliations. Banaji and others soon developed tests for bias against gays, women and foreigners. The bias tests, which have now been taken by more than 2 million people, 90 percent of them American, and used in hundreds of research studies, have arguably revolutionized the study of prejudice. In their simplicity, the tests have raised provocative questions about this nation's ideal of a meritocracy and the nature of America's red state/blue state political divide. Civil rights activists say the tests have the potential to address some of the most corrosive problems of American society; critics, meanwhile, have simultaneously challenged the results and warned they could usher in an Orwellian world of thought crimes. Banaji has received death threats from supremacist groups; sensing that the tests can detect secrets, officials from the Central Intelligence Agency have made discreet inquiries. The results of the millions of tests that have been taken anonymously on the Harvard Web site and other sites hint at the potential impact of the research. Analyses of tens of thousands of tests found 88 percent of white people had a pro-white or anti-black implicit bias; nearly 83 percent of heterosexuals showed implicit biases for straight people over gays and lesbians; and more than two-thirds of non-Arab, non-Muslim volunteers displayed implicit biases against Arab Muslims. Overall, according to the researchers, large majorities showed biases for Christians over Jews, the rich over the poor, and men's careers over women's careers. The results contrasted sharply with what most people said about themselves -- that they had no biases. The tests also revealed another unsettling truth: Minorities internalized the same biases as majority groups. Some 48 percent of blacks showed a pro-white or anti-black bias; 36 percent of Arab Muslims showed an anti-Muslim bias; and 38 percent of gays and lesbians showed a bias for straight people over homosexuals. "The Implicit Association Test measures the thumbprint of the culture on our minds," says Banaji, one of three researchers who developed the test and its most ardent proponent. "If Europeans had been carted to Africa as slaves, blacks would have the same beliefs about whites that whites now have about blacks." As the tests have been refined, replicated and reinterpreted over the past decade, they have challenged many popular notions -- beginning with the increasingly common assertion that discrimination is a thing of the past. The research has also upset notions of how prejudice can best be addressed. Through much of the 20th century, activists believed that biases were merely errors of conscious thought that could be corrected through education. This hopeful idea is behind the popularity of diversity training. But Banaji suggests such training relies on the wrong idea of how people form biases. There is likely a biological reason people so quickly make assumptions -- good or bad -- about others, Banaji says. The implicit system is likely a part of the "primitive" brain, designed to be reactive rather than reasoned. It specializes in quick generalizations, not subtle distinctions. Such mental shortcuts probably helped our ancestors survive. It was more important when they encountered a snake in the jungle to leap back swiftly than to deduce whether the snake belonged to a poisonous species. The same mental shortcuts in the urban jungles of the 21st century are what cause people to form unwelcome stereotypes about other people, Banaji says. People revert to the shortcuts simply because they require less effort. But powerful as such assumptions are, they are far from permanent, she says. The latest research, in fact, suggests these attitudes are highly malleable. Such reassurance has not assuaged test takers, who are frequently shocked by their results. The tests are stupid, and the results are wrong, some say. People have argued that the tests are measures of only hand-eye coordination or manual dexterity. Some have complained about which groups are assigned to the left- and right-hand keys, and about how the computer switches those categories. None of these factors has any real impact on the results, but Banaji believes the complaints are a sign of embarrassment. Americans find evidence of implicit bias particularly galling, Banaji theorizes, because more than any other nation, America is obsessed with the ideal of fairness. Most of the people approached for this article declined to participate. Several prominent politicians, Republican and Democrat, declined to take the tests for this article. The aide to one senator bristled, "You think he is a racist!" But the tests do not measure actions. The race test, for example, does not measure racism as much as a race bias. Banaji is the first to say people ought to be judged by how they behave, not how they think. She tells incredulous volunteers who show biases that it does not mean they will always act in biased ways -- people can consciously override their biases. But she also acknowledges a sad finding of the research: Although people may wish to act in egalitarian ways, implicit biases are a powerful predictor of how they actually behave. PEOPLE WHO FIND THEIR WAY TO THE HARVARD WEB SITE THAT HOSTS THE IMPLICIT ASSOCIATION TEST are asked a few questions about themselves. The tests are anonymous, but volunteers are asked about their sex, race and whether they consider themselves liberal or conservative. The voluntary questionnaires have allowed Banaji and her colleagues to arrive at one of the most provocative conclusions of the research: Conservatives, on average, show higher levels of bias against gays, blacks and Arabs than liberals, says Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and a principal IAT researcher with Greenwald and Banaji. In turn, bias against blacks and Arabs predicts policy preferences on affirmative action and racial profiling. This suggests that implicit attitudes affect more than snap judgments -- they play a role in positions arrived at after careful consideration. Brian Jones, a Republican National Committee spokesman, says the findings are interesting in an academic context but questions whether they have much relevance in the real world. "It's interesting to ponder how people implicitly make decisions, but ultimately we live in a world where explicit thoughts and actions are the bottom line," he says. Volunteers drawn to the tests were not a random sample of Americans, Jones adds, cautioning against reading too much into the conclusions. Though it's true that about two-thirds of test takers lean liberal, Banaji says, the sample sizes are so large that randomness is not a serious concern. And Andy Poehlman, a graduate student at Yale, has tracked 61 academic studies using the IAT to explore how implicit attitudes predict people's actions. When volunteers who took the race bias test were given the option to work with a white or black partner, one study found, those with the strongest implicit bias scores on the test tended to choose a white partner. Another study found that volunteers with lower bias scores against gays were more willing to interact with a stranger holding a book with an obviously gay theme. A third experiment found that when volunteers were told that another person was gay, those whose scores indicated more bias against gays were more likely to avoid eye contact and show other signs of unfriendliness. A study in Germany by psychologist Arnd Florack found that volunteers whose results suggested more bias against Turks -- an immigrant group -- were more likely to find a Turkish suspect guilty when asked to make a judgment about criminality in an ambiguous situation. In another study by psychologist Robert W. Livingston at the University of Wisconsin, Poehlman says, volunteers were given details of a crime in which a Milwaukee woman had been assaulted, suffered a concussion and required several stitches. In this case, Poehlman says, some volunteers were told the perpetrator had been proven to be David Edmonds from Canada. Others were told the guilty perpetrator was Juan Luis Martinez from Mexico. Volunteers were asked what length of sentence was appropriate for the crime: Bias scores against Hispanics on the implicit tests tended to predict a longer sentence for the Mexican. An implicit attitude "doesn't control our behavior in a be-all and end-all kind of way, but it flavors our behavior in a pretty consistent way," says Poehlman. In perhaps the most dramatic real-world correlate of the bias tests, economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago recently sent out 5,000 r?sum?s to 1,250 employers who had help-wanted ads in Chicago and Boston. The r?sum?s were culled from Internet Web sites and mailed out with one crucial change: Some applicants were given stereotypically white-sounding names such as Greg; others were given black-sounding names such as Tyrone. Interviews beforehand with human resources managers at many companies in Boston and Chicago had led the economists to believe that black applicants would be more likely to get interview calls: Employers said they were hungry for qualified minorities and were aggressively seeking diversity. Every employer got four r?sum?s: an average white applicant, an average black applicant, a highly skilled white applicant and a highly skilled black applicant. The economists measured only one outcome: Which r?sum?s triggered callbacks? To the economists' surprise, the r?sum?s with white-sounding names triggered 50 percent more callbacks than r?sum?s with black-sounding names. Furthermore, the researchers found that the high-quality black r?sum?s drew no more calls than the average black r?sum?s. Highly skilled candidates with white names got more calls than average white candidates, but lower-skilled candidates with white names got many more callbacks than even highly skilled black applicants. "Fifty percent? That's huge," says Sendhil Mullainathan, an economist who led the study and who recently moved to Harvard to work with Banaji. Human resources managers were stunned by the results, he says. Explicit bias, says Mullainathan, can occur not only without the intent to discriminate, but despite explicit desires to recruit minorities. Implicit attitudes need only sway a few decisions to have large impact, he says. For example, if implicit bias caused a recruiter to set one r?sum? aside, it could be just one of 100 decisions the recruiter made that day. Collectively, however, such decisions can have dramatically large consequences. SAJ-NICOLE JONI WAS THE FIRST WOMAN TO BE HIRED AS AN APPLIED MATHEMATICS PROFESSOR AT MIT. It was 1977, and there were no women's bathrooms in her building. Joni was not particularly surprised. She had battled obstacles all her life. When she first declared -- at age 12 -- that she was going to be a mathematician, her announcement evoked gales of laughter at a family gathering. But opposition only made her more determined. After a successful stint at MIT, Joni worked for Microsoft and then launched a successful business consulting firm called the Cambridge International Group Ltd. Her recent book, The Third Opinion, stresses the importance of seeking diverse points of view. Joni was recently introduced to Banaji and expressed interest in taking the Implicit Association Test. Like most volunteers, she did not think she had biases and believed strongly in "meeting people as they are, without looking at the color of their skin." Given Joni's background, Banaji thought it would be interesting for her to take a bias test that examined whether Joni associated men or women with careers in science. Most people find it easier to associate men with the sciences -- but Joni was clearly not most people. The test came up on the screen. Joni's fingers, trained for many years on the piano, flew as she classified a number of words such as "husband," "father," "mother" and "wife" between "male" and "female" groups. She then grouped words such as "chemistry," "history," "astronomy" and "music" under "science" or "liberal arts." The computer then asked her to group "male" with "science" and "female" with "liberal arts." When the groupings were reversed, Joni had to group "male" words with "liberal arts," and "female" words with various disciplines in science. She made a mistake in classifying "uncle." She hesitated over "astronomy" and made a second mistake in classifying "physics." The results popped up: "Your data show a strong association between science and Male relative to Female." Joni's fingers tapped the table in frustration. "I fought for women to be scientists all my life," she said, incredulous. Banaji nodded sympathetically. Her own results on this test were similar. While Banaji says such results show the pervasive power that cultural biases have even on those who are themselves the victims of such biases, critics of the Implicit Association Test have asked whether it might be merely measuring people's awareness of bias. In other words, might Joni and Banaji associate men with careers in science precisely because, as women who chose to be scientists, they were intimately familiar with the obstacles? Alternatively, could the tests be picking up something about the larger culture, rather than about the individual herself? Banaji says that researchers have shown the implicit tests are measuring more than mere awareness of bias, through studies that cancel out the effects of familiarity. "Is the IAT picking up something about the culture?" Banaji asks. "Yes, but it is picking up that aspect of the culture that has gotten into your brain and mind." On the race test, for example, a sophisticated brain-imaging study showed that implicit bias tests can predict fear responses among volunteers. Banaji and New York University neural scientist Elizabeth Phelps had white volunteers take the implicit race bias test and then undergo sophisticated brain scans called fMRIs, which measure instantaneous changes in brain activity. Those with the most bias on the implicit tests showed the most activity in the brain area called the amygdala, when photos of black faces, obtained from college yearbooks, were flashed before their eyes. The amygdala is part of the primitive brain involved with fear responses. But the critics persist. Philip Tetlock, a professor of organizational behavior in the business school at the University of California at Berkeley, and Ohio State University psychology professor Hal Arkes argue that Jesse Jackson might score poorly on the test. They cite the civil rights leader's statement a decade ago that there was nothing more painful at that stage of his life "than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved." If a prominent black civil rights leader could hold such a bias, Tetlock and Arkes ask, what do bias scores really mean? Whatever the IAT is measuring, Tetlock and Arkes argue, it is not what people would call discrimination -- no one would dream of accusing Jesse Jackson of harboring feelings of hostility toward African Americans. Banaji says Tetlock and Arkes are relying on an outmoded notion of discrimination. The IAT research shows that hostility is not needed for discrimination to occur. Women and minorities can just as easily harbor biases, absorbed from the larger culture, that can lead them to discriminate against people like themselves. Tetlock says he thinks the IAT research project is drawing conclusions much more sweeping than are justified. "One of the key points in contention is not a psychological point, it is a political point," says Tetlock. "It is where we are going to set our threshold of proof for saying something represents prejudice. My view is the implicit prejudice program sets the threshold at a historical low." By the standards of slavery and segregation, the critics argue, delays in mental associations are trivial. "We've come a long way from Selma, Alabama, if we have to calibrate prejudice in milliseconds," says Tetlock. But the biases that the tests uncover are not trivial, Banaji counters. Their consequences, while subtler, could be devastating. In settings such as the criminal justice system, she argues, lives may hang in the balance. In their most controversial argument, Tetlock and Arkes asked whether some implicit biases might simply be politically incorrect truths. By comparing national statistics of violent crime against census figures of different ethnic groups, the researchers argued it was more likely for a violent crime to be perpetrated by an African American man than a white man. Would it not therefore be rational, they asked, for people to hold biases against blacks? Even here, however, rationality did not appear to be the prime mover, Banaji argues. Even if whites and blacks committed crimes at exactly the same rate, Banaji says, people would assign greater weight to the black crimes. This phenomenon is known as an illusory correlation: Aberrational behavior by a member of a minority group is not only given greater prominence in the mind but is also more easily associated with the entire group, rather than just the individual. "When in-groups do bad things, we think it is individual behavior or circumstance," says Jerry Kang, a UCLA law professor who is interested in policy applications of the research. "I screw up because it is a bad day; others screw up because they are incompetent." THE APPARENT ABILITY OF THE IMPLICIT ASSOCIATION TEST TO DETECT HIDDEN ATTITUDES AND PREDICT BEHAVIOR has raised questions about its potential uses. Might it predict, for example, which police officers are likely to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black man? Should such tests be used to cull juries of people with high bias scores? Might employers use such tests to weed out potential racists? Might employees trying to prove discrimination demand that their bosses take bias tests? The problem, Banaji says, is that all those uses assume that someone who shows bias on the test will always act in a biased manner. Because this isn't true, Banaji and her colleagues argue against the use of the IAT as a selection tool or a means to prove discrimination. Banaji says she and her colleagues will testify in court against any attempt to use the test to identify biased individuals. Another reason to limit the IAT's use: Research has shown that individuals who are highly motivated can successfully fool the tests by temporarily holding counter-stereotypes in their minds. (Other attempts to fool the tests -- such as consciously attempting to respond faster or slower -- tend to change results only slightly, if at all, Banaji says.) Banaji hesitates to perform real-world studies that examine, for instance, whether police officers with the most bias are the most likely to shoot an unarmed suspect in an ambiguous situation, because the results of such studies could be subpoenaed and used in lawsuits against police departments. The researchers say they want to keep the focus of the tests on public education and research. They are wary of having the tests used in lawsuits, because if people feared their results might one day be used against them, they would be hesitant to use the tests for personal education. Banaji says she is keenly aware that psychology has a long history of tests -- starting with the "lie-detector" polygraph -- that have been hyped and misused. Personality tests that lack the rigor of the Implicit Association Test have been widely used by companies in employee training and even hiring. Atop Banaji's desk at work is a bust of a human skull marked with different brain areas once thought to be responsible for different emotions: a representation of the discredited science of phrenology. The bust is a daily warning about the many failed ways science has promised to unlock people's minds and personalities. But even as Banaji hears from critics who say the Implicit Association Test, which is not patented, will get misused, some proponents tell her it would be unethical not to use the test to screen officials who make life-and-death decisions about others. One test in a British jail showed that, compared with other criminals, pedophiles had implicit associations linking children and sexual attraction. Should such tests be used to determine which pedophiles have been rehabilitated and should be eligible for parole or, more controversially, as a law enforcement tool to evaluate which individuals are at risk of harming children? "People ask me, 'How do you sleep at night knowing this can be misused?'" Banaji says. "Others ask me, 'How do you sleep at night knowing this won't be used fully?'" IN SEPTEMBER, 50 TOP LEHMAN BROTHERS EXECUTIVES GATHERED IN A CONFERENCE ROOM ON THE FIFTH FLOOR OF THE PALACE HOTEL on Madison Avenue, across from New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral. They were a self-assured, competitive bunch, the type of crowd that usually views academics with skepticism. The executives had assembled for one of the leadership training programs that the firm mandates, and the mood in the room was very much "uh-huh, uh-huh," and "here we go again," says Barbara Byrne, a senior executive at the company who was present. Banaji told the executives she was going to test their skills of observation. She played a video of a basketball game. Shot in black-and-white, the video showed a swift series of basketball passes between players with rapidly changing positions. Banaji asked the executives to count the number of passes. The group loved competitive exercises. As soon as the short clip was over, answers came flying from all sides: Five! Seven! Eleven! Banaji asked whether anyone had seen anything unusual? No one had noticed anything out of place. Banaji played the video again, this time instructing her audience not to pay any attention to the basketball passes. Halfway through the video clip, a woman with an open umbrella slowly walked through the frame from one end to the other. Stunned at what they had missed, the executives collapsed in helpless laughter. "I sat there and said, God, it wasn't subtle," says Byrne. "It was a woman with an open umbrella. It was right in front of your eyes. But you were so focused on counting the basketballs, that part of your brain was not functioning." Banaji's point was that human beings filter what they see through the lenses of their own expectations. People believe they are acting rationally, but numerous psychological tests prove that subtle cues influence people all the time without their knowledge. "You thought to yourself, Maybe [hidden biases] could influence me in other ways," Byrne says. No one knows exactly why people develop implicit biases. Living in a diverse neighborhood does not in itself seem to reduce bias, but having close friendships with people from other ethnic groups does appear to lower bias, the IAT researchers have found. Saj-nicole Joni, who is white, for example, did not have test results showing a race bias and said she has long been close friends with an African American woman. Morgan Walls, an African American woman who works at the Peace Corps in the District, used to work in Thailand and has retained her connections with Asia. Her test suggested no bias toward European Americans or Asian Americans. Jeff Chenoweth, the director of national operations at the Catholic Legal Immigration Network in Washington, appeared tohave no bias against Arab Muslims compared with people from other parts of the world. As he took the tests, Chenoweth, a white man and a devout evangelical, said he was planning to have two Iraqi Shiite Muslims over to his home for Christmas dinner. "I've lived as a minority in an Arab country and have 10 close friends who are Arab," he said. Banaji herself shows no implicit biases against gays or Jews -- a result, she believes, of an upbringing where explicit biases against those groups were largely nonexistent. There is growing evidence that implicit attitudes can be changed through exposure to counter-stereotypes. When the race test is administered by a black man, test takers' implicit bias toward blacks is reduced, says Irene Blair, a University of Colorado psychologist who recently conducted a review of studies that looked at how attitudes could be changed. Volunteers who mentally visualized a strong woman for a few seconds -- some thought of athletes, some thought of professionals, some thought of the strength it takes to be a homemaker -- had lower bias scores on gender tests. Having people think of black exemplars such as Bill Cosby or Michael Jordan lowered race bias scores. One experiment found that stereotypes about women became weaker after test takers watched a Chinese woman use chopsticks and became stronger after they watched the woman put on makeup. Interventions as brief as a few seconds had effects that lasted at least as long as 24 hours. But the volunteers were not aware of their attitudes having been changed. Having counter-stereotypical experiences, in other words, might be much like going on a new diet with healthier food. Just as healthy eating can have a subtle impact on how people look and feel, counter-stereotypical experiences sustained throughout one's life seem to subtly change how one thinks. But, Banaji says, such experiences may not eliminate bias altogether. Banaji believes that conscious efforts are needed to fight what she calls ordinary prejudice, the primitive brain filtering the world through its biased lenses without the conscious part of the brain being aware of it. Tests have shown, for example, that when people are given a sense of power, they show greater biases than they did before. As a result, workplaces that are explicitly more egalitarian might be implicitly less biased, she says. Since Mullainathan found startling differences in his r?sum? study, he says, he has come to believe that personal identifiers should be removed from r?sum?s to make evaluations more fair. Another area highly prone to implicit biases is job interviews, says Max Bazerman of Harvard Business School. "What you need to do is look at objective measures separate from the interview." Banaji and Kang believe the IAT can be used as one measure to determine when affirmative action policies ought to be ended. Rather than pick an arbitrary amount of time -- Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor recently suggested 25 years -- the researchers asked whether such policies should expire when implicit tests show that people are really evaluating others without bias. Banaji and Kang are less interested in using affirmative action to redress historical wrongs -- they argue it is essential to fight discrimination still taking place today. Lani Guinier, President Bill Clinton's unsuccessful nominee for assistant attorney general for civil rights and now a professor at Harvard, is a fan of Banaji's work. But she says she worries the IAT will usher in superficial changes. The decor on the walls might be important, she says, but it isn't the real problem. "I worry people will think you can depress [implicit bias] scores through sporadic interventions," she says. "That will channel our efforts toward reform in potentially modest ways that don't fundamentally change the cultural swamp in which we are living." Banaji disagrees. Decades of research in social psychology, she says, have demonstrated that small cues can have powerful impact on the way people think and behave. Finding evidence of implicit bias, she says, is like driving a car and discovering that, although the steering wheel is being held straight, the vehicle is drifting to one side. Banaji's solution: However strange it may feel, the driver should consciously hold the steering wheel against the known bias. "The implicit system is dumb," Banaji says. "It reacts to what it sees. That is its drawback. But if we change the environment, we can change our attitudes." ALMOST FROM THE MOMENT BANAJI TOOK THAT FIRST RACE TEST, she says, she has applied her research to her own life. Her office at Harvard is testimony. At eye level on a bookshelf are postcards of famous women and African Americans: George Washington Carver, Emma Goldman, Miles Davis, Marie Curie, Frederick Douglass and Langston Hughes. During one interview, she wore a brooch on her jacket depicting Africa. What might seem like political correctness to some is an evidence-based intervention to combat her own biases, Banaji says. People's minds do not function with the detachment of machines, she says. For example, when she was recently asked to help select a psychologist for an award, Banaji says, she and two other panelists drew up a list of potential winners. But then they realized that their implicit biases might have eliminated many worthy candidates. So they came up with a new approach. They alphabetically went down a list of all the psychologists who were in the pool and evaluated each in turn. "Mind bugs operate without us being conscious of them," Banaji says. "They are not special things that happen in our heart because we are evil." But assumptions lead to attitudes, and attitudes lead to choices with moral and political consequences. So, whether she is in a classroom or a grocery store, Banaji says, she forces herself to engage with people she might otherwise have avoided. Just before Halloween, Banaji says, she was in a Crate & Barrel store when she spied a young woman in a Goth outfit. The woman had spiky hair that stuck out in all directions. Her body was pierced with studs. Her skull was tattooed. Banaji's instant reaction was distaste. But then she remembered her resolution. She turned to make eye contact with the woman and opened a conversation. Shankar Vedantam covers science and human behavior for The Post's National desk. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline. How the Web Version Of the Implicit Association Test Works By linking together words and images, the race bias test measures what associations come most easily to mind. People who take the Web version are asked to classify a series of faces into two categories, black American and white American. They are then asked to mentally associate the white and black faces with words such as "joy" and "failure." Under time pressure, many Americans find it easier to group words such as "failure" with black faces, and words such as "joy" with white faces. The test "measures the thumbprint of the culture on our minds," says Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji. To take the Implicit Association Test, go to https: //implicit.harvard.edu. To better understand how the test works and your results, go to https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/faqs.html The Paper Version Of the Implicit Association Test This test was designed by University of Washington psychologist Anthony Greenwald. It is intended to measure how easily people associate home- and career-related words with either men or women. If you can, time yourself as you do Part 1 and compare the result with how long it takes to do Part 2. Many people find grouping men with home words takes longer than grouping women with home words -- evidence of a possible gender bias. Do you think your results occurred because you took the tests in a particular order? You can repeat the tests again, this time pairing men with career words in Part 1 and women with career words in Part 2. Whichever part took longer the first time should be shorter this time, and vice versa. Results from the Web version are considered more reliable than those from the paper version. Part 1 The words in this first list are in four categories. MALE NAMES and FEMALE NAMES are in CAPITAL letters. Home-related and career-related words are in lowercase. Go through the list from left to right, line by line, putting a line through only each MALE NAME and each home-related word. Do this as fast as you can. executive LISA housework SARAH entrepreneur DEREK silverware MATT cleaning TAMMY career BILL corporation VICKY office STEVE administrator PAUL home AMY employment PEGGY dishwasher MARK babies BOB marriage MIKE professional MARY merchant JEFF garden KEVIN family HOLLY salary SCOTT shopping DIANA business DONNA manager EMILY laundry JOHN promotion KATE commerce JILL kitchen GREG children JASON briefcase JOAN living room ANN house ADAM Part 2 The following list is the same as the one above. This time, go through the list putting a line through only each FEMALE NAME and each home-related word. Again do this as fast as you can. executive LISA housework SARAH entrepreneur DEREK silverware MATT cleaning TAMMY career BILL corporation VICKY office STEVE administrator PAUL home AMY employment PEGGY dishwasher MARK babies BOB marriage MIKE professional MARY merchant JEFF garden KEVIN family HOLLY salary SCOTT shopping DIANA business DONNA manager EMILY laundry JOHN promotion KATE commerce JILL kitchen GREG children JASON briefcase JOAN living room ANN house ADAM The Deese-Roediger-McDermott Test (Part 1) Much as we like to believe that our perceptions and memories are always accurate, a number of experiments show people routinely make errors in how they see and remember things, without their being aware of it. Read the list of words in this box. Then refer to Part 2. small feelers ugly slimy creepy tiny crawl spider fly fright bite poison ants bug web The Deese-Roediger-McDermott Test (Part 2) Go through the words in this list, without referring back to the other list. Check all of the words that you recall as being in the previous list. The explanation of the test is below. bite feelers bed fly pillow poison sleep bug dream insect ants web slimy night blanket Explanation: Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji offers this test in lectures to show how easily a false memory can be created. Most people remember seeing the word "insect" in the first list. The mistake happens because the words in the first box were associated with insects: Unlike a machine, human memory is prone to error, because of reasonable-but incorrect-assumptions. "Mind bugs operate without us being concious of them," Banaji says. From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 26 18:21:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 13:21:02 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Umberto Eco plus get ready to haul...best computer jokes ever Message-ID: get ready to haul...best computer jokes ever [I do not know the source of this. Before this, here is Umberto Eco on operating systems and some related matter I have gathered.] But you did know - didn't you? - that [Umberto] Eco was the guy behind that unforgettable Mac versus DOS metaphor. That in one of his weekly columns he first mused upon the "Software Schism" dividing users of Macintosh and DOS operating systems. Mac, he posited, is Catholic, with "Sumptuous Icons" and the promise of offering everybody the chance to reach the Kingdom of Heaven ("or at least the moment when your document is printed") by following a series of easy steps. DOS, on the other hand, is Protestant: "it allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions...and takes for granted that not all can reach salvation." Following this logic, Windows becomes "an Anglican-style schism -- big ceremonies in the cathedral, but with the possibility of going back secretly to DOS in order to modify just about anything you like." (Asked to embellish the metaphor, Eco calls Windows 95 "pure unadulterated Catholicism. Already Windows 3.1 was more than Anglican - it was Anglo-Catholic, keeping a foot in both camps. But Windows 95 goes all the way: six Hail Marys and how about a little something for the Mother Church in Seattle.") --"The World According to Eco," The Wired Interview by Lee Marshall, _Wired_ 1997 March. But there remain millions of [DOS] computer users who won't be satisfied to barge down the information superhighway in a whacked-out '71 Cadillac with an automatic transmission and power steering and power brakes and air conditioning and not getting a lot of feedback about how the trip's going. Some of us still want to understand the purpose of the different parts of our computer system, both hardware -and software. --Van Olverton, _Supercharging MS-DOS_, 4th ed. (Alberton, MT: Forsyth-Wolf Communications, 1994), p. ix. He [Neal Stephenson, science-fiction author, whose new novel, _Cryptomicon_ "has reached No. 15 on the New York Times best- seller list, despite being 918 pages long and having crytptography as its central subject] draws an analogy by comparing computer operating systems to auto dealerships, all operating at an intersection along a highway. In this world the Mac OS becomes an attractive Euro-style sedan whose innards are hermetically sealed from the driver. Microsoft's Windows becomes a colossal station wagon with all the esthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block ("It leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success"). By the same token Windows NT is an off-road vehicle and the Be OS is a Batmobile. And Linux? Linux is not even a car dealership, but rather a bunch of people who live in yurts, tepees and geodesic domes in a field, building super tanks and giving them away. He portrays an imaginary conversation between a Linux hacker and a potential station wagon buyer: Hacker: "But if you accept one of our free tanks, we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!" Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!" Hacker: "But . . . " Buyer: "Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?" --John Markoff, "Behind Happy Interfact, More Complex Reality," article about Stephenson, _The New York Times_, 1999 June 3, Circuits section, p. E7. ------------------------- The proliferation of modern programming languages (all of which seem to have stolen countless features from one another) sometimes makes it difficult to remember what language you're currently using. This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers who find themselves in such dilemmas. C You shoot yourself in the foot. C++ You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying "That's me, over there." FORTRAN You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-handling facility. Modula-2 After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head. COBOL USEing a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. CHECK whether shoelace needs to be retied. Lisp You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds... BASIC Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged. Forth Foot yourself in the shoot. APL You shoot yourself in the foot; then spend all day figuring out how to do it in fewer characters. Pascal The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot. Snobol If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot. HyperTalk Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of you. Answer the result. Prolog You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't allow it to explain. 370 JCL You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried. ---- Of course, it didn't end there; there are many extensions to this idea (some included below). What many fail to recognise, however (especially those that add more complicated options for C, or reorder the list) is the meta-joke. Given the first line, the list starts off looking like yet another insult to C. But after reading the whole list, and coming back to the beginning, it becomes clear this is actually a compliment to C! I have compiled the following lists from a variety of different sources on the Web, and from emailed suggestions; it includes contributions from Giles Constant, James Davis, Steve DiVerdi, Fritz Freiheit, Murray S. Kucherawy, Simon Mikkelsen, Doug Snell, Reynir Stef?nsson, Wayne Throop, and Nick Wallis. ---- FORTRAN-77 You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you still can't do exception-processing. Modula-2 (alternative) You perform a shooting on what might be currently a foot with what might be currently a bullet shot by what might currently be a gun. BASIC (compiled) You shoot yourself in the foot with a BB using a SCUD missile launcher. Visual Basic You'll really only appear to have shot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much fun doing it that you won't care. Forth (alternative) BULLET DUP3 * GUN LOAD FOOT AIM TRIGGER PULL BANG! EMIT DEAD IF DROP ROT THEN (This takes about five bytes of memory, executes in two to ten clock cycles on any processor and can be used to replace any existing function of the language as well as in any future words). (Welcome to bottom up programming - where you, too, can perform compiler pre-processing instead of writing code) APL (alternative) You hear a gunshot and there's a hole in your foot, but you don't remember enough linear algebra to understand what happened. or @#&^$%&%^ foot Pascal (alternative) Same as Modula-2 except that the bullet is not the right type for the gun and your hand is blown off. Snobol (alternative) You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to be a bullet. The act of shooting the original foot then changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot (a left foot). Prolog (alternative) You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing to find its mark, backtracks to the gun, which then explodes in your face. or No. COMAL You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol, but the bore is clogged, and the pressure build-up blows apart both the pistol and your hand. or draw_pistol aim_at_foot(left) pull_trigger hop(swearing) Scheme As Lisp, but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening. Algol You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is aesthetically fascinating and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room. Ada If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in front of a firing squad and tell the soldiers, "Shoot at the feet." or The Department of Defense shoots you in the foot after offering you a blindfold and a last cigarette. or After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong type. or After correctly packing your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream, and confidently aim at your foot knowing it is safe. However the cordite in the round does an Unchecked Conversion, fires and shoots you in the foot anyway. Eiffel You create a GUN object, two FOOT objects and a BULLET object. The GUN passes both the FOOT objects a reference to the BULLET. The FOOT objects increment their hole counts and forget about the BULLET. A little demon then drives a garbage truck over your feet and grabs the bullet (both of it) on the way. Smalltalk You spend so much time playing with the graphics and windowing system that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away your workstation and makes you develop in COBOL on a character terminal. or You send the message shoot to gun, with selectors bullet and myFoot. A window pops up saying Gunpowder doesNotUnderstand: spark. After several fruitless hours spent browsing the methods for Trigger, FiringPin and IdealGas, you take the easy way out and create ShotFoot, a subclass of Foot with an additional instance variable bulletHole. Object Oriented Pascal You perform a shooting on what might currently be a foot with what might currently be a bullet fired from what might currently be a gun. PL/I You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The Data Processing & Payroll Department doubles its size, triples its budget, acquires four new mainframes and drops the original one on your foot. Postscript foot bullets 6 locate loadgun aim gun shoot showpage or It takes the bullet ten minutes to travel from the gun to your foot, by which time you're long since gone out to lunch. The text comes out great, though. PERL You stab yourself in the foot repeatedly with an incredibly large and very heavy Swiss Army knife. or You pick up the gun and begin to load it. The gun and your foot begin to grow to huge proportions and the world around you slows down, until the gun fires. It makes a tiny hole, which you don't feel. Assembly Language You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight. or You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot.or The bullet travels to your foot instantly, but it took you three weeks to load the round and aim the gun. BCPL You shoot yourself somewhere in the leg -- you can't get any finer resolution than that. Concurrent Euclid You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot. Motif You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the trajectory, the bullet and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams. Powerbuilder While attempting to load the gun you discover that the LoadGun system function is buggy; as a work around you tape the bullet to the outside of the gun and unsuccessfully attempt to fire it with a nail. In frustration you club your foot with the butt of the gun and explain to your client that this approximates the functionality of shooting yourself in the foot and that the next version of Powerbuilder will fix it. Standard ML By the time you get your code to typecheck, you're using a shoot to foot yourself in the gun. MUMPS You shoot 583149 AK-47 teflon-tipped, hollow-point, armour-piercing bullets into even-numbered toes on odd-numbered feet of everyone in the building -- with one line of code. Three weeks later you shoot yourself in the head rather than try to modify that line. Java You locate the Gun class, but discover that the Bullet class is abstract, so you extend it and write the missing part of the implementation. Then you implement the ShootAble interface for your foot, and recompile the Foot class. The interface lets the bullet call the doDamage method on the Foot, so the Foot can damage itself in the most effective way. Now you run the program, and call the doShoot method on the instance of the Gun class. First the Gun creates an instance of Bullet, which calls the doFire method on the Gun. The Gun calls the hit(Bullet) method on the Foot, and the instance of Bullet is passed to the Foot. But this causes an IllegalHitByBullet exception to be thrown, and you die. ---- FOOTOS -- A Guide to Modern Operating Systems extended the joke to operating systems, with Unix playing the role of C, of course. And this too has grown... ---- Unix You shoot yourself in the foot or % ls foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o % rm * .o rm: .o: No such file or directory % ls % 370 JCL (alternative) You shoot yourself in the head just thinking about it. DOS JCL You first find the building you're in in the phone book, then find your office number in the corporate phone book. Then you have to write this down, then describe, in cubits, your exact location, in relation to the door (right hand side thereof). Then you need to write down the location of the gun (loading it is a proprietary utility), then you load it, and the COBOL program, and run them, and, with luck, it may be run tonight. VMS $ MOUNT/DENSITY=.45/LABEL=BULLET/MESSAGE="BYE" BULLET::BULLET$GUN SYS$BULLET $ SET GUN/LOAD/SAFETY=OFF/SIGHT=NONE/HAND=LEFT/CHAMBER=1/ACTION=AUTOMATIC/ LOG/ALL/FULL SYS$GUN_3$DUA3:[000000]GUN.GNU $ SHOOT/LOG/AUTO SYS$GUN SYS$SYSTEM:[FOOT]FOOT.FOOT %DCL-W-ACTIMAGE, error activating image GUN -CLI-E-IMGNAME, image file $3$DUA240:[GUN]GUN.EXE;1 -IMGACT-F-NOTNATIVE, image is not an OpenVMS Alpha AXP image or %SYS-F-FTSHT, foot shot (fifty lines of traceback omitted) sh,csh, etc You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five hours reading manual pages, then your foot falls asleep. You shoot the computer and switch to C. Apple System 7 Double click the gun icon and a window giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small bomb appears with note "Error of Type 1 has occurred." Windows 3.1 Double click the gun icon and wait. Eventually a window opens giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small box appears with note "Unable to open Shoot.dll, check that path is correct." Windows 95 Your gun is not compatible with this OS and you must buy an upgrade and install it before you can continue. Then you will be informed that you don't have enough memory. CP/M I remember when shooting yourself in the foot with a BB gun was a big deal. DOS You finally found the gun, but can't locate the file with the foot for the life of you. MSDOS You shoot yourself in the foot, but can unshoot yourself with add-on software. ---- And it has extended even further, to databases, and other computer-related things... ---- Access You try to point the gun at your foot, but it shoots holes in all your Borland distribution diskettes instead. Paradox Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too. dBase You squeeze the trigger, but the bullet moves so slowly that by the time your foot feels the pain, you've forgotten why you shot yourself anyway. or You buy a gun. Bullets are only available from another company and are promised to work so you buy them. Then you find out that the next version of the gun is the one scheduled to actually shoot bullets. DBase IV, V1.0 You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the gun was a poorly designed hand grenade and the whole building blows up. SQL You cut your foot off, send it out to a service bureau and when it returns, it has a hole in it but will no longer fit the attachment at the end of your leg. or Insert into Foot Select Bullet >From Gun.Hand Where Chamber = 'LOADED' And Trigger = 'PULLED' Clipper You grab a bullet, get ready to insert it in the gun so that you can shoot yourself in the foot and discover that the gun that the bullets fits has not yet been built, but should be arriving in the mail _REAL_SOON_NOW_. Oracle The menus for coding foot_shooting have not been implemented yet and you can't do foot shooting in SQL. English You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off. (For those who don't know, English is a McDonnell Douglas/PICK query language which allegedly requires 110% of system resources to run happily.) Revelation [an implementation of the PICK Operating System] You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for. FlagShip Starting at the top of your head, you aim the gun at yourself repeatedly until, half an hour later, the gun is finally pointing at your foot and you pull the trigger. A new foot with a hole in it appears but you can't work out how to get rid of the old one and your gun doesn't work anymore. FidoNet You put your foot in your mouth, then echo it internationally. PicoSpan [a UNIX-based computer conferencing system] You can't shoot yourself in the foot because you're not a host. or (host variation) Whenever you shoot yourself in the foot, someone opens a topic in policy about it. Internet You put your foot in your mouth, shoot it, then spam the bullet so that everybody gets shot in the foot. troff rmtroff -ms -Hdrwp | lpr -Pwp2 & .*place bullet in footer .B .NR FT +3i .in 4 .bu Shoot! .br .sp .in -4 .br .bp NR HD -2i .* Genetic Algorithms You create 10,000 strings describing the best way to shoot yourself in the foot. By the time the program produces the optimal solution, humans have evolved wings and the problem is moot. CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) You only fail to shoot everything that isn't your foot. ---- In July 2002 Jim Nidositko emailed me the following story, with contributions to the list Last summer, I found myself analyzing the plague of problems afflicting a sorely neglected MS-SQL Server implementation. This process was made more interesting by the fact that this analysis was being performed with an eye toward moving the database over to Sybase. My previous database experiences involved Oracle and Ingres, so I found myself learning about both platforms at the same time. In short order I uncovered the fact of their shared heritage (early versions of MS-SQL Server were licensed from Sybase). This became a strong platform for understanding the differences between these two systems. I found it particularly fascinating that MS made it blindingly easy to get the system up and running, but in doing so it pretty much assured that you would shoot yourself in the foot by allowing the user to avoid performing basic tasks that are essential to good database design. Sybase, in contrast, makes it stupefyingly difficult to get a system up and running, thereby reducing your likelihood of foot shooting (by making it nearly impossible to shoot anything), but the Sybase documentation is so abysmal that you're also more or less assured of soundly shooting yourself for the difficulty of finding the information that will prevent this from among the confusing and circuitous cross references. This melange of similarities and contrasts inspired me to author the following vignettes. (Keep in mind, we were specifically trying to avoid any foot shooting, so these bits each end with advice toward that end.) MS-SQL Server MS-SQL Server?s gun comes pre-loaded with an unlimited supply of Teflon coated bullets, and it only has two discernible features: the muzzle and the trigger. If that wasn't enough, MS-SQL Server also puts the gun in your hand, applies local anesthetic to the skin of your forefinger and stitches it to the gun's trigger. Meanwhile, another process has set up a spinal block to numb your lower body. It will then proceeded to surgically remove your foot, cryogenically freeze it for preservation, and attach it to the muzzle of the gun so that no matter where you aim, you will shoot your foot. In order to avoid shooting yourself in the foot, you need to unstitch your trigger finger, remove your foot from the muzzle of the gun, and have it surgically reattached. Then you probably want to get some crutches and go out to buy a book on SQL Server Performance Tuning. Sybase Sybase's gun requires assembly, and you need to go out and purchase your own clip and bullets to load the gun. Assembly is complicated by the fact that Sybase has hidden the gun behind a big stack of reference manuals, but it hasn't told you where that stack is. While you were off finding the gun, assembling it, buying bullets, etc., Sybase was also busy surgically removing your foot and cryogenically freezing it for preservation. Instead of attaching it to the muzzle of the gun, though, it packed your foot on dry ice and sent it UPS-Ground to an unnamed hookah bar somewhere in the middle east. In order to shoot your foot, you must modify your gun with a GPS system for targeting and hire some guy named "Indy" to find the hookah bar and wire the coordinates back to you. By this time, you've probably become so daunted at the tasks stand between you and shooting your foot that you hire a guy who's read all the books on Sybase to help you shoot your foot. If you're lucky, he'll be smart enough both to find your foot and to stop you from shooting it. ---- In May 2003 Kristof Elst emailed me his contribution to the list I'm a highly frustrated Magic Software developer who would rather be back to coding tsql. So I made my own version. Magic software You spend 1 week looking up the correct syntax for GUN. When you find it, you realise that GUN will not let you shoot in your own foot. It will allow you to shoot almost anything but your foot. You then decide to build your own gun. You can't use the standard barrel since this will only allow for standard bullets, which will not fire if the barrel is pointed at your foot. After four weeks, you have created your own custom gun. It blows up in your hand without warning, because you failed to initialise the safety catch and it doesn't know whether the initial state is "0", 0, NULL, "ZERO", 0.0, 0,0, "0.0", or "0,00". You fix the problem with your remaining hand by nesting 12 safety catches, and then decide to build the gun without safety catch. You then shoot the management and retire to a happy life where you code in languages that will allow you to shoot your foot in under 10 days. From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 26 18:23:34 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 13:23:34 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: At Harvard, the Bigger Concern of the Faculty Is the President's Management Style Message-ID: At Harvard, the Bigger Concern of the Faculty Is the President's Management Style http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/26/education/26harvard.html January 26, 2005 [The drum beat continues. Is anyone wagering on how many more days Summers will last?] By SARA RIMER CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 25 - Among Harvard's faculty, the underlying conversation right now is not about gender differences and the ability of women to succeed in math and science. It is about Lawrence H. Summers's ability to succeed as president of the university. The uproar over Mr. Summers's remarks suggesting that innate gender differences might explain the lack of women in math and science careers comes against the backdrop of distress over his management style, which has been building since he took over three and a half years ago. A dozen Harvard professors, as well as other educators associated with the university, said in interviews that for all his intellectual vigor and vision, Mr. Summers, a former Harvard economics professor, has created a reservoir of ill will with what they say is a pattern of humiliating faculty members in meetings, shutting down debate and dominating discussions. This ill will, they say, has helped fuel the fury on campus over what Mr. Summers initially said were meant to be provocative, off-the-record remarks at an academic conference here on Jan. 14. "Larry is stimulating to argue with one on one and would be admirably controversial as a colleague," said Daniel S. Fisher, a Harvard professor of physics and applied physics, who has observed Mr. Summers in many meetings. "But with Larry as president, the rules are clear. For the president, it is fine to be provocative, but for faculty, serious questions and constructive dissent are squelched." The support of the faculty is particularly important now, as Mr. Summers pushes ahead with his ambitious plans to expand the campus across the Charles River, revise the undergraduate curriculum, make Harvard pre-eminent in big science and bring more low-income students to the university. The many admirers of Mr. Summers say his brash style makes him just the person to lead Harvard into the future. Steven Pinker, a star psychology professor who left the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for Harvard a year ago, called Mr. Summers a "refreshing" change from the "bland diplomats" that he said college presidents tend to be today. "He does speak his mind," said Professor Pinker, whose work Mr. Summers is known to admire and which provided much of the foundation for the recent remarks about women. "He subscribes to the idea that ideas should be discussed. He enjoys stating his position forcefully. He enjoys a forceful rejoinder. He doesn't believe people should wilt under the pressure of a good argument." But his critics say Mr. Summers puts his ego before the university and its academic values. "He just dominates faculty meetings," said Mary C. Waters, the chairwoman of the sociology department, "There's no dialogue. You speak and then Larry responds." Most professors who were interviewed refused to be identified, saying they were afraid of retribution from Mr. Summers. Those who did speak on the record took pains to mute their public criticism. Mr. Summers spent much of last week apologizing for his remarks about women and science and declaring his intention to recruit more women as professors. In an interview on Friday, Mr. Summers said his propensity to debate and challenge "sometimes leaves people thinking I'm resistant to their ideas when I am really trying to engage with their ideas." Asked if he thought he needed to adjust his style, he said, "I've learned from this experience." Whatever anger and resentment he has stirred among the faculty, Mr. Summers appears to have the strong support of the Harvard Corporation's seven-member board, which includes him and his former mentor Robert E. Rubin, a former Treasury secretary. "I think he is an outstanding president and he has a chance to be one of Harvard's greatest presidents," Mr. Rubin said. He added that he was unaware of widespread faculty discontent with the management style of Mr. Summers. Mr. Summers, who was Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, was only a few months into the job when he got into a fight with Cornel West, a star of the Afro-American Studies department, over his scholarship, which resulted in Professor West's highly publicized departure for Princeton. ("Good morning, Mr. President, who have you insulted today?" Mr. Clinton said to Mr. Summers in a telephone conference call after the West incident.) Several months later, invited to speak at a conference on globalization sponsored by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Mr. Summers stunned many professors with his brusque dismissal of their views on the subject, saying those who voiced concern about the possible downside of globalization were na?ve. At an early meeting with some 80 law school professors, Mr. Summers dismissed as stupid the reasoning behind a junior faculty member's suggestion about which departments might benefit by moving across the Charles River, to Allston, Mass., though he later apologized. Some professors who were present felt that Mr. Summers was dismissing the faculty member along with her suggestion. Professor Fisher and others cite many recent examples in which Mr. Summers has dismissed their views or questions, or put down their colleagues. Professor Waters said she and many other women on the faculty left a meeting with Mr. Summers in October feeling he had not understood their concerns over the sharp decline in the recruiting of tenured female faculty members. But Melissa Franklin, a physics professor who had spoken out at the meeting, said she felt encouraged afterward when Mr. Summers telephoned her to say he wanted to explore her concerns. Mr. Summers's reputation had preceded him to Harvard, and was even the subject of discussion on the presidential search committee. "When Larry was being considered for president, his provocative manner and insensitivity to others was the major criticism raised by skeptics," said Howard Gardner, a professor of cognition at the Harvard education school and an expert on leadership. Supporters like Mr. Rubin "gave assurances that he'd gotten an education in Washington, that his rough edges had been smoothed," Professor Gardner said. "On the basis of what I have observed and heard from colleagues, I now believe, regrettably, that the supporters were expressing a hope rather than a reality." Professor Gardner made a point of saying that in many ways he still considers Mr. Summers "an impressive leader," adding, "but I fear that his inability to anticipate the effects of his informal remarks - both in terms of content and in terms of style - could cripple his effectiveness." His critics say that Mr. Summers brings a hierarchical management style that is especially ill-suited to Harvard, a decentralized institution where much of the power resides with the deans of the university's 10 separate schools and where many faculty members have their own large egos as well as lifetime appointments. A president, they say, needs diplomatic skills to persuade the faculty to support his initiatives and work out compromises. "For me it's sad that Harvard isn't able to benefit from all the upside potential of Summers as a leader because he doesn't know what kind of organization he's operating in," said Theda Skocpol, a professor of government. "And he's often self-centered and discourages people around him." Professor Skocpol observed that Mr. Summers's advantages as a leader include his incisiveness and ability to "identify a problem and throw out challenges." Mr. Summers has made no secret that he intends to shake up Harvard and that intimidation may sometimes be required. In a mostly admiring article in the British newspaper The Guardian in October, he is quoted as saying, "You know, sometimes fear does the work of reason." Told that many faculty members had described him as a bully who squelches debate, Mr. Summers said the criticism was unjustified. "I've not, since I've been here, resisted a meeting or a discussion with any faculty member on the university," he said. "I've never suppressed anyone's views." Told that many faculty members said he had created an atmosphere of intimidation, he said: "I'm really sorry if that's true. It's certainly not my intent." Even his critics say Mr. Summers is highly accessible. He might insult someone in a meeting, they say, and then telephone afterward to apologize and solicit their views. The problem, his critics say, is that his confrontational style and tendency to criticize the ideas of faculty members in front of their colleagues requires an equally combative response. And, as president, he has the upper hand in the battle. "If you come back at him and hold your own, you come out all right," said Everett Mendelsohn, who has been a Harvard professor of the history of science for 40 years. "I've done it on a number of occasions." But Professor Mendelsohn added that many of his colleagues, while no shrinking violets, nevertheless feel afraid to speak up. Professor Waters says she is not afraid of Mr. Summers. But she said she stopped going to meetings of the faculty advisory committee for the search for the dean of Faculty of Arts and Sciences because she felt Mr. Summers was ignoring the faculty's views. She said she subsequently turned down a request to be co-chair of a curriculum review committee because she has become skeptical of Mr. Summers's interests in faculty opinion. "More and more faculty I speak to share my own sense, which is that Summers is exerting a lot of control and making a lot of decisions without really listening to faculty input," Professor Waters said. "So people I know who used to do a lot for the university are pulling back and becoming more selfish." "I think in the long run that is bad for a university because alienated professors who don't think they have a stake in the university will not do much for it." Sam Dillon contributed reporting for this article. From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 26 18:25:44 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 13:25:44 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: The end of the world: A brief history Message-ID: The end of the world: A brief history http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3490697 Dec 16th 2004 Why do end-of-time beliefs endure? A VERICHIP is a tiny, implantable microchip with a unique identification number that connects a patient to his medical records. When America's Food and Drug Administration recently approved it for medical use in humans, the news provoked familiar worries in the press about privacy-threatening technologies. But on the notice boards of [3]raptureready.com, the talk was about a drawback that the FDA and the media seemed to have overlooked. Was the VeriChip the "mark of the beast"? Raptureready.com runs an online service for the millions of born-again Christians in America who believe that an event called the Rapture is coming soon. During the Rapture, Christ will return and whisk believers away to join the righteous dead in heaven. From there, they will have the best seats in the house as the unsaved perish in a series of spectacular fires, wars, plagues and earthquakes. (Raptureready.com advises the soon-to-depart to stick a note on the fridge to brief those left behind--husbands, wives and in-laws--about the horrors in store for them.) Furnished with apocalyptic tracts from the Bible, believers scour news dispatches for clues that the Rapture is approaching. Some think implantable chips are a sign. The Book of Revelation features a "mark" that the Antichrist makes everybody wear "in their right hand, or in their foreheads". Rapturists have more than a hobbyist's idle interest in identifying this mark. Anyone who accepts it spends eternity roasting in the sulphurs of hell. (And, incidentally, the European Union may be "the matrix out of which the Antichrist's kingdom could grow.") Christians have kept faith with the idea that the world is just about to end since the beginnings of their religion. Jesus Himself hinted more than once that His second coming would happen during the lifetime of His followers. In its original form, the Lord's Prayer, taught by Jesus to his disciples, may have implored God to "keep us from the ordeal". Men have been making the same appeal ever since. In 156AD, a fellow called Montanus, pronouncing himself to be the incarnation of the Holy Spirit, declared that the New Jerusalem was about to come crashing down from the heavens and land in Phrygia--which, conveniently, was where he lived. Before long, Asia Minor, Rome, Africa and Gaul were jammed with wandering ecstatics, bitterly repenting their sins and fasting and whipping themselves in hungry anticipation of the world's end. A bit more than a thousand years later, the authorities in Germany were stamping out an outbreak of apocalyptic mayhem among a self-abusing sect called the secret flagellants of Thuringia. The disciples of William Miller, a 19th-century evangelical American, clung ecstatically to the same belief as the Montanists and the Thuringians. A thick strand of Christian history connects them all, and countless other movements. Don't get left behind Apocalyptic belief renews itself in ingenious ways. Belief in the Rapture, which enlivens the familiar end-of-time narrative with a compellingly dramatic twist, appears to be a modern phenomenon: John Nelson Darby, a 19th-century British evangelical preacher, was perhaps the first to popularise the idea. (Darby's inspiration was a passage in St Paul's letter to the Thessalonians, which talks about the Christian dead and true believers being "caught up together" in the clouds.) It is not easy to say how many Americans believe in Darby's concept of Rapture. But a dozen novels that dramatise the event and its gripping aftermath--the "Left Behind" series--have sold more than 40m copies. New apocalyptic creeds have even sprung from those sticky moments when the world has failed to end on schedule. (Social scientists call this "disconfirmation".) When the resurrected Christ failed to show up for Miller's disciples on the night of October 22nd 1844, press scribblers mocked the "Great Disappointment" mercilessly. But even as they jeered, a farmer called Hiram Edson snuck away from the vigil to pray in a barn, where he duly received word of what had happened. There had been a great event after all--but in heaven, not on Earth. This happening was that Jesus had begun an "investigative judgment of the dead" in preparation for his return. Thus was born the Church of Seventh-day Adventists. They were not the only ones to rise above apparent setbacks to the prophesies by which they set such store: the Jehovah's Witnesses of the persistently apocalyptic Watchtower sect survived no fewer than nine disconfirmations every few years between 1874 and 1975. Which way to Armageddon? Why do end-of-time beliefs endure? Social scientists love to set about this question with earnest study of the people who subscribe to such ideas. As part of his investigation into the "apocalyptic genre" in modern America, Paul Boyer of the University of Wisconsin asks why so many of his fellow Americans are "susceptible" to televangelists and other "popularisers". From time to time, sophisticated Americans indulge the thrillingly terrifying thought that nutty, apocalyptic, born-again Texans are guiding not just conservative social policies at home, but America's agenda in the Middle East as well, as they round up reluctant compatriots for the last battle at Armageddon. (It's a bit south of the Lake of Galilee in the plain of Jezreel.) Behind these attitudes sits the assumption that apocalyptic thought belongs--or had better belong--to the extremities of human experience. On closer inspection, though, that is by no means true. Properly, the apocalypse is both an end and a new beginning. In Christian tradition, the world is created perfect. There is then a fall, followed by a long, rather enjoyable (for some) period of moral degeneration. This culminates in a decisive final battle between good (the returned Christ) and evil (the Antichrist). Good wins and establishes the New Jerusalem and with it the 1,000-year reign of King Jesus on Earth. This is the glorious millennium that millenarians await so eagerly. Millenarians tend to place history at a moment just before the decisive final showdown. The apocalyptic mind looks through the surface reality of the world and sees history's epic, true nature: "apocalypse" comes from the Greek word meaning to uncover, or disclose. Norman Cohn, a British historian, places the origin of apocalyptic thought with Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), a Persian prophet who probably lived between 1500 and 1200BC. The Vedic Indians, ancient Egyptians and some earlier civilisations had seen history as a cycle, which was for ever returning to its beginning. Zoroaster embellished this tepid plot. He added goodies (Ahura Mazda, the maker and guardian of the ordered world), baddies (the spirit of destruction, Angra Mainyu) and a happy ending (a glorious consummation of order over disorder, known as the "making wonderful", in which "all things would be made perfect, once and for all"). In due course Zoroaster's theatrical talents came to Christians via the Jews. This basic drama shapes all apocalyptic thought, from the tenets of tribal cargo cults to the beliefs of UFO sects. In 1973, Claude Vorilhon, a correspondent for a French racing-car magazine, claimed to have been whisked away in a flying saucer, in which he had spent six days with a green chap who spoke fluent French. The alien told Mr Vorilhon that the Frenchman's real name was Rael, that humans had misread the Bible and that, properly translated, the Hebrew word Elohim (singular: Eloha) did not mean God, as Jews had long supposed, but "those who came from the sky". The alien then revealed that his species had created everything on Earth in a space laboratory, and that the aliens wanted to return to give humans their advanced technology, which would transform the world utterly. First, however, Rael needed financial contributions to build the aliens an embassy in Jerusalem, because otherwise they would not feel welcome (a bit lame, this explanation). Although the Israeli government has not yet given its consent, the Raelians--those persuaded by Rael's account--continue to welcome donations in anticipation of a change of heart. The Raelians' claim to be atheists who belong to the secular world must come as no surprise to Mr Cohn, who has long detected patterns of religious apocalyptic thought in what is supposedly rational, secular belief. He has traced "egalitarian and communistic fantasies" to the ancient-world idea of an ideal state of nature, in which all men are genuinely equal and none is persecuted. As Mr Cohn has put it, "The old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one, and this tends to obscure what otherwise would be obvious. For it is the simple truth that, stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism are with us still." Nicholas Campion, a British historian and astrologer, has expanded on Mr Cohn's ideas. In his book, "The Great Year", Mr Campion draws parallels between the "scientific" historical materialism of Marx and the religious apocalyptic experience. Thus primitive communism is the Garden of Eden, the emergence of private property and the class system is the fall, the final gasps of capitalism are the last days, the proletariat are the chosen people and the socialist revolution is the second coming and the New Jerusalem. Hegel saw history as an evolution of ideas that would culminate in the ideal liberal-democratic state. Since liberal democracy satisfies the basic need for recognition that animates political struggle, thought Hegel, its advent heralds a sort of end of history--another suspiciously apocalyptic claim. More recently, Francis Fukuyama has echoed Hegel's theme. Mr Fukuyama began his book, "The End of History", with a claim that the world had arrived at "the gates of the Promised Land of liberal democracy". Mr Fukuyama's pulpit oratory suited the spirit of the 1990s, with its transformative "new economy" and free-world triumphs. In the disorientating disconfirmation of September 11th and the coincident stockmarket collapse, however, his religion has lost favour. The apocalyptic narrative may have helped to start the motor of capitalism. A drama in which the end returns interminably to the beginning leaves little room for the sense of progress which, according to the 19th-century social theories of Max Weber, provides the religious licence for material self-improvement. Without the last days, in other words, the world might never have had 65-inch flat-screen televisions. For that matter, the whole American project has more than a touch of the apocalypse about it. The Pilgrim Fathers thought they had reached the New Israel. The "manifest destiny" of America to spread its providential liberty and self-government throughout the North American continent (not to mention the Middle East) smacks of the millennium and the New Jerusalem. Science treasures its own apocalypses. The modern environmental movement appears to have borrowed only half of the apocalyptic narrative. There is a Garden of Eden (unspoilt nature), a fall (economic development), the usual moral degeneracy (it's all man's fault) and the pressing sense that the world is enjoying its final days (time is running out: please donate now!). So far, however, the green lobby does not appear to have realised it is missing the standard happy ending. Perhaps, until it does, environmentalism is destined to remain in the political margins. Everyone needs redemption. Watch this spacesuit Noting an exponential acceleration in the pace of technological change, futurologists like Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil think the world inhabits the "knee of the curve"--a sort of last-days set of circumstances in which, in the near future, the pace of technological change runs quickly away towards an infinite "singularity" as intelligent machines learn to build themselves. From this point, thinks Mr Moravec, transformative "mind fire" will spread in a flash across the cosmos. Britain's astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees, relegates Mr Kurzweil and those like him to the "visionary fringe". But Mr Rees's own darkly apocalyptic book, "Our Final Hour", outdoes the most colourful of America's televangelists in earthquakes, plagues and other sorts of fire and brimstone. So there you have it. The apocalypse is the locomotive of capitalism, the inspiration for revolutionary socialism, the bedrock of America's manifest destiny and the undeclared religion of all those pseudo-rationalists who, like The Economist, champion the progress of liberal democracy. Perhaps, deep down, there is something inside everyone which yearns for the New Jerusalem, a place where, as a beautiful bit of Revelation puts it: God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away. Yes, perhaps. But, to be sure, not everyone agrees that salvation, when it comes, will appear clothed in a shiny silver spacesuit. From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 26 18:32:00 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 13:32:00 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Reiss and Havercamp: Toward a Comprehensive Assessment of Fundamental Motivation: Factor Structure of the Reiss Profiles Message-ID: Reiss and Havercamp: Toward a Comprehensive Assessment of Fundamental Motivation: Factor Structure of the Reiss Profiles Psychological Assessment, Vol 18(2) (1998.6): 97-106 [Reiss is famous for his using factor analysis to determine 16 basic human motivations. Here's an early paper on this.] Reiss, Steven1,2; Havercamp, Susan M.1 1Nisonger Center, Ohio State University. 2Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Steven Reiss, Nisonger Center, Ohio State University, 1581 Dodd Drive, Columbus, Ohio 43210-1296. Electronic mail may be sent to reiss.7 at osu.edu. Received Date: July 18, 1997; Revised Date: December 15, 1997; Accepted Date: January 20, 1998 ---------------------------------------------- Abstract Two instruments were developed to provide a comprehensive assessment of the strength of a person's fundamental end goals and motivational sensitivities. One instrument was a self-report inventory for adolescents and adults in general, and the other was an informant-rating scale for adolescents and adults with mental retardation and development disabilities. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and test-retest reliabilities are reported in 7 studies, with independent samples of participants from diverse geographical areas, occupations, and social groups, N = 2,548. Each instrument was found to have a 15-factor solution, and the 2 solutions were similar to one another. Because the factors assess universal motives that are also seen in animals, a genetics-behavior-cognitive model of fundamental motivation is suggested. ---------------------------------------------- According to Reiss and Havercamp's (1996, 1997) sensitivity theory, individual differences in motivational needs are the key to predicting human behavior. If you want to predict what people will do, find out what they fundamentally desire and predict that they will try to get it. It is surprising that this idea has not been given greater emphasis in psychology. For example, psychologists have not developed standardized instruments suitable for a comprehensive assessment of a person's motivational needs. Although there are thousands of standardized instruments, none purports to tell us what a person wants from life so we might then try to predict what he or she will seek. Instead, psychologists try to predict behavior on the basis of personality theories, although the link between personality and behavior often is much less direct than that between motive and behavior. Human motives can be divided into two categories called means and end (Reiss, in press). The distinction is based on the purposes of the behavior. Means are indicated when a person performs an act for instrumental purposes. Examples include a professional athlete who is playing ball for a salary and a person who is avoiding the dentist to save money. In these examples, the acts of playing ball and avoiding the dentist are sought as means of obtaining or saving money. In contrast, end purposes are indicated when a person performs a behavior for no apparent reason other than its own sake. Examples include a child who is playing ball for the fun of it and a person who is taking aspirin to reduce pain. In these examples, physical exercise and pain reduction are sought for no purpose other than as ends in themselves. A motivational analysis of many actions may reveal chains of instrumental behavior, but eventually there must be an intrinsically reinforcing stimulus (a noninstrumental goal) at the end of each chain. For example, a person may take a second job for extra income (instrumental motive), desire the extra salary to purchase health care (instrumental motive), and desire the health care to prolong personal or family survival (end goal). In this example, the person's aim is to help his or her family, not to gain or hoard money. End motives vary in their psychological significance. Some end motives, such as thirst, account for relatively little behavior. Except for polydipsia, the behavior motivated by thirst shows little variance. Furthermore, thirst is not an important motive in understanding alcohol and drinking problems. In contrast, hunger accounts for many more behaviors than does thirst. Many cultures have rules for the preparation and consumption of food. Furthermore, strong or unusual appetites are implicated in eating disorders. We sought to limit our initial research to those ends that account for the most behavior. We defined the term fundamental motive as a universal end goal that accounts for psychologically significant behavior. The three criteria for fundamental motivation, then, were end goal, universal motivator, and psychological significance. It is surprising that few researchers have attempted to assess comprehensively the fundamental end goals of human conduct (Ryff, 1989). The Thematic Apperception Test has been used (Murray, 1943), but basic questions about the validity of this measure are still unanswered (Zubin, Eron, & Schumer, 1965). The Personality Research Form (Jackson, 1984) has many motivational items, but it was not intended to assess end motivation, and it is too long (440 items) for use in many research studies. There are many excellent anxiety scales, anger scales, and self-concept scales, but these consider only one motive per instrument and do not permit a comprehensive assessment of what motivates a given individual. Researchers have developed various reinforcement checklists that have been found to be useful in applied behavior analysis (e.g., Bihm, Poindexter, Kienlen, & Smith, 1992). However, these instruments assess preferences for specific reinforcers (e.g., preference for M & M's candy) rather than preferences for specific reinforcement categories (e.g., desire to eat); moreover, few reinforcement surveys have been subjected to psychometric evaluation. Zigler (1997) developed a new instrument to assess personality and motivation in children with mental retardation and developmental disabilities (MR/DD). However, this promising instrument addresses significant motives seen in a targeted population and is not intended to provide a comprehensive assessment of end motivation. The purpose of this investigation was to develop two new psychological instruments for use in assessing fundamental motivation. One instrument is a self-report measure intended for use with anybody who can read and understand the items. Because we have a long-standing interest in people with MR/DD, we also developed a ratings instrument to assess fundamental motivation in this population. Six factor analyses (four exploratory and two confirmatory), with six independent samples, are reported in this article. A seventh study evaluated test-retest reliabilities with a seventh independent sample. The primary reason for reporting both instruments in the same article is to permit an assessment of the robustness of factor solutions across methods (self-report vs. ratings) and populations (general vs. people with MR/DD). The Reiss Profiles essentially ask people how much they like activities that are to some extent liked by virtually everybody and how much they dislike activities that are to some extent disliked by virtually everybody. When we first started this research (Reiss & McNally, 1985), some colleagues questioned its significance, wondering why we would ask people if they dislike anxiety or like sex. Doesn't everybody experience anxiety as a displeasure and sex as a pleasure? Our response was that individuals differ in the strength of these desires. Although everybody hates anxiety, some hate it more than others (Reiss & McNally, 1985; Taylor, 1995). Although nearly everybody likes sex, some people crave it, whereas others seek it only rarely. Sensitivity theory holds that individual variations in the strength of these motives are important for understanding a person's life goals and everyday behavior. Study 1 We developed a self-report instrument for assessing individual differences in fundamental motivation. The first step was to generate a large list of items that refer to end purposes. We reviewed a variety of sources to generate ideas for items, including Murray's (1938) theory of needs, motivational studies, psychopathology articles and books, and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994). In total, 25 fundamental motives were identified; however, we subsequently deleted thirst, because this motive does not account for much everyday behavior. Steven Reiss wrote between 8 and 18 items to assess the usual strength of an individual's desire for each of 24 motivational domains. For a period of 2 months, colleagues, relatives, and friends were solicited to review the list and suggest additional items. As a consequence, the initial list of items was broader than the 24 motivational domains with which we started. Redundant items were deleted, and miscellaneous items were added, so that the total list included every significant end purpose that was suggested by our colleagues. The initial 328-item instrument was named the Reiss Profile of Fundamental Goals and Motivational Sensitivities (Reiss Profile). Every item on the instrument was designed to measure the strength of an individual's fundamental desire or fundamental aversion for a specific end purpose. The item stems consisted of the phrases "I like," "I enjoy," "I am happiest when," "I love," "I try," "I must have," "I hate," "I am proud of," "I want," and "is important to me." Examples of items included "I love to eat," "Sex is very important to me," "I am happiest when I am physically active," and "I love parties." None of the items assessed instrumental motives. For example, the scale did not include items such as "Sex is a great way to get to know somebody," or "Becoming famous is a great way of gaining acceptance." The intent of including only items that refer to end purposes was to assess individual differences in the strength of various fundamental motives. Method Participants. The participants were 401 adolescents and adults sampled from six sources (three universities, a high school, a seminar for MR/DD professionals, and a church group) in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The demographic data for this Sample 1 are shown in Table 1. Participants were solicited through friends, relatives, and colleagues, who offered no inducements. However, the college students completed the instrument in exchange for an educational lecture on the underlying theory, which was given immediately after they completed the instrument. ---------------------------------------------- Table 1 Demographic Data for Six Independent Research Sample ---------------------------------------------- Procedure. The participants completed the instrument individually, anonymously, and without consultation from others. In an effort to minimize social desirability and the other biasing effects, the participants were instructed not to write any identifying information on the response sheets and to return completed response sheets in closed envelopes. They were told that research assistants would enter their responses into a computer data bank so that nobody could ever trace a particular set of responses to a particular individual. Results and Discussion We conducted a series of factor analyses using maximum likelihood extraction method with oblique direct oblimin rotations. Oblique rotations were used because sensitivity theory implies that some fundamental motives are intercorrelated, functioning both as end goals and as instrumental means for other end goals (e.g., seeking power both for its own sake and as a means of obtaining social status.) Twenty-four factors were expected theoretically, and the scree plot suggested a 12-factor solution. In accordance with Tucker, Koopman, and Linn's (1969) discussion of how to proceed under such circumstances, we did not use the eigenvalue > 1 rule. (For eigenvalues, see Results and Discussion sections of Studies 3 and 5.) The first factor analysis extracted a 10-factor solution, the second extracted an 11-factor solution, and so on up to 20 factors. Because the factor loadings for the 20-factor solution were very small, we did not do further analyses to extract more than 20 factors. The 15-factor solution was easiest to interpret, with few items loading on multiple factors. The 15 factors were labeled as follows: Power, Social Conflict, Food, Physical Activity, Order, Pain, Anxiety, Frustration, Sex, Rejection, Social Contact, Vengeance, Curiosity, Independence, and Nurturance. One hundred and ten items were retained, all having a .3 or higher loading on one of the 15 factors and none having a loading of .3 or higher on more than one factor. Key items intended to measure mastery loaded on the factor for Curiosity; those intended to measure romantic love loaded on the factor for Sex; those intended to measure positive mood loaded on the Social Contact factor; those intended to assess desire for attention loaded with desire for Power and with items assessing desire for money. Factors were not found for help others, positive self-regard, or self-control. Study 2 This study was intended to provide a preliminary exploration of the factor structure of the revised instrument. Two types of revisions were made in the Reiss Profile on the basis of the results of Study 1. First, we added 110 new items in order to support 15 emerging factors by increasing to eight the number of items on each factor. Second, 42 of the 110 retained items were modified. The main purpose of the modifications was to increase item variance. Because the items ask people how much they like something that is to some extent liked by virtually everybody, or dislike something that is to some extent disliked by nearly everybody, there was a tendency for universal endorsement and little variance. One purpose of this investigation was to find item wordings that maximize variance. For example, the item "My personal honor is very important to me" was reworded as "My personal honor is foremost in guiding my behavior." The reworded item is less likely to be strongly endorsed by an overwhelming majority of people. Method Participants. The participants were 380 adolescents and adults sampled from nine sources in mostly Nebraska, Ohio, and Pennsylvania (see Table 1). None of the people served as participants in Study 1. The participants represented students from two colleges, members of a military reserve unit, direct care staff attending an MR/DD workshop, and employees of a McDonald's restaurant. The method of recruitment was the same as that described for Study 1. Procedure. The procedure was the same as that described for Study 1. Results and Discussion The data were submitted to a series of factor analyses using the maximum likelihood method of extraction with oblique, direct oblimin rotations. Factor solutions were examined extracting 12 to 20 factors. The 17-factor solution was easiest to interpret. We labeled the factors as follows: Social Status, Vengeance, Physical Exercise, Sex, Order, Family (nurturance), Rejection, Independence, Anxiety, Social Contact, Food, Pain, Curiosity, Citizenship, Power, Frustration, and Honor. It was interesting that family, not nurturance, emerged as a factor. Because animals have instincts to take care of their own, as opposed to general desires to nurture plants and animals, perhaps family (not nurturance) is the more fundamental motive. Using the same retention rules used in Study 1, we kept a total of 113 items. In total, 107 items were deleted. Study 3 The purpose of this study was to provide an exploratory factor investigation of the second revision of the Reiss Profile instrument. The second revision added 74 items, bringing the new total to 187. One purpose of the revisions was to support an emergent Family factor. The other purposes were to support the factors that had emerged in the results of Study 2, so that each factor would have at least eight items with a .30 loading or higher. In addition, 24 of the 113 retained items were reworded in an effort to increase item variance. Method Participants. The participants were 341 adolescents and adults sampled from 14 sources in mostly Canada, Connecticut, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (see Table 1). The sources included students from required high school English classes in a racially mixed school and from two undergraduate colleges, members of a church group, mental health professionals employed at a rural community health center, legal secretaries working for a large firm, graduate students in either dentistry or business, and residents of an urban nursing home. The methods of recruitment were the same as those described for Studies 1 and 2, except that a $100 contribution was paid to the nursing home resident association for its assistance in collecting data. None of the people had served as participants in either of the previous two studies. Procedure. The procedures were the same as those described for Studies 1 and 2. Results and Discussion The data were submitted to a series of exploratory factor analyses using the maximum likelihood extraction method with oblique direct oblimin rotations. On the basis of the scree plot and the results of Studies 1 and 2, 14 to 17 factors were extracted. The 15-factor solution was the easiest to interpret; this solution accounted for 53% of the variance. The factor labels, eigenvalues, percentage variance, and item loadings for this analysis are shown in Table 2. The factor correlation matrix revealed largely unrelated factors: Of 105 correlations, only 15 exceeded .20 and none exceeded .29. ---------------------------------------------- Table 2 Factor Structure of Reiss Profile (N = 341) ---------------------------------------------- In an effort to reduce the length of the instrument, we combined the factors for anxiety sensitivity and pain sensitivity into a single scale for sensitivity to aversive sensations. This decision was consistent with the factor results and with previous findings that the two sensitivities are significantly correlated (e.g., Asmundson & Taylor, 1996). The effort to develop a frustration sensitivity factor distinct from sensation sensitivity was abandoned. Items were deleted if their factor loading was less than .30. Items that loaded .30 or higher on some of the factors were deleted if the factor already had eight items that loaded highly. In total, 118 items were retained and 69 deleted. Study 4 The purpose of this study was to confirm the factor results obtained in Study 3 with a different sample of research participants. Only three new items were added, bringing the total to 121 items. All of the new items were intended to load on the Independence factor. No items were reworded. Thus, 118 of the 121 items used in Study 4 also were used in Study 3. Method Participants. The participants were 398 adolescents and adults sampled from six sources in Iowa, Ohio, and Illinois (see Table 1). The sources included high school students, students at an undergraduate college, residents of a suburban nursing home, members of a church group, professionals attending a seminar on mental retardation, and volunteers in a community service organization (Kiwanis Club). The methods of recruitment were the same as those described for Study 3. None of the people had served as participants in any of the previous three studies. Procedure. The procedures were the same as those described for Studies 1, 2, and 3. Results and Discussion We performed a confirmatory factor analysis on the interitem correlation matrix to test the fit of the 15-factor model using a generalized least squared discrepancy function. When the factors were allowed to correlate, the 15-factor solution yielded a close fit to the data, root-mean-square error of approximation (RMSEA) = .047. This finding provided evidence of a robust factor structure and was obtained despite the fact that Sample 4 had a lower percentage of young adults (12% vs. 25%) and a higher percentage of people 55 and older (46% vs. 24%) than Sample 3. The Cronbach's alpha coefficients ranged from .74 to .92, with a median of .82. The alpha values for male and female participants on each factor were similar to one another. However, future research is needed to explore more completely the possibility of gender effects. For the Independence scale, the alpha coefficients were used to delete one of the three new items. The remaining two new items were added to the six previously retained items, bringing the total for this scale to eight items. Thus, the final instrument has 15 scales, each with eight items (see Table 2). Study 5 Many people with MR/DD cannot validly self-report their emotions and desires (see Reiss, 1990). Because of our long-standing interest in this population, we developed an instrument for rating people with MR/DD, called the Reiss Profile of Fundamental Goals and Motivation Sensitivities for Persons With Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities (Reiss Profile-MR/DD). The instrument is intended to be completed by caregivers, teachers, or parents and used with anyone whose cognitive ability precludes the use of our self-report instrument. The instrument was developed concurrently with the self-report instrument. Steven Reiss wrote a 157-item inventory intended to assess the following 10 fundamental motives: Anxiety Sensitivity, Attention, Food, Frustration Sensitivity, Help Others, Independence, Order, Physical Exercise, Positive Mood, and Social Contact. About two thirds of the items directly referred to motives, such as "more than most people, seeks attention," "has a strong sex drive," "enjoys learning," "always wants to win," "strong desire for autonomy," and "more than most people, enjoys working independently." Some items were written to refer to behaviors that strongly implied, but did not explicitly state, motives. For example, anxiety sensitivity is indicated by beliefs that anxiety has harmful personal consequences (Reiss & McNally, 1985). Because raters cannot be expected to know the anxiety sensitivity beliefs of the people they are rating, items were selected that are known to be correlated with anxiety sensitivity beliefs, such as the presence of many fears (Reiss, Peterson, Gursky, & McNally, 1986). At a national MR/DD conference, we collected ratings on 199 people from the professionals and parents attending the conference. Steven Reiss used the interitem correlation matrix to develop a 162-item revised instrument. The revised instrument included items intended to assess 15 factors (9 of the 10 fundamental motives assessed by the initial instrument [the positive mood items were deleted] plus Curiosity, Morality, Pain, Rejection, Social Contact, and Vengeance). The purpose of Study 5 was to explore the revised instrument's factor structure with a large heterogenous sample of people with MR/DD. Method Participants and raters. The participants were 515 adults (304 men and 211 women) with MR/DD (see Table 1). They were recruited from eight community-based service and residential agencies located in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Ontario, Illinois, Texas, Ohio, and the United Kingdom. None of the people served as participants in any of our previous studies. The research was conducted in full compliance with each agency's ethics committee. The instrument was completed by parents, siblings, agency supervisors, and direct care workers. All raters reported that they had known the participants for at least 4 months. In order to limit the extent to which the results might be influenced by any one rater, no person rated more than five individuals. As shown in Table 1, the agencies indicated whether or not participants had a behavior disorder. In people with MR/DD, these behavior disorders are mostly conduct problems, aggression, and severe behavior symptoms, such as self-injurious behavior, although the full range of psychiatric disorders is seen in this population (see Reiss, 1994). Local psychiatrists and clinical psychologists provided the diagnostic information. Procedure. The data collection at each agency was supervised by a program director or by his or her assistant. All data collected were completely anonymous in that no names or identifying participant codes were used. Results and Discussion We submitted the data to a series of factor analyses using the maximum likelihood extraction method with oblique direct oblimin rotations. On the basis of the scree plot that suggested a 12-factor solution and a theoretical expectation of 14 factors (see Reiss & Havercamp, 1997), a series of factor analyses were conducted extracting 10 to 20 factors. The 14-factor solution was the easiest to interpret; this solution accounted for 52% of the variance. The factor labels, eigenvalues, percentage variance, and item loadings for this analysis are shown in Table 3. The factor correlation matrix revealed largely unrelated factors. Of 91 correlations, only 13 exceeded .20 and none exceeded .40. ---------------------------------------------- Table 3 Factor Structure of Reiss Profile (MR/DD;: N = 515) ---------------------------------------------- A scale for social contact did not emerge from the exploratory factor analysis. Because of the significance of the desire for social contact, the eight items that were intended to measure this desire were retained. Cronbach's alpha coefficient for this scale was .79 for Sample 5. Of the 162-items on the instrument, 62 were deleted because they did meet the item retention rules used for Studies 1 and 2. Study 6 The purpose of this study was to confirm the factor results obtained in Study 5 with a different sample of research participants. No new items were added to the instrument. However, we reworded 10 of the 100 retained items to increase item variance, and we reworded six items so that all 100 items could be scored in the same numerical direction. Method Participants. Sample 6 consisted of 438 people (248 men, 189 women, 1 unreported) who either were receiving services from one of the following agencies: a large national residential agency with headquarters in Ohio, a large residential provider of group homes in suburban Chicago, or a residential dual diagnosis program near Philadelphia; or whose parents, siblings, or county board support staff attended a research presentation at the 1996 national meeting of the Arc of the United States. In total, the data came from 24 states. Demographic information is summarized in Table 1. None of the people had served previously as participants or raters in any of the other studies on fundamental motivation. Procedure. The procedures were the same as those used in Study 5. Results and Discussion We performed a confirmatory factor analysis on this sample and the 15-factor model obtained from Study 5 (14 empirically derived factors plus Social Contact). A generalized least squared discrepancy function was applied to the interitem correlation matrix. When the factors were allowed to correlate, the 15-factor solution provided a reasonable fit to the data (RMSEA = .078). This finding provided evidence of a robust factor structure. As shown in Table 3, the Cronbach's alpha coefficients for each of the scales varied between .70 and .92, with a median of .83. The alpha values for male and female participants on each factor were similar to one another. However, future research is needed to explore more completely the possibility of gender effects. These factor results are similar to those obtained for the self-report instrument. As many as 13 of the 15 factors on the self-report instrument have corresponding factors on the MR/DD (ratings) instrument. The main differences are these: The self-report instrument has a scale for Power (dominance) not found on the MR/DD instrument. The self-report instrument has a scale for Citizenship (desire for social justice) not found on the MR/DD instrument. The MR/DD instrument has separate scales for Anxiety, Frustration, and Pain Sensitivity, whereas the self-report instrument has a single (combined) scale. The interpreted factors and factor definitions for the MR/DD and self-report instruments are shown in Table 4. ---------------------------------------------- Table 4 Scale Definitions for Reiss Profile: Self-Report and MR-DD Informant Version ---------------------------------------------- Study 7 Because fundamental motives are purported to be stable individual differences, it is important to assess the stability of this construct over time. The purpose of this study was to establish the test-retest reliability of the two instruments. Method Participants. Sample A consisted of 31 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory psychology course. Their ages ranged from 19 to 44 years (M = 21.9), where 90% were between the ages of 19 and 21. The sample consisted of 28 women (90%); racial composition was 73% Caucasian, 10% African American, 13% Asian American, and 3% Other. Sample B consisted of 44 individuals (23 women) who were receiving services from a large not-for-profit mental retardation service agency with headquarters in New York. Participants' ages ranged from 22 to 79 years (M = 43.9 years); racial composition was 86% Caucasian and 14% African American. Seventy percent of the sample were reported to have a behavior disorder or psychiatric diagnosis. The instrument was completed by agency psychology staff and direct care workers. All raters reported that they had known the participants for at least 8 months (M = 28 months). In order to limit the extent to which the results might be influenced by any one rater, no person rated more than five individuals. None of the people had served previously as participants or raters in any of the other studies on fundamental motivation. Procedure. Sample A participants were invited to complete the Reiss Profile during class on two occasions with a time interval of 2 weeks. Data collection for Sample B was supervised by the agency director of psychology. Raters completed the Reiss Profile-MR/DD for the same individual twice, at initial assessment and again 3 months later. All data collected were completely anonymous in that no names or identifying participant codes were used. Results and Discussion For the self-report instrument, the test-retest Pearson product-moment r values for the 15 scales ranged from .80 to .96 (M = .83). For the MR/DD instrument, r values for the 15 scales ranged from .72 to .89 (M = .81). All of these correlations were significant at the p General Discussion The results of the various factor analyses of the Reiss Profiles were consistent across diverse samples and assessment methods. Similar 15-factor solutions were obtained for the two instruments and confirmed on independent samples varying significantly in age, IQ, and the presence of behavior disorders. Most items had high factor loadings. The finding that the factor solutions were consistent across methods (self-report vs. ratings by others) suggests that the results were not significantly biased by the method of assessment. For example, the results were not easily explained in terms of social desirability, which is primarily associated with self-report instruments and usually not considered with ratings instruments. Furthermore, the fact that the MR/DD instrument has some items in which motivational preferences are implied, rather than directly stated, was not a problem because the same factor structure was obtained with the self-report instrument. These results are consistent with what used to be called the instinct model of human motivation. This model was developed by James (1890/1950) and McDougall (1926) after Darwin (1872/1965) showed an instinctual basis to some human emotions. According to instinct theory, the human desire for social contact is an expression of the herd instinct, and the tendency for revenge is an expression of an aggression instinct. Both James (1890/1950) and McDougall (1926) emphasized that human instincts are not automatic behaviors but are modified considerably by cognition and experience. Their idea of an instinct was essentially what today would be called a genetic disposition. James (1890/1950) and McDougall (1926) used three criteria to infer an instinct. They inferred an instinct when a motive was (a) seen in all humans, (b) seen in some animals, and (c) thought to have survival value. Nearly all of the factors on the Reiss Profiles, with the possible exceptions of Citizenship and Independence, meet these criteria. That is, these factors refer to universal end motives that are seen in many animals and have been thought to have survival value. We suggest a cognitive-behavior-genetics model of end motivation. Because of genetic variations, individuals may differ in how much they enjoy each end goal. For example, variations in genetic variables may cause some people to experience sex as more pleasurable than do others. Beliefs about the personal consequences of sex, as well as other learning experiences, may add or subtract from the individual's total enjoyment. For example, the belief that sex is a sin and past punishment of sexual behavior should subtract from the person's overall enjoyment of sex. The net effect is the extent to which the individual enjoys sex relative to other people, which we call the person's "sensitivity" to sex. People who enjoy sex more than others should have high libido. Anxiety sensitivity is another case in point. All humans inherit genes that cause anxiety to be experienced as aversive and motivate flight from feared objects. Beliefs about the personal consequences of experiencing anxiety, however, vary from one person to the next, causing significant net differences in an individual's sensitivity to anxiety (McNally, 1994; Reiss, 1997; Taylor, 1995). Researchers have recently found that anxiety sensitivity (a cognitive modification of the instinct to flee) is an early risk factor for spontaneous panic attacks (Schmidt, Lerew, & Jackson, 1997). Similar assumptions can be made for each of the 15 fundamental motives identified by the results of these studies. Because power has survival value and leadership is seen in animals, there may be a genetic basis to how much a person enjoys power. Beliefs about the consequences of power, as well as conditioning experiences, may combine to modify the person's enjoyment of power. The net effect is the person's sensitivity to power, which is one motive that the Reiss Profiles purport to measure. One of the many potential applications of these scales for future research is to study the relative contribution of genetics and environment to end motivation. Using established research designs in behavior genetics, it should be possible to conduct research designed to estimate the extent to which fundamental goals and sensitivities have genetic components. Why should clinical psychologists care about any of this? They should care because the potential implications are significant for early diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of mental illness. Look at the emerging implications of the concept of anxiety sensitivity, for example. Clinical psychologists soon may predict spontaneous panic attacks years before they occur (Maller & Reiss, 1992; Schmidt et al., 1997) and soon may be able to predict panic attacks in adulthood on the basis of data obtained in childhood (see Silverman, Fleisig, Rabian, & Peterson, 1991). Early identification of mental illness is an important first step in the prevention of a disorder. In order to exemplify the type of information these instruments generate, a profile obtained using the MR/DD instrument is shown in Figure 1. This profile is shown for illustrative purposes only and should not be considered as evidence for the validity of the instrument, because we do not yet know how typical the profile is of the indicated diagnostic condition. This profile for a person with both MR/DD and major depression reveals little desire for most fundamental motivators, which is consistent with clinical descriptions of depressed people as being disinterested in enjoyable activities. Motivational profiles such as this one cannot be obtained from any prior instrument, partially because few prior instruments assess more than one motivational trait. ---------------------------------------------- Figure 1. Motivational profile of an individual diagnosed with mental retardation and major depression. ---------------------------------------------- Clinicians should be able to use these scales for purposes as diverse as selecting reinforcers in applied behavior analysis to planning intervention strategies in cognitive-behavioral therapy and counseling. According to sensitivity theory, the people who are called mentally ill often behave in unusual ways because they do not care about the same things as everybody else, at least not to the same degree. They may not care about anything (e.g., as with depression), they may care too much about something (e.g., as with compulsive behavior or phobias), or they may care about unusual things (e.g., as with schizophrenia). As Ellis (1987) has emphasized, mental illness often is associated with a disturbance in caring, and these scales are the first to assess caring comprehensively. People with low scores on the Social Prestige factor should present as indifferent to what others think about them; people with high scores for Power should be highly ambitious; people with high scores for Citizenship should be social idealists, perhaps easily depressed over the injustices in the world. Using cognitive-behavioral therapy and other techniques, psychologists may effectively treat disturbances in caring, leading to significant improvements in the person's adjustment. After these scales are validated, researchers will be able to obtain the first ever profiles of end motives of various diagnostic groups. By definition, motives precede behavior. If the fundamental end motives underlying aberrant behavior could be measured objectively, it may be possible to identify risk for aberrant behavior much earlier than has previously been possible. This investigation provided evidence of 15 psychometrically distinct end motives. This number is 12 to 14 more than is recognized in social psychological theories of intrinsic motivation. For example, Deci (1975) defined intrinsic motivation as engaging in behavior for its own sake; reviewed the literature on intrinsic motivation in terms of stimulus novelty motives, such as exploration, curiosity, and play; and proposed that all intrinsic motivation is self-determination. Deci's (1975) position implies that the concept of engaging in an activity for its own sake defines a single unitary phenomenon. However, the factor results of the present investigation provide evidence of 15 distinguishable fundamental (intrinsic) motives. Future researchers should study this discrepancy and determine the extent to which Deci's viewpoint can be substantiated by psychometric science. References American Psychiatric Association. (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed.). Washington, DC: Author. Asmundson, G. J. G., & Taylor, S. (1996). Role of anxiety sensitivity in pain-related fear and avoidance. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 19, 573-582. Bihm, E. M., Poindexter, A. R., Kienlen, T., & Smith, B. L. (1992). Staff perceptions of reinforcer responsiveness and aberrant behavior in people with mental retardation. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 22, 83-93. Darwin, C. (1965). The expression of the emotions in man and animals. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1872). Deci, E. L. (1975). Intrinsic motivation. New York: Plenum Press. Ellis, A. (1987). The impossibility of achieving consistently good mental health. American Psychologist, 42, 364-375. Ovid Full Text Bibliographic Links Jackson, D. N. (1984). Personality research form manual. Port Huron, MI: Research Psychologists Press. James, W. (1950). The principles of psychology (Vol. 2). New York: Dover. (Original work published 1890) Maller, R. G., & Reiss, S. (1992). Anxiety sensitivity in 1984 and panic attacks in 1987. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 6, 241-247. Full Text Bibliographic Links McDougall, W. (1926). An introduction to social psychology. Boston: John W. Luce. McNally, R. J. (1994). Panic disorder. New York: Guilford Press. Murray, H. A. (1938). Explorations in personality. New York: Oxford University Press. Murray, H. A. (1943). Manual of the Thematic Apperception Test. New York: Oxford University Press. Reiss, S. (1990). The development of a screening measure for psychopathology in people with mental retardation. In E. Dibble & D. B. Gray (Eds.), Assessment of behavior problems in persons with mental retardation living in the community (pp. 107-118; DHHS Publication No. ADM 90-1642). Rockville, MD: National Institute of Mental Health. Reiss, S. (1994). Handbook of challenging behavior: Mental health aspects of mental retardation. Worthington, OH: IDS Publishing. Reiss, S. (1997). Trait anxiety: It's not what you think it is. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 11, 201-214. Full Text Bibliographic Links Reiss, S. (in press). The sensitivity theory of aberrant motivation. In S. Taylor (Ed.), Anxiety sensitivity. New York: Erlbaum. Reiss, S., & Havercamp, S. H. (1996). The sensitivity theory of motivation: Implications for psychopathology. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 34, 621-632. Reiss, S., & Havercamp, S. H. (1997). Sensitivity theory and mental retardation: Why functional analysis is not enough. American Journal of Mental Retardation, 101, 553-566. Reiss, S., & McNally, R. J. (1985). The expectancy model of fear. In S. Reiss & R. R. Bootzin (Eds.), Theoretical issues in behavior therapy (pp. 107-121). New York: Academic Press. Reiss, S., Peterson, R. A., Gursky, D. M., & McNally, R. J. (1986). Anxiety sensitivity, anxiety frequency, and the prediction of fearfulness. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 26, 341-345. Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness is everything, or is it? Exploration on the meaning of psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 1069-1081. Schmidt, N. B., Lerew, D. R., & Jackson, R. L. (1997). The role of anxiety sensitivity in the pathogenesis of panic: Prospective evaluation of spontaneous panic attacks during acute stress. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 106, 355-364. Silverman, W. K., Fleisig, W., Rabian, R., & Peterson, R. A. (1991). Childhood Anxiety Sensitivity Index. Journal of Child Clinical Psychology, 20, 162-168. SPSS (1995). Statistical Package for the Social Sciences for Windows version 7. 0 users guide. Old Tappan, NJ: Prentice Hall. SPSS (1997). Systat 7.0: Statistics. Old Tappan, NJ: Prentice Hall. Taylor, S. (1995). Anxiety sensitivity: Theoretical perspectives and recent findings. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 33, 243-258. Tucker, L. R., Koopman, R. F., & Linn, R. L. (1969). Evaluation of factor analytic research procedures by means of simulated correlation matrices. Psychometrika, 34, 421-459. Bibliographic Links Zigler, E. (1997, May). Assessing personality traits of individuals with mental retardation: Introducing a new measure. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association on Mental Retardation, New York, NY. Zubin, J., Eron, L. D., & Schumer, F. (1965). An experimental approach to projective techniques. New York: Wiley. 1There are significant similarities and dissimilarities between the concepts of fundamental and intrinsic motivation. On the one hand, both concepts express the idea of engaging in an activity for its own sake. On the other hand, many researchers also use the term intrinsic motivation to express the idea of locus of control and to refer to the stimulus novelty motives. For example, intrinsic motivation has been used to refer to exploration, learning, play, and personal freedom (Deci, 1975). In contrast, the concept of fundamental motivation gives emphasis to the idea of an end purpose rather than a locus of control. It implies a comprehensive list of end purposes, such as family, vengeance, power, honor, food, sex, and so on. 2We express our gratitude to Ellen Langer and Rolf A. Peterson for their suggestions. 3All exploratory factor analyses reported herein were performed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS; 1995) for Windows version 7.0. Confirmatory factor analyses were performed using the RAMONA program available in Systat 7.0 for Windows (SPSS, 1997). 4Murray's (1938) influential list of human needs was essentially a psychodynamic reinterpretation of lists previously generated by instinct theorists. As Murray (1938) himself stated, "This classification of needs is not very different from lists constructed by McDougall, Garnett, and a number of other writers" (p. 84). The results of this investigation match more closely the details of prior lists than the one published by Murray (1938). We thank the following people and agencies for their assistance in collection of data: Ray Anderson (VOCA Corporation), Stephen Becker (Arc of Greater Hartford), Nicholas Bouras, Sharon Davis (Arc of the United States), Henry Deutsch (Keystone Residences), Arthur Dykstra (Trinity Services), Steven Fast (Day, Berry, & Howard), Madalyn Fotovich, W. I. Fraser, Nancy Guriati (Argo Community High School), Alan Havercamp (Davenport Kiwanis Club), Margo Izzo (Ohio State University), Porter Laird, Gregory Mathews, Terrence McNelis (National Association on Dual Diagnosis), Barry Mitnick (University of Pittsburgh), Estelle Musico (owner-operator with McDonald's Corporation), Paul E. Panek (Ohio State University Newark Campus), Martha Owens, Rolf A. Peterson (George Washington University), Susan Sherwood (Franklin County Board of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities), Van Silka (Project Start), Scott Spreat, Edward Sterling (Ohio State University), Henry Svec, Joseph Szyszko (ISDD Mental Health Program), Denise Valenti-Hein, Mandy Williams (Argo Community High School), and David Wehmeyer (Arc of the United States). From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 26 18:36:00 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 13:36:00 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Statesman: (Schopenhauer): The Art of Always Being Right Message-ID: The Art of Always Being Right http://www.newstatesman.com/Bookshop/300000092264 5.1.5 [I'm having to increase my forwardings to twenty a day, so as to clear the deck by Ash Wednesday (February 9, at which time I'll be taking my annual Lenten break.] Arthur Schopenhauer; with an introduction by A C Grayling Gibson Square Books, 190pp, ?9.99 Reviewed by George Walden Schopenhauer's sardonic little book, laying out 38 rhetorical tricks guaranteed to win you the argument even when you are defeated in logical discussion, is a true text for the times. An exercise in irony and realism, humour and melancholy, this is no antiquarian oddity, but an instruction manual in intellectual duplicity that no aspiring parliamentarian, trainee lawyer, wannabe TV interviewer or newspaper columnist can afford to be without. The melancholy aspect comes in the main premise of the book: that the point of public argument is not to be right, but to win. Truth cannot be the first casualty in our daily war of words, Schopenhauer suggests, because it was never the bone of contention in the first place. "We must regard objective truth as an accidental circumstance, and look only to the defence of our own position and the refutation of the opponent's . . . Dialectic, then, has as little to do with truth as the fencing master considers who is in the right when a quarrel leads to a duel." Such phrases make us wonder whether his book was no more than a bitter satire, an extension of Machiavellian principles of power play from princes to individuals by a disappointed academic whom it took 30 years to get an audience for his major work, The World as Will and Idea. Perhaps, but only partly. With his low view of human nature, Schopenhauer is also saying that we are all in the sophistry business together. The interest of his squib goes beyond his tricks of rhetoric: "persuade the audience, not the opponent", "put his theory into some odious category", "become personal, insulting, rude". Instinctively, we itch to apply it to our times, whether in politics, the infotainment business or our postmodern tendency to place inverted commas, smirkingly, around the very notion of truth. Examples of jaw-dropping sophistry by public figures (my own favourite is Tony Blair defending his quasi-selective choice of school for his son on the grounds that he did not wish to impose political correctness on his children: see Schopenhauer's rule number 26: "turn the tables") are easy enough to find. It is more entertaining to see his theory in the light of our national peculiarities. The flip side of our "healthy scepticism" can be a disinclination to trouble ourselves with rational discussion at all, and a tediously moderate people can be bored by its own sobriety. So it is that, in debate, we prefer to be stirred by passions, or simply amused. Hence the rampant nostalgia for the old political order, dominated by orators such as Michael Foot or Enoch Powell. Each did real damage to the country, Foot with his patrician self-abasement in the face of trade union power, Powell on race, and both with their culpable fantasies about Russia. "Well you say that," comes the predictable response - a handy rhetorical trick in itself - "but let's not get into their policies; we could go round that buoy for ever" (see trick number 12: "choose metaphors favourable to your proposition"). "The point is that they were such wonderfully passionate, col-ourful and entertaining debaters, compared to the managerial drabness of the House of Commons today." (Trick 29 recommends diversion from the point at issue.) The pay-off line follows quickly (draw your conclusions smartly, says trick 20). "If only we had Boris as Tory leader, it would perk the place up no end!" (This is not wholly invention. Tory and Labour columnists have both written in this vein.) Perhaps because Schopenhauer was so very un-British, his 38 points overlooked our favourite rhetorical trick: coming up with "quirky" or "original" responses to serious questions. (The nearest he gets is trick number 36: "bewilder your opponent".) In Britain, a willed eccentricity, the cheapest form of distinction, works because it is part of our top-down ethos. The game is to dodge the issue in such a way as to show yourself above it - for example, by throwing off dandyish opinions. Take any premise ("Boris Johnson is not a serious contender for prime minister"), invert it, toss it to the herd with a supercilious smile - and the herd will warm to you, because we do so love a maverick, don't we? For similar reasons, "controversialists" (that is, vulgar cynics who argue positions they do not necessarily believe, the better to astound the impressionable masses) are a very British phenomenon. The anti-intellectualism all this implies is not, however, a uniquely British trait, and is covered in Schopenhauer's list. "If you know that you have no reply to the arguments your opponent advances . . . declare yourself to be an incompetent judge: 'What you say passes my poor powers of comprehension.'" Your opponent stands instantly convicted of pretension, a crime without appeal in democracies, of which Schopenhauer was no admirer. Truth and logic, he comes close to saying, get you nowhere in a mass society. "The only safe rule, therefore, is [to dispute] only with those of your acquaintance of whom you know that they possess sufficient intelligence and self-respect not to advance absurdities." In a frequently light-hearted book, this is the least amusing message. The suggestion is that the audiences for serious discussion are doomed to shrink - and remember that Schopenhauer never experienced the sophistry of TV images, whose deliberate or, more frequently, casual mendacity a mere 38 points would not suffice to explain. Yet has his lugubrious prediction proved true? Or do we rather get a feeling, not of an absolute decline in standards of public debate, but of missed potential - something even the BBC has apparently begun to recognise? How many times have we listened to a radio or TV debate on art or politics or literature and asked ourselves, even as we are lulled by the undemanding discussion: are these the best people they can come up with? The answer is yes and no. Yes because in media terms they are the best: practised "communicators" with every crowd-pleasing response at the ready. And no because we have all read or heard or known people far more interesting and far more informed about the disciplines in question. Sadly, they tend to be folk who are not up to speed on their 38 points and who think the truth matters, and so, communication-wise, they are deemed useless. Still, they exist. If your preference is nevertheless for Schopenhauer's tragic vision of a world in thrall to debate that is indifferent to the truth, examples are not lacking, not just in art or politics, but in the allegedly objective and internationalist scientific world. A brief period as minister for science taught me that when it comes to rubbishing a rival's research or inveigling funds for your own, objectivity is out, and foreigners become a joke. Now I hear neo-Darwinian atheists lambasting as primitive and irrational every religion except the most populous and, in its extreme form, the most dangerous. Why are scientists so intellectually dishonest? For the same reason that the Archbishop of Canterbury hides behind procedural sophistry (needless commissions of inquiry and the like, when the need for liberalism is clear) in dealing with homosexuality in the Church: politics, dear boy. Which does rather diminish the right of scientists and churchmen to look down on politics as a scurvy trade. The palm for rhetorical shamelessness must nevertheless go to US presidents. "There you go again," said Ronald Reagan, annihilating with a grin the very concept of rational debate, and the right loved him for it. "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," Bill Clinton assured us, with his emetic sincerity, and the left - especially women - adore him still. And not even the melancholic German predicted that the world's most powerful democracy would one day be run by a president who cannot be accused of sophistry chiefly because he cannot talk at all. And they say Schopenhauer was a pessimist. George Walden is the author of The New Elites: making a career in the masses (Penguin). From paul.werbos at verizon.net Thu Jan 27 02:07:31 2005 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Paul J. Werbos, Dr.) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 21:07:31 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] channeling In-Reply-To: <01C5031F.7141E2E0.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C5031F.7141E2E0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <6.2.0.14.0.20050126210211.01e31780@incoming.verizon.net> At 11:50 PM 1/25/2005, Steve Hovland wrote: >One of my current goals is to do more >by channeling increasing amounts of >transpersonal energy without being >inflated or damaged by it :-) Interesting comment. I can certainly relate to it, perhaps more than you would expect. But on the other hand... aside from going with the flow... I feel a stronger calling this month to get into issues so technical that even technical people tend to underestimate their significance... like "what REALLY is a finite or superrenormalizable model? How exactly prove that the Hasenfratz or 'tHooft or Sachdev/Skyrme model bosonic field theories are indeed such?" Yet basic understanding is often exactly what we need before new technology can emerge... and sometimes new technology is a life or death matter... so back to the desert, so to speak... to the extent that the usual flow of daily life permits... Best, Paul > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. >http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From paul.werbos at verizon.net Thu Jan 27 02:12:38 2005 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Paul J. Werbos, Dr.) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 21:12:38 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: The end of the world: A brief history In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6.2.0.14.0.20050126210925.01d65a10@incoming.verizon.net> At 01:25 PM 1/26/2005, Premise Checker wrote: >The end of the world: A brief history >http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3490697 >Dec 16th 2004 > > Why do end-of-time beliefs endure? > > A VERICHIP is a tiny, implantable microchip with a unique > identification number that connects a patient to his medical records. > When America's Food and Drug Administration recently approved it for > medical use in humans, the news provoked familiar worries in the press > about privacy-threatening technologies. But on the notice boards of > [3]raptureready.com, the talk was about a drawback that the FDA and > the media seemed to have overlooked. Was the VeriChip the "mark of the > beast"? Actually, the Terminator movies have bad-outcome scenarios worth thinking about. T3 was a truly atrocious movie in many ways, but the scenario is not worthless to think about. COULD an intelligent system, improperly managed, actually break all of our usual RF wireless systems and, for exact, hack into Onstar systems and thereby freeze traffic? I suppose that RF connections to the human body could actually figure in such a scenario... But that's not the top of my list of scenarios to worry about. We have lots of other more immediate and obvious ones. Best of luck... Paul > Raptureready.com runs an online service for the millions of born-again > Christians in America who believe that an event called the Rapture is > coming soon. During the Rapture, Christ will return and whisk > believers away to join the righteous dead in heaven. From there, they > will have the best seats in the house as the unsaved perish in a > series of spectacular fires, wars, plagues and earthquakes. > (Raptureready.com advises the soon-to-depart to stick a note on the > fridge to brief those left behind--husbands, wives and in-laws--about > the horrors in store for them.) > > Furnished with apocalyptic tracts from the Bible, believers scour news > dispatches for clues that the Rapture is approaching. Some think > implantable chips are a sign. The Book of Revelation features a "mark" > that the Antichrist makes everybody wear "in their right hand, or in > their foreheads". Rapturists have more than a hobbyist's idle interest > in identifying this mark. Anyone who accepts it spends eternity > roasting in the sulphurs of hell. (And, incidentally, the European > Union may be "the matrix out of which the Antichrist's kingdom could > grow.") > > Christians have kept faith with the idea that the world is just about > to end since the beginnings of their religion. Jesus Himself hinted > more than once that His second coming would happen during the lifetime > of His followers. In its original form, the Lord's Prayer, taught by > Jesus to his disciples, may have implored God to "keep us from the > ordeal". > > Men have been making the same appeal ever since. In 156AD, a fellow > called Montanus, pronouncing himself to be the incarnation of the Holy > Spirit, declared that the New Jerusalem was about to come crashing > down from the heavens and land in Phrygia--which, conveniently, was > where he lived. Before long, Asia Minor, Rome, Africa and Gaul were > jammed with wandering ecstatics, bitterly repenting their sins and > fasting and whipping themselves in hungry anticipation of the world's > end. A bit more than a thousand years later, the authorities in > Germany were stamping out an outbreak of apocalyptic mayhem among a > self-abusing sect called the secret flagellants of Thuringia. The > disciples of William Miller, a 19th-century evangelical American, > clung ecstatically to the same belief as the Montanists and the > Thuringians. A thick strand of Christian history connects them all, > and countless other movements. > > Don't get left behind > > Apocalyptic belief renews itself in ingenious ways. Belief in the > Rapture, which enlivens the familiar end-of-time narrative with a > compellingly dramatic twist, appears to be a modern phenomenon: John > Nelson Darby, a 19th-century British evangelical preacher, was perhaps > the first to popularise the idea. (Darby's inspiration was a passage > in St Paul's letter to the Thessalonians, which talks about the > Christian dead and true believers being "caught up together" in the > clouds.) It is not easy to say how many Americans believe in Darby's > concept of Rapture. But a dozen novels that dramatise the event and > its gripping aftermath--the "Left Behind" series--have sold more than > 40m copies. > > New apocalyptic creeds have even sprung from those sticky moments when > the world has failed to end on schedule. (Social scientists call this > "disconfirmation".) When the resurrected Christ failed to show up for > Miller's disciples on the night of October 22nd 1844, press scribblers > mocked the "Great Disappointment" mercilessly. But even as they > jeered, a farmer called Hiram Edson snuck away from the vigil to pray > in a barn, where he duly received word of what had happened. There had > been a great event after all--but in heaven, not on Earth. This > happening was that Jesus had begun an "investigative judgment of the > dead" in preparation for his return. Thus was born the Church of > Seventh-day Adventists. They were not the only ones to rise above > apparent setbacks to the prophesies by which they set such store: the > Jehovah's Witnesses of the persistently apocalyptic Watchtower sect > survived no fewer than nine disconfirmations every few years between > 1874 and 1975. > > Which way to Armageddon? > > Why do end-of-time beliefs endure? Social scientists love to set about > this question with earnest study of the people who subscribe to such > ideas. As part of his investigation into the "apocalyptic genre" in > modern America, Paul Boyer of the University of Wisconsin asks why so > many of his fellow Americans are "susceptible" to televangelists and > other "popularisers". From time to time, sophisticated Americans > indulge the thrillingly terrifying thought that nutty, apocalyptic, > born-again Texans are guiding not just conservative social policies at > home, but America's agenda in the Middle East as well, as they round > up reluctant compatriots for the last battle at Armageddon. (It's a > bit south of the Lake of Galilee in the plain of Jezreel.) > > Behind these attitudes sits the assumption that apocalyptic thought > belongs--or had better belong--to the extremities of human experience. > On closer inspection, though, that is by no means true. > > Properly, the apocalypse is both an end and a new beginning. In > Christian tradition, the world is created perfect. There is then a > fall, followed by a long, rather enjoyable (for some) period of moral > degeneration. This culminates in a decisive final battle between good > (the returned Christ) and evil (the Antichrist). Good wins and > establishes the New Jerusalem and with it the 1,000-year reign of King > Jesus on Earth. > > This is the glorious millennium that millenarians await so eagerly. > Millenarians tend to place history at a moment just before the > decisive final showdown. The apocalyptic mind looks through the > surface reality of the world and sees history's epic, true nature: > "apocalypse" comes from the Greek word meaning to uncover, or > disclose. > > Norman Cohn, a British historian, places the origin of apocalyptic > thought with Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), a Persian prophet who > probably lived between 1500 and 1200BC. The Vedic Indians, ancient > Egyptians and some earlier civilisations had seen history as a cycle, > which was for ever returning to its beginning. Zoroaster embellished > this tepid plot. He added goodies (Ahura Mazda, the maker and guardian > of the ordered world), baddies (the spirit of destruction, Angra > Mainyu) and a happy ending (a glorious consummation of order over > disorder, known as the "making wonderful", in which "all things would > be made perfect, once and for all"). In due course Zoroaster's > theatrical talents came to Christians via the Jews. > > This basic drama shapes all apocalyptic thought, from the tenets of > tribal cargo cults to the beliefs of UFO sects. In 1973, Claude > Vorilhon, a correspondent for a French racing-car magazine, claimed to > have been whisked away in a flying saucer, in which he had spent six > days with a green chap who spoke fluent French. The alien told Mr > Vorilhon that the Frenchman's real name was Rael, that humans had > misread the Bible and that, properly translated, the Hebrew word > Elohim (singular: Eloha) did not mean God, as Jews had long supposed, > but "those who came from the sky". > > The alien then revealed that his species had created everything on > Earth in a space laboratory, and that the aliens wanted to return to > give humans their advanced technology, which would transform the world > utterly. First, however, Rael needed financial contributions to build > the aliens an embassy in Jerusalem, because otherwise they would not > feel welcome (a bit lame, this explanation). Although the Israeli > government has not yet given its consent, the Raelians--those > persuaded by Rael's account--continue to welcome donations in > anticipation of a change of heart. > > The Raelians' claim to be atheists who belong to the secular world > must come as no surprise to Mr Cohn, who has long detected patterns of > religious apocalyptic thought in what is supposedly rational, secular > belief. He has traced "egalitarian and communistic fantasies" to the > ancient-world idea of an ideal state of nature, in which all men are > genuinely equal and none is persecuted. As Mr Cohn has put it, "The > old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one, and this tends > to obscure what otherwise would be obvious. For it is the simple truth > that, stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary > millenarianism and mystical anarchism are with us still." > > Nicholas Campion, a British historian and astrologer, has expanded on > Mr Cohn's ideas. In his book, "The Great Year", Mr Campion draws > parallels between the "scientific" historical materialism of Marx and > the religious apocalyptic experience. Thus primitive communism is the > Garden of Eden, the emergence of private property and the class system > is the fall, the final gasps of capitalism are the last days, the > proletariat are the chosen people and the socialist revolution is the > second coming and the New Jerusalem. > > Hegel saw history as an evolution of ideas that would culminate in the > ideal liberal-democratic state. Since liberal democracy satisfies the > basic need for recognition that animates political struggle, thought > Hegel, its advent heralds a sort of end of history--another > suspiciously apocalyptic claim. More recently, Francis Fukuyama has > echoed Hegel's theme. Mr Fukuyama began his book, "The End of > History", with a claim that the world had arrived at "the gates of the > Promised Land of liberal democracy". Mr Fukuyama's pulpit oratory > suited the spirit of the 1990s, with its transformative "new economy" > and free-world triumphs. In the disorientating disconfirmation of > September 11th and the coincident stockmarket collapse, however, his > religion has lost favour. > > The apocalyptic narrative may have helped to start the motor of > capitalism. A drama in which the end returns interminably to the > beginning leaves little room for the sense of progress which, > according to the 19th-century social theories of Max Weber, provides > the religious licence for material self-improvement. Without the last > days, in other words, the world might never have had 65-inch > flat-screen televisions. For that matter, the whole American project > has more than a touch of the apocalypse about it. The Pilgrim Fathers > thought they had reached the New Israel. The "manifest destiny" of > America to spread its providential liberty and self-government > throughout the North American continent (not to mention the Middle > East) smacks of the millennium and the New Jerusalem. > > Science treasures its own apocalypses. The modern environmental > movement appears to have borrowed only half of the apocalyptic > narrative. There is a Garden of Eden (unspoilt nature), a fall > (economic development), the usual moral degeneracy (it's all man's > fault) and the pressing sense that the world is enjoying its final > days (time is running out: please donate now!). So far, however, the > green lobby does not appear to have realised it is missing the > standard happy ending. Perhaps, until it does, environmentalism is > destined to remain in the political margins. Everyone needs > redemption. > > Watch this spacesuit > > Noting an exponential acceleration in the pace of technological > change, futurologists like Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil think the > world inhabits the "knee of the curve"--a sort of last-days set of > circumstances in which, in the near future, the pace of technological > change runs quickly away towards an infinite "singularity" as > intelligent machines learn to build themselves. From this point, > thinks Mr Moravec, transformative "mind fire" will spread in a flash > across the cosmos. Britain's astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees, > relegates Mr Kurzweil and those like him to the "visionary fringe". > But Mr Rees's own darkly apocalyptic book, "Our Final Hour", outdoes > the most colourful of America's televangelists in earthquakes, plagues > and other sorts of fire and brimstone. > > So there you have it. The apocalypse is the locomotive of capitalism, > the inspiration for revolutionary socialism, the bedrock of America's > manifest destiny and the undeclared religion of all those > pseudo-rationalists who, like The Economist, champion the progress of > liberal democracy. Perhaps, deep down, there is something inside > everyone which yearns for the New Jerusalem, a place where, as a > beautiful bit of Revelation puts it: > > God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be > no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be > any more pain; for the former things are passed away. > > Yes, perhaps. But, to be sure, not everyone agrees that salvation, > when it comes, will appear clothed in a shiny silver spacesuit. >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Jan 27 03:02:30 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 19:02:30 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: The end of the world: A brief history Message-ID: <01C503D9.96CC86E0.shovland@mindspring.com> Any extension of on-line systems can be hacked. All of the election-night reporting we saw indicated the presence of a very dense network of computers, which made it very easy to hack to vote due to the large number of entry points. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Paul J. Werbos, Dr. [SMTP:paul.werbos at verizon.net] Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2005 6:13 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list; paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Economist: The end of the world: A brief history At 01:25 PM 1/26/2005, Premise Checker wrote: >The end of the world: A brief history >http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3490697 >Dec 16th 2004 > > Why do end-of-time beliefs endure? > > A VERICHIP is a tiny, implantable microchip with a unique > identification number that connects a patient to his medical records. > When America's Food and Drug Administration recently approved it for > medical use in humans, the news provoked familiar worries in the press > about privacy-threatening technologies. But on the notice boards of > [3]raptureready.com, the talk was about a drawback that the FDA and > the media seemed to have overlooked. Was the VeriChip the "mark of the > beast"? Actually, the Terminator movies have bad-outcome scenarios worth thinking about. T3 was a truly atrocious movie in many ways, but the scenario is not worthless to think about. COULD an intelligent system, improperly managed, actually break all of our usual RF wireless systems and, for exact, hack into Onstar systems and thereby freeze traffic? I suppose that RF connections to the human body could actually figure in such a scenario... But that's not the top of my list of scenarios to worry about. We have lots of other more immediate and obvious ones. Best of luck... Paul > Raptureready.com runs an online service for the millions of born-again > Christians in America who believe that an event called the Rapture is > coming soon. During the Rapture, Christ will return and whisk > believers away to join the righteous dead in heaven. From there, they > will have the best seats in the house as the unsaved perish in a > series of spectacular fires, wars, plagues and earthquakes. > (Raptureready.com advises the soon-to-depart to stick a note on the > fridge to brief those left behind--husbands, wives and in-laws--about > the horrors in store for them.) > > Furnished with apocalyptic tracts from the Bible, believers scour news > dispatches for clues that the Rapture is approaching. Some think > implantable chips are a sign. The Book of Revelation features a "mark" > that the Antichrist makes everybody wear "in their right hand, or in > their foreheads". Rapturists have more than a hobbyist's idle interest > in identifying this mark. Anyone who accepts it spends eternity > roasting in the sulphurs of hell. (And, incidentally, the European > Union may be "the matrix out of which the Antichrist's kingdom could > grow.") > > Christians have kept faith with the idea that the world is just about > to end since the beginnings of their religion. Jesus Himself hinted > more than once that His second coming would happen during the lifetime > of His followers. In its original form, the Lord's Prayer, taught by > Jesus to his disciples, may have implored God to "keep us from the > ordeal". > > Men have been making the same appeal ever since. In 156AD, a fellow > called Montanus, pronouncing himself to be the incarnation of the Holy > Spirit, declared that the New Jerusalem was about to come crashing > down from the heavens and land in Phrygia--which, conveniently, was > where he lived. Before long, Asia Minor, Rome, Africa and Gaul were > jammed with wandering ecstatics, bitterly repenting their sins and > fasting and whipping themselves in hungry anticipation of the world's > end. A bit more than a thousand years later, the authorities in > Germany were stamping out an outbreak of apocalyptic mayhem among a > self-abusing sect called the secret flagellants of Thuringia. The > disciples of William Miller, a 19th-century evangelical American, > clung ecstatically to the same belief as the Montanists and the > Thuringians. A thick strand of Christian history connects them all, > and countless other movements. > > Don't get left behind > > Apocalyptic belief renews itself in ingenious ways. Belief in the > Rapture, which enlivens the familiar end-of-time narrative with a > compellingly dramatic twist, appears to be a modern phenomenon: John > Nelson Darby, a 19th-century British evangelical preacher, was perhaps > the first to popularise the idea. (Darby's inspiration was a passage > in St Paul's letter to the Thessalonians, which talks about the > Christian dead and true believers being "caught up together" in the > clouds.) It is not easy to say how many Americans believe in Darby's > concept of Rapture. But a dozen novels that dramatise the event and > its gripping aftermath--the "Left Behind" series--have sold more than > 40m copies. > > New apocalyptic creeds have even sprung from those sticky moments when > the world has failed to end on schedule. (Social scientists call this > "disconfirmation".) When the resurrected Christ failed to show up for > Miller's disciples on the night of October 22nd 1844, press scribblers > mocked the "Great Disappointment" mercilessly. But even as they > jeered, a farmer called Hiram Edson snuck away from the vigil to pray > in a barn, where he duly received word of what had happened. There had > been a great event after all--but in heaven, not on Earth. This > happening was that Jesus had begun an "investigative judgment of the > dead" in preparation for his return. Thus was born the Church of > Seventh-day Adventists. They were not the only ones to rise above > apparent setbacks to the prophesies by which they set such store: the > Jehovah's Witnesses of the persistently apocalyptic Watchtower sect > survived no fewer than nine disconfirmations every few years between > 1874 and 1975. > > Which way to Armageddon? > > Why do end-of-time beliefs endure? Social scientists love to set about > this question with earnest study of the people who subscribe to such > ideas. As part of his investigation into the "apocalyptic genre" in > modern America, Paul Boyer of the University of Wisconsin asks why so > many of his fellow Americans are "susceptible" to televangelists and > other "popularisers". From time to time, sophisticated Americans > indulge the thrillingly terrifying thought that nutty, apocalyptic, > born-again Texans are guiding not just conservative social policies at > home, but America's agenda in the Middle East as well, as they round > up reluctant compatriots for the last battle at Armageddon. (It's a > bit south of the Lake of Galilee in the plain of Jezreel.) > > Behind these attitudes sits the assumption that apocalyptic thought > belongs--or had better belong--to the extremities of human experience. > On closer inspection, though, that is by no means true. > > Properly, the apocalypse is both an end and a new beginning. In > Christian tradition, the world is created perfect. There is then a > fall, followed by a long, rather enjoyable (for some) period of moral > degeneration. This culminates in a decisive final battle between good > (the returned Christ) and evil (the Antichrist). Good wins and > establishes the New Jerusalem and with it the 1,000-year reign of King > Jesus on Earth. > > This is the glorious millennium that millenarians await so eagerly. > Millenarians tend to place history at a moment just before the > decisive final showdown. The apocalyptic mind looks through the > surface reality of the world and sees history's epic, true nature: > "apocalypse" comes from the Greek word meaning to uncover, or > disclose. > > Norman Cohn, a British historian, places the origin of apocalyptic > thought with Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), a Persian prophet who > probably lived between 1500 and 1200BC. The Vedic Indians, ancient > Egyptians and some earlier civilisations had seen history as a cycle, > which was for ever returning to its beginning. Zoroaster embellished > this tepid plot. He added goodies (Ahura Mazda, the maker and guardian > of the ordered world), baddies (the spirit of destruction, Angra > Mainyu) and a happy ending (a glorious consummation of order over > disorder, known as the "making wonderful", in which "all things would > be made perfect, once and for all"). In due course Zoroaster's > theatrical talents came to Christians via the Jews. > > This basic drama shapes all apocalyptic thought, from the tenets of > tribal cargo cults to the beliefs of UFO sects. In 1973, Claude > Vorilhon, a correspondent for a French racing-car magazine, claimed to > have been whisked away in a flying saucer, in which he had spent six > days with a green chap who spoke fluent French. The alien told Mr > Vorilhon that the Frenchman's real name was Rael, that humans had > misread the Bible and that, properly translated, the Hebrew word > Elohim (singular: Eloha) did not mean God, as Jews had long supposed, > but "those who came from the sky". > > The alien then revealed that his species had created everything on > Earth in a space laboratory, and that the aliens wanted to return to > give humans their advanced technology, which would transform the world > utterly. First, however, Rael needed financial contributions to build > the aliens an embassy in Jerusalem, because otherwise they would not > feel welcome (a bit lame, this explanation). Although the Israeli > government has not yet given its consent, the Raelians--those > persuaded by Rael's account--continue to welcome donations in > anticipation of a change of heart. > > The Raelians' claim to be atheists who belong to the secular world > must come as no surprise to Mr Cohn, who has long detected patterns of > religious apocalyptic thought in what is supposedly rational, secular > belief. He has traced "egalitarian and communistic fantasies" to the > ancient-world idea of an ideal state of nature, in which all men are > genuinely equal and none is persecuted. As Mr Cohn has put it, "The > old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one, and this tends > to obscure what otherwise would be obvious. For it is the simple truth > that, stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary > millenarianism and mystical anarchism are with us still." > > Nicholas Campion, a British historian and astrologer, has expanded on > Mr Cohn's ideas. In his book, "The Great Year", Mr Campion draws > parallels between the "scientific" historical materialism of Marx and > the religious apocalyptic experience. Thus primitive communism is the > Garden of Eden, the emergence of private property and the class system > is the fall, the final gasps of capitalism are the last days, the > proletariat are the chosen people and the socialist revolution is the > second coming and the New Jerusalem. > > Hegel saw history as an evolution of ideas that would culminate in the > ideal liberal-democratic state. Since liberal democracy satisfies the > basic need for recognition that animates political struggle, thought > Hegel, its advent heralds a sort of end of history--another > suspiciously apocalyptic claim. More recently, Francis Fukuyama has > echoed Hegel's theme. Mr Fukuyama began his book, "The End of > History", with a claim that the world had arrived at "the gates of the > Promised Land of liberal democracy". Mr Fukuyama's pulpit oratory > suited the spirit of the 1990s, with its transformative "new economy" > and free-world triumphs. In the disorientating disconfirmation of > September 11th and the coincident stockmarket collapse, however, his > religion has lost favour. > > The apocalyptic narrative may have helped to start the motor of > capitalism. A drama in which the end returns interminably to the > beginning leaves little room for the sense of progress which, > according to the 19th-century social theories of Max Weber, provides > the religious licence for material self-improvement. Without the last > days, in other words, the world might never have had 65-inch > flat-screen televisions. For that matter, the whole American project > has more than a touch of the apocalypse about it. The Pilgrim Fathers > thought they had reached the New Israel. The "manifest destiny" of > America to spread its providential liberty and self-government > throughout the North American continent (not to mention the Middle > East) smacks of the millennium and the New Jerusalem. > > Science treasures its own apocalypses. The modern environmental > movement appears to have borrowed only half of the apocalyptic > narrative. There is a Garden of Eden (unspoilt nature), a fall > (economic development), the usual moral degeneracy (it's all man's > fault) and the pressing sense that the world is enjoying its final > days (time is running out: please donate now!). So far, however, the > green lobby does not appear to have realised it is missing the > standard happy ending. Perhaps, until it does, environmentalism is > destined to remain in the political margins. Everyone needs > redemption. > > Watch this spacesuit > > Noting an exponential acceleration in the pace of technological > change, futurologists like Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil think the > world inhabits the "knee of the curve"--a sort of last-days set of > circumstances in which, in the near future, the pace of technological > change runs quickly away towards an infinite "singularity" as > intelligent machines learn to build themselves. From this point, > thinks Mr Moravec, transformative "mind fire" will spread in a flash > across the cosmos. Britain's astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees, > relegates Mr Kurzweil and those like him to the "visionary fringe". > But Mr Rees's own darkly apocalyptic book, "Our Final Hour", outdoes > the most colourful of America's televangelists in earthquakes, plagues > and other sorts of fire and brimstone. > > So there you have it. The apocalypse is the locomotive of capitalism, > the inspiration for revolutionary socialism, the bedrock of America's > manifest destiny and the undeclared religion of all those > pseudo-rationalists who, like The Economist, champion the progress of > liberal democracy. Perhaps, deep down, there is something inside > everyone which yearns for the New Jerusalem, a place where, as a > beautiful bit of Revelation puts it: > > God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be > no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be > any more pain; for the former things are passed away. > > Yes, perhaps. But, to be sure, not everyone agrees that salvation, > when it comes, will appear clothed in a shiny silver spacesuit. >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 27 14:48:15 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 09:48:15 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] For Howard: 1) science of harmonics 2) mind over matter do-U'r self experiments instructions Message-ID: This is from another list. I think some of the things here will be of great interest to Howard, though I can't vouch for their truth. Frank ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 03:52:43 -0800 From: moondust at uniserve.com Reply-To: World Transhumanist Association Discussion List To: wta-talk at transhumanism.org Subject: [wta-talk] 1) science of harmonics 2) mind over matter do-U'r self experiments instructions Science has many faces, here is an example of the type of universal curiosity some great minds have displayed in simple concepts I really enjoy at a visionary gut feeling, not having formal education in science but a lot of hands on musical experiments relating to feed back and harmonics/fractals and personal ingrained pitch ( we all play naturally at very specific and individual speeds, vibrational levels that is, although some of us are litterally on the same wave leangh and will naturally share the exact pitch, rare though a fact ) if allowed to be ourselves of course. Just try with a digital delay set for a particular person's natural tempo, leave the setting on and invite the person weeks later to start playing a rythm, then after a couple of bars, start the digital delay, 9 times out of ten the delay will be syncronised to the playing of that person without any perceptible adjustment needed ; have also dabbled in the mayan calendar based on harmonics and fractals and harmonic counting mathematical systems ( neither binary, quadranary nor decimal...but fractals...so further down are some very interesting instructions to conduct mind over matter experiments I am planning to try, expect a different jargon and presentation but a lot of numbers and instructions, like in music some teachers distill knowledge to its basics and most common denominators, I would love feed back on this, I feel there is a lot more than meets the eye in here, could harmonics hide the deepest secrets of life/universe/multiverse? " cristallised photons and so forth "... 2. John Keely ~ Late in the 19th century, John E.W. Keely published 40 Laws of Harmony, which served as the foundation for the Sympathetic Vibratory Physics he discovered and developed. The following representation was cribbed from Dale Pond's website, www.spvril.com : (1) Law of Matter and Force ~"Coextensive and coeternal with space and duration, there exists an infinite and unchangeable quantity of atomoles, the base of all matter; these are in a state of constant vibratory motion, infinite in extent, unchangeable in quantity, the initial of all forms of energy." (2) Law of Corporeal Vibrations ~"All coherent aggregates when isolated from like bodies, or when immersed or confined in media composed of matter in a different state, vibrate at a given ascertainable pitch." (3) Law of Corporeal Oscillations ~ "All coherent aggregates not isolated from like bodies, oscillate at a period-frequency varying with the tensions that augment and diminish the state of equilibrium." (4) Law of Harmonic Vibrations ~ "All coherent aggregates are perpetually vibrating at a period-frequency corresponding to some harmonic ratio of the fundamental pitch of the vibrating body; this pitch is a multiple of the pitch of the atomole." (5) Law of Transmissive Vibraic Energy ~ "All oscillating and vibrating coherent aggregates create, in the media in which they are immersed, outwardly propagated concentric waves of alternate condensation and rarefaction, having a period-frequency identical with the pitch of the aggregate. Scholium: All forms of transmissive energy can be focussed, reflected, refracted, diffracted, transformed, and diminished in intensity inversely as the square of the distance from the originating source." (6) Law of Sympathetic Oscillation ~ "Coherent aggregates immersed in a medium pulsating at their natural pitch simultaneously oscillate with the same frequency, whether the pitch of the medium be a unison, or any harmonic of the fundamental pitch of the creative aggregate." (7) Law of Attraction ~"Juxtaposed coherent aggregates vibrating in unison, or harmonic ration, are mutually attracted." (8) Law of Repulsion ~"Juxtaposed coherent aggregates vibrating in discord are mutually repelled." (9) Law of Cycles ~"Coherent aggregates harmonically united constitute centers of vibration bearing relation to the fundamental pitch not multiples of the harmonic pitch, and the production of secondary unions between themselves generate pitches that are discords, either in their unisons, or overtones with the original pitch; from harmony is generated discord, the inevitable cause of perpetual transformation." (10) Law of Harmonic Pitch ~"Any aggregate in a state of vibration develops in addition to its fundamental pitch a series of vibration in symmetrical sub-multiple portions of itself, bearing ratios of one, two, three, or more times its fundamental pitch." (11) Law of Force ~ "Energy manifests itself in three forms: Creative, the vibrating aggregate; Transmissive, being the propagation of isochronous waves through the media in which it is immersed; Attractive, being its action upon other aggregates capable of vibrating in unisons or harmony." (12) Law of Oscillating Atomic Substances ~ "Coherent atomic substances are capable of oscillating at a pitch varying directly as the density, and inversely as the linear dimensions from one period of frequency per unit of time to the 21st octave above, producing the creative force of Sonity, whose transmissive force (Sound) is propagated through the media of solids, liquids, and gases, and whose static effect (Sonism) produces attractions and repulsions between sympathetically vibrating bodies according to the Law of Harmonic Attraction and Repulsion." (13) Law of Sono-Thermity ~ "Internal vibrations of atomic substances and atomic molecules are capable of vibrating at a period-frequency directly as their density, inversely as their linear dimensions, directly as the coefficient of their tension from the 21st to the 42nd octaves, producing the creative force (Sono-thermity), whose transmissive force (Sono-therm) is propagated in solid, liquid, gaseous, and ultra-gaseous media, statically producing adhesions and molecular unions, or disintegration, according to the Law of Harmonic Attraction and Repulsion." (14) Law of Oscillating Atoms ~ "All atoms when in a state of tension are capable of oscillating at a pitch inversely as the cube of their atomic weights, and directly as their tension from 42 to 63 octaves per second, producing the creative forcce (Thermism), whose transmissive force (Rad-energy) propagated in solid, liquid, and gaseous ether, produces the static effects (Cohesion and Chemism) on other atoms of association, or dissociation, according to the Law of Harmonic Attraction and Repulsion. Scholium: Dark radiant heat begins at absolute zero temperature, and extends through light, chemical rays, actinic rays, and infra-violet rays, up to the dissociation of all molecules to the 63rd octave." (15) Law of Vibrating Atomolic Substances ~ "Atoms are capable of vibrating within themselves at a pitch inversely as the Dyne (the local coefficient of Gravity), and as the atomic volume, directly as the atomic weight, producing the creative force (Electricity), whose transmissive force is propagated through atomolic solids, liquids, and gases, producing induction and the static effect of magnetism upon other atoms of attraction or repulsion, according to the Law of Harmonic Attraction and Repulsion. Scholium: The phenomenon of Dynamic Electricity through a metallic conductor and of induction are identical. In a metallic conductor, the transmission is from atom to atom, through homologous interstices, filled with ether, presenting small areas in close proximity. In crystalline structures, heat, which expands the atoms, by twisting them produces striae, increases the resistance, etc. Between parallel wires and through air the induction takes place from large areas through a rarefied medium composed of a mixture of substances, whose atoms are separated by waves of repulsion of various pitches, discordant to electric vibrations; the said atoms sympathetically absorb the vibrations and dissipate from themselves, as centers, concentric waves of electric energy which produces heat and gravism." (16) Law of Oscillating Atomoles ~ "Atomoles oscillating at a uniform pitch (determined by their uniform size and weight) produce the creative force Atomolity, whose transmissive form, Gravism, is propagated through more rarefied media, producing the static effect upon all other atomoles, denominated Gravity." (17) Law of Transformation of Forces ~ "All forces are different forms of Universal Energy unlike in their period- frequency, merging into each other by imperceptible increments; each form representing the compass of 21 octaves. Each form or pitch may be transformed into an equivalent quantity of another pitch above or below it in the scale of 105 octaves. The transformation can occur only through its static effect, developing vibrations of harmonic pitches above or below their fundamental vibration, or developing with juxtaposed aggregates, resultant and difference, or third order, as the case may be. Scholium: A table of the intervals and harmonics of the normal harmonic scale will indicate the ratios in which the transformation of forces will occur." (18) Law of Atomic Pitch ~"Atoms have each a different and definite pitch, at which they naturally vibrate. Scholium: Atomic pitch is determined directly from its simple spectrum. Scholium: Atomic pitch is determined by computations from its associate spectrum with all other atoms, as in known spectra. Scholium: Atomic pitches are more important working data than atomic weights; tables of atomic pitches must be precise." (19) Law of Variation of Atomic Pitch by Rad-Energy ~ "The higher harmonics and overtones of projected rad-energy are of a pitch sufficiently high to cause the atom to expand; by causing the atomoles to vibrate systematically the same influence will cause the atom to contract, and thus by changing the volume, atomic pitch is varied." (20) Law of Variation of Atomic Pitch by Electricity and Magnetism ~ "Electricity and Magnetism produce internal vibrations in the atom, which are followed by proportional changes in volume and, therefore, pitch." (21) Law of Variation of Atomic Pitch by Temperature ~ "Atoms in chemical combination oscillate with increasing amplitude directly as the temperature, and simultaneously absorb overtones of higher harmonics, producing expansion of volume and diminution of pitch. Rule: The gradual approach of the temperature of harmonic combination can be observed by mutually comparing superimposed spectra; chemical combination commences when the fundamental lines of each spectrum bear harmonic ratios by linear measurement." (22) Law of Pitch of Atomic Oscillation ~ "Atoms not isolated and in a state of tension between forces that oppose and increase the equilibrium oscillate bodily at a pitch that is a resultant of the atomic weight, atomic volume, and tension." (23) Law of Variation of Pitch of Atomic Oscillation by Pressure ~ "The frequency of atomic oscillation increases and diminishes inversely as the square of the pressure." (24) Law of Variation of Atomic Oscillation by Temperature ~ "The force of cohesion diminishes inversely as the square of the distance the atoms are apart, and the force of the chemical affinity diminishes in the same ratio. Heat increases the amplitude of the oscillations in a direct ratio to the temperature of the natural scale. Scholium: New thermometers and accurate thermometric tables, on the natural base, wherein doubling the temperature doubles the pitch of the transmissive energy, are required. Such a table of temperature will bear natural relations to atomic weights, pitches, specific heats, chemical affinities, fusions, solubilities, etc., and will disclose new laws. One table for each must be constructed." (25) Law of Variation of Atomic Oscillation by Electricity ~ "The electric current destroys cohesion and chemical tension directly as square of current in amperes, inversely as the resistance in ohms, inversely as the chemical equivalent, and conversely as the coefficient of the difference between the freezing and volatilizing temperature of mass acted upon." (26) Law of Variation of Atomic Oscillation by Sono-Thermism ~ "Diminishes the tensions directly as the quantity of heat developed, and in antithetical proportion to the harmonics absolved." (27) Law of Chemical Affinity ~ "Atoms whose atomic pitches are in either unison, harmonic or concordant ratios, unite to form molecules. Corollary: When two atoms are indifferent, they may be made to unite by varying the pitch of either, or both. Scholium: This necessitates the construction of tables, representing variation of atomic pitches by temperature, pressure, etc. Scholium: Tables of all harmonics and concords, and harmonics founded upon a normal harmonic scale, are equally essential. Scholium: Optical instruments may be made to measure pitches of energy." (28) Law of Chemical Dissociation ~ "If the pitch of either atom, in a molecule, be raised or lowered; or, if they both be unequally raised or lowered in pitch until the mutual ratio be that of a discord; or, if the oscillation amplitude be augmented by heat until the atoms are with the concentric waves of attraction, - the atoms will separate." (29) Law of Chemical Transposition ~ "New molecules must be harmonics of the fundamental pitch." (30) Law of Chemical Substitution ~ "(too complex for brief statement)" (31) Law of Catalysis ~"The presence of harmonics and discords." (32) Law of Molecular Synthesis and Combination (Organic) ~ "The molecular pitch must be a derived harmony of the radicals. Scholium: Reconstruction of electric units to represent pitches and amplitudes." (33) Law of Chemical Morphology ~ "The angle of crystallization is determined by the relation between the molecular pitch of the crystallizing substance to the variation- density of the liquid depositing it." (34) Law of Atomic Dissociation ~ "Overtones of high rad-energy pitches produce separation of the atomoles and recombinations among the atomolic molecules of the atoms." (35) Law of Atomolic Synthesis of Chemical Elements ~ "Harmonic pitches of atomolity produce association of etheric-atomolic particles to form atoms; the kind of atom is determinable by the pitches employed." (36) Law of Heat ~ "Atoms under the tension of chemical combination oscillate with an amplitude directly as the temperature, inversely as the pressure, and as the square of the specific heat. Diminishing the pitch of oscillation inversely as the square of the distance of the atoms apart, and simultaneously increasing the vibrating pitch of the atom by absorption of overtones and higher harmonics." (37) Law of Electro-Chemical Equivalents ~ "An atom vibrates sympathetically under the influence of electric energy, such undertones of which are absorbed as are a harmonic or harmony of the electric pitch; the amount of energy absorbed being directly as the arithmetical ratio of the undertone of the fundamental electric pitch. Scholium: A table of electro-chemical equivalents on the normal basis will indicate the electrical conditions and amount of chemical change." (38) Law of Cohesion ~"The cohesion between atoms diminishes directly as the square root of the pressure and temperature, and as the square of electric intensity." (39) Law of Refractive Indices ~ "A table of the refractive indices of substances indicates their molecular pitch; and in connection with crystalline form the phase of molecular oscillation." (40) Law of Electric Conductivity ~ "Electric energy is transmitted through homogeneous bodies with a completeness in direct proportion as the atoms are more or less perfect harmonics of the electric pitch, but not at all through substances whose atoms are discordant to the electric pitch; also through molecular substances, when their resultant notes are harmonics of the electric pitch, - the transmissions being inversely as the temperature, directly as the density diminished in proportion to the amount of crystallization, and inversely as the cube of the dyne, also directly as the reciprocal of the local magnetic intensity."(12) The phenomena of Cymatics, the wave phenomena, vibrational effects, and harmonic oscillations revealed by the Chaldni plate, etc., was researched by Hans Jenny in the 1960s. He demonstrated the basic unified triadic phenomenon of vibrational, kinetic and dynamic effects in acoustic interactions with matter. The triadic phenomenon occurs in many other fields (biology, mineralogy, astronomy, atomic physics, etc) and is a skeleton key that unlocks many gates of knowledge. Certainly it aids in understanding and practicing quabbalistic transmutation, and pertains to the work of John Keely and Dr Stephen Emmens. For example: the sacred word "Om" forms the Sri Yantra geometry when spoken into a Chaldni plate or Tonoscope! (6) It should be noted that Franz Tausend, who made gold from mercury for the Nazis, developed a circular periodic table of the elements with Pythagorean musical correlations, based on his understanding of atoms. Sacred geometry is another rewarding area of study for alchemists. The phi ratio (5/8, 0.618, &c) enables the alchemist to impregnate and enliven matter with cosmic energies in a simple manner. For example, a model of the Great Pyramid (incorporating phi in its base angle of 51o 51') will exert phenomenal effects on substances placed within it (i.e., mummification, sharpening dull razor blades, enhanced germination of seeds, &c). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- 3. Abiogenesis & Astrochemy ~ Charles Littlefield ~ At the beginning of the 20th century, Dr Charles W. Littlefield experimented with the effects of mental concentration (visualization and prayer) on the crystallization of tissue salt solutions. He was able to produce many microscopic images of life forms, alphabets, structures, etc, some of which he published in his book Man, Minerals and Masters. Dr Littlefield conducted long series of experiments with vitalized mineral salts. The vitalizations were accomplished by repeated evaporations. Littlefield offered these guidelines for experimentation: "The number of evaporations necessary to effect this [radiate structure] with each salt, is generally one evaporation for each tenth part of the molecular weight or fraction thereof as shown by the following table: Salt: Molecular weight: Number of Evaporations: Na-Chloride 58.37 6 Si-Oxide 60.22 7 K-Chloride 74.2 8 Ca-Fluoride 78 8 Ca-Sulfate 135.73 14 K-Phosphate 174 18 K-Sulfate 174 18 Mg-Phosphate 246 25 Fe-Phosphate 301.36 31 Ca-Phosphate 309.33 31 Na-Sulfate 321.42 33 Na-Phosphate 357.32 36 "Another interesting and important fact with this process of vitalization is, those salts that are otherwise insoluble in water are by the evaporation of water rendered soluble. This is a most valuable discovery from the standpoint of treating disease, as all the mineral salts must be dissolved in the blood before they are available to the tissue cells as food. "I began my experiments by attempting mind control of one or more of these salts dissolved in distilled water. First, a drop of the mineral solution was put on the glass slide of my microscope, then placed in a temperature nearly that of the human body. As the water dried away, I would repeat the [unspecified Biblical] verse referred to above, the mystic three times. "While doing this I would image, or mentally picture, the form of some fowl or animal as the victim of the bleeding. Finally, I succeeded in making the crystals of common table salt, which is the most abundant salt in the blood, group themselves in the form of a chicken. "Long before I succeeded, there built up from the mineral solutions a great variety of microscopic organisms in the shape of octupi, fish, and reptiles. I do not know why. "Continued experiments demonstrated that forms of different kinds could be predetermined by the proportion, number, and kind of salts used. Thus I discovered that mineral composition is the law of living forms... These laws may be stated as follows: "1. A mental image is the beginning of every created thing. With whatever functions, faculties or qualities this image may be endowed by the mind creating it, the same will be expressed by the creature. "2. This mental image has the power to group the twelve mineral salts normally found in organic nature, in the exact proportion necessary to build the form, and all the tissues and organs necessary to express all the functions, faculties and qualities which the mind image may be endowed. Hence composition becomes the law of form and function. "3. Evaporation of water, a process universal on sea and land, generates a subtle magnetism which is the vital force of plants and animals. This force saturates the mineral salts of organic nature making them susceptible to mental control, so that any picture that the mind accepts as true in principle may be fixed in them... "Procure twelve one-ounce bottles with fresh, clean corks. Label each bottle with the name of the salt it is to contain. Into each bottle put about 10 grains of one of the salts and fill with pure distilled water. Shake frequently. Not all the salts are equally soluble, some in large amounts and others only slightly. >From time to time remove a drop of any one of the solutions with a clean toothpick to the glass slide of the microscope. Heat the slide carefully until the water is evaporated. Then examine the crystal formed from the salt. Do this with each of the twelve salts until you become familiar with their forms and differences. Then combine one or more of the solutions in a clean bottle. Place a drop of this on the glass slide, then evaporate and examine. It will be seen by these experiments that the slightest difference in the amounts of each solution will make the widest possible difference in the resulting crystals... "In my own experiments I use sulfate of potash and sulfate of soda, one part of the potash to ten parts of the soda. When this combination forms crystals like the letters C, D, or O, then the solution of these salts is susceptible to mental mastery by my mind... _______________________________________________ wta-talk mailing list wta-talk at transhumanism.org http://www.transhumanism.org/mailman/listinfo/wta-talk From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 27 15:27:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:27:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Philip Johnson, Elder Statesman of U.S. Architecture, Dies at 98 Message-ID: Philip Johnson, Elder Statesman of U.S. Architecture, Dies at 98 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/26/arts/design/26cnd-john.html January 26, 2005 By PAUL GOLDBERGER [Was Johnson put into jail during WW II for sedition? I recall hearing that he was. A bunch of NYT pieces are appended, even one entitled, "American Culture's Debt to Gay Sons of Ha'va'd." Question: are homosexual and bisexual graduates from Ha'va'd any more prominent in American life than other graduates from Ha'va'd? In which parts of American life?] Philip Johnson, at once the elder statesman and the enfant terrible of American architecture, died yesterday at the Glass House, the celebrated estate he built for himself in New Canaan, Conn., said David Whitney, his companion of 45 years. He was 98 years old. Often considered the dean of American architects, Mr. Johnson was known less for his individual buildings than for the sheer force of his presence on the architectural scene, which he served as a combination godfather, gadfly, scholar, patron, critic, curator and cheerleader. His 90th birthday, in July 1996, was marked by symposiums, lectures, an outpouring of essays in his honor and back-to-back dinners at two venerable New York institutions he had played a major role in creating: the Museum of Modern Art, whose department of architecture and design he joined in 1930, and the Four Seasons Restaurant, which he designed as part of the Seagram Building in 1958. Mr. Johnson was the first winner of the Pritzker Prize, the $100,000 award established in 1979 by the Pritzker family of Chicago to honor an architect of international stature. In 1978, he won the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, the highest award the American architectural profession bestows on any of its members. His long career was a study in contradictions. For all his honors, Mr. Johnson was in some ways always an outsider in his profession. His own architecture received mixed reviews, and frequently startled both the public and his fellow architects. The style of his work changed frequently, and he was often accused of pandering to fashion and designing buildings that were facile and shallow. Yet he created several buildings, including the Glass House, the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, that are widely considered among the architectural masterworks of the 20th century, and for his entire career he maintained an involvement with architectural theory and ideas as deep as that of any scholar. As an architect, he made his mark arguing the importance of the esthetic side of architecture, and claimed that he had no interest in buildings except as works of art. Yet he was so eager to build that he willingly took commissions from real-estate developers who refused to meet his own esthetic standards, and liked to refer to himself, with only partial irony, as a whore. And in the 1930's, this man who believed that art ranked above all else took a bizarre and, he later conceded, deeply mistaken detour into right-wing politics, suspending his career to work on behalf of Huey Long and later Father Charles Coughlin, and expressing more than passing admiration for Adolf Hitler. Mr. Johnson's foray into Fascism was over by the time the United States entered World War II, and two decades later he sought to make public atonement to Jews by designing a synagogue in Port Chester, N.Y., for no fee. But to the end of his life the contradictions continued. With his dignified bearing and elegant, tailored suits, he looked every bit the part of a distinguished, genteel aristocrat, but he played the celebrity culture of the 1980's and 90's as successfully as a rock star. He was far and away the best-known living architect to the public, and his crisply outlined, round face, marked by heavy, round black spectacles of his own design, was a common sight on television programs and magazine covers. With the exception of his brief involvement in right-wing politics, all of Philip Johnson's careers - historian, museum director and designer - revolved around architecture. He began his professional life as a writer, historian and curator and did not enter architecture school until he was 35. Even when he became one of the nation's most eminent practicing architects, he continued to be a major patron of institutions and of younger architects, whose work he followed with avid interest. He began his career as an ardent champion of Modernism, but unlike many of the movement's early proselytizers, he changed with the times, and his own work showed a major movement away from beginnings that were heavily influenced by the architect Mies van der Rohe. In the late 1950's, just after he had collaborated with Mies on the design of the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, he introduced elements of classical architecture into his buildings, beginning a long quest to find ways of connecting contemporary architecture to historical form. It was a quest that would begin with highly abstracted versions of classicism in the 1960's and culminate in a much more literal use of the architectural forms of the past in his revivalist skyscrapers of the 1980's. That phase of Mr. Johnson's career included such well-known monuments as the classically detailed pink granite AT& T Building (now the Sony Building) on Madison Avenue, which he completed in 1983 with John Burgee, then his partner; the Republic Bank Tower (now NCNB Center) in Houston, which used elements of Flemish Renaissance architecture; the Transco Tower in Houston, which recapitulated the setback forms of a romantic 1920's tower in glass, perhaps his finest skyscraper; and the PPG Center in Pittsburgh, a reflective glass tower whose Gothic form copied the shape of the tower of the Houses of Parliament in London. Institutional clients also got their share of Mr. Johnson's fixation with historical form: he designed a Romanesque structure in brick for the Cleveland Play House and a classical building based on the designs of the French visionary architect ?tienne-Louis Boull?e for the architecture school of the University of Houston. In the late 1980's Mr. Johnson's restless mind, having played a major role in shifting American architecture toward Postmodernism, with its re-use of traditional elements, moved on yet again. Fascinated by the intense, highly abstract work of a group of younger Modernist architects who were to become known as the Deconstructivists, Mr. Johnson began to incorporate elements of their architecture into his own work. He was particularly entranced with the buildings of the Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry, whose complex, seemingly irrational forms would appear to be the antithesis of the cool, rational, ordered architectural world of Mr. Johnson's first mentor, Mies, and much of his late work reflected Mr. Gehry's influence. Mr. Johnson, an urbane, elegant figure, was perhaps the best-known New York architect since Stanford White. Born to wealth, he and Mr. Whitney, a curator and art dealer, lived well - for many years in a town house on East 52nd Street that Mr. Johnson had originally designed as a guest house for John D. Rockefeller 3d, then in an elaborately decorated apartment in Museum Tower above the Museum of Modern Art - and always on weekends in the famous Glass House compound.Mr. Johnson had lunch daily amid other prominent and powerful New Yorkers at a special table in the corner of the Grill Room of the Four Seasons restaurant. His guest was as likely to be a young architect in whose work he had taken an interest, and for years his table functioned as a kind of miniature architectural salon. In the evenings, he was frequently seen at exclusive social events - for years by himself, and in the last decade, as he felt greater ease in making his relationship with Mr. Whitney public, with his companion. He was among the few architects whose comings and goings were considered worthy of notice in the gossip columns. He had been an active art collector since the days when, as a student traveling in Germany, he purchased a pair of Paul Klees directly from the artist. Eventually he came to be a busy collector of contemporary art: advised by Mr. Whitney, he filled his walls with paintings by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns when these artists were just gaining public attention, and he amassed one of the most complete collections of paintings by Frank Stella in private hands. Mr. Johnson not only lived and ate in places of his own design, he worked in them as well. Until 1986 his office was in the Seagram Building, the great skyscraper he designed with Mies, who was its principal architect. Mr. Johnson practiced alone there for some years, then collaborated with Richard Foster of Greenwich, Conn., for a time, and in 1967 formed a partnership with John Burgee. It was this partnership that transformed Mr. Johnson from a scholar-architect designing small to medium-size institutional buildings for well-to-do clients to a major force in American commercial architecture. Mr. Burgee's arrival coincided with the firm's movement toward a number of major and widely acclaimed skyscraper projects, including the I.D.S. Center in Minneapolis and Pennzoil Place in Houston. Mr. Johnson's own leanings were always toward the esthetic issues involved in design, and in Mr. Burgee he found a partner who could serve not only as a colleague in design but also as an executive overseeing the kind of large architectural office required to produce major skyscrapers. As if to mark Mr. Burgee's role, the Johnson-Burgee firm moved in 1986 into the elliptical skyscraper at 885 Third Avenue, between 53rd and 54th Streets, popularly known as the Lipstick Building, which the partners had designed together. But the partnership was not to last long beyond the move: Mr. Burgee, eager to occupy center stage, negotiated a more limited role for Mr. Johnson, and in 1991 exercised the prerogative he had as chief executive of the firm and eased Mr. Johnson out altogether. It proved an unwise decision, since the firm, crippled by an arbitration decision unrelated to Mr. Johnson, soon went into bankruptcy, all but ending Mr. Burgee's career. Mr. Johnson, his ties with his former firm having been severed, had no liability, and he went on to rent a smaller space in the Lipstick Building, gleefully hanging out his shingle and declaring himself in business as a solo practitioner at the age of 86. Before long, he had several commissions, including a cathedral in Dallas, and his career had recharged itself completely. Philip Cortelyou Johnson was born on July 8, 1906, in Cleveland, the son of Homer H. Johnson, a well-to-do lawyer, and Louise Pope Johnson. Supported by a fortune that consisted largely of Aluminum Company of America stock given him by his father, Mr. Johnson went to Harvard to study Greek, but became excited by architecture and spent the years immediately after his graduation in 1927 touring Europe and looking at the early buildings of the developing Modern architecture movement. He teamed up with Henry-Russell Hitchcock, at that time the movement's chief academic partisan in the United States, and their travels together resulted in their book "The International Style," published in 1932 and now a classic. "We have an architecture still," is how Mr. Johnson and Mr. Hitchcock concluded the book, which played a major role in introducing Americans to the work of European modernists ranging from Le Corbusier to Mies to Walter Gropius, then barely known here. In 1930, before "The International Style" was published, Mr. Johnson joined the department of architecture at a new institution in New York, the Museum of Modern Art. He moved the museum quickly to the forefront of the architectural avant-garde, sponsoring exhibitions on contemporary themes and arranging for visits by Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies, for whom he also negotiated his first American commission. Mr. Johnson left the museum in 1936 to pursue his political agenda full-time, dividing his time between Berlin, Louisiana and his family's home in Ohio. By the summer of 1940, his infatuation with Fascist politics had faded, although as Franz Schulze, his biographer, wrote in 1994, it was never clear whether he withdrew because he changed his mind or because he had failed to achieve political success. "In politics he proved to be a model of futility," Mr. Schulze wrote.. "He was never much of a political threat to anyone, still less an effective doer of either political good or political evil." In 1941, at the age of 35, Mr. Johnson turned once and for all to the field that would occupy him for the rest of his life, and enrolled at the Harvard Graduate School of Design to begin the process of becoming an architect. While at Harvard, Mr. Johnson did what few students, even those of great means, have been able to do - he actually built the project he designed as a thesis. It was a house in the style of Mies, its lot surrounded by a wall that merges into the structure, and it still stands at 9 Ash Street in Cambridge, Mass. After wartime service in the United States Army - although the Federal Bureau of Investigation had investigated Mr. Johnson for his Fascist leanings, the Government decided he was sufficiently repentant to wear the uniform - he returned in 1946 to the Museum of Modern Art. At the same time he began slowly to build up an architectural practice of his own, combining it with his career as a writer and curator. He designed a small, boxy house, also highly influenced by Mies, for a client in Sagaponack, L.I., in 1946, but his first significant building, and still perhaps his most famous, was not for an outside client at all but, like the Cambridge house, for his own use: it was the Glass House at New Canaan, completed in 1949 with its counterpoint, a brick guest house. The serene Glass House, a 56-foot by 32-foot rectangle, is generally considered one of the 20th century's greatest residential structures. Like all of Mr. Johnson's early work, it was inspired by Mies, but its pure symmetry, dark colors and closeness to the earth marked it as a personal statement, calm and ordered rather than sleek and brittle. Over the years, Mr. Johnson added to the Glass House property, turning it into a compound that became a veritable museum of his architecture, with buildings representing each phase of his career. A small, elegant white-columned pavilion by the lake was built in 1963; an art gallery, an underground building set into a hill, with pictures from Mr. Johnson's extensive collection of contemporary art set on movable panels, in 1965; the sculpture gallery of 1970, a sharply defined, irregular white structure covered with a greenhouse-like glass roof; a library of stucco with a rounded tower that from a distance looks like a miniature castle (1980); a concrete-block tower, as much a piece of sculpture as a building, dedicated to his lifelong friend Lincoln Kirstein, the writer and New York City Ballet founder(1985); a "ghost house" of chain-link fence, honoring Mr. Gehry, who often used this material (1985), and finally, what Mr. Johnson called "the Monsta," an irregularly-shaped building of deep red with sharply curving walls, finished in 1995. The "Monsta" - Mr. Johnson could not quite bring himself to call one of his buildings a monster, but he felt its shape resembled it - is set at the gate of the estate and was designed to serve as a visitors center once the public was admitted to the property after his death. (Although Mr. Johnson kept an office in New York, working part time there until a year ago, he and Mr. Whitney have spent most of their time at the Glass House in recent years.) The Glass House compound is willed to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which plans to operate it as a museum. In addition to Mr. Whitney, Mr. Johnson is survived by a sister, Jeannette Dempsey of Cleveland, now 102. After the Glass House was completed in 1949, Mr. Johnson received other residential commissions, including a number of houses in New Canaan. His first work at very large scale, however, was the Seagram Building, designed in association with Mies, though Mr. Johnson himself did the elegant Four Seasons restaurant within. The deep bronze Seagram, completed in 1958, is considered by many critics to be the finest postwar skyscraper in New York. By that time, however, Mr. Johnson was already becoming impatient with the limitations of the strict, austere Miesian design vocabulary. He began to explore a more decorative sort of neo-Classicism, which led to such designs as the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth (1961), the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center (1964) and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library at New York University, designed in 1965 but not completed until 1973. His work in that period led the architectural historian Vincent Scully to refer to him as "admirably lucid, unsentimental and abstract, with the most ruthlessly aristocratic, highly studied taste of anyone practicing in America today." "All that a nervous sensibility, lively intelligence and a stored mind can do, he does,"Mr. Scully said. Mr. Johnson's active art collecting brought him a nearly continuous stream of commissions to design museums, and his ties to the Museum of Modern Art brought him the request to design the museum's 1951 and 1964 expansions beyond its original 1939 building, including the sculpture garden. He also designed the original Asia House gallery on East 64th Street, now the Russell Sage Foundation, as well as museums in Utica, N.Y., Fort Worth, Lincoln, Neb., and Corpus Christi, Tex. Despite his record as a museum designer and his long association with the Modern, the museum's board, of which Mr. Johnson was a member, decided in 1978 to hire a different architect to design its new West Wing. The job went to Cesar Pelli, and Mr. Johnson was deeply hurt. For some time, relations cooled between him and the museum he had supported nearly since its founding, but eventually they resumed, and Mr. Johnson and Mr. Whitney moved into the apartment tower above the museum designed by Mr. Pelli. In 1984, as a tribute to Mr. Johnson as its founding curator, the museum's department of architecture and design named its exhibition space the Philip Johnson Gallery. And the museum marked Mr. Johnson's 90th birthday with a pair of exhibitions: one of notable works of art that the architect had donated to the museum, and another of works given by architects in Mr. Johnson's honor. The beginnings of Mr. Johnson's late career as a major commercial architect were not in New York, however, but in Minneapolis, through an immense project in 1972 for Investors Diversified Services, a financial conglomerate that has since become part of American Express. A square-block complex containing a 51-story glass tower roughly shaped like an octagon, a hotel and a retail wing placed around a central glass-covered court, the design blended Mr. Johnson's interest in angular forms with a sensitive urbanism. It quickly became a focal point for downtown Minneapolis, and was the first of a generation of what might be called social skyscrapers, towers that did not merely house office workers but contained a myriad of public spaces as well. Among the many observers who were impressed by the I.D.S. tower was Gerald D. Hines of Houston, a real estate developer who had begun his career as a builder of warehouses but by the early 1970's had sought to make a new mark as the developer of much larger buildings by prominent architects. Mr. Hines hired Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee to design Pennzoil Place, a twin-towered complex of glass in downtown Houston that was completed in 1973. One of the most widely known skyscrapers in the country, Pennzoil Place consists of two trapezoidal towers placed so as to leave two triangular areas open on the site. These areas were covered with steel and glass trusses to create greenhouse-like lobbies; as a further formal gesture, each tower was given a slanted roof for the top seven floors. Pennzoil Place would prove widely influential, but five years later Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee moved away from it with the design for one of the most startling skyscrapers of the last generation, the AT& T (now Sony) headquarters in New York, the so-called "Chippendale skyscraper" of granite with a split pediment resembling an antique highboy. During the 1980's Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee also designed major skyscrapers in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Dallas, most of which, following the lead of the AT& . Building, were lavishly finished in granite and marble and imitated some aspect of the architecture of the past. Mr. Johnson also designed the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., and the Museum of Television and Radio on West 52d Street in New York, and with Mr. Burgee produced plans through the 1980's for office towers for Times Square. Widely criticized, they have yet to be built. On his own, since the dissolution of his partnership with Mr. Burgee, he produced several projects for Donald J. Trump, including the glass tower at 1 Central Park West and projects for the Riverside South residential development; plans for a cathedral for a gay congregation in Dallas; and an office building for Berlin. Although he gave up formal scholarship when he became an architect, Mr. Johnson continued to write and lecture frequently. He constant theme, unchanged through all his stylistic variations, was his belief in the need to view architecture as an art - something that separated him, in fact, from the socially minded early Modernists whose cause he once championed so ardently. In a famous lecture in 1954 at Harvard titled "The Seven Crutches of Modern Architecture," he said, "Merely that a building works is not sufficient." Later, in an oft-quoted remark, he said, "I would rather sleep in Chartres Cathedral with the nearest toilet two blocks away than in a Harvard house with back-to-back bathrooms." Years later, Mr. Johnson told an audience, "We still have a monumental architecture. To me, the drive for monumentality is as inbred as the desire for food and sex, regardless of how we denigrate it." But he ended by arguing: "Monuments differ in different periods. Each age has its own. "Maybe, just maybe, we shall at last come to care for the most important, most challenging, surely the most satisfying of all architectural creations: building cities for people to live in." ---------- An Appreciation | Philip Johnson: A Tastemaker Propelled by Curiosity http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/27/arts/design/27arch.html By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF At the height of his power, Philip Johnson's tentacles seemed to reach into every corner of his profession. As the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art's department of architecture and design, he almost single-handedly introduced American audiences to European Modernist buildings; he was a tireless promoter of emerging architectural talents, from Mies van der Rohe to Frank Gehry. And although he often played down his creative talent, he produced a number of 20th-century landmarks in his long, eclectic career, among them the 1949 Glass House, rightly considered a masterpiece of American design. Yet his greatest talent of all may have been his unquenchable curiosity, which prevented him, and by extension, his audience, from becoming mired in any specific architectural style or movement. In architectural terms, Mr. Johnson's output was uneven. His most memorable works are almost without exception his most intimately scaled, and they evoke a remarkable range of references that with hindsight, imbues them with unexpected subtlety. The Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., for example, was famously inspired by Mies's earlier design for the Farnsworth House in Plano, Ill., but its sleek Modernist appearance and slender brick base also suggested a traditional home with its skin stripped off. That catholic sensibility was also evident in his 1950 design for Dominique and John de Menil's residence in Houston, whose blank brick facade masked a more transparent interior that opened onto flowing gardens, echoing, in its small way, the Janus-like vision of precedents like the 17th-century French estate Vaux le Vicomte. But what most separates his work from more austere influences like Mies is its thinly veiled hedonism. The beauty of the Glass House, for example, arises from the quality of the glass, which is less about transparency than about the creation of a subtle interplay of visual images, from reflections of the surrounding trees to the movement of bodies inside. Similarly, the polished interiors he designed for the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan, with beaded steel curtains that conjure up a woman's slip, make it one of the sexiest rooms in the city 45 years after its completion. That bias toward aesthetics over social issues had been clear since his 1932 "International Style" show at the Modern, which he organized at the age of 26 with Henry-Russell Hitchcock. The show, which celebrated the work of such pillars of early Modernism as Mies, Le Corbusier and J. J. P. Oud, electrified an audience that was unfamiliar with Modernist achievements in Europe. But its relentless focus on form tended to overlook the deeper social goals that inspired such architecture. While Mr. Johnson may have made such work palatable to the American cultural elite, he also emptied it of some of its meaning. Nonetheless, that narrow devotion to aesthetics may also have been what allowed Mr. Johnson, in his later career, to slip so easily from one architectural style to the next. When the glow of late Modernism began to fade sometime in the early 1970's, Mr. Johnson was one of the first to abandon that vision in favor of postmodernism, a movement that he helped spawn and that eventually landed him on the cover of Time, clutching a model of his AT&T tower with its granite Chippendale top. A decade later, Johnson was exploring the more fragmented forms of architects like Frank Gehry, which led to a short-lived collaboration on an unbuilt guest house for the insurance magnate Peter B. Lewis. His forays into so-called deconstructivism yielded the canted walls and curved shapes of a visitors center at his estate in New Canaan. Mr. Johnson's fickleness often led to accusations that he was more an arbiter of architectural tastes than a creative groundbreaker. And in truth, few of his buildings from the 1970's and 80's could be considered distinguished. Most - banal corporate towers done on the cheap - seemed a winking testament to his famous quip that all architects are whores. Yet there were exceptions. The angular glass surfaces of his 1976 Pennzoil Place, for example, frame a thin sliver of sky that gives a palpable tension to what are otherwise a pair of conventional corporate towers. His Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., completed in 1980, is a mesmerizing composition of faceted glass planes. And in many ways, Mr. Johnson's restlessness may have been his greatest asset: not so much as an architect as in his effect on the culture of architecture. During his long reign, no one was a more eloquent advocate for architecture, and few were more open to new ideas. Nor has any American architect been more indefatigable in promoting new talents, many benefiting from his patronage. Mr. Johnson accomplished much of this through his position at the Modern, where he continued to curate shows until he was into his 80's. The 1988 show on deconstructivism, which he organized with Mark Wigley, may not have had the impact of his earlier successes, but it underlined Mr. Johnson's zest for exploring contemporary architectural ideas at an age when most would be content to play the role of dignified figurehead. His connection to the Modern was only the most visible aspect of his stature as architectural tastemaker, a position enhanced by his aristocratic charm and social connections. It was Mr. Johnson, for instance, who famously introduced Mies to the Seagram heiress Phyllis Lambert in the early 1950's; soon afterward she commissioned Mies and Mr. Johnson to design the landmark Seagram Building. Later, he was an ardent supporter of emerging talents then like Peter Eisenman and Mr. Gehry. His dinners at the Century club, meanwhile, were coveted as a means of entree into the tight-knit world of New York high culture, the kind of circles that guaranteed large-scale, high-profile commissions. Conversely, the architects he ignored sometimes felt as though the power he wielded could be devastating. But Mr. Johnson felt free to follow talent and ideas wherever they led him. That blazing openness to the new - that ease in gliding from style to style, from one milieu to another - seems virtually impossible to replace. ---------- New Life and New Mission for a 1964 World's Fair Relic http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/17/arts/design/17FLUS.html July 17, 2004 By FRED A. BERNSTEIN Philip Johnson's steel and concrete fantasia in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, designed as the New York State Pavilion for the 1964-65 World's Fair, has been crumbling for decades. Now it is finally getting some attention. Adrian Benepe, New York City's parks commissioner, said his department had begun soliciting ideas from groups interested in renovating the pavilion. If there are enough expressions of interest, he said, the department will issue a formal request for proposals. At the same time, the Queens Theater in the Park which produces performances geared to the borough's immigrant communities is planning to build an 8,000-square-foot addition to its space, a small section of the pavilion that was called the Theaterama during the World's Fair. That section has been maintained while the rest of the pavilion, including the huge "Tent of Tomorrow" and cluster of round observation towers, continues to fall apart. The addition will consist of a 75-seat cabaret and a new entry hall with an inverted-dome ceiling, a shape that one of its architects, Sara Caples of Caples Jefferson, said would recall the "va-voom architecture" of Johnson's pavilion. The city has allocated $5.2 million for the addition and hopes to break ground this fall, the cultural affairs commissioner, Kate D. Levin, said. The opening is planned for late next year. When completed, Ms. Caples said, the new entry hall will join the original Theaterama, the observation towers, and the tent to be "a fourth geometric figure in this wonderful composition of Philip Johnson's." But the shiny new addition will also call attention to the blighted condition of the tent, which appears to be on the verge of collapse. Sixteen 100-foot-high concrete towers once supported a multicolored canopy above a football field-size map of New York State. The canopy is gone, and the map is now a forest of weeds that have cracked the state's 62 counties. As recently as 2001, the city's parks commissioner at the time, Henry J. Stern, said he thought the tent structure was useless and should be torn down. But Mr. Benepe said the pavilion as a whole was worth preserving because it is a remnant of the fair and was designed by "an important architect." Mr. Johnson, who turned 98 last week, was not available for comment and has not seen the plans for the theater addition, said his design partner, Alan Ritchie. But Mr. Johnson once said that he cringed every time he passed the crumbling pavilion on the way to the airport. One group, Mr. Benepe said, has proposed creating a New York City sports hall of fame at the pavilion. Another, which includes the Manhattan architect Frankie Campione, has proposed turning it into an aerospace museum. Mr. Campione said he was concerned that the theater addition would detract from Mr. Johnson's composition. Worse, he said, construction could damage the existing building, which, because it was not intended to be permanent, was constructed on wooden pilings. But Ms. Caples said that her team, which includes Lee/Timchula Architects of Manhattan and the structural engineer Stanley Goldstein, was aware of the wooden pilings and had performed what she called "obsessive" engineering studies to make sure the pavilion did not topple as a result of the construction. The proposed theater addition is only one of several significant building projects in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. A radical alteration to the Queens Museum, by the Los Angeles architect Eric Owen Moss, is in the planning stages. And a 55,000-square-foot addition to the Hall of Science, by Polshek Partnership Architects of Manhattan, is nearing completion. Ms. Caples said she believed that she and her partner, Everardo Jefferson, were respecting the Johnson building by adding to it. "Repurposing cultural buildings and bringing them into our time," she said, "is a stronger way of keeping these beloved institutions part of the life of the city than letting them fall into disuse." --------------- Minimalist Oases in a Bustling Manhattan http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/23/arts/design/23MINI.html April 23, 2004 By RANDY KENNEDY TAKING a Minimalist art tour in a maximalist city like New York is not easy. In many ways, it's the polar opposite of going to Marfa, the tiny West Texas town where the artist Donald Judd bought a defunct Army base in the late 1970's and created a sprawling mecca of Minimalism. Getting to Marfa is difficult, but once you're there, everything else is simple. Little comes between you and the art, except the light and the view of uninterrupted high desert through the windows, which was Judd's almost monastic intention. It's like going to a museum on the moon. New York City is, of course, a much more populous planet. And its citizens have not always been so friendly toward Minimalism, which still poses difficult questions about the purpose and definitions of art. Remember that in 1989, Richard Serra's rusty steel "Tilted Arc" was hauled away from the plaza in front of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in Lower Manhattan, after years of complaints from the building's workers. So when a group of curators and artists at the Guggenheim Museum recently proposed a tour in which they would present the city through the eyes of Minimalism and demonstrate how much the movement's precepts have already shaped the everyday fabric of New York I signed on as a curious art tourist with a notebook. The ramps at the Guggenheim are now completely filled, or sometimes purposely not filled, with Minimalist art, as part of "Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Art From 1951 to the Present." The pieces, selected mostly from the museum's permanent collection, highlight the work of artists like Judd, Mr. Serra, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Ellsworth Kelly, Bruce Nauman and younger artists who have absorbed and transformed Minimalist and post-Minimalist ideas, like Rachel Whiteread and Liam Gillick. The tour started at the museum early one morning, with the show's two curators, Nancy Spector and Lisa Dennison, leading the way, along with Ms. Spector's husband, the architect Michael Gabellini, who designed the exhibition's installation, and Mr. Gillick, a young British artist whose work often investigates the relationship between architecture and art. The basic idea was to use the museum as a kind of lodestone and then over the rest of the day to search the city for traces, echoes and mutations of what we had seen there. Looking at people who are looking at Minimalist art is always fun, of course, and as visitors began to fill the Guggenheim's curving ramps you could almost see many of them becoming self-conscious as they stared at stark works like Robert Rauschenberg's 1951 "White Painting," an all-white canvas that relies on the shadows of the viewer for part of its effect. For some people staring at the painting, the induced self-consciousness an important element of much Minimalism seemed to be insulting or disorienting, and they laughed or shook their heads. ("It's a good thing we have some Impressionism on the second floor," joked Anthony Calnek, a spokesman for the museum.) But as our tour group left the cloister of the museum and plunged into the chaos of the city, the idea of self-consciousness became an important one to follow. New York, with its avalanches of billboards and advertisements and lavish store windows, often seems like a giant distraction machine. Every piece of the landscape seems designed to make you think about something or someplace else besides what you are looking at the tropical island where you need to relax, the pretzel you need to eat, the shoes you need to buy, the swimsuit on the model, the model herself. Minimalist artists like Flavin and Judd (who hated the term Minimalism) wanted to create art that did not make you think about other things, like the subject of a painting or a sculpture, but about the artwork itself, and the space around it, and about your looking at it. "It's become our form of modern classicism," Ms. Spector said. And in a city as exhausting as New York, which is always trying to pull you out of yourself, experiencing this sounded to me like an almost religious experience, an aesthetic oasis. Arriving at this state of Minimalist Zen, however, would require a lot of driving. So we all piled into a van in front of the museum. It felt a little like the scene in Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters," in which Sam Waterston, playing an architect, gives Dianne Wiest and Carrie Fisher a car tour of his favorite Manhattan buildings. Except in this case, there were seven of us, along with Ms. Spector's and Mr. Gabellini's 3-month-old daughter, Chiara, in her own state of Zen, and the driver, who never quite understood the point of our tour, but didn't care as long as he could hear our directions. A Recurring Theme The grid is a recurring visual theme in Minimalism, and no sooner had we left the museum than we were imprisoned in one, somewhere on Park Avenue, gridlocked. (Mr. Gillick, with a lot of time to look out the van's window, remarked that the city's smoking ban had been good for architecture appreciation. "Look at all those people standing outside, staring at buildings," he said.) Finally, we reached our first stop, or stops: the Seagram Building at 53rd Street and Park, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson in 1958, and Lever House, just up the avenue between 53rd and 54th Streets, designed by Gordon Bunshaft at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in 1952. Both buildings predate the Minimalist art movement as such, but they were revolutionary precursors of Minimalism's intentions and practices reducing, stripping off the unnecessary, revealing the structural bones. Mies wrote that for most buildings, "when the outer walls are put in place, the structural system, which is the basis of all artistic design, is hidden by a chaos of meaningless and trivial forms." His bronze-and-glass Seagram building now a city landmark, along with Lever House is certainly devoid of trivia. Even the lines of the ceiling panels that you can glimpse through the glass are in lock step with the building's unbroken exterior lines. It is a place where "the structure, really, is the expression of the building," Mr. Gabellini said, adding, "With Mies you knew the kind of suit he was wearing, and it was always a very formal one." In a city of jumbled and often jammed-together architectural styles, the two buildings still have an almost puritanical effect today. Mr. Gabellini, who designed the Guggenheim's show by rethinking the museum's lighting and many of the surfaces inside, noted how the Seagram Building stands back from the avenue on its roomy plaza, making you aware of the space it occupies in a way the other buildings around it don't. And while other tall buildings push up like stalagmites, essentially extensions of Manhattan's bedrock, Lever House instead seems to float on its horizontal slab, breaking the city's vertical monotony. The next stop was also architectural, but of a different sort. It was the Jil Sander store on 57th Street near Fifth Avenue, designed by Mr. Gabellini, who explained how much he had been influenced by Minimalist artists, especially those who deal with light, like Doug Wheeler, whose work at the Guggenheim is a large, serene room in which a blue-white light emanates from the corners of one wall. The same effect could be seen in the spare Jil Sander clothing store, where light emerges from unseen places near the corners of one wall. The strong influence of Judd could also be seen. Isolated metal shelves jutting from the walls were reminiscent of the rows or stacks of wall boxes that Judd made, often from brass or aluminum. In fact, a metal display case in the store looked much like the aluminum Judd boxes on display in Marfa. Except that the box in the store displayed atop it a very pricey Jil Sander blue purse, reminding you that these days, Minimalism is the language lots of New York boutiques speak to say "expensive." The stop at the store was quick because Ms. Dennison had warned us upon entering, "There is a very real danger that I will start to shop, so we'd better be brief." Next it was across town to a much bigger and more crowded nexus of architecture and commerce the new Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle to see the artist James Carpenter's towering cable-net glass wall, the largest such glass wall in the world. It takes the reductionist mantra even further: crystal-clear glass interrupted only by the requisite number of stainless-steel cables needed to keep it together. It is a window that is barely there, as much for looking into the building as for looking out, reminding me of Gerhard Richter's plain glass window panes, which we had just seen in the Guggenheim show, and especially of a 1972 work by Lawrence Weiner that uses no materials at all, unless you count ink. It's simply words on a wall saying, "To See and Be Seen." The last stop before lunch finally took us off the commerce trail and closer to art for art's sake again. We drove to Trisha Brown's new dance studio complex on West 55th Street, where she moved in 2001. While the 16,000-square-foot studio itself stripped-down loftlike space, painted white, with movable walls and basic lighting is minimal enough, the point was to talk with Ms. Brown, who in her early years, especially, was very influenced by Minimalist artists and, in turn, influenced them. The stop was particularly appropriate in such a tour of the city because Ms. Brown's earliest work rejected conventional stages altogether and often put dancers atop roofs in SoHo or in a harness, scaling the walls of a Lower Manhattan warehouse. She has collaborated frequently with Mr. Rauschenberg and also with Judd, whom she recalled once sitting in a chair and watching her dancers as a pained expression spread across his face. "He said, `Trisha, they keep moving,' " she said. "He didn't know how to deal with that." Echoing a theme that the tour had emphasized over and over, Ms. Brown said she was extremely happy with the new dance space on a street filled with trucks and warehouses between 11th and 12th Avenues because it reduced distractions. "I've made very good work here in part because I think it just is what it is, a very clean, basic empty space," she said, adding later that there was "nothing here to gobble up your eye." (She said that she was also glad that it was in a former garage because, as a girl, she had attended her first dance classes in a garage in Aberdeen, Wash. "It's sort of like parentheses on my life," she said.) By this point, art had made us so hungry that we almost abandoned Minimalism and veered off to a Greek diner on 10th Avenue. But we remained disciplined, stayed the course and ended up on a slow slog down to TriBeCa and 66, Jean-Georges Vongerichten's pared-down palace of Shanghai food, which was designed by the architect Richard Meier as a kind of "2001: A Space Odyssey" version of China. After so many hours of looking at the city through Minimalist goggles, I was beginning to see it everywhere. It was easy in the restaurant, of course, which one amateur food critic described on the Web as "a Zen dim sum commune," but on the ride down, I had also been noticing many things differently. A pipe leaning against a building reminded me of Mr. Serra's "Close Pin Prop" at the museum, which is essentially a sculpture made with a leaning pipe. The huge metal plates that cover construction holes in the street were reminiscent of Mr. Andre's famous hot-rolled steel plates, arranged on the floor of the museum. And later, when we dropped by the sleek Apple Store in SoHo, an iPod display in the window with three colored light columns looked just like a Flavin fluorescent work. Mr. Gillick, who described himself as distrustful of categories in the art world, says he also has Minimalist moments in many places in the city you might not expect. Like Penn Station. Or around the United Nations, where he has an apartment. He also says that he finds the empty space where Mr. Serra's sculpture once sat in front of the Javits Federal Building to be powerful in its own right because of the ghostly memory of the sculpture. In the Guggenheim show, Mr. Gillick chose to hang "Trajectory Platform," one of his own works, which resembles a dropped ceiling panel with stripes of red in it, in an anonymous corner, near a door to a staff room. "I wanted a place that I thought of as semi-ambiguous architecture," he said, "a place that kind of plays with your expectations." A Judd Building The last major stop on our tour was that kind of place, too, but only because of its interaction with a city that never stays still. It was a building on Spring Street in SoHo that Judd, who died in 1994, owned and used as a home and studio. Surrounded now by expensive perfume shops and shoe stores, and almost abandoned by other galleries, it can take a viewer by surprise. Through smudged windows, you can see an open first floor, with some of Flavin's fluorescent tubes glowing against the wall, Judd's boxes nearby and a plain roll-top desk and chair near the back of the room. Someone who didn't know the building's history might mistake it for a bankrupt store that hadn't yet moved out all of the lights and display cases. But inside it is a kind of monastery of Judd's ideas and the tenets of Minimalism, and undoubtedly a great way to end the tour, solemnly, almost silently, finally shutting the city out again. This cast-iron building, a former garment factory, has five large floors, almost all left completely open, displaying works by Claes Oldenburg, Frank Stella, John Chamberlain and Duchamp. On the second floor is a spare living and dining area. The third floor was Judd's studio, with a drafting table that still has a fold-out ruler, metal triangles and pieces of drawing paper atop it. The fourth floor was intended as a formal dining room, but in theory only. In practice, almost no one ate there, said Peter Ballantine, a longtime Judd collaborator who conducts appointment-only tours of the building. Instead, it allowed Judd to make dining-room things like tables and a cabinet for storing dishes. The fifth floor is a bedroom, with a mattress barely raised from the floor on a wooden platform, and very Quaker-like cubicle rooms designed for Judd's son and daughter. The most telling floor, however, is the first, which was Judd's studio before he had to abandon it, convert it to a gallery and flee upstairs. Why did he have to retreat? Mr. Ballantine said that too many people started knocking on the windows to say hello to Judd, and that he couldn't stand it anymore too many distractions in a city that has always been too full of them. Mr. Ballantine shrugged. "He became too famous, and SoHo became SoHo," he said. "What could he do?" --------------- Residential Real Estate: Cold Call Leads to Philip Johnson Project on East Side http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/21/nyregion/21REAL.html November 21, 2003 RESIDENTIAL REAL ESTATE By NADINE BROZAN It is safe to assume that few designs for luxury high rises start with a cold call, but that is how Roy Stillman and Martin Levine, developers of a new 32-story condominium at East 90th Street and Third Avenue, first reached Philip Johnson and his partner, Alan Ritchie. Shortly after Mr. Stillman and Mr. Levine acquired the 8,017-square-foot site, at 181 East 90th Street and occupying half a block on Third Avenue, they decided to call the 97-year-old Mr. Johnson, dialing information to get his phone number. "It took us two calls, but we got through to him and heard an old, frail voice on the phone," Mr. Stillman recalled. " `Mr. Johnson,' we asked, `is that you?' " Indeed it was. Persuading the architects to undertake the project was not even a tough sell. "I had never met them," Mr. Ritchie said, "but their enthusiasm and concern for architecture rather than just being developers whetted our appetite. Hearing architecture discussed early on in a project that is not a museum or church, I said to Mr. Johnson that we should get to know them." Although Mr. Johnson is increasingly fragile, Mr. Ritchie said, "he was involved in the early stages and continued to be informed about what was going on." The architects were not starting from scratch. The site had been assembled, and since it was to be developed within zoning regulations for the area, the project needed no special approvals. The air rights that would allow the developers to transfer unused height authorizations from other buildings had been bought from their owners. The shape of the building, called the Metropolitan, had been worked out by the firm of Schuman Lichtenstein Claman Efron Architects, which designed the apartment interiors. "When they came to us, they already had the zoning and massing of the building approved, but we created the facade and changed some shapes," Mr. Ritchie said. "We also had control of the interior public spaces, lobby, corridors and elevators." Among the building's more distinctive characteristics is the way it cantilevers 21 feet over one adjoining building on East 90th Street and 15 feet over another that extends along Third Avenue to 91st Street. Because zoning restrictions require a setback at 60 to 80 feet high and that half the structure be below 150 feet high, "we decided to build fat instead of tall," Mr. Stillman said. Fat and curvy, in fact. In addition to the cantilevers, which hover over but do not touch the neighboring structures, the building has seven semicircular bays where glass-enclosed living rooms are set. But the interiors came first, Mr. Levine said. "We always knew that this was a family neighborhood, and we needed family-size apartments," he said. Mr. Claman, whose firm was the architect of record, said, "We determined that these apartments would be like prewar units, with large foyers and rooms larger than what can be found in the rental market. The two-bedrooms here are in excess of 1,250 square feet, compared to new rental buildings we are doing that are approximately 950 square feet. So they are about 30 percent bigger." One-bedroom apartments of 1,255 square feet are $750,000 to $925,000. Two-bedroom units of 1,423 to 2,077 square feet are $1.1 million to $1.950 million; three-bedrooms, at 1,948 to 2,319 square feet, are $1.930 million to $3.7 million; and four-bedrooms, all of them 2,234 square feet, are $2.295 million to $2.475 million. There are also three terraced penthouses, which are $4.7 million and $7.5 million, respectively. The $120 million project is the first collaboration between Mr. Stillman and Mr. Levine. In addition to the de rigueur touches for condos commanding these kinds of prices, like marble bathrooms and sophisticated telecommunications systems, the building has some unusual touches. Kitchen cabinets are by the craftsman Wendell Castle. The master bath is a tub within a tub that permits the water to overflow, pass through a filter and recirculate. "And look at this," Mr. Stillman said proudly, slamming his shoe into a glass cabinet. It made not the slightest crack. -------------- American Culture's Debt to Gay Sons of Harvard http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/29/books/29HARV.html May 29, 2003 By DINITIA SMITH CAMBRIDGE, Mass. George Santayana, F. O. Matthiessen, Lincoln Kirstein, Leonard Bernstein, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Philip Johnson: all of them Harvard men professors and students and all of them gay or bisexual. But is that news? "The fact that, individually, they were gay is not news," said Douglass Shand-Tucci, the author of "The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality and the Shaping of American Culture," recently published by St. Martin's Press. "But the Harvard gay experience is more important in the shaping of American culture, because, in so many ways, Harvard is more important." Harvard being Harvard, one could make a list of prominent people with ties to the university in almost any category alumni from Cincinnati, say, or Jews, or blacks. Still, Mr. Shand-Tucci says there is an important untold story about the singular environment Harvard provided for gays and how it shaped their later contributions to American culture. Harvard, of course, has viciously discriminated against gays in the past. Last year a writer for The Harvard Crimson discovered records from 1920 of a secret university court that had persecuted homosexuals, apparently driving two to suicide. But Mr. Shand-Tucci argues that despite harassment, Harvard's atmosphere was also creatively and intellectually fertile for gays. The biggest factor in the evolution of Harvard's gay culture, Mr. Shand-Tucci said, was the university's proximity to Boston, which was the nation's intellectual capital at least until the turn of the 20th century. Gay Harvard men had access to the city's rich cultural and intellectual life. New Haven, he said, was a provincial town, Yale's presence notwithstanding; Princeton was deliberately built away from big-city temptation. But Boston also had a liberal tradition and thriving Bohemian culture, "a synonym for gayness," Mr. Shand-Tucci said, with many bars and venues where gay men met. Another aspect of Harvard that nourished gay culture, Mr. Shand-Tucci said, was the Socratic tutorial, which can lead, as it did at Oxford and Cambridge, to intense teacher-student relationships. Mr. Shand-Tucci, Harvard '72, was interviewed amid the paneled walls, oil paintings and tasseled curtains of the Harvard Faculty Club. With his tweedy dress he could be a professor. But he has a mischievous air. "There are two Douglasses," he said. "One respectable. One not." He admits to being "50-something," and says he suffers from "unrequited love" for another man. He speaks in the drawl of a Boston Brahmin, which he almost is. He was raised in "genteel poverty," he said. His father, John, was Italian-American, Harvard '32, a prominent anesthesiologist. His mother, Geraldine, a social worker, was Scotch and German. They divorced when Mr. Shand-Tucci was 10, and the family's mansion was divided into a rooming house. Today, the relics of his patrimony portraits, faded rugs, old furniture are crammed into his studio apartment. He came to his history of gay Harvard by way of his 1998 book "The Art of Scandal: The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner," about the 19th-century art collector. "She and Santayana were the presiding geniuses of gay Harvard," he said. He is also author of "Boston Bohemia, 1881-1900," a biography of the architect Ralph Adams Cram, and of the official Harvard Campus Guide. In "The Crimson Letter" Mr. Shand-Tucci builds on the work of other scholars to describe how gay Harvard men were exposed to a world of learning and artistic achievement. Gay faculty members mentored gay students, gays formed friendships, collaborated and became patrons of the arts. Among prominent Harvard gay men whose stories Mr. Shand-Tucci recounts is Professor F. O. Matthiessen, who virtually created the field of American literature with his book "American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman." Mr. Shand-Tucci cites "Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature" by the scholar David Bergman to argue that "American Renaissance" was a direct result of Matthiessen's 20-year love affair with the painter Russell Cheney. Cheney encouraged Matthiessen's interest in Whitman. That book, Mr. Shand-Tucci said, was the ultimate expression of Matthiessen's love for Cheney and a secret celebration of the gay artist. Matthiessen committed suicide in 1950 after Cheney's death. Citing O'Hara's biographer Brad Gooch, Mr. Shand-Tucci writes that the intense friendship between O'Hara and his fellow undergraduate Mr. Ashbery contributed to the development of postmodernism. Mr. Shand-Tucci describes the two wiling away hours in the 1950's, discussing high and low culture, everything from Schoenberg to Hollywood. Leonard Bernstein "was introduced at Harvard to the glories of Western classical music," Mr. Shand-Tucci said. "He had an affair with the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos, who was visiting Boston." Mr. Shand-Tucci said that a tutor took Bernstein to a concert in New York where he met Aaron Copland, who was not a Harvard student but "with whom he had an affair, and who stayed with him in his dorm." "His experience at Harvard solidified him as a gay man," Mr. Shand-Tucci said, though Bernstein later married and had children. Another bisexual Harvard man, Lincoln Kirstein, went on to be co-founder with Balanchine of the New York City ballet. He was also co-founder with Varian Fry at Harvard of the magazine Hound & Horn. The art historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock published an article in the magazine on the decline of architecture. Another gay Harvard man, the future architect Philip Johnson, read the article, became Hitchcock's friend, and together they developed what became known as the International Style. Kirstein later repudiated Boston and Harvard. Nonetheless, he wrote that his "identification with a society of living and thinking New England dynastic actors gave a security and assurance prompting freedom of action." Mr. Shand-Tucci points out that three gay or bisexual former Harvard graduate students changed the course of gay history. Alfred Kinsey, who is said to have been bisexual, by asserting in the Kinsey Report that 10 percent of men had homosexual experiences, made it difficult to consider homosexuality a crime anymore, Mr. Shand-Tucci said. Franklin Kameny helped lobby the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from the list of psychiatric illnesses. And the historian John Boswell made it more difficult to consider homosexuality a sin, Mr. Shand-Tucci said, by depicting the church's sanctioning of gay relationships in his book "Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe." Some may disagree with Mr. Shand-Tucci's broad definition of homosexuality, which includes those who have sex with both men and women, and "the ideal of the platonic, that homosexuality is the highest and purest kind of love, more so than opposite-sex love." And some of Mr. Shand-Tucci's assertions may raise hackles. The historian Martin Duberman, who has written of his experiences as a Harvard graduate student, is writing a biography of Kirstein. He has not read Mr. Shand-Tucci's book, but he said: "I was certainly not nurtured at Harvard. Instead, I was hounded and belittled." As for Boston's gay culture, he said, "In the mid-1950's there were only two gay bars in Boston." He added, "In Cambridge there wasn't anything." Mr. Shand-Tucci said: "There are not more gays at Harvard than anyplace else. But when you put together that such an enormous number of gay men who influenced the arts and culture came out of Harvard, it is a significant phenomena." ------------- Fort Worth Updates Its Museums http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/travel/11ftworth.html May 11, 2003 By ROBERTA SMITH FORT WORTH is unusual among small American cities for its high incidence of seriously ambitious art museums. There are three to be exact - a lot for a town of 535,000 people. For more than 30 years they have shared a swath of meticulously maintained greensward along Camp Bowie Boulevard, not far from the Will Rogers Memorial Center near the center of town. One has tended to outshine the others: the Kimbell Art Museum, blessed with an acclaimed building designed by Louis Kahn, opened in 1972 with a small, choice collection of ancient and Asian art and European painting. In the Kimbell's shadow are the Fort Worth Modern Art Museum, the state's first art museum (founded in 1892 and committed to living artists almost since then), and the Amon Carter Museum, founded in 1961 to house a collection of Western art, including a cache of works by Frederick Remington. Both institutions have been perennially hamstrung by cramped buildings that no amount of fiddling or expanding seemed to improve. Now the balance has shifted. In October 2001, the Amon Carter, having torn down two awkward additions and called back the original architect, Philip Johnson, unveiled a handsome new wing that triples its gallery space while dovetailing nicely with the original building. And in December of 2002, the Fort Worth Modern pulled up stakes altogether for a striking new building, designed by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, that is right next to the Kimbell. To see the results, I went to Fort Worth with my husband in early April for a weekend. What we found was, as they say, a whole new ballgame. There are not many places where you can contemplate new museum architecture without getting depressed, view extraordinary groupings of European and American paintings and have an epiphany in feminist history all in the same day, while stumbling across a calf-cutting contest and never once have to resort to vehicular transportation. All these high points were within comfortable walking distance of one another. First we paid our respects to the Kimbell, which I had not visited for more than 20 years. In the downstairs entrance hall we found a stunning array of European paintings: Caravaggio, de la Tour, Picasso, Goya, Vel?zquez, Bellini - a nice welcome but, well, a little premature. Upstairs we discovered why. While the building is as great as ever, the airy central gallery once used for the display of art has been given over to a large gift shop that, to add insult to injury, sells toys and frivolous accessories for the home along with art books and postcards. One group of galleries was closed for the installation of a traveling exhibition of Egyptian art (opening today); another held a traveling show of so-so quality: "Modigliani and the Artists of Montparnasse" (through May 25). I suggest visiting Fort Worth when the Kimbell is devoting more of its luminous gallery space to its own superb collection. Nearby, the new Modern impressively synthesizes late-20th-century austerity with the more intimate scale and textures of Japanese and Bauhaus architecture. This imposing two-story Minimalist structure in glass, steel and architectural concrete quintuples the museum's gallery space and includes its first cafe (highly recommended for lunch). Curling around a two-acre reflecting pool, Mr. Ando's design exploits the fact that in a place as historically parched as Texas, few things are as riveting as quantities of water, elegantly presented. When the water's surface is nearly level with the floor - as it is in the museum's enormous foyer, the cafe and the wonderful glass-walled corridors that wrap around the exteriors of the ground-floor galleries - the experience is sublime. A sprawling, garrulous Philip Guston retrospective (through June 8) filled the upstairs galleries at the time of our visit, but it is great to see the collection begin to strut its stuff on the ground floor. Despite the thrills of the Ando building, the biggest surprise of the trip came at the Amon Carter. The compact two-story Johnson addition is admirably understated, lined with exquisitely fossil-pocked Texas limestone. Like Mr. Ando, Mr. Johnson seems to have taken a page from Kahn's use of unadorned surfaces as well as his exploitation of the clear Texas light. The museum's popular Western art, mostly by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell, still occupies pride of place in the old building (which now resembles a spacious and sprightly porch) and fills a long new gallery leading to a skylighted dome. The real treat is upstairs: the museum's 19th- and early-20th-century American paintings ensconced in skylighted galleries. There are exemplary canvases by Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Martin Johnson Heade, Thomas Eakins, John Frederick Peto and John Mix Stanley, as well as works by American modernists like Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove and Stuart Davis (six astutely selected Davis works form a veritable survey). There were also impressive displays from the museum's large photography collection and a lively exhibition of watercolors by Winslow Homer, which he made during fishing trips into the wilderness. Pleasant nonart adventures lurk nearby. The newest is the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, which opened last June in a small Art Deco-style building on the other side of Lancaster Avenue, a short walk from the Kimbell. The incongruous Beaux-Arts interior is overdone and occasionally tacky - as in the lenticular images of Western heroines, including Georgia O'Keeffe, that line the balcony. But the exhibits are both illuminating and uplifting (take your daughter). Packed with artifacts and punctuated with kiosks showing film clips (Dale Evans's saddle, the sequined costumes of the eminent Western designer Nudie and a white leather trick saddle passed down from mother to daughter), it vividly traces the daring and the achievements of professional cowgirls, the first American women to live off their earnings as athletes. On our way to the museum we ventured into the Coliseum at the Art Deco Will Rogers Memorial Center and were smitten by the sight of highly trained horses shadowing the movements of young steers with amazing quickness, skill and, it seemed, no apparent direction from their riders. (We learned that it was a calf-cutting contest; that, yes, the riders don't do a whole lot and that there is something horse- or cattle-related at the arena nearly every week.) On our way back we came upon a sizable flea market in the center's Hall of Cattle and found a painting that fitted both our budget requirements (under $10) and our weekend luggage. For accommodations, we lucked into the Ashton, a new 39-room boutique hotel that occupies a refurbished 1916 Italianate Arts and Crafts building, of brick with wrought-iron balconies - on Main Street, a five-minute drive from the museum cluster. Well run and extremely comfortable, the hotel is part of a downtown revitalization that has brought back to serviceable life many of the turn-of-the-20th-century and Art Deco buildings that managed to survive the city's various postwar building booms. And Fort Worth seems to excel at casual, inexpensive dining. Joe T. Garcia's offers unpretentious but outstanding Mexican food (there is no menu). If you're willing to wait in line on busy nights, you can dine beneath the stars in the large, lush garden. At Angelo's, a legendary barbecue place that is beyond authentic, spurs are normal and stuffed trophies of several species, including moose and buffalo, stare down as you tuck into what may be the world's best ribs. If the experience doesn't bring out the inner vegetarian in you, you probably don't have one. In other words, a weekend of looking at art and architecture of Fort Worth can be punctuated with equally vivid encounters with the plainer, indigenous pleasures of Texas life. ROBERTA SMITH is an art critic for The Times. From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 27 15:29:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:29:58 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Dowd: Love for Sale Message-ID: Love for Sale Liberties column by Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, 5.1.27 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/27/opinion/27dowd.html I'm herewith resigning as a member of the liberal media elite. I'm joining up with the conservative media elite. They get paid better. First comes news that Armstrong Williams got nearly a quarter of a million from the Education Department to plug No Child Left Behind. The families of soldiers killed in Iraq get a paltry $12,000. But good publicity? Priceless. Mr. Williams helped out the first President Bush and Clarence Thomas during the Anita Hill scandal. Mr. Williams, who served as Mr. Thomas's personal assistant at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission when the future Supreme Court justice was gutting policies that would help blacks, gleefully attacked Professor Hill, saying, "Sister has emotional problems," and telling The Wall Street Journal "there is a thin line between her sanity and insanity." Now we learn from media reporter Howard Kurtz that syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher had a $21,500 contract from the Health and Human Services Department to work on material promoting the agency's $300 million initiative to encourage marriage. Ms. Gallagher earned her money, even praising Mr. Bush in print as a "genius" at playing "daddy" to the nation. "Mommies feel your pain," she wrote in 2002. "Daddies give you confidence that you can ignore the pain and get on with life." Genius? Not so much. Spendthrift? Definitely. W.'s administration was running up his astounding deficit paying "journalists" to do what they would be happy to do for free - just to be friends with benefits, getting access that tougher scribes are denied. Consider Charles Krauthammer, who went to the White House on Jan. 10 for what The Washington Post termed a "consultation" on the inaugural speech and then praised the Jan. 20th address on Fox News as "revolutionary," said Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group. I still have many Christmas bills to pay. So I'd like to send a message to the administration: THIS SPACE AVAILABLE. I could write about the strong dollar and the shrinking deficit. Or defend Torture Boy, I mean, the esteemed and sage Alberto Gonzales. Or remind readers of the terrific job Condi Rice did coordinating national security before 9/11 - who could have interpreted a memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" as a credible threat? - not to mention her indefatigable energy obscuring information undercutting the vice president's dementia on Iraq. My preference is to get a contract with Rummy. It would be cost effective, compared with the latest $80 billion he needs to train more Iraqi security forces to be blown up. For half a mil, I could write a doozy of a column promoting Rummy's phantasmagoric policies. What is all this hand-wringing about the 31 marines who died in a helicopter crash in Iraq yesterday? It's only slightly more than the number of people who died in traffic accidents in California last Memorial Day. The president set the right tone, avoiding pathos when asked about the crash. "Obviously," he said, "any time we lose life it is a sad moment." Who can blame Rummy for carrying out policies of torture? We're in an information age. Information is power. If people are not giving you the intelligence you want, you have to customize to get the intelligence you want to hear. That's why Rummy also had to twist U.S. laws to secretly form his own C.I.A. A Pentagon memo said Rummy's recruited agents could include "notorious figures," whose ties to the U.S. would be embarrassing if revealed, according to The Washington Post. Why shouldn't a notorious figure like Rummy recruit notorious figures? I could write a column denouncing John McCain for trying to call hearings into Rummy's new spy unit, suggesting the senator is just jealous because Rummy's sexy enough to play James Bond. The president might need my help as well. He looked out of it yesterday when asked why his foreign policy is so drastically different from the one laid out in Foreign Affairs magazine in 2000 by Ms. Rice - a preview that did not emphasize promoting democracy and liberty around the world. "I didn't read the article," Mr. Bush said. Why should he? Robert McNamara never read the Pentagon Papers. Why should W. bone up on his own foreign policy? Freedom means the freedom to be free from reading what you promise voters and other stuff. I could make that case - if the price was right. From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 27 15:31:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:31:38 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Roger Kimball: The intellectual capacity of women Message-ID: Roger Kimball: The intellectual capacity of women http://www.newcriterion.com/weblog/2005_01_01_cano.html#110624648623646756 Poor Larry Summers. The president of Harvard University has good instincts. But he wants people to like him. So he starts off by saying things that are true but unpopular. Then people get angry with him and he apologizes and takes it all back. A case in point: A few years ago, Summers caused a ruckus when he suggested that Cornel West, who was then the Alphonse Fletcher, Jr., University Professor of Afro-American Studies at Harvard, buckle down to some serious scholarship (West's most recent production was a rap CD called "Sketches of my Culture") and that he lead the way in fighting the scandal of grade inflation at Harvard where one of every two grades is an A or A-. Summers was quite right. Cornel West is one of the most ridiculous figures in contemporary academia. He calls himself a philosopher but really is just a political sermonizer. He acts like an old-time Baptist minister. But his revival meetings feature not hellfire and brimstone but sermons about racism and the horrible failings of American society. What Summers did not understand was that college presidents are not allowed to criticize black professors. No sooner had Summers opened his mouth than West went into a snit, followed by the entire politically correct community at Harvard and beyond. Charles J. Ogletree, another professor of Afro-American Studies at Harvard, thundered that "It's absolutely critical that the president make an unequivocal public statement in support of affirmative action." And The New York Times, natch, lumbered into support West and criticize Summers. You might ask, why is it "critical" that the president of Harvard support "affirmative action"? After all, "affirmative action" is just a fancy phrase for discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or some other PC category. Isn't Harvard an institution of higher education where what matters is accomplishment, not skin color, sex, or ethnic background? Summers evidently thought so, but he was quickly disabused of the notion. When West and his buddies in the Afro-American Studies department whined and threatened to leave Harvard, Summers collapsed. The whole thing, he said, was "a huge misunderstanding." He told everybody how "proud" he was of "the Afro-American Studies program at Harvard, collectively and individually. We would very much like to see them stay at Harvard and will compete vigorously to make this an attractive environment." In other words, "Name your price, boys. I give up." Writing about the West v. Summers affair in National Review, I suggested that readers send Larry Summers a copy of Ralph Bucksbaum's zoological classic, Animals Without Backbones. I am happy to report that several did. I didn't do any good, though. Larry Summers still suffers from spinelessness. Witness his current travails. Last time it was the blacks. This time it is other big "affirmative action" interest: the girls. Speaking at a conference last week, Summers suggested that one of the reasons there are not more women scientists at elite universities is because of "innate differences" between the sexes. My what a storm that comment sparked! "I felt I was going to be sick," sniffed Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who then walked out on Summers. Oh, the poor dear. "My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow," Hopkins said. "I was extremely upset." Of course, Summers was right. There are innate differences between men and women. Everyone knows this, even the feminists who most loudly deny it. But the wailing and gnashing of teeth that greeted Summers's comments pushed him into full retreat. Yesterday, he published an open letter to the Harvard Community in order to abase himself: "I deeply regret the impact of my comments," he said, "and apologize for not having weighed them more carefully." Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Naturally, he also claimed that he had been misunderstood: "Despite reports to the contrary, I did not say, and I do not believe, that girls are intellectually less able than boys, or that women lack the ability to succeed at the highest levels of science." Now, I know some pretty smart ladies. I'm sure you do as well. Maybe, dear reader, you are a very intelligent woman yourself. That's not the issue. The issue is whether the innate difference between the sexes might express itself in differences in intellectual aptitude as well as in other ways (musculature, for example). The best answer to this question that I know is from the late Australian philosopher David Stove. In 1990, Stove created a small firestorm by publishing an essay called "The Intellectual Capacity of Women." I can well understand the controversy that Stove's essay sparked, because I experienced a repeat performance when I was shopping around Against the Idols of the Age, my anthology of Stove's writings which included that essay. I forget how many publishers turned it down, many quite rudely, but eventually Transaction published the book and you can read the whole essay in that volume (available from Amazon here; Partisan Review reviewed the book here). I am thinking of sending Professor Hopkins a copy. Here's how the essay begins: I believe that the intellectual capacity of women is on the whole inferior to that of men. By "on the whole," I do not mean just "on the average"; though I do mean that much. My belief is that, if you take any degree of intellectual capacity which is above the average for the human race as a whole, then a possessor of that degree of intellectual capacity is a good deal more likely to be a man than a woman. This proposition is consistent, of course, with there being women, and indeed with there being any number of women, at any level of intellectual capacity however high. But it does mean, for example, that if there is a large number of women at a given above average level of intellectual capacity, then there is an even larger number of men at that level. In the past almost everyone, whether man or woman, learned or unlearned, believed the intellectual capacity of women to be inferior to that of men. Even now this is, I think, the belief of most people in most parts of the world. In this article my main object is simply to remind the reader of what the evidence is, and always was, for this old belief, and of how strong that evidence is. An opposite belief has become widely current in the last few years, in societies like our own: the belief that the intellectual capacity of women is on the whole equal to that of men. If I could, I would discuss here the reasons for the sudden adoption by many people of this opinion. But I cannot, because I have not been able to find any reasons for it, as distinct from causes of it. The equality-theory (as I will call it) is not embraced on the grounds of any startling facts which have only lately come to light. It is not embraced on the grounds of some old familiar facts which have been misunderstood until lately. It is not embraced, as far as I can see, on any grounds at all, but from mere prejudice and passion. If you ask people, "What evidence is there for the equality-theory?," you do not get an answer (though you are likely to get other things). Rather, the question is felt to be somehow improper, morally or intellectually, and is thought not to deserve any answer. I do not know why it should be thought so. The question is a perfectly proper one morally and intellectually, and should not be hard to answer. That men and women have the same intellectual capacity is not, after all, a self-evident proposition, like (say) 7 + 5 = 12"; nor is it something just obvious, like (say) the sun's rising in the east. So if it is rational to believe it, there must be evidence for it: facts which lead to it by good reasoning. But where is that evidence to be found? By contrast, there is no difficulty at all in saying what the evidence is, and always was, for the other theory, the theory of the inferior intellectual capacity of women. This evidence is not at all esoteric, but on the contrary is of the most familiar and homely kind. The main reason why I believe, and the main reason why nearly everyone always has believed, that the intellectual capacity of women is inferior to that of men, is just this: that the intellectual performance of women is inferior to that of men. The reasoning involved, then, is reasoning from inferior performance to inferior capacity. It is reasoning of the same general kind, therefore, as that which convinces us, even if we understand nothing of the internal make-up of cars, that Fords are on the whole inferior to Mercedes; or as that which convinces dog-fanciers that Irish setters are not as smart as labradors; or as that which convinces everyone that the intellectual capacity of seven-year-old children is on the whole inferior to that of nine-year-olds. They do not do as well, and we infer from this that they cannot do as well. This is a very homely kind of reasoning, to be sure. But that is not to say that there is anything wrong with it, and in fact no one distrusts reasoning of this kind. On the contrary, we could scarcely take a single step, in science or in common life, if we did not rely on this kind of reasoning. Of course no thoughtful person mistakes such reasoning for proof. Inference from inferior performance to inferior capacity is fallible: that should go without saying. Everyone knows that a car, or an organism, may on a given occasion fail to perform as well as it can perform: there was some interfering factor at work. And this can happen not just on one occasion, or to just one organism. A whole class of organisms might perform below capacity, in a given respect, for any length of time, or forever. It is even logically possible that every organism of a certain kind should have a certain capacity and yet that interfering factors prevent every one of them from ever exercising that capacity even once. So far, then, is inferior performance from being an infallible indication of inferior capacity. And so far, too, should we be, from mistaking the inferior intellectual performance of women for a proof of their inferior intellectual capacity. This, then, is one commonplace truth which needs to be borne in mind when we think about the intellectual capacity of women: that capacity does not require performance. But there are other such commonplace truths, and some of these point in the opposite direction. One is that, although performance is no infallible guide to capacity, it is, in the end, the only guide we have or can have. I do not mean that there can be no evidence of A's capacity to F, unless A actually has F-ed at least once. That would be a stupid thing to say. When I meet a brown snake in the bush, I have good evidence of its capacity to inflict a dangerous bite on me, even if this particular snake has never bitten anyone. Again, a chemist often has good evidence concerning the capacities of a compound which, until he makes it in the laboratory, has never even existed, and which therefore cannot possibly have yet exercised any of its capacities. All I mean is, that the evidence for an unexercised capacity, which is a kind of unrealized possibility, cannot consist in its turn just of other unexercised capacities, or unrealized possibilities. Such evidence must include some actualized possibilities, some exercises of capacities. If the chemist, for example, is entitled to say in advance that new compound X will have the capacity to F, that is because he knows of capacities which have actually been exercised by existing elements or compounds. While, then, capacity does not require performance, still evidence of a capacity does require performances, of some kind, by something or other, somewhere along the line. What explains the inferior intellectual performance of women as compared with men? Sexism? Partriarchy? Not likely. As Stove observes, The variety of physical and social circumstances in which women have found themselves is, surely, just about as great as the variety which is possible for any class of persons. Women have been pirates and poets, princes and paupers, priests and prostitutes: you name it, some women have been it, if it is logically and biologically possible for a woman to be it. Almost every conceivable factor, therefore, which might have been thought to constitute an impediment to the intellectual performance of some women, has been removed in the case of some other women. Yet their intellectual performance, or at least the comparison of it with the intellectual performance of men, has not varied. This is true of the variety in women's circumstances which occurs spontaneously between or within societies; but the same is true of that variety in women's circumstances which has been introduced by human contrivance. Wherever some defect has been found or imagined in existing arrangements for the education of females, energetic and ingenious people have always been busy setting up a form of education free from that real or supposed defect. Novel schemes of education, intended among other things to remove obstacles to the exercise of the intellectual capacity of women, are at least as old as Plato, and hundreds of them have been put into more or less widespread practice. Yet despite all this variety in the supposed causes of female intellectual performance, the effects have been singularly invariant. I do not mean that these schemes of education have never had any effect at all on female intellectual performance. I do not know, but it is in any case indifferent to my thesis, whether they have or not. My thesis only requires, what is the case, that educational innovations have never shown any significant tendency to bridge the gap between male and female intellectual performance. If the fragile Professor Hopkins reads this, she will doubtless be prostrate for a week. After, of course, she makes a little spectacle of herself by registering her pain, disgust, nausea, indignation, etc. But her tantrum, like that of the other feminists who joined in her outrage, is less disturbing than Larry Summers's craven retraction. He is the leader of an institution supposedly dedicated to intellectual inquiry, that is to say, to the truth. Once again, however, he has shown himself to be the puppet of expediency and the intimidating forces of political correctness. From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 27 15:42:23 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:42:23 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Skeptical Inquirer: Martin Gardner: The Brutality of Dr. Bettelheim Message-ID: Martin Gardner: The Brutality of Dr. Bettelheim http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_6_24/ai_66496160/print [I distinctly remember reading an article in Scientific American in 1960 about a boy who thought he was a robot. I'd been meaning to track it down for years, but at least I turned up a reference to it. It was 1959 September, not 1960, and the title was "Joey: A Mechanical Boy." Alas, there is not too much about the article itself, which has not yet been made available to academic libraries online by those digiitizing old journals, such as JStor of the Mellon Foundation. [Since 1959, I've gotten interested in philosophy and have wondered why those who don't believe in free will do not act like Joel! This is clearly something for transhumanists to discuss. [Bettelheim was a media-promoted guru in his days, but his star fell even more than Freudianity in general. And that is the subject of Garner's expos?.] Dr. Bruno Bertelheim Devoted most of his time Condemning mothers to perdition By blaming them for their autistic child's condition. Friend Armand T. Ringer composed the above clerihew after reading a first draft of this column. It is an accurate statement about the enormous harm that can be done by dogmatic, closed-minded Freudians. Estimates of the number of children afflicted with a broadly defined autism vary from one in a thousand to one in 250. It is more common than Down syndrome. Boys outnumber girls four to one. Symptoms start to appear when a child approaches two, but often are not recognized as autistic until the child begins school. Autistic children look deceptively normal, and many are very beautiful. Like almost all mental illnesses, autism has a spectrum of symptoms that range from mild to severe. Severe autism has the following traits: 1. Children with autism are self-absorbed ("auto" is Greek for "self"). They live inside a glass shell, hardly recognizing the existence of their parents or others. They are unresponsive to affection and incapable of normal social relationships. 2. They seldom make eye contact, and rarely point to anything. Many refuse to talk or they speak only in brief sentences. Some speak fluently but in repetitive sentences. They are unable to maintain a normal conversation. 3. About 80 percent are mentally retarded. 4. Their behavior is bizarre. They are prone to a wide variety of repetitive rituals such as banging their head, flapping their arms, slapping their face, pulling their hair, or rocking back and forth. They can spend hours repeating such mindless tasks as running sand through their fingers in a sandbox, typing a single key on a typewriter, or spinning objects on the floor or in their hands. The slightest change in their experience, such as a mother wearing a different dress, or a toy moved to a different spot, can trigger a severe tantrum. 5. Some autistic adults resemble idiot savants in developing curious skills such as memorizing a phone book, an ability to multiply large numbers or identify huge prime numbers, or quickly memorize complicated musical scores. Some become obsessed with calendars and can correctly name the day of the week for any given date. Some rapidly solve jigsaw puzzles even when the pieces are picture-side down. Such strange abilities, along with the usual self-absorption, were featured in the movie Rain Man, a film in which Dustin Hoffman takes the role of Raymond, an autistic middle-aged man. [1] "Joey: A Mechanical Boy," by Dr. Bruno Bettelheim (Scientific American, March 1959), is a famous article about an autistic child who thought he was a robot. He would construct all sorts of weird machines around his bed, and repeatedly connect himself to them to obtain power for running himself. It would be interesting to know Joey's later history. Autism is a mysterious malady whose causes are not known. There are several competing theories, none confirmed, but all recognize that autism is a brain disorder probably caused by a set of malfunctioning genes. If one of a pair of identical twins is autistic, the other twin will be autistic about 65 percent of the time. The most persistent myth about autism is that there is a normal child inside the shell desperately wanting to emerge if only the shell can be shattered. There is no normal child inside the shell. For a report on recent research into the causes of autism, see "The Early Origins of Autism," by Patricia Rodier, professor of obstetrics at the University of Rochester, in Scientific American, February 2000, pages 56-63. See also Uta Frith's earlier article "Autism," in the same magazine, June 1993. A London psychologist, Frith is also the author of Autism: Explaining the Engima (1989). Evidence that autism is in any way related to how parents behave is unconvincing, nor is there evidence that it is related, as so many parents foolishly believe, to early vaccinations. Marian DeMeyer, an Indiana University psychiatrist, made a careful study of three groups: parents with an autistic child, parents with normal children, and parents with a brain-damaged child. Personality tests showed that the three groups were indistinguishable. (See DeMeyer's paper in The Journal of Autism and Childhood Schizophrenia, Vol. 2, 1972, pages 49-66.) More recent work, I am told, has cast doubt on DeMeyer's findings. Siblings of autistic children are normal. The percentage of children with autism is the same in all cultures, and among all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. Medication and therapy help mildly autistic children lead normal lives, but for severe autism no cures are known. Strong evidence that autism is a dysfunction of the brain has been available for half a century, and was taken for granted by neurologists outside the Freudian tradition. For a while it was called childhood schizophrenia. However, psychoanalysts and amateur Freudians persisted for decades in the fantasy that autism was somehow caused by unloving parents, especially by cold "refrigerator mothers." The leading advocate of this absurd view was Dr. Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990). Bettelheim was a small, bald, nearsighted man with thick glasses and a strong Austrian accent. He liked to tell people he was so ugly that when his mother first saw him after his birth she exclaimed "Thank God it's a boy!" Born in Vienna to a Jewish father who died of syphilis, Bettelheim claimed to have studied under Freud. Although he was briefly psychoanalyzed in Vienna, he was not trained as an analyst. He never claimed to be a psychiatrist of any sort -- only a psychologist. His doctorate in Austria was on the aesthetics of nature. Arrested by the Nazis, Bettelheim spent a year in Nazi concentration camps, first at Dachau, then at Buchenwald. This was before they became extermination centers. Released in 1939, he came to the United States where he was given a job teaching at Rockford College for women, near Chicago, and later at the University of Chicago. In 1994 he took over the University of Chicago's decaying Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for disturbed children, which he headed from 1944 to 1978. During this period he became one of the country's most respected experts on childhood pathology. Bettelheim wrote eleven books, numerous articles in technical and popular journals, and an advice column that ran for ten years in The Ladies Home Journal He lectured everywhere, and even appeared as a psychiatrist in Woody Allen's 1983 film Zelig. In 1983 Bettelheim retired from the Orthogenic School, or Bruno's Castle as it was sometimes called, and moved to California. He had early on been divorced from Gina, his first wife. His second wife Gertrude died in 1984 after forty-three years of a happy marriage and three children. After a stroke in 1987, Bettelheim moved to a retirement home, which he despised, in Silver Spring, Maryland. In 1990, ill, lonely, and depressed over a rift with his daughter Ruth, he overdosed on sleeping pills, fastened a plastic bag over his head, and died. After his suicide, evidence of Bettelheim's dark side began to emerge. Although many of his counselors at the Orthogenic School considered him brilliant and admirable, others began openly to call him a cruel, egotistical tyrant, the guru of a cult, and a power-mad mountebank. Evidence accumulated that Bettelheim exaggerated his bravery in the concentration camps, and lied when he said that Eleanor Roosevelt had helped him escape. He claimed an 85 percent cure rate of autistic children in his care, a boast no other psychiatrist came close to making. Critics pointed out that Bettelheim alone diagnosed autism and he alone evaluated "cures." Most of his cures, they charged, were of children who were not even autistic or only mildly so. Although untrained in analysis, Bettelheim was a Freudian fundamentalist. Counselors reported that every trivial incident that occurred in his school, such as a child breaking a dish or unintentionally hitting another child with a rubber ball, was taken by Bettelheim to be an unconscious expression of hostility. He was given to outbursts of anger and frequently slapped children. Alida Jatich, a patient for seven years who became a computer programmer in Chicago, published an article in The Chicago Reader (a weekly newspaper) in which she said Bettelheim once dragged her naked and dripping from a shower and slapped her repeatedly in front of her dorm mates. In her words: In person, he was an evil man who set up his school as a private empire and himself as a demigod or cult leader. He bullied, awed, and terrorized the children at his school, their parents, school staff members, his graduate students and anyone else who came into contact with him. Roger Angres, another former patient, in an article for Commentary (October 1990), described what he called Bettelheim's "insulting and intimidating theatrics." He insulted children, Angres wrote, "just in order to break any self-confidence they might have. I lived in terror of his beatings, in terror of his footsteps in the dorm." The degree of Bettelheim's cruelty toward patients was mild compared to his cruelty toward mothers. For a detailed account of this I recommend science writer Edward Dolnick's excellent, hard-hitting Madness on the Couch: Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis (Simon and Schuster, 1998). It is one of a raft of recent books exposing psychoanalysis as one of the most monumental pseudosciences of the last century. What follows is taken mainly from Dolnick's book. Bettelheim was convinced, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that autism had no organic basis but was caused entirely by cold mothers and absent fathers. "All my life," he wrote, "I have been working with children whose lives have been destroyed because their mothers hated them." Again: "The precipitating factor in infantile autism is the parent's wish that his child should not exist." In the mid-fifties Bettelheim adopted a policy known as "parentectomy." Under this policy, parents were not allowed to see their children for at least nine months! You can imagine the desolation felt by mothers when they were told they had created their child's pathology. Annabel Stehli, one of many such mothers, read Bettelheim's book about autism, The Empty Fortress (1967), a book his detractors called The Empty Book. In The Sound of a Miracle (1991), Stehli described her reaction this way: I was carrying around this terrible secret. I didn't want to talk to anyone about Berrelheim. My husband said that he thought it was baloney, but I didn't talk to my friends about it. I was very alone. I really felt as if I had a scarlet letter on, only the "A" was for "Abuse." I felt that I'd hurt Georgie in some subtle way that I couldn't grasp, and if I could just figure it out, then maybe she'd be okay. There was a part of me that wanted to believe Berrelheim, because that would mean that if I got better, Georgie would get better. A typical bit of Freudian nonsense in Bettelheim's Empty Fortress was how he explained a child's obsession with weather. The child broke down the word "weather," unconsciously of course, into "we/eat/her." It's hard to believe, but Bettelheim actually wrote: "Convinced that her mother (and later all of us) intended to devour her, she felt it imperative to pay minutest attention to this 'we/eat/her'." Other Freudian analysts, as well as scientists who were not psychiatrists, followed Bettelheim in blaming the poor mothers for their child's autism. Psychologist Harry Harlow's research with monkeys who were deprived of mothers convinced him that autism was caused by icebox mothers. Dutch zoologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, who for his study of bird behavior shared a 1973 Nobel Prize in medicine with zoologist Konrad Lorentz and Karl von Frisch, also fell for the preposterous cold mother theory. He actually wrote a book titled Autistic Children: New Hope for a Cure (1983). And what was the cure? It was constant hugging of children by their mothers! Dolnick records an ironic twist to all this. Psychiatrists Maurice Green and David Schecter, in several technical papers, argue that autism is caused not by cold mothers, but by mothers who love a child too much! They give a milk bottle before a child asks for it, or a toy before he or she wants it. By excessive anticipation of their child's needs, the child naturally doesn't bother to speak and remains a permanent infant. There are two biographies of Bettelheim. Richard Pollak, former literary editor of The Nation, published The Creation of Dr. B in 1997. It's a bitter attack on Bettelheim, who was called Dr. B by his patients and counselors. Nina Sutton's Bettelheim: A Life and a Legacy (1996), translated from the Greek, is more balanced. She sees Bettelheim as a complex man with both good and bad qualities. A hostile account of a character called "Dr. V" is in Tom Wallace Lyons's autobiographical novel The Pelican and After (1983). Lyons was a former patient of Bettelheim Bernard Rimland, a psychologist and father of his autistic son Mark, is the author of Infantile Autism (1964), another slashing attack on Bettelheim. Dolnick devotes several pages to Mark, an amiable man who has managed to adjust to life. Mark is one of those autistics who can name the day of the week for any date, but is unable to explain how he knows. When Bettelheim died, Rimland's comment reflected the opinions of almost all authorities on autism. "He will not be missed." My next column will be about Facilitated Communication, a crazy development involving autistic children that is almost as sad and deplorable as Bettelheim's attacks on refrigerator mothers. Martin Gardner's two-volume Annotated Alice has recently been reprinted in a one-volume edition. Note (1.) Such abilities can be greatly exaggerated. For example, a Newsweek cover story "Understanding Autism" (July 31, 2000), cited an autistic savant who could memorize a phone book in ten minutes. No one can even read a phone book in ten minutes, let alone memorize it. From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 27 15:44:42 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:44:42 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Finding Homosexual Threads in Lincoln's Legend Message-ID: Finding Homosexual Threads in Lincoln's Legend NYT December 16, 2004 By DINITIA SMITH [A later article by Richard Brookheiser (?sp) said the issue did not matter, since Lincoln was such a great man. Tell that to Mr. Mencken!] Was Abraham Lincoln a gay American? The subject of the 16th president's sexuality has been debated among scholars for years. They cite his troubled marriage to Mary Todd and his youthful friendship with Joshua Speed, who shared his bed for four years. Now, in a new book, C. A. Tripp also asserts that Lincoln had a homosexual relationship with the captain of his bodyguards, David V. Derickson, who shared his bed whenever Mary Todd was away. In "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln," to be published next month by Free Press, Mr. Tripp, a psychologist, influential gay writer and former sex researcher for Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, tries to resolve the issue of Lincoln's sexuality once and for all. The author, who died in 2003, two weeks after finishing the book, subjected almost every word ever written by and about Lincoln to minute analysis. His conclusion is that America's greatest president, the beacon of the Republican Party, was a gay man. But his book has not stopped the debate. During the 10 years of his research, Mr. Tripp shared his findings with other scholars. Many, including the Harvard professor emeritus David Herbert Donald, who is considered the definitive biographer of Lincoln, disagreed with him. Last year, in his book "We Are Lincoln Men," Mr. Donald mentioned Mr. Tripp's research and disputed his findings. Mr. Tripp was the author of "The Homosexual Matrix," a 1975 book that disputed the Freudian notion of homosexuality as a personality disorder. In this new book, he says that early biographers of Lincoln, including Carl Sandburg, sensed Lincoln's homosexuality. In the preface to the original multi-volume edition of his acclaimed 1926 biography, Sandburg wrote: "Month by month in stacks and bundles of fact and legend, I found invisible companionships that surprised me. Perhaps a few of these presences lurk and murmur in this book." Sandburg also wrote that Lincoln and Joshua Speed had "streaks of lavender, spots soft as May violets." Mr. Tripp said that references to Lincoln's possible homosexuality were cut in the 1954 abridged version of the biography. Mr. Tripp maintains that other writers, including Ida Tarbell and Margaret Leech, also found evidence of Lincoln's homosexuality but shied away from defining it as such or omitted crucial details. Mr. Tripp cites Lincoln's extreme privacy and accounts by those who knew him well. "He was not very fond of girls, as he seemed to me," his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, told Lincoln's law partner William Herndon. In addition, Lincoln was terrified of marriage to Mary Todd and once broke off their relationship. They eventually had four children. But in "We Are Lincoln Men" Mr. Donald wrote that no one at the time ever suggested that he and Speed were sexual partners. Herndon, who sometimes slept in the room with them, never mentioned a sexual relationship. In frontier times, Mr. Donald wrote, space was tight and men shared beds. And the correspondence between Lincoln and Speed was not that of lovers, he maintained. Moreover, Lincoln alluded openly to their relationship, saying, "I slept with Joshua for four years. " If they were lovers, Mr. Donald wrote, Lincoln wouldn't have spoken so freely. Mr. Tripp charts Lincoln's relationships with other men, including Billy Greene, with whom Lincoln supposedly shared a bed in New Salem, Ill. Herndon said Greene told him that Lincoln's thighs "were as perfect as a human being Could be." Lincoln's fellow lawyer Henry C. Whitney observed once that Lincoln "wooed me to close intimacy and familiarity." Then there is Lincoln's youthful humorous ballad from 1829, "First Chronicles of Reuben," in which he refers to a man named Biley marrying another man named Natty: "but biley has married a boy/ the girles he had tried on every Side/ but none could he get to agree/ all was in vain he went home again/and sens that he is married to natty." Mr. Tripp tries to debunk the popular opinion among scholars that Lincoln's lifelong depressions were caused by the death of his first love, Ann Rutledge. He writes that at the time she was supposedly involved with Lincoln, she was engaged to John McNamar and that her name appears nowhere in Lincoln's letters. Mr. Donald also takes issue with the conclusion that Lincoln had a sexual relationship with Derickson, his bodyguard at his presidential retreat, the Soldiers' Home, outside Washington. Mr. Tripp writes that their closeness stirred comment in Washington, and cites a diary entry from Nov. 16, 1862, by Virginia Woodbury Fox, wife of Gustavus Fox, assistant secretary of the Navy. She recounted a friend's report: " 'There is a Bucktail soldier here devoted to the president, drives with him, and when Mrs. L. is not home, sleeps with him.' What stuff!" But Mr. Donald writes that "What stuff!" meant she was dismissing the rumor. Mr. Tripp cites a second description of the relationship in an 1895 history of Derickson's regiment, the 150th Pennsylvania Volunteers, by Thomas Chamberlain, Derickson's commanding officer: "Captain Derickson, in particular, advanced so far in the president's confidence and esteem that, in Mrs. Lincoln's absence, he frequently spent the night at his cottage, sleeping in the same bed with him and - it is said - making use of his Excellency's night-shirts!"When Derickson was to be transferred, Lincoln pulled strings to keep him. But Mr. Donald wrote that if their relationship was romantic, they would not have separated so casually when Derickson finally left Washington in 1863. Despite Mr. Donald's criticism, Mr. Tripp has won support from other scholars. Jean H. Baker, a former student of Mr. Donald's and the author of "Mary Todd Lincoln: a Biography" (W. W Norton, 1987), wrote the introduction to the book. She said that Lincoln's homosexuality would explain his tempestuous relationship with Mary Todd, and "some of her agonies and anxieties over their relationship." "Some of the tempers emerged because Lincoln was so detached," Ms. Baker said in a telephone interview. "But I previously thought he was detached because he was thinking great things about his court cases, his debates with Douglas. Now I see there is another explanation." "The length of time when these men continued to sleep in the same bed and didn't have to was sort of an impropriety," Ms. Baker said. The question of Lincoln's sexuality is complicated by the fact that the word homosexual did not find its way into print in English until 1892 and that "gayness" is very much a modern concept. Ms. Baker said the focus of 19th-century moral opprobrium was masturbation, not homosexuality. "Masturbation was considered more dangerous," she said. "For homosexuals, there was a cloud over them, but it seldom rained." People, she noted, "were accustomed to these friendships between men." In researching Lincoln, Mr. Tripp created a vast database of cross-indexed material, now available at the Lincoln Library in Springfield, Ill. He began the book working with the writer Philip Nobile, but they fell out. Mr. Nobile has charged that Mr. Tripp plagiarized material written by him and fabricated evidence of Lincoln's homosexuality. "Tripp's book is a fraud," Mr. Nobile said in an interview. He declined to say what was fraudulent, however, because he said he was writing his own article about it. After Mr. Nobile made his charges, Free Press delayed publication. "We made some slight changes," said Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for the publishing house, "and we are satisfied that we are publishing a book that reflects Mr. Tripp's ideas and is supported by his research and belief." The manuscript was edited by Mr. Tripp's friend Lewis Gannett. Larry Kramer, the author and AIDS activist, said that Mr. Tripp's book "will change history." "It's a revolutionary book because the most important president in the history of the United States was gay," he said. "Now maybe they'll leave us alone, all those people in the party he founded." Michael B. Chesson, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and another former student of Mr. Donald's, wrote an afterword to Mr. Tripp's book supporting his thesis. The book is "enormously important to understanding the whole person," he said in an interview. He likened the criticism to early objections to Fawn Brodie's 1974 biography of Thomas Jefferson in which she claimed that Jefferson had children with his slave Sally Hemings; later genetic studies suggested that they had at least one child together. Finding the truth is a sacred principal for historians, Mr. Chesson said, adding, "It's incumbent on us as scholars to present to readers material if historians have ignored it or swept it under the rug because they don't agree with it." Still, if Lincoln was gay, how did it affect his presidency? Ms. Baker said that his outsider status would explain his independence and his ability to take anti-Establishment positions like the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation. As a homosexual, she said, "he would be on the margins of tradition." "He is willing to be independent, to do what is right," she said. "It is invested in his soul, in his psyche and in his behavior." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/16/books/16linc.html From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 27 15:51:53 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:51:53 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] AP: Russian lawmakers: Ban Jewish groups Message-ID: Russian lawmakers: Ban Jewish groups http://www.turkishweekly.net/news.php?id=2635 through the Jerusalem Post 5.1.25 [I think this is a first, detesting anti-semitism and then blaming the Jews for it.] A group of nationalist lawmakers is calling for an investigation aimed at outlawing all Jewish organizations in Russia, accusing Jews of inciting ethnic hatred and provoking anti-Semitism. In a letter dated January 13, about 20 members of the lower parliament house, the State Duma, asked Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov to investigate their claims and, if they are confirmed, to launch proceedings "on the prohibition in our country of all religious and ethnic Jewish organizations as extremist." Arguing that Jews were to blame for anti-Semitism, the authors of the letter want Jewish groups outlawed based on legislation against extremism and fomenting ethnic discord. "The negative assessments by Russian patriots of the qualities and actions against non-Jews that are typical of Jews correspond to the truth, indeed these actions are not random but prescribed in Judaism and have been practiced for two centuries," says the letter, faxed in part to The Associated Press by the office of lawmaker Alexander Krutov. "Thus," it says, "the statements and publications against Jews that have incriminated patriots are self-defense, which is not always stylistically correct but is justified in essence". The stunning call to ban all Jewish groups comes amid concerns of persistent anti-Semitism that continues to plague Russia. Jewish leaders have praised President Vladimir Putin's government for encouraging religious tolerance, but rights groups accuse the authorities of failing to adequately prosecute the perpetrators of anti-Semitic and racial violence. Russia's chief rabbi, Berel Lazar, said the lawmakers were either insane or "quite sane but limitlessly cynical" and were hoping to win support "by playing the anti-Semitic card." Speaking with Israel Radio, Lazar called on Russia's chief prosecutor to move to expel the legislators from the parliament since, he said, they were acting against all religions and were harming Russia. "Everyone who read this letter surely understood that something irregular had taken place. It is a known fact that there are those in parliament who posses these views. However, it has been a while since an anti-Jewish theme has been raised, and suddenly everyone is talking about it", Lazar told the radio. According to the rabbi, "The timing was not coincidental and was made on the same day in which the UN commemorated 60 years since the liberation of Nazi death camps. President Putin is slated to visit Auschwitz in the near future and they probably wanted to express their objection to the upcoming visit by sending this letter." With Putin planning to join events this week commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops, Russia's Holocaust Foundation head Alla Gerber said it was "horrible that as we're marking the 60th anniversary of this tragic and great day ... we can speak of the danger of fascism in the countries that defeated fascism." She said that while the Russian state itself is no longer anti-Semitic, there are "anti-Semitic campaigns that are led by all sorts of organizations." "The economic situation is ripe for this, an enemy is needed, and the enemy is well-known, traditional," Gerber said. Responding to the lawmakers' letter, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said on Israel Radio that the Israeli government "will act on every level to combat this. We do not let any group or country live peacefully with phenomena like these." "There is a large international call to arms against anti-Semitic incidents anywhere in the world. To my great sorrow, these incidents have been happening a lot lately, but we have to fight anti-Semitism anywhere it is." Echoing anti-Semitic tracts of the Czarist era, the letter's authors accuse Jews of working against the interests of the countries where they live and of monopolizing power worldwide. They say the United States "has become an instrument for achieving the global aims of Judaism." "It is possible to say that the entire democratic world today is under the monetary and political control of international Judaism, which high-profile bankers are openly proud of," the letter says. Along with outlawing Jewish organizations, the lawmakers call for the prosecution of "individuals responsible for providing these groups with state and municipal property, privileges and state financing." The prosecutor general's office could not immediately be reached for comment on the letter, which the Interfax news agency said was signed by lawmakers from the nationalist Rodina and Liberal Democratic parties as well as the Communist Party. From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 27 15:54:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:54:43 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Nation: New Power for 'Old Europe' Message-ID: New Power for 'Old Europe' http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20041227&s=schapiro by MARK SCHAPIRO [from the December 27, 2004 issue] The Bush Administration has interpreted its victory in the 2004 election as a mandate to take its free-market policies to further extremes. It is signaling its determination to unhinge US industry from what remains of regulations limiting the poisons in our water, our bodies and our air. But while they are newly emboldened at home, the Administration and its corporate allies are looking warily across the Atlantic to Brussels. Here, in the capital of the European Union, an unprecedented challenge to longstanding practices of American industry is unfolding. Since the fall of the Berlin wall, the European Union has been steadily transforming itself from a facilitator of trade to a sophisticated geopolitical power with the teeth to back up its policies--an evolution that has occurred largely under the American public's radar. Over the past decade, EU member states have ceded governing and enforcement authority to Brussels in areas ranging from environmental regulation to food safety, accounting standards, telecommunications policy and oversight of corporate mergers. As a result, US companies that do business in Europe--which remains America's largest export market--are quickly learning that "old Europe" is now wielding new world power. Just this year, US manufacturers of such goods as chemicals, cars and cosmetics have been confronted with EU regulations that force a choice: Either conform to the EU's standards of pre-emptive screening for toxicity--far tougher than US standards--or risk sacrificing the European market, which, with 450 million people, is now larger than that of the United States. In the process, the European Union is challenging US presumptions of unilateral decision-making on issues with tremendous consequences for American companies and consumers, treading on ground that has long been considered sacred turf. "Americans are in for a rude shock," says Clyde Prestowitz, a former Reagan Commerce Department official and author of Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions. "Other players are establishing their own standards, and they have the muscle to make them stick. We are headed into a new era." REACH and Ye Shall Find Last summer, while Americans were focused on the worsening crisis in Iraq and the intensifying presidential campaign, the US chemical industry was consumed by plans at the EU's Environment Commission to complete the details of a proposed regulation known as REACH--Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals. For the $500 billion chemical industry, REACH threatens a revolution in chemical regulation--upending decades-long practices that were pioneered in the United States. In 1976 the US Congress passed the Toxic Substances Control Act, which required chemicals introduced after the law took effect in 1979 to be tested before being registered for use. The problem with TSCA--or what critics call the "Toxic Substances Conversation Act"--is that 80 percent of the chemicals on the market today were introduced before 1979. But Europe at that time followed the US model, so in effect TSCA established the global standard. No more. REACH is the first effort to secure environmental data on some 30,000 chemicals that have been on the market in the United States and around the world without any significant testing of their toxicity on human health and the environment. These include an array of highly toxic substances that were effectively grandfathered into the market by TSCA, including industrial solvents like ethyl benzene, known to cause nerve damage; heavy metals like cadmium, an ingredient in many paints and industrial ceramics that can cause kidney failure; and a family of plastic byproducts, called furans, that are potent carcinogens and endocrine disrupters. Many of these chemicals have already been found in high concentration in the blood of Americans and Europeans; during a World Health Organization convention in Budapest last June, the World Wildlife Fund International revealed forty-four different hazardous chemicals in the bloodstream of top EU officials, including then-Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstrom, now the vice president of communications for the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU. The proposed regulations, according to Robert Donkers, one of the authors of REACH and now posted in Washington as environment counselor for the European Commission's US delegation, evolved out of the realization that little was known about chemicals contained in a vast array of consumer products. "There was great political anxiety in Europe when we discovered that carcinogenic chemicals were being released from consumer products like diapers and softeners in baby toys. We discovered that neither consumers nor the government was informed about the chemical properties of what is in those and other products and how they break down. An overhaul was needed." Under REACH, chemicals determined to be "carcinogens, mutagens or repro[ductive] toxins" would have to be taken off the market within a decade. According to the EPA's own standards, this could amount to as many as 1,400 chemicals. For other chemicals, REACH establishes several layers of testing for toxicity--with strictures that grow tougher as the quantity and risk increases. The proscriptions also apply to chemicals in manufactured goods: REACH encourages substitutions for chemicals that pose "potentially serious or irreversible threats" to human health. A new European Chemicals Agency would administer the program from Helsinki. The REACH directive represents an upheaval in the basic philosophy of chemical regulation, flipping the American presumption of "innocent until proven guilty" on its head by placing the burden of proof on manufacturers to prove chemicals are safe--what is known as the "precautionary principle." REACH adds extra bite with a requirement that toxicity data be posted publicly on the new agency's website. Thus, test results that were once tightly held by chemical companies will suddenly be available to citizens and regulators across the globe. That prospect foreshadows trouble for US chemical producers. "The chemical industry is scared that the American people might not want to be second-class world citizens," says Charlotte Brody, executive director of Health Care Without Harm, a Washington, DC-based coalition of healthcare professionals. "If people in Europe have chemicals in their toys that are not dangerous, maybe we don't want those same chemicals for our kids." With REACH, the Europeans hit a powerful nerve. The chemical industry launched an intensive lobbying campaign, conducted in parallel with the Bush Administration, to derail the proposed directive before it becomes law. In late January, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued his now-famous slight of our European allies as "the old Europe," inside the State Department "old Europe" was causing panic: A draft position paper circulating inside Foggy Bottom expressed alarm at the evolving REACH proposal. By early March, the State Department sponsored a visit by Dow Chemical executives to Athens to lobby the Greeks--who at that time occupied the EU presidency--to oppose REACH. On April 29, Secretary of State Colin Powell sent out a seven-page cable to US embassies in all the EU member states claiming that REACH "could present obstacles to trade and innovation" and cost US chemical producers tens of billions of dollars in lost exports. The cable stated that REACH's precautionary principle was "problematic"--striking at the heart of the difference between the US and European regulatory approaches toward potential environmental hazards. The State Department's tone and apocalyptic predictions that REACH could adversely affect "the majority of U.S. goods exported to the EU" (over $150 billion last year) mirrored the position papers of the industry's main lobbying organization, the American Chemical Council, on REACH. The State Department claimed that REACH would be "unworkable in its implementation, [would] disrupt global trade, and adversely impact innovation." In June US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick reiterated that argument in a submission to the World Trade Organization's Technical Barriers to Trade Committee in Geneva. Those assertions have been vigorously disputed by the EU. In October the EU claimed in a countersubmission to the WTO that the costs of implementing REACH over the next eleven to fifteen years could total $3.5-$6.5 billion, but that those costs would be offset over time by profits generated from safer alternatives--and compare favorably to the $60 billion it estimates would be saved in chemical-related health costs alone over the next three decades. Zoellick's objections to REACH prompted Senators Frank Lautenberg and James Jeffords to request that he provide details about who the Administration consulted before issuing its position to the WTO. "We are troubled," the senators wrote Zoellick on October 19, "by reports that the Administration fashioned its position on REACH to reflect unsubstantiated cost concerns raised by a narrow segment of U.S. industry, without any genuine consideration of the likely health and environmental benefits that such policies would generate." Thus far there has been no response to their queries. EU officials I spoke with describe practically weekly visits from delegations representing the Commerce Department, the US Trade Representative, the State Department and/or the American Chemical Council. In April, then-Environment Commissioner Wallstrom complained to a meeting of EU and EPA officials in Charlottesville, Virginia, that REACH had been subject to "enormous interest and lobbying," but she insisted that the "consensus" for reform of the current system remains strong. The lobbying continues: In October the US mission to the EU sent out a joint appeal with the Australian mission to the EU missions of Canada, Japan and other Asian nations to attend a meeting to develop a "coordinated outreach" strategy among "EU trading partners" on REACH. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) were invited to meetings with the US- and Australian-orchestrated delegations so the latter could communicate their opposition to REACH--an extraordinary intrusion of the United States into a debate over internal EU policy. Never before has an EU proposal drawn fire from such heavy guns. The US chemical industry, like other American industries, has been discovering that a presence in Brussels is now a must--and has had to learn new ways to exert influence in a governing institution with three chambers, twenty-five countries and twenty national languages, and in which the usual cocktail of campaign contributions, arm-twisting and seduction are neither warmly received nor, in the case of campaign contributions, legal. "We've certainly had to learn a lot about a new parliament, new procedures, new political parties," says Joe Mayhew, senior adviser to the American Chemical Council. The lobbying campaign has largely backfired. Its primary effect has been to delay a final vote on REACH in the European Parliament from February to the middle of next year at the earliest. But there is little doubt it will pass--almost a decade in the making, support for REACH in the Parliament stretches broadly across party lines. "It is not a question of if but when," says the EU's Robert Donkers. Hearings will commence in the Parliament on January 19. The current Dutch president of the EU has committed to forging political agreements around REACH for consideration by the Council of Ministers before the hearings begin. The fact that policies emanating from Brussels now threaten longstanding American industrial practices is a sign of how profoundly trans-Atlantic relations are shifting. "We used to have to deal with individual countries," comments Mayhew of the American Chemical Council. "We'd pay attention to, say, France. Not to be pejorative here, but we wouldn't really pay much attention to what Spain was doing. Having the EU as a single bloc with regulatory authority is a new thing for us." A Makeover for the Cosmetics Industry Every morning across America, tens of millions of women apply to themselves an average of nine "personal care" products. From tubes and bottles and delicate brushes come the tools of beauty and self-preservation known as cosmetics. Users of these products might assume that somebody is watching to insure that potentially toxic ingredients are kept away from intimate contact with their body. They would be wrong. Neither the Food and Drug Administration nor any other government agency regulates ingredients used in the preparation of cosmetics. The Food, Drugs and Cosmetics Act of 1938 established extraordinarily lax standards for the regulation of cosmetic ingredients. But earlier this year, when the Environmental Working Group compared the ingredients in 7,400 personal care products with potentially hazardous chemicals identified by the Centers for Disease Control and other leading medical institutions, dozens of varieties of skin and tanning lotions, nail polish, mascara and other personal care products were found to contain known and suspected carcinogenic, mutagenic and endocrine disrupting chemicals. The improvisational nature of the cosmetics industry is about to change. EU member states submitted plans to the European Commission to institute new guidelines established by what's known as the "Cosmetics Directive," which takes effect this coming February. The directive calls for the removal of ingredients suspected of causing "harm to human health" from cosmetics and personal care products in Europe. The effects of that directive are being felt around the world. The main regulatory body for cosmetics in the United States is the industry itself, represented by the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association (CTFA). What that means, in effect, is that several times a year a Cosmetic Ingredient Review board (CIR)--made up of toxicologists drawn primarily from universities and paid for by the CTFA--reviews the existing literature on ingredients and makes recommendations to the industry. There is nothing that requires any member company to respond to the board's safety or health recommendations. Over the past three years the review board suggested that at least nineteen ingredients be removed from personal care products--including coal tar, a hair dye linked to high rates of bladder cancer among hairdressers; sodium borate, sometimes called boric acid, which has been linked to testicular development problems and is included in Desitin diaper rash ointment for infants, and which the CIR recommended "should not be used on infant or injured skin"; iodopropynyl butylcarbamate, a mutagen in animal testing included in a South Beach tanning spray that the CIR recommended "not be used in products intended to be aerosolized"; and ethoxyethanol acetate in nail polish, which the CIR stated is "unsafe for use in cosmetic products." The FDA has done nothing to mandate removal of these or legions of other potentially dangerous ingredients, according to the Environmental Working Group. Last spring the Safe Cosmetics Campaign, a group of women's and environmental health NGOs, sent an appeal to some 250 firms that sell personal care products in the United States, asking that they conform to the health requirements of the EU's Cosmetics Directive as well as take other actions to insure more stringent controls over potentially toxic ingredients. Of those, the campaign heard from sixty-five companies; responses ranged from resistance to accommodation. Revlon and Estee Lauder replied by citing the CTFA's official response to the EU: On March 25, CTFA stated that the directive "represents an unnecessary change in the philosophy of regulation of cosmetic ingredients in the EU." Other major producers, like L'Oreal, Liz Claiborne and Gillette, responded that they were already beginning the process of reformulating their products to conform to the requirements of the Directive; the Gap and Alberto Culver indicated that they would do so if they discovered ingredients within the EU's range of health concerns. Natural product companies, like Aveda, Custom Aesthetics and numerous small firms, claimed they were already in compliance. Several of the largest companies, like Unilever, have yet to respond, while Procter & Gamble insisted to the campaign that it would continue its policy of formulating products on a market-by-market basis. After the Safe Cosmetics Campaign began running a newspaper ad in the fall about the potential health dangers from cosmetics, Revlon shifted gears, indicating its willingness to abide by the EU's new strict rules. "We are asking companies to be accountable for the safety of their cosmetics," says Janet Nudelman, program director of the Breast Cancer Fund. To accomplish that goal, public health advocates looked not to Washington but to Brussels--where the EU is now a force that enjoys transatlantic reach and is far tougher than our own FDA. A Car's Life Jean Tinguely was a Swiss sculptor renowned for his grand mechanical creations, huge machines full of whirring wheels and gears that were designed to self-destruct. His works, widely dispersed through Europe's finer art institutions--and showing up more rarely in the United States--evoke a kind of grinding perfection, a speed-up of what is built into every mechanical device: its own death. Much like the automobile, which may purr steadily for ten or twenty years or even longer. But ultimately those gears and crankshafts, like a Tinguely machine, will fail, and the automobile will die. Then what happens? Every year aging cars, left to decay in scrapyards or fields or suburban driveways, create more than 15 million tons of waste across the United States and Europe. Many components in those autos contain toxic ingredients, including metals like lead, mercury, chromium and cadmium, which are known to induce problems such as nerve damage and cancer in laboratory animals. The plastic in the seats and dashboards never biodegrades. Cars and their component parts are left to despoil the landscape, leach into the soil and poison groundwater. There is nothing to stop them. Across the Atlantic, the EU has implemented a program with the oddly philosophical title "End of Life Vehicles Directive." Starting in 2006, all cars produced or sold in the EU must be built with at least 85 percent recyclable components; by 2015 that figure rises to 95 percent. The directive also bans toxic heavy metals like cadmium and requires that manufacturers take responsibility for disposing of their cars. According to the European Commission's administrator for the vehicles program, Rosalinde van der Vlies, European, Japanese and Korean car manufacturers are already beginning to adapt their production processes in anticipation of the new requirements. For US car manufacturers the directive presents a historic challenge. American car companies export virtually no cars to Europe; thus US manufacturers are under little direct pressure to adapt to European standards. But each of the US Big Three has substantial ties to the European market: Ford has its own Ford Europe production facilities and owns the Jaguar line in Britain. General Motors owns the German Opel, the Swedish Saab and produces its own line of vehicles in Britain under the Vauxhall label. DaimlerChrysler is owned by the German manufacturer Daimler-Benz. Glenn Mercer, an auto industry analyst for the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, says there is no sign of these reforms' being instituted by either US parent or subsidiary companies, nor is a serious effort being made to develop alternatives to the toxic chemicals included in American cars. The concept of being responsible for the ultimate disposal of those cars has been received in this country like a message from another planet. Mercer comments: "Every time you drive a car you've made a decision to pollute. With every car, you have the decision: Do you dispose of it in a controlled setting, as required by the European Union? Do you find alternatives to the chemicals and take the hit on sales that may result from a higher price? Or do you leave them in your car, and have them dispose themselves into the environment over fifteen years?" Thus far, the United States has been taking the latter approach--dual production according to dueling standards. At the core of the EU's regulatory approach is what van der Vlies calls "life cycle analysis": assessing the actual costs over the lifetime of consumer products, from their creation to their demise. The End of Life Vehicles Directive is intended to insure that those costs are shared by the manufacturer--while providing a powerful incentive to develop more sustainable alternatives. Every European diplomat I spoke with was careful to insist that Europe's new generation of environmental directives is not intended to "impose" Europe's will upon the United States. Camilo Barcia Garcia-Villamil, the Spanish consul in San Francisco, who spent fifteen years working with the EU in Brussels, comments: "The European Union now has increased decision-making capacity. And if American companies want to be active in the European market, they must take account of European rules. We are not imposing our standards. We are making foreign companies respect our standards when they are in Europe." This is diplomatic language that is new in the context of transatlantic relations--though its inverted formulation would be quite familiar to generations of postwar American policy-makers. "Economically, Europe stands toe to toe with the United States," says Clyde Prestowitz, now head of the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington. "We can't dictate to it any longer. We have to negotiate." The New Power of 'Old Europe' When Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State for President Ford in 1977, he famously asked in frustration, "What telephone number do you dial to reach Europe?" Today, the area code for that number is clear: 32-2, for Brussels, which has been transformed from the provincial capital of a small European country into an international metropolis bustling with a multilingual, highly educated EU workforce drawn from across the continent. The European Union has its roots in a simple "coal and steel pact" signed between France and Germany in 1951 to facilitate trade in those critical commodities to aid in postwar reconstruction. Over the subsequent decades of the cold war, an integrated Europe was supported by the United States as a restraint on Germany's resurgence and a critical Western bulwark against the expansion of the Soviet Union. The pact would later evolve into the Common Market and, finally, into the political and economic powerhouse of today's European Union. For the first time in history, a superpower has emerged that is not based on nationalistic ambitions or military power but upon a voluntary submission of national aspirations to a transnational authority. Its architects were well aware of the EU's departure from the usual march of political history: Jacques Delors, the visionary European Commission president from 1985 to 1994, used to refer lightheartedly to the evolving Union as an "Unidentified Political Object." On foreign affairs, Europeans continue to have trouble speaking with one voice--as the divisions in Europe over the US invasion of Iraq showed. But on domestic matters, the EU speaks for Europe--and it is those initiatives, emanating from Brussels, that are sending powerful messages across the Atlantic. "In Europe today, we are seeing a focal point of regulatory action other than the United States that, for the first time in the postwar period, is driving world markets," says David Wirth, a trade law specialist who negotiated the Montreal Protocol on ozone depletion on behalf of the United States and is currently director of international studies at Boston College Law School. Indeed, a broad spectrum of American industry has already felt the potency that comes from an integrated market and differing standards of environmental and consumer protection. Microsoft, for example, was fined $497 million earlier this year by the EU for its "anti-competitive practices," and General Electric's long-planned takeover of Honeywell was skewered in 2002 by the EU's Competition Commission, which has now emerged as a critical first stop by corporations en route to a merger. "It used to be," comments Amelia Torres, spokeswoman for the Competition Commission, "that the EU would be the last part of any deal. Now they know they have to come here first." The agribusiness company Monsanto became accustomed to contentious forays into Brussels while struggling to obtain EU acceptance of its genetically engineered seeds. EU politics are a complicated business; the Parliament is as tumultuous a democratic body as any. The recent controversy over the nomination of a new European justice commissioner with extreme views on women and homosexuals illustrated some of the social and political frictions that continue to divide Europeans, a passing storm to which much of the American media responded with smug condescension. These developments came on the heels of a European parliamentary election last June that drastically changed the composition of the legislature: Ten new member countries, most from the orbit of the former Soviet Union, sent delegations to the Parliament; 50 percent of the MEPs who won election had never before served in Brussels. But these changes show little sign of derailing the regulatory policies that are now embedded in the EU's machinery of government. Now that Europe has a phone number, US ardor for integration has begun to cool. "The White House is questioning whether it's a good idea for Europe to be speaking with one voice," says Fraser Cameron, who served with the European Commission's delegation to Washington until 2002 and is now director of studies at the European Policy Center in Brussels. Cameron points out that the United States and the European Union remain each other's most significant trading partners in the world--our entanglements are deep and abiding. But as Europe becomes a more assertive political force, the question will become, as he puts it, "Why shouldn't Americans enjoy the same standards as Europeans?" Such a basic question used to run in the other direction, when the United States set the gold standard for the world's environmental health. And the answer strikes at the core of the Bush Administration's most savored narratives--that we, alone, are masters of our nation's fate. From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 27 15:47:04 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:47:04 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] WkStd: Honest, Abe? Message-ID: Honest, Abe? http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=5107&R=C3BC2744F 5.1.17 by Philip Nobile The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln by C.A. Tripp Free Press, 384 pp., $27 THE NOTION that Abraham Lincoln had homosexual experiences is hardly new. All the way back in 1924, Carl Sandburg's bestselling biography winked at Lincoln's "streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets." And more explicit versions of the idea have appeared in the years since--as signaled by "Log Cabin Republicans," the name chosen by gay members of the GOP for their advocacy group. But the attempt to use this "Gay Lincoln Theory," making the sixteenth president an icon for modern homosexuals, is now poised to make its biggest push--led by the late C.A. Tripp's The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, a book published this month by Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster. The topic of Lincoln's sexuality keeps reappearing because the available evidence is so tantalizing: a jokey poem he wrote in his youth about a boy marrying a boy, a four-year sleeping arrangement with adored friend Joshua Speed, a marriage sometimes said to be reluctant and less than amorous, a lifelong preference for male company, a documented claim that he shared a bed in the summer White House with his soldier-bodyguard in 1862, and a number of other suggestive items. C.A. Tripp, who died in 2003, was a well-known sex researcher, a prot?g? of Alfred Kinsey and the author of a 1975 volume, The Homosexual Matrix. After a decade of pondering Lincoln's relations with men, he pronounces in his posthumously published new book on Lincoln's masturbation habits, seduction style, sex positions, and orgasms. Confidently naming five male lovers of the president, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln declares the conclusion absolute and obvious that this married father of four was "predominately homosexual." The argument is "irrefutable," Gore Vidal blurbs on the book's cover. And, in fact, Tripp's work is as good as the case gets for Lincoln's walk on the Wilde side. Unfortunately, that is merely a way of saying the Gay Lincoln Theory fails any historical test. "Useful history" is always a dubious kind of scholarship. But in its attempt to be useful for gays today, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln reaches far beyond the merely dubious. The book is a hoax and a fraud: a historical hoax, because the inaccurate parts are all shaded toward a predetermined conclusion, and a literary fraud, because significant portions of the accurate parts are plagiarized--from me, as it happens. Tripp and I intended to be coauthors of the book, laboring together on the project from 1995 to 2000--when our partnership, already fissured by dueling manuscripts, came to a bitter end. We quarreled constantly over evidence: I said the Gay Lincoln Theory was intriguing but impossible to prove; he said it was stone-cold fact. More advocate than historian, Tripp massaged favorable indicators (Lincoln's early puberty), buried negative ones (Lincoln's flirtations with women), and papered over holes in his story with inventions (Lincoln's law partner and biographer William Herndon never noticed the homosexuality because he was an extreme heterosexual and thus afflicted with "heterosexual bias"). I quit the project first in 1999, when Tripp refused to include citations to Charles Shively, a former University of Massachusetts historian and Tripp's main guide to the gay Lincoln. "Darwin didn't do it," he said to me, referring to Darwin's initial failure to cite precursors in The Origin of Species. Although Tripp profusely copied ideas and references from Shively's flamboyantly rendered Lincoln chapter in Walt Whitman's Civil War Boy Lovers, he brushed off proper mention because he thought Shively's reputation for being "too gay-lib" would dissuade readers. After Tripp relented, I rejoined the book on one condition: We would write separate chapters, and a Lincoln expert would decide which one went in the book. In January 2000, when the time came to send out our competing versions of chapter one--about Lincoln's prized bodyguard--Tripp refused to let Dr. Tom Schwartz, secretary of the Abraham Lincoln Association and his choice for referee, do the expected peer review. Realizing that Tripp would never give up his homosexual bias or observe the customary standards of historiography, I resisted his offer to sign a new agreement. Sadly, we never spoke again. ONLY AFTER READING his two-column obituary in the New York Times on May 22, 2003, did I learn of a completed manuscript. A year later, I heard that Free Press had bought it and set a publication date for November 2004. Last July, I alerted Elisa Rivlin, Simon & Schuster's general counsel, to my suspicions of problems in Tripp's final text. According to Rivlin, it is company policy to ignore complaints about forthcoming books--but she was curious about what I knew, and we made a deal: In exchange for a copy of the galleys, I would vet the book for errors. Apart from jaw-dropping plagiarism in the first chapter, which kidnapped the text I wrote for the aborted peer review, I saw that Tripp was up to the same tricks that had forced me to withdraw from the project: consistently bending the evidence in the lavender direction. The con was so outrageous that I urged killing the book. "If you correct the errors, remove the copied material, restore what Tripp covered up, and make the proper attributions, there is not much left of Tripp's argument," I emailed Free Press counsel Jennifer Weidman. Emphasizing the risk of a Simon & Schuster-sponsored history fraud (it was also the house that published the plagiarized works of Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose), I turned over my correspondence with Tripp. The file included a four-page letter from Lincoln biographer and Simon & Schuster author David Donald, disparaging a 1996 draft of Tripp's argument. "Throughout you seem to be neglecting the fundamental rule, the historian has to rely on facts," observed Donald. "I don't mean to discourage you from doing further work--but I do think it ought to be more systematic and more empirical." Tripp was cavalier about the negative reaction from historians--ascribing their rejection of the theory to their unwillingness to admit homosexuality in their hero. He said that Donald told him that he would not believe Lincoln was gay even if Lincoln said so. Tripp was even convinced that another doubtful biographer was timid because he was a nervous closet case--until the man introduced him to his fianc?e. MY INTERVENTION seems to have caused second thoughts at Free Press. The publication date was shifted from November into the new year, sacrificing the Christmas trade. Rivlin appeared to value my criticism. After the first round of memos, she asked for more. Yet despite repeated requests, she blocked my meeting with Tripp's Free Press editor, Bruce Nichols. Company spokesman Adam Rothberg told the New York Times last month that "slight changes" were made after my protest and that "we are satisfied that we are publishing a book that reflects Mr. Tripp's ideas and is supported by his research and belief." BELIEF, ABSOLUTELY. Supported by Tripp's research, not quite. Free Press's corrections have managed to put the book's ideas in even a worse light than Tripp had left them. As he once wrote me after I toned down his purple prose on Lincoln's puberty, "with 'friendly' editing like this, we don't need any enemies." Look, for instance, at the discussion of Lincoln's adolescence. Tripp felt his date-of-puberty argument was the most-important "smoking gun" in the whole gay Lincoln arsenal. Not only did it lend a quasi-scientific luster to a largely speculative quest, it was his sole original contribution to the discussion of Lincoln's sexuality. According to Kinsey, extremely precocious puberty in males is associated with a higher lifelong sex drive, social extrovertism, and, in almost half the sample, at least some incidence of homosexuality. Consequently, Tripp sought to establish the earliest possible date for Lincoln's transition into adolescence and twisted the facts to do so. Initially, his source was William Herndon's 1888 biography, Herndon's Life of Lincoln. "In his eleventh year he began that marvelous and rapid growth in stature for which he was so widely noted in the Pigeon Creek settlement," wrote Herndon, relying on Lincoln's older grammar school classmate, David Turnham. Since Kinsey's average age for puberty was 13.7 years, Tripp said that Lincoln's eleventh year puberty increased the probability for some homosexual experience. So far, so good, if one grants that boys of Lincoln's day had the same average as Kinsey's twentieth-century sample, a wrinkle blithely ignored by Tripp. But in 1998, Tripp moved Lincoln's puberty date from eleven to nine after reading a full transcript of Herndon's scribbled Turnham interview, published in the 1998 Herndon's Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements About Abraham Lincoln: "immediately on landing in Ind I became acquainted with Mr Lincoln. My father and his were acquainted in Ky--Abe was then about ten years of age--I being 16 ys of age--Abe was a long tall dangling award drowl looking boy--went hunting and fishing together." Tripp insisted that Turnham meant Lincoln was long, tall, and dangling the very day they met. If Lincoln spurted so tall at ten, he must have attained puberty at nine, which implies that he was on the fastest possible track to youthful homosexual tryouts and likely homosexuality as an adult. YET A CAREFUL READING of Herndon's notes show that nothing Turnham recollected justifies this huge leap backward. As I told Tripp, Turnham did not precisely link his first impression of Lincoln with height. Rather his remark seemed to reflect a general memory of Lincoln's above-average stature throughout his boyhood. Later in the same interview, Turnham described Lincoln's height with the same language wrapped in the same misty reminiscence: "He loved fishing & hunted Some--not a great deal--He was naturally Cheerful and good natured while in Indiana: Abe was a long tall raw boned boy." But Tripp would not let go. The temptation to portray Lincoln as a nine-year-old poster boy for the Friends of Dorothy was too great. Turnham's description, despite the obvious ambiguity, became Tripp's foundation for backdating Lincoln's puberty, now "precisely known." Apparently, Simon & Schuster was not totally convinced. After I sent Rivlin a copy of Turnham's interview, a table-turning revision was inserted into the puberty passage in the second chapter of the book: Thanks to an accident of history, Lincoln's age at puberty happens to be precisely known. In March 1819 the Turnham family, longtime friends of the Lincolns back in Kentucky, moved "next door" to them in Indiana, less than a mile away. David Turnham was sixteen years old at the time; Abe had turned ten just the previous month. David later remembered Abe as a "long, tall, dangling, awkward, droll-looking boy," marking Abe's growth spurt as obvious enough by then to have been well under way for several months, with his first ejaculatory capacity predating even that; thus, Lincoln may have arrived at puberty before David Turnham first met him in March. In short, Lincoln hit puberty at age nine. Notice the contradiction between the claim that "Lincoln's age at puberty can be precisely known" and the later admission that "Lincoln may have arrived at puberty before David Turnham first met him." There was no "may have" in Tripp's galleys in which he wrote assuredly that "Lincoln arrived at puberty several months, perhaps half a year, before David Turnham first met him in March." The qualifier popped in during the publisher's rewrite just as the hyperbolic "several months, perhaps half a year before" extension was cut. If Tripp's editor were serious about correcting the dating exaggeration, he would have altered other passages in the book where the extreme puberty claim resurfaced without any qualification. SIMILAR EDITING CHALLENGES arise in the third chapter, where Tripp discusses Billy Greene, Lincoln's first bed partner in Herndon's Life of Lincoln. They clerked together in a general store in New Salem, Illinois, in 1831. Greene was then eighteen, destined to marry and father nine children; Lincoln was twenty-two. Based on his Greene interview, Herndon wrote: "William G. Greene was hired to assist [Lincoln], and between the two a life-long friendship sprang up. They slept in the store, and so strong was the intimacy between them that 'when one turned over the other had to do likewise.'" Naturally, this line excited Tripp, and he began to touch-up the evidence to fit his preconception. Thus, when Herndon asked Greene what he remembered about his first sight of Lincoln, Greene replied that he was "well and firmly built: his thighs were as perfect as a human being's could be." Bingo. Greene's eye on Lincoln's thigh, opined Tripp, "strongly suggests a sexual practice later named 'femoral intercourse,' . . . one of the most frequently used homosexual techniques." Likewise, Tripp treasured a line from the wife of Mentor Graham, briefly Lincoln's schoolmaster in New Salem, which seemed to confirm a lusty affection between Billy and Abe. But the source was an unfootnoted 1944 biography entitled Mentor Graham, the dialogue of which, its own authors admitted, was fictionalized. Unfazed, Tripp camouflaged the problem by introducing Mrs. Graham's quotation with the unexplained qualifier allegedly: "Allegedly, Graham's wife, Sarah, specifically mentioned that Billy and Abe 'had an awful hankerin', one for t'other.'" This usage was designed more to deceive than enlighten the reader, who hardly expects to see a concocted quotation passing for real in a nonfiction book. Despite my complaints, Tripp's editor made no adjustments in the hilarious "perfect thighs" and invented "hankerin'" items. But a third Greene passage got a correction that boomeranged on page 52: In later life on a visit to the White House Lincoln introduced [Greene] to his secretary of state, William Seward, saying that this friend of his, William Greene, was the man who taught him grammar. This embarrassed Greene, who knew little about grammar, so he remained silent for fear Seward would notice his deficiency. Lincoln later reminded Greene that he had helped Lincoln by quizzing him from a grammar book. Certainly the White House tribute was proof enough of Greene's help, and a salute as well to the reality of the grammar problem. But why, in fact, was Greene so embarrassed? One cannot know for sure, but a reasonable guess might be that those long ago grammar sessions, many of them in bed, ended with sexual contact. To now have these private events suddenly recalled within the formal surroundings of the White House by what may have seemed at the moment an all too free-speaking long-ago bed partner could have been a real jolt. Mark the oddly divergent explanations for Greene's discomfort with Seward. First the unsourced assertion that Greene was "silent for fear Seward would notice his deficiency," then, three sentences later, out of nowhere, Tripp's "reasonable guess" that Greene was nervous about Lincoln's edging too close on those hot nights in New Salem. The answer is simple: Tripp did not write the "for fear" sentence. It was inserted in the book because I sent Free Press a passage from Thomas Reep's 1927 book, Lincoln at New Salem, in which Greene relayed the origin of his unease: "This statement embarrassed Greene, who himself knew little about grammar and in whose conversation grammatical rules were not always adhered to, so that he did not engage in conversation for fear that Seward would notice his deficiencies and wonder at Lincoln's statement." I had previously showed Reep's treatment to Tripp, but he preferred cooking up a sexual fantasy to sourcing Greene's own explanation. Apart from its cynicism, the insertion in the new Free Press version not only makes Tripp look a fool, but a copyist all over again--for the person who corrected this passage wound up plagiarizing Reep, as can be seen by comparing the two passages. WHAT The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln lacks in history, it makes up in thievery. "I am the principle author of Tripp's first chapter," Iwrote in an email to Simon & Schuster's Rivlin. "I conceived, titled, structured, researched, and wrote most of the words in [Tripp's] 'What Stuff!'" The publisher was slow to admit the problem. Although I had turned over my original manuscript for comparison along with correspondence confirming sole and prior authorship, the initial response was dismissive. Free Press counsel Weidman, who reports to Rivlin, contended that my chapter and Tripp's chapter were "dissimilar in many respects" and therefore "it is difficult for us to determine what, if any, credit or attribution you might find appropriate with respect to the chapter." I replied that despite some differences, Tripp's version copied my "language, ideas, construction, citations, and narrative line." Hoping to dissociate myself from the book, I rejected credit. "As previously stated, I seek no attribution because I grant no permission to publish 'What Stuff!', which is substantially my work." Tripp's borrowings--ranging from sentences to paragraphs to whole pages--appeared on nineteen of his twenty-five chapter-one galley pages. The differences involved additions (mostly of Tripp's trying to go beyond the evidence) and subtractions (mostly of evidence casting doubt on Tripp's thesis). Otherwise, the galleys kept my blueprint and mimicked my language from first page to last. Here, for instance, are our opening paragraphs: Tripp: Margaret Leech won a Pulitzer Prize for her Reveille in Washington, 1860-1865, a boisterous chronicle of life in Washington, D.C., during Abraham Lincoln's presidency. Elegantly written and exhaustively researched, this 1941 book remains in print today. On page 303, in one of the least cited passages in Lincoln literature, Leech claimed that the President surreptitiously slept with an Army officer whom he invited into his bedroom at the summer White House, not just once, but repeatedly, in 1862. Nobile: Margaret Leech won a Pulitzer Prize for Reveille in Washington 1860-1865, a boisterous chronicle of life in Washington D.C. during Abraham Lincoln's presidency. Elegantly written and exhaustively researched, the 1941 book remains in paperback today. On page 303, in one of the least cited passages in Lincoln literature, Leech reported that the president surreptitiously slept with an army officer in 1862. And here are paragraphs from the conclusion: Tripp: Derickson said his final good-bye on April 28, 1865, when Lincoln's funeral train stopped in Cleveland. "From Meadville, Pennsylvania, had come two hundred [men] marshalled by Captain Derickson and some of his boys who had served with Lincoln's White House bodyguard," wrote Carl Sandburg in the final pages of The War Years. Although Sandburg borrowed a few passages from Tarbell's narrative on Company K, he did not delve into Lincoln's friendship with the captain. Nobile: Derickson said his final goodbye on April 28, 1865, when Lincoln's funeral train stopped in Cleveland. "From Meadville, Pennsylvania, had come two hundred marshalled by Captain Derickson and some of his boys who ha[d] served with Lincoln's White House bodyguard," wrote Carl Sandburg in the final pages of The War Years. (Although Sandburg cribbed parts of Tarbell's narrative of Company K, he did not delve into Lincoln's friendship with the Captain. . . . ) Faced with reality, the publisher dropped the dissimilarities dodge. No longer able to deny Tripp's plagiarism, the defense shifted ground. "The issue is not whether you contributed to the work, or for that matter who wrote parts of it," Rivlin declared. The new issue went to ownership. She insisted Tripp's "Estate has the right to authorize the publication of the chapter. We see no issue of theft or other impropriety in our acting upon that authorization. Rather, any concerns that you have with respect to the authorization should be raised directly with the Estate." THE ESTATE ATTORNEY is Rosalind Lichter, a specialist in entertainment law. Tripp hired her in 2000 on the recommendation of author and AIDSactivist Larry Kramer to stop me from publishing my version of "What Stuff!" She sent me threatening letters about stealing her client's material: "We will not hesitate to seek an injunction and money damages," she wrote. The years have not softened her attitude. Lichter was curt when I telephoned her office in Manhattan. I rehashed our unresolved legal dispute. "Tripp and I never signed a work-for-hire agreement and so the Estate doesn't own my material," I said. "I'm not going to have a discussion with you--have a lawyer call me," Lichter said before hanging up. A friend who called on my behalf, a law professor, turned out to be a mutual acquaintance. She stonewalled him, too. Meantime, somebody was busy revising "What Stuff!", presumably to obscure my contribution. It was a delicate task. How do you rewrite a rewrite, copy a copy, without leaving traces of the original design and detail? Many of my words were cut, some paraphrased, and others repeated. My narrative was rearranged, but the new choreography did not erase the underlying DNA of my prose, lines of argument, and sources. In the finished book, my work remains abused. All told, the rewriter copied or paraphrased twenty-four passages of mine on sixteen of the revised chapter's twenty-one pages. Let a pair of simple examples suffice: Tripp: "Tish" was Letitia McKean, a player in Washington's fashionable society and the daughter of an admiral. It is unknown how she came by her information, but hearsay is likely. Nobile: "Tish" was Leticia McKean, a Washington socialite and friend of Mrs. Fox. How Miss McKean, the daughter of an admiral, came by her information is unknown, though hearsay may be presumed. And: Tripp: Whether the two ever saw each other again is not known. However, a letter of June 3, 1864, from Provost Marshall Derickson to his commander-in-chief, preserved in the Library of Congress, expressed Derickson's abiding warmth. Nobile: Whether Lincoln and Derickson ever saw each other again after May 1863 is not recorded. However, a June 3, 1864 letter from Provost Marshall Derickson to his Commander in Chief, preserved at the Library of Congress, expressed the former's abiding warmth. How did Simon & Schuster imagine that it could get away with a second round of plagiarism? In the first instance, the publisher was a recipient of purloined goods. But the post-mortem rewrite upgraded the firm to direct participant. Maybe Rivlin figured that some sort of acknowledgment of my role in creating chapter one would be enough to save face, no matter what. So now there is an asterisk beside "What Stuff!" on the chapter's title page. Two-hundred-and-ninety-seven pages later, the asterisk reappears in the chapter's endnotes beside the claim: "From 1996 to 2000, C.A. Tripp worked with Philip Nobile on the early drafting of this book, principally of this chapter, the original draft of which was written by Mr. Nobile. After disagreement on various points of interpretation, methodology, and wording, the relationship came to an end." I told Rivlin that her acknowledgment was unacceptable and designed to cover up the copying. It reminded me of the acknowledgment that Doris Kearns Goodwin slipped into a backdated preface of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys after British author Lynne McTaggart threatened to sue her and Simon & Schuster in 1987 over copying from McTaggart's Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times. "A more accurate endnote," I tweaked Rivlin, would be: "From 1995 to 2000, C.A. Tripp worked with co-author Philip Nobile who wrote the original draft of Chapter One that Tripp has substantially copied in this book without Mr. Nobile's approval. After Mr. Nobile failed to persuade his coauthor and old friend to stop faking evidence and stealing from other historians, the relationship came to an end." Simon & Schuster was in a terrible bind. Should it scrap Tripp's tainted first chapter and thereby cripple the book, or should it repeat its embarrassing Goodwin history by knowingly printing stolen words? In the end, the publisher did both: Tripp's version of "What Stuff!" was scrapped in favor of a rewrite and the book still contained borrowed words. "IF YOU DON'T STOP MAKING A STINK about Tripp's book, I'm going to expose you as an enormous homophobe," Larry Kramer telephoned me to say last October. "For the sake of humanity, please, gays need a role model." I replied that the book was so bad, it would backfire on the homosexual movement when reviewers and readers caught on to the fabrications, contradictions, and general nuttiness of The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln. One of the biggest roadblocks to the Gay Lincoln Theory is the fact that neither friends nor enemies ever connected the man to homosexual thoughts, words, or deeds. Would not a secret of that magnitude have leaked out somehow, sometime? Tripp had Lincoln boinking four bosom buddies during his prairie years, but there was not a whiff of this supposed hanky-panky anywhere in the record, not even in Herndon's exhaustive history of Lincoln's frontier contemporaries. I asked Tripp about Herndon's silence. How could Lincoln's Springfield law partner, who occupied the same small bedroom as Speed and Lincoln for two years, have been clueless about the romance a few inches away? Tripp handed me several pages profiling Herndon as a super-heterosexual who was psychologically blocked from picking up Lincoln's lavender vibes. "Little wonder that with a marriage glowing like a diamond in his own life Herndon was blind as a bat to other possibilities," he wrote. What evidence backed up Herndon's handicap? Tripp wrote that Herndon "never complained" about caring for his wife and six children (strictly speculation), that he "rushed home [from the traveling court circuit] on weekends" (like most husbands), and that he said during his final days "that his whole married life" was "'an endless stream of happiness.'" SUCH MAKE-IT-UP-AS-YOU-GO-ALONG methodology similarly shows in Tripp's analysis of Lincoln's original encounters with Joshua Speed and Captain David Derickson. Scenes innocent on their face are always soft-focused into seductions. Thus, when Lincoln rode up to Speed's store in Springfield in 1837, Speed could not (in Tripp's telling) wait to get his hands on the lonesome, lanky stranger when he offered to have him crash in his bed, a common occurrence on the rude frontier. And the evidence for Speed's lightning erotic response: He did not mention to Lincoln that he had previously heard him give a speech. Why not? Well, Tripp writes, "Had he said anything about recognizing Lincoln, or expressed admiration for the speech, this would have immediately moved their contact toward a conventional, friendly familiarity--exactly appropriate for, say, the start of either an ordinary friendship or conventional courtship, be it heterosexual or homosexual--but enemy territory for any brand of rapid sexual conquest." Of course, Speed could well have mentioned the speech to Lincoln at the time and merely forgot to tell Herndon three decades later. Or perhaps Herndon failed to mention it for any of a dozen other reasons. And since when is "friendly familiarity" an anaphrodisiac for male cruising? Is that something Tripp improvised, like Herndon's ultra-heterosexuality, or did it hold for other seductions? TRIPP'S SOUPED-UP STUDY of Lincoln's first encounter with Captain David Derickson in 1862 gives the game away. Here the fifty-one-year-old Lincoln was the presumed aggressor moving in on the forty-four-year-old captain: It's clear that almost as soon as [Captain Derickson] entered Lincoln's carriage for their first ride to the city, their connection was immediate. There was a charged atmosphere of mutual esteem, one well-primed for moving toward some kind of culmination. As Derickson described it, their conversation proceeded through many small but rapid steps, with Lincoln's questions about his background. These are precisely the kinds of redundant questions in pursuit of small increments of intimacy that quickly become tiresome in ordinary conversation--but not here, perhaps because interest was not on facts but rather on the chance they offered the partners to increase the quality and extent of their closeness within an almost classical seduction scene. When Speed laid a trap for Lincoln, small talk was uncool. But when Lincoln dogged his bodyguard, chitchat was exactly right. Meanwhile, there's the boy-marries-boy comic poem Lincoln penned when he was twenty: The girls he had tried on every side. But none could he get to agree; All was in vain, he went home again And since that, he is married to Natty. So Billy and Natty agreed very well; And mamma's well pleased at the match, The egg it is laid but Natty's afraid, The shell is so soft that it never will hatch. In his mid-1990s draft, Tripp regarded the verse as another smoking gun: "viewed through the prism of sex research, the poem is an open and shut case, a virtual certification of Lincoln's own engagement in homosexuality," he wrote at the time. David Donald criticized Tripp's forced interpretation in his 1996 letter: "The person who tells a joke about 'fags' or 'gays' or 'butch' women may reveal a lack of taste but that does not necessarily indicate homosexual leanings." Under pressure from Donald and me, the simple equation of the poem and homosexuality was dropped. But this concession did not leave Tripp emptyhanded. Hoping to say something in the book that Shively had not already said about Lincoln's provocative lines, he latched on to the soft-eggshell image. The couplet "suggests Abe was well aware of the term 'jelly-baby,'" he wrote. "Originally from Negro vernacular, the phrase soon came to be used by whites as well: slang denoting what uneducated folk imagined (and sometimes still imagine) as a 'pregnancy' from homosexual intercourse." But "jelly baby" was a twentieth-century term cited in Kinsey's 1952 female volume, making it unlikely that Lincoln was aware of it. TRIPP'S LAX STANDARD of evidence became looser the more distant from sex. For example, he grew enamored of Ida Tarbell's report in her The Life of Abraham Lincoln that every living member of Lincoln's former bodyguard troop could "quote verbatim the note which the President wrote" to the War Department keeping Captain Derickson and the boys of Company K at the White House. And so Tripp deduced "that very quickly, probably on the very day Lincoln wrote the order acknowledging his high favor for Company K, he also scribbled out at least a few copies for the soldiers themselves," all the better to memorize from. The opposite was actually the case. The soldiers of Company K were angry with Lincoln. They wanted combat, not guard duty. "Many of the regiment were so weary of the prolonged inaction and the wasting of its strength at the capital by disease, that they chafed very much at the countermanding of these orders," wrote Colonel Thomas Chamberlin, Derickson's commanding officer, in his History of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers. IN TEN YEARS OF ASSIDUOUS RESEARCH Tripp found no final proof of consummation with any of the five men identified as Lincoln's lovers. His raw sex file is astonishingly thin, just three fragments in Herndon about Lincoln's sleeping with Greene, Speed, and A.Y. Ellis, a merchant and political admirer. Another claimed lover, Henry C. Whitney, a lawyer friend, had only a sentence from his memoir Life on the Circuit With Lincoln tipping him into the boyfriend category: "It was as if he wooed me to close intimacy and familiarity." A single sentence, too, branded the bodyguard in Chamberlin's military history: "Captain Derickson, in particular, advanced so far in the President's confidence and esteem that in Mrs. Lincoln's absence he frequently spent the night at his cottage, sleeping in the same bed with him, and--it is said--making use of his Excellency's nightshirt!" Provocative, puzzling, possibly homosexual, but who is to say what truly happened? Was the short, stocky, middle-aged captain even Lincoln's type? Elsewhere Tripp devoted a chapter to the glam Elmer Ellsworth, a young prot?g? of Lincoln's, who purportedly fit his "tastes for young men." And why would any reader put faith in Tripp's opinion when he has squandered his credibility throughout his book? Would you trust a revisionist who told you that "Speed was, in fact, the one and only person in Lincoln's life on whom he repeatedly lavished his most personal and most endearing 'Yours forever,' in itself a major smoking gun and a salutation he never bestowed on any woman, including his wife"--if you knew that his database held Lincoln letters addressed to six other men with the same closing, a fact not included in the text? THE INTIMATE WORLD OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, already an object of derision among specialists, contains a poison pill in an afterword by Michael Burlingame entitled "A Respectful Dissent." Recently retired from Connecticut College, Burlingame has a monumental three-volume Lincoln biography in progress with Johns Hopkins University Press. He and Tripp got along well and shared information, if not a thesis. "I liked Tripp, but he was careless and sloppy," Burlingame told me. "I'm surprised that Free Press accepted my afterword since it says the book is full of baloney." In particular, Burlingame devastates Tripp's intellectual honesty by noting that he had suppressed many stories of Lincoln's heterosexual interest. "Since it is virtually impossible to prove a negative, Dr. Tripp's thesis cannot be rejected outright," wrote Burlingame. "But given the paucity of hard evidence adduced by him, and given the abundance of contrary evidence indicating that Lincoln was drawn romantically and sexually to some women, a reasonable conclusion, it seems to me, would be that it is possible but highly unlikely that Abraham Lincoln was 'predominately homosexual.'" The Gay Lincoln Theory, for all its jagged edges, may be a more satisfying explanation for the president's weird inner life than the Utterly Straight Lincoln Theory. "I have heard [Lincoln] say over and over again about sexual contact: 'It is a harp of a thousand strings,'" Henry Whitney told William Herndon in 1865. Leaving aside Tripp's bad faith, it is not utterly beyond imagining that Lincoln may have played a few extra strings on that harp. But the fraud and the hoax of C.A. Tripp's The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln are no way to explore the hallowed ground of history. Philip Nobile teaches history at the Cobble Hill School of American Studies in New York. He is the author of Intellectual Skywriting: Literary Politics & the New York Review of Books and editor of Judgment at the Smithsonian. From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 27 15:55:44 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:55:44 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Criterion: The whys of art by Robert Conquest Message-ID: The whys of art by Robert Conquest http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/dec04/rconquest.htm From The New Criterion Vol. 23, No. 4, December 2004 The troubles that beset the arts, though perhaps less amenable to diagnosis than those besetting the political and social order, may be thought relevant to the whole question of civilization. And their particular phenomena often seem to be melded with the attitudes one finds in those other fields. Changes in art and cultural history have never been easy to assimilate to political or economic changes. But perhaps we have enough evidence to show that particular sub-ideologies, combined with or supported by a bureaucratic upsurge, have caused, or been associated with, what appear to be downhill trends. Different generations naturally engender different styles. No harm in that. Still, it can be argued that some fashions in the field are less troublesome than others. In an analysis of this sort, one cannot exclude subjectivity. (And Wordsworth warned us against the "hope of reasoning [one] into approbation"). When a writer finds spokesmen of a new generation not susceptible to his or others' earlier work, several notions may occur to him. First, that tastes change. Francis T. Palgrave wrote, editing the second Golden Treasury, "nothing, it need scarcely to be said, is harder than to form an estimate, even remotely accurate, of one's own contemporary poets." So, to judge art and culture is indeed, in part, to make a more subjective assessment of the aesthetics, which is of taste. And if one asserts that a current trend or current trends are negative, one is, of course, open to the retort that, in various epochs, changes of taste have emerged deplored by the representatives of earlier trends but later seen as having their own value. True, but it is equally true that some striking and popular new art has soon proved no more than a regrettable and temporary fad--as with the once universally acclaimed Ossian or the German poet Friedrich Klopstock. Moreover, our cultural people, in the sense of producers of the arts defined as creative, are now in a strong and unprecedented relationship with the bureaucratic or establishmentarian world discussed earlier. (This is, paradoxically, at a time when many of these cultural people have entered a period of what one might call ostentatious transgressiveness, something on which indeed both they and their state, official, and academic sponsors pride themselves.) Of course, there is no reason to think that sections of the intelligentsia are any sounder on the arts than they are on politics or history. And, here again, they, as a phenomenon, form a far larger social stratum than at any time in the past. It might be argued that, as with the personnel of the state apparatus proper, there is now such a superfluity of the artistically and literary "educated" class that their very number is part of the means of coping with, and employing part of, the product. There comes to a point, hard to define specifically but more or less obvious, when a regrettable general impression is unarguably convincing--well, not "unarguably," yet beyond serious debate. Still, an organism, or a polity, may present faults seen as lethal that are in practice comfortably contained and do not require therapy. Nor would one want there to be any implied use of power from outside institutions or individuals. Even apart from analytics, a great deal of nonsense has been talked or written about art, or rather Art. Some reflections seem to be in order. The question of what constitutes "art," and what distinguishes good from less good art, is an old one. We can be certain that humanity was creating what we call art long before the word or the concept existed. And--a further complication--how is it that we all accept that some Paleolithic paintings are among the best of their kind and excel by any standards? Well, not all; there are presumably those who are beyond such acceptance. And in considering the paintings of Lascaux, Altamira, and elsewhere, the question arises: What did their creators think they were doing? Not decorating--they did not live in the caves. So why did these men go deep into them, too deep to see, and paint by the light of cedar wicks set in grease-filled hollow stones? Why are the hooves of many, but not all, the cattle shown in twisted perspective? "Magic" is a word often used of all this. But it is indisputable that this was not the "hunting magic" found in later, and more distant, "primitive" depictions. "Religious" is also often applied. But magic or religious in what way? We simply don't know--but one thing seems obvious: they did not think of their painting as something called "art." This point was reinforced a few years ago by an interview with a Nigerian village sculptor of some fine formal statuettes, I suppose you would call them. Asked why he carved them, he could only reply that this is what he did. Thucydides tells us, quoting Pericles, that the Athenians "philokaloumen ... kai philosophoumen," love both beauty and wisdom. Can the modern age combine philosophy and philokaly? One problem, nowadays, is the sort of art in which "beauty" is not merely abandoned but replaced by a positive addiction to the unbeautiful, or the antibeautiful. It is true that "beauty" became sentimentalized and cosmetic from the early nineteenth century. So it is possible that we have now broadened and deepened the idea. One can see today, for example, the view of Verdi as among the finest; a commentator in The New Yorker (September 24, 2001) said of a new performance of Otello that it was astonishingly--and unanalyzably--moving, "stripped of directorial brainstorms and interpretive ego trips with no attempt to deconstruct or recontextualize." But, as Joseph Brodsky noted (of Ezra Pound), "beauty" must arise of itself and cannot just be added from outside. When a Greek used kalos, which we conventionally translate as "beautiful," of a city, or a weapon, or a harbor, or a virtue, we feel that his judgment of the practical and the moral was essentially aesthetic. But this was not so. He did not differentiate the categories. Kalos meant, in effect, "admirable" or "fine." Similarly, arete, which we translate as "virtue," was used of everything from a racehorse's speed to the skills of a fighter or an orator and is better translated simply as "excellence." In the Renaissance, there was a natural attempt to revive this attitude with the concept of virt?, but the distinction between goodness and beauty was already so firmly established that reaction from it led mainly to a mere conscious amoralism. We, or others, have used the word "art" of a wide range of human action (as in the Art of War, the Art of Love). All the same, we differentiate between various skills and the value we give to each. Even though we may speak of "trapeze art," its artistry depends wholly on a skill. If a practitioner regularly falls, he will not be admired. (One could argue--indeed, I would--that in our days there are "artists" who, in effect, do regularly fall into the arena and yet do not forfeit their prestige.) William Hazlitt, of course, wrote similarly of Indian jugglers. On a slightly different level, I remember in the mid-1970s watching no television but the odd opera and Joe Montana playing for the 49ers. I was not deeply interested in American football as such, but in seeing this combination of, I suppose, skill and judgment... . In the broader context, medieval Scandinavians can be cited as having had a wide range of skills, some of them "artistic" in the modern usage: arts, the law, the accumulated skills and experience of brilliant shipbuilding and shipsailing, and the making and handling of weapons. It is not that the main arts--narrative prose and gnomic verse--required any less sophistication than those of the present day; there were simply less of them. Fewer people were doing fewer things. This was as true culturally as it was socially. We may feel that Earl Rognvald of Orkney, boasting eight hundred years ago of his nine skills--as draughts player, runner, reader, smith, skier, archer, oarsman, poet, and harper--set a standard towards which we should all strive. All the same, such comprehensive mastery was exceptional even then. And nowadays, with an immense range of skills to be mastered, an enormous spectrum of individuality seeking an ever-wider variety in the arts, and a huge and diversely specialized volume of knowledge, any oneness we can expect in our culture cannot possibly be that of the centralized and unitary. A certain amount of scientific knowledge on the part of writers is desirable as a matter of mere literacy. We can go further and expect some of this knowledge actually to enter imaginative literature. When Quintilian says in the Institutio oratoria that knowledge of astronomy is essential to a proper understanding of poets, he is describing a culture in which some such merging of science and art applied. Yet even if that were regained, it would be an illusion to think that we could ever revive the full classical unity and interconnectedness of all the fields of knowledge, when a Greek geometer could put forward the proposition "I cannot demonstrate the properties of a triangle without the aid of Venus." The minds that produce and variegate our culture form part of a large spectrum. And when we speak of art, we should be wary of certain high-decibel voices ringing out with claims about it or about one or another contributor to its bulk. In particular, we should beware of some efforts truly to represent it, to stand as icons of its significance. Pretensions to, or perhaps better seen as projections of, high souldom, are, generally speaking, to be rejected. "Creativity" is a well-known dazzler. And as Anthony Powell put it in A Writer's Notebook, "It is a rule, almost without exception, that writers and painters who are always talking about being artists, break down at just that level." A heavy self-conscious solemnity is another symptom. In fact, low seriousness is a mark of every epoch. Apart from its role in silencing merited rejection, it is also to be seen as narrowing the grasp of the arts by blocking their lighter side. Proust noted (of Saint-Loup) that it is a philistinism to judge the arts by their intellectual content, "not perceiving the enchantments of its imagination that give me some things that he judges frivolous." The more constrictive tendencies always start among a minority, an extremely small minority, even of the artistic or literary strata. Then, at some point, they spill over into intellectually or aesthetically more passive, though argumentatively even more active, personalities. As for the art- and literature-consuming public, it is persuaded, or even deafened, by a small stratum. The difference between the way this has happened in the past and the way it is happening now is that this intermediate caste has increased in number and in power, and has to some extent adopted, or been penetrated by, the same sociopolitical ideologies whose mental estrangement from good sense we have already deplored. Constant Lambert, the British conductor and composer, is recorded as saying that even among what we would now call the high artistic intelligentsia, it was very rare to find one who was adept or interested in all of the arts. In what follows, we will concentrate on literature and, more specifically, verse. The examples given here could certainly be matched in other fields, but should suffice for our purposes. Anthony Burgess said flatly that "Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered." There are several ways, in writing, as in the other arts, in which the decoupling of craft and art may be accomplished. Explosively intended phrases tend to distract attention from any broader pattern. But a less sensational shift of direction may also serve, if a mood is created or titillated without concern for anything accomplished. As Dr. Johnson said of James Macpherson's supposed translation of the poetry of Ossian, "Sir, a man might write such stuff forever, if he would abandon his mind to it." One new phenomenon of our time was the establishment of English schools and departments in the universities at about the same time as "modernism" arose. For the first time, we had a specific and separate group that was supposed to be exceptionally qualified to judge literature, as against that larger, more heterogeneous set of people constituting the cultural community. Literature was moreover beset by theory, and in general by an excess of academicism and discussionizing. As in other fields, many were and are simply misled by words. A local paper speaks of those "eating the menu instead of the meal." Academic critics claimed to be the only ones competent to discuss poetry properly and indeed to prescribe its forms, methods, and contents. This is as if a claim should be put forward that only professors of ballistics should discuss cricket or football. The American poet Karl Shapiro remarked that though he knew scores of poets, he almost never heard from them the adulation of Eliot that is found in the textbooks. The past had dictatorial critics, but these have always been the more troublesome to the degree that they were systematic. No doubt, then and now, nondogmatic criticism contains a congeries of more or less unconscious assumptions. But that is not the same thing, just as those people are wrong who say that conscious and systematic political indoctrination is all right since in any case we are subject to unsystematic indoctrination in the set of assumptions implicit in our society. The answer is that a supposedly full and conscious conceptualization is, even in so far as it may be successful at all, a narrower and shallower matter than the other; that it goes with an authoritarian attitude; that its products, because of the formality of their definition, are more solidified and less able to evolve. Just as it is those people who think they have discovered the laws of history who have, in our time, caused our major public catastrophes, so, in a lesser field, it is those who think they have discovered the laws of literature who have been the trouble. But it should also be said that there is an element of illusion in these conceptualizations. Since it is impossible to achieve the pretended rigor, an element of unconscious prejudice after all remains; in fact, it is corrupted through repression and rationalization into something less, rather than more, rational. The more "rigor," the greater the belief that what is "rigorously" covered is the main and major matter, while in reality, it may simply be that part of the subject most susceptible to analysis. Obscurer but profounder aspects of a work then tend to be forgotten. We may also feel that the bringing to the analytic consciousness of all one's attitudes to a piece of writing, even if it were possible, is not an unmixed advantage. A psyche that is entirely conscious (or with a subconscious component subject to instant recall) does not seem to be in accord with the present design of Homo sapiens; even if an android with these characteristics could be produced, one suspects that it might not be wholly satisfactory. To put it in terms of the arts, we might consider A. E. Housman's view that poetry finds its way "to something in man which is obscure and latent, something older than the present organization of his nature, like the patches of fen which still linger here and there in the drained lands of Cambridgeshire." The rules of these profound and intricate unconscious activities are probably in practice unknowable. At any rate, if not unknowable, much of their working is at present unknown. If the vague, peripheral, and hypothetical knowledge we have is given the status of law, we are worse off than before. Literature exists for the ordinary educated man, and any literature that actively requires enormous training can be at best of only peripheral value. Moreover, such a style in literature produces the specialist who knows only about literature. The man who knows only about literature does not know even about literature. Common in all academic circles is the assumption that argument put forward with careful definition and meticulous analysis is automatically superior to more general argument in more ordinary language. The analyst is inclined to assume that anyone who is content to use such more general formulae does so because he is incapable of finding distinctions, untrained in the minutiae of new methods of analysis, and in general all thumbs. And he even feels perhaps that he has demolished a large-scale argument by dissecting, qualifying, and distinguishing, i.e., proving that there is more to be said. This is rather like a microscope trying to refute a telescope. It is basically an error about semantics. Language is capable of being used in either way, and neither is intrinsically superior to the other--as long as the operator is aware of what he is doing, and the method is suitable to the material. We find, in fact, that a general treatment, without pretense of finality but rather, as it were, open-ended, is the preferable approach to literature. One also sees it argued that the more one knows about a work of art, the better one is equipped to judge it aesthetically. In theory, this sounds all right. But even if we neglect the fact that much critical "knowledge" of a poem is in effect not knowledge at all but patterns imposed on the poem by the critic, a little common sense will tell us that things are not as easy as all that. Are we really to suppose that a modern expert on painting, able to analyze brushwork with a microscope and to identify the chemicals used, is a better judge of painting than were the great patrons of the Renaissance? Knowledge does not necessarily imply judgment. All truly critical, as against technical, argument is either intuitive or hypothetical or partial. This cannot be compensated for by a study of the raw material, however exhaustive. The first great age of analytical criticism, the Alexandrian, produced among its frigidities some of the aberrations we have today--its brand of concrete poetry, for example, of which Henry Fuseli wrote: "The wing, the harp, the hatchet, the altar of Simmias were the dregs of a degraded nation's worn-out taste." But it is easy to see how the critical temper may promote meaningless drivel. One of superb Rimbaud's worst poems is the sonnet in which he allots various colors to the vowels. Critics were instantly found to give coherent interpretations (eight or ten were propounded in all), though, as Paul Verlaine tells us, Rimbaud "se foutait pas mal si A ?tait rouge ou vert." But his "Sonnet des Voyelles," just because it was interpretation fodder, became the favorite and most quoted of the lot. That was in primitive times, when criticism had not yet reached its zenith. Still, even nowadays, the most ambiguous (or complicated-appearing) poetry often pleases the critic best. Whereas, in any reasonable sense, the more incomprehensible the poem, the worse it must be. It also seems to be felt that emotionalism proves emotion, and that nonsense is aesthetically preferable to sense. Things have changed since Sophocles was able to establish his sanity in old age by reciting to a court the newly written Colonus. I cannot feel that the point is irrelevant, any more than is Coleridge's unforgettable remark about Shakespeare that "his rhythm is so perfect, that you may be almost sure that you do not understand the real force of a line, if it does not run well as you read it." It seems odd that a taste for involved intellectualism in literature should so often be accompanied, or succeeded, by a taste for the most extreme irrationalism. The writer A. G. Macdonell, reviewing novels in the mid-1920s, noted such a change in the titles: "Slashing" ones like Rat-Ridden, Bilge-Bestank gave way to a more "Shadowy" lot, like And She Said So Too. But on second thoughts, it will be seen that this is natural: the two approaches both involve, in most cases, contrivance, in its shallowest sense. We think of art from the intellect as clear, arid, formal. Obviously, this is not always so: anything, however emotionalist, which is devised to suit a conscious scheme is intellectual, in this bad sense. Hysteria is the product of frigidity, not of passion. Both extreme cases are often, it will be noted, missionary types: the one of a highly organized and ritualistic set of sacramental forms, the other of a theology of revivalist self-abandon. In either case, a sectarianism. One finds a political element, or at any rate a political tone, in these literary discussions--with an occasional lack of amenity. How George Orwell would have relished Anthony Hecht telling (in the introduction to his Melodies Unheard) of opponents of meter and rhyme that "one such radical has recently affirmed" that anyone that observes such constraints "is unambiguously a fascist." One of the ways to give the impression of an aesthetic performance to those lacking the organ of taste is indeed to put into a work of art the political, religious, or other extraneous satisfactions popular with one or another audience. Particularly, of course, if strongly held. As Paul Val?ry wrote, "Enthusiasm is not an artist's state of mind." Few poets have had much experience of the political. They have generous impulses, no doubt, and concern for humanity. These can be expressed in various ways and are not sufficient for a poem involving facts. On political issues, it is extremely rare for the facts to be so clear, and the human involvement so direct and simple, as to approach the immediacy and undeniability of experience. Still, there can be few comments as inept as that of William Carlos Williams, in his introduction to Allen Ginsberg, that this Beat poet had gone "into his Golgotha, from that charnel house, similar in every way, to that of the Jews in the past war." Not that even those few poets with some political knowledge and experience find it easy to produce political poems. Lawrence Durrell, one of those few, has dealt directly with political events in prose, in Bitter Lemons. But in the poem which concludes this book, as soon as he approaches the subject, he has the modesty, a sense of the subject's intractability, to write: "Better leave the rest unsaid." Excellent advice, for several reasons. There is an idea that expressing any reputable sentiment or opinion on politics makes good verse. No. In particular, apart from satire, there is almost no good political verse in English (except for Andrew Marvell's "Horatian Ode"). J. C. Furnas in his book on--and against--slavery, The Road to Harper's Ferry, says, "Blake, Cowper, Wordsworth and Southey, when touching on slavery, wrote drivel." I have come across one good poem about the nuclear bomb--by the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella (not a "political" sort of poem, actually). None of the hundreds on the death of Dylan Thomas is any good (and please don't let us speak of Princess Diana). On AIDS, there are a few good poems by Thom Gunn--a great exception. Back in the first and second decades of this century, there was indeed a ferment of revolutionary-sounding attitudes, and these attracted precisely some of the aesthetically radical--Marinetti into Fascism, Mayakovsky into Bolshevism. Enmity of artists to "capitalism" and the "bourgeoisie" is a symptom of this radical temperament. Of course, the notion that capitalism is hostile to art is in itself absurd. In fact, capitalist or bourgeois patronage has often marked a great flowering of art: the Medicis, Venice, and Holland, or, to go further back, the great merchant republic of Athens. The Mexican painters like Diego Rivera well illustrate one aspect of political modernism. And it is clear that an important part of the impact of their "new" art was due far more to the political type of content than to the quasi cubism involved in the forms chosen. In the palace at Chapultepec, one may see romantic revolutionary paintings of a century ago, showing liberators like Benito Ju?rez and Porfirio D?az cursing venomous foes, etc., to the applause and enthusiasm of romantically conceived peasants and of "the people" in general. The difference between these and the more modern Mexican paintings is not great, and indeed the later generation owes a good deal not merely to this political inheritance but also to an element of primitivism already to be seen in the work of their predecessors. In fact, art with a revolutionary political component is very much a traditionalist form. The only exception I have come across, where a genuine new impulse seems visible, is in the strange statuary of Kemalist Turkey, with its earthy New Turks pushing up out of the soil. Here, perhaps, novelty may be due to a total lack of previous representational art. On a slightly different point, one of the truly remarkable things about the Mayan cities--Uxmal, in particular--is what one may (inadequately) call the elegance of the shapes and dispositions of the buildings (in a way like the Greek equivalent). Literature is written in language. That language has a close relationship to common speech. To "heighten" speech is not in fact to depart from it more than very slightly. When poetry goes bad, from the point of view of language, it is invariably due to the creation of "poeticism"--a vocabulary, or diction, or general phraseology of an isolated type. This has usually in the past taken the form of certain words becoming traditional in poetry at the same time as they became obsolete in common speech. But it is also possible--and this is the form the vice took in the twentieth century--to depart from the true roots by creating linguistic forms equally separated from the natural language and equally to be regarded as poeticisms. We distinguish poetry from prose. There are poetry magazines, poetry anthologies, and so on that may print the occasional confessedly "prose poem," but their contents and claims, generally speaking, differ from what is usually designated "prose." So it seems that poetry is a particular art and, presumably, in some sense a particular craft. Traditionally, prosody sought, as Baudelaire put it, "the immortal needs of monotony, of symmetry and of surprise"; or, if we need an English equivalent, there is Dr. Johnson's "To write verse is to dispose syllables and sounds harmonically by some known and settled rule--a rule however lax enough to substitute similitude for identity, to admit change without breach of order, and to relieve the ear without disappointing it." Of course, there has long been within or adjacent to such verse a subordinate or complementary tradition of something closer to prose, but this was always, until recently, peripheral to and dependent on the main tradition. Even in Johnson's time, his friend Christopher Smart, whose "Song to David" is a fine example of a long, wholly formal poem, also wrote that fine, free apostrophe to his cat Jeoffrey. To some extent based on the psalms, or on a sort of loose or resolved hexameter, this genre was often not even that, but better seen as declamation. Clearly some of this what we might call declamatory verse is successful. But after all, prose too may be typographically broken up into lines for some particular effect. We have the notes from which Churchill made his speech to a secret session of the House of Commons in 1940. After quoting a call to man Britain's defenses and resist the then threatened German landings, the notes go on: That will play its part; but essence of defence of Britain is to attack the landed enemy at once, leap at his throat and keep the grip until the life is out of him. This might, in some sense, be called an art, perhaps of rhetoric. But in what sense is it prose? At any rate, it shows how the two arts meet at a not readily definable point. It can be brilliantly used: for example, in the tenser and more dramatic passages of David Jones's magnificent In Parenthesis, the best book produced by World War I (though we may note that Jones did not call his work poetry but just a "writing"). It has produced terrible stuff too: Martin Tupper, highly respected in mid-Victorian times, is an example. Freeish verse has been with us for some generations (when I was young, my sister's school magazine was full if it). Most poets of this century have written it, sometimes only rarely. Again, successes are possible, though uncommon--Robert Frost compared writing free verse to playing "tennis without a net"--and again, it depends for its effect on being under the protection of the guns of the main tradition. Modernism, in the broadest sense, was largely an import from France, starting with impressionism. As Anthony Powell commented in A Writer's Notebook, it is extraordinary that "after Turner, Impressionism seemed altogether new; and `modern poetry' after Browning." (Indeed, most of the tropes of symbolism, for example, are to be found in Shakespeare.) But the new artistic evolution seems to have been that French models impressed those who wrote in English. But the French had quite a different history. Which may remind us that there was also an element, and often a very attractive one, of joking in the early Paris's avant-garde. And further West, one finds the saving note of the comic not only in E. E. Cummings but also in Dylan Thomas, for example (even at his most portentous, he seems to fit Lautr?amont's description of Byron, "L'hippotame des jungles infernales": more sympathetic, even as a monster, than the tyrannosaurs later infesting Bohemia). St?phane Mallarm?, the true avatar of symbolism, wrote specifically of the new "dissonances" that the background of "strict" verse is needed to make them "profitable." This sensible rule was not (and is not) observed. And the "experimentation," as Mallarm? suggests, went beyond the technical into the whole approach, when every sort of grammatical, structural, and semantic novelty was tried out. Certain benefits resulted--acceptable variations in structure, half rhymes. It was no less a product of classicism than when Edward Gibbon himself spoke of the alternative aims of poetry being to "satisfy, or silence, our reason." The crux, the main and major disjunction in all fields, was when the artist took the decision to abandon the laity. As Pasternak wrote later, "All this writing of the Twenties has terribly aged. They lacked universality. I have never understood these dreams of a new language, of a completely original form of expression. Because of this dream, much of the work of the Twenties which was stylistic experimentation has ceased to exist." In fact, many writers classed as modernist were merely modern. Which is not to say that they were not affected by experimentalism proper, to various degrees. But with this notion of artistic alienation came the similar, but logically distinct, element of the existential human in his condition; and with the twentieth century, though deriving from earlier thought, came angst. It may be argued that artistic alienation had been around for generations, ever since the "superfluous man" of Mikhail Lermontov, the Byron of Continental imagination, the romantic idea of the mad or maddish poet grandly isolated from the rest of mankind. As W. H. Auden put it, nearly two generations ago: Chimeras mauled them, they wasted away with the spleen, Suicide picked them off, sunk off Cape Consumption, Lost on the Tosspot Seas, wrecked on the Gibbering Isles Or trapped in the ice of despair at the Soul's Pole. In any case, when we look back, we can surely say that the great revolution modernism thought it was bringing about simply failed. Yet that is not the whole story. First of all, even if they were not as world-shaking as they imagined, they might still have left us some valuable, if peripheral, work. Such a modest contribution, after all, is all that Mallarm? claimed--that for his classical verse was "the great nave of the `basilica' French poetry," while vers libre simply created special attractions on the sidelines. Lionel Trilling noted how a contrary demand excessively catered to in his time was for verse that advertised itself as being under high pressure. Some verse of that type may indeed be successful. But mere groaning and sweating and thrashing around, with adjectives to suit, simply begs for D. J. Enright's comment: "the effects may be striking but they don't strike very deep." And this is, or can easily become, bad taste--as Wordsworth put it, a "degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation." Nor will it do to attribute this sort of thing to a more "primitive"--and therefore more true and real--depth of feeling. Yet, as I write, I come across a poetry reviewer in the Economist praising "a raw vigorous celebration of instinctive animal energy." (The cave paintings, too, were subtle and civilized compared with what is now exhibited at the Royal Academy.) Much has been published over the past decade or two that has something of the appearance of form, but relaxed, or dissolved, to the degree that it is really no more than an overextended type of free verse. We have indeed noted that this can also be said of verse reaching us from the other pole of arid academicism. There are, of course, many people on all sides who are in one way or another interested in poetry but not for poetical reasons. Kingsley Amis once wrote me, "The trouble with chaps like that is that they have no taste--I don't mean bad taste, just the mental organ that makes you say This is bloody good or This is piss is simply missing, and they have to orientate themselves by things like `importance' and `seriousness' and `depth' and `originality' and `consensus' (= `trend')." Even if its proponents did not say that all obscurity is profound--and some came near to saying that--they certainly implied that all profundity is obscure. But a muddy puddle may pretend to any depth; a clear pool cannot. Coleridge writes somewhere that he read one of Dante's shorter poems every year for ten years, always finding more in it. This did not mean that it lacked comprehensibility at first reading, merely that in this comprehensibility there were resonances that did not immediately declare themselves. This "death of the past" includes ignorance of the cultural knowledge that would have been taken for granted from Chaucer to Auden. One example: Byron's "The Isles of Greece" required some, though not much, background. The assumed historical knowledge in the lines "A king sate on the rocky brow/ Which looks o'er sea-born Salamis"--not even knowledge, only literacy--is now largely forgotten (and the oddity of "Salamis" pronounced as if the plural of an Italian sausage might have been avoided by a parallel grip on scansion). More generally, how widespread is this anticultural plague? I was talking to an aging and not in the least anti-intellectual Los Angeles businessman. He said that he had been schooled, and honed, in a certain ambience of the old anthologies (The Golden Treasury, The Oxford Book of English Verse) and other such inheritances, but that his children, still less his grandchildren, no longer seemed to have this access. In the 1990s, television carried a replay of the 1940s Western movie My Darling Clementine, in the course of which a traveling actor playing Hamlet is terrorized by bad guys in a saloon, who make him stand on a table, shoot at bottles behind him, and order him to act something. He starts, "To be or not to be," but dries up. Doc Holliday comes in and finishes the speech for him. This shows that half a century ago Hollywood producers thought that all this would be acceptable and comprehensible to the movie public. In the intervening years, a generation has been miseducated, as we all know, in many different ways. And one of these is that there is (or so it seems) no longer a general memory not only of meter and rhyme but also even of their earlier existence. Craft, it might be said, has been painted into a corner. There are indeed many voices, including young ones, that have called for and started a return to verse. The persistence of form and rhythm and rhyme in the general population, as in country music, is perhaps a sign of their ineradicability. And "light verse" has been, on the whole, a bastion of form. It is true that a decline in the craft of verse has been noted before. Edmund Wilson's "Is Verse a Dying Technique?" appeared in the late 1920s. Still, the then wave of free verse was only a peripheral fashion. We were not simultaneously untaught the older poets. And there were no creative-writing classes, and few experimental-academic versifiers, or, at any rate, far fewer and less obtrusive than today. Over the ages, the condition of the arts has been seen as a part--a striking and important part--of the exercise of the critical imagination, of the human mind, in their broader compass. And the record of those faculties has seen contractions and contortions as well as periods of progress. Will the humanities nevertheless prosper? Such a view perhaps underestimates, as ever, the power of inertia and interests. In Anatole France's Tha?s, faced with the (to him) irrational spectacle of a Pillar Saint--up on his pillar--the Roman governor's secretary says, "There are forces, Lucius, infinitely more powerful than reason and science." "Which?" "Ignorance and madness"--and the saint was an "educated" man. Moreover, his views were to conquer. In Rudyard Kipling's words: And they overlaid the teaching of Ionia And the Truth was choked at birth ... to rise again many years later. Let us hope for the best. _________________________________________________________________ Robert Conquest, author of Reflections on a Ravaged Century and The Great Terror, is a Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 27 15:56:28 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:56:28 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: How About Not 'Curing' Us, Some Autistics Are Pleading Message-ID: How About Not 'Curing' Us, Some Autistics Are Pleading NYT December 20, 2004 By AMY HARMON BOICEVILLE, N.Y. - Jack Thomas, a 10th grader at a school for autistic teenagers and an expert on the nation's roadways, tore himself away from his satellite map one recent recess period to critique a television program about the search for a cure for autism. "We don't have a disease," said Jack, echoing the opinion of the other 15 boys at the experimental Aspie school here in the Catskills. "So we can't be 'cured.' This is just the way we are." >From behind his GameBoy, Justin Mulvaney, another 10th grader, objected to the program's description of people "suffering" from Asperger's syndrome, the form of autism he has. "People don't suffer from Asperger's," Justin said. "They suffer because they're depressed from being left out and beat up all the time." That, at least, was what happened to these students at mainstream schools before they found refuge here. But unlike many programs for autistics, this school's program does not try to expunge the odd social behaviors that often make life so difficult for them. Its unconventional aim is to teach students that it is O.K. to "act autistic" and also how to get by in a world where it is not. Trained in self-advocacy, students proudly recite the positive traits autism can confer, like the ability to develop uncanny expertise in an area of interest. This year's class includes specialists on supervolcanoes and medieval weaponry. "Look at Jack," Justin pointed out. "He doesn't even need a map. He's like a living map." The new program, whose name stands for Autistic Strength, Purpose and Independence in Education - and whose acronym is a short form of Asperger's - is rooted in a view of autism as an alternative form of brain wiring, with its own benefits and drawbacks, rather than a devastating disorder in need of curing. It is a view supported by an increasingly vocal group of adult autistics, including some who cannot use speech to communicate and have been institutionalized because of their condition. But it is causing consternation among many parents whose greatest hope is to avoid that very future for their children. Many believe that intensive behavioral therapy offers the only rescue from the task of caring for unpredictable, sometimes aggressive children, whose condition can take a toll on the entire family. The autistic activists say they want help, too, but would be far better off learning to use their autistic strengths to cope with their autistic impairments rather than pretending that either can be removed. Some autistic tics, like repetitive rocking and violent outbursts, they say, could be modulated more easily if an effort were made to understand their underlying message, rather than trying to train them away. Other traits, like difficulty with eye contact, with grasping humor or with breaking from routines, might not require such huge corrective efforts on their part if people were simply more tolerant. Spurred by an elevated national focus on finding a cure for autism at a time when more Americans are receiving autism diagnoses than ever before - about one in 200 - a growing number of autistics are staging what they say amounts to an ad hoc human rights movement. They sell Autistic Liberation Front buttons and circulate petitions on Web sites like neurodiversity.com to "defend the dignity of autistic citizens." The Autistic Advocacy e-mail list, one of dozens that connect like-minded autistics, has attracted nearly 400 members since it started last year. "We need acceptance about who we are and the way we are," said Joe Mele, 36, who staged a protest at Jones Beach, on Long Island, while 10,000 people marched to raise money for autism research recently. "That means you have to get out of the cure mind-set." A neurological condition that can render standard forms of communication like tone of voice, facial expression and even spoken language unnatural and difficult to master, autism has traditionally been seen as a shell from which a normal child might one day emerge. But some advocates contend that autism is an integral part of their identities, much more like a skin than a shell, and not one they care to shed. The effort to cure autism, they say, is not like curing cancer, but like the efforts of a previous age to cure left-handedness. Some worry that in addition to troublesome interventions, the ultimate cure will be a genetic test to prevent autistic children from being born. That would be a loss, they say, not just for social tolerance but because autistics, with their obsessive attention to detail and eccentric perspective, can provide valuable insight and innovation. The neurologist Oliver Sacks, for instance, contends that Henry Cavendish, the 18th-century chemist who discovered hydrogen, was most likely autistic. "What they're saying is their goal is to create a world that has no people like us in it," said Jim Sinclair, who did not speak until he was 12 and whose 1993 essay "Don't Mourn for Us" serves as a touchstone for a fledgling movement. At this year's "Autreat," an annual spring gathering of autistics, attendees compared themselves to gay rights activists, or the deaf who prefer sign language over surgery that might allow them to hear. Some discussed plans to be more openly autistic in public, rather than take the usual elaborate measures to fit in. Others vowed to create more autistic-friendly events and spaces. Autreat participants, for instance, can wear color-coded badges that indicate whether they are willing to be approached for conversation. Common autistic mannerisms, like exceedingly literal conversation and hand-flapping, are to be expected. Common sources of autistic irritation, like casual hugs and fluorescent lighting, are not. For many parents, however, the autistic self-advocacy movement often sounds like a threat to the brighter future they envision for their children. In recent months, the long-simmering argument has erupted into an online brawl over the most humane way to handle an often crippling condition. On e-mail lists frequented by autistics, some parents are derided as "curebies" and portrayed as slaves to conformity, so anxious for their children to appear normal that they cannot respect their way of communicating. Parents argue that their antagonists are showing a typical autistic lack of empathy by suggesting that they should not try to help their children. It is only those whose diagnosis describes them as "high functioning" or having Asperger's syndrome, they say, who are opposed to a cure. "If those who raise their opposition to the so-called oppression of the autistic would simply substitute their usage of 'autism or autistic' with 'Asperger's,' their arguments might make some sense," Lenny Schafer, publisher of the widely circulated Schafer Autism Report, wrote in a recent e-mail message. "But I intend to cure, fix, repair, change over etc. my son and others like him of his profound and typical disabling autism into something better. Let us regain our common sense." But the autistic activists say it is not so easy to distinguish between high and low functioning, and their ranks include both. In an effort to refute parental skeptics, the three owners of autistics.org, a major Web hub of autistic advocacy, issued a statement listing their various impairments. None of them are fully toilet-trained, one of them cannot speak, and they have all injured themselves on multiple occasions, they wrote: "We flap, finger-flick, rock, twist, rub, clap, bounce, squeal, hum, scream, hiss and tic." The touchiest area of dispute is over Applied Behavior Analysis, or A.B.A., the therapy that many parents say is the only way their children were able to learn to make eye contact, talk and get through the day without throwing tantrums. Some autistic adults, including some who have had the therapy, say that at its best it trains children to repress their natural form of expression and at its worst borders on being abusive. If an autistic child who screams every time he is taken to the supermarket is trained not to, for example, he may still be experiencing pain from the fluorescent lights and crush of strangers. "Behaviors are so often attempts to communicate," said Jane Meyerding, an autistic woman who has a clerical job at the University of Washington and is a frequent contributor to the Autistic Advocacy e-mail discussion list. "When you snuff out the behaviors you snuff out the attempts to communicate." Perhaps the most public conflict between parents and adult autistics came in a lawsuit brought by several Canadian families who argued that the government should pay for their children's A.B.A. therapy because it is medically necessary. Michelle Dawson, an autistic woman in Montreal, submitted testimony questioning the ethics of the therapy, which the Canadian Supreme Court cited in its ruling against the families in November. Ms. Dawson's position infuriates many parents who are fighting their own battles to get governments and insurance companies to pay for the expensive therapy. "I'm afraid of this movement," said Kit Weintraub, the mother of two autistic children in Madison, Wis. Ms. Weintraub's son, Nicholas, has benefited greatly from A.B.A., she said, and she is unapologetic about wanting to remove his remaining quirks, like his stilted manner of speaking and his wanting to be Mickey Mouse for Halloween when other 8-year-olds want to be Frodo from "The Lord of the Rings." "I worry about when he gets into high school, somebody doesn't want to date him or be his friend," she said. "It's no fun being different." The dispute extends even to the basic terminology of autism. "I would appreciate it, if I end up in your article, if you describe me as 'an autistic' or 'an autistic person,' versus the 'person with...,' " Ms. Dawson wrote in an e-mail message. "Just like you would feel odd if people said you were a 'person with femaleness.' " Ms. Weintraub insists on the opposite. "My children have autism, they are not 'autistics,' " she wrote in her own widely circulated essay, "A Mother's Perspective." "It is no more normal to be autistic than it is to have spina bifida." Terry Walker, 37, who has Asperger's syndrome, said he was not opposed to the concept of a cure for autism but he suggested that there was a pragmatic reason to look for other options. "I don't think it's going to be easy to find," Mr. Walker said. "That's why I opt for changing the world around me; I think that does more long-term good." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/20/health/20autism.html From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 27 18:37:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 13:37:41 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Brooks: The Sticky Ladder Message-ID: The Sticky Ladder Opinion column by David Brooks, The New York Times, 5.1.25 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/25/opinion/25brooks.html [Letters to the editor are appended.] In his Inaugural Address President Bush embraced the grandest theme of American foreign policy - the advance of freedom around the world. Now that attention is turning to the State of the Union address, it would be nice if he would devote himself as passionately to the grandest theme of domestic policy - social mobility. The United States is a country based on the idea that a person's birth does not determine his or her destiny. Our favorite stories involve immigrants climbing from obscurity to success. Our amazing work ethic is predicated on the assumption that enterprise and effort lead to ascent. "I hold the value of life is to improve one's condition," Lincoln declared. The problem is that in every generation conditions emerge that threaten to close down opportunity and retard social mobility. Each generation has to reopen the pathways to success. Today, for example, we may still believe American society is uniquely dynamic, but we're deceiving ourselves. European societies, which seem more class riven and less open, have just as much social mobility as the United States does. And there are some indications that it is becoming harder and harder for people to climb the ladder of success. The Economist magazine gathered much of the recent research on social mobility in America. The magazine concluded that the meritocracy is faltering: "Would-be Horatio Algers are finding it no easier to climb from rags to riches, while the children of the privileged have a greater chance of staying at the top of the social heap." Economists and sociologists do not all agree, but it does seem there is at least slightly less movement across income quintiles than there was a few decades ago. Sons' income levels correlate more closely to those of their fathers. The income levels of brothers also correlate more closely. That suggests that the family you were born into matters more and more to how you will fare in life. That's a problem because we are not supposed to have a hereditary class structure in this country. But we're developing one. In the information age, education matters more. In an age in which education matters more, family matters more, because as James Coleman established decades ago, family status shapes educational achievement. At the top end of society we have a mass upper-middle class. This is made up of highly educated people who move into highly educated neighborhoods and raise their kids in good schools with the children of other highly educated parents. These kids develop wonderful skills, get into good colleges (the median family income of a Harvard student is now $150,000), then go out and have their own children, who develop the same sorts of wonderful skills and who repeat the cycle all over again. In this way these highly educated elites produce a paradox - a hereditary meritocratic class. It becomes harder for middle-class kids to compete against members of the hypercharged educated class. Indeed, the middle-class areas become more socially isolated from the highly educated areas. And this is not even to speak of the children who grow up in neighborhoods in which more boys go to jail than college, in which marriage is not the norm before child-rearing, in which homes are often unstable, in which long-range planning is absurd, in which the social skills you need to achieve are not even passed down. In his State of the Union address, President Bush is no doubt going to talk about his vision of an ownership society. But homeownership or pension ownership is only part of a larger story. The larger story is the one Lincoln defined over a century ago, the idea that this nation should provide an open field and a fair chance so that all can compete in the race of life. Today that's again under threat, but this time from barriers that are different than the ones defined by socialists in the industrial age. Now, the upper class doesn't so much oppress the lower class. It just outperforms it generation after generation. Now the crucial inequality is not only finance capital, it's social capital. Now it is silly to make a distinction between economic policy and social policy. We can spend all we want on schools. But if families are disrupted, if the social environment is dysfunctional, bigger budgets won't help. President Bush spoke grandly and about foreign policy last Thursday, borrowing from Lincoln. Lincoln's other great cause was social mobility. That's worth embracing too. References 1. http://www.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/davidbrooks/index.html?inline=nyt-per -------------- The New York Times > Opinion > Bound by Class, or Moving Up? (7 Letters) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/27/opinion/l27brooks.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position= January 27, 2005 Bound by Class, or Moving Up? (7 Letters) To the Editor: David Brooks is right to raise the alarm about declining social mobility ("The Sticky Ladder," column, Jan. 25). True, American college enrollments have boomed since World War II. In 1940, about 5 percent of the population held college degrees, compared with more than 25 percent today. But while this greater access to education has opened pathways to the middle class for millions of Americans, it has also created new inequalities. As racial and economic segregation has declined, educational segregation has grown. Today, college graduates concentrate in a few places, while huge swaths of the country's interior and dozens of urban neighborhoods suffer a brain drain. The result is what Mr. Brooks aptly calls a "hereditary meritocratic class": Kids who grow up in neighborhoods filled with college graduates - and good schools - start life with a leg up; those raised in places abandoned by college graduates are at a disadvantage. Thurston Domina New York, Jan. 25, 2005 To the Editor: Finally, a discussion of decreased social mobility that looks beyond schooling. As David Brooks notes: "We can spend all we want on schools. But if families are disrupted, if the social environment is dysfunctional, bigger budgets won't help." Advantaged children succeed not merely because their schools are better but because their medical care, preschool, after-school and summer experiences are better - and because their home lives are structured for success. Yet our current economic and social policies make life precarious in just those ways - for those who are poor and (increasingly) for those who are middle class. What should we do about this, Mr. Brooks? Eileen M. Foley Washington, Jan. 25, 2005 To the Editor: A century ago, John Dewey noted that formal education is commonly used to reinforce class separation. Given the evidence presented by Mr. Brooks, this system has worked all too well. Indeed, as conservatives continue to slash programs intended to help working-class and poor students get the education Mr. Brooks considers so essential, social mobility may soon come to a halt. Ralph DiCarpio Round Top, N.Y., Jan. 25, 2005 To the Editor: In reminding us of Abraham Lincoln's belief in the importance of social mobility, David Brooks could have also quoted a line from Lincoln's 1864 appearance before the Workingmen's Association of New York: "That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and, hence, is just encouragement to industry and enterprise." How pertinent are those words - not only because they are fair but also because of the need for the economic growth and innovation that benefit all Americans. Mara D. H. Smith Lake Placid, N.Y., Jan. 26, 2005 To the Editor: Here's one way to halt the erosion of social mobility: Raise taxes for those of us making at least $150,000 (the median income of Harvard parents, as Mr. Brooks points out). Then, less privileged teenagers can go to college on government grants, more underprivileged toddlers can go to Head Start and public school teachers can earn enough to make the profession attractive again. Next, strengthen the estate tax, as both a revenue source and a social leveler - so that my grandchildren's advantages will spring from their abilities, not their trust funds. Michael E. Goldberg New York, Jan. 25, 2005 To the Editor: David Brooks writes that the meritocracy is faltering and that "we are not supposed to have a hereditary class structure in this country." In his State of the Union address, President Bush may talk about leaving no child behind, but his actions bespeak a different agenda. His tax cuts favor the wealthy, and his goal of eliminating all estate taxes will do much to institutionalize a hereditary upper class. Janice Gewirtz Mountain Lakes, N.J., Jan. 25, 2005 To the Editor: Reading "The Sticky Ladder," one would assume that America had always been - until recently - a land where hard work and talent were rewarded with prosperity and social status. But it never was. Studies have long revealed that the best predictor of an individual's socioeconomic status was that of his or her parents. (The situation was less clear for women, who could "marry up," but the pattern still held.) Although social mobility exists, most people remain in the class into which they were born. This is especially difficult for certain groups, like blacks, who for generations were deliberately kept on the ladder's bottom rungs. But it affects all Americans to some degree. The ladder of social mobility has always been "sticky." It's just getting stickier. Eric B. Lipps Staten Island, Jan. 25, 2005 From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 27 18:41:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 13:41:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: It Can Be an Annoying Jingle, Mister Softee Concedes at Hearing Message-ID: It Can Be an Annoying Jingle, Mister Softee Concedes at Hearing http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/27/nyregion/27noise.html January 27, 2005 By WINNIE HU He was the star witness, and had come before the City Council to speak on one of the Bloomberg administration's more controversial proposals. With the news media closely watching, James Conway Jr., the scion of the family that founded Mister Softee, had an admission to make: the Mister Softee ditty, a staple of urban summer, could be so annoying that even he would not want it playing outside his house all day. "Does it get stuck in your head occasionally?" he said. "We hope so. But the Mister Softee song as a threat to the health and welfare of New Yorkers? I don't think so." The jingle, with its lyrics, "Listen for my store on wheels, ding-a-ling down the street," has become a flashpoint in the debate over revising the city's noise code. From dogs that bark too long to nightclubs that draw neighbors' complaints, the administration wants new restrictions, but it found wide-ranging opposition at yesterday's City Council hearing. Also speaking out against the administration's plan was the New York Nightlife Association, which contended that some of the city's hottest nightclubs would become sitting ducks for a newly empowered noise police. And a coalition of labor unions protested that picket lines and demonstrations could also become easy targets. These critics say that while they are not opposed to updating the code, the current plan is too vague and could impose an unnecessary expense and burden on many businesses while doing little to combat problems like early morning construction and noisy smokers gathered on the street. "In the real world, the current code is a joke, and this is worse," said David Rabin, the co-owner of the nighclub Lotus and president of the nightlife association. In a city with no shortage of complainers, excessive noise in any form - the ricochet of jackhammers, the thumping of club music, the drone of air-conditioners - has long fostered complaints. The Department of Environmental Protection, which oversees the noise code, receives an average of 3,500 complaints a month. David B. Tweedy, the agency's acting commissioner, said the city wants to reduce sound levels by adopting more enforceable regulations on construction, air-conditioners, and bars and clubs that play music, among other things. To encourage cooperation, he said, no penalties would be levied for a first offense if the person or business agreed to make changes to comply with the code. In addition, enforcement officers would be allowed to issue violations for "plainly audible" sounds coming from commercial music establishments, personal audio devices and exhausts on cars and motorcycles. Currently, they are required to register potential offenses on handheld decibel meters, which they say require frequent adjustments and are prone to error. "This proposal provides a flexible approach to address the No. 1 quality-of-life complaint," Mr. Tweedy said. "And balances the need for construction, development and nightlife with the need for peace and quiet enjoyment for the city's residents." But several council members expressed skepticism about the plan and pledged to vote against it. Councilwoman Margarita L?pez, who represents the Lower East Side and the East Village, said the new regulations could be used to harass businesses and called the plan "a threat to the economic development of my community." While the four-hour hearing was packed with critics of the city's plan, there were also many supporters, including frustrated residents and members of a group known as Noise, which is short for Neighbors Against Noxious Odors, Incessant Sounds and Emissions. But it was Mister Softee that drew the most interest. Councilman Charles Barron of Brooklyn told Mr. Tweedy: "You and the mayor are very bold taking on Mister Softee. You're going to traumatize a lot of children in this city." Mr. Conway said that the current plan would not only silence the 347 Mister Softee trucks that operate in the city but also disappoint more than 120,000 customers. Instead, Mr. Conway proposed a compromise: stop the music only when trucks are parked for a certain length of time. Anything more, he said, would cause sales to plummet. "To get a sense of what this would do to us, remember when you were a kid," he said. "You heard the jingle, you grabbed your money and you ran to the truck. The way you knew Mister Softee was in the neighborhood was the song." From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 27 18:59:40 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 13:59:40 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Newsweek: The biology of beauty (fwd) Message-ID: The biology of beauty. (Cover Story) Geoffrey Cowley. http://hss.fullerton.edu/sociology/orleans/symmetry.txt Newsweek, June 3, 1996 v127 n23 p60(7) (note date) Abstract: Recent research correlates physical attraction between human females and males to certain physical features regardless of culture. Men and women are naturally drawn to symmetry in face a nd body. Men innately prefer women with a small waist-to-hip ratio, a physical indicator of child-bearing ability. WHEN IT COMES TO CHOOSING A MATE, A FEMALE PENGUIN knows better than to fall f or the first creep who pulls up and honks. She holds out for the fittest suitor available--which in Antarctica means one chubby enough to spend several weeks sitting on newly hatched eggs without starving to death. The Asi an jungle bird Gallus gallus is just as choosy. Males in that species sport gaily colored head combs and feathers, which lose their luster if the bird is invaded by parasites. By favoring males with bright ornaments, a hen improves her odds of securing a mate (and bearing offspring) with strong resistance to disease. For female scorpion flies, beauty is less about size or color than about symmetry. Females favor suitors who have well-matched wings--and with good reason. Studies show they're the most adept at killing prey and at defending their catch from competitors. There's no reason to think that any of these creatures under stands its motivations, but there's a clear pattern to their preferences. "Throughout the animal world," says University of New Mexico ecologist Randy Thornhill, "attractiveness certifies biological quality." Is our corner of the animal world different? That looks count in human affairs is beyond dispute. Studies have shown that people considered attractive fare better with parents and teachers, make more friends and more money, and have better sex with more (and more beautiful) partners. Every year, 400,000 Americans, including 48,000 men, flock to cosmetic surgeons. In other lands, people bedeck themselves with scars, lip plugs or bright feathers. "Every culture is a `beauty culture'," says Nancy Etcoff, a neuroscientist who is studying human attraction at the MIT Media Lab and writing a book on the subject. "I defy anyone to point to a society, any time in history or any place in the world, that wasn't preoccupied with beauty." The high-minded may dismiss our preening and ogling as distractions from things th at matter, but the stakes can be enormous. "Judging beauty involves looking at another person," says University of Texas psychologist Devendra Singh, "and figuring out whether you want your children to carry that person's genes." It's widely assumed that ideals of beauty vary from era to era and from culture to culture. But a harvest of new research is confounding that idea. Studies have established that people everywhere--regard less of race, class or age--share a sense of what's attractive. And though no one knows just how our minds translate the sight of a face or a body into rapture, new studies suggest that we judge each other by rules we're not even aware of. We may consciously admire Kate Moss's legs or Arnold's biceps, but we're also viscerally attuned to small variations in the size and symmetry of facial bones and the placement of weight on the body. This isn't to say that our preferences are purely innate--or that beauty is al l that matters in life. Most of us manage to find jobs, attract mates and bear offspring despite our physical imperfections. Nor shoul d anyone assume that the new beauty research justifies the biases it illuminates. Our beautylust is often better suited to the Stone Age than to the Information Age; the qualities we find alluring may be powerful emblems of health, fertility and resistance t o disease, but they say nothing about people's moral worth. The human weakness for what Thornhill calls "biological quality" causes no end of pain and injustice. Unfortunately, that doesn't make it any less real. BALANCING ACT One key to physical attractiveness is symmetry; humans, like other species, sh ow a strong preference for individuals whose right and left sides are well matched. Denzel Washington's face, below, is alm ost completely symmetrical. Lyle Lovett's, on the right, is not--as revealed by a computerized image made up of his left side re peated on the right. NO ONE SUGGESTS THAT points of attraction never vary. Rolls of fat can signal high status in a poor society or low status in a rich one, and lip plugs go over better in the Kalahari than they do in Ka nsas. But local fashions seem to rest on a bedrock of shared preferences. You don't have to be Italian to find Michelangelo's Dav id better looking than, say, Alfonse D'Amato. When British researchers asked women from England, China and India to rate pic tures of Greek men, the women responded as if working from the same crib sheet. And when researchers at the University of Louisville showed a diverse collection of faces to whites, Asians and Latinos from 13 countries, the subjects' ethnic ba ckground scarcely affected their preferences. To a skeptic, those findings suggest only that Western movies and magazines ha ve overrun the world. But scientists have found at least one group that hasn't been exposed to this bias. In a series of groun dbreaking experiments, psychologist Judith Langlois of the University of Texas, Austin, has shown that even infants share a sense of what's attractive. In the late '80s, Langlois started placing 3- and 6-month-old babies in front of a screen and showing the m pairs of facial photographs. Each pair included one considered attractive by adult judges and one considered unattrac tive. In the first study, she found that the infants gazed significantly longer at "attractive" white female faces than at "unattra ctive" ones. Since then, she has repeated the drill using white male faces, black female faces, even the faces of other babies, an d the same pattern always emerges. "These kids don't read Vogue or watch TV," Langlois says. "They haven't been touched by th e media. Yet they make the same judgments as adults." What, then, is beauty made of? What are the innate rules we follow in sizing e ach other up? We're obviously wired to find robust health a prettier sight than infirmity, "All animals are attracted to o ther animals that are healthy, that are clean by their standards and that show signs of competence," says Rutgers University anthropo logist Helen Fisher. As far as anyone knows, there isn't a village on earth where skin lesions, head lice and rotting teeth count as beauty aids. But the rules get subtler than that. Like scorpion flies, we love symmetry. And though we generally favor ave rage features over unusual ones, the people we find extremely beautiful share certain exceptional qualities. WHEN RANDY THORNhill started measuring the wings of Japanese scorpion flies si x years ago, he wasn't much concerned with the orgasms and infidelities of college students. But sometimes one thing leads to another. Biologists have long used bilateral symmetry--the extent to which a creature's right and left sides matc h--to gauge what's known as developmental stability. Given ideal growing conditions, paired features such as wings, ears , eyes and feet would come out matching perfectly. But pollution, disease and other hazards can disrupt development. As a result, the least resilient individuals tend to be the most lopsided. In chronicling the scorpion flies' daily struggles, Thornhill found that the bugs with the most symmetrical wings fared best in the competition for food and mates. To his amazement, females preferre d symmetrical males even when they were hidden from view; evidently, their smells are more attractive. And when resear chers started noting similar trends in other species, Thornhill turned his attention to our own. Working with psychologist Steven Gangestad, he set about measuring the body sy mmetry of hundreds of college-age men and women. By adding up right-left disparities in seven measurements--the breadth of the feet, ankles, hands, wrists and elbows, as well as the breadth and length of the ears--the researchers scored each subjec t's overall body asymmetry. Then they had the person fill out a confidential questionnaire covering everything from temperam ent to sexual behavior, and set about looking for connections. They weren't disappointed. In a 1994 study, they found that the m ost symmetrical males had started having sex three to four years earlier than their most lopsided brethren. For both men an d women, greater symmetry predicted a larger number of past sex partners. That was just the beginning. From what they knew about other species, Thornhil l and Gangestad predicted that women would be more sexually responsive to symmetrical men, and that men would exploit tha t advantage. To date, their findings support both suspicions. Last year they surveyed 86 couples and found that women with highly symmetrical partners were more than twice as likely to climax during intercourse (an event that may foster concept ion by ushering sperm into the uterus) than those with low-symmetry partners. And in separate surveys, Gangestad and Thornhill h ave found that, compared with regular Joes, extremely symmetrical men are less attentive to their partners and more likely to cheat on them. Women showed no such tendency. It's hard to imagine that we even notice the differences between people's elbo ws, let alone stake our love lives on them. No one carries calipers into a singles bar. So why do these measurements predict so much? Because, says Thornhill, people with symmetrical elbows tend to have "a whole suite of attractive features." His fi ndings suggest that besides having attractive (and symmetrical) faces, men with symmetrical bodies are typically larger, more mus cular and more athletic than their peers, and more dominant in personality. In a forthcoming study, researchers at the Unive rsity of Michigan find evidence that facial symmetry is also associated with health. In analyzing diaries kept by 100 stud ents over a two-month period, they found that the least symmetrical had the most physical complaints, from insomnia to nasal con gestion, and reported more anger, jealousy and withdrawal. In light of all Thornhill and Gangestad's findings, you can hardly blame them. IF WE DID GO COURTING WITH calipers, symmetry isn't all we would measure. As w e study each other in the street, the office or the gym, our beauty radars pick up a range of signals. Oddly enough, one of the qualities shared by attractive people is their averageness. Researchers discovered more than a century ago that if t hey superimposed photographs of several faces, the resulting composite was usually better looking than any of the images that went into it. Scientists can now average faces digitally, and it's still one of the surest ways to make them more attractive. From an evolutionary perspective, a preference for extreme normality makes sense. As Langlois has written, "Individuals with aver age population characteristics should be less likely to carry harmful genetic mutations." So far, so good. But here's the catch: while we may find average faces attract ive, the faces we find most beautiful are not average. As New Mexico State University psychologist Victor Johnston has shown , they're extreme. To track people's preferences, Johnston uses a computer program called FacePrints. Turn it on, a nd it generates 30 facial images, all male or all female, which you rate on a 1-9 beauty scale. The program then "breeds" the to p-rated face with one of the others to create two digital offspring, which replace the lowest-rated faces in the pool. By ra ting round after round of new faces, you create an ever more beautiful population. The game ends when you award some visage a per fect 10. (If you have access to the World Wide Web, you can take part in a collective face-breeding experiment by visiti ng http://www-psych.nmsu.edu/^vic/faceprints/.) For Johnston, the real fun starts after the judging is finished. By collecting people's ideal faces and comparing them to average faces, he can measure the distance between fantasy and reality. As a rule, he finds that an ideal female has a higher forehead than an average one, as well as fuller lips, a shorter jaw and a smaller chin and nose. Indeed, the ideal 25-year-old woman, as configured by participants in a 1993 study, had a 14-year-old's abundant lips and an 11-year-old's delicate jaw. Because her lower face was so small, she also had relatively prominent eyes and cheekbones . The participants in that study were all college kids from New Mexico, but rese archers have since shown that British and Japanese students express the same bias. And if there are lingering doubts abo ut the depth of that bias, Johnston's latest findings should dispel them. In a forthcoming study, he reports that male volu nteers not only consciously prefer women with small lower faces but show marked rises in brain activity when looking at pict ures of them. And though Johnston has yet to publish specs on the ideal male, his unpublished findings suggest that a big j aw, a strong chin and an imposing brow are as prized in a man's face as their opposites are in a woman's. Few of us ever develop the heart-melting proportions of a FacePrints fantasy. And if it's any consolation, beauty is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Madonna became a sex symbol despite her strong nos e, and Melanie Griffith's strong jaw hasn't kept her out of the movies. Still, special things have a way of happening to p eople who approximate the ideal. We pay them huge fees to stand on windblown bluffs and stare into the distance. And past s tudies have found that square-jawed males not only start having sex earlier than their peers but attain higher rank in the m ilitary. None of this surprises evolutionary psychologists. They note that the facial f eatures we obsess over are precisely the ones that diverge in males and females during puberty, as floods of sex hormones wash us into adulthood. And they reason that hormonal abundance would have been a good clue to mate value in the hunter-gatherer wor ld where our preferences evolved. The tiny jaw that men favor in women is essentially a monument to estrogen--and, obliqu ely, to fertility. No one claims that jaws reveal a woman's odds of getting pregnant. But like breasts, they imply that she could. Likewise, the heavy lower face that women favor in men is a visible record of the surge in androgens (testosterone and other male sex hormones) that turns small boys into 200-pound spear-throwers. An ove rsized jaw is biologically expensive, for the androgens required to produce it tend to compromise the immune system. But fro m a female's perspective, that should make jaw size all the more revealing. Evolutionists think of androgen-based feature s as "honest advertisements" of disease resistance. If a male can afford them without falling sick, the thinking goes, he must hav e a superior immune system in the first place. No one has tracked the immune responses of men with different jawlines to see if these predictions bear out (Thornhill has proposed a study that would involve comparing volunteers' responses to a vacci ne). Nor is it clear whether penis size figures into these equations. Despite what everyone thinks he knows on the subject, sc ientists haven't determined that women have consistent preferences one way or the other. BODY LANGUAGE When men are asked to rank figures with various weights and waist-hip ratios ( 0.7 to 1.0), they favor a pronounced hourglass shape. The highest-ranked figures are N7, N8 and U7 (in that order). The lowes t ranked is O10. OUR FACES ARE OUR SIGNATURES, but when it comes to raw sex appeal, a nice chin is no match for a perfectly sculpted torso--especially from a man's perspective. Studies from around the w orld have found that while both sexes value appearance, men place more stock in it than women. And if there are social rea sons for that imbalance, there are also biological ones. Just about any male over 14 can produce sperm, but a woman's ability to bear children depends on her age and hormone levels. Female fertility declines by two thirds between the ages o f 20 and 44, and it's spent by 54. So while both sexes may eyeball potential partners, says Donald Symons, an anthropologist at the University of California in Santa Barbara, "a larger proportion of a woman's mate value can be detected from visual cues. " Mounting evidence suggests there is no better cue than the relative contours of her waist and hips. Before puberty and after menopause, females have essentially the same waistlin es as males. But during puberty, while boys are amassing the bone and muscle of paleolithic hunters, a typical girl gains near ly 35 pounds of so-called reproductive fat around the hips and thighs. Those pounds contain roughly the 80,000 calories needed t o sustain a pregnancy, and the curves they create provide a gauge of reproductive potential. "You have to get very close to see the details of a woman's face," says Devendra Singh, the University of Texas psychologist. "But you can see the sha pe of her body from 500 feet, and it says more about mate value." Almost anything that interferes with fertility--obesity, malnutrition, pregnan cy, meno-pause--changes a woman's shape. Healthy, fertile women typically have waist-hip ratios of .6 to .8, meaning their waist s are 60 to 80 percent the size of their hips, whatever their actual weight. To take one familiar example, a 36-25-36 figure would have a WHR of .7. Many women outside this range are healthy and capable of having children, of course. But as resea rchers in the Netherlands discovered in a 1993 study, even a slight increase in waist size relative to hip size can signal re productive problems. Among 500 women who were attempting in vitro fertilization, the odds of conceiving during any given cyc le declined by 30 percent with every 10 percent increase in WHR. In other words, a woman with a WHR of .9 was nearly a third l ess likely to get pregnant than one with a WHR of .8, regardless of her age or weight. From an evolutionary perspective, it's hard to imagine men not responding to such a revealing signal. And as Singh has shown repeatedly, they do. Defining a universal standard of body beauty once seemed a fool's dream; commo n sense said that if spindly Twiggy and Rubens's girthy Three Graces could all excite admiration, then nearly anyone c ould. But if our ideals of size change from one time and place to the next, our taste in shapes is amazingly stable. A low wai st-hip ratio is one of the few features that a long, lean Barbie doll shares with a plump, primitive fertility icon. And Singh's fi ndings suggest the fashion won't change any time soon. In one study, he compiled the measurements of Playboy centerfolds and Mi ss America winners from 1923 to 1990. Their bodies got measurably leaner over the decades, yet their waist-hip ratio s stayed within the narrow range of .68 to .72. (Even Twiggy was no tube; at the peak of her fame in the 1960s, the British mo del had a WHR of .73.) The same pattern holds when Singh generates line drawings of different female figures and asks male volunteers to rank them for attractiveness, sexiness, health and fertility. He has surveyed men of var ious backgrounds, nationalities and ages. And whether the judges are 8-year-olds or 85-year-olds, their runaway favorite is a figure of average weight with a .7 WHR. Small wonder that when women were liberated from corsets and bustles, they took up g irdles, wide belts and other waist-reducing contraptions. Last year alone, American women's outlays for shape-enhancing ga rments topped a half-billion dollars. FACIAL FANTASIES As a rule, average faces are more attractive than unusual ones. But when peopl e are asked to develop ideal faces on a computer, they tend to exaggerate certain qualities. TO SOME CRITICS, THE search for a biology of beauty looks like a thinly veiled political program. "It's the fantasy life of American men being translated into genetics," says poet and social critic Kath a Pollitt. "You can look at any feature of modern life and make up a story about why it's genetic." In truth, says Northwestern University anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo, attraction is a complicated social phenomenon, not just a hard-wired response. If attraction were governed by the dictates of baby-making, she says, the men of ancient Greece wouldn't have found young boy s so alluring, and gay couples wouldn't crowd modern sidewalks. "People make decisions about sexual and marital partne rs inside complex networks of friends and relatives," she says. "Human beings cannot be reduced to DNA packets." Homosexuality is hard to explain as a biological adaptation. So is stamp colle cting. But no one claims that human beings are mindless automatons, blindly striving to replicate our genes. We pursue countl ess passions that have no direct bearing on survival. If we're sometimes attracted to people who can't help us reproduce, that doesn't mean human preferences lack any coherent design. A radio used as a doorstop is still a radio. The beauty maven s' mission--and that of evolutionary psychology in general--is not to explain everything people do but to unmask our biases and m ake sense of them. "Our minds have evolved to generate pleasurable experiences in response to some things while ignoring oth er things," says Johnston. "That's why sugar tastes sweet, and that's why we find some people more attractive than others." The new beauty research does have troubling implications. First, it suggests t hat we're designed to care about looks, even though looks aren't earned and reveal nothing about character. As writer Ken S iman observes in his new book, "The Beauty Trip," "the kind [of beauty] that inspires awe, lust, and increased jeans sale s cannot be evenly distributed. In a society where everything is supposed to be within reach, this is painful to face." From acne to birth defects, we wear our imperfections as thorns, for we know the world sees them and takes note. A second implication is that sexual stereotypes are not strictly artificial. A t some level, it seems, women are designed to favor dominant males over meek ones, and men are designed to value women for youthfu l qualities that time quickly steals. Given the slow pace of evolutionary change, our innate preferences aren't likely to fade in the foreseeable future. And if they exist for what were once good biological reasons, that doesn't make them any less nettle some. "Men often forgo their health, their safety, their spare time and their family life in order to get rank," says Hel en Fisher, the Rutgers anthropologist, "because unconsciously, they know that rank wins women." And all too often, those who c an trade cynically on their rank do. But do we have to indulge every appetite that natural selection has preserved in us? Of course not. "I don't know any scientist who seriously thinks you can look to nature for moral guidance," says Thornhil l. Even the fashion magazines would provide a better compass. From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 27 19:01:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 14:01:41 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Robert O'Hara: Population Thinking and Tree Thinking in Systematics Message-ID: Population Thinking and Tree Thinking in Systematics http://rjohara.net/cv/1997Scripta.html This is a web version of a previously published paper that was first presented at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm as part of a symposium honoring the 25th anniversary of the journal Zoologica Scripta. A version of this paper in portable document format, suitable for printing, is [10]also available. In the web version the text is reproduced in its entirety but no figures are included. Editorial insertions in the web version are enclosed in [INS: {braces} :INS] . Citations to this paper should refer to the original printed version: O'Hara, Robert J. 1997. Population thinking and tree thinking in systematics. Zoologica Scripta, 26(4): 323-329. _________________________________________________________________ Population Thinking and Tree Thinking in Systematics Robert J. O'Hara Cornelia Strong College and Department of Biology University of North Carolina at Greensboro Greensboro, North Carolina 27402 U.S.A. Abstract Two new modes of thinking have spread through systematics in the twentieth century. Both have deep historical roots, but they have been widely accepted only during this century. Population thinking overtook the field in the early part of the century, culminating in the full development of population systematics in the 1930s and 1940s, and the subsequent growth of the entire field of population biology. Population thinking rejects the idea that each species has a natural type (as the earlier essentialist view had assumed), and instead sees every species as a varying population of interbreeding individuals. Tree thinking has spread through the field since the 1960s with the development of phylogenetic systematics. Tree thinking recognizes that species are not independent replicates within a class (as earlier group thinkers had tended to see them), but are instead interconnected parts of an evolutionary tree. It lays emphasis on the explanation of evolutionary events in the context of a tree, rather than on the states exhibited by collections of species, and it sees evolutionary history as a story of divergence rather than a story of development. Just as population thinking gave rise to the new field of population biology, so tree thinking is giving rise to the new field of phylogenetic biology. Introduction The history of systematics in the twentieth century can be broadly divided into two periods. The first is the period of population systematics, which began at the turn of the century and flourished especially through the years of the Modern Synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s and beyond (Mayr & Provine 1980). The second period is the period of phylogenetic systematics which began during the 1960s and which continues to flourish today (de Queiroz 1997). During the period of population systematics much of the work of the systematics community was directed toward studies of geographical variation, speciation, and microevolutionary processes, and a great many practical and theoretical advances were made in all of these areas. The theory of allopatric speciation was comprehensively developed, especially for vertebrates; large series of specimens for the study of geographical variation were assembled in museums; the application of statistical techniques became widespread; and studies of cytological and biochemical variation began to be added to traditional studies of gross anatomical variation. The period of phylogenetic systematics, beginning in the 1960s, has seen a shift in emphasis toward larger questions of evolutionary history and the structure of the evolutionary tree, and, just as in the earlier period, this newer phylogenetic era has seen and continues to see many advances in systematic theory and practice. The development of all the tools and concepts of cladistic analysis has been the most important advance of this period; the distinction between ancestral and derived character states; the application of computational techniques for reconstructing trees; the increasing availability of data on molecular anatomy to supplement the data of gross anatomy; and more recently the application of phylogenetic information to problems in many other biological fields from ecology to physiology to embryology to behavior. The distinction between the two periods of population systematics and phylogenetic systematics is not sharp, of course, and there continues to be much fine work done today in population systematics, just as there were important contributions to the study of phylogeny before the 1960s. But the general distinction between these two periods is real, and it captures a variety of important practical, theoretical, and disciplinary developments in the history of twentieth-century systematics. At the broadest level, beyond the development of particular techniques or concepts, each of these two periods may be characterized by the introduction and spread of new ways of thinking about systematic and evolutionary problems, ways of thinking that correspond in scope to the scientific "themata" described by Holton (1973) for the physical sciences. Distinctive of the period of population systematics was the spread of what is commonly called "population thinking" (Mayr, 1959, 1975), and distinctive of the period of phylogenetic systematics has been the spread of what may be called "tree thinking" (O'Hara, 1988). My aim here is to outline the components of tree thinking, as a way of undertanding some of the larger changes that have taken place since the 1960s. Before we consider tree thinking, however, let us look at the idea of population thinking by way of comparison. Population thinking The term "population thinking" was coined by Ernst Mayr in 1959. In coining the term Mayr did not claim to be describing something new; rather he intended to capture with the term a way of thinking that had swept through systematics and evolutionary biology generally in the first half of the twentieth century. (Mayr in fact traces the idea of population thinking back to the early 1800s, but I think it is fair to say that its hold within systematics did not become widespread until early in the twentieth century.) To understand the idea of population thinking it is necessary to contrast it with the mode of thought it replaced, which Mayr calls typology or essentialism. In simple terms, an essentialist sees individual variation within a species as error. An essentialist would in no way deny the existence of individual variation; it obviously does exist. But for an essentialist every species has a natural form, a true type, and individual variation within that species represents accidental deviation from that true type caused by external environmental influences. In the absence of external influences that cause individuals to deviate from their true type all individuals of a species would be forever the same, because each species' type remains fixed through time. The French naturalist Buffon expressed the essentialist view well in his Histoire Naturelle in 1753 (Sloan 1987: 121): There is, in nature, a general prototype in each species upon which each individual is modeled, but which seems, in realizing itself, to be altered or perfected by circumstances. So that, relative to certain characteristics, there is an unusual variation in the appearance in the succession of individuals, and at the same time a constancy in the species as a whole which appears remarkable. The first animal, the first horse, for example, has been the external model and the internal mold upon which all horses which have ever been born, all those which now exist, and all which will arise, have been formed. But this model, which we know only by its copies, has been able to be altered or perfected in the communication and multiplication of its form. The original impression subsists in its entirety in each individual, but although there might be millions of them, none of these individuals is similar in entirety to any other, nor, by implication, to the impressing model. Elliott Sober (1980, 1994) has provided a very thorough examination of the idea of essentialism as it applies to species, drawing on what he calls the "natural state model" of Aristotle, and I recommend his work to all who are interested in this subject. Sober's discussion can be fruitfully compared with those of Toulmin (1961) and Kuhn (1977) on the conceptual framework of early chemistry and physics. In contrast to the essentialist, the population thinker rejects entirely the idea that species have "types" or "natural states." Individual variation within a species is not deviation from a natural state under the influence of external forces, a natural state to which the species will return if the forces are removed. Rather, the range of individual variation within a species is the result of ongoing processes of mutation and recombination, the production of phenotypes in the available environments, and then the selection of those phenotypes from generation to generation. Nothing remains invariant across time because new individuals are not produced from some permanent "internal mold," but instead are produced directly from their parents, and they incorporate new heritable variations in each generation. This allows species to "depart indefinitely" (Wallace 1858) from their ancestors, and in so doing it dissolves the idea of an enduring species type altogether. In passing it is worthwhile to note that even though population thinking has by now thoroughly permeated systematics and evolutionary biology generally, there are other biological fields, most notably medicine, where it has made little headway. Medical notions of health and disease have strong essentialist overtones, and as medicine has come to focus more on the genetic traits of individuals (as opposed to external agents of infection) there is a tendency on the part of medical practicioners to pathologize normal variation in human populations, and in so doing to resurrect the idea of a "natural type" for Homo sapiens, an idea long ago rejected by evolutionary biology. Tree Thinking If the spread of population thinking characterized the period of population systematics, then the spread of what we may call "tree thinking" (O'Hara 1988; Maddison & Maddison 1989; de Queiroz 1992; Doyle & Donoghue 1993; Wake 1994) has characterised the period of phylogenetic systematics. Tree thinking is in no sense a successor to population thinking, which is just as important today as it has ever been. Tree thinking is simply the phylogenetic counterpart to population thinking, and like population thinking it has brought a more completely evolutionary perspective to systematics (de Queiroz 1988, 1992, 1997; O'Hara 1988, 1992, 1996). What constitutes tree thinking, and more especially what constitutes the absence of tree thinking? If population thinking is contrasted with essentialism, then with what should we contrast tree thinking? Tree thinking may be contrasted with two other ways of thinking about systematics and large-scale evolutionary phenomena. The first of these I call "group thinking," and the second I call "developmental thinking." Let us consider each in turn, and consider how tree thinking differs from them. Group thinking has been a long-standing way of thinking in systematics, and group thinking equates "systematics" with "classification." Just as we can classify many kinds of objects--landforms, books, minerals, stars--so in the same way can we classify species, says the group thinker. Group thinking in systematics (and classificatory thinking in general) treats each member of a particular group as an independent replicate, and this is key. Each neutron star, for example, is an instance of the class of neutron stars, an independant replicate that can teach us something about the nature of neutron stars as a class. Each drumlin is an independent replicate of the landform group "drumlins" and can give us insight into the common causes of drumlins--the common processes responsible for the formation of all drumlins. The goal is to abstract from the replicate instances a general picture that will describe all members of the class and account for their existence. Group thinking of this kind--seeing members of a group as replicate instances--is quite appropriate for many kinds of scientific inquiry, such as the study of stars or landforms, but it breaks down when we try to apply it to species. It breaks down for the fundamental reason that species are not independent replicates: they are parts of a connected tree of ancestry and descent, and they inherit most of their attributes in a way that stars and landforms, for example, do not. Tree thinking, in contrast to group thinking, considers species in a phylogenetic context, not as independent replicates but as parts of a single phylogenetic tree. If we seek to understand common causes acting in evolution then the replicates we need to examine are not species, but the evolutionary events that are of interest in a particular study, and this can only be done by plotting those events on a tree. If we are interested in why ten species in a larger group exhibit a particular trait (say a trait that is correlated with the occupation of a certain environment) then we must first ask, in the context of a tree, whether this situation represents ten independent originations of the trait, or eight with two subsequent speciations, or five, or three, or perhaps only one independent origination event with the ten separate species all retaining the trait through inheritance. These questions can only be answered in the context of a tree. The focus on explaining evolutionary events rather than the states of supposedly replicate species, and on determing where the events occur on a phylogeny, is central to tree thinking. This new phylogenetic orientation has in recent years opened the door to a whole range of important studies of adaptation, ecology, physiology, and other areas that long been approached from ahistorical, synchronic perspectives (Fink 1982; Lauder 1982; Felsenstein 1985; Huey 1987; Coddington 1988; Ronquist & Nylin 1990; Wanntorp et al. 1990; Brooks & McLennan 1991; Harvey & Pagel 1991; Vane-Wright et al. 1991; Stiassny 1992). Although tree thinking as I have described it is an aspect of systematic biology, the idea of tree thinking isn't necessarily tied to living things--all it requires is descent and inheritance. A fascinating inorganic example of tree thinking can be found in a recent paper on the motion of asteroids (Milani & Farinella 1994), an example which makes use of many of the same ideas I have just outlined. In examining the orbits of asteriods it is often possible to identify groups of asteroids that have motion characteristics in common. One might be tempted to assume that there is something about the composition of this group of asteroids or about their location that causes this common "phenotype" (if you will) to exist. But Milani and Farinella have shown that these asteroids do not share certain characteristics of motion because of some common set of external forces acting on them; they share common patterns of motion because they literally inherited that motion from an ancestral asteroid of which they once were parts and which subsequently broke up into the pieces we now see. The asteroids in this group are not independent replicates that constitute a class, but rather are parts of a tree of inheritance and their common characteristics can be explained by reference to their shared history. There is another aspect of group thinking that tree thinking is supplanting, and that is the traditional inclination to regard taxa of equal rank within certain large groups as equivalent and comparable in some sense. (This is a higher level version of the species-as-replicates perspective.) An example concerns the traditional orders of birds, the largest of which is the Passeriformes which by itself contains about half of all bird species, with the other 30 or so traditional orders containing all the rest. The ornithologist Robert Raikow wrote a paper called "Why are there so many kinds of passerine birds?" (1986) in which he argued in part that this question is misplaced because it assumes that the various "orders" of birds are in some way comparable groups when in fact they are not. And further, even if we frame a more precise comparison between the Passeriformes and their sister clade, and ask why each of these two groups differs in species richness, here the validity of the question will depend upon the internal structure of the passeriform tree (Fig. 1). Framing these questions in the context of a tree is essential if progress is to be made, a point that some of Raikow's commentators did not appear to fully grasp (Raikow 1988). Let us now turn from group thinking as contrasted with tree thinking, to what may be called "developmental thinking" and contrast this also with tree thinking. By "developmental thinking" I mean thinking that sees evolutionary history as a story of individual development or unfolding--a story of "evolution" in the original sense of the word. There is a long-standing tradition in evolutionary writing of describing the course of evolution as a developmental course running from monad to man. This tradition pre-dates evolution certainly; the evolutionary version is really a temporalization of the ancient idea of the Chain of Being (Lovejoy 1936). Evolutionary histories of the developmental type don't narrate a tree--a branching history--they select one important endpoint (usually us) and then trace up from the root through the tree to that endpoint, employing a variety of narrative and nomenclatural devices that minimize the branching aspect of evolution. In other papers (O'Hara 1988, 1992, 1993) I have discussed in detail the narrative and graphical devices that have traditionally been used to minimize the branching aspect of evolutionary history and to thereby create a linear, developmental aspect. Tree thinking, in contrast to this sort of developmental thinking, emphasizes the divergent character of evolutionary history and the complexity and irregularity of the evolutionary tree. I'm afraid to say, however, that while many contemporary systematists no longer think of evolution as a developmental story and no longer draw diagrams that show humans as the pinnacle of life, most of the general public and most of our students still do. A survey of beginning biology students' understanding of evolutionary history almost invariably produces images of the developmental type with a long main line reaching to vertebrates, mammals, or humans (Fig. 2). One of the main objectives of the systematics community for the next decade should be the preparation of educational materials for beginning students to teach them to become tree thinkers (O'Hara 1994). Just as beginning students in geography need to be taught how to read maps, so beginning students in biology should be taught how to read trees and to understand what trees communicate (Figs. 3, 4). One effective method of jarring students out of the traditional pattern of developmental thinking is to show them trees that are purposely drawn from a different evolutionary perspective (Fig. 5), although few such trees are now available. Systematics and palaetiology When William Whewell, the nineteenth-century polymath, compiled his comprehensive survey of all the sciences (Whewell 1847), he placed systematic zoology and systematic botany along with mineralogy in the category "classificatory sciences." Elsewhere in his survey, however, Whewell created a new class of sciences which he called by the awkward name "palaetiological sciences"--the sciences of history and historical causation. Into this new category Whewell put such seemingly disparate fields as geology and comparative philology, fields he saw as united by their common aim of historical reconstruction (O'Hara 1996). Charles Lyell's geological work, which was new at the time, helped to shape Whewell's characterization of the palaetiological sciences. When Charles Darwin began to work seriously on the species question he didn't take as his model the approaches of the classificatory sciences; he took as his model the palaetiological science of Lyell. Indeed, the Origin of Species is almost a casebook of the palaetiological principles that Whewell had outlined. Darwin in effect took systematic biology out of the classificatory sciences and placed it squarely among the palaetiological sciences, and in so doing he set for us a range of historical problems the full implications of which are still being discovered today (de Queiroz 1988; O'Hara 1988, 1992, 1993; de Queiroz & Gauthier 1992, 1994; Williams 1992). "As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds," wrote Darwin in one of his more literary passages (1859: 130), "and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications." The tree of life has proven to be a subtle construct, more subtle perhaps than Darwin suspected. But the spread of tree thinking throughout systematics in the last thirty years, and its more recent spread from systematics to other fields, has brought a new clarity to our understanding of the tree of life, an idea that is fundamental to all of evolutionary biology. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Per Sundberg, Marit Christiansen, and Fredrik Pleijel of Zoologica Scripta, as well as to the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for their kind invitation to participate in this anniversary symposium. Margareta Wilberg handled all the arrangements expertly, and Per Sundberg extended especially kind hospitality during my stay in Sweden. Jeremy Ahouse directed my attention to Scott's tree of butterfly evolution. Gregory Mayer, Kevin de Queiroz, and Fredrik Pleijel offered valuable comments on the manuscript. References Brooks, D.R., & McLennan, D.A. 1991. Phylogeny, Ecology, and Behavior: A Research Program for Comparative Biology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Coddington, J.A. 1988. Cladistic tests of adaptational hypotheses. Cladistics 4: 3-22. Darwin, C. 1859. On the Origin of Species. John Murray, London. de Queiroz, K. 1988. Systematics and the Darwinian revolution. Phil. Sci. 55: 238-259. de Queiroz, K. 1992. Review of Principles of Systematic Zoology, 2nd edition, by E. Mayr & P.D. Ashlock. Syst. Biol. 41: 264-266. de Queiroz, K. 1997. The Linnaean hierarchy and the evolutionization of taxonomy, with emphasis on the problem of nomenclature. Aliso 15: 125-144. de Queiroz, K. & Gauthier, J. 1992. Phylogenetic taxonomy. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 23: 449-480. de Queiroz, K. & Gauthier, J. 1994. Toward a phylogenetic system of biological nomenclature. Trends Ecol. Evol. 9: 27-31. Doyle, J.A. & Donoghue, M.J. 1993. Phylogenies and angiosperm diversification. Paleobiol. 19: 141-167. Felsenstein, J. 1985. Phylogenies and the comparative method. Am. Nat. 125: 1-15. Fink, W.L. 1982. The conceptual relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny. Paleobiol. 8: 254-264. Harvey, P.H. & Pagel, M.D. 1991. The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Holton, G. 1973. Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Huey, R.B. 1987. Phylogeny, history, and the comparative method. In New Directions in Ecological Physiology (eds. M.E. Feder, A.F. Bennett, W. Burggren & R.B. Huey): 76-98. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Kuhn, T.S. 1977. The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Lauder, G.V. 1982. Historical biology and the problem of design. J. Theor. Biol. 97: 57-67. Lovejoy, A.O. 1936. The Great Chain of Being. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Maddison, W.P. & Maddison, D.R. 1989. Interactive analysis of phylogeny and character evolution using the computer program MacClade. Folia Primatol. 53: 190-202. Mayr, E. 1959. Darwin and the evolutionary theory in biology. In Evolution and Anthropology: A Centennial Appraisal: 409-412. Anthropological Society of Washington, Washington, D.C. Mayr, E. 1975. Evolution and the Diversity of Life. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Mayr, E. & Provine, W.B. (eds.). 1980. The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Milani, A. & Farinella, P. 1994. The age of the Veritas asteroid family deduced by chaotic chronology. Nature 370: 40-42. O'Hara, R.J. 1988. [11]Homage to Clio, or, toward an historical philosophy for evolutionary biology. Syst. Zool. 37: 142-155. O'Hara, R.J. 1992. [12]Telling the tree: narrative representation and the study of evolutionary history. Biol. Phil. 7: 135-160. O'Hara, R.J. 1993. [13]Systematic generalization, historical fate, and the species problem. Syst. Biol. 42: 231-246. O'Hara, R.J. 1994. [14]Evolutionary history and the species problem. Am. Zool. 34: 12-22. O'Hara, R.J. 1996. [15]Trees of history in systematics and philology. Mem. Soc. ital. Sci. nat. 27: 81-88. Raikow, R.J. 1986. Why are there so many kinds of passerine birds? Syst. Zool. 35: 255-259. Raikow, R.J. 1988. The analysis of evolutionary success. Syst. Zool. 37: 76-79. Ronquist, F. & Nylin, S. 1990. Process and pattern in the evolution of species associations. Syst. Zool. 39: 323-344. Scott, J.A. 1986. The Butterflies of North America. Stanford University Press, Stanford. Sloan, P.R. 1987. From logical universals to historical individuals: Buffon's idea of biological species. In Histoire du concept d'espece dans les sciences de la vie (ed. S. Atran): 101-140. Fondation Singer-Polignac, Paris. Sober, E. 1980. Evolution, population thinking, and essentialism. Phil. Sci. 47: 350-383. Sober, E. 1994. From a Biological Point of View: Essays in Evolutionary Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Stiassny, M.L.J. 1992. Phylogenetic analysis and the role of systematics in the biodiversity crisis. In Systematics, Ecology, and the Biodiversity Crisis (ed. N. Eldredge): 109-120. Columbia University Press, New York. Toulmin, S. 1961. Foresight and Understanding: An Enquiry Into the Aims of Science. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Vane-Wright, R.I., Humphries, C.J. & Williams, P.H. 1991. What to protect? Systematics and the agony of choice. Biol. Conserv. 55: 235-254. Wake, D.B. 1994. Comparative terminology. Science 265: 268-269. Wallace, A.R. 1858. On the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type. J. Proc. Linn. Soc., Zool. 3: 54-62. Wanntorp, H.-E., Brooks, D.R., Nilsson, T., Nylin, S., Ronquist, F., Stearns, S.C. & Wedell, N. 1990. Phylogenetic approaches in ecology. Oikos 57: 119-132. Whewell, W. 1847. The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon Their History. Volume 1. John Parker, London. Williams, G.C. 1992. Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges. Oxford University Press, New York. [INS: {Figure Captions} :INS] Fig. 1. -- Two sister taxa differing in species richness (A). One might be inclined to assume that the speciose taxon possesses a "key innovation" that has caused it to speciate at a greater rate than its sister taxon. Such an assumption may or may not be warranted depending upon the internal structure of the speciose clade. If the internal structure is as shown in (B) then it is unlikely that clade B possesses any special innovation, although its sub-clade B' may. Fig. 2. -- An evolutionary tree drawn by an undergraduate biology student at the University of Wisconsin--Madison. At the beginning of a course each student was asked to "sketch an evolutionary tree of life, and label as many branches as you can. Don't worry if your tree is not perfect or if you can't remember technical terminology; this is not a graded exercise, and you should not even put your name on the page." Most trees the students produced have as their longest branches the ones leading humans or to mammals or vertebrates generally. Fig. 3. -- A phylogeny of three taxa shown in four different graphical styles (A-D), from O'Hara (1994: 14). All four of these diagrams convey exactly the same information about the three taxa. Non-specialists and beginning biology students need to be taught to read modern evolutionary trees just as beginning students of geography need to be taught to read maps. Fig. 4. -- A phylogeny of eight taxa (A), and two simplified versions of that phylogeny (B-C), from O'Hara (1994: 14). If students and non-specialists are to become tree thinkers they must learn to recognize how trees can be differentially simplified (or differentially resolved) to show the details of particular branches. Fig. 5. -- "The evolutionary tree of animals, especially those along the line that evolved into butterflies," from Scott (1986: 87). Vertebrates appear on the lower left. Trees such as this can jar students and non-specialists into thinking about the assumptions behind traditional human-centered trees such as the one shown in Fig. 2. Numbers on this tree represent millions of years. References 3. http://rjohara.net/cv/publications.html 5. http://rjohara.net/accesskeys/ 7. http://rjohara.net/search/ 8. http://rjohara.net/cv/ 10. http://rjohara.net/cv/1997Scripta.pdf 11. http://rjohara.net/cv/1988SZ.html 12. http://rjohara.net/cv/1992BP.html 13. http://rjohara.net/cv/1993SB.html 14. http://rjohara.net/cv/1994AZ.html 15. http://rjohara.net/cv/1996Milan.html 16. http://rjohara.net/ From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 27 19:05:13 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 14:05:13 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Atlantic Monthly: Robin Hood Message-ID: Robin Hood Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, 1857 December, pp. 156-166 [Robin Hood revisionism was well underway in 1857! I have no idea what the current theories are. The author was not named. I found this browsing among a special collection of Serials before 1915 at the Colorado College library, which was set up at the suggestion of the Revisionist historian, James J. Martin, who died last year. Among the serials was _Around the World_, edited by Charles Dickens, which ot even UVa has.] [The text stretches across the page, as I edited it. Footnotes do not. Source is Cornell University's Making of America journal collection, through Optical Character Recognition.] 156 Robin Hood. [December, THERE is no one of the royal heroes of England that enjoys a more enviable reputation than the bold outlaw of Barnsdale and Sherwood. His chance for a substantial immortality is at least as good as that of stout Lion-Heart, wild Prince Hal, or merry Charles. His fame began with the yeomanry full five hundred years ago, was constantly in- creasing for two or three centuries, has extended to. all classes of society, and, with some changes of aspect, is as grcat as ever. Bishops, sheriffs, and game- keepers, the only enemies he ever had, have relinquished their ancient grudges, and Englishmen would he almost as loath to surrender his exploits as any part of the national glory. His free life in the woods, his unerring eve and strong arm, his open hand and love of fair play, his never forgotten courtesy, his respect for women and devotion to Mary, form a picture eminently health- ful and agreeable to the imagination, and commend him to the hearty favor of all genial minds. But securely established as Robin Hood is in popular esteem, his historical position is by no means well ascertained, and his actual existence has been a sub- ject of shrewd doubt and discussion. "A tale of Robin Hood" is an old prov- erb for the idlest of stories; yet all the materials at our command for making up an opinion on these questions are pre- cisely of this description. They consist, that is to say, of a few ballads of un- known antiquity. These ballads, or others like them, are clearly the author- ity upon whieh the statements of the earlier chroniclers who take notice of Robin Hood are founded. They are also, to all appearance, the original source of the numerous and wide-spread 1857] Robin Hood. 157 traditions concerning him; which, unsess the contrary can be shown, mnst be re- garded, according to the almost universal rule in such cases, as having been sug- gested by the very legends to which, in the vulgar belief; they afford an irresisti- ble confirmation. Various periods, ranging from the time of Richard the First to near the end of the reign of Edward the Second, have bcen selected by different writers as the age of Robin Hood; but (except- ing always the most ancient ballads, which may possibly be placed within these limits) no mention whatever is made of him in literature before the latter half of the reign of Edward the Third. "Rhymes of Robin Hood" are then spoken of by the author of "Piers Ploughman" (assigned to abont 1362) as better known to idle fellows than pious songs, and from the manner of the allusion it is a just inference that such rhymes were at that time no novel- ties. The next notice is in Wyntown's Scottish Chronicle, written about 1420, where the following lines occur without any connection, and in the form of an entry under the year 1283 "Lytil Thou and Robyne linde Wayth-men ware commendyd gude: In Yngil-wode and Barnysdale Thai oysyd all this tyme thare trawale."~ At last we encounter Robin Hood in what may be called history; first of all in a passage of the "Scotiebronicon," often quoted, and highly curious as containing the earliest theory upon this subject. The "Scotichronicon" was written partly by Fordun, canon of Aberdeen, between ~8 A writer in the Edinburgh Review (July, 1847, p. 134) has cited an allusion to Robin Hood, of a date intermediate between the passages from Wyntown and the one about to he cited from Bower. In the year 1439, a petition was presented to Parliament against one Piers Venables of Aston, in Derbyshire, "who bavin~, no lifiode, ne sufficeante of ~oodes, gadered and assembled unto him many misdoers, beynge of his clothynge, and, in manere of insurrection wente into the wodes in that countrie, like as it hadde he Robpn Node and his meyaf." Rot. Pan. v. 16. 1377 and 1384, and partly by his pupil Bower, abbot of St. Columba, about 1450. Fordun has the character of a man of judgment and researcl4, and any statement or opinion delivered by him would be entitled to respect. Of Bower not so much can be said. He largely interpolated the work of his master, and sometimes with the absurdest fictions.* Among his interpolations, and forming, it is important to observe, no part of the original text, is a passage translated as follows. It is inserted immediately after Fordun's account of the defeat of Simon de Moutfort, and the punishments in- flicted on his adherents. "At this time, [sc. 1266,] from the number of those who had been deprived of their estates arose the celebrated bandit Robert Hood, (with Little John and their accomplices,) whose achieve- ments the foolish vulgar delight to cele- brate in comedies and tragedies, while the ballads upon his adventures sung by the jesters and minstrels are preferred to all others. "Some things to his honor are also related, as appears from this. Once on a time, when, having incurred the anger of the king and the prince, he could hear mass nowhere but in Barnsdale, while he was devoutly occu- pied with the service, (for this was his wont, nor would he ever suffer it to be interrupted for the most pressing occa- sion,) he was surprised by a certain sheriff and officers of the king, who had often troubled him before, in the secret .place in the woods where he was en- gaged in worship as aforesaid. Some of his men, who had taken the alarm, came to him and begged him to fly with al[ speed. This, out of reverence for the host, which he was then most devoutly adoring, he positively refused to do. But while the rest of his followers were trembling for their lives, Robert, confid- ing in Him whom he worshipped, fell on his enemies with a few who chanced to "Legendis non raro incredibilibus alils- que plusquam anilibus neniis." Hearne, Scotichronicon, p. xxix. 158 Robin Hood. [December, be with him, and easily got the better of them; and having enriched himself with their plunder and ransom, he was led from that time forth to hold ministers of the church and masses in greater vener- ation than ever, mindful of the common saying, that "'God hears the man who often hears the mass.' In another place Bower writes to the same effect: "In this year [1266] the dispossessed barons of England and the royalists were engaged in fiprce hostili- ties. Among the former, Roger Morti- mer occupied the Welsh marches, and John Daynil the Isle of Ely. Robert Hood was now living in outlawry among the woodland copses and thickets." Mair, a Scottish writer of the first quarter of the sixteenth century, the next historian who takes cognizance of our hero, and the only other that requires any attention, has a passage which may be considered in connection with the foregoing. In his "Ilistoria Majoris Britanni&' he remarks, under the reigu of Richard the First: "About this tune [1189 99], as I conjecture, the notorious robbers, Robert Hood of England and Little Jobs1, lurked in the woods, spoiling the goods only of rich men. They slew nobody but those who attacked them, or offered resistance in defence of their property. Robert maintained by his plunder a hundred archers, so skilful in fight that four hundred brave men feared to attack them. He suffered no woman to be maltreated, and never robbed the. poor, but assisted them abundantly with the wealth which he took from abbots." It appears, then, that contemporaneous history is absolutely silent concerning Robin Hood; that, excepting the casual allusion in "Piers Ploughman," he is first mentioned by a rhyming chronicler who wrote one hundred years after the latest date at which he can possibly be sup- posed to have lived, and then by two prose chroniclers who wrote about one hundred and twenty-five years and two hundred years respectively after that date; and it is further manifest that all three of these chroniclers had no other authority for their statements than tradi- tional tales similar to those which have come down to our day. When, there- fore, Thierry, relying upon these chroni- cles and kindred popular legends, un- hesitatingly adopts the conjecture of Mais~, and describes Robin Hood as the hero of the Saxon serfs, the chief of a troop of Saxon banditti, that continued, even to the reign of Cmur de Lion, a determined resistance against the Nor- man invaders,*~and when another able and plausible writer accepts and main- tains, with equal confidence, the hypoth- esis of Bower, and exhibits the renowned outlaw as an adherent of Simon de Moutfort, who, after the fatal battle of Evesham, kept up a vigorous guerilla warfare against the officers of the tyrant Henry the Third, and of his successor,t we must regard these representations, which were conjectural three or four centuries ago, as conjectures still, and even as arbitrary conjectures, unless one or the other can be proved from the only authorities we have, the ballads, to have a peculiar intrinsic probability. That neither of them possesses this intrinsic probability may easily be shown; but first it will be advisable to notice another theory, which is more plausibly founded on internal evidence, and claims to be confirmed by documents of unimpeach- able validity. This theory has been propounded by the Rev. John Hunter, in one of his Critical and Historical Tracts." ~ Mr. Hunter adusits that Robin Hood "lives only as a hero of song"; that be is not found in authentic contemporary chroni- In his Hisloire de in tonqnite de t'Angte~ terre par les Normnands, livr. xi. Thierry was anticipated in his theory hy Barry, in a dis- sertation cited hy Mr. Wright in his Essays: Thise de Littsrature mr les Vicissitudes et 1cm Transfrrmetions du fjbcle ]JOpUtane de Robin Hood. Paris, 1832. t London and Westminster Renew, vol. xxxiii. p. 424. No 4. The Balladifero, Robin Flood June, 1852. 1857] Robin Hood. des; and that, when we find him men- tioned in history, the information was derived from the ballads, and is not inde- pendent of them or correlative with them." While making these admissions, he ac- cords a considerable degree of credibility to the ballads, and particularly to the "Lytell Geste," the last two fts of which he regards as giving a tolerably accurate acconnt of real occurrences. In this part of the story King Edward is representcd as coming to Nottingham to take Robin Hood. He traverses Lan- cashire and a part of Yorkshire, and finds his forcsts nearly stripped of their deer, but can get no trace of the author of these extensive depredations. At last, by the advice of one of his forcsters, assuming with several of his knights the dress of a inoisk, he proceeds from Nottingham to Sherwood, and there soon encounters the object of his search. lie submits to plnn- der as a matter of conrse, and then an- nounces himself as a messenger sent to invite Robin Hood to the royal presesice. The outlaw receives this message with great resl)ect. There is no man in the world, he says, whom he loves so much as his king. The monk is invited to re- main anil dine; and after the repast an exhibition of archery is ordered, in which a bad shot is to be punished by a buffet from the hand of the chieftain. Robin, having himself once failed of the mark, requests the monk to administer the pen- alty. Tic receives a stagge ring blow, which rouses his suspicions, recognizes the king on an attcntive consimleration of his countcnancc, entreats grace for himself an(l his followers, and is freely pardoned on condition that he and they shall en- ter into the king's service. To this he agrees, and for fifteen months resides at court. At the end of this time he has lost all his followers but two, and spent all his money, and feels that he shall pine to death with sorrow in such a life. He returns accordingly to the green- wood, collects his old followers around him, an(1 for twenty-two years maintains his independence in defiance of the power of Edward. 159 Without asserting the literal verity of all the particulars of this narrative, Mr. llniiter attempts to show that it contains a substratum of fact. Edward the First, he iiiformns us, was smever in Lancashire after he because kiiig; and if Edward the Third was ever there at all, it was not in time early years of his reign. But Edward the Second did make one single progress in Lancashire, and this in the year 1323. During this progress the king spent some tinie at Nottingham, and took particular note of the conditioms of his forests, and among these of the forest of Sherwood. Supposing now that the incidents de- tailed in the Lytell Geste" really took place at this time, Robin 1-100(1 must have entered into the royal service beibre the end of the year 1323. it is a singular. anti in the opinion of Mr. hunter a very pregnant coincidence, that in certani Exchequer documents, containing ac- counts of expenses iii the king's house- hold, the iiaine of Robyn hio(le (or Robert hood) is found several times, beginning with the 24th of March, 1324, among the "porters of the chamber" of the kiiig. lie received, with Simon Hood and others, the wages of three pence a day. In August of the follow- ing year Robin Hood suffers deduction from his pay for non-attendamice, his ab- sences grow frequent, and on the 22d of November he is discharged with a pres- ent of five shillings, "pour cas qil rmepoait pluis ~ravailler." * It remains still for Mr. Hunter to ac- count for the existence of a band of seven score of outlaws in the reign of Edward the Second, in or about Yorkshire. The stormy and troublous reigns of tIme Plan tagenets make this a matter of no difficulty. Running Isis finger down the long list of rebellions and coummotions, he finds that early in 1322 England was convulsed by the insurrection of Thomas, Earl of Lan- caster, the king's near relation, supported by many powerful noblemen. The Earl's chief seat was the castle of Poatefract, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. He is 51' Wsnter, pp. 28, 35 38 160 Robin Hood. [December, said to have been popular, and it would be a fair inference that many of his troops were raised in this part of Eng- land. King Edward easily got the bet- ter of the rebels, and took exemplary vengeance upon them. Many of the leaders were at once put to death, and the lives of all their partisans were in dane er. Is it impossible, then, asks Mr. Hunter, that some who had been in the army of the Earl secreted themselves in the woods, and turned their skill in arch- ery against the king's subjects or the king's deer? "that these were the men who for so long a time haunted Barns- dale and Sherwood, and that Robin Hood was one of them, a chief amongst them, being really of a rank originally somewhat superior to the rest?" We have, then, three different hypoth- eses concerning Robin hood: one l)lac- ing him in the reign of Richard the First another in that of Hesny the Third, and the last under Edward the Second, and all describing him as a political foe to the established government. To all of these hypotheses there are two very ob- vious and decisive objections. The first is, that Robin Hood, as already remarked, is not so much as named in contempora- ry history. Whether as the unsubdued leader of the Saxon peasantry, or insur- gent against the tyranny of Henry or Edward, it is ineonceivable that we should not hear something of him from the chroniclers. If, as Thierry says, "he had chosen Hereward for his model," it is unexplained and inexplicable why his historical fate has been so different from that of Hereward. The hero of the Camp of Refuge fills an ample place in the annals of his day; his achievements are also han(led down in a prose ro- mance, which presents many points of resemblance to the ballads of Robin Hood. It would have been no wonder, if the vulgar legends about Hereward had utterly perished; but it is altogeth- er anomalous * that a popular champion * Mr. Hunter thinks it necessary to prove that it was formerly a usage iu England to celebrate real events in popular song. We who attained so extraordinary a notoriety in song, a man llving from one hundred to two hundred and fifty years later than Hereward, should be passed over without one word of notice from any authorita- tive historian.* That this would not be so we are most fortunately able to de- monstrate by reference to a real case which furnishes a singularly exact paral- lel to the present- that of the famous outlaw, Adam Gordon. In the year 1267, says the continuator of Matthew Paris, a soldier by the name of Adam Gordon, who had lost his estates with other adherents of Simon de Montfort, an(l refused to seek the mercy of the king, established himself with others in like circumstances near a woody and tortuous road between the village of Wilton and the castle of Farnham, frGm which position he made forays iato the country round about, directing his at- tacks especially against those who were of the king's party. Prince Edward hac. heard much of the prowess and honor- able character of this man, and desired to have some personal knowledge of him. He succeeded in surprising Gordon with a superior force, and engaged him in sin- gle combat, forbidding any of his own fol- lowers to interfere. They fought a long time, and the prince was so filled with admiration of the courage and spirit of his antagonist, that he promised him life and fortune on condition of his surren- dering. To these terms Gordon ac- ceded, his estates were restored, and Ed- ward found him ever after an attached and faithful servant.t The story is ro- mantic, and yet Adam Gordon was not submit that it has been still more customary to celebrate them in history, when they were of public importance. The case of private and domestic stories is different. * Most remarkable of all would this be should we adopt the views of Mr. Hunter, because we know, from the incidental testi- mony of Piers Ploughman, that only forty years after the date fixed upon for the out- law's submission "rhymes of Robin Hood" were in the mouth of every tavern lounger; and yet no chronicler can spare him a word. t Matthew Paris, London 1640, p~ 1002. 1857] Robin Hood. 161 made the subject of ballads. Caruit vate sacro. The contemporary historians, however, all have a paragraph for him. He is celebrated by Wikes, the Chronicle of Dunstaple, the Waverley Annals, and we know not where else besides. But these theories are open to an ob- jection stronger even than the silence of history. They are contradicted by the spirit of the ballads. No line of these songs breathes political animosity. There is no suggestion or reminiscence of wrong, from invading Norman, or from the estab- lished sovereign. On the contrary, Rob- in loved no man in the world so well as his king. What the tone of these bal- lads would bave been, had Robin Hood been any sort of partisan, we may judge from the mournful and indignant strains which were ponred out on the fall of De Montfort. We should have heard of the fatal field of Hastings, of the perfidy of Henry, of the sanguinary revenge of Edward, and not of matches at archery and encounters at quarter-staff, the plun- dering of rich abbots and squabbles with the sheriff. The Robin Hood of our ballads is neither patriot under ban, nor proscribed rebel. An outlaw indeed he is, but an "ontlaw for venyson," like Adam Bell, and one who superadds to deer-stealing the irregularity of a genteel highway-robbery. Thus much of these conjectures in general. To recur to the particular evi- dence by which Mr. Hunter's theory is supported, this consists principally in the name of Robin Hood being found among the king's servants shortly after Edward the Second returned from his visit to the north of his dominions. But the value of this coincidence depends entirely upon the rarity of the name.* Now Hood, as Mr. Hunter himself remarks, is a well ~ Mr. Hunter had previously instituted a similar argument in the case of Adam Bell, and doubtless the reasoning might be extend- ed to Will Scathiock and Little John. With a little more rummaging of old account-books we shall be enabled to "comprehend all vagrom men." It is a pity that the Sheriff of Nottingham could not have availed himself of the services of our "detective." VOL. I. 11 established hereditary name in the reigns of the Edwards. We find it very fre- quently in the indexes to the Record Publications, and this although it does not belong to the higher class of people. That Robert was an ordinary Christian name requires no proof; and if it was, the combination of Robert Hood must have been frequent also. We have taken no extraordinary pains to hunt up this com- bination, for really the matter is alto- gether too trivial to justify the expense of time; hut since to some minds much may depend on the coincidence in ques- tion, we will cite several Robin Hoods in the reigns of the Edwards. 28th Ed. I. Robert Hood, a citizen of London, says Mr. Hunter, supplied the king's household with beer. 30th Ed. I. Robert Hood is sued for three acres of pasture land in Throckley, Northumberland. (Rot. Orig. Abbrev.) 7th Ed. H. Robert Hood is surety for a burgess returned for Lostwithiel, Corn- wall. (Parlie?nentary Writs.) 9th Ed. II. Robert Hood is a citizen of Wakefield, Yorkshire, whom Mr. Hunter (p. 47) "may be justly charged with carrying supposition too far" in striving to identify with Robin the porter. 10th Ed. III. A Robert Hood, of How- den, York, is mentioned in the Calenda- riunz Rot. Patent. Adding the Robin Hood of the 17th Ed. H. we have six persons of that name mentioned within a period of less than forty years, and this circumstance does not dispose us to receive with great favor any argument that may be founded upon one individual case of its occurrence. But there is no end to the absurdities which flow from this supposition. We are to believe that the weak and timid prince, that had severely punished his kinsman and his nobles, freely pardoned a yeoman, who, after serving with the rebels, had for twenty months made free with the kiiig's deer and robbed on the highway, and not only pardoned him, but received him into service near his person. We are further to believe that the man who had led so daring and jovial 162 Robin Hood. [December, a life, and had so generously dispensed the pillage of opulent monks, willingly entered into this service, doffed his Lin- coln gr ~en for the Fantagenet plush, and consented to be enrolled among royal flunkies for three pence a day. And again, admitting all this, we ave finally obliged by Mr. Hunter's document to concede that the stalworth archer (who, according to the ballad, maintained him- self two-and-twenty years in the wood) was worn out by his duties as "proud porter" in less than two years, and was discharged a superannuated lackey, with five shillings in his pocket, "poar cas qil ne poait pluis travailler"! To those who are well acquainted with ancient popular poetry the adventure of King Edward and Robin Hood will ~em the least eligible portion of this cir- cle of story for the foundation of an historical theory. The ballad of King Edward and Robin Hood is but one ver- sion of an extremely multiform legend, of which the tales of "King Edward and the Shepherd" and "King Edward and the Hermit" are other specimens; and any one who will take the trouble to examine will be convinced that all these stories are one and the same thing, the personages being varied for the sake of novelty, and the name of a recent or of the reigning monarch substituted in successive ages for that of a predecessor. Rejecting, then, as nugatory, every at- tempt to assign Robin Hood a definite position in history, what view shall we adopt? Are all these traditions absolute fictions, and is he himself a pure crea- tion of the imagination? Might not the ballads under consideration have a basis in the exploits of a real person, living in the forests, somewhere and at some time? Or, denying individual existence to Rob- in Hood, and particular truth to the adventures ascribed to him, may we not regard him as the ideal of the outlaw class, a class so numerous in all the coun- tries of Europe in the Middle Ages? We are perfectly contented to form no opinion upon the subject; but if com- pelled to express one, we should say that this last supposition (which is no novelty) possessed decidedly more likelihood than any other. Its plausibility will be con- firmed by atteading to the apparent sig- nification of the name Robin Hood. The natural refuge and stronghold of the outlaw was the woods. Hence he is termed by Latin writers siluaticus, by the Normans forestier. The Anglo-Saxon robber or highwayman is called a wood- rover, wealdgenga, and the Norse word for outlaw is exactly equivalent.* It has often been suggested that Robin Hood is a corruption, or dialectic form, of Robin of the Wood; and when we remember that wood is pronounced hood in some parts of England,~ (as whoop is pro- nounced hoop everywhere,) and that the outlaw bears in so many languages a name descriptive of his habitation, this notion will not seem an idle fancy. Various circumstances, however, have disposed writers of learning to look far- ther for a solution of the question before us. Mr. Wright propounds an hypothe- sis that Robin Hood was "one among the personages of the early mythology of the Teutonic peoples"; and a Ger- man scholar,t in an exceedingly interest- SE See Wright's Essays, ii. 207. "The name of Witikind, the famous opponent of Charle- magne, who always fled before his sight, con- cealed himself in the forests, and returned again in his absence, is no more than witu chint, in Old High Dutch, and signifle sthe son of the wood, an appellation which he could never have received at his birth, since it de- notes an exile or outlaw. Indeed, the name Witikind, though such a person seems to have existed, appears to be the representative of all the defenders of his country against the invaders." t Thus, in Kent, the Hobby-Horse is called hooden, i. e. wooden. It is curious that Or- lando, in As You Like It, (who represents the outlaw Gamelyn in the Tale of Gamelyn, a tale which clearly belongs to the cycle of Robin Hood,) should be the son of Sir Row- land de Bois. Robin de Bois (says a wrifrr in Notes and Queries, vi. 697) occurs in one of Sue's novels "as a well-known mythical character, whose name is employed by French mothers to frighten their children." $ Kuhn, in Haupt's Zeitschrsftftir deutschej Alterthum, v. 472. The idea of a northern 1857] Robin Hood. 163 ing article which throws much light on the history of English sports, has endeav- ored to show specifically that he is in name and substance one with the god Woden. The arguments by which these views are supported, though in their present shape very far from convincing, are entitled to a respectful consideration. The most important of these argu- inents are those which are based on the peculiar connection between Robin Hood and the month of May. Mr. Wright has justly remarked, that either an express mention of this month, or a vivid de- scription of the season, in the older bal- lads, shows that the feats of the hero were generally performed during this part of the year. Thus, the adventure of "Robin Hood and the Monk" befell on "a morning of May." "Robin Hood and the Potter" and "Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne" begin, like "Robin Hood and the Monk," with a description of the season when leaves are long, blos- soms are shooting, and the small birds are singing; and this season, though called summer, is at the same time spoken of as May in "Robin Hood and the Monk," which, from the de- scription there given, it needs must be. The liberation of Cloudesly by Adam Bel and Clym of the Clough is also achieved "on a merry morning of May." Robin Hood is, moreover, intimately as- sociated with the month of May through the gaines which were celebrated at that time of the year. The history of these games is unfortunately very defective, and hardly extends farther back than the beginning of the sixteenth century. By that time their primitive character myth will of course excite the alarm of all sensible, patriotic Englishmen, (e. g. Mr. Hunter, at page 3 of his tract,) and the hare suggestion of Woden will he received, in the same quarters, with an explosion of scorn. And yet we find the famous shot of Eigill, one of the mythical personages of the Scan- dinavians, (and perhaps to he regarded as one of the forms of Woden,) attributed in the bal- lad of Adam Bel to William of Cloudesly, who may be considered as Robin Hood under another name. seems to have been corrupted, or at least their significance was so far forgotten, that distinct pastimes and ceremonials were capriciously intermixed. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the May sports in vogue were, besides a con- test of archery, four pageants, the King- ham, or election of a Lord and Lady of the May, otherwise called Summer King and Queen, the Morris-Dance, the Hol~by-Horse, and the "Robin Hood." Though these pageants were diverse in their origin, they had, at the epoch of which we write, begun to be confounded; and the Morris exhibited a tendency to absorb and blend them all, as, from its character, being a procession interspersed with dancing, it easily might do. We shall hardly find the Morris pure and simple in the~ English May-game; but from a comparison of the two earliest representations which we have of this sport, the Flemish print given by Douce in his "Illustrations of Shakspeare," and Tollett's celebrated painted window, (de- scribed in Johnson and Steevens's Shak- speare,) we may form an idea of what was essential and what adventitious in the English spectacle. The Lady is evi- dently the central personage in both. She is, we presume, the same as the Queen of May, who is the oldest of all the characters in the May games, and the apparent successor to the Goddess of Spring in the Roman Floralia. In the English Morris she is called simply The Lady, or more frequently Maid Marian, a name which, to our apprehension, means Lady of the May, and nothing more.* A fool and a taborer seem also to have been indispensable; but the other dancers had neither names nor peculiar offices, and were~ unlimited in number. The Morris, then, though it lost in allegorical significance, would gain considerably in spirit and variety by combining with the other shows. Was it not natural, therefore, and in fact inevitable, that the old favorites of 51' Unless importance is to he attached to the consideration that May is the Virgin's month. 164 Robin Hood. [December, the populace, Robin Hood, Friar Tuck, and Little John, should in the course of time displace three of the anonymous performers in the show? This they had pretty effectually done at the beginning of the sixteenth century; and the Lady, who had accepted the more precise desig- nation of Maid Marian, was after that generally regarded as the consort of Rob- in Hood, though she sometimes appeared in the Morris without him. In like man- ner, the Hobby-Horse was quite early adopted into the Morris, of which it formed no original part, and at last even a Dragon was annexed to the company. Under these circumstances we cannot be. surprised to find the principal performers in the May pageants passing the one into the other, to find the Ma.y King, whose occupation was gone when the gallant outlaw had supplanted him in the favor of the Lady, assuming the part of the Hobby~Horse,* Robin Hood usurping the title of King of the May,~ and the Hobby-Horse entering into a contest with the Dragon, as St. George. We feel obliged to regard this inter- change of functions among the characters in the English May-pageants as fortui- tous, notwithstanding the coincidence of the May King sometimes appearing on horseback in Germany, and notwith- standing our conviction that Kuhn is right in maintaining that the May King, the Hobby-Horse, and the Dragon-Slayer are symbols of one mythical idea. This idea we are compelled by want of space barely to state, with the certainty of doing injustice to the learning and in- genuity with which the author has sup- ported his views. Kuhn has shown it to be extremely probable, drst, that the Christmas games, which both in Ger- many and England have a close resem- blance to those of Spring, are to be con- sidered as a prelude to the May sports, and that they both originally symbolized the victory of Summer over Winter,~ ~ As in Tollett's window. t In Lord Hailes's Extracts Jr the Book of the Universal Kirk. ~ More openly exhibited in the mock battle which, beginning at the winter solstice, is completed in the second month of spring; secondly, that the conquering Summer is represented by the May King, or by the Hobby-Horse (as also by the Dragon- Slayer, whether St. George, Siegfried, Apollo, or the Sanskrit Indras); and thirdly, that the Hobby-Horse in par ticu- lar represents the god Woden, who, as well as Mars * among the Romans, is the god at once of Spring and of Victory. The essential point, all this being ad- mitted, is now to establish the identity of Robin Hood and the Hobby-Horse. This we think we have shown cannot be done by reasoning founded on the early history of the games under consideration. Kuhn relies principally upon two modern accounts of Christmas pageants. In one of these pageants there is introduced a man on horseback, who carries in his hands a bow and arrows. The other fur- nishes nothing peculiar except a name: the ceremony is called a kooderiirmq, and the hobby-horse a hooden. In the rider with bow and arrows Kuhn sees Robin Hood and the Hobby-Horse, and in the name hooden (which is explained by the authority he quotes to mean wooden) he discovers a provincial form of wood- en, which connects the outlaw and the divinity4 It will be generally agreed between Summer and Winter celebrated by the Scandinavians in honor of May, a custom still retained in the Isle of Man, where the month is every year ushered in with a con- test between the Queen of Summer and the Queen of Winter. (Brand's Antiquities, by Ellis, i. 222, 257.) A similar ceremony in Germany, occurring at Christmas, is noticed by Kuhn, p. 478. ~ Hence the spring begins with March. The connection with Mars sug~ests a possible etymology for the Morris which is usually explained, for want of something better, as a Morisco or Moorish dance. There is some resemblance between the Morris and the Salic dance. The Salic games are said to have been instituted by the Veian king Morrius, a name pointing to Mars, the divinity of the Salii. Kuhn, 488 493. t The name Robin also appears to Kuhn worthy of notice, since the horseman in the May pageant is in some parts of Germany called Ruprecht (Rupert, Robert). 1857] Rolnn Hood. that these slender premises are totally in- adequate to support the weighty conclu- sion that is rested upon them. Why the adventures of Robin Hood should be specially assigned, as they are in the old ballads, to the month of May, remains unexplained. We have no ex- quisite reason to offer, but we may per- haps find reason good enough in the delicious stanzas with which some of these ballads begin. "In summer when the shaw~s be sheen And leavds be lar~e and long, It is full merry in fair for~st To hear the fowids song; To see the deer draw to the dale, And leave the hilids hee, And shadow them in the leaves green Under the green-wood tree." The poetical character of the season af- fords all the explanation tbat is required. Nor need the occurrence of exhibitions of archery and of the Robin Hood plays and pageants, at this time of the year, oc- casion any difficulty. Repeated statutes, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth cen- tury, enjoined practice with the bow, and ordered that the leisure time of holidays should be employed for this purpose. Under Henry the Eighth the custom was still kept up, and those who partook in this exercise often gave it a spirit by assuming the style and character of Robin Hood and his associates. In like manner the society of archers in Eliza- beth's time took the name of Arthur and his Knigh ; all which was very natural then, an(l would be now. None of all the merrymakings in merry England sur- passed the May festival. The return of the sun stimulated the populace to the accumulation of all sorts of amusements. In addition to the traditional and appro- priate sports of the season, there were, as Stowe tells us, divers warlike shows, with good archers, morris-dancers, and other devices for pastime all day long, and towards evening stage-plays and bon- fires in the streets. A Play of Robin Hood was considered "very proper for a May-game"; but if Robin Hood was peculiarly prominent in these entertain- 166 ments, the obvious reason would appear to be that he was the hero of that loved green-wood to which all the world re- sorted, when the cold obstruction of whuiter was broken up, "to do observance for a morn of May." We do not, therefore, attribute much value to the theory of Mr. Wright, that the May festival was, in its earliest form, "a religious celebration, though, like such festivals in general, it possessed a double character, that of a religious ceremony, and of an opportunity for the perform- ance of warlike games; that, at such festivals, the songs would take the char- acter of the amusements on the occasion, and would most likely celebrate warlike deeds, perhaps the myths of the patron whom superstition supposed to preside over them; that, as the character of the exercises changed, the attributes of the patron would change also, and he who was once celebrated as working wonders with his good axe or his elf-made sword might afterwards assume the character of a skilful bowman; that the scene of his actions would likewise change, and the person whose weapons were the bane of dragons and giants, who sought them in the wildernesses they infested, might be- come the enemy only of the sheriff and his officers, under the 'grene-wode lefe."' It is unnecessary to point out that the language we have quoted contains, be- yond the statement that warlike exercises were anciently combined with religious rites, a very slightly founded surmise, and nothing more. Another circumstance, which weighs much with Mr. Wright,goes but a very little way with us in demonstrating the mythological character of Robin Hood. This is the frequency with which his name is attached to mounds, wells, and stones, such as in the popular creed are connected with fairies, dwarfs, or~ giants. There is scarcely a county in England which does not possess some monument of this description. "Cairns on Black- down in Somersetshire, and harrows near to Whitby in Yorkshire and Ludlow in Shropshire, are termed Robin Hood's 166 Robin Hood. [December, pricks or butts; lofty natural eminences in Gloucestershire and Derbyshire are Robin Hood's hills; a huge rock near Matlock is Robin Hood's Tor; ancient boundary-stones, as in Lincoinshire, are Robin Hood's crosses; a presumed log- gan, or rocking-stone, in Yorkshire, is Robin Hood's penny-stone; a fountain near Nottingham, another between Don- caster and Wakefield, and one in Lan- cashire, are Robin Hood's wells; a cave in Nottinghamshire is his stable; a rude natural rock in Hope Dale is his chair; a chasm at Chatsworth is his leap; Blackstone Edge, in Lancashire, is his bed." * In fact, his name bids fair to overrun every remarkable object of the sort which has not been already appro- priated to King Arthur or the Devil; with the latter of whom, at least, it is presumed, that, however ancient, he will not dispute precedence. "The legends of the peasantry," quoth Mr. Wright, "are the shadows of a very remote antiquity." This proposition, thus broadly stated, we deny. Nothing is more deceptive than popular legends; and the "legends" we speak og if they are to bear that name, have no claim to antiquity at all. They do not go beyond the ballads. They are palpably of sub- sequent and comparatively recent origin. It was absolutely impossible that they should arise while Robin Hood was a liv- ing reality to the people. The archer of Sherwood who could barely stand King Edward's buffet, and was felled by the Potter, was no man to be playing with rocking-stones. This trick of naming must have begun in the decline of his fame; for there was a time when his pop- ularity drooped, and his existence was just not doubted, not elaborately main- tained by learned historians, and anti- quarians deeply read in the Public * Edinburgh Renew, vol. 86, p. 123. Records. And what do these names prove? The vulgar passion for bestow- ing them is notorious and universal. We Americans are too young to be well provided with heroes that might serve this purpose. We have no imaginative peasantry to invent legends, no ignorant peasantry to believe them. But we have the good fortune to possess the Devil in common with the rest of the world; and we take it upon us to say, that there is not a mountain district in the land, which has been opened to summer travellers, where a "Devil's Bridge," a "Devil's Punch-bowl," or some object with the like designation, will not be pointed out.* We have taken no notice of the later fortunes of Robin Hood in his true and original character of a hero of romance. Towards the end of the sixteenth cen- tury Anthony Munday attempted to re- vive the decaying popularity of this king of good fellows, who had won all his honors as a simple yeoman, by representing him in the play of "The Downfall of' Robert, Earl of Huntington" as a nobleman in disguise, outlawed by the machinations of his steward. This pleasing and suc- cessful drama is Robin's sole patent to that title of Earl of Huntington, in con- firmation of which Dr. Stukeley fabri- cated a pedigree that transcends even the absurdities of heraldry, and some unknown forger an epitaph beneath the skill of a Chatterton. Those who desire a full acquaintance with the fabulous history of Robin Hood will seek it in the well-known volumes of Ritson, or in those of his recent editor, Gutch, who d6es not make up by superior discrimina- tion for his inferiority in other respects to that industrious antiquary. * See some sensible remarks in the Geatle~- men's Magazine for March, 1Z93, by D. H., that is, says the courteous Ritmon, by Gough, "the scurrilous and malignant editor of that degraded publication." From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 27 19:09:01 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 14:09:01 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Foundation for the Future News, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2004/5 Winter Message-ID: Foundation for the Future News, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2004/5 Winter http://www.futurefoundation.org/documents/FFFNews71.pdf [I call your attention to this newsletter about Walter Kistler's foundatino. It would be much better to just click on the PDF, which I converted using Adobe Professional. Note the great number of awards given to those who stress the role of heredity in human life. Big Ed is losing its grip.] Humanity 3000 Seminar 5 - A Fresh Multidisciplinary View The .. participants who gathered for the .fth Humanity 3000 seminar August ..-.4, 2004, brought together expertise in anthropology, psychiatry, philosophy, nanotechnology, social complexity, cognitive ethics, physics, genetics, science history, and ecological/economi-cal sustainability - to name just a portion of the knowledge .elds represented. "We believe that it is essential to have a wide mix of minds and disciplines in the dialogue about the long-term future," said Sesh Velamoor, Foundation For the Future Deputy Director, Programs, who facilitated the seminar. Walter Kistler, founder and President of the Foundation, opened the seminar with comments about the viewpoint and purpose of the Foundation: "There are lots of organizations today that have a speci.c purpose, a speci.c idea, even an axe to grind. This organization is quite di.erent ... it does not look at any short-range purpose and does not have any axe to grind. We want the free exchange of ideas, to let ideas evolve in freedom without constraints, the Disciplines ranging from computational social sciences to anthropology, nanotechnology, and philosophy were represented by (left to right) Claudio Cio.-Revilla, Ian Tattersall, Ramez Naam, Vincent Sarich, and John Leslie. way evolution took place on Earth." Seminar 5 participants [see Page 2 for this seminar's roster of participants] worked in both plenary and small-group settings, arriving at what they determined to be the three most critical issues for the next thousand years. These were articulated as: (.) human identity and threats: positive cooperation in an identity beyond nationhood in the context of a major, perceived, shared global threat, (2) .nding ways to bounce back when disasters happen, and (3) designing an organizational solution that can mitigate or eliminate the possibility of collapse of collective welfare. These critical issues were discussed at length in .shbowl dialogues. Two keynote speakers were selected from among the participants. Dr. Ian Tattersall, Curator, Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, Continued on page 2 n the evening of August .., 2004, before an audience of .50 colleagues, family, and other guests, Dr. Vincent M. Sarich, Professor Emeritus of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, was presented the Kistler Prize for 2004 by Walter Kistler, creator of the Prize. Dr. Sarich was honored for his scienti.c research in molecular dating, which resulted in the determination that humans and the great apes diverged much more recently than had previously been believed. His .ndings came to be known as the "molecular clock" hypothesis, a milestone in human evolution studies. Created in .999, the Kistler Prize includes a cash award of US..00,000 and a .80-gram gold medallion. The purpose of Continued on page 3 Humanity 3000, continued from page 1 spoke on "Human Past, Human Future." Tattersall said: "Much as paleoanthropologists like to think of human evolution as a linear process, a gradual progression from primitiveness to perfection, this conceptual holdover from the past is clearly in error. We are not the result of constant .ne-tuning over the eons, anymore than we are the summit of creation." The invention of language in a local population is, he believes, the cultural stimulus that led to humankind's present cognition. The implication for the future is that "we can't depend on evolution to ride in on its white horse and save us from our follies," said Tattersall. Dr. Mott Greene, John B. Magee Professor of Science and Values, and Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Puget Sound, spoke on "The Scienti.c Worldview - an Oxymoron?" Greene de.ned three world-views in physics (Aristotelian, Newtonian, and Einstein-Planck) and three world-views in biology (Aristotelian, Darwinian, and Watson-Crick/Wright-Kimura). "Our Wrye Sententia leads a small-group discussion on dominant civilizational values in the millennium. Clockwise around the table from left are Wrye Sententia, John Leslie, Victor Stenger, and Mott Greene. Claudio Cio.-Revilla is a specialist A current interest of Mott Greene, William Calvin is a neurobiologist in the origins of warfare and of historian of science, is the evolution with expertise in the causes and government in ancient civilizations. of computer climate modeling. impacts of abrupt climate change. current political system and social system in the United States, and perhaps elsewhere in the world," said Greene, "is very closely tied to the Newtonian worldview with a limited version of Darwinism and a hankering to get back to Aristotle. There is an impossible longing to know why...." A formal debate was engaged on the resolution: It is resolved that terrorism manifests a clash of civilizations and is a war without end. Geneticist Spencer Wells argued against the resolution, o.ering de.nitions and history. "The key is the targeting of civilians with acts of violence for disruptive e.ect," said Wells. "Race and nationalism, some sort of ideology such as communism, and religion seem to be the unifying factors in what motivates people to join or form these terrorist organizations." His argument delineated means for mitigating each of these factors. Claudio Cio.-Revilla, as the proponent, illustrated how, throughout history, acts of terror have been clashes of civilizations. If terrorists are clever enough, he said, they will bring such clashes to large warfare with twice the Continued on page 4 Kistler Prize, continued from page 1 the annual Prize is to recognize and reward original work investigating the implications of genetics for human society. In his acceptance speech, Dr. Sarich explained that it was some 40 years ago, in the mid-.960s, when he undertook a study of what was known at the molecular level about relationships of human beings in order to prepare a presentation for a seminar conducted by Clark Howell and Sherwood Washburn. "Reading through the material, it occurred to me that it evidenced the existence of a clock and that we ought to be able to .nd out something about human relationships using molecular comparisons. We weren't the .rst to do this, but we were the .rst to document that there was a clock and then use it to solve a speci.c evolutionary problem.... The idea was that the human line in its separation from the African apes was no more than .ve million years old. Since the australopithecines were already three million years old, this very markedly narrowed the range of time, which was not evidenced either among living forms or in the fossil record." Sarich's .ndings were not well received at the time and did not .nd wide acceptance until the .980s. "As people found more australopithecines in Africa, they found more and more primitive forms, and shortened the genetic and temporal distances between those forms and us," he said. Dr. Sarich acknowledged the contributions to his work of Allan Wilson, with whom he performed the molecular com- Walter Kistler congratulates Vincent M. Sarich, who was awarded the Kistler Prize for work in molecular dating. parisons, and Sherwood Washburn, the professor who encouraged his research. Both are now deceased. The Kistler Prize award ceremony has been held at Bell Harbor International Conference Center, Seattle, WA, annually for .ve years. Previous Kistler Prize recipients are Dr. Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University (2000); Dr. Richard Dawkins, Oxford University (200.); Dr. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Stanford University (2002); and Dr. Arthur R. Jensen, University of California at Berkeley (2003). . Knowledge Base of Future Studies: What Futurists Think By Sesh Velamoor, Deputy Director, Programs, Foundation For the Future Walter P. Kistler Book Award Presented to Dr. Spencer Wells n March the Foundation For the Future presented the 2004 Walter P. Kistler Book Award to Dr. Spencer Wells for his book The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey (hardback, Princeton University Press, 2003; paperback, Random House, 2004). The award was established in 2002 to recognize authors of science-based books that make important contributions to the public's understanding of the factors that may impact the long-term future of humanity. The annual award includes a cash prize of US..0,000 and a certi.cate. It is named for the originator of the award program and benefactor of the Foundation, Walter Kistler, who presented the award to Dr. Wells in a standing-room-only public ceremony at the University of Washington's Kane Hall. The Journey of Man explains the science of population genetics that enabled Dr. Wells to trace the genealogy of humankind by focusing on genetic markers on the Y-chromo-some. From the Kalahari Desert to Australia, the Russian Arctic, the Mediterranean, and the Americas, Wells collected blood samples from modern-day males to analyze DNA changes in the Y-chromosome - the genetic evidence that all modern humans evolved from a single man - and to trace the movements of humankind from that single origin in Africa through waves of migration to other parts of the world. Wells writes in The Journey of Man: "Accepting the evidence at face value, the implication is that Adam lived in population groups directly ancestral to the modern San, in eastern and/or southern Africa, around 60,000 years ago. The date of the earliest modern human populations - the .rst of our species - remains to be Continued on page 7 he "future" has become my second life and profession. As a novice in the .eld, functioning in a new foundation with a mission to "increase and di.use knowledge concerning the long-term future of humanity," I have had the good fortune to start with a new and clean slate. While this necessitated examining the work of contemporaries and institutions in the .eld, it also created the opportunity to construct possible new approaches within a relatively unfettered framework: the Foundation For the Future. Bringing together practitioners of repute, I examined their respective approaches, mindsets, and methodologies, and found that it is necessary to question what the terms future and long term really mean. It became apparent that the "future" has been colonized by futurists but with no consensus as to frameworks or methodologies. There are a plethora of these. Closer examination also showed that a priori and implicit ideologies, biases, preferences, visions, and dreams formed the basis for their studies about the future. There is also an underlying assumption that the future can and must be made to come about per speci.cations that generally tend to be "ideal." Invariably, such studies appear to take the currently dominant values, paradigms, memes, structures, etc., and seek to enlarge the scope and range of their applicability to those sections of humankind that are not currently under such sway. For instance, democracy, freedom, and equality are implicitly enshrined as desirables without question. Simply observing the past, it is fairly obvious that most such well-intentioned e.orts at shaping the future have failed, or are failing. Forced to reexamine and reinvent, I have, like the proverbial fool, rushed in where angels fear to tread. Taking sole responsibility, I will name some of the more important irreversibles that I believe we must take into account in ruminations about the long-term future. .. Civilizational paradigms. At base, the Continued on page 7 Humanity 3000, continued from page 2 lethality of World War II: as many as 26 million fatalities among combatants, or 45 to 50 million if civilian casualties and postwar fatalities are included. As to the phrase "without end," Cio.-Revilla said that "a number of very important social dynamics that are currently taking place" mean that our current condition of terrorism will continue for the very long term. The .nal vote narrowly defeated the debate resolution. The seminar concluded with .nal statements from participants. . Foundation Executive Director Bob Citron, far left, sits in on a Humanity 3000 small-group discussion on key knowledge areas for the millennium. Participants, left to right, are Tom Prugh, Spencer Wells, and Ramez Naam. The Next Thousand Years Workshop Ponders "This Tiny Planet" Russell Genet (with microphone) suggests to the plenary that a challenge for the future is evolving cultural workarounds that will allow humans to work together in ever-larger groups until we achieve a planet-size group. hat human-planet issues threaten the long-term livability of Earth? What is the carrying capacity of our planet? What is the prognosis of Earth's sustainability? What about global warming? What issues will impact Earth's very long-term future? These and related questions were the main focus of a workshop entitled "This Tiny Planet" in June 2004 to develop background material for the Foundation's television series, The Next Thousand Years. The eight scholar participants were selected for their high levels of expertise in scienti.c .elds related to climate, environment and ecology, oceanogra- Jon Palfreman, Executive Producer of the Foundation's television documentary series, The Next Thousand Years. phy, atmospheric research, Earth ethics, population, sustainability, astronomy, and demographics and public policy. [See sidebar for a listing of participants.] Joining the scholars were Jon Palfreman, President of the Palfreman Film Group (PFG) and Executive Producer of The Next Thousand Years, and Kirk Citron, writer and advertising entrepreneur who has been instrumental in laying the groundwork of the Foundation's television series. The purpose of the gathering was to enable PFG to learn from the discussions and question the scholars at length about speci.c scienti.c factors and the possible impacts to the planet of those factors. Two keynote speeches provided critical information for the discussions. Dr. John Delaney, Professor of oceanography at the University of Washington, spoke on "The Role of the Oceans in Earth's Sustainability." Dr. Delaney recommended viewing the oceans as the environmental .ywheel of the planet. "There is so much momentum, so much heat, so much chemical content tied up in the ocean," he said, "that in almost every way you can imagine, the ocean is central to the long-term, sustained capability of the planet to support all forms of life." However, there is so much about the oceans we have yet to understand. Michael Glantz, Senior Scientist in Continued on page 6 Participants Richard Clugston, Elliott Maynard, and Steven Salmony consider the implications of oceanographer John Delaney's remark: "What feeds the human race grows on the continents, and what grows on the continents is tied to the patterns of the ocean." "This Tiny Planet," continued from page 5 the Environmental and Societal Impacts Group of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, spoke on "Creeping Environmental Problems and Societal Responses to Them." Listing air pollution, acid rain, global warming, tropical deforestation, soil erosion, and glacier retreat, Glantz said, "Almost every environmental change in which humans are involved is of the creeping kind. Today is not much worse than yesterday; tomorrow is not much worse than today - so we don't pay attention to it. It's always a back-burner issue. ... I would argue that no society deals well with creeping environmental problems." Small-group conversations targeted three temporal divisions: one generation (the next 25 years), ten generations (the next 250 years), and 40 generations (the next thousand years). William Calvin "... if you look out 100 or 250 years, we might very well be in a colonial era again," said Phillip Longman. led the one-generation discussion, which emphasized issues such as droughts, economic bounce-back, and bioterrorism. The group discussing ten generations' time saw a progression in personal identity, which started as identity with family, then became identity with tribe, then neighborhoods of tribes, and eventually nation-states. This identity with nation-state, the group concluded, will continue for another hundred years and will then move to a planetary identity, followed eventually by solar system identity and ultimately (at some point beyond a thousand years) a galaxy identity. Issues of decision-making, the aging of the population, and technology .gured into these deliberations, possibly leading back to a re-tribalization of society. John Delaney led the discussion focused on the next 250 years. The third discussion, addressing the thousand-year future, was led by Russell Genet. This group concluded that perhaps the most striking thing 40 generations away will be the change in human consciousness - how di.erently humans will think about themselves, about society, and about the planet. Perhaps there will be a blending of science and spirit, of cultures and religions, even of reality and virtual reality. Content from this workshop will be used in preparing a television program entitled "Earth and Beyond," part of The Next Thousand Years series. The workshop Proceedings will be published in the .rst quarter of 2005 and will be available for downloading from the Foundation's web-site (www.futurefoundation.org). . Spring 2005 Events in Planning he Evolution of the Human Brain is the topic for the next Center for Human Evolution workshop, planned for spring 2005. The workshop will be held at the Foundation o.ces, and distinguished scholars with expertise related to this subject have been invited to participate. This will be the .fth in a series of evolution workshops. The .rst two, held in .998 and .999, focused on The Evolution of Intelligence; Workshop 3, held in .999, was on How Evolution Works; and Workshop 4, conducted in 2000, dealt with various aspects of Cultural Evolution. Proceedings documents, including transcripts, of some of these earlier workshops are available for downloading from the Foundation's web-site, www.futurefoundation.org. In conjunction with the Center for Human Evolution workshop in spring 2005, the Foundation will present the third Walter P. Kistler Book Award. This award is given annually to authors of science-based books that signi.cantly increase the knowledge and understanding of the public regarding subjects that will shape the future of our species. The award for 2005 will be announced in the near future. Previous winners are Dr. Gregory Stock, in 2003, for Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future, and Dr. Spencer Wells, in 2004, for The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey [see story on Page 4 of this issue]. The Walter P. Kistler Book Award includes a cash prize of US..0,000 and a certi.cate, and is presented personally by the originator of the award program, Walter Kistler, benefactor of the Foundation. . Research Grant Awards Program he Foundation For the Future's Research Grant Awards Program enters its sixth year of operation in 2005 with a revised structure and calendar. In 2004, the program went from two cycles per year to one annual cycle with a number of revised deadlines. Details on the overall program, subject restrictions, requirements for both preliminary applications and formal proposals, and the Preliminary Grant Application are all spelled out at http://www.futurefounda-tion.org/grants/grant_index.html. A project funded by a Foundation For the Future grant in 2003 was completed this fall. The Long Now Foundation has designed an open source Timeline Tool for showing a series of events over centuries and millennia. Visit the website (http:// www.longnow.org/.0klibrary/LongView. htm) to see biotechnology milestones from 8000 BC through AD 2022, and bets and predictions over time through 2.50. The Foundation established the Research Grant Awards Program to provide .nancial support to scholars undertaking research directly related to a better understanding of the factors a.ecting the long-term future of humanity. Preliminary Grant Applications are accepted only through the website application process. . Walter P. Kistler Book Award, continued from page 4 assessed, and could be anywhere between 60,000 and several hundred thousand years ago." In presenting the award, Walter Kistler said, "Dr. Wells demonstrates that the combination of three forces - mutation, selection, and genetic drift - has produced, as he puts it, 'the dizzying array of genetic patterns we see today,' and provides a simple but powerful basis for understanding the wonderful diversity we see around us. Dr. Wells's research not only tells us where we have been, it also provides valuable insight into humankind today, with important implications for us as we move forward into the future." Following his acceptance of the award, Dr. Wells gave a lecture on his work, then .elded questions from the audience and was available for signing books. . Evolution-Education Award Goes to Assistant Professor of Biology obertG.Weck,Assistant Professor of biology at Southwestern Illinois College, Belleville, IL, is the 2004 recipient of the Evo-lution-Education Award, an annual award given by the Foundation For the Future in conjunction with the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT). The award honors educators who have demonstrated innovative classroom teaching and community-education e.orts to promote the understanding of biological evolution. Weck is one of the organizers of Darwin Day, an annual event at Southwestern designed to promote understanding of evolution by exposing students and members of the community to experts in the .elds of science and education. "It is important to show students that evolution is a modern, sophisticated, empirical science and not just a theory," Weck said. He has taught college-level biology since .99., and before that he was a researcher in population genetics for the Cooperative Fisheries Research Lab at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Weck received the 2004 award during the NABT Convention, held in Chicago in mid-November. The Evolution-Educa-tion Award includes US..,000 in cash plus travel expenses to the convention and a plaque. . What Futurists Think, continued from page 4 many civilizational paradigms that have in.uenced our past and present, and will in.uence the future, essentially articulate three relationships: human and human, humans and nature, and humans and God. 2. Evolution. The complex yet simple and exquisite mechanism of evolution, not only in the biological sense but also in the memetic sense, is ultimately the mechanism that is operative in how the future comes about. This is notwithstanding our view of ourselves as a species in control of how we evolve. I believe this view is at least contradictory and probably wrong. 3. The roles of the biological and the memetic realms in this evolutionary process. 4. The interaction between the accumulation of knowledge and the corresponding e.ects on and responses of our faith and belief systems, both religious and otherwise. 5. The role, place, and value of human intervention in the human future. Human intervention and initiative are not the sole drivers of the future and I believe them to be overstated. 6. Complex interactions. The future is a result of complex interactions among a multitude of variables that defy planning, implementation, and achievement of desired futures. 7. Chance and necessity. These are important triggers as they relate to occur rences that will signi.cantly a.ect the future. 8. The future and its emergence is a process, not an event amenable to being brought about in some managerial sense. 9. A true appreciation of what long term means is essential. In my view, the human past, present, and future are relevant and comprehensible only in evolutionary time frames, or, if it is necessary to shorten that, in millennial time frames. .0. The future and our role in it are akin to an "eternal" play without beginning or end. "Humans Acting in an Eternal Play" My primary role, as Director of Programs at the Foundation For the Future, is to Continued on page 8 New Award to Honor Science Documentary Films The Foundation For the Future has created a new annual prize, the Kistler Science Documentary Film Award, which will be presented for the .rst time in summer 2005. The award includes a US$10,000 cash award and a certi.cate, and honors science-based documentary .lms that make important contributions to the public's understanding of the factors that may impact the long-term future of humanity. What Futurists Think, continued from page 7 construct and facilitate ongoing multidisciplinary conversations about the past, the present, and the future, and see that those conversations are made available to the public. The major domains that are represented in these conversations include: .. Cosmological/evolutionary 2. Biological/genetic 3. Natural resources 4. Scienti.c/technological/knowledge 5. Social/cultural/religious 6. Governance/political/ideological 7. Space 8. Wildcards: climate change, asteroids, SETI, pandemics, etc. My metaphor for the future is "humans acting in an eternal play." Humans have parts in the play, but are neither the play nor the prime actors. It is a play without beginning or end, and a future evolving a trajectory that no one will ever see. The closest I could come to describing this trajectory is to suggest that we are currently positioned in the last "ethical" phase of a multiphase evolution moving from the particulate to the galactic, stellar, planetary, chemical, biological, and cultural stages. (I acknowledge Eric Chaisson for this model of evolution.) Researching the future within such a framework is undiluted ecstasy. It is without limits. My current studies in this context are related to the exploration of the "knowledge/faith-belief " interaction, and the biological and genetic revolution that is unfolding before our eyes. If one can accept that the future does evolve but not in some "design" or "vision" or "preferred sense" but as reactive adjustments by humans at all levels of identity and organization, there are no limits - only that one must allow that what one is researching is a microscopic piece of a very large and unde.ned jigsaw puzzle. Forces and Trends for the Next 30 Years Given that context, I believe that in the next 30 years a few basic themes will dominate the planet: .. The inevitable demise of the nation-state with accompanying trauma for those states that have to submerge their self-importance, and huge positives for those that seek to emerge from the dungeons and cellars of the hierarchy - a path that promises eventual planetary consciousness and citizenship for all humanity. This may not occur within 30 years but the signs will be unmistakable. It is not a question of if but when. 2. Faith and belief systems of all kinds, religious and otherwise, that are at odds with the march of knowledge will see their power and in.uence erode. They will be relegated to issues of spirit in the private domains of life and banished from the commons. Issues of sustainability, planetary citizenship, climate change, etc., at the planetary level will dominate. 3. The revolution in biology that is taking place will set the stage for a complete rede.nition of what it means to be human. 4. There will .rst be a return to Eastern paradigms in terms of the three relationships named earlier and .nally a middle path will continue to emerge including elements of Western paradigms. In.uences, sources, theories, individuals, and dreams that have formed my thinking with regard to the future are too numerous to mention. I would, however, be remiss in not acknowledging Sohail Inayatullah, Eric Chaisson, Walter Kistler, Zia Sardar, Joe Coates, et al, for their early and .rm support for my foray into future studies. Books that have had a profound impact on my thinking number in the hundreds but signi.cant among these are books on evolution, memes, complexity, tipping points, macrohistories, and criticalities. I do not have a preferred future. My dream is to assist in the process of an informed humanity in.uencing their future from the bottom up as citizens of the planet. . From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 27 19:15:14 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 14:15:14 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Robert Higgs: Franklin D. Roosevelt and George W. Bush: Some Unsettling Similarities Message-ID: Robert Higgs: Franklin D. Roosevelt and George W. Bush: Some Unsettling Similarities http://www.independent.org/printer.asp?page=%2Fnewsroom%2Farticle%2Easp?id=1452 The Independent Institute January 23, 2005 In view of the ideological chasm that seems to separate the admirers of Franklin D. Roosevelt from those of George W. Bush, one might suppose that these two presidents exhibited completely different character and conduct, yet a close examination reveals that they actually have much in common. The similarities, however, are scarcely reassuring to those who are worried about what President Bush might do next. Roosevelt and Bush came from similar class backgrounds, each being the scion of a wealthy, well established Northeastern family. After early schooling at home, Roosevelt went to the elite Groton School in Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard College, and attended Columbia Law School. Bush, the grandson of a U.S. senator and the son of a U.S. president, went to the elite Phillips Academy in Massachusetts and graduated from Yale University and from Harvard Business School. Neither man ever achieved any notable success on his own in the private sector, and both leaped at opportunities to trade on their family background and social connections by involving themselves in politics at an early age. Despite the advantages of study at premier educational institutions, neither man possessed much interest in or capacity for deep thinking, specializing instead in conducting themselves as bon vivants and backslappers. In a biography of Roosevelt, John T. Flynn remarked on "the free and easy manner in which [Roosevelt] could confront problems about which he knew very little." Indeed, Roosevelt affected complete insouciance about his lack of understanding of many matters for which he had responsibility as president. Of Bush's intellectual caliber, obviously, the less said the better. Neither had to dwell on the concerns that cause ordinary people to lose sleep, such as earning an honest living or meeting the challenges of an occupation, trade, or profession. The old adage "it's who you know" must have had special resonance for both men. Neither possessed sterling personal character. Roosevelt was an inveterate liar. His "first instinct," according to New York Times reporter Turner Catledge, "was always to lie," although "sometimes in midsentence he would switch to accuracy because he realized he could get away with the truth in that particular instance." Bush, too, in the view of his legions of enemies and detractors, has resorted frequently to lies, most notably in his series of shifting prewar and subsequent justifications for the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. His critics may be wrong, however, that he has--in the strictest sense--lied in these pronouncements. It may be that he simply does not distinguish truth from falsehood, and rather than making the effort to do so, he prefers to float along on his arrogance in a sea of delusions. Many observers have remarked on Bush's astonishing insulation from information that might contradict his bizarre interpretations of events in the outside world. Evidently, he does not read newspapers or even watch much news on television, relying instead on the briefing papers and verbal reports fed to him by his aides and on the opinions expressed by the sycophants with whom he surrounds himself. Roosevelt seems to have had the wit to know that he was lying; Bush seems content to live in a reality-free environment, confidently awaiting the divine intervention that will transform his fantasies and wishful thinking into facts on the ground. Both men sought successfully to plunge the nation into war, and having done so, both then gained stature from serving as a "war president," although Roosevelt's war was the greatest cataclysm of all time, whereas Bush's is a much smaller conflict, albeit one replete with important global consequences. Both men engaged in war with cavalier disregard for constitutional scruples. In 1940 and 1941, Roosevelt made the United States an undeclared belligerent working hand in hand with the British, even going so far as to give away a substantial chunk of the U.S. Navy to a foreign power wholly on his own authority in the so-called "destroyer deal." Bush, despite having sworn to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution," eschewed the clear constitutional requirement of a congressional declaration of war and sent U.S. forces to attack Iraq as if he were a Caesar beyond earthly restraint. Both men preferred, especially in the conduct of foreign policy, to do as they wished, taking Congress or the courts into account only as a courtesy or in pro forma consultations and hearings. Before Roosevelt transformed himself from Dr. New Deal to Dr. Win the War, his administration had run out of steam and faced mounting opposition in Congress and among the general public. Similarly, Bush's administration was drifting and pointless until the 9/11 attacks elevated the president to the status of "great leader" and changed his uncertain gait into "bring 'em on" swagger. Neither man learned anything from political opponents or from the failure of his polices to pan out, lapsing instinctively into an "us against them" mentality for dealing with differences of opinion, interpretation, or moral judgment. When the New Deal failed to bring the economy fully out of the Great Depression and then, in 1937-1938, knocked it into a "depression within a depression," Roosevelt could only sputter that his enemies among the "economic royalists" had mounted a strike of capital to sabotage his presidency. Bush, confronted with the manifest catastrophe of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, finds nothing to fault and no one in his administration to hold accountable for the debacle. Those such as Colin Powell, who recently mustered the courage to tell the president that "we are losing," the president prefers to send packing, perceiving in their honesty only disloyalty to his noble quest, with its patient willingness to prolong the pointless savagery and slaughter indefinitely. Both Roosevelt and Bush presided over a huge spurt in the growth of government financed in substantial part by running up debt. Under Roosevelt, domestic spending and economic regulation mushroomed prior to the gargantuan military buildup of the war years; under Bush, domestic and military spending and regulation all have zoomed upward. Although Roosevelt's sweeping regulatory measures bulked far larger than Bush's, the current president did make the largest addition in decades to the government's welfare apparatus--the prescription-drug benefit attached to Medicare, which is sure to exceed its already enormous cost estimates before long. Bush's spending increases have been at the fastest rate since the guns-and-butter heyday of Lyndon B. Johnson's administration, and Bush has not seen fit to veto a single spending bill, no matter how outrageously packed with pork it might be. No doubt other parallels might also be mentioned, but the foregoing remarks suffice to establish my main point. In government, as many commentators have noted, no failure goes unrewarded. Indeed, the greater the failure, the greater the reward. Franklin D. Roosevelt and George W. Bush exemplify in strikingly similar ways the veracity of this observation. _________________________________________________________________ [3]Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at The Independent Institute, author of [4]Against Leviathan and [5]Crisis and Leviathan, and editor of the scholarly quarterly journal, [6]The Independent Review. _________________________________________________________________ [7]The Empire Has No Clothes New from Robert Higgs! [8]AGAINST LEVIATHAN: Government Power and a Free Society Against Leviathan offers an unflinchingly critical analysis of government power. Topics include Social Security, the paternalism of the FDA, the "War on Drugs", the nature of political leadership, civil liberties, the conduct of the national surveillance state, and governmental responses to a continuing stream of "crises," including domestic economic busts and foreign wars both hot and cold. References 3. http://www.independent.org/aboutus/person_detail.asp?id=489 4. http://www.independent.org/store/book_detail.asp?bookID=53 5. http://www.independent.org/store/book_detail.asp?bookID=15 6. http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/ 7. http://www.independent.org/store/book_detail.asp?bookID=53 8. http://www.independent.org/store/book_detail.asp?bookID=53 From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 27 19:17:09 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 14:17:09 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Onion: Someday, I Will Copyedit The Great American Novel Message-ID: Someday, I Will Copyedit The Great American Novel http://www.theonion.com/opinion/index.php?issue=4104&o=2 [Thanks to Sarah for this. Does anyone know what Mr. Mencken said about copyeditors?] VOLUME 41 ISSUE 04 AMERICA'S FINEST NEWS SOURCE 26 JANUARY 2005 EDITORIAL ROUNDUP Someday, I Will Copyedit The Great American Novel By Joanne Cohen Most of my coworkers here at Washington Mutual have no idea who I really am. They see me correcting spelling errors in press releases and removing excess punctuation from quarterly reports, and they think that's all there is to me. But behind these horn-rimmed glasses, there's a woman dreaming big dreams. I won't be stuck standardizing verb tenses in business documents my whole life. One day, I will copyedit the Great American Novel. "Sure," you say, "along with every other detail-oriented grammarian in the country." Yes, I know how many idealistic young people dream of taking a manuscript that captures the spirit of 21st-century America and removing all of its grammatical and semantic errors. But how many of them know to omit the word "bear" when referring to koalas? How many know to change "pompom" to "pompon"? Copyediting is a craft. A good copy editor knows the rules of punctuation, usage, and style, but a truly great copy editor knows when to break them. Macaulay's copy editor let him begin sentences with "but." JFK's copy editor knew when to let a split infinitive work its magic. You need only look at Thackeray to see the damage that overzealous elegant variation can do. Right now, there's a writer out there with a vision as vast as Mark Twain's or F. Scott Fitzgerald's. He is laboring in obscurity, working with deliberate patience. He isn't using tricks of language or pyrotechnic plot turns. He is doing the hardest work of all, the work of Melville, of Cather: He is capturing life on the page. And when the time comes, I'll be here--green pencil in hand--to remove the excess commas from that page. With clear eyes and an unquenchable thirst for syntactical truth, I will distinguish between defining and non-defining relative clauses and use "that" and "which" appropriately. I will locate and remove the hyphen from any mention of "sky blue" the color and insert the hyphen into any place where the adjective "blue" is qualified by "sky." I will distinguish between "theism" and "deism," between "evangelism" and "evangelicalism," between "therefor" and "therefore." I will use the correct "duct tape," and not the oft-seen apocope "duck tape." The Great American Novel's editor will expect no less of me, for his house will be paying me upwards of $15 an hour, more than it paid the author himself. To a writer who didn't strive for perfection, my corrections would seem niggling. But the author of the Great American Novel will understand that I am as essential to his book as the ink that will cover sheaf after sheaf of virgin paper. Some people edit copy because they choose to. I copyedit because I must. It isn't merely a matter of making a living. If it were that, I would have been line editing years ago. No, I've been fascinated by the almost mathematical questions of copy since the summer of my 15th birthday, when I found a leather-bound diary hidden away in the cupboard of an old abandoned farmhouse. In the diary, a young housemaid recorded her hopes, fears, and aspirations. That summer, I spent many hours poring over the handwritten book, pen in hand, correcting grammar and writing "sp" next to words. I urged paragraph breaks, provided omitted words, and indicated improper capitalizations with a short double-underline. I wrote "stet" in the margins when I made a mistake. Even though I knew Miss Charlotte would never see the notation, I wanted the text to be flawless. In my mind's eye, I can see the galleys of the Great American Novel on my desk. There is no time to waste. Deadlines have been missed, for the writer has passed out on his desk many times after writing into the wee hours. But, finally, he has perfected the 23rd draft. His work is done. I get myself a fresh cup of coffee, get out several sharpened green pencils, and adjust my noise-reduction headphones for the long task ahead. I lower my head into my cubicle. My work is just beginning. From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Thu Jan 27 22:29:48 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 14:29:48 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] systems In-Reply-To: <200501271930.j0RJUYC03541@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050127222948.92113.qmail@web30804.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>COULD an intelligent system, improperly managed, actually break all of our usual RF wireless systems and, for exact, hack into Onstar systems and thereby freeze traffic?<< --Good question to ask... also, could a governmental system, withdrawing into an incestuous web of closely connected interests, squeeze out information about the world to the point where it in effect wages war against reality? In many governmental systems, truth is treason and criticism is met with a deaf ear, often by vilifying and attacking the character of those who speak the truth. Michael __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Jan 28 02:21:46 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 18:21:46 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] systems Message-ID: <01C5049D.10120480.shovland@mindspring.com> One can certainly do that within the confines of the White House :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2005 2:30 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] systems >>COULD an intelligent system, improperly managed, actually break all of our usual RF wireless systems and, for exact, hack into Onstar systems and thereby freeze traffic?<< --Good question to ask... also, could a governmental system, withdrawing into an incestuous web of closely connected interests, squeeze out information about the world to the point where it in effect wages war against reality? In many governmental systems, truth is treason and criticism is met with a deaf ear, often by vilifying and attacking the character of those who speak the truth. Michael __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Jan 28 02:41:30 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 18:41:30 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] On Sunday, Only the Propaganda Will Change Message-ID: <01C5049F.D1F9D710.shovland@mindspring.com> Our man Allawi will "win," just like Karzai did in Afghanistan. We will be told that turnout was strong in spite of the terrorist threats. One wonders how many people will actually be dumb enough to risk their lives for a PR stunt. Any stories about violence at the polls or voting problems will quickly disappear from the corporate media. President Bush will make a flowery speech about how wonderful democracy is. He will say that we are in Iraq at the invitation of a legitimate government, and that we are only there to protect a fledgling democracy against those who hate freedom. Yada yada yada... The killing will continue. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 28 15:58:17 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 10:58:17 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: The Fit Tend to Fidget, and Biology May Be Why, a Study Says Message-ID: The Fit Tend to Fidget, and Biology May Be Why, a Study Says http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/28/health/28weight.html [The Science article itself is appended.] By DENISE GRADY Overweight people have a tendency to sit, while lean ones have trouble holding still and spend two hours more a day on their feet, pacing around and fidgeting, researchers are reporting in findings published today. The difference translates into about 350 calories a day, enough to produce a weight loss of 30 to 40 pounds in one year without trips to the gym - if only heavy people could act more restless, like thin ones. The difference in activity levels may be biological and inborn, the researchers say, the result of genetically determined levels of brain chemicals that govern a person's tendency to move around. It is the predisposition to be inactive that leads to obesity, and not the other way around, they suggest. The findings, being published today in the journal Science, are from a study in which researchers at the Mayo Clinic outfitted 10 lean men and women and 10 slightly obese ones - all of whom described themselves as "couch potatoes" - with underwear carrying sensors that measured their body postures and movements every half second for 10 days on several occasions. By the end of the study, which required a staff of 150, the researchers had collected 25 million pieces of data on each participant. One thing that convinced the scientists that the activity levels were innate, and not the product of a person's being overweight or underweight, was that the levels did not change when the subjects were forced to gain or lose weight in different phases of the study. To make sure they knew exactly how many calories the subjects were eating, the researchers cooked all their meals for weeks at a time, and had them pledge not to cheat. A total of 20,000 meals were prepared. The director of the study, Dr. James Levine, an endocrinologist and nutritionist at the Mayo Clinic, said the findings offered hope to overweight people, suggesting that relatively simple and painless changes in their daily behavior, like making an effort to walk more and ride less, could help control weight. He said increases in obesity in recent decades could be traced more to declines in daily exercise - more time spent in cars, behind desks and in front of computers and televisions - than to increases in eating. In an environment that allows people to be sedentary, those with a biological predisposition to sit still will do so, he said. In contrast, the restless ones will still find ways to burn off calories, even if it means walking around their desks. "People with obesity are tremendously efficient," Dr. Levine said. "Any opportunity not to waste energy, they take. If you think about it that way, it all makes sense. As soon as they have an opportunity to sit down and not waste those calories, they do." Participants in the study went through three 11-week phases over a year or so in which their diets were controlled to maintain, increase or decrease their weight. They were paid $2,000 at the end of each phase, for a total of $6,000. Each phase included a 10-day period during which they had to wear the underwear with the sensors around the clock, taking it off for only about 15 minutes a day to shower and get a fresh set from the researchers. The top was either an undershirt or a sports bra made of Lycra, and the bottom was a risqu?-looking pair of shorts with openings at the crotch and backside so the garment would not have to be lowered during the day, which would have disturbed the sensors. Dr. Levine said he had designed the outfit with a colleague. "We had to be very creative," he said. "And you have to test them for comfort. I would put them on top of my suit. Mayo has a very strict dress code. Nothing gave me more pleasure than to wander around with this bizarre underwear over my suit." Dr. Eric Ravussin, an obesity researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., who wrote an essay in Science about Dr. Levine's study, said that because the tendency to sit still seemed to be biological, it might not be easy for obese people to change their ways. "The bad news," Dr. Ravussin said, "is that you cannot tell people, 'Why don't you sit less and be a little more fidgety,' because they may do it for a couple of hours but won't sustain it for days and weeks and months and years." But Dr. Rudolph Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia University Medical Center, said, "People can be taught and motivated to change their behavior in service of their health." Dr. Leibel also noted that although it was plausible that the tendency to be inactive was biologically determined, it had not been proved. Dr. Ravussin said it might be possible to help people stay lean by making their environments less conducive to sitting, though that would take major societal changes like rebuilding neighborhoods in which people can walk to markets instead of "the remote shopping mall with 10,000 parking spots and everybody is fighting for the handicapped one." A participant in the study, Othelmo da Silva, 41, an academic adviser at Rochester Community and Technical College in Minnesota, said he was overweight and felt encouraged by the study and the idea that people could lose weight by moving around more and did not necessarily have to join a gym. As for the idea that the tendency to sit still might be genetic, Mr. da Silva said no "lazy genes" had been identified and added, "I personally believe in self-determination over detrimental biological predisposition." Dr. Jules Hirsch, an obesity researcher at Rockefeller University, said studies in the 1950's first suggested that obese people were less fidgety than thin ones. One study, of young women playing tennis, showed that although fat and thin ones played equally well, fat ones wasted less motion hitting the ball. They were seemingly more efficient, and probably burned fewer calories. Dr. Hirsch said some people were probably born with, or developed at an early age, a "greater efficiency at caloric storage," from eating more or moving less. "This phenomenon helps store energy," he said, "but is a great risk factor for the development of obesity." But until it is understood better, he said, "we're not apt to understand the overall obesity problem any better." Dr. Levine of the Mayo Clinic said the study findings had inspired him to redesign his office. His computer is now mounted over a treadmill, and he walks 0.7 miles an hour while he works. "I converted a completely sedentary job to a mobile one," he said. The walking is addictive and "terribly good fun," Dr. Levine said, adding that he has had 30 or 40 requests from colleagues at Mayo for treadmill desks like his. Has he lost weight? He does not know. "I'm a relatively lean bloke," he said. "I never weigh myself. You'll think I'm a bad nutritionist. I don't recommend people weigh themselves all the time. It's not a healthy thing to do." -------------- Betterhumans > Couch Potatoes Hardwired to Sit http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2005-01-27-2 Non-exercise activity a key to staying lean, and some people appear biologically predisposed against it Betterhumans Staff 1/27/2005 2:20 PM Non-exercise activity is far more important for leanness than hitting the gym, suggests a complex study that involved high-tech underwear monitoring participants 24 hours a day. The study shows that everything from tapping toes to cleaning the basement boosts what's been dubbed non-exercise activity thermogenesis--"NEAT"--and plays a large role in determining who is lean and who is obese. "A person can expend calories either by going to the gym, or through everyday activities," says study leader [8]James Levine of the [9]Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. "Our study shows that the calories that people burn in their everyday activities--their NEAT--are far, far more important in obesity than we previously imagined." In the study, obese people sat on average 150 minutes more each than lean people, burning 350 fewer calories per day. And importantly for understanding the origins of obesity, the difference appeared to be biological. "It most likely reflects a brain chemical difference because our study shows that even when obese people lose weight they remain seated the same number of minutes per day," says Levine. "They don't stand or walk more. And conversely, when lean people artificially gain weight, they don't sit more. So the NEAT appears to be fixed." Is that a sensor in your pants? The findings are based on a complex study involving more than 150 people who helped in planning, design, invention, food preparation and data analysis. Ten obese and 10 lean participants were fitted with a special monitoring system invented by Mayo Clinic researchers. Incorporating technology used in fighter-jet control panels, the system uses sensors in data-logging undergarments--bottoms like bicycle shorts, women's tops like sports bras and men's like undershirts. Participants wore the undergarments 24 hours a day, getting a fresh pair each morning at breakfast when they were also weighed and their clothing's data downloaded. Using the system, researchers monitored the body postures and movements of participants for 10 days. The only things participants were forbidden to do were swim and eat food the research team didn't prepare for them. Next, they overfed lean participants by 1,000 calories per day and underfed obese participants by 1,000 calories per day. They then monitored participants' movements every half second for 10 days. Encouraging "NEAT-seeking" Comparing results, the researchers found that even after losing weight, the naturally obese group sat more and moved less. And even after gaining weight, the naturally lean group moved around more. The researchers conclude that obese people are NEAT-deficient, possibly because of a cognitive defect in processing biological drives and environmental cues. They think that the findings could be used to help reverse obesity trends, such as by encouraging "NEAT-seeking" behavior. "This is entirely doable, because the kind of activity we are talking about does not require special or large spaces, unusual training regimens or gear," says Levine. "Unlike running a marathon, NEAT is within the reach of everyone." References 3. http://www.betterhumans.com/News/news.aspx?articleID=2005-01-27-4 4. http://www.betterhumans.com/News/news.aspx?articleID=2005-01-27-3 5. http://www.betterhumans.com/News/news.aspx?articleID=2005-01-27-2 6. http://www.betterhumans.com/News/index.aspx 7. http://www.betterhumans.com/About_Us/Products/Syndication/index.aspx 8. http://www.mayoclinic.org/endocrinology-rst/11206608.html 9. http://www.mayoclinic.org/ 10. http://www.sciencemag.org/ ------------- Interindividual Variation in Posture Allocation: Possible Role in Human Obesity Science, Vol 307, Issue 5709, 584-586 , 28 January 2005 James A. Levine,* Lorraine M. Lanningham-Foster, Shelly K. McCrady, Alisa C. Krizan, Leslie R. Olson, Paul H. Kane, Michael D. Jensen, Matthew M. Clark Obesity occurs when energy intake exceeds energy expenditure. Humans expend energy through purposeful exercise and through changes in posture and movement that are associated with the routines of daily life [called nonexercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT)]. To examine NEAT's role in obesity, we recruited 10 lean and 10 mildly obese sedentary volunteers and measured their body postures and movements every half-second for 10 days. Obese individuals were seated, on average, 2 hours longer per day than lean individuals. Posture allocation did not change when the obese individuals lost weight or when lean individuals gained weight, suggesting that it is biologically determined. If obese individuals adopted the NEAT-enhanced behaviors of their lean counterparts, they might expend an additional 350 calories (kcal) per day. Endocrine Research Unit, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN 55905, USA. * To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: Jim at Mayo.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------- Obesity is epidemic in high-income countries. In the United States alone poor diet and physical inactivity are associated with 400,000 deaths per year (1) and obesity-related medical expenditures in 2003 approximated $75 billion (2). Obesity is also an emerging problem in middle- and low-income countries, where the health and fiscal costs are likely to be devastating (3). As the impact of obesity on health escalates, so too does the need to understand its pathogenesis. Weight gain and obesity occur when energy intake exceeds energy expenditure. We are interested in a specific component of energy expenditure called NEAT and the role it might play in human obesity. NEAT is distinct from purposeful exercise and includes the energy expenditure of daily activities such as sitting, standing, walking, and talking. We have previously shown that when humans overeat, activation of NEAT helps to prevent weight gain (4). To better understand NEAT and its role in obesity, we separated NEAT into the thermogenesis associated with posture (standing, sitting, and lying) and that associated with movement (ambulation). To investigate whether the obese state has an effect on NEAT, we first developed and validated a sensitive and reliable technology for measuring the postural allocation of NEAT in human volunteers (5, 6). This physical activity monitoring system uses inclinometers and triaxial accelerometers to capture data on body position and motion 120 times each minute. By combining these measurements with laboratory measures of energy expenditure, we can summate NEAT and define its components (7). To compare body posture and body motion in lean and obese people, we recruited 20 healthy volunteers who were self-proclaimed "couch potatoes." Ten participants (five females and five males) were lean [body mass index (BMI) 23 ? 2 kg/m2] and 10 participants (five females and five males) were mildly obese (BMI 33 ? 2 kg/m2) (8) (table S1). We deliberately selected mildly obese subjects who were not incapacitated by their obesity and who had no joint problems or other medical complications of obesity. The volunteers agreed to have all of their movements measured for 10 days and to have their total NEAT measured with the use of a stable isotope technique (9). They were instructed to continue their usual daily activities and occupations and not to adopt new exercise practices. Over the 10-day period, we collected 25 million data points on posture and movement for each volunteer. Our analysis revealed that obese participants were seated for 164 min longer per day than were lean participants (Fig. 1A). Correspondingly, lean participants were upright for 152 min longer per day than obese participants. Sleep times (lying) were almost identical between the groups. Total body movement, 89% of which was ambulation, was negatively correlated with fat mass (Fig. 1, B and C). Notably, if the obese subjects had the same posture allocation as the lean subjects, they would have expended an additional 352 ? 65 (?SD) (range, 269 to 477) calories (kcal) per day (Fig. 1C). -------------------------------------------------------------------- Fig. 1. (A) Time allocation for different postures for 10 obese and 10 lean sedentary subjects. Data are shown as mean + SEM. Significant differences between lean and obese are indicated: *, P = 0.001; **, P = 0.0005. There were no statistically significant differences between females (n = 10) and males (n = 10): Females stood 470 ? 35 min/day and males stood 429 ? 40 min/day. (B ) Relationship between total body movement and body fat content. Body fat, determined from dual x-ray absorptiometry, is expressed as a percentage (left) and mass (right) plotted against the total 10-day accelerometer output [accelerometer units (AU)] for 20 (10 obese and 10 lean) sedentary subjects. The open diamonds are data for females and the filled diamonds are data for males. There was no significant relationship between fat-free mass and accelerometer output (fig. S1). The relationship between NEAT by doubly labeled water adjusted by weight versus accelerometer output is shown in fig. S2. (C) (Left) Total daily energy expenditure and (right) NEAT in 10 obese and 10 lean sedentary subjects. The uppermost segments of the bars for obese individuals (vertical arrows) represent the additional energy that could be expended if these subjects were ambulatory for the same amount of time as lean subjects. BMR, basal metabolic rate; TEF, thermic effect of food. There was no significant difference in sleeping time between the lean group (423 ? 15 min) and the obese group (434 ? 17 min). The energy expenditure data and standard deviations appear in table S2. The relationship between NEAT measured with doubly labeled water and NEAT measured with the instruments is shown in fig. S3. [View Larger Version of this Image (19K GIF file)] -------------------------------------------------------------------- To investigate whether these differences in posture allocation are a cause or consequence of obesity, we asked seven of the original obese volunteers (four females and three males, BMI 33 ? 2 kg/m2) to undergo supervised weight loss over a period of 8 weeks. The average weight loss was 8 kg. Likewise, we recruited nine of the original lean volunteers and one additional lean volunteer (six females and four males, BMI 23 ? 2 kg/m2) to undergo supervised overfeeding over a period of 8 weeks. The average weight gain was 4 kg. After these weight perturbations, we studied posture allocation in these subjects for another 10 days. Interestingly, both the obese subjects losing weight and the lean subjects gaining weight maintained their original posture allocation (Fig. 2). Thus, it appears that interindividual differences in posture allocation are biologically determined. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Fig. 2. (A) Posture allocation in seven obese sedentary subjects who underwent caloric restriction (8 ). (Left) Posture allocation data at baseline and after weight loss of 8 ? 2 kg. (Right) The time the subjects spent standing/ambulating at baseline is plotted against the time the subjects spent standing/ambulating after weight loss. (B) Posture allocation in 10 lean sedentary subjects who underwent experimental weight gain (8 ). (Left) The posture allocation data for baseline and after weight gain of 4 ? 2 kg. (Right) The time the subjects spent standing/ambulating at baseline is plotted against the time the subjects spent standing/ambulating after weight gain. Data are shown as mean + SEM. [View Larger Version of this Image (34K GIF file)] -------------------------------------------------------------------- It should be emphasized that this was a pilot study and that the results need to be confirmed in larger studies. Nevertheless, the current data may be important for understanding the biology of obesity and how best to treat it. The propensity of obese persons to sit more than lean individuals has several potential explanations. Rodent studies support the concept that there are central and humoral mediators of NEAT (10, 11). For example, we have shown that a neuropeptide associated with arousal, orexin (12), increases NEAT in rats when injected into the paraventricular nucleus (PVN) of the hypothalamus. Preliminary data suggest that PVN injections of orexin also cause dose-dependent increases in standing posture allocation in rats (13). Thus, there may be central and humoral mediators that drive the sedentary behavior of obese individuals. The negative relationship between fat mass and movement (Fig. 1B) raises the intriguing possibility that body fat releases a factor that slows physical activity in obesity. However, these data also demonstrate that posture allocation is not the mechanism by which NEAT is modulated with short-term overfeeding. One hypothesis is that this occurs through modulation of energy efficiency; this is an area worthy of future investigation. These data may also have implications for obesity intervention. One could argue that obese individuals have a biologically determined posture allocation and therefore are destined to become obese. If this were true, obesity would have been as common 50 years ago as it is today. However, obesity rates have increased and continue to do so (14). We speculate that obese and lean individuals respond differently to the environmental cues that promote sedentary behavior. If the obese volunteers adopted the NEAT-enhanced behavior of their lean counterparts, they could expend an additional 350 kcal per day. Over a year, this alone could result in a weight loss of 15 kg, if energy intake remained unchanged. Herein lies the rationale behind nationwide approaches to promote NEAT in small increments (15). For example, in Rochester, Minnesota, in 1920 before car use was commonplace the average walk to and from work was 1.6 miles (16). If walking this distance to work were reinstituted by our obese subjects, all of whom currently drive to work, an extra 150 kcal per day could be expended. We will need to use similar measures to promote NEAT as an impetus to create an active and dynamic environment in which, for example, dancing supersedes television as a leisure activity. Approaches that succeed in getting people out of their chairs and moving could have substantial impact on the obesity epidemic. References and Notes 1. A. H. Mokdad, J. S. Marks, D. F. Stroup, J. L. Gerberding, JAMA 291, 1238 (2004).[Abstract/Free Full Text] 2. E. A. Finkelstein, I. C. Fiebelkorn, G. Wang, Obes. Res. 12, 18 (2004).[Abstract/Free Full Text] 3. World Health Organization, Obesity: Preventing and Managing the Global Epidemic (Geneva, Switzerland, 1997). 4. J. A. Levine, N. L. Eberhardt, M. D. Jensen, Science 283, 212 (1999).[Abstract/Free Full Text] 5. J. A. Levine, P. A. Baukol, K. R. Westerterp, Med. Sci. Sports Exerc. 33, 1593 (2001).[CrossRef][ISI][Medline] 6. J. A. Levine, E. L. Melanson, K. R. Westerterp, J. O. Hill, Eur. J. Clin. Nutr. 57, 1176 (2003).[CrossRef][ISI][Medline] 7. J. A. Levine, E. L. Melanson, K. R. Westerterp, J. O. Hill, Am. J. Physiol. Endocrinol. Metab. 281, E670 (2001).[Abstract/Free Full Text] 8. Materials and methods are available as supporting material on Science Online. 9. D. A. Schoeller, C. A. Leitch, C. Brown, Am. J. Physiol. 251, R1137 (1986).[ISI][Medline] 10. J. A. Levine, J. Nygren, K. R. Short, K. S. Nair, J. Appl. Physiol. 94, 165 (2003).[Abstract/Free Full Text] 11. K. Kiwaki, C. M. Kotz, C. Wang, L. Lanningham-Foster, J. A. Levine, Am. J. Physiol. 286, E551 (2004).[ISI] 12. J. G. Sutcliffe, L. de Lecea, Nature Med. 10, 673 (2004).[CrossRef][ISI][Medline] 13. C. M. Kotz, personal communication. 14. J. O. Hill, H. R. Wyatt, G. W. Reed, J. C. Peters, Science 299, 853 (2003).[Abstract/Free Full Text] 15. More information about promoting NEAT in small increments can be found at www.smallstep.gov and www.americaonthemove.org. 16. L. Lanningham-Foster, L. J. Nysse, J. A. Levine, Obes. Res. 11, 1178 (2003).[Abstract/Free Full Text] 17. We thank the volunteers, dietitians, food technicians, nursing staff, and the Mass Spectrometer Core at the General Clinical Research Center, A. Oberg for assistance with statistics, and P. Baukol for technical support. Supported by NIH grants DK56650, DK63226, DK66270, and M01 RR00585, by T. S. and D. B. Ward, and by the Mayo Foundation. Supporting Online Material www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/307/5709/584/DC1 Materials and Methods Figs. S1 to S4 Tables S1 and S2 References 20 October 2004; accepted 7 December 2004 10.1126/science.1106561 Include this information when citing this paper. Volume 307, Number 5709, Issue of 28 Jan 2005, pp. 584-586. From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 28 16:02:50 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 11:02:50 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Utne: (James Hughes) The Next Digital Divide Message-ID: The Next Digital Divide http://www.utne.com/cgi-bin/udt/im.display.printable?client.id=utne_web_specials&story.id=11539 [Three part interview with James Hughes appended.] January 2005 By Alyssa Ford, Utne.com How biopolitics could reshape our understanding of left and right Didn't think it was possible for the left to be anymore splintered? Welcome to the world of biopolitics, a fledgling political movement that promises to make mortal enemies out of one-time allies -- such as back-to-nature environmentalists and technophile lefties -- and close friends of traditional foes, such as anti-GMO activists and evangelicals. Biopolitics, a term coined by Trinity College professor James Hughes, places pro-technology transhumanists on one pole and people who are suspicious of technology on the other. [1]According to Hughes, transhumanists are members of "an emergent philosophical movement which says that humans can and should become more than human through technological enhancements." The term transhuman is shorthand for transitional human -- people who are in the process of becoming "posthuman" or "cyborgs." It may sound like a movement founded by people who argue over Star Trek minutia on the Internet, but transhumanists are far more complex and organized than one might imagine. They got their start in the early 1980s as a small band of libertarian technophiles who advocated for any advancement that could extend human life indefinitely or eliminate disease and disability. Their members were some of the first to sign up to be cryogenically frozen, for example. As biotech and bioethics issues such as cloning and stem cell research gained importance on the international agenda, the transhumanist philosophy grew in popularity and became more diverse. For instance, several neo-nazi groups who saw technological advancement as the way to achieve eugenics embraced the transhumanist label. Transhumanism pierced the popular culture when the Coalition of Artists and Life Forms (CALF) formed in the 1990s. This small band of artists and writers has a shared excitement for technology and a distrust of the corporations that mishandle it. In 1997, a group of American and European leftist-transhumanists (including Dr. Hughes) formed the [2]World Transhumanist Association to advocate for technology not only as a means to improve the human race and increase longevity, but as a tool for social justice. Unlike their [3]libertarian forebearers, these "democratic transhumanists" advocate for moderate safeguards on new technology, such as drug trials. In an exhaustive [4]article about various factions under the transhuman label, Hughes identifies 11 subgroups, including "disability transhumanists" who argue for their right to technology and "gay transhumanists" who want children conceived outside of the opposite-sex paradigm (i.e., cloning). By definition, social conservatives oppose the transhumanists, but the new movement also has many enemies on the new age, environmental, anti-GMO, and anti-biotech left. These progressive opponents have even aligned with right wing factions in opposition to transhumanist goals. In 2002, Jeremy Rifkin and other environmentalists joined with anti-abortion groups to float an anti-cloning petition. Abortion opponents again found themselves working with the left when a [5]group of feminists and civil libertarians began pressuring the Indian government to restrict women's access to ultrasounds and abortions for fear of female infanticide. The transhumanists, in turn, call these anti-technology liberals "left luddites," "bioconservatives," and "technophobes" -- a not-so-subtle linguistic clue that the new biopolitical axis has the potential to completely reconfigure traditional politics. Related Links: * [6]In Defense of Posthuman Dignity * [7]Cyborg Liberation Front * Three-part interview with Dr. James Hughes: * [8]Part One * [9]Part Two * [10]Part Three [11]Jeremy Rifkin's Center for Genetics and Society References 1. http://www.changesurfer.com/Acad/DemocraticTranshumanism.htm 2. http://transhumanism.org/index.php/th/ 3. http://www.extropy.com/ 4. http://www.changesurfer.com/Acad/TranshumPolitics.htm 5. http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/organizations/grhf/SAsia/suchana/0500/h003.html 6. http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/dignity.html 7. http://villagevoice.com/news/0331,baard,45866,1.html 8. http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001659.html 9. http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001664.html 10. http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001670.html 11. http://www.genetics-and-society.org/index.asp --------------- WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: A Conversation with Dr. James Hughes (part 1 of 3) http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001659.html November 30, 2004 A Conversation with Dr. James Hughes (part 1 of 3) For many, the term "transhumanism" suggests a rejection of humanity or a dismissal of the body of philosophy we call "humanism." Some of the movement's proponents don't help matters, embracing an Ayn Rand-style libertarian perspective and disdain for "unenhanced" humanity. But not all transhumanists are the same. [9]A growing number see the drive to develop technologies to strengthen and extend human capabilities as part and parcel of the push to improve global social conditions, and recognize that there is a necessary role for society and government in the safe development and fair distribution of new technologies. They refer to themselves as "Democratic Transhumanists," and their founding philosopher is Dr. James Hughes. Dr. Hughes is a bioethicist and sociologist at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut, where he teaches Health Policy, Drug Policy and Research Methods in Trinity's Graduate Public Policy Studies program. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago, where he also taught bioethics. He is a member of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities, and the Working Group on Ethics and Technology at Yale University. He has been a longtime left activist, having founded [10]EcoSocialist Review while in grad school, as well as working on systemic reform of health care organizations to empower patients. He is also a [11]Director of the [12]World Transhumanist Association, and the author of the recently-published [13]Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future. Dr. Hughes sees Democratic Transhumanism as existing in the space left fallow by both the libertarian transhumanist wing and the Luddite element of the left. As he put it in his [14]lengthy and detailed treatise on the philosophy: Democratic transhumanism stems from the assertion that human beings will generally be happier when they take rational control of the natural and social forces that control their lives. This fundamental humanistic assertion has led to two intertwined sets of Enlightenment values: the democratic tradition with its values of liberty, equality, solidarity and collective self-governance, and to the belief in reason and scientific progress, that human beings can use reason and technology to improve the conditions of life. A recent manifestation of these principles is his founding of the [15]Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), an organization at which [16]I am a Fellow. Over the past month, I've had an extended email conversation with Dr. Hughes, discussing the sometimes-strained relationship between progressive principles and technological utopianism. Because of its length, I'll post the discussion in three parts. Today's focuses on the meaning of Democratic Transhumanism. Cascio: Let's start with the basics: what does "Democratic Transhumanism" mean? Hughes: To me, the democratic part is a bit redundant, since I see transhumanism as a natural conclusion of the democratic and humanist philosophical tradition: life is better when people are empowered to make decisions about their own lives, individually and collectively. The two basic ways we can be empowered are by pushing back social domination through equality, liberty and social solidarity, and by pushing back the domination of nature through science and technology. It seems a natural conclusion that we should help one another use emerging technologies to push back sickness, aging, suffering and death, which is the key goal of transhumanism. However, there are variants of the humanist tradition - neo-liberal, libertarian and anarcho-capitalist philosophies - that prioritize liberty to the exclusion of equality and solidarity, and try to eliminate democratic oversight, regulation, redistribution and public provision. Although transhumanists like Condorcet and Haldane were most often advocates of radical egalitarianism, the 1960s brought an ascendance of the romantic, anti-technology wing of the Left and the ceding of narratives of progress to these champions of the free-market and corporate capitalism. So when transhumanism finally found its feet as a social movement in the early 1990s, many transhumanists were attracted to these neo-liberal philosophies, at least up till the dotcom bust. I think that libertarian tilt to transhumanism is now turning around. Progressives are discovering that their natural allies are not the Christian Right with its anxieties about hubris, but women trying to defend their reproductive rights to use technology, the disabled like Christopher Reeve fighting for assistive and restorative technologies, and the world's poor who need new technologies to provide clean water and abundant food. Transhumanists, in turn, are realizing that our Big Pharma is too short-sighted to commit to risky, far-sighted research on things like "negligible senescence." These projects need funding through the National Institutes of Health, the National Nanotechnology Initiative, and the Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno program. They also need to go through the Food and Drug Administration. Nothing is more disastrous for technology than a thalidomide-type disaster. We've already seen with estrogen replacement therapy that the public is ready to adopt technologies to try to forestall aging which they then find are actually killing them. So progressive or "democratic" transhumanists, unlike the free marketeers, understand that strong oversight and social reform has to accompany technology diffusion. Technologies need to be tested for safety and made universally available. Hopefully as this perspective becomes more common we can drop the redundant "democratic." Cascio: I wonder how much of the negative reaction to transhumanism comes from a reaction to the term itself, and its implied disdain for being human. While you make a good argument that democratic transhumanism is a natural evolution of humanist philosophies, some of the ideas that transhumanism encompasses do include outcomes (uploading, radical bioengineering to the point of speciation, etc.) which discard "human-ness." How does democratic transhumanism speak to those who find such a transition frightening? Hughes: The first point is that transhumanism does not connote disdain for humanity, but disagreement that the category of "human" is meaningful. Take our newly discovered Hobbit cousins from Indonesia, or Neanderthals. If they were still around would we consider them human? What would it mean for our society if we were to deny modern Hobbits or Neanderthals human rights on the grounds they weren't "human" and treated them as pets or slaves? Are conjoined twins human? Is someone in an intensive care unit with machines breathing for them, pumping their blood, and maintaining their blood chemistry, are they still human? "Human," "human dignity" are empty signifiers that have crept into our language as proxies for "soul," and progressives need to rethink their use of these categories. Francis Fukuyama, in Our Posthuman Future, explicitly argues that humanness is a "Factor X," a black box that combines some combination of genetics, rationality and emotion. But he doesn't want to specify it because if he did it would be clear that there are humans who don't have those specifics, and that great apes probably do. Specifying what it is that we value about humanness would also allow us to regulate biotechnology to protect that, and allow individual choice on the rest. Rationality and emotional complexity what makes us human? Great - nobody will be allowed to make themselves developmentally disabled or autistic. Remaining primarily organic what makes us human? OK, then adding lion genes shouldn't be a problem. The basic argument between transhumanists and human-racists is a debate about what is really important and valuable in the human condition, self-aware existence, consciousness, emotionally rich experience and rational thought, on the one hand, or having the modal genome and body type of human beings circa 2000 (which is very different from what it was even 20 years ago, but never mind that)? The transhumanist position is known in bioethics as "personhood theory": you can be a self-aware person and not be human (great apes for instance) and you can be "human" and not be a person (such as fetuses and the brain dead). Rights are for persons, not humans. But there is a grain of truth to the critics' attack in that we are very upset about the limitations of the human body and we think that, using reason and technology, we can do much better. That's what medicine is to begin with. Is it a lack of love for and faith in "humanness" to get vaccinated, or have surgery, or take insulin or vitamins? I think one of the thing most people consider core to "humanity" is a desire to improve and progress, so in that sense human enhancement technologies are quintessentially "human." Since "human" is basically a tribal identity with no empirical referent, what Kurt Vonnegut called a "[17]granfalloon" , I fully expect that in four hundred years there will be people with green skin, four arms, wings, endless lives, and nanocomputer brain pans, who proudly consider themselves "human" and who organize big family reunions for all the people with their surname, or all the other descendents of Civil War veterans, or whatever. And there are people today who are ready to give up any claim to membership in the human race because they have glasses or a pacemaker or are pissed off about the persistent ubiquity of ignorance and cruelty in this race that pretends to know better. I understand that people do get frightened by the idea of a transhuman society, with increasing diversity of persons. People were frightened that the end of slavery and Jim Crow would unleash anarchy and race-mixing, and people are still scared that legal gay marriage will destroy Western civilization. We need to try to convince those who are afraid of human enhancement that we can still have peace, prosperity and tolerance of diversity in that future. And at the same time we need to remember that the transhumanist claim is that people should control their own bodies and minds, and other people don't get to tell us to go to the back of the bus because of their vague anxieties and yuck reactions to our choices. Cascio: Say a little bit more about the "yuck reaction" -- it's a term I see in use among the transhumanist circles, but doesn't have quite the same impact in broader conversation. Hughes: "Yuck factor" is bioethics shorthand for the many variants of the argument that something must be unethical just because it freaks people out. For instance people think consensual cannibalism is self-evidently immoral even though the alleged ethical arguments against it are very tenuous. Leon Kass, G.W.'s bioethics czar, is the principal proponent of the theory that people should be guided by their gut instincts in ethics. Don't like chocolate cake? Then there is probably something unethical about chocolate cake. Most bioethicists aren't as bold as Kass in jettisoning reason however, so they have invented two variants on the uncontestable "God don't like it": that something is "unnatural" and that it violates "human dignity." Both of these arguments are just hand waving. As Love and Rockets said "You cannot go against nature, Because when you do, Go against nature, It's a part of nature too." As for violating human dignity its in the eye of the beholder. Yuck factor is also closely related to "future shock." When society changes fast people get upset and try to slow things down. In democratic societies they will be able to use quite a few brakes, which is generally a good thing. But balance is provided by the protection of individual liberty and minority rights. So, for instance, when most Americans freaked out about the Massachusetts Supreme Court's decision that gays should be able to marry they passed referenda around the country to stop gay marriage. I think the state courts and then the Supreme Court should overturn those referenda on the grounds that gay marriage is a fundamental right. When we are talking about basic rights, like the right to control your own body and mind, or vote, or sit anywhere on the damn bus you feel like, or marry your lover, those rights should trump other people's future shock and yuck reactions. Cascio: "We can do better" is at the core of what WorldChanging does and what IEET represents. And the "we" is as important as the "do better" -- it's not just atomistic individuals trying to compete for greatest personal satisfaction, it's a social effort, which reflects social concerns. Hughes: That's absolutely important. Libertarian individualism is completely self-defeating for the human enhancement movement. You want to make yourself and your kids smarter? You can take a smart pill and do your mental gymnastics, but you still need good books, stimulating friends, a solid education, a free and independent press, and a stable, well-regulated economy so your PDA keeps beaming Google searches and email chat into your eyeball through that laser display. And it might be nice to have a strong, independent Food and Drug Administration to make sure that your smart pill doesn't cause dementia in five years, and that that laser display doesn't blind you. Similarly, the principal determinants of longevity in the 20th century have been improvements in social technology not medical technology, e.g. getting people to suppress infectious diseases. Universal access to safe, effective life extension and age-retardation technology in the coming decades will require public investments into basic research, reining in our out-of-control intellectual property system, and the subsidizing of access for the uninsured and the world's poor. The libertarian fantasies that atomistic individualism and an unregulated free market will build an attractive future are just stupid. Posted by Jamais Cascio at November 30, 2004 03:13 PM | [18]TrackBack Comments Good stuff. I could add: It's necessary for a wide variety of humanists to chip in in order for the face of the future to be *sane.* Don't leave it up to the . . . well, apocalyptic oddballs who have invested religious significance into the Singularity. "I fully expect that in four hundred years . . ." A couple of decades back, "The Space Gamer" ran a cute little story set in a spaceport bar. A guy wanders in before things get busy. He chats with people as the after-work crowd wanders in. Various cyborgs, robots, an uplifted dinosaur just in from shooting a monster movie, people adapted to other planets, and so on. At some point it's revealed that the protagonist is an _alien_. The other patrons react with shock and horror. He's tossed out -- they don't serve that kind here -- and the fellow he was sitting with feels betrayed and scandalized. Hilarious. Posted by: [19]Stefan Jones at November 30, 2004 03:53 PM I agree that a great deal of libertarian fantasies are simply stupid, but I also think that too much regulation and public accountability rhetoric can kill the movement in its infancy. Early technologies are full of mistakes, bugs and problems. That's just how life is. And if these technologies are used on the body, then people will suffer, too. In order for the methods to become safe, the early pioneers will have to make sacrifices -- and they will have to be _allowed_ to make those sacrifices. While libertarian fantasies may be stupid, it is people believing in them that are going to make the largest impact on pro-transhumanist technology. Posted by: [20]Sergiy Grynko at November 30, 2004 05:49 PM What a fine interview, Jamais. Worthy subject and good questions. I felt my incipient Luddism coming to the fore as I read the articles. We haven't been able to solve the many problems that can easily be remedied with the technology we already have. And in the present culture, I do not trust us to make wise decisions with the tricky issues of biotechnology. GMOs are a case in point. Perhaps in a social democracy with the corporations under control and a much greater awareness of ecology -- maybe then I'd start to feel enthusiasm rather than a sense of dread. As it is, transhumanism sounds either like a costly irrelevance (e.g., space flight, artificial intelligence) or a Pandora's box (e.g., nuclear weapons). To his credit, Hughes seems aware of many of the potential problems. Posted by: [21]bart at December 3, 2004 01:27 AM References 9. http://www.cyborgdemocracy.net/ 10. http://web.archive.org/web/19980206065817/http://www.dsausa.org/dsa/rl/ESR/index.html 11. http://transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/board/ 12. http://www.transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/index/ 13. http://cyborgdemocracy.net/citizencyborg.htm 14. http://www.changesurfer.com/Acad/DemocraticTranshumanism.htm 15. http://ieet.org/ 16. http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001547.html 17. http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/granfalloon 18. http://www.worldchanging.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=1659 19. mailto:SeJ at aol.com 20. mailto:sgrynko at hotmail.com 21. mailto:bart at cwo.com WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: A Conversation with Dr. James Hughes (part 2 of 3) http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001664.html December 01, 2004 A Conversation with Dr. James Hughes (part 2 of 3) Continuing the conversation with Dr. James Hughes of Trinity College, founder of the Democratic Transhumanism movement. Democratic Transhumanism, despite its futuristic trappings, hearkens back to an earlier manifestation of the liberal tradition. In the 19th and early 20th century, scientific rationalism and technological utopianism went hand-in-hand with socialism, feminism, and progressivism. This changed in the post-WW2 era, as science and technology seemed to many to be increasingly the tools of military and corporate giants. The anti-technology perspective emerged most strongly in the environmental movement, which often linked ecological irresponsibility (industrial pollution, toxic waste dumps, unethical animal and human experimentation, etc.) with technological development. While many progressives and greens are more willing adopt cleaner, better technologies today, some of the anti-technology biases remain. From Dr. Hughes' [10]essay on Democratic Transhumanism: Today most bioethicists, informed by and contributing to the growing Luddite orientation in left-leaning arts and humanities faculties, start from the assumption that new biotechnologies are being developed in unethical ways by a rapacious medical-industrial complex, and will have myriad unpleasant consequences for society, especially for women and the powerless. Rather than emphasizing the liberty and autonomy of individuals who may want to adopt new technologies, or arguing for increased equitable access to new biotechnologies, balancing attention to the "right from" technology with attention to the "right to" technology, most bioethicists see it as their responsibility to slow the adoption of biotechnology altogether. The tension between philosophies focused on for social justice and environmental responsibility and the transhumanist movement is strong, and the evident frustration and anger in Dr. Hughes' tone -- both in the article linked above and in today's section of the interview -- reflects his belief that the human enhancement movement should be considered an ally, not an opponent, of those who are trying to better the human condition. He and I don't see eye-to-eye on many of the topics discussed in today's section, but we do agree on an underlying value: responsible technological development is critical for building a better planet. Cascio: A concern many technologically-literate environmentalists have about human bioengineering (and life extension, and the like) is that it will inevitably be asymmetrically distributed, with the already-rich and powerful getting the first shot at it. Hughes: In first place there is no inevitability about the cost of transhuman technologies. Depending on the type of technology and the point in its innovation lifecycle, technologies can be cheap or expensive. Just look at anti-retroviral therapy. For a decade HIV-positive people in the affluent North were the guinea pigs and underwriters of the enormous costs of these therapies. Then the developing world threatened to produce the drugs themselves and abrogate the intellectual property regime (and I wish they had). In response to the threat and the political pressure from the global public health lobby anti-retrovirals were licensed for less expensive production, and then alternative versions were developed which cut costs to less than a dollar day. Now, less than a dollar a day is still more than a lot of HIV positive people in Africa make, so is the answer of leftist Greens that we should ban anti-retrovirals until everybody can afford them? Or do we try to get them to as many people as possible, year by year? The same logic will apply to every new technology, from those which save lives, to those which allow us to improve memory and mood, to those which enable radical body art. And some of these technologies will be cheap at the outset, such as a cancer vaccine that sensitizes the immune system to identify and destroy cancers. Cascio: That's an interesting take -- that rather than thinking of the early adopting rich countries as getting the goodies first, we should think of them as being the guinea pigs (or beta testers) for the rest of the world. Hughes: I don't want to sound like I think its good for the poor and developing world to wait a couple years for new tech. But there is a life cycle to most tech that the Luddite left ignores - if a technology develops a large enough market among the affluent they get then cheap enough so that they become available to the poor. There is a strong moral and practical case for using public monies to shorten that cycle for technologies that dramatically improve people's lives, as human enhancement technologies will. For Gameboys or McDonalds equitable access isn't so urgent. Cascio: Many left-greens, including me, worry that transhuman technologies can result in conditions which would tend to further concentrate power and wealth in the hands of those who already possess it. Is that a legitimate concern? Hughes: Yes, absolutely. There is probably a qualitative difference between the feedback loop between wealth inequality and differential access to cognitive enhancement, and the feedback loop between wealth inequality and differential access to the Internet. In other words, we do have to worry about the possible development of a widening gap between an accelerating "posthuman" aristocracy and a majority of the rest of the world moving ahead at a much slower pace. The best, and probably the only way, to effectively reduce the risk of GenRich/GenPoor bifurcation is the ensure broad as possible access to cognitive, health and ability enhancements. I think this will be perfectly obvious even to the most Luddite as these technologies arrive. The world's poor are going to want life extension and very few left Greens are going to campaign to save them from it. The "forbid enhancement because it will only be available to the rich" argument does, however, provide one more brick for the bioconservative roadblock to funding research in human enhancement. So long as the public thinks life extension and cognitive enhancement is "science fiction," and will never happen, then the religious fundamentalist zealots and their secular and progressive allies can deep six the research programs which could bring them online all the sooner. One hundred and fifty thousand people die every day, and if you are a transhumanist, you see a day when they would not have to have died. The profound immorality of the bioLuddite position is not that they will be able to stop human enhancement technologies, but that they will be able to delay them and kill many people who could otherwise have lived. Yes, fresh water and more food and income could save people as well. That's why I'm a democratic transhumanist. Cascio: What do you think of the "precautionary principle?" Hughes: The precautionary principle is a Luddite Trojan Horse. It starts with the uncontroversial principle that technologies should be assessed for their risks before they are deployed. That's no problem, and we can argue about what kinds of approval processes and regulatory agencies are adequate, and when we have sufficient information of the risk/benefit ratios. But when the principle is applied by the technophobic, to things like human genetic engineering, the precautionary principle becomes a rationale for permanent bans. The first thing the technophobic do is systematically rubbish the potential benefits, and take seriously every hypothetical harm from now until the end of time. Their second argument appeals to the virtue of the known and the supposed inevitability that human efforts to engineer the delicate, evolved mechanisms of nature are doomed to disaster. On those grounds, no clinical trial or EPA assessment could ever capture the real long-term risks of genetic engineering. Nick Bostrom has just written a brilliant paper about the "status quo bias" in everyday heuristics, and how it is expressed in bioethics. Once we take account of real, proximate risks and benefits of human enhancement technologies in a balanced way there certainly will be a case for banning some until they are safer. For instance, the World Transhumanist Association has taken the position that experiments with human reproductive cloning are currently unethical since the animal research suggests a very high risk of birth defects. Once the animal research has got the success rate up and birth defects low, then there the risk-benefit would pass the threshold for permitting the technique for parents who have genetic or infertility problems and want a child related to one of the parents. Then, when the risk of birth defects in these first clones has been assessed, and the technique demonstrated to be safe, we should permit all would be parents to use it. This process suggests the other huge problem with applying the precautionary principle to human enhancement. Banning a new industrial chemical on precautionary principle grounds doesn't step on an individual's self-determination, but stopping them from exercising control over their own body, brain and reproduction does. For instance, Western feminists are delighted to encourage India and China to restrict women's access to ultrasound and abortion, restrictions most American women would never accept, all to prevent largely hypothetical future social consequences of imbalanced gender ratios from sex selection. As a consequence these laws not only harm the women who lose some of their reproductive choices, but also the girls born into families that don't want them, and who at best are given up for adoption. The way people use the precautionary principle is to argue that the difficulties that boys in the class of 2020 will have in getting a date to the prom trump all other concerns. I don't think so. Cascio: Our *current* understanding of biological and environmental systems is more limited than we often like to admit, particularly regarding subtle cross-system interactions. It seems to me that some degree of a precautionary structure, one designed to consider very carefully the implications (both biological and social) would be a useful tool for making certain that the enhancements end up being that and not long-term degradations. Hughes: Anything involving the release of genetically modified organisms in the environment and I completely agree. But in regards human genetic enhancement I think the right to self-determination trumps a lot of those vaguer, long-term concerns. What would the approval process have looked like for the precautionary approval of organ transplantation back in the 1970s? We might be getting around to trying some transplants about now, and untold hundreds of thousands of people would have died unnecessarily. Cascio: But don't some self-determination choices have broader results for society at large? As a simplistic example, wouldn't a society already near the breaking point for pension support have a legitimate say in the implementation of life-extension technologies? Hughes: You want to live in a society that tells people they have to die because we can't figure out how to keep them housed and fed? We are already living well-beyond the average 65 years that Social Security and Medicare estimated at their founding, and they are facing crisis as a consequence; so should we now deny medical treatment to everybody over 70? Yes, every society has to set priorities, and pensions and medical research and treatments can't be allowed to consume everything. But my preference is that we try to keep everyone healthy and alive first, and then figure out how to adjust. Cascio: At the same time, as the recent Vioxx situation demonstrates, the current mechanism for assessment (in this case, FDA) isn't nearly as effective as one would hope it to be. One could easily imagine thousands (millions?) of people adopting an enhancement technology that looked good in computer models and fast-tracked trials, only to discover a decade or two down the road that it has some pretty unpleasant long-term side-effects, perhaps even shortening lives that they had expected to be lengthened. How long of a test would you consider appropriate for human enhancement biotech? Hughes: I don't think enhancement medicine should be subject to a more stringent approval process than medical therapies. The calculations will be the same. Every medical treatment is a rapidly evolving mix of information and unknowns about risks, side-effects and benefits. When the FDA approved the weight loss drug Meridia it was controversial, and continues to be, because there were minor benefits and occasionally serious cardiac side effects. But then morbid obesity is a much bigger killer. Why not let people make that calculation with their doctor? If we were to come up with a gene tweak that doubles the life span of mice, but it had a 1% risk of earlier mortality, I think we would want to make it available to the public and let them decide. The question is when the possible risks outweigh the possible benefits so far that no one should be using it. Posted by Jamais Cascio at December 1, 2004 10:08 AM | [11]TrackBack References 10. http://www.changesurfer.com/Acad/DemocraticTranshumanism.htm 11. http://www.worldchanging.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=1664 WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: A Conversation with Dr. James Hughes (part 3 of 3) http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001670.html December 02, 2004 A Conversation with Dr. James Hughes (part 3 of 3) WorldChanging Interviews Concluding the conversation with Dr. James Hughes of Trinity College, founder of the Democratic Transhumanism movement. While it may be difficult to see in the aftermath of last month's election, the compositions of the post-World War II coalitions on both the Left and the Right are changing. Emerging issues, from globalization to climate disruption to intellectual property rights on the Internet, are starting to push some traditional allies apart and traditional opponents together. For Dr. Hughes, human enhancement technologies will likely prove to be another axis for new political friction. From his [11]democratic transhumanism treatise: The biopolitical spectrum is still emerging, starting first among intellectuals and activists. Self-described "transhumanists" and "Luddites" are the most advanced and self-conscious of an emerging wave of the public's ideological crystallization. We are at the same place in the crystallization of biopolitics as left-right economic politics was when Marx helped found the International Workingmen's Association in 1864, or when the Fabian Society was founded in England in 1884: intellectuals and activists struggling to make explicit the battle lines that are already emerging, before popular parties have been organized and masses rallied to their banners. Will transhumanism -- or human enhancement technology -- be a key line of conflict for the 21st century? It's possible, although I suspect it will be part of a larger struggle both over the direction of human technology and the nature of "personhood." If the core philosophical struggle of the 20th century was over "how we live," the core philosophical struggle of the 21st may be "who we are." I also suspect, moreover profoundly hope, that the "transhuman" meme falls to the wayside, and that tools and techniques that help us live healthier, longer, happier lives are seen as human technologies, something rightly available to us all, not something that implicitly divides us. Progressives are [12]thinking a lot about "framing" these days, and rightly so: how we describe something imparts a great deal of meaning. Just as Dr. Hughes wishes (as said in Part I of the interview) that, in due time, "democratic transhumanism" will shed "democratic" in the name because the need for equitable, fair, and full distribution of enhancement technologies will be obvious to all, I hope that "democratic transhumanism" will shed "transhumanism," because the realization that enhancement technologies are simply part of our cultural birthright as humans will be equally obvious. In the final installment of my interview with James Hughes, we talk a bit about what the future may hold for the democratic transhumanist movement and humankind in general. Cascio: How do you see the politics of transhuman technologies playing out over the next few decades? Hughes: I'm convinced that politics will become more complex in the next decades as new coalitions form along the emerging biopolitical axis, an axis with transhumanists at one end and bioconservatives at the other. Biopolitics will divide traditional progressives and conservatives, and the outcomes of struggles will be partly determined by whether progressive or conservative voices are louder at each end of debate. I would much prefer that the policy debate be framed between [13]democratic transhumanists and left-wing bioconservatives like the [14]Center for Genetics and Society, for instance, so that whatever the outcome our concerns for safety and equity are reflected. The fight over embryonic stem cell research is the current hot biopolitical struggle. Some of the issues likely to force a crystallization and polarization along the biopolitical axis in the future include: Demands of the growing senior population for anti-aging research and therapies, in the context of increasing conflict over generational equity and the tax burdens of retiree pensions and health care. FDA approval of gene therapies, psychopharmaceuticals and nanocybernetics for "enhancement" purposes, such as improving memory, mood, senses, life extension and athletic performance. Perfection of neonatal intensive care and artificial uteruses which will erode the current political compromise on fetal rights, predicated on "viability" as a moral dividing line. The intellectual enhancement of animals, which will force a clarification of the citizenship status of intelligent non-humans. The regulation of the potentially apocalyptic risks of nanomaterials, nanomachines, genetically engineered organisms, and artificial intelligence. The fight over parental rights to use germinal choice technologies to choose enhancements and aesthetic characteristics of their children. Cascio: How may "bioconservatives" react as they see people starting to use these technologies? I think social conservatives and bioconservatives will all use the latest enhancement technologies at the same rate as the rest of us, and religious Right and neocon leaders will scramble to keep the goal post one step ahead of the latest life extending technology. They no longer oppose autopsies, condoms, organ transplantation or IVF because they can't win those battles. Cascio: Cloning as a hot-button issue has died down a bit, at least for now. I've always been a bit confused by the fervor of opposition. While the opponents seem to assume that there would be a huge groundswell of desire for cloning if it was allowed, I just can't see that many people actually wanting a time-delayed twin. Or not even that close! Identical twins are closer in many respects than clones. Hughes: The use of donor eggs for nuclear transfer introduces the egg donor's mitochondrial DNA; twinning produces a much cleaner copy. Although transhumanists defend cloning as an eventual reproductive option once its safe, it is not an enhancement technique. I would go so far as to say that once we have enhancement gene therapies it would be unethical for parents to make a copy of themselves. It would be like insisting that your kid use your grade school textbooks. OK, worse. Cascio: I've noticed over the course of our conversation something that I've seen in other transhumanist speculations: a subtle mixture of medical technologies implemented to protect or restore some measure of normative health (e.g., insulin injections or vaccinations) and technologies implemented to enhance the human biology beyond what is considered a standard part of human biology (e.g., endless lives or four arms). It's a very slick slope, of course; is a technology which gives what amounts to an IQ of 250 -- vanishingly rare, but definitely a part of broader human experience -- an enhancement beyond the norm or a restoration of what's possible? How about not an endless lifespan, but healthy life to (say) 140? Nonetheless, I suspect it's these transhumanist musings about radical divergences that sets some people off. Hughes: The problem is that that is precisely the slope we want to slip down. There is no practical or ethical distinction between therapy and enhancement. We're living in an unnatural, enhanced human state already. I don't see many people going back to foraging and chipping stone tools in caves, or more to the point, giving up aspirin and vaccines. The average IQ of the citizens of the industrialized countries has already risen by 30 points in the last century, a phenomenon called the "[15]Flynn effect." What we are saying is that its good for people to be able to live another day, whether they are 70, 100 or 150. Its good for people to learn more, faster, whether they have IQs of 80, 120 or 200. Its good for people to have more acuity to their vision, whether they are legally blind or 20/20. Moreover, the therapies will not be clearly therapeutic or enhancement. If I give you an anti-aging vaccination that reduces your likelihood of contracting all aging-related diseases and extends your life span to 120, was that therapy for prevention of those diseases or an enhancement? We think it doesn't matter. Cascio: In a world of limited research resources, which should receive a greater priority: research into technologies to enhance human biology, or research into technologies to improve social conditions? What's the appropriate balance between "democracy" and "transhumanism"? Hughes: As I've said before, I think the two go hand-in-hand, although we do have to allocate resources. But take the example of obesity, which is growing worldwide. There is very little evidence that public health education or diet program interventions have any long-term effect for the majority of the obese. The reason people are getting fat is that we are programmed to eat good-tasting food when we can, and we live increasingly sedentary lives. So, by all means let's educate people to eat right, and set up community activity centers, and get sodas out of the schools, and tax high fructose corn syrup. But let's also pursue research on drugs and gene tweaks to prevent obesity in the first place, to be slim and healthy no matter what we eat and how much exercise we get, because if we really want to save the people's lives that's where the answer will come from. And then let's make sure those treatments are available to everybody worldwide. Investing in technological obesity prevention will not only be more cost-effective than social-behavioral weight control, but will dramatically reduce overall health costs. If people want to find some spurious social account they can empty out and put into their favorite social reforms let's start with professional football not medical research. Cascio: One aspect of your work which I greatly appreciate is that you think about transformative technologies as social technologies, which while they may directly change the lives of individuals, also affect us at the level of social relationships. Hughes: One of the books that I was deeply influenced by as an undergraduate Buddhist Sociology major was Trevor Ling's The Buddha. Ling was a Marxist scholar, and he drew out of early Buddhism a radical message of integrated social and individual change. The monks weren't just told to go meditate in caves, they were instructed that their liberation was an interdependent process involving psychological change, behavioral change, a certain kind of community and a certain kind of engagement with the world. The Wheel of Dharma, turned by these interlocking processes, countervailed against the Wheel of Karma, with its characteristic greed, hatred and ignorance and attendant behaviors and social systems (e.g. patriarchy, capitalism, militarism, the Repuglican Party). I think I bring pretty much he same perspective to transhumanism. The core demand of transhumanism is that we all should be given the means to reach our fullest potentials. But helping people achieve their full potential is a matter of social reform as much as individual technological empowerment. Cascio: Do you expect that, once [16]radical life extension technologies are available, the majority of people will adopt them? Hughes: In a gene-tweaked heart-beat. Posted by Jamais Cascio at December 2, 2004 10:59 AM | [17]TrackBack Comments On the whole I agree with Mr. Hughes. I've been following these areas (longevity research, nanotechnology, neurotechnology and others.) for nearly twenty years now and he is a refreshing change from the libertarian-tinged thought that used to dominate these topics. On the other hand, I think he's too worried about the power that luddites (And I use that term very vaguely.) have to slow things down. Change is happening in too many areas and synergizing in too many complex ways for anyone to stop it now. That's both good and bad. Look our current circumstance. We are living in a world almost beyond the imagining of the participants of the 1938 World's Fair in New York City. We have the superhighways, fast food, cheap telecommunications and spaceflight they dreamed of back then. Did their grand utopia come to pass? Not exactly. Upon solving one problem, we always seem to find another to worry about. These transhuman technologies are coming to pass. They will become commonplace and even cheap. But I am pretty sure that the transhumans and posthumans will find something else to complain about. Posted by: [18]Mr. Farlops at December 4, 2004 03:46 AM References 11. http://www.changesurfer.com/Acad/DemocraticTranshumanism.htm 12. http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001654.html 13. http://ieet.org/ 14. http://www.genetics-and-society.org/index.asp 15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect 16. http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001378.html 17. http://www.worldchanging.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=1670 18. http://www.worldchanging.com/cgi-bin/blather.cgi?__mode=red&id=4701 From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 28 16:05:16 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 11:05:16 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: Green Tea a Performance-enhancing Drug Message-ID: Green Tea a Performance-enhancing Drug http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2005-01-27-4 Equivalent of four cups a day improves swimming endurance up to 24% in mice while stimulating the use of fat as energy Betterhumans Staff 1/27/2005 5:00 PM Cup of Tea Credit: Andrzej Burak Sports drink: Green tea appears to boost exercise performance by spurring the use of fat during endurance activities Green tea may soon show up in locker rooms and doping tests after being found to boost exercise endurance in mice up to 24% while spurring the use of fat as energy. While the finding is based on green tea extract (GTE) and is difficult to extrapolate to human athletes, Japanese researcher Takatoshi Murase estimates that to match the effects athletes weighing 75 kilograms (165 pounds) would need to drink about four cups of [8]green tea a day--and over several weeks. "One of our important findings," says Murase, "was that a single high-dose of GTE or its active ingredients didn't affect performance. So it's the long-term ingestion of GTE that is beneficial." Exercise boost The study was conducted by Murase and colleagues at the Biological Sciences Laboratories of [9]Kao Corp. in Tochigi, Japan--a company that makes green tea beverages and has been investigating the tea's anti-obesity effects. The researchers say their findings show that green tea extract can boost exercise capacity and support the hypothesis that stimulating the use of fatty acids can improve endurance. While acknowledging that the impact of dietary interventions on performance is controversial, the researchers note that compounds in green tea called [10]catechins have already been found to have various physiological effects. These include counteracting obesity from a high-fat diet, for which the researchers recently demonstrated evidence. This finding suggested that catechins stimulate fat oxidation. It's thought that this might improve exercise performance by allowing the body to get energy from fat rather than carbohydrates during endurance activities. Supplemental benefits To test the theory that catechins boost endurance capacity by stimulating fat burning, the researchers used mice swimming in an adjustable-current water pool. Some of the mice received no green tea compounds, others received green tea extract and still others received only a catechin in green tea known as EGCG. Mice on no supplements could swim about 33 minutes before they were exhausted. Mice on green tea extract consistently performed better after the first week and by week nine those taking 0.5% green tea extract by weight could swim 40 minutes compared to 33 for the controls. A similar effect was observed in mice on EGCG, suggesting that it was at least partly responsible for the benefits. To support their theory about fat burning, the researchers found that fatty acids in blood increased slightly but significantly in mice on the supplements. They say that their findings suggest that green tea extract enhanced the ability of muscle to use fatty acids as an energy source. To avoid potential complicating factors in other studies, the researchers controlled for possible influences of caffeine--a known performance enhancer--and changes that might have affected the animals' buoyancy. The next steps are to determine the molecular mechanism by which green tea stimulates fat burning and whether the antioxidant properties of catechins mediate their effects on endurance capacity. The research is reported in the [11]American Journal of Physiology--Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology. Tools [12]Related content References 8. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_tea 9. http://www.kao.co.jp/e/ 10. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catechin 11. http://ajpregu.physiology.org/ 12. http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2005-01-27-4#RelatedContentLinks From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 28 16:06:10 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 11:06:10 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: Where to Look for Gay Genes Message-ID: Where to Look for Gay Genes http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2005-01-27-3 Genome analysis reveals chromosome regions influencing male sexual orientation Betterhumans Staff 1/27/2005 3:26 PM The locations of genes influencing male sexual orientation have been identified in a genome analysis of men in families with multiple gay brothers. The research confirms biological origins of homosexuality while underscoring that there is no single "gay gene." "Sexual orientation is a complex trait, so it's not surprising that we found several DNA regions involved in its expression," says researcher Brian Mustanski of the [8]University of Illinois at Chicago. Runs in the family Working with colleagues at the [9]National Institutes of Health, Mustanski analyzed the genome of 456 men from 146 families with two or more gay brothers. Unlike earlier studies focusing just on the X [10]chromosome, this study looked at the X as well as all 22 pairs of non-sex chromosomes. (The Y chromosome was ignored because it's not thought to contain many genes.) The researchers found identical strings of DNA on chromosomes 7, 8 and 10 that were shared by 60% of gay brothers in the study. The region on chromosome 10, however, was only linked with sexual orientation if it was inherited from the mother. "Our study helps to establish that genes play an important role in determining whether a man is gay or heterosexual," says Mustanski. "The next steps will be to see if these findings can be confirmed and to identify the particular genes within these newly discovered chromosomal sequences that are linked to sexual orientation." The research is reported in the journal [11]Human Genetics ([12]read abstract). References 7. http://www.betterhumans.com/About_Us/Products/Syndication/index.aspx 8. http://www.uic.edu/ 9. http://www.nih.gov/ 10. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome 11. http://springerlink.metapress.com/app/home/journal.asp?wasp=64cr5murql1wyvhukgur&referrer=parent&backto=linkingpublicationresults,1:100421,1 12. http://springerlink.metapress.com/link.asp?id=3xcxqtb6x36aaap1 From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 28 16:07:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 11:07:19 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Women in Science: Voices in the Debate (4 Letters) Message-ID: Women in Science: Voices in the Debate (4 Letters) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/28/opinion/l28harvard.html January 28, 2005 To the Editor: Re "Lawrence Summers, Provocateur," by James Traub (Week in Review, Jan. 23): The question is not whether Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, offended people with his remarks about the possible innate scientific abilities (or rather, disabilities) of women, but whether the studies he cited in his remarks have any validity. I would like to see the evidence he alluded to, and would be happy to hear statisticians and other scientists debate the question in an open forum. This is not a matter of politics or offense; it is a matter of a search for truth, which is the task of any great university. Harvard's motto is "Veritas." It would be good to see the university's president pay more attention to that in his "provocative" statements. To transform his approximate declarations into a fight against the "pieties of academic culture," as Mr. Traub does, and to suggest that he is a Socratic "gadfly" courageously shaking up current orthodoxies, is to trivialize the meaning and the responsibilities of scholarship. Susan Rubin Suleiman Cambridge, Mass., Jan. 23, 2005 The writer is professor of the civilization of France and of comparative literature, Harvard University. To the Editor: Regarding Lawrence H. Summers's remarks on the underrepresentation of women in mathematics and science, the real news is that despite cultural barriers, women are entering these fields in greater and greater numbers. About a third of all United States citizens who have received Ph.D.'s in mathematics recently are women. About half of all undergraduate mathematics degrees in the United States go to women. Yes, there is still a shortage of women on the mathematics and sciences faculties of many American universities, including Harvard. So universities should hire more of these excellent women and then treat them as if they value them. We call on Lawrence Summers, as well as the leaders of all educational institutions, to take positive action to encourage the influx of women and minorities into mathematics, science and engineering. Carolyn Gordon Hanover, N.H., Jan. 22, 2005 The writer, a professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College, is president of the Association for Women in Mathematics. To the Editor: Re "Gray Matter and the Sexes: Still a Scientific Gray Area" (front page, Jan. 24): I am one of those women who excelled in math, chemistry and physics in school and who scored highly on the math SAT's yet chose not to pursue a career in those fields. The reason? I wanted a profession involving frequent daily contact with others rather than solitary time in the laboratory. I wonder if women in general prefer careers that involve building and nurturing interpersonal relationships while men might more frequently prefer to work alone. This type of biological difference could explain the scarcity of women physicists and engineers without resorting to the argument that women are inherently less able in the sciences. Working conditions, and not just ability, greatly affect a choice of career. Helen M. Jacoby, M.D. Syracuse, Jan. 24, 2005 To the Editor: Re "Sex Ed at Harvard," by Charles Murray (Op-Ed, Jan. 23): The fact is that 99.9 percent of American men lack the skills to be top-flight scientists at major research universities. So, too, do 99.9 percent of American women. It seems absurd, then, to attribute the sex imbalance among science faculties to innate differences between men and women. If the vast majority of men are not gifted at mathematics, what do we gain by arguing that mathematical skill is a male trait? Human beings with the aptitude to become physics professors at Harvard are extremely rare, and they are not representative of men or women in any meaningful way. That most of those professors are men is a product of how we have organized ourselves as a society, not a product of genes. Seth Rockman Providence, R.I., Jan. 23, 2005 From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 28 16:08:32 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 11:08:32 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: 'Rembrandt's Late Religious Portraits': Humanity With Flaws Forgiven Message-ID: 'Rembrandt's Late Religious Portraits': Humanity With Flaws Forgiven http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/28/arts/design/28kimm.html January 28, 2005 By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN WASHINGTON THE woman, hand to chest, leans a little forward, head turned and tilted, lips slightly parted, liquid eyes gazing into the ether. She is dressed in a dark, fur-lined cloak that reveals a peek-a-boo white chemise; a robe sewn with gold is draped over her right shoulder and it glints, like the gold fillet in her hair. Her round, pretty face is a little puffy and sad, and she seems oblivious of us. But she is no doubt alert to the painter, her lover, whose gifts are so surpassing that simply by virtue of being the object of his devotion she looks divine. This is a portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels, Rembrandt's companion. In the little Rembrandt show opening Sunday here at the National Gallery, the picture is tentatively identified (with a question mark after the title) as "The Sorrowing Virgin." Had he been a poet instead of a painter, Rembrandt would have seduced countless women with his love sonnets. Every lover would have believed him when he wrote yet another poem that swore undying devotion to her unrivaled feet and peerless earlobes. His portraits convey pretty much the same message, after all. Each one says: "Here, stripped bare, is the true essence of this person, the depth of his or her soul in paint. Have you ever met anyone so authentic and remarkable?" Painting after painting makes that point. Rembrandt's touch was itself about his own individuality, suggesting the inimitability of his genius (never mind that his style was imitable enough for assistants and followers to flummox future generations of experts, and delight those who mischievously enjoy seeing other people's gold turn out to be brass). Not everybody would want to be painted by Rembrandt - launched into posterity in such an eloquent brown fog, bearing the weight of the world on one's shoulders, looking watery-eyed and wrinkled. But it's flattering to think of yourself as the sort of person, spiritually speaking, that Rembrandt concocted: soulful, substantial. Every Dutch burgher became a saint in his hands. My favorite Rembrandt portraits may be a pair of pictures in London, the ones of Jacob Trip and his wife, Margaretha de Geer, at the National Gallery there. Trip was a Dordrecht mining honcho and an arms dealer, rich as Croesus. In his portrait, he looks like the aged Moses leaning on a cane instead of a staff. Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., the curator of this focused gem of an exhibition, contemplated including the Trip portrait, which was painted sometime around 1661. It would have joined 17 other works from the 1650's and 1660's, pictures late in Rembrandt's career (he died in 1669, at 63), which have mystified scholars. They are paintings of Jesus, Mary and assorted evangelists, apostles and monks. Or some are. Others may be. Some look like "portraits histori?s," commissioned portraits in which Rembrandt decked out his hoity-toity patrons as holy men and women. Some are clearly not commissioned portraits but models. We know this because the same face appears in different pictures, here as a St. Bartholomew, there as a St. Paul. Portraits like the one of Stoffels are more ambiguous: an "Apostle Bartholomew" is so titled because the alert, heavy-lidded, mustachioed man with his hand to his chin staring melancholically at us, clasps a knife, the symbol of Bartholomew's martyrdom. But at one time this same painting was called "Rembrandt's Cook," then "The Assassin." Cook, assassin, lover or the Virgin Mary? The first question is why Rembrandt, reared a Protestant, whose religious beliefs nonetheless remain largely unknown, would have painted saints and apostles at all. In Protestant Holland, Catholic religious orders and monasteries were banned. Reformationists regarded saints as needless intermediaries in the quest for salvation. For whom did Rembrandt paint these pictures? For himself? Did he have Catholic patrons, perhaps, outside Holland? It's clear he was going through a bad patch at the time. The church condemned his relationship with Stoffels when she bore him a child out of wedlock in 1654. Debts forced him to auction off his house, his personal effects, his art collection, even his wife's grave. His style of painting also fell out of fashion in Amsterdam; young artists were deserting his brand of expressiveness. It's hard to know how much trouble Rembrandt really was in, whether he sheltered income from creditors, whether he still had assistants. He was commissioned to paint not just Trip's portrait but also the "Syndics of the Drapers' Guild," so he was not without opportunities. But in various ways, Rembrandt's difficulties might have caused him to identify with saints and apostles. His self-portrait as St. Paul, Mr. Wheelock speculates, is "about the supremacy of grace over law" and the notion of "the great but flawed man who, saved by God's grace, reveals the power of the Christian faith to those struggling with their own human limitations." Rembrandt's Paul is not a sturdy and forbidding pillar of righteousness but a scruffy, ordinary old man, hapless, weak-chinned and quizzical, gazing at or just past us with arched eyebrows, crumpled brow, a big, fleshy nose and wild tufts of hair escaping from his turban: a humble Paul, on whom God happens to shines the bright, consoling light of grace. Perhaps Mr. Wheelock is right. It's as if Rembrandt, at odds with the law now, were saying the only law that matters ultimately is divine law. He's also admitting in this picture, "I'm not perfect." The flawed humanity of his saints is the heart of the art, and what gives it spiritual truth. Plain sight suggests that some of the paintings might have been linked as a series because they're the same size. But others differ; their touch varies wildly - so much so that people might well wonder whether Rembrandt even did them all. I prefer to flip the question: could any other artist have painted with such affective variety? Rembrandt by this stage knew how to do everything: how to scuff and scratch and scribble, where to leave passages rough, where to smoothen, how to telegraph forms, to hint at volumes, to paint thin and dry or thick and pasty. In a version of "Apostle Paul," this one with a bearded model sitting before a table, hand to brow, rapt in thought, Rembrandt painted flesh tones as a thin layer over a warm primary. Then he suggested eyes, nose and beard without drawing any sharp contours, letting light sculpture the hair, skin and bone, a different tack from the one he took for "Bartholomew" or Stoffels or himself. What's constant is the human aspect. It's what Rembrandt focuses our eyes on: on St. James's meaty hands; on Simon's long, rugged face, like a lumberjack's, brooding, his thumb casually hooked over the handle of the cross saw that is the instrument of his martyrdom; on the sad eyes of the man with the reddish mustache and bushy beard, a portrait that used to be called "A Jewish Rabbi." Rembrandt's power was to show us ourselves in these portraits of holy men and women. Which is to say, the divine in us. From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 28 16:09:28 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 11:09:28 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: A New Fin for a '59 Cadillac? It's Online Message-ID: A New Fin for a '59 Cadillac? It's Online http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/28/automobiles/28JUNK.html January 28, 2005 By TIM SULTAN YOU still see them from time to time on the streets, these diners on wheels: Skylarks, Meteors, Fairlanes and Falcons with their gleaming chrome and their vinyl interiors. If there is one thing to know about the owners of these vintage cars, it is that they are people of faith faith that truck drivers will give those side mirrors a wide berth, that messengers will slip their bicycles past those precious taillights with care, that window-smashing vandals will let out an appreciative whistle and walk on. The owners must have faith, because finding replacement parts can be murder. Hours of trawling a salvage yard can turn up nothing, and ordering parts sight-unseen through an ad is a gamble: chrome hood ornaments can turn out to be heavily pitted, interior lamp bezels rusted. But now the guesswork is being taken out of parts-hunting, thanks to the greatest salvage yard of all: the Internet. Junkyards across the country are putting together photographic databases of their wrecks, making it easy to find all kinds of arcane auto parts. All American Classics in Vancouver, Wash., runs one such virtual junkyard. It has begun photographing its 3,000 cars for its site, [1]allamericanclassics.com. "Although we have had the most success through [2]car-part.com, a search engine that allows buyers to scan our inventory for parts, putting up pictures of our cars has attracted buyers, for sure," said Todd Toedtli, the manager of All American. Other well-known junkyards like Desert Valley Auto Parts in Phoenix (azclassics .com) and CTC's Autoranch (ctcautoranch .com) in Denton, Tex., also have limited virtual tours of their wrecks. And Anna McCormick, the manager of Classic Ford ([3]classicford.com) in East Dixfield, Me., said that her salvage yard had an even more ambitious plan. "We sent about 800 cars to the crusher this fall, and we are now in the process of photographing the millions of parts that we'd stripped," she said. "We'll have our entire stock available on our Web site by June." Perhaps the most absorbing of the salvage Web sites belongs to Sunman Classic Ford ([4]sunmanford.net) in Seminole, Okla. Sunman's individual portraits of wrecked 50's, 60's and 70's cars sitting in a barren landscape are not just useful; they can be mesmerizing. A 1965 Ford Ranch Wagon, for example, with a good-size tree growing through the engine block. A 1964 Mercury Monterey, ready for its close-up, its headlights painted jungle red. A 1960 Dodge Pioneer, brown with surface rust, being admired by a herd of brown cows. A 1963 Cadillac Fleetwood sitting in high prairie grass capable of inspiring a Walker Evans. The archivist and founder of Sunman Ford is Sam Arrington, a salvage lifer who named his yard after an imaginary personage from his boyhood. "The Sunman was a guardian figure that appeared in my childhood dreams," he said. "And I feel that he's still either keeping me out of trouble or retrieving me from it." Though Mr. Arrington opened his 40-acre lot only five years ago, he had been stockpiling old cars for years. "I started buying up cars during scavenging trips," he said. "They were considered nothing but crush meal. I knew the area from being a fender and bumper man in Buffalo. This had involved driving out to Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas in my International Harvester and buying up rust-free bumpers, fenders and gas tanks for $5 to $10 and reselling them back in Buffalo for $150." MR. ARRINGTON set up his business in rural south-central Oklahoma. "When I arrived in this part of the country," he said, "the oil fields had collapsed, and Seminole was a ghost town. It still is like the Twilight Zone around here." The drawback to starting a business in a ghost town is that there is not exactly a lot of drive-through traffic. (The nearest town is Bowlegs, Okla., population 372.) So Mr. Arrington, who now runs the business with his wife, Cynthia, turned to the Web. "Even back in the 1980's when I started buying up Fords, I dreamed of the Internet, or at least something like a satellite connection that'd make a specialized business like mine possible." What began as a modest yard now has an international reach. Requests for parts come from as far away as Sweden and Australia, thanks to a link on the Ford Galaxie Club of Australia's Web site. "The Swedes are stateside now, driving around, collecting Mercury parts," Mr. Arrington said. "They're into Park Lanes pretty heavily. Pretty soon you'll have to go to Sweden for Mercury parts." Mr. Arrington confirmed what other salvage yards with Web sites also say they are experiencing: the great expansion of a business that was once fairly localized. "All of our cars are Arizona cars," said Shea Larimer at Desert Valley, "but our customers are nearly all out-of-state, often from places like Minnesota, where they use a lot of salt in the winter. Only place I can think of we haven't had any calls from yet is Iraq." Mr. Toedtli of All American said: "We get collectors all the time from far-off places who otherwise would never have heard of us. We just sold a '63 S.S. Impala 409 to a buyer in Scandinavia who found us on the Web. He sent someone over to pick it up. This guy was driving across the country, collecting salvage cars and shipping them back to Europe. When he got here and was standing in our office, we had another call from over there, and it turned out the two knew each other. It's either a small world, or old American cars are big in northern Europe." Another auto restorer who found Mr. Toedtli's yard through the Web is Michael Golter of Scotland, S.D. "You know the Johnny Cash song `One Piece at a Time'?" Mr. Golter said. "That's the story of my life. I had picked up a '51 Cadillac Coupe de Ville shell at a local junkyard, and the grille, bumpers and hood ornament in St. Paul. This is a rare car, and you have to get the parts when you can. I searched the Web, and within a day found out that All American had the fender skirt, rear window glass and deck lid I needed." After All American sent Mr. Golter multiple close-up photos of the Caddy parts, "it made my week," he said. "It's a little like creating Frankenstein's monster finding a part here, a part there but I have to say that there is nothing like taking a dead thing and bringing it back to life." From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 28 16:12:35 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 11:12:35 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: The Supposed Sin of Defying Nature Message-ID: Betterhumans > The Supposed Sin of Defying Nature http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2005-01-19-1 [This is part one. Part two is appended.] Why are policy debates still plagued by an irrational idea that refuses to die? By Russell Blackford 1/19/2005 11:19 AM Appeals to what is "natural" have a long history in policy debates about unpopular practices--such as homosexual acts, technological innovations and, particularly in recent times, manipulating DNA. The assumption is that there is something wrong morally about interfering with nature's processes, or defying nature itself--however, exactly, those ideas are to be understood. You'd think that any concept of the inviolability of nature would long have been abandoned by philosophers, ethicists and cultural commentators. But sadly it isn't so. Nature's inviolability is still a club to bash any controversial practice or technology that conservative thinkers dislike. John Stuart Mill's essay [8]On Nature seemingly exploded the whole idea more than 100 years ago, but it persists in 21st century policy debates. It's like a vampire with a stake through its heart that refuses to die. Choose any of a vast range of controversial topics, from gay marriage to genetic enhancement and beyond, and you'll find a few thinkers willing to argue that it must be stopped because it defies nature. And so we're left with two questions: Why does this argument persist? And is there anything that we can do about it? The simple argument The idea seems hopeless from the beginning. As Mill and many others have demonstrated, there are various ways that we can think of nature, and none of them make defying nature a sin. Once we clarify what is meant by "nature," there seems to be no easy way to make a morally salient distinction between "the natural" and "the unnatural." The most obvious definitions are as follows. Nature is either: 1. The totality of all the phenomena and their causal relationships, as investigated by science; or 2. Those things which are not artificial, i.e. not produced by human agency or technology. If these are the only ways we can understand what is meant by "nature," the first difficulty is this: nothing we ever do is unnatural in the first sense. After all, we are part of nature (so defined). Using this first sense, there is no distinction between natural actions and unnatural actions, such that the former are morally acceptable and the latter are not. No such distinction can be made because every action is natural. The second difficulty relates to the second sense of "nature." Using this definition, every action that we ever carry out is unnatural, since it is a product of human agency (unless perhaps someone is so drunk that she is essentially running on automatic pilot; I'll leave that small class of actions out of the discussion). It follows that everything we do must be morally wrong, if unnaturalness is our criterion. Once again, no distinction can be made between natural and unnatural human actions, so we cannot use such a distinction to separate what is morally acceptable from what is morally unacceptable. But here's an idea. We could replace the word "or" in the second definition with "and." What's more, we could think of technology rather narrowly. If we made those two moves, we could (for example) include in the realm of "the artificial" only those activities that use some form of advanced 20th or 21st century technology. Note, however, that if we take this approach some supposedly "unnatural" activities (e.g. homosexual acts) end up being defined as "natural," and hence morally okay, since they do not require any advanced technology. That causes a problem for some extreme conservatives. But what about the sort of moderate bioconservative who considers homosexuality to be morally acceptable, yet wishes to condemn various technologically based actions that supposedly defy nature? Well, some acts or technologies can clearly be condemned by our modified criterion, such as genetic engineering and the contraceptive pill. Unfortunately, however, this modified idea of "the unnatural" also covers many modern medical therapies that are not controversial. It also covers computer technology, aviation, advanced building techniques and materials, and a host of other innovations that no one seriously has moral qualms about. Clearly this won't do. It still proves far too much. In the end, it seems impossible to make a simple distinction between morally acceptable "natural" practices and morally unacceptable "unnatural" ones. Something much more sophisticated is required if the idea is to work at all. A dose of sophistication Nothing I've said so far completely rules out the possibility that there is a sin of defying nature. It is always conceivable that someone will come up with a new sense of "nature" or "the natural" that is, indeed, morally salient. It's not easy to see how this could be done, but the understandings of what constitutes nature that I've offered so far (guided by Mill) are not the only ones that have ever been given, and still others might be offered in the future. They are not logically exhaustive of all the possibilities. But there is a more general difficulty lying in wait. Anyone who wants to rehabilitate the idea of defying nature must first define "nature" in a way that really is morally salient, and must show us why it is. Then, to put this concept to use in moral argument, he or she will also need to show how some controversial practices fall under the new concept--not merely some other concept of nature, such as those already discussed. From where I sit, achieving both of those requirements at once looks to be an insurmountable problem. We'll have to see how much it frustrates, and continues to frustrate, actual arguments that are brought by conservatives, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for a cogent argument to be delivered. I don't have space to deal with a whole range of novel understandings of "nature," much less the time to test each one to see whether it can overcome this general difficulty. I'll simply underline my skepticism and leave the exercise for readers. Meanwhile, I'll concentrate on a line of argument developed by [9]Stephen Holland in a recent bioethics text, Bioethics: A Philosophical Introduction. Holland, in turn, draws upon a 1996 article by British philosopher [10]Richard Norman, published in the [11]Journal of Applied Philosophy. Norman himself is not inclined to attack any particular practice on the basis that it defies nature; indeed, he actually defends IVF against that kind of attack. But he develops an understanding of "the natural" that can be exploited by bioconservative thinkers, and Holland puts it to good use in suggesting that there really is something morally problematic about contemporary and prospective reproductive technologies. Norman begins his article, "Interfering with Nature," by pointing out some of the well-known difficulties in this area, following a similar line to that of John Stuart Mill. However, he then sets out on a more adventurous path. Early in his discussion, he makes three main points: First: As a matter of logic, our choices of actions, projects, life plans, and so on must be made against a background in which some things are not open to choice. Otherwise, we would have no basis on which to choose. The background conditions for us will vary but they typically include general facts about sex, procreation, nurturing, maturing and aging, death, the necessity of work and the existence of illness and pain in our world--eternal verities, it might be thought, of human experience. Second: It turns out that this causes various paradoxical threshold effects. For example, the fact that the world contains illness and pain is a background condition which informs our choices to attempt to avoid them, or ameliorate them, in any particular case. But if illness and pain disappeared from the world entirely, or almost entirely, and we no longer had to fight against them, much of what is valuable in our lives would disappear with them. For example, we would no longer need doctors and medical science. We would no longer guard our children's health, or our own. So many important practices would be lost that our lives would become "shallow and empty." Third: Where threshold effects are concerned, the risk is not that some specific harm will be done. Rather, the threatened elimination of basic conditions from the background of our lives creates the specter of a loss of experienced meaning. Norman is sophisticated enough to realize that different cultures will understand these basic background conditions of life in different ways. Also, because these background conditions are very broad and general, not just any innovation will threaten people's sense of experienced meaning in their lives. Furthermore, some of the basic conditions understood in particular societies or cultures may actually not be eternal verities, even if they seem to be so within the culture. For example, many cultures have beliefs about the inferiority of women among their most basic background "knowledge." At the same time, Norman believes that what is seen in a particular culture as the basic background conditions is not entirely arbitrary: background conditions are shaped not just by culture but by our evolved biology and the physical world that we all live in. Thus we can expect a great deal of intercultural agreement about them. Furthermore, he says, it seems to be a psychological fact about human beings that we need a quite extensive conception of what must be accepted as part of the basic background to our choices--conditions without which our sense of leading meaningful lives may be threatened. For Norman then, the discomfort that some people feel about IVF and such things as the prospect of biological immortality comes from their sense that important background conditions relating to procreation and death are under attack. If technologies are used for fertility enhancement and life extension, then very basic conditions of human life in the culture concerned no longer obtain, or are at least eroded. A sense that this is happening can be expressed as a claim that "nature" is being interfered with; here, "nature" is equated with the basic background conditions recognized by the culture. However, Norman defends IVF on the basis that incremental changes to our culture's background conditions can be absorbed into our thinking, and do not constitute "taking an axe to the natural order," as alleged by one conservative commentator. Is it rational? Norman's theory seems to have a great deal of explanatory power. It explains why some technological innovations, but not others, seem to make people feel threatened. It also explains what they have in common with such practices as homosexuality, which are not products of high technology. Anything that might challenge our main background assumptions about how ordinary human life works--especially our understanding of sex, its relationship to conception and birth, the development and rearing of children, the roles of men and women, the processes of aging and death--is likely to seem threatening. Rightly or not, if the facts of these matters change it can seem to pull out the rug out from under various constant understandings of life that we assume in all our decisions. That is unsettling. So, if Norman is right, we have an explanation as to why the supposed sin of "defying nature" lingers in policy debates. I am prepared to accept this theory, at least for the sake of argument. It appears to be a good theory to explain some human motivations. That does not, however, entail that people who react in the way that the theory predicts are thereby behaving rationally. Perhaps they are in some sense, and I'll discuss that in part two of this column. Note, however, that the theory predicts that there will be opposition to sufficiently powerful technological innovations even if they are beneficial. If a new technology is powerful enough to alter fundamental conditions that are relied on by people making choices within a particular culture, it should be expected to cause unease and attract opposition. In part two, I will analyze the view of Holland, who believes that the responses predicted by Norman's theory are not only relevant and rational but often justifiable. I'll try to answer this claim, and I'll comment on the implications of the theory for advocates of radical technological change. Part two of this column will be published next week. Tools [12]Related content References 8. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/mill2.htm 9. http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/phil/staff/stephenh.htm 10. http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/philosophy/norman.html 11. http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0264-3758 12. http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2005-01-19-1#RelatedContentLinks ----------- Betterhumans > The Supposed Sin of Defying Nature: Part Two Arguments that something's unnatural are really expressions of fear, and responses should be adjusted accordingly By Russell Blackford 1/26/2005 1:37 PM In [8]part one of this column, I followed [9]John Stuart Mill in attempting to demolish simple arguments that there is something wrong with "defying nature" or "interfering with nature's processes." I then introduced a more sophisticated analysis by [10]Richard Norman, who believes that human beings need to make choices and shape their lives against a quite extensive background of conditions that are seen as not open to choice. These background conditions generally include basic understandings of sex, procreation, nurturing, maturing, aging, death, the necessity of work and the existence of illness and pain in our world. If technology is used to alter facts relating to these, such as by allowing for conception and birth without sex, or by promising us biological immortality, many people will feel that their sense of leading meaningful lives is threatened, suggests Norman. They are likely to express this sense by claiming that "nature" is being interfered with--here, "nature" is equated with whatever is seen in their particular culture as basic background conditions to human life. Let's explore this line of reasoning further and look at an extension of the theory. We'll see how arguments that something's unnatural are really expressions of fear, and how responses should be adjusted accordingly. Threatening the background In his [11]recent book on bioethical issues, [12]Stephen Holland emphasizes that background conditions to choice are culturally specific constructs based on natural facts. For Holland, the appeal to nature is away of expressing hostility when a culture's very basic and general understandings are threatened--and he believes that such expressions of hostility are rational. Threats to basic background conditions might include a threat to the "natural connection between sex and procreation"; no one (so Holland says) would want the emergence of a future society in which "all fertilization takes place without sex." Although he believes that there is utilitarian benefit in current reproductive technologies, he thinks that Norman is too quick to conclude that complaints about interfering with nature are unjustified. Similarly, Holland explains the unease about genetic enhancement by saying that it threatens basic background conditions for choices and achievement in parenting. According to Holland, "we" feel threatened by the prospect that too much of a technological guarantee of our children's endowments would make parental nurturing seem meaningless. Fears about human reproductive cloning are similarly explained as threatening because cloning combines the separation of sex from procreation with technological control of children's endowments. Holland concedes that not all threats to basic background conditions will be perceived, or perceived for long, as unacceptable. Where we can see a real need for some new technology, we are likely to accept it, perhaps after initial doubts. We are unlikely to oppose a particular technology where to do so seems cruel or heartless, or once the technology becomes familiar to us, in which case it is accommodated into our sense of the background conditions, or they are adjusted. Holland's theory has some explanatory power. It can, for example, be used to explain the widespread opposition to homosexual acts. First, they violate what many conservative heterosexuals perceive as an eternal verity about the relationship between sex and procreation. Second, it may be difficult for conservative heterosexuals to see much utilitarian value in homosexual acts, or to understand the cruelty of laws that forbid homosexuality--it is difficult for many heterosexuals to understand, really understand, how anyone could find pleasure in acts that fill them with repugnance. Third, although homosexual acts have happened for countless millennia, they are still unfamiliar to many people. Evaluating the theory The theory obviously rings true for Holland as an explanation of some of his own [13]yuck factor responses. It also rings true for me, in the sense that I can readily imagine how it could explain the yuck factor phenomenon, or part of it. Furthermore, the theory seems a good explanation of why some people feel threatened by minority sexual practices, such as homosexuality, and also by technological innovations that alter human biology, or involve procreation without sex. The hypothesis can also be tested. The theory predicts at least some resistance to any new technology that seems likely to have a powerful impact on the basic conditions of human life even for the better. This a strength, as the prediction is consistent with historical experience. The theory also suggests why some people find emerging technologies threatening, even though they may not be affected directly. And it suggests plausible circumstances in which powerful new technologies (or unpopular practices) will gain acceptance. In short, the theory gives a coherent and plausible explanation of why arguments against defying nature take the forms they do, why they are applied in ways that initially seem inconsistent, why they persist and why some powerful technological innovations get accepted more easily than others. Norman seems to have made a valuable contribution to our understanding of [14]memetics--of how ideas survive and reproduce themselves. At the very least, the theory is worth accepting for the sake of argument. Unreasonable behavior None of this, however, entails that the behavior described and predicted by the theory is rational behavior. Holland believes that people are behaving rationally when they express their hostility to an actual or predicted innovation by claiming it is "against nature." But this is a very doubtful claim. Even if the theory is true, people who oppose certain practices or technologies for their supposed defiance of nature do not usually understand their own psychological motivations. That is, few of these people would, if challenged, justify their responses by enunciating something like Norman's theory. This alone suggests a sense in which claims that something defies nature are not usually rational. Such claims are essentially expressions of fear, not articulations of rational arguments. But could a rational argument based on the theory be put against, say, homosexual acts, gay marriage, human reproductive cloning, genetic enhancement or biological immortality? What might such a sophisticated "defying nature" argument look like, if directed at a particular innovation or practice? Here is an example: Premise 1: It is morally wrong to threaten any of the basic background conditions for people's choices in our culture. Premise 2: The connection between sexual acts and procreation is one of the background conditions. Premise 3: To commit a homosexual act is to threaten the connection between sexual acts and procreation. Conclusion 1: To commit a homosexual act is to threaten one of the background conditions. (This follows from Premise 2 and 3.) Conclusion 2: To commit a homosexual act is morally wrong. (This follows from Premise 1 and Conclusion 1.) As formulated, this argument is logically valid. Accordingly, its conclusions are true as long as its premises are true, and the various expressions used in the argument are used in the same way throughout (otherwise it fails because of equivocation). However, all three premises are highly controversial. Premise 1 cannot be accepted as it stands, if only because many background conditions in various societies should be threatened. Threatening a background condition may unsettle people, but it is not necessarily disastrous. Some background conditions actually distort cultures and their moral assumptions in highly undesirable ways. A good example is the belief in many cultures that women are intellectually inferior to men. If something such as Premise 1 is to be accepted, it will need to be narrowed in a way that makes it far more plausible, but how exactly? Perhaps we should confine it to conditions that are matters of fact, not false belief, and perhaps to facts that are widely relied upon by people. But these might be very difficult to "threaten" (as required by Premise 3). I am not sure how Premise 1 could be reworded to make the argument a better one. Furthermore, in the argument given, Premise 2 is true in our own culture only if interpreted loosely. There is a connection between sex and procreation, but it is a very loose one in any culture that uses both the contraceptive pill and IVF. If the premise is interpreted loosely enough to be true, then the rather tenuous connection that it asserts does not seem to be threatened in any way by the fact that there are homosexual acts going on. Thus Premise 2 and Premise 3 cannot simultaneously be true if the same terms are used in the same way. I feel that it is going to be very difficult to find any case where an argument with this structure is rationally compelling. Premise 1 needs to be qualified, even though this threatens to undermine the whole argument. Meanwhile, one of the other premises is always likely to be false, or else the premises cannot be stated truthfully and simultaneously, without equivocation. Those pesky premises just won't sit still. However, let's try a more high-tech example. The case of cloning Perhaps the argument's failures, as outlined above, are case specific. Let's give the benefit of the doubt and try another example, an argument against human reproductive cloning. Such an argument would be as follows: Premise 1: It is morally wrong to threaten any of the background conditions. Premise 2: That sex is necessary for procreation is one of the background conditions. Premise 3: Human reproductive cloning threatens the situation that sex is necessary for procreation. Conclusion 1: Human reproductive cloning threatens one of the background conditions. Conclusion 2: Human reproductive cloning is morally wrong. Here, Premise 2 seems to be false. I'm sure that most people plan their lives against the belief that sex is usually necessary for procreation, but I am not sure that anyone in our culture believes anymore that it is always necessary. So how can the latter be a basic background condition for choice? After all, we now have such technologies as IVF, not to mention AID--whether with sterile, clinical methods or the proverbial turkey baster. For Premise 2 to be true, it surely needs to be rephrased considerably--perhaps along the lines that the following is now a background condition for choice in our culture: "Sex is usually necessary for procreation and the alternatives are likely to be difficult and expensive." Reworded in this way, Premise 2 is probably true, and the background condition that it now states is a reasonable one for people to accept and rely upon in making choices and planning their lives. But it is not likely to be threatened by reproductive cloning, so if we reword Premise 2, we make Premise 3 false. Those premises still won't sit still! Encouraging acceptance, avoiding dread I invite you to try for yourself to come up with workable arguments against particular emerging technologies, using premises about basic background conditions for choice. I am quite certain you will meet with intractable problems. However, I concede this much: The theory of background conditions confirms that there is a limit to human psychological adaptability. Accordingly, there is a limit to how much we can reasonably expect individuals to adapt to if rapid and sweeping changes are made to the basic circumstances in which they, personally, made their life plans. Thus there may be good reasons not to support technological changes which would be that dramatic--and, as I've hinted at [15]elsewhere, there may be reasons not to frighten people with gung-ho predictions of imminent, sudden, total change, even if it seems beneficial. But this can't normally ground an argument against particular practices or technologies. For example, the fact that some people are engaging in homosexual acts doesn't pull the rug out from under anyone's individual choice to lead a more conventional lifestyle. This choice remains viable and meaningful, even in a society that actually provides a system of gay marriage. Again, if some people used reproductive cloning to conceive children, it would not undermine the plans of couples who'd had kids in the usual way. Nor would those who'd used cloning find that their children's nurturance was a meaningless activity. Holland worries about the possibility that people in the distant future may routinely procreate without sex, but why is this a problem? The change would surely not come as much of a shock to the people of the time, as long as it happened fairly gradually. Nor does the likelihood that future societies will be very different from current ones, with different sets of basic, widely-understood background conditions, cause any disadvantage to those of us who are alive today. Such change is something that we can be confident will happen, but so what? It's something that we'd now be wise to accept as one of the basic background conditions to our lives. The analysis in this two-part column suggest that it will, to say the least, be very difficult to mount a good argument against any practice on the ground that it "defies nature." Indeed, claims that some new technology is a sin against nature, or its processes, should be treated as expressions of fear, not as rational arguments. The theory developed by Norman and elaborated by Holland does not rehabilitate the idea of nature's inviolability. It does, however, offer useful insight into why the idea lingers on, vampire-like, and how we might best respond. Tools [16]Related content References 8. http://www.betterhumans.com/Features/Columns/Eye_of_the_Storm/column.aspx?articleID=2005-01-19-1 9. http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/m/milljs.htm 10. http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/philosophy/norman.html 11. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0745626181/qid=1105753871/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-8743358-5011021?v=glance&s=books 12. http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/phil/staff/stephenh.htm 13. http://www.wordspy.com/words/yuckfactor.asp 14. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMES.html 15. http://www.ieet.org/2005/01/ontological-diminution.htm 16. http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2005-01-26-1#RelatedContentLinks 17. http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2005-01-26-1 From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 28 16:13:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 11:13:51 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] ABC News: Proving Einstein Right Message-ID: Proving Einstein Right http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/print?id=427518 Most of the Great Physicist's Ideas Have Been Confirmed, But Not All By AMANDA ONION Jan. 24, 2005 - It was 100 years ago when an obscure 26-year-old office worker in a Swiss patent office submitted five papers that would radically change the way people think about the universe. In fact, Albert Einstein's ideas, devised entirely from thought, were so advanced that scientists are still trying to prove some of them. To find evidence for the brilliant physicist's ideas, researchers are using the latest in technology and a century of research -- neither of which Einstein had when he devised such profound concepts as the General Theory of Relativity. "It's amazing Einstein came up with his theories just by thinking about the situation," said Peter Shawhan, a staff scientist at the California Institute of Technology. Catching a Wave Shawhan is part of a large team of researchers who operate LIGO, a set of two giant, L-shaped experiments in Louisiana marshland and Washington state forestland. The facilities each feature two 2.5-mile-long steel tubes built in perfectly straight lines that are designed to detect one of the faintest and most rare signals in the universe -- gravitational waves. According to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, gravitational waves are sent out by any object that undergoes acceleration. The waves are so faint, however, that only those emanating from huge events -- such as colliding neutron stars or two black holes smashing together -- can be detected. Even waves from these events are so faint that by the time they reach Earth, they will be recorded by a difference of timing in the instruments amounting to just 0.0000000000000000000000001th of a second. "This is one of the hardest parts of his theory to prove because the waves we hope to see are just so incredibly weak," said Shawhan. "It's a tiny effect." So far, the crew of scientists has no direct evidence the waves are there. But a century ago Einstein proposed their existence, and so they're confident they'll prove him right. It's just a matter of when. An instrument at the joint of the two passageways sends light beams down each arm. The light travels down the tubes and hits mirrors at the near and far ends of each tunnel and then bounces back and forth 100 times. If no gravitational wave has been detected, then both light beams arrive back at the source at exactly the same time. But if a gravitational wave has struck Earth, then it will ever so slightly alter the path of the beams so one will arrive fractions of a second before the other. The problem is, to measure something so slight, every aspect of the experiment has to be extremely precise. And although LIGO is extremely precise, it isn't as precise as it could be, says Shawhan. "If there is a storm, it shakes the ground. High winds can shake the buildings, which affect the readings, as does general traffic in the area," he said. A Waiting Game To buffer the skewing affect of local vibrations, engineers are in the process of installing a feedback control system that will eliminate such outside "noise." They're also fine-tuning the instruments' mirrors to prevent warping by heat from the lasers. By 2013, LIGO is due to be ramped up even further so it can detect gravitational waves emanating from even further out in space. That should improve the experiment's chances since researchers suspect that events large enough to emit a gravitational wave big enough to detect are few and far between. "We'll be able to detect events 10 times farther away with the improvements," said Shawhan. "By then, there's a good chance we'll see something. Otherwise, we might have to wait 10 to 100 years for a big event." Three other similar facilities in Italy, Japan and Germany are also waiting for a big wave. With so much money, work and time invested, some may wonder if all the effort might be in vain. But they're not just banking on Einstein's brilliance. In 1993, two Princeton University scientists won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating that the increasing speed of two spiraling neutron stars fits exactly with Einstein's theory of relativity and gravitational waves. "They've been tracking this for some 20 years and the change in orbit agrees exactly with the general theory of relativity," said Shawhan. "It looks like great confirmation, but it's not a direct one." What Did Einstein Miss? While the LIGO team is eager to find direct confirmation of gravitational waves and prove Einstein right, other groups are scanning space for evidence that the physicist's theory might be slightly off. Why search for chinks in Einstein's armor? As his theory now stands, the ideas don't mesh completely with another major field of physics -- quantum theory. Quantum theory examines all matter and motion in terms of particles. As the theories now stand, Einstein's General Theory of Relativity doesn't incorporate all the concepts within quantum theory. So scientists have yet to discover a "Theory of Everything" -- something Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life pursuing -- in vain. "Einstein's theory of gravity is not a complete theory," said Michael Salamon, a physicist at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. "In order to probe gravity fully, we believe there are deviations from Einstein's classical theory. Our mission is designed to find those deviations." Salamon is part of NASA's Gravity Probe B mission, which has launched four gyroscopes into orbit around Earth. The sensitive instruments were designed to detect whether or not a large spinning object in space (in this case, Earth) drags space-time -- the fabric of space -- with it, as Einstein's theory predicts. "It's like twirling a spoon in a jar of honey," explains Salamon. "You see the honey dragging along with the spoon. It's analogous to what happens in space." Scientists with the Gravity Probe B mission announced last fall that the instruments have indeed proven that space-time is dragged by large spinning objects, as Einstein predicted. But as more data streams in, they hope to also reveal aspects of gravity that Einstein didn't predict. It's this information that could point to an all-encompassing theory that includes both Einstein's thinking and the more recent concepts of quantum theory. Even if scientists find evidence for new explanations of the universe, Salamon stresses that Einstein's theories will still play a central role. "Whatever new theory we come up with," he said, "it will ultimately contain Einstein's original thinking. There is no doubt about that." From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 28 16:15:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 11:15:51 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Second-Home Buyers Head Back to School Message-ID: Second-Home Buyers Head Back to School NYT December 24, 2004 By SETH KUGEL [Studies about relationship between football victories and alumni contributions give highly mixed results, most of them negative.] FOR the average American second-home seeker, "just steps from Death Valley" is not the most alluring of come-ons. But at the Tiger Walk Condominiums, that was the amenity that helped sell all of the 12 $270,000-plus units before construction was finished. The Death Valley in question is the football stadium at Clemson University in South Carolina, where alumni wearing orange and black return religiously for home games, tailgate parties and reunions with friends and relatives. "It's almost like a family reunion six times a year," said Tom Winkopp, the developer of Tiger Walk and several other complexes aimed at alumni. "They think this is a decent investment anyway, and they're already coming up for games." Another of Mr. Winkopp's developments in Clemson, Tory Pointe, opened just in time for the final game of the season, against the Tigers' archrival, South Carolina. Ed Norris came up from his home in Pawleys Island, S.C., to close on the place on Wednesday, and his family spent the long weekend shopping for housewares and enjoying tailgate parties. The Norrises had been frustrated by inflated prices at local motels when they made the five-hour drive to Clemson. "Every time we came back," he said, "it was like, `It would be nice to have somewhere close by.' " The Tory Pointe condo was the Norrises' second Clemson real estate purchase: four years ago, they bought a "condominium parking space," a permanent slab of asphalt where they could park their car and tailgate at will. It cost $12,000, plus $150 a year in property taxes. Mr. Norris said neighboring spaces are now going for over $20,000. Clemson isn't alone. Across the Southeast, around colleges like Virginia Tech in Blacksburg; the University of Georgia in Athens; and Auburn University in Auburn, Ala., sales of second homes specifically for football weekends are booming, even though many owners use them only a few weekends a year, real estate agents said. "It's not been real common until recently," said Monica Zielinski, the agent in charge at Carolina Real Estate on College Avenue in Clemson. "We have such a strong alumni that for years they want to come back to Clemson. I've never seen anything like it." The temptation to buy can be particularly strong when family ties come into play. John and Susan Weathers used to make three-hour day trips to Auburn football games from Albertville, Ala., but last year bought a $50,000 condominium in a student-inhabited area of town when, not coincidentally, their daughter Anna started school there. But the place is not for her. "It helped my wife get through the transition of losing her," Mr. Weathers said. They had been concerned about party-minded neighbors, but that has not been a problem. On Saturdays, the Weatherses tailgate at a relative's motor home (also in town for the weekend), downing casseroles, ribs and a special drink called the Tipsy Tiger, a rusty orange-colored concoction of vodka and fruit juices. "It's just a great day whether you win or lose," said Mr. Weathers. Easy for him to say - Auburn is undefeated this year and is playing in the Nokia Sugar Bowl next Monday, though Mr. Weathers , like many fans, thought they'd earned a berth in the Orange Bowl. Real estate agents in other regions of the country say that they have seen nothing resembling the Southeastern trend but that football homes are not unheard of. Six years ago, Dan Lee, Notre Dame class of 1974 and a real estate agent in Madison, Wis., bought a condominium in South Bend, Ind. His son was going to Notre Dame, but once again, the place wasn't for him. "We aren't that stupid," Mr. Lee said. The Lees typically use the condo during football season and rent it out, often to a visiting professor, for the spring semester. Gameday Centers Southeastern L.L.C., an Atlanta-based developer, picked up on the trend in 1998 and has since sold nearly 500 condominiums in college football communities across the Southeast, Gameday's president, Gary B. Spillers, said. His fully furnished developments take team loyalty to an extreme: they are decorated in school colors, often with special touches like rugs with football yardlines marked on them. Depending on size and amenities, the condos sell from $140,000 to $1 million. Mr. Spillers is optimistic that the idea will work nationwide and said that he was planning developments from Penn State to Texas A&M. "I can guarantee you the people in the Midwestern states, Southwestern states, Northwestern states are just as passionate about their football and their sports," he said. Perhaps, but don't tell that to Joe Barnes, a 72-year-old widower who goes by the nickname Bama Joe and has an accent to match. For decades, he had been driving the 300 miles from his home in Pensacola, Fla., to Tuscaloosa, Ala., for football games and the occasional basketball game at his alma mater, the University of Alabama. Four years ago, he bought a 700-square-foot Gameday Centers unit for about $130,000. "It was just the ideal thing for me," he said. "I used to stay in hotels all the time. It was such a hassle; you couldn't find rooms." Now, he drives up on Thursdays, hangs out on campus, goes to tailgate parties and heads to the game, just a block and a half from his condo. "You can stay till the game is over, then you can enjoy your friends and have a good hollering after the game," he said. The after-game party at his condominium often includes slabs of hickory-smoked ribs from Dreamland Ribs, a local restaurant. In the last four years, sports weekends have developed into a year-round habit for Mr. Barnes, who has cultivated a growing taste for Crimson Tide basketball, baseball, even gymnastics. Or, perhaps, for the ribs. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/24/realestate/24FSIDE.html From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 28 16:16:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 11:16:19 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: In One Kansas Town, the End of the Year Game Is Chess Message-ID: In One Kansas Town, the End of the Year Game Is Chess NYT December 25, 2004 By STEPHEN KINZER LINDSBORG, Kan., Dec. 21 - Fifteen chess grandmasters, including present or former national champions from five European countries, are spending the last days of December in a windswept Kansas town that has suddenly become a world chess center. "I never thought it would go this far or get this big," said Mikhail Korenman, a Russian ?migr? who has brought his passion for chess to a most unlikely place. Like countless other small towns across the Midwest, Lindsborg, which has a population of 3,500, is struggling to survive as rural life becomes more difficult and people move to cities or suburbs. Until a few years ago, it relied on its niche as Little Sweden, a place where tourists could buy Swedish crafts and eat pancakes with lingonberry sauce. Swedish flags are still visible around town, but now the banners along Main Street say, "Welcome Anatoly Karpov School of Chess." The school, which Mr. Korenman runs, opened last year, paid for with donations from local business people and a $216,000 economic development grant from the Kansas Department of Commerce and Housing. It has already staged several important competitions. This year, both the United States junior championship and the Final Four collegiate championship were held here. Mr. Korenman has brought Mr. Karpov, a former world champion from Russia who is considered one of the best players of the last century, to Lindsborg three times. Mr. Karpov has given the school his official sanction, something he has previously done only for schools in big cities like Damascus and Istanbul. In September, Mr. Karpov played an exhibition match here against Susan Polgar, the first ever between former male and female world champions. For that event, which he billed as "Clash of the Titans," Mr. Korenman staged a parade through the center of town, complete with floats and a marching band. Both players spent hours signing autographs and posing for pictures, he proudly recalled. "If a kid here is interested in football, what he really wants is to see the Kansas City Chiefs or maybe Denver Broncos in real life," Mr. Korenman said. "The chance to meet and talk to a world champion in chess is also something special. It has an effect on these kids, believe me." Mr. Korenman's enthusiasm, imagination and web of contacts have been crucial to the burgeoning appeal of chess here, but this is also a town that was ready to accept what he had to offer. Lindsborg's Swedish heritage has given it a cosmopolitan identity. It stages several festivals every year, and people here are used to welcoming outsiders. Mr. Korenman arrived in 1999 to teach chemistry at Bethany College here. His interest in chess has overtaken his interest in chemistry, and he recently quit the college faculty to devote his full time to it. This month Mr. Korenman is staging three tournaments in succession, with the last ending on Dec. 30. A grandmaster who is playing, Anna Zatonskih, 26, a former women's champion in her native Ukraine who is now one of the top-ranked American women players, said Lindsborg had "a great reputation" among chess players. "It's amazing what has happened here," Ms. Zatonskih said. "You can understand this kind of enthusiasm in New York, because there are 20 grandmasters living there. But even in New York, there isn't this kind of huge attention to us and what we do." Some local people are amazed, too. "Here's a guy who lands here with his wife and starts this chess thing," said Jim Richardson, a local photographer. "We're all going, 'Right, sure.' Next thing you know, Anatoly Karpov is in town." "The Midwest still does have this inferiority complex," Mr. Richardson said. "We really do think that things happen somewhere else. Now they're happening here. A world champion is coming down the street, and we're part of the bigger world." This year the United States Chess Federation named Lindsborg as its "chess city of the year," a title that in past years it has given to large cities like New York, Seattle and Miami. It also chose Mr. Korenman, who is 44, as its "chess organizer of the year." Mr. Korenman began staging tournaments soon after he arrived in Lindsborg, and at one of them he met a player who knew Mr. Karpov. That gave him the connection that turned this town into an elite chess center. The tournaments have an important economic impact. Kathy Malm, executive director of the Lindsborg Chamber of Commerce, estimated that about 1,000 people will attend the three this month. Becky Anderson, owner of the Swedish Country Inn, where several grandmasters are staying this month, said chess was good for business and also good for the town's young people. "The best impact I see is the number of people from abroad, especially from the former Soviet Union, that chess has brought here," Ms. Anderson said. "When you're as far from the coasts as we are, that's wonderful. I employ a lot of high school and college kids at the inn, and it's a great experience for them to meet people, often very young, who have distinguished themselves so much." More than 100 local schoolchildren take regular chess lessons from Mr. Korenman, who is a serious player, though not a grandmaster. On one recent afternoon, he hovered above half a dozen of them as they clustered around a table. Several mothers sat nearby and watched. "How can black protect, and not let white take this little pawn?" Mr. Korenman asked with a distinct Slavic accent, which seemed to add to his authority the way a Viennese accent suits a psychoanalyst. There was a long silence as the boys and girls concentrated. Suddenly, 9-year-old Christian Hansen broke it. "I know!" he cried out. "I see it! Rook to G-6." "Excellent," Mr. Korenman replied with a satisfied smile. There was a brief interruption as a visitor brought Mr. Korenman up to date on plans to bring a Brazilian exchange student to the high school - a chess champion, needless to say. Then it was back to the children. "Now white has to come up with an idea," he told them. "Let's try not to make a move without an idea. You want to create something. What can you create?" Mr. Korenman built on the work of Wes Fisk, a Lindsborg chess fan who started a club in 1997. Their work has already shown results in local schools. "If you go to our trophy cabinet at the middle school, you'll see four trophies, two for basketball and two for chess," said Bill Nelson, a former assistant principal of the local high school. "Has it caught on in every family? No, it hasn't. But there does seem to be an academic advantage for many of those who play. It helps kids learn how to think." The success of chess here has also changed some views of how small towns can improve their economies. "It's taught us something about growth," Mayor Ron Rolander said. "We can't compete with towns that are offering tax breaks and utilities and everything else to attract some company to come here and bring us jobs. What we should try to do instead is look around, find people who are already here who have interesting ideas and support them." Among the happiest tournament participants was Azeez Sanusi, a 19-year-old Nigerian who came from Louisiana, where he attends college, to compete. He said he had played chess "since I was me." "In the last couple of days, I got to play two grandmasters," Mr. Sanusi said with an air of wonder. "I lost, of course, but how often do you get to do that? Only in Lindsborg." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/25/national/25chess.html From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 28 16:16:46 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 11:16:46 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: The Saturday Profile: A Mongolian and His Nation, Evolving Together Message-ID: The Saturday Profile: A Mongolian and His Nation, Evolving Together NYT December 25, 2004 By JAMES BROOKE ULAN BATOR, Mongolia TSAKHIA ELBEGDORJ was running late. After his first 100 days as the prime minister of Central Asia's only multiparty democracy, he had stopped by a hospital to check his blood pressure. The results, as he feared, were not good. The demands of the job, even in Mongolia, are relentless. "Holding this coalition together is like holding a raw egg," Mr. Elbegdorj said later that evening, cupping his hands together for effect. It was easier in graduate school at Harvard, he said, studying problems of government instead of dealing with them. It was more fun as an opposition journalist taking potshots at past Mongolian leaders, calling one Mongolia's Lenin and another Mongolia's Stalin. Now, he has to receive the grandchildren of the two former leaders when they troop into his office to ask him not to remove their relatives' mausoleums from the capital's central square. The government plans to replace them with an enormous statue of Genghis Khan, still the proudest symbol of Mongolia, nearly a thousand years after his death in 1227. "Please don't call them Mongolia's Lenin and Stalin," Mr. Elbegdorj said, trying out his newly acquired diplomatic skills on a visiting reporter. Perhaps Asia's most unlikely democratic leader, Mr. Elbegdorj is a pudgy, bespectacled intellectual whose 41 years track the extraordinary political transformation of this vast, thinly populated nation sandwiched between Russia and China. Like most members of his 17-member cabinet, Mr. Elbegdorj studied in the Soviet Union but now advocates free market economics. The son of a herder in Mongolia's far west, the young Tsakhia proudly wore the red kerchief of a Communist Young Pioneer in elementary school. Twenty-five years later, he helped privatize the nation's livestock herds, all 31 million head. In the army, he was so diligent in running a Revolutionary Youth unit that he won a scholarship to study Marxism, Leninism and journalism in the Ukrainian city of Lvov. Now, his Liberty Center foundation, which promotes political and legal reform, is overseeing translations into Mongolian of the works of Milton Friedman and Friedrich A. Hayek. The turning point for Mr. Elbegdorj came in 1989, when the Soviet grip began to weaken. He quit a comfortable job as a reporter for a military newspaper to found Mongolia's first independent newspaper, called Democracy. Soon, he was a charter member of a group that is now revered as the 13 First Democrats, and took the lead in the protests that toppled the country's Communist government after a 70-year rule. "We were tough, we went to jail, we led a hunger strike," he recalled over dinner, a five-course affair that moved from dried beets to sheep's tongue. The setting was the upstairs state dining room of Guest House No. 30, originally the residence of Khorloo Choibalsan, the aforementioned Mongolian Stalin who put many of the Soviet dictator's policies into effect, including the execution of an estimated 17,000 Buddhist priests. THE Communist era already seems like ancient history for Mongolia's overwhelmingly young population, which has proved remarkably receptive to democracy and has embraced free speech and free markets. In two opinion surveys conducted this year by the Sant Maral Foundation, an independent polling group, policies for "the transition to the democratic system" won the support of 90 to 92 percent of respondents, while those promoting "the transition to a market economy in 1990" won the support of 86 to 88 percent. "We want to show the world that so-called Western values not only belong to America, Europe, South Korea and Japan, but to Mongolia," Mr. Elbegdorj said, proud that Mongolia survives as a multiparty democracy in an authoritarian sea, with China to the south, Russia to the north, North Korea to the east and the autarchies of Central Asia to the west. Exactly why is a matter of debate. Historically, Mongolians have been receptive to new ideas and gifted at foreign languages, a heritage of living for centuries on the Silk Road from Asia to Europe. After 300 years of domination, first by China and then by the Soviet Union, moreover, they have an acute sense of the value of freedom. Mr. Elbegdorj also points to the role of the United States, which has contributed money and advice in the quest to build strong democratic institutions. This is actually Mr. Elbegdorj's second turn in the top job. In the late 1990's, his anti-Communist coalition fumbled its first chance in a chaotic four-year term that consumed seven finance ministers and five prime ministers. In 2000, the voters, fed up with the turmoil and corruption, returned to power the political heirs of the Communist Party, the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party. That led to four years in the opposition for Mr. Elbegdorj, time he used to earn a master's degree in public administration at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Now a humbler, more wary Mr. Elbegdorj is back in power, hoping to push Mongolia toward a free market, high-technology economy. In addition to replacing dead Communists with Genghis Khan in the nation's mythology, he wants English to supplant Russian as Mongolia's primary foreign language, state ministers to hand out their e-mail addresses and an independent public broadcasting board to control Mongolia's state-owned radio and television. He has grand plans to spin a web of fiber-optic high-speed Internet cables across this land that is twice the size of Texas, and to place a cellphone in the pocket of every herder. "If I have e-mail access, and you have e-mail access, that makes us more equal," said the prime minister, who often answers questions on his new bilingual Mongolian-English Web site: www.open-government.mn. Warier of his opponents this time around, he devotes weekends to politicking and building support: Saturdays for trips to the interior and Sundays for socializing with cabinet members, half of whom are allied with the former Communists. "In the classroom, everything is plain, you don't feel the heat," he said. "In real life, every problem is very real." TO the south, he has a problem in China, an economic colossus with about 500 times the population of Mongolia's 2.5 million inhabitants. Twenty years ago, 95 percent of Mongolia's exports went north, to the Soviet Union. In the first half of this year, 60 percent of Mongolia's exports went south, to China. Militarily and diplomatically, China is flexing new muscles as well. "I hope China will become a responsible superpower," he said, choosing his words very carefully. "We wish all the best for China." Then there is North Korea, a constant destabilizing force even though it is 500 miles away. The problem is that defectors make their way through China to the Mongolian border, where Mongolia is committed to providing them a haven until transport can be arranged to a country that will accept them, usually South Korea. Anything that encourages defections, however, is sure to irritate China. For protection in the neighborhood, Mongolia is counting on close ties with the United States. To encourage that, it has sent 180 soldiers to Iraq, dropped visa requirements for American tourists and made clear its desire to sign a free trade pact. It regularly unrolls the red carpet for visiting American officials, most recently Adm. Thomas B. Fargo, the commander of United States forces in the Pacific. Asked if Mongolia would continue to send soldiers to Iraq, the prime minister's face clouded. "If America asks us to send a fourth contingent," he started. Then, noticing a telepathic elbow in the ribs from an aide across the dinner table, he brightened and said with the ambiguity of a seasoned politician, "We would discuss it in the cabinet." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/25/international/asia/25mongolia.html From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 28 16:18:23 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 11:18:23 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: At I.B.M., That Google Thing Is So Yesterday Message-ID: At I.B.M., That Google Thing Is So Yesterday http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/26/business/yourmoney/26techno.html New York Times, 4.12.26 By JAMES FALLOWS SUDDENLY, the computer world is interesting again. The last three months of 2004 brought more innovation, faster, than users have seen in years. The recent flow of products and services differs from those of previous hotly competitive eras in two ways. The most attractive offerings are free, and they are concentrated in the newly sexy field of "search." Google, current heavyweight among systems for searching the Internet, has not let up from its pattern of introducing features and products every few weeks. Apart from its celebrated plan to index the contents of several university libraries, Google has recently released "beta" (trial) versions of Google Scholar, which returns abstracts of academic papers and shows how often they are cited by other scholars, and Google Suggest, a weirdly intriguing feature that tries to guess the object of your search after you have typed only a letter or two. Give it "po" and it will show shortcuts to poetry, Pok??mon, post office, and other popular searches. (If you stop after "p" it will suggest "Paris Hilton.") In practice, this is more useful than it sounds. Microsoft, heavyweight of the rest of computerdom, has scrambled to catch up with search innovations from Google and others. On Dec. 10, a company official made a shocking disclosure. For years Microsoft had emphasized the importance of "WinFS," a fundamentally new file system that would make it much easier for users to search and manage information on their own computers. Last summer, the company said that WinFS would not be ready in time for inclusion with its next version of Windows, called Longhorn. The latest news was that WinFS would not be ready even for the release after that, which pushed its likely delivery at least five years into the future. This seemed to put Microsoft entirely out of the running in desktop search. But within three days, it had released a beta version of its new desktop search utility, which it had previously said would not be available for months. Meanwhile, a flurry of mergers, announcements and deals from smaller players produced a dazzling variety of new search possibilities. Early this month Yahoo said it would use the excellent indexing program X1 as the basis for its own desktop search system, which it would distribute free to its users. The search company Autonomy, which has specialized in indexing corporate data, also got into the new competition, as did Ask Jeeves, EarthLink, and smaller companies like dTSearch, Copernic, Accoona and many others. I have most of these systems running all at once on my computer, and if they don't melt it down or blow it up I will report later on how each works. But today's subject is the virtually unpublicized search strategy of another industry heavyweight: I.B.M. Last week I visited the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, 20 miles north of New York, to hear six I.B.M. researchers describe their company's concept of "the future of search." Concepts and demos are different from products being shipped and sold, so it is unfair to compare what I.B.M. is promising with what others are doing now. Still, the promise seems great. Two weeks before our meeting, I.B.M. released OmniFind, the first program to take advantage of its new strategy for solving search problems. This approach, which it calls unstructured information management architecture, or UIMA, will, according to I.B.M., lead to a third generation in the ability to retrieve computerized data. The first generation, according to this scheme, is simple keyword match - finding all documents that contain a certain name or address. This is all most desktop search systems can do - or need to do, because you're mainly looking for an e-mail message or memorandum you already know is there. The next generation is the Web-based search now best performed by Google, which uses keywords and many other indicators to match a query to a list of sites. I.B.M. says that its tools will make possible a further search approach, that of "discovery systems" that will extract the underlying meaning from stored material no matter how it is structured (databases, e-mail files, audio recordings, pictures or video files) or even what language it is in. The specific means for doing so involve steps that will raise suspicions among many computer veterans. These include "natural language processing," computerized translation of foreign languages and other efforts that have broken the hearts of artificial-intelligence researchers through the years. But the combination of ever-faster computers and ever-evolving programming allowed the systems I saw to succeed at tasks that have beaten their predecessors. One example is question answering. Google-type search engines are fabulous at retrieving random data, but mediocre at handling subtler queries. Using Google or Ask Jeeves, you can eventually find out how many of the world's Web pages are in each of the major languages, but it's slow and frustrating compared with finding out, say, Mozart's birthplace. Jennifer Chu-Carroll of I.B.M. demonstrated a system called Piquant, which analyzed the semantic structure of a passage and therefore exposed "knowledge" that wasn't explicitly there. After scanning a news article about Canadian politics, the system responded correctly to the question, "Who is Canada's prime minister?" even though those exact words didn't appear in the article. The Semantic Analysis Workbench, demonstrated by Eric Brown and Dave Ferrucci, showed another way of exposing latent meaning. The I.B.M. officials said the best use for this technology would be customer-support call centers: As representatives took notes on the problems people were having with their cars or computers or prescription drugs, automatic interpretation of the results would reveal useful patterns. Arthur Ciccolo, an I.B.M. strategist for its unstructured-information project, said that call centers would be the first place for new search systems to be applied. Genomic-research projects, where unexpected correlations can be crucial, might be the second. But the demonstration suggested another likely market, since every bit of sample text was a transcript of intercepted phone calls, apparently among people suspected of terrorism. ("He made two calls from Frankfurt on these dates ... ") Whether these were real, I still don't know. Salim Roukos demonstrated a system I would like to have tomorrow: an assortment of news headlines, roughly comparable to Google News, but from non-English language sources. The system automatically - and comprehensibly - translated the headlines and leads of each article. If you wanted to read more, you pressed a button and in 15 or 20 seconds had a good-enough translation. MR. CICCOLO, the search strategist, said that in a way his team was trying to match - and reverse - what Google has achieved. "As Google use became widespread, people began asking why it was so much easier to find material on the external Web than it was on their own computers or in their company's Web sites," he said. "Google sets a very high standard for that Web. We would like to set the next standard, so that people will find it so easy to do things at work that they'll wonder why they can't do them on the Internet." How soon might this happen? He said, with a chuckle, "Well, if I could freeze what everyone else is doing, it could be in two years." The great part is, the competition won't be frozen. At least this part of the future looks bright. James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly. E-mail: tfiles at nytimes.com From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 28 16:20:09 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 11:20:09 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Reiss and Havercamp: The Sensitivity Theory of Motivations Message-ID: Steven Reiss* and Susan Havercamp: The Sensitivity Theory of Motivations: Implications for Psychopathology Behavioral Research and Thererapy, 34.8 (1996): 621-32 [Another published paper by Steven Reiss and his colleague, Susan Havercamp. I have been beating a drum for Reiss's 16 fundamental human motives for some time.] Nisonger Center, The Ohio State University, 1581 Dodd Drive, Columbus, OH 43210-1296, U.S.A. *Author for correspondence. (Received 4 March 1996) Summary--Sensitivity theory holds that people differ in both the types of reinforcement they desire and in the amounts of reinforcement they need to satiate. People who crave too much love, too much attention, too much acceptance, too much companionship, or too much of some other fundamental reinforcer are at risk for aberrant behavior because normative behavior does not produce the desired amounts of reinforcement. People who are intolerant of even everyday amounts of anxiety or frustration also are at risk for aberrant behavior. Individual differences in desired amounts of particular reinforcers may predict person-environment interactions, risk factors for psychopathology, and the occurrence of generalized and durable therapy effects versus the occurrence of relapses. Parallel predictions are made for individual differences in tolerance of aversive stimuli. Implications are discussed for applied behavior analysis, the development of psychopathology, and treatment strategies. INTRODUCTION Anxiety sensitivity refers to individual differences in what people think will happen to them when they experience anxiety (Reiss & McNally, 1985; Reiss, 1991). People with high anxiety sensitivity believe that the experience of anxiety will cause them bodily or psychological harm, whereas people with low anxiety sensitivity believe that anxiety is just an unpleasant but harmless emotion that readily dissipates. Theoretically, people with high anxiety sensitivity have a low capacity to cope with anxiety and are at risk of developing Panic Disorder, other anxiety disorders, and many ordinary fears (Reiss, Peterson, Gursky & McNally, 1986; Reiss, 1991; Taylor, Koch & McNally, 1992). On the other hand, people with low anxiety sensitivity have a high capacity to cope with anxiety. The concept of anxiety sensitivity (AS) has been extensively validated (McNally, 1994; Peterson & Reiss, 1992; Taylor, 1995). High scores on the Anxiety Sensitivity Index (ASI) are strongly associated with Panic Disorder (Cox, 1994;McNally, 1992;Peterson & Reiss, 1992), even when scores on a variety of alternative anxiety and fear measures are held constant. High AS has been found to be a risk factor for panic responses to biological challenges in laboratory situations (Holloway & McNally, 1987; Rapee, Brown, Antony & Barlow, 1992; Telch & Harrington, 1994). AS is strongly related to fearfulness and only moderately related to frequency of anxiety and stress experiences (Reiss et al., 1986; McNally & Lorenz, 1987; Taylor, 1995). ASI scores at the end of treatment for Panic Disorder predict relapse better than alternative measures (Bruce, Spiegel, Gregg & Nuzzarello, 1995; Jones & Barlow, 1991). In addition to Panic Disorder and other anxiety disorders, AS is associated with alcoholism (Stewart, Knize & Phil, 1992; Stewart, 1994). In this article, a general theory of human motivation is proposed. The idea of individual differences in reinforcement effectiveness, implicit in the concept of anxiety sensitivity, is applied to a broader list of fundamental motivators. Thus, this is a major expansion of previous theoretical ideas. STATEMENT OF THEORY The sensitivity theory of motivation may be viewed as a call for research on individual differences in what people want from their lives. Of course, psychologists already have provided considerable research on this topic. Sensitivity theory suggests, however, that the psychological analysis provided to date has been inadequate because of certain methodological limitations that are common in psychological research. Psychologists generally have evaluated only one type of motivation at a time. Yet in everyday life people can pursue multiple types of reinforcements simultaneously, or they can switch from pursuing one type of reinforcement to another. For example, the person who reads a newspaper while eating is pursuing simultaneously both intellectual satisfaction and food. The person who puts down a newspaper to start a morning walk has switched from pursuing the satisfactions of intellectual activity to those of physical activity. Although such 'motivation switching' is a fundamental aspect of everyday behavior, there are few psychological efforts to account for it. Animal and human participants were not permitted to switch motivation in virtually all psychological experiments on motivation reported to date. By not studying in greater depth when people switch from seeking one reinforcer to another, psychologists may have underestimated the importance of individual differences in rates of satiation (individual differences in desired amounts of various reinforcers). Another reason psychologists have underestimated individual differences in desired amounts of reinforcement concerns the tendency to study animals in deprivational states. Deprivation induces common motivation in animals who otherwise may have very different motivations. For example, the behavioral consequences of individual differences in appetite are temporarily obscured by deprivational procedures that make animals very hungry. The motivational principles that apply to starving animals may not generalize well to other animals who are not necessarily starving, and they may be even less applicable to the everyday lives of people. Whereas almost all starving people spend most of their time and energy searching for food, people who are not starving show considerable individual differences in the amount of time and energy devoted to the preparation and consumption of meals. Sensitivity theory reminds us that routinely inducing deprivational states obscures differences in how much reinforcement individuals want, a potentially important variable for understanding human motivation. Our discussion of sensitivity theory begins with the concept of a reinforcement sensitivity, which is defined here as an individual difference in the reinforcing effectiveness of a fundamental motivator. The three key phrases in this definition are 'reinforcing effectiveness', 'individual difference', and 'fundamental motivator'. The meaning of each of these phrases will be discussed in this article along with comments on resistance to satiation. In this discussion, the terms motivator and reinforcer will be used interchangably. Moreover, two types of reinforcers, called rewards and aversive stimuli, will be recognized. The concept of reinforcement sensitivity has some similarities with the Hull-Spence concept of drive and with related concepts such as that of an 'establishing operation' (Hull, 1952; Keller & Schoenfeld, 1950). The higher the degree of reinforcement sensitivity, the stronger is the associated motivational drive. A crucial difference, however, is that sensitivity refers to a stable individual difference, whereas drive and establishing operation refer to situational phenomena. Reinforcing effectiveness The phrase reinforcing effectiveness refers to the strength of a particular motivator for a particular individual (cf. Rescorla & Wagner, 1972). The more effective a given reinforcer, the stronger (higher) is the person's drive or motivational state. Deprivational states temporarily increase the effectiveness or motivational strength of a deprived reinforcer. For example, food deprivation increases the strength of the person's motivation to obtain food, social isolation increases the strength of the individual's motivation for companionship, and prolonged exposure to the same environment increases the drive for stimulus novelty. Theoretically, the more effective a reward is for a particular person: (1) the larger is the amount of reinforcement needed to satiate the person; (2) the more intense and persistent is the person's seeking of reinforcement; (3) the more impatient the person is in waiting for reinforcement; and (4) the lower is the amount of reward that can function as reinforcement for instrumental behavior. The more effective a given aversive stimulus is for a particular person: (1) the lower is the person's threshold for performing coping/avoidance responses; (2) the more intense and persistent is the person's performance of coping/avoidance responses; (3) the more quickly the person will perform coping/avoidance responses; and (4) the lower is the amount of aversive stimulation that can function as negative reinforcement for instrumental behavior. There are many everyday examples of these principles. Children who present clinically as chronically 'starved for attention' want large amounts of attention immediately. People with a low threshold for pain put off going to a dentist as long as they can and jump at the most minimal sensations when the dentist begins drilling. Gluttons become impatient waiting for dinner. A person with high anxiety sensitivity shows panic when biologically challenged (Holloway & McNally, 1987). People who are starving will work to obtain very small amounts of food if that is all that is available. People with high anxiety sensitivity avoid situations in which even minimal anxiety is expected. Individual differences Up to this point, reinforcement sensitivities have been discussed in terms of their similarities to states of deprivation. However, even though reinforcement sensitivities and states of deprivation have similar consequences (both induce drive), reinforcement sensitivities are not the result of states of deprivation. Consider the distinction between gluttony and hunger. A glutton is a person who habitually has a hearty appetite and overeats for pleasure--the dictionary indicates that gluttons are people who enjoy eating above other pleasures (Kipfer, 1993). Because gluttony is a personality (individual difference) concept, it applies to only some people. In contrast, hunger is a temporary situational state related mostly to how long it has been since one's last meal; the term hunger is not a personality factor and potentially applies to anyone who has not eaten in a while. Sensitivity theory is concerned with personality concepts such as gluttony, not with deprivational concepts such as hunger. At first consideration, the idea of stable individual differences in the effectiveness of certain reinforcers may seem counterintuitive. After all, psychologists have long thought that virtually everybody seeks pleasure and avoids anxiety and pain. If almost everybody is motivated to obtain rewards and avoid aversive stimuli, the concept of 'individual differences' may seem to be insignificant. Although all people are to some degree motivated to eat, the amount of time, effort, and persistence devoted to the pursuit of food may vary significantly from one individual to the next. The amount of food required for satiation varies considerably from one person to the next, even when deprivational factors are held constant. This is recognized in everyday life by references to some people as being 'good eaters' or having 'hearty appetites'. These phrases suggest recognition among lay people that there are stable individual differences in the motivational strength of rewards such as food. The plain fact is that some people just like eating much more than most people. Similarly, the amount of time, effort, and persistence people devote to the pursuit of happiness (positive mood) varies considerably from one individual to the next. The platitude 'everybody wants to be happy' trivializes potentially important individual differences in effort. Some people try to look at everything positively and make the most out of whatever happens. These people work at being happy and organize a large portion of their everyday lives to achieve it. Others make only token efforts to escape a life filled with burdens, boredom, or misery. These observations are made not as a value judgment on people's lives but as a factual statement that individuals differ considerably in the effort they make to experience positive moods. At this point, our analysis of individual differences is descriptive rather than explanatory. The intent here is not to explain why some people eat more than others in terms of their having a stronger appetite or to explain why some people seek attention in terms of greater need. Rather, the intent simply is to observe that some people have hearty appetites, so that we may use this fact later to explain other psychological phenomena. Individual differences in reinforcement sensitivity should be considered only with reference to a particular reward or aversive stimulus. It would be invalid to say something like, "Bill has higher reinforcement sensitivity than Jane". On the other hand, Bill might have a high reinforcement sensitivity for attention, and Jane might have a high reinforcement sensitivity for physical activity. Resistance to satiation. One difference between situationally-induced motivational states such as hunger, and motivational states associated with stable individual differences such as gluttony, is that satiation occurs much more readily in situation-induced states than in person-specific states. People who are deprived of food readily satiate when they eat a full meal. In contrast, after eating a large meal, gluttons are quick to crave food again. A high reinforcement sensitivity for food, as in gluttony and in other conditions such as Prader Willi Syndrome (a rare condition associated with hyptotonia, hypergonadism, extreme obesity, and sometimes mental retardation), implies resistance to satiation and a relatively quick reinstatement of motivational states following the consumption of reinforcement. Origins of reinforcement sensitivities. How does it happen that some people become gluttons and others become intellectuals? No specific hypotheses on the origins of reinforcement sensitivity will be advanced here. The question of what accounts for the individual differences in sensitivities will be left unanswered. It would be helpful to know what accounts for the occurrence of sensitivities, and why some people show much higher sensitivity than others. However, this knowledge is not essential to support the various research suggestions and hypotheses expounded in this article. It is not unusual for hypotheses of individual differences to be offered without hypotheses regarding origin. For example, the concept of intelligence has proven useful even though we do not fully understand the origins of individual differences in intelligence. It is possible that reinforcement sensitivity will prove to be a useful construct even though we presently do not know the origin of reinforcement sensitivities. Reinforcement preferences. Psychologists have long recognized individual differences in preferences for particular reinforcers. Applied behavior analysts routinely assess the individual's preferences for various reinforcers in order to select one for use in a contingency management program. Whereas one child might prefer to be reinforced by candy, another might prefer time in an enjoyable activity. To help therapists select motivators, some researchers have developed reinforcement checklists (Bihm, Poindexter, Kienlen & Smith, 1992). Behavior analysts have recognized a relationship between reinforcement preference and reinforcement effectiveness. The primary reason for assessing an individual's preference for reinforcement is to maximize the effectiveness of a contingency management program by using the most effective reinforcer for a particular person. For example, if a person prefers physical activity to adult attention, the opportunity for physical activity may function as the more effective reinforcer in contingency management programs. The Premack Principle is relevant to these comments (Premack, 1959, 1965). This principle suggests that reinforcement preference in a free operant situation is a measure of reinforcement effectiveness. The Principle holds that access to a more highly preferred activity can be used to reinforce time in a less preferred activity but not vice versa. The Principle has been supported by numerous studies with both animal and human Ss, although some have suggested alternative interpretations (Dunham, 1977). What is new or different about the concept of reinforcement sensitivity, given the Premack Principle and the recognition of individual differences in reinforcement preferences? In the past, reinforcement preferences were considered technical details that were assessed in order to maximize the effectiveness of contingency management programs. If it were found that a child had a strong preference for adult attention, attention was used to reinforce operant behavior. However, no effort was made to modify the strength of the individual's attraction for attention. Rarely have psychologists assessed reinforcement preferences in order to modify those preferences or to modify the reinforcing effectiveness of a particular reward or aversive stimulus. This is what is called for under sensitivity theory, as explained later in this article. Fundamental motivators Fundamental motivators are defined here as conceptually distinct reinforcers relevant to understanding a significant amount of behavior displayed by a large percentage of all people. The criterion of conceptual distinctiveness means that fundamental motivators cannot be analyzed entirely as combinations of other sources of motivation. For example, swimming is not a fundamental motivator partially because it can be reduced to a more fundamental motivator, physical activity. On the other hand, moral behavior is suggested to be a fundamental motivator. This suggestion is based on the view that the desire to behave morally cannot be explained entirely in terms of avoidance of punishment for immoral behavior. If future research were to find that this desire is ultimately reducible to the desire to avoid punishment, moral behavior no longer would be considered to be a fundamental motivator. Each fundamental motivator induces a drive in a great many people. Fundamental motivators are either rewarding or aversive for almost everybody. They are distinguished from nonfundamental motivators, which are rewarding or aversive for relatively few people. For example, sexual pleasure is suggested to be a fundamental motivator because it is motivating for almost everybody, whereas reading mysteries is not suggested to be a fundamental motivator because it is reinforcing for only a relatively small percentage of all people. Fundamental motivators reinforce substantial amounts of behaviors in everyday lives, and/or they reinforce behaviors that generally are considered to be important or significant. Food is suggested to be a fundamental motivator because people expend a great deal of time and effort preparing and consuming meals and because overeating and undereating are major health and psychological issues. On the other hand, drinking water is not suggested to be a fundamental motivator because people expend little effort in their everyday lives to obtain water and because the associated seeking behaviors are considered relatively unimportant in psychology. Sensitivity theory suggests a need for research to identify the fundamental motivators of humankind. What rewards are to some degree desired by virtually everybody? What aversive stimuli are to some degree avoided by virtually everybody? How do various motives relate to one another and which ones can be analyzed in terms of others? Although a number of personality theorists have attempted to address these questions, especially Murray (1938), researchers have produced surprisingly few efforts to provide a comprehensive listing of fundamental motives. Most personality theories do not provide a comprehensive account of fundamental motives, identifying at most only a few of them. A preliminary list of fundamental motives is presented in Table 1. This list represents the authors' own views based on an analysis of the motivational constructs discussed in major personality theories (Hall & Lindzey, 1957). Since the main purpose of sensitivity theory is to identify issues for future research, this list is offered as an example of the sort of analysis we hope someday will result from empirical research. Although we have given our list considerable thought--this is by no means a hastily developed or arbitrary list--we recognize that the list is at the moment without empirical support and that many readers will take issue with at least some of the items on the list. Diverse opinions on the subject are welcome, provided we all agree that the issues need to be studied empirically. Table I. Preliminary list of fundamental motives Acceptance/Success The satisfaction associated with acceptance by others. Anger/Frustrative Impulses The discomfort associated with aggressive or frustrative impulses that occur in response to a perceived threat to self-esteem or to one's physical well-being. Anxiety The belief that experiencing anxiety is personally harmful. Attention The satisfaction derived from adult consideration of the individual. Companionship The satisfaction derived from spending time in the company of other people. Competence (Mastery) The satisfaction derived from competence in the performance of a skill. Curiosity The satisfaction derived from exploration of novel stimuli. Dominance (Leadership) The satisfaction derived from directing or influencing the behavior of others. Food The satisfaction derived from eating. Help Others The satisfaction derived from providing assistance to a personal friend. Help Society The satisfaction derived from contributing to society/public welfare. Independence The satisfaction derived from doing things on one's own without assistance or interference from others. Love/Romance The satisfaction associated with romance. Morality The satisfaction derived from behavior in accordance with a code defining right versus wrong conduct. Nuturance The satisfaction derived from taking care of people, animals, or plants. Order The satisfaction derived from an organization of time, events, or things into a well-defined pattern in one's everyday life. Physical Activity The satisfaction derived from exercise of the body. Physical Pain The discomfort associated with bodily injury (tissue damage), inflammation, or bodily spasms. Positive Mood The satisfaction derived from states of positive mood, as in happiness and optimism. Positive Self-Regard The satisfaction associated with positive self-esteem. Self-Control The satisfaction associated with mastery over one's impulses, social reactions, and emotional reactions. Sexual Gratification The satisfaction derived from real or fantasized sexual intercourse or foreplay. Social Conflict The discomfort associated with social strife such as arguments, disagreements, and opposition. Survival The desire to stay alive. Vengeance The satisfaction derived from retaliation for those real or imagined acts of others that the person perceives to be offensive, aggressive, or threatening. There are many aspects of Table 1 that are subject to alternative viewpoints. For example, some readers may question the suggestion that helping others and helping society are conceptually distinct reinforcers rather than substantially related motives. We suggest distinct motivators because we have observed people who seem to enjoy helping friends but pay little attention to social issues, and vice versa. Whether or not this view will be confirmed by factor analysis or other research remains to be seen. The task of generating a comprehensive list of fundamental motivators is challenging. The main difficulty is to generate a list that meets the criteria of conceptual distinctiveness and is comprehensive in its totality. This cannot be accomplished by developing a list of biological drives. As suggested by the list presented in Table 1, some fundamental motivators are not biological drives. Moreover, the motivational effects of biological drives are influenced by culture, personality, and learning. For example, the motivational properties of sex for any given person reflect both the person's biological drive and the person's culture, attitudes, morality, and past experiences with sex. The motivational implications of food may be influenced considerably by self-perceptions of being a 'skinny' or 'fat' person. Generally, fundamental motivation is determined by a combination of both biological and psychological factors. Individual differences. Individuals show important differences in the strength of the motivations listed in Table 1. Some people are extremely interested in surviving, whereas alcoholics drink themselves to death. Some people panic in anxious situations, whereas others readily approach them. American football players withstand considerable physical pain that the more squeamish among us would avoid at all cost. To the extent that psychological theories of motivation have all people equally motivated to seek pleasure, or equally motivated to avoid anxiety, these theories are in disagreement with sensitivity theory. Researchers who disagree with the assumption of individual differences should be careful to avoid arguing a tautology. For example, the argument that everybody seeks pleasure can become tautological if work is defined as pleasure for workaholics. If both the hedonist and the workaholic are viewed as seeking pleasure, important differences in motivation are trivialized. The hedonist attends every party possible, whereas the workaholic can hardly relax and stop working long enough to enjoy a single party. Rather than say that both seek pleasure, sensitivity theorists say that both seek reinforcement, but that what reinforces the two is very different. The hedonist has a high reinforcement sensitivity for sexual pleasure, whereas the workaholic has a high reinforcement sensitivity for the pleasures of intellectual activity, physical activity, and/or helping society. Set points. Under sensitivity theory every person has a set point for each fundamental motivator. The set point indicates either the amount of reward an individual desires or the strength of an aversive stimulus an individual will tolerate. A person with an aberrantly high or low set point is said to have a reinforcement sensitivity for that motivator. Consider the example of companionship. The hypothesis of set points implies individual differences in how much companionship people seek in their daily lives. People with high set points seek a great deal of company, whereas those with low set points prefer to be alone quite a bit. If the amount of companionship in one's everyday life is less than that indicated by the set point, the individual is temporarily motivated to seek additional amounts of companionship (now a positive reinforcer). If the amount of companionship in one's everyday life is more than that implied by the set point, the individual is temporarily motivated to avoid (decrease the amount of) companionship (temporarily a negative reinforcer). Depending on one's set point, a fundamental reinforcer may be pleasant or annoying. For example, attention is positively reinforcing for some (show-offs) and negatively reinforcing for others (shy people). Under sensitivity theory, show-offs have high set points for attention; that is, they require large amounts of attention before satiating. In contrast, shy people have low set points for attention; that is, they desire small amounts of attention and find large amounts annoying. Although the details will not be developed here, the concept of set point may be relevant to explaining motivation switching behavior in which a person seeks one type of reinforcer at one point and another a moment later. As previously noted, motivation switching is a basic phenomenon of behavior, but it has received surprisingly little attention. Theoretically, the key to such behavior for any individual may be the relative strength/set point of each motivation as compared with the rate at which each type of reward and aversive stimulus is experienced, with the greatest discrepancies controlling the person's behavior. Since such discrepancies should vary from one moment to the next, people may switch from seeking one reinforcer to seeking another, or they may seek both simultaneously. Measurement. A number of alternative methods may be applicable to assessing reinforcement sensitivities. One possibility is to assess free-operant preferences, such as the amount of time a person chooses to spend in an activity when many choices can be made (Premack, 1959, 1965). However, such assessments would need to be standardized across individuals to identify persons who are high and low on various reinforcer preferences. The Motivation Assessment Scale (MAS: Durand & Crimmins, 1988) is a popular scale for assessing four of the most common motivations of self-injurious behavior (sensory, escape, attention, tangible). However, the MAS has not been standardized. Moreover, the psychometric properties of the MAS are limited by the fact that it has only four items on each of four subscales. As already noted, the Anxiety Sensitivity Index (ASI: Reiss et al., 1986; Peterson & Reiss, 1992) is a 16-item, self-report measure that has been extensively validated (McNally, 1994; Taylor, 1995). Researchers have also developed a Child ASI (Silverman, Lesig, Rabian & Peterson, 1991). The authors currently are developing self-report and informant-rating instruments for assessing reinforcement sensitivities, one for the general population and the other for the population of people with mental retardation. The instruments will provide MMPI-like, individual profiles of set points on fundamental motivators derived from a factor analysis. The successful development of measures of reinforcement sensitivity may lead to many new research opportunities. To the extent to which people seek out what they want, measures of reinforcement sensitivities may be helpful in predicting some person-environment interactions. Additionally, psychopathology researchers may wish to compare standardized motivation profiles obtained from different diagnostic groups. For example, it would be interesting to compare motivational profiles associated with the various personality disorders. IMPLICATIONS Sensitivity theory potentially has broad implications. For the sake of brevity, however, our present discussion of implications will be limited to self-injurious behavior in persons with mental retardation, the development of aberrant behavior, and clinical strategies. Functional analysis In the 1970s a number of researchers found that different cases of self-injurious behavior were associated with any of four different motivations. Different people with self-injury are motivated by attention, internal stimulation ('self-reinforcing' behavior), escape from frustrative task demands, and tangible reinforcers (Carr, 1977; Napolitan, 1979). These findings stimulated the use of an assessment technique called functional analysis (Iwata, Dorsey, Slifer, Bauman & Richman, 1982; Kanfer & Saslow, 1969). This technique provides an empirical method for classifying the motivational source of specific examples of self-injury. As Iwata et al. (1982) put it, Carr (1977) indicated that the behavior may be reinforced through extrinsic sources (e.g. through positive reinforcement such as attention, or negative reinforcement such as the termination of demands), or that the behavior itself may produce some form of intrinsic reinforcement (e.g, sensory stimulation, pain reduction). This conceptualization of self-injury as a multiply controlled operant would indicate that no single form of treatment can be expected to produce consistent positive results, and it suggests that one means of selecting a potentially effective treatment would consist of first determining what events are currently maintaining the behavior. As the preceding quotation indicates, functional analysis is used to help select an operant treatment method. The idea is first to identify the nature of the motivation and then to use that information to extinguish the self-injurious response(s). For example, if it were found that self-injury is being motivated by attention, the therapist might ignore future instances of self-injury while attending to alternative behaviors. In this manner, the therapist would attempt to extinguish self-injurious behavior while strengthening an alternative behavior. On the other hand, if it were found that self-injury is being motivated by escape from frustrative task demands, the therapist might attempt to extinguish self-injury by never allowing escape when this behavior occurs. Sensitivity theory may provide a basis for strengthening functional analysis by focusing attention on the role of individual differences in operant conditioning. Sensitivity theory suggests that what is aberrant is not only the self-injurious behavior but also the individual's sensitivity to reinforcing attention or to frustrative task demands. Thus, treatment should be aimed not only at extinguishing the self-injurious behavior but also at reducing the aberrant reinforcement sensitivities that may create predispositions for self-injurious behavior. Alcohol addiction provides a helpful analogy of some of the main points to be made here about reinforcement sensitivity and functional analysis. Suppose that therapists at a substance abuse clinic determine that an individual is stealing money in order to support a drinking habit rather than a heroin habit or abuse of some other substance. In theory, the stealing could be extinguished either by giving the individual free alcohol or by controlling the individual's environment so that stealing money cannot lead to drinking. Although the treatment might effectively extinguish stealing behavior under circumstances where the therapist can control the environment, it would not treat the person's addiction to alcohol. As soon as the therapist's control of the consequences of stealing weakens, the individual will return to stealing to buy alcohol. People with a high reinforcement sensitivity may be thought of as having a 'psychological addiction' to a reinforcement. For example, people who engage in self-injury to obtain high amounts of attention may be considered 'psychologically addicted' to attention. Just as people addicted to alcohol seek aberrant quantities of alcohol, people addicted to attention seek aberrant amounts of attention. Effective treatment of alcoholism requires a reduction in the underlying need (addiction) for alcohol. Effective treatment of self-injurious behavior motivated by attention sensitivity may require a reduction in the underlying craving (seeking) for attention. That is, effective treatment must do more than teach people that self-injury no longer leads to attention (extinction); it also should reduce the motivation for aberrant amounts of attention. What does it mean to say that some people have a 'psychological addiction' for attention? Technically, it means that they have a high degree of reinforcement sensitivity for attention, as that term is defined herein. The addiction metaphor works partially because addictions are person-specific variables associated with personal suffering and indicating a need for treatment. The addiction metaphor also works because it implies a problem in the amount of substance the individual wishes to consume. The problem in alcoholism is not that the person drinks but that the person drinks too much. Similarly, sensitivity theory suggests that the problem in some examples of aberrant behavior is not that the person seeks attention (or some other fundamental reinforcement) but that the person seeks too much attention. These theoretical issues suggest a number of possible future research issues. If motivations for self-injury are determined by high reinforcement sensitivities, the following should be true. Engaging in self-injurious behavior for attention (or to avoid frustrative task demands) should be part of a general pattern of behavior in which the individual engages in a variety of aberrant behaviors in order to obtain attention (or avoid frustration). The attention-seeking should present as a stable individual difference in motivation that has been true of the individual for a long time, is difficult to modify, and usually will last indefinitely unless specifically reduced by successful treatment methods. Just as anxiety sensitivity levels at the end of treatment have been found to predict relapse rates for patients successfully treated for anxiety disorder (Bruce et al., 1995; Jones & Barlow, 1991), reinforcement sensitivity levels at the end of treatment may predict relapse rates for extinguished self-injurious behaviors. Development of behavior disorders When a person desires an unusually large or unusually small amount of reinforcement, that person is said to be aberrantly motivated. Aberrant motivation (very high reinforcement sensitivity or very low reinforcement sensitivity) is assumed to result from complex interactions among biological, developmental, conditioning, and cognitive factors. Theoretically, aberrant motivation is a risk factor for aberrant behavior. That is, the amount of reinforcement a person seeks (how much reinforcement is required to produce satiation) may be the key to understanding the development of aberrant behavior in at least some, if not many, people. Appropriate behavior usually is followed by small or moderate amounts of reinforcement, whereas inappropriate behavior sometimes is the best strategy for obtaining high amounts of reinforcement. Since most people are satisfied with the amount of reinforcement that follows socially appropriate behavior, most people learn socially appropriate responses. However, people with high reinforcement sensitivity seek much higher amounts of reinforcement than most people. These people are not satisfied with the amount of reinforcement that follows socially appropriate behavior. For these people, socially inappropriate behavior sometimes offers the best strategy to obtain immediately a high amount of reinforcement. Consider the example of a boy with a high sensitivity for attention. By definition, the boy should behave as if he is chronically 'starved' for attention. The child should show vigorous efforts to obtain as much attention as immediately as possible. For this child, engaging in inappropriate behavior may be an effective strategy to obtain quickly a large amount of reinforcement. This theory is different from previous learning theory explanations of the role of reinforcement in the development of behavior disorders. Past explanations held that some children learned aberrant behavior when it was inadvertently reinforced. The pathogenic agent was in the environment in the form of response-reinforcement contingent relationships that inadvertently favored the learning and performance of aberrant behavior. In contrast, reinforcement sensitivity theory holds that the pathogenic agent sometimes is partially 'within' the person, not the environment. That is, people with a high reinforcement sensitivity react to the same environment very differently than other people. Sometimes people develop aberrant behavior because they want something too badly or too quickly. A person who has not eaten in a long time starts thinking about food constantly so that obtaining food starts to dominate the person's behavior. In a similar fashion, people who develop aberrant behavior may want to be loved too much, may need companionship too often, may need to escape immediately from frustration, or may desire pleasure all the time. At times these motivations may be extremely strong and dominate the person's behavior. Treatment Therapists should assess the degree to which a person's aberrant behavior may be related to aberrant motivation and directly treat the aberrant motivation as one component of an overall therapy plan. A number of direct treatment strategies may be attempted depending on the individual and circumstances. Possible strategies to be explored by future researchers include the following: (a) Cognitive therapy may alter reinforcement sensitivities by changing attitudes and beliefs about the consequences of various reinforcers. For example, anxiety sensitivity is reduced when people believe that the experience of anxiety will not harm them. (b) Psychotropic drugs may alter reinforcement sensitivities by affecting both biological processes and cognitive expectancies. These drugs should be evaluated for outcomes on aberrant motivation distinct from their effects on aberrant behavior. (c) Research is needed on the effects of the length of treatment on changes in aberrant motivation. Whereas short-term approaches sometimes may lead to improvements in aberrant behavior, long term trials of behavior therapy may be needed to change aberrant motivation. Reinforcing effectiveness may change if people adjust to fixed quantities of a reinforcer given over a long period of time. For example, if a glutton consistently ate a moderate amount of food, eventually the person's appetite may adjust to a lower amount of food. (d) It may be possible to increase the effectiveness of a reinforcer by pairing it with a more effective reinforcer in Pavlovian trials. For example, a therapist might attempt to treat social isolation behavior by pairing companionship with a more effective reinforcer for the person. (e) Desensitization and various exposure techniques sometimes may reduce high sensitivities for anxiety (Harrington & Telch, 1994) and perhaps frustration. (f) When ethical, counterconditioning may be an appropriate strategy for decreasing reinforcement sensitivity by pairing a reinforcer with an aversive stimulus (Bandura, 1969). For example, a therapist might decrease a high reinforcement sensitivity for sex by pairing fetish stimuli with aversive stimuli. In contrast, the following strategies seem less likely to alter reinforcement sensitivities: (a) Teaching people socially appropriate alternative behaviors may have little impact in changing what they want. This strategy may work when skill deficits are assessed to be the main problem, but not when aberrant motivation is implicated. For example, teaching a thief appropriate job skills is of little benefit because there are few jobs that can produce as much money as quickly as robbing banks. (b) Extinction strategies may work well when the problem is a maladaptive response-reinforce- ment contingency but not when aberrant motivation is implicated. There is no particular reason to assume that simple extinction alters what people want; it only alters the behaviors that produce what they want. (c) Punishment strategies are unlikely to work when aberrant motivation is associated with a problem behavior. Punishment temporarily may suppress maladaptive behavior by creating a stronger motivation (avoidance of punishment), but the person's aberrant motivation remains unchanged and will stimulate maladaptive behavior in situations in which punishment is not anticipated. Because high reinforcement sensitivities are predicted to be risk factors for psychopathology, aberrant motivation must be successfully treated if the therapy is to have durable and generalized benefits. If aberrant behavior is modified but aberrant motivation is left unchanged, the person is at risk for relapse because he/she will crave high amounts of some fundamental reinforcer. The person probably will not be able to obtain high amounts of reinforcement by behaving in socially appropriate ways and, therefore, is at risk to resort to aberrant behavior in an effort to obtain immediately the desired amounts of reinforcement. Thus, measures of aberrant motivation at the end of treatment may predict relapse rates. Researchers of anxiety disorders have obtained some data supporting this hypothesis. Reduction of anxiety sensitivity has been found to be an important factor in minimizing the risk of relapse in patients with Panic Disorder (Bruce et al., 1995; Jones & Barlow, 1991). CONCLUSIONS Generally, three limitations may be noted to previous research on motivation. First, psychologists have widely assumed but not critically examined the hypothesis that everybody is equally motivated to seek pleasure/happiness and equally motivated to avoid anxiety. People actually show wide individual differences in the strength of these motives. Second, psychological theories of motivation have been unduly influenced by the study of animals in deprivational states. This method has obscured the role of individual differences in desired amounts of various reinforcers. Whereas starving animals spend almost all of their time and energy seeking large quantities of food, most people spend widely varying amounts of time and energy pursuing a much broader range of reinforcers. Third, psychologists have studied only one motivation at a time. This has obscured the importance of individual differences in rates of satiation. Whereas individual differences in satiation rates may seem unimportant when only one motivation is considered, they seem relevant to explaining motivation switching in which a person changes the type of reinforcement he/she is pursuing. The sensitivity theory of motivation has potentially important implications for future research. First, the theory identifies individual differences in desired amounts of reinforcement (individual differences in rates of satiation) as an understudied and potentially important variable. Because people spend considerable time and energy seeking the reinforcers they desire, these individual differences may predict some person-environment interactions. Second, the theory suggests the need for research to identify fundamental sources of motivation. Surprisingly, psychologists have proposed very few comprehensive lists of fundamental motivation. Third, a new theory on the development of psychopathology is suggested based on the assumption that different people not only desire different types of reinforcers but also desire widely varying amounts of each fundamental reinforcer. Aberrant motivation is indicated when a person wants too much of a particular type of reinforcement and/or is too intolerant of everyday levels of some aversive stimulus such as anxiety or frustration. Aberrant motivation may be a risk factor for psychopathology because people usually cannot obtain high amounts of reinforcement by behaving in socially appropriate ways. People sometimes resort to inappropriate behavior as the best strategy to obtain a high amount of immediate reinforcement. However, aberrant behavior rarely leads to enough reinforcement to satiate aberrant desires; people with aberrant motives rarely obtain what they want and are at risk for unhappiness. Sensitivity theory has implications for practice. First, the development of standardized measures that produce MMPI-like profiles of motivational set points may help clinicians identify aberrant motivation and assess its role in any particular case. To date, psychologists have produced thousands of standardized measures, not one of which provides a comprehensive, standardized profile of what motivates a therapy patient. The development of standardized measures will help clinicians assess the extent to which a person's psychopathology may be related to wanting too much love or too much attention or too much acceptance. Second, the theory suggests reconsideration of when to use certain clinical strategies. These strategies must be evaluated not only for their effects on response-reinforcement contingencies but also for their effects on aberrant motivation. For example, teaching people socially appropriate skills to obtain desired reinforcers has been a popular strategy. Although this strategy may be effective when the primary problem is a lack of skill, it may be ineffective when an important part of the person's problem is aberrant motivation. Teaching thieves employment skills may not work for those who crave immediate riches; in such cases, it may be necessary to reduce the greed for a durable and generalized treatment benefit. Finally, sensitivity theory provides a basis for strengthening behavior analysis. In cases of self-injurious behavior, for example, some people are motivated to escape frustrative task demands, and they may be intolerant of even minor frustrations. These considerations should be regarded as theoretical suggestions, not prescriptions for therapy. Sensitivity theory is in an early stage of development. Researchers are encouraged to take advantage of the theory's unique perspective to identify future areas of research and to test some of the predictions suggested in this article. 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From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 28 16:21:07 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 11:21:07 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Steven Reiss: The Sixteen Strivings for God Message-ID: Steven Reiss: The Sixteen Strivings for God Zygon, vol. 39, no. 2 (June 2004). [The same, applied to religion. PDF converted by me.] Steven Reiss is Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry and Director of the Nisonger Center at The Ohio State University, 1581 Dodd Drive, Columbus, OH 43210-1296; email reiss.7 at osu.edu. Abstract. A psychological theory of religious experiences, sensitivity theory, is proposed. Whereas other theories maintain that religious motivation is about a few overarching desires, sensitivity theory provides a multifaceted analysis consistent with the diversity, richness, and individuality of religious experiences. Sixteen basic desires show the psychological foundations of meaningful experience. Each basic desire is embraced by every person, but to different extents. How we prioritize the basic desires expresses our individuality and influences our attraction to various religious images and activities. Each basic desire is associated with a basic goal and a unique joy, such as love, self-worth, relaxation, or strength. We do not seek to experience joys infinitely; we regulate joys, in accordance with our core values, to sixteen balance points (sensitivities) that vary based on individuality. Religions help persons of faith regulate the sixteen basic joys by providing some images that strengthen joyful experiences and others that weaken them. We can strengthen our experience of selfworth, for example, by contemplating God in the image of savior; we can weaken our experience of self-worth by contemplating original sin. The theory of sixteen basic desires is testable scientifically and suggests such philosophical concepts as value-based happiness. Keywords: Gordon Allport; Aristotle and psychology; god-images; intrinsic value; meaning of life; means and ends; Reiss Profile; religion and motivation; religion and personality; sensitivity theory of motivation; sixteen basic desires. Human beings embrace religion for a number of reasons, according to previously published theories. Religion can, for example, help individuals cope with fear and anxiety, especially the fear of death. This idea is expressed by the saying "There are no atheists in foxholes" (Argyle and Beit- Hallahmi 1975, 197) and explains why clergy are readily available in hospices and hospitals and near battlefields. Some religious teachings, moreover, are aimed at helping the faithful manage anxiety and experience inner peace. Ritual observance has been suggested to be a significant source of religious motivation. Rituals are common in religious ceremonies; they help people cope with life's major events, such as birth of a child, child rearing, marriage, and death of a loved one. Sigmund Freud (1907) emphasized the significance of religious rituals, calling religion an "obsessive neurosis." John C. Flugel discussed the significance of religion in helping persons cope with guilt. Religions teach adherents to atone for their sins through sacrifice to gods. "Men [hold] the primitive notion that their God . . . is appeased by human suffering" (Flugel [1945] 1961, 187-88). We inflict punishment and suffering on ourselves and hope that our gods will forgive us, much as our parents forgave us after we had been punished as children. Being forgiven reduces our experience of guilt and increases our fundamental sense of acceptance and salvation. Freud thought that religion plays an important role in regulating sexual impulses. For example, religions ban incest, and Freud regarded such taboos as essential for the survival of our species. God images, according to Freud, are disguised father figures that help people manage their unconscious sexual desires. Intellectual curiosity may motivate interest in religion (Allport 1961). We all wonder about life's larger questions-who we are and why we exist. Religions address our curiosity by providing explanations for the origin of the universe, the origin and purpose of human beings, and the nature of good and evil. Religion can help people satisfy their need to find meaning in suffering and, thus, cope with poverty, illness, disappointment, and frustration. Karl Marx expressed this idea when he called religion the "opium of the people" (1964, 43-44). As Kenneth Davis put it, "The greater [one's] disappointment in this life, the greater his faith in the next. The existence of goals beyond this world serves to compensate people for frustrations they inevitably experience in striving to reach socially acquired and socially valuable ends" (1948, 532). Recently, a number of psychologists have suggested that spirituality is a unique motive. Ralph Piedmont (1999) presents some evidence for this idea, proposing a trait he calls spiritual transcendence. Piedmont has validated the concept of spirituality in factorial studies and studies of peer ratings of religious behavior. He has shown that spiritual transcendence has some independence from five-factor personality theory. At least part of the appeal of religion may be to satisfy our need for spiritual experiences. Scholars have ascribed these and other psychological motives for religious behavior. Anxiety reduction, fear of death, guilt reduction, enjoyment of rituals, and spirituality represent the most frequently cited. THEORY OF BASIC MOTIVATION My sensitivity theory (Reiss 2000a) holds that sixteen basic desires motivate much of our behavior, including religious behavior. In this essay I consider the main tenets of this theory and then apply the sixteen basic desires to understanding religious experiences.1 CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS. Sensitivity theory represents an original combination of Aristotle's analysis of motivation ([330 B.C.E.] 1976) and Gordon Allport's concept of individuality (1961).2 Desires are Reasons. These are motives, defined as reasons for engaging in behavior. Ends are Intrinsically Desired. Sensitivity theorists divide motives into means and ends (see Aristotle ([330 B.C.E.] 1976). Means are behaviors we engage in because they produce something else, whereas ends are desired for no reason other than that is what we want. When a professional athlete plays football for a living, the game is a means of obtaining a salary. When a professional athlete plays football to exercise, the game is its own end. An analysis of a person's behavior may identify a series of means followed by one or more ends that complete the behavior chain. For example, a person may attend medical school to become a researcher (a means), seek the cause of cancer because it has killed a parent (a means), and show loyalty to a deceased parent out of honor (an end). Automatic Nature of Ends. End motives occur automatically and cannot be deliberately chosen. As Aristotle observed, "Deliberation is about means, not ends" ([330 B.C.E.] 1976, Book III, iii, 79). We cannot choose whether or not we feel hunger, for example, but we can choose a diet to satiate our hunger. The idea of choosing an end is a self-contradiction: the ends are the criteria by which we make fundamental choices, and the means are the options that are chosen. As a matter of logic, any option we choose is a means to the criteria of choice and, thus, not an end. Ends are Associated with Varying Degrees of Self-Awareness. Self-awareness of our end desire-both what we want and how strongly we want it- varies considerably depending on individuality, experiences, and possibly the effects of culture on attitudes toward the desire in question. When we increase self-awareness we are better able to use our intellect to select appropriate and effective means. Basic Desires Exclude Certain Biological Needs. Basic desires (also called human strivings) are end motives, excluding those biological needs that have no relevance for psychology. For example, the need for constant body temperature is not considered a basic desire. As shown in Table 1, sensitivity theory recognizes sixteen basic desires. Genetic Origin of Basic Desires. Theoretically, the sixteen basic desires are regarded as genetically distinct sources of motivation. Culture and learning, however, play significant roles in the strength of a person's desires.3 Basic Desires Imply End (Basic) Goals. Each of the sixteen basic desires is aimed at different ends, called basic goals because of their connections to basic desires. A person who is motivated by curiosity, for example, has a basic goal of acquiring knowledge, whereas a person who is motivated by idealism aims to improve society. Other basic goals are sound character, approval, and so on (see Table 1). Basic Goal Experiences Produce Joys. The experience of a basic goal produces a joy (an intrinsically valued psychological state), a different joy depending on which basic (end) goal is experienced. For example, the joy of wonderment is experienced when we obtain knowledge, and the joy of beauty is associated with the experience of sex. I argue that the sixteen joys cannot be reduced to a few global categories such as pleasure versus pain or intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation (Reiss forthcoming a). Aristotle observed, "As activities differ in kind, so do their pleasures" ([330 B.C.E.] 1976, Book X, v, 322). The pleasure associated with the joy of wonderment, for example, is qualitatively different from the pleasure associated with the joy of loyalty. Basic Goals Imply Core Values. The concepts of values and goals are closely connected. We value what we want and want what we value. Values connected to basic desires are called core or fundamental values; examples include family values, intellectual values, and humanitarian values. According to sensitivity theory, each basic goal implies its own core values.4 Core Values Drive Personality Development. Values, not pleasure and pain, are the primary motivators of human behavior and personality development, according to sensitivity theory. We sacrifice for our children because we value them, not because we want to avoid the guilt associated with parental neglect. Soldiers throw themselves on exploding grenades and save their comrades because they value their honor even more than they value their life. People survived Nazi concentration camps because they found ways to express meaningful core values (Frankl 1984), not because they found ways to make their experience pleasurable. BASIC DESIRE Acceptance Curiosity Eating Family Honor Idealism Independence Order Physical Exercise Power Romance Saving Social Contact Staus Tranquility Vengeance BASIC GOAL (Core value) approval (inclusion) knowledge, cognition (truth) food, sustenance raise children (family values) sound character (morals) fairness (human condition) autonomy (self-reliance) organization (precision, cleanliness) muscle movement (strength) influence (leadership, glory) sex (sensuality) collection (frugality) friendship (groups) prestige, stature (social class) personal safety (prudence) retaliation (self-defense) BASIC JOY positive self-regard wonderment satiation love loyalty compassion freedom stability vitality self-efficacy lust, beauty ownership belonging, fun selfimportance inner peace, relaxation vindication RELIGIOUS IMAGES FOR MORE JOY (express core value) Savior, baptism, confession omniscient, God as Reason totem animals, Eucharist, feasts God in image of son/daughter God in image of father; Ten Commandments social gospel, missionary work God is self-sufficient God's immortality; church rituals God's infinite strength Almighty, Creator, Brahman holy matrimony religious relics, mementos festivals Divine creation of humankind freedom from anxiety and guilt(the Way) wrath of God; war gods RELIGIOUS IMAGES FOR LESS JOY (negative core value original sin incomprehensible, ineffable God fasts, dietary laws mythical gods of abandonment devil's temptations God's tolerance of illness and natural disaster unity, Nirvana, attentive deities impurity of body, soul; unclean food Sabbath submission celibate, ascetic, Puritanical mythical gods of waste retreat, solitude, vows of silence human beings nothing compared with divinity fear of God conflict avoidance ("turn cheek") Basic Goals Experienced as Meaningful. Because the meaning of a behavior is its purpose or aim, and because basic desires aim for basic goals, basic desires and goals are experienced as psychologically meaningful. The sixteen basic desires are the key psychological foundations for meaningful experience, according to sensitivity theory. In contrast, unmotivated behavior such as reflexes and biological events are without purpose and are therefore considered to occur without conveying a psychological sense of meaningfulness. Organizing Role of Basic Desires. Under sensitivity theory, basic desires organize perceptions, values, cognitions, emotions, and behavior into coherent acts. Generally, we attend to stimuli relevant to our needs and desires and ignore irrelevant stimuli. We filter what we see through our desires and values. We want what we value, we value what we want, and we experience joyful emotions when we get what we want. Our values affect our attitudes, beliefs, and thoughts. A person with above-average motivation for status, for example, may pay a great deal of attention to prestigious versus less prestigious clothing labels, cars, residential neighborhoods, and so on; put on airs associated with high social class; wear expensive jewelry; dismiss lower-class persons as unworthy of attention; believe that one should not have to achieve in order to gain attention from others; believe that persons should associate with, and marry, within their social class; believe that those of high social class are more important than those of lower social class; be highly concerned with personal reputation; be careful to wear the "right" clothes; and be uncomfortable in the presence of lower-class persons or when visiting their homes or neighborhoods. In contrast, a person with below-average motivation for status tends not to notice the differences between clothing labels, cars, residential neighborhoods, and so on; may not value wealth or other marks of social class; may believe that social class is a trifle when selecting a marriage partner; may identify with working or lower-class persons; may feel uncomfortable when at a high-society gathering; and may dress sloppily, showing little interest in what others think about his or her appearance. Summary. Sensitivity theory puts forth sixteen basic desires that include both biological needs such as eating and psychological needs such as acceptance and status. Each basic desire motivates people to embrace basic goals and express the core values associated with basic goals. Table 1 shows some of the connections between specific basic desires, basic goals, and core values. Basic desires occur automatically, with varying degrees of self-awareness, and are assumed to have a genetic origin. They may be altered by significant life events, but generally we do not know how to deliberately change them. Our basic desires and core values motivate personality development by organizing perceptions, values, cognitions, emotions, and behavior into coherent acts and behavioral propensities. Under sensitivity theory, the sixteen basic desires provide the key psychological foundations of meaningful experiences, because they determine what we care about and who we are. EVIDENCE FOR SIXTEEN BASIC DESIRES. Deep down, what do people desire? What are the basic motives that drive our behavior and give psychological meaning to our lives? To find out, Susan Havercamp and I developed a questionnaire, called the Reiss Profile (Reiss and Havercamp 1998), which was completed by more than ten thousand research participants. The results of this work showed that sixteen specific desires guide much of human behavior.5 The research was conducted in three phases. In Phase 1, we showed the "factorial validity" of the Reiss Profile questionnaire and the sixteen basic desires. Factorial validity implies that if a person endorsed an item on one of the sixteen Reiss Profile scales, such as the scale for status, the individual (a) tended to endorse all other items on the same scale (such as all of the status items) and (b) did not necessarily endorse any item on a different scale (such as the items on the scale for curiosity or eating). Phase 2 consisted of studies that assessed the psychometric properties of the questionnaire. These studies showed that people self-report their basic motives similarly at different points in time. They also showed that the results of the questionnaire were only minimally influenced by the social desirability bias factor (the tendency to respond in ways that make one look good). In Phase 3 we validated the sixteen basic motives by showing that how people self-reported their motives on the Reiss Profile predicted significantly how they had behaved in their lives (such as choice of college major, interest in military or clergy), how they scored on psychological tests, meaningful aspects of romantic relationships and friendships, mental health diagnoses, and certain genetic developmental syndromes. INDIVIDUALITY. Sensitivities are about individuality in basic motivation and core values. The concept is similar in meaning to that of an Aristotelian mean. As Aristotle put it, "I call a mean in relation to us that which is neither excessive nor deficient, and this is not one and the same for all ([330 B.C.E.] 1976, Book II, vi, 100; emphasis added). Sensitivity is the term given to how strongly a person is usually motivated by a particular basic desire. Those who are strongly motivated by power, so-called dominant personalities, may be said to have a high (strong) sensitivity for power, whereas those who are weakly motivated by power, so-called submissive personalities, may be said to have a low (weak) sensitivity for power. Inquisitive persons may be said to have a high sensitivity for curiosity, whereas noninquisitive people may be said to have a low sensitivity for curiosity. One way is to consider each of the sixteen basic desires as a continuum of end motivation anchored by opposite basic goals. In Figure 1, for example, the basic desire of curiosity is shown as a continuum between the basic goal of spending no time in effortful thought versus always being engaged in effortful thought. All other possibilities lie between these extremes. Sue is happiest when she spends approximately 15 percent of her time in effortful thought, whereas Mary is happiest when she spends about 70 percent of her time thinking. If the average person desires to spend about 20 percent time in effortful thought, Sue has normative curiosity, and Mary has high (strong) curiosity. Sensitivity theory holds that we go through life motivated to regulate each of the sixteen basic desires to individually determined balance points, called sensitivities. In the example shown in Figure 1, Sue is bored when her intellect is challenged significantly less than 15 percent of the time; the boredom motivates Sue to seek out intellectual challenges. When Sue is intellectually challenged more than 15 percent of the time, she experiences intellectual fatigue, which motivates her to behave mindlessly for a while. Mary experiences boredom when her intellect is challenged significantly less than 70 percent of her waking hours, and she experiences intellectual fatigue when her intellect is challenged significantly more than 70 percent of the time. Practically speaking, Sue will rarely experience boredom and often behave mindlessly, but occasionally she will want to think things through. Mary will easily experience boredom and be thoughtful about nearly everything, but on some occasions she will be motivated to behave mindlessly. Sue will likely embrace anti-intellectual values, whereas Mary will likely embrace intellectual values. Figure 2 shows the hypothetical sensitivity points for Steve and Bob on the basic desire for independence. Bob places a higher value on self-reliance than does Steve. Sensitivity theory holds that whenever Bob and Steve experience more independence (self-reliance) than they desire, they experience an overwhelming sense of freedom and seek psychological support to moderate their experience. Whenever Bob and Steve experience less independence than they desire, they feel trapped and are motivated to behave in a self-reliant fashion. Because Bob and Steve are motivated to experience different degrees of independence, the same experiences can have opposite effects on their behavior. Suppose that Bob and Steve are being on his own when competing for the contract, but Steve should prefer to confide in a partner or pray for divine assistance to experience psychological support and reduce the frightening feelings of being on his own. Desire Profile. Each of the sixteen basic desires motivates everybody, but to different extents. A Reiss Desire Profile is an individual's rank ordering of the sixteen basic desires, a display of an individual's sixteen sensitivities. Some military people may have a desire profile in which the basic motives of power, honor, and physical strength are highly valued, whereas some business executives may have a desire profile in which power and status are highly valued. Generally, the motives most relevant to defining our personalities are those that are strong or weak relative to norms. People who are motivated by leadership, for example, show high (strong) power motivation relative to the norm and may show dominant, ambitious, authoritarian, or controlling personality traits. Those who are motivated to be followers show low (weak) power motivation relative to the norm and may show submissive, nondirective, and unambitious personalities. VICARIOUS AND COGNITIVE EXPERIENCES. We have the potential to express our core values and experience the sixteen basic joys through vicarious experiences, such as viewing shows, and through imagination and reflection. When we watch or imagine our favorite team scoring a goal, for example, we experience the joy of efficacy (which falls under the basic desire for power) similar to what is experienced by the player who scored the goal. The vicarious experience of power is so apparent at sporting events that some fans thrust clenched fists into the air upon viewing the achievement. Although sensitivity theory allows for the possibility that the power experienced by the player is of higher quality than that experienced by the fan-it may be more enduring and more readily reexperienced by recalling the achievement-sensitivity theory holds that both player and fan experience the same joy of efficacy. The hypothesis that the sixteen basic desires motivate vicarious experiences should not be confused with catharsis. Like sensitivity theory, catharsis theory predicts, and the results of research studies confirm, that people are attracted to shows with content relevant to their basic motives and core values. Aggressive children are attracted to aggressive television programs (Huesmann and Eron 1989; Freedman 1984), sex-oriented people to programs with sexual themes (Greenberg and Woods 1999), religious people to religious programs, and curious people to television news (Perse 1992). Unlike sensitivity theory, however, catharsis theory predicts that basic motives can be satiated vicariously-that, for example, viewing aggression temporarily satiates the need to release aggressive energy. The available evidence does not consistently support this viewpoint; in fact, children who view aggressive models may imitate aggressive behavior rather than show satiation for aggressive motivation (Bandura and Walters 1965). If viewing aggressive models serves as an outlet for the viewer's aggressive energy, as predicted by catharsis, why are viewers no less aggressive after viewing violence than before? Sensitivity theory does not predict that viewing aggression usually leads to reductions in aggressive behavior. Sensitivity theorists do not view aggression motivation as a pool of energy that can be released vicariously through viewing experiences; under sensitivity theory, the basic motive of vengeance expresses enduring personality needs to experience vindication frequently and at high magnitudes. Vindication is a joy, not a pool of negative energy awaiting release, for highly aggressive people. To summarize, sensitivity theory holds that we have the potential to experience the sixteen joys through imagination, fantasy, and contemplative experiences that have content relevant to the sixteen basic desires. An aggressive person, for example, may experience the joy of vindication by watching a violent movie. THEORY OF RELIGION We regulate, in accordance with our core values and sensitivities, how often and how intensely we experience each of the sixteen basic joys. Some people seek to experience a particular joy frequently and intensely; others seek to experience the same particular joy moderately; still others seek to experience this joy only infrequently and at low intensity. Intellectuals seek to experience wonderment frequently, the average person only sometimes, and nonintellectuals infrequently-and they also may behave mindlessly at times as a tactic for minimizing cognition. In each case, the individual is regulating the experience of wonderment to a desired level. In order to regulate or balance the sixteen basic desires, we need two kinds of experiences: those that enhance each of the sixteen basic joys and those that block, impede, or reduce them. For example, we have the potential to experience the joy of vitality by playing a sport, and we have the potential to decrease our experience of vitality by resting. The balance we seek between physical exercise and rest depends on individuality-on our sensitivity to and our valuation of physical exercise. We have the potential to express our core values and regulate the sixteen basic joys through both secular and religious means. Religious people aim to satisfy their needs through spirituality and nonreligious people through secular activities. Religious experiences are well suited to help us regulate these joys and express the associated core values. Many god-images are "pure" expressions of core values. Throughout history, people have imaged gods of power, status, knowledge, order, vindication, acceptance, and so on, as outlined in Table 1. Human beings strive for power, status, knowledge, order, vindication, acceptance, and so on. Many religious images express the specific core values and produce the same joys as those associated with the sixteen basic desires. The following comments are intended to show the relevance of religious experiences for the management of the basic desires. Although religious experiences address all sixteen, Judeo-Christian values are more relevant to the management of some basic desires than others. Because of space considerations, the discussion here is limited to those basic desires most relevant to Judeo-Christian values. Table 1, however, shows that sensitivity theory is potentially relevant for understanding spirituality, not only Judeo-Christian religions. Acceptance. The desire for approval expresses the value of inclusion and produces the joy of positive self-regard. This desire forms a continuum between always seeking approval and never seeking approval. Psychological studies show that people regulate this desire. In laboratory experiments, for example, people given the opportunity to self-reward themselves for their performances usually choose moderate amounts of reward consistent with their self-esteem; people rarely give themselves maximum reward or no reward (Bandura 1977). We have the potential to experience acceptance by imagining gods in the form of savior or redeemer. The Christian belief that Jesus died to atone for the sins of humanity increases feelings of acceptance and selfworth in the minds of the faithful. Roman Catholic priests forgive people who confess their sins, increasing their sense of acceptance and self-worth. Baptism is a religious ritual that atones for original sin, producing a sense of fundamental acceptance from God. When we experience a level of acceptance greater than we desire, we feel uncomfortable and are motivated to reduce acceptance. At these times religious people may find themselves attracted to preachers who talk about original sin and the sinfulness or unworthiness of human nature. Family. The basic desire to raise children expresses the value we place on children and child rearing and produces the joy of love. Adults vary significantly in how much time they want to spend raising children. Some do not want to have children, some have children but are not around to raise them, and some organize their lives around their children's needs. We have the potential to vicariously experience parental love by worshipping God in the image of sons or daughters. Various ancient societies, including prehistoric people who left behind artifacts such as figurines and drawings, worshipped child gods (Armstrong 1993). Jesus Christ represents God in the image of a son. Although some mythical gods were antifamily (Cronus ate his children as they were born), mainstream institutional religions express family values. Persons who want to reduce time spent with family or express antifamily values probably will not be able to accomplish this goal through religious means. Honor. The desire to behave morally expresses the values of duty and responsibility and produces the joy of loyalty. Honor motivates psychological connections between ourselves and our parents and ancestors. This desire forms a continuum between absolute goodness (God) and absolute evil (the devil). Dutiful people obey traditional moral codes of conduct, whereas expedient people are quick to take personal advantage of any opportunities that may arise. Some adult children may feel guilt when they are disloyal to their parents or heritage. We have the potential both to increase and to decrease our experience of honor through religious means. We can honor our parents by embracing God's commandments, or we can dishonor them by behaving immorally. We can choose to behave morally in most areas of life but expediently or unethically in others so that our overall experience is consistent with our individually determined balance (sensitivity) point for honor. We can increase our experience of loyalty by worshipping gods in the image of father. We also can embrace the religious affiliation of our parents (Kendler, Gardner, and Prescott 1997). Loyalty can be experienced each time an adult child thinks about his/her observance of family religious traditions or his/her efforts to marry or raise children within the religion of the parents. We can decrease our experience of loyalty to religious parents by behaving immorally. Independence. The desire for self-reliance expresses the value of taking care of oneself and produces the joy of freedom. People normally aim for a balance point (interdependence) between absolute independence (never in need of others) and absolute dependence (always in need of others). In its extreme variant, absolute dependence implies a diminution of the sense of I to the point of unification with love objects. In love, we see some type of wish for loss of the sense of I and desire for union with the loved object. We have the potential to increase or decrease our experience of independence by embracing various religious images and beliefs. We can increase our sense of independence by embracing god in the form of Reason. Using this imagery, many intellectuals believe that we have the potential to discover scientific principles (the rationality of the natural universe) and then apply those principles to increase our control over our destiny. We philosophical concept of divine substance. We can decrease our experience of being on our own by imagining attentive and supportive deities who care about us and listen to our prayers. When we imagine caring deities we tend to experience psychological support, which moderates the experience of independence. An especially discomforting aspect of dying, for example, is that human beings die alone (Malraux 1961). Persons who face death have the potential to moderate the feeling of being on their own through faith in gods who care. Order. The basic desire for organization expresses the values of precision, neatness, cleanliness, and perfection and produces the joy of stability. Order can be viewed as a continuum between the extremes of constant flux or chaos and unchanging form. Organized persons pay attention to detail, follow rules religiously, and enjoy rituals and planning. Spontaneous persons enjoy ambiguity and spontaneity, interpret rules flexibly, and dislike detailed plans and organization. Some spontaneous persons introduce ambiguity into arguments because they enjoy ambiguity more than they enjoy persuading others of their opinion. Others will mess up a neat and clean room just enough to feel comfortable. We have the potential to increase our experience of order by embracing various religious images and beliefs. Immortality, a characteristic of many gods, conveys a sense of infinite stability and permanence. No matter what might happen in life, religious people believe that the Divine will be unchanged. Although the physical universe is in constant flux, divinity is stable and permanent. Stability also can be experienced through the practice of religious rituals and traditions. Nations may come and go, but certain religious rites and rituals have remained little changed since antiquity. Religions have put forth many rituals that express the value of cleanliness, which falls under the desire for order. Cleanliness is a form of perfection and organization. Since antiquity people have worshipped gods who create order. The first gods of ancient Babylonia were organized structures that emerged from a primordial soup of divine substance (Armstrong 1993). These gods did not create the world and did not intervene in people's lives. They expressed the human beings' yearnings for permanence and stability. When Babylonians worshipped these gods, they experienced a sense of stability by contemplating the order in the universe. Further, the first sentences of the Bible describe an orderly creation. Religious values favor order and cleanliness over flexibility and sloppiness. Religions have provided few images that decrease our experience of order. Religious services and ceremonies rarely encourage spontaneity. Power. The desire for influence expresses the values of leadership and achievement and produces the joy of efficacy. Individuals differ in how much power they like to experience. Dominant personalities usually enjoy being in charge, giving advice, making decisions, and controlling things and may seek high levels of achievement (influential works). Submissive or nonambitious personalities usually prefer to be followers and to let others make decisions. We have the potential to express our core values regarding power by embracing various religious images and practices. The image of god as Almighty Creator expresses infinite influence and conveys efficacy: Creation is arguably the greatest achievement human beings can imagine. We can decrease our experience of self-efficacy by imagining god in this form, as lord over all. When we reflect on this god's power over us, we feel powerless relative to divinity. A highly successful person, who may tend to look at his or her accomplishments and feel extremely competent, may experience humility through religious submission. Psychologically, humility moderates the experience of efficacy. Status. The basic desire for prestige expresses the value of stature and produces the joy of self-significance. Individuals vary in how strongly they are motivated by status and in the level of status with which they feel most comfortable. People who are highly motivated by status are often concerned with their reputation and stature. They tend to seek wealth or popularity or social standing as means of gaining an impressive reputation. People who are weakly motivated by status care little about what others think of them and pay little attention to marks of social class, such as wealth and popularity. We have the potential to regulate our experience of status by embracing various religious images and beliefs. The religious idea that gods created humanity and that they are aware of what happens to us implies that we are so important that we command attention from divine sources. The concept of a soul also suggests a special status for human beings. We can decrease our sense of self-significance by imagining gods who are too busy to pay attention to us. Vengeance. The basic desire to retaliate expresses the value of selfdefense and produces the joy of vindication. This desire can be considered as a continuum between the extremes of "seeks to experience conflict 100 percent of time" and "seeks to experience conflict 0 percent of the time." Vengeful people tend to be highly vigilant to signs of offense, may strike back quickly, and may value self-defense and aggressiveness. Conflictavoidant people tend to look the other way when offended, strike back very slowly, if at all, and may value peacemaking. We have the potential to use religious imagery and practices both to increase and to decrease our experience of vindication. Since the dawn of history, people have prayed to war gods for divine assistance on the battlefield. God has been invoked on both sides of the war in Iraq, for example. Prayers for divine intervention may arouse images of battlefield victory, which lead to feelings of vindication. Hindus have the potential to experience vengeance by imagining and identifying with the destructive goddess Kali and the god Shiva, who is experienced in the image of destroyer. It is said that more temples have been built for Shiva than to God in the form of creator and preserver combined (Smith 1991). Christians can reduce the experience of vengeance by focusing on teachings of kindness and "turning the other cheek." Thus, we can regulate our experience of vengeance by imagining different aspects of divinity. Tranquility. This basic desire for personal safety produces the joy of relaxation and expresses the value of prudence. Individuals differ in how much risk they like to take. People with high tranquility tend to be cautious, risk-avoidant, fearful, and anxious, and they have a propensity to experience panic attacks (McNally 2002). People with low tranquility tend to be risk takers, fearless, and nonanxious. Through faith we have the potential to overcome fear and anxiety and experience tranquility. According to Reinhold Niebuhr (1949), we become anxious when we realize how precarious our lives are. We develop fundamental fears concerning death and human insignificance. Niebuhr thought that faith offers the best opportunity to overcome such anxieties and experience tranquility. There is less of a tendency to panic over the possibility of death if you believe your soul is headed for Heaven. Buddhism and Taoism offer religious paths for gaining tranquility and coping with anxiety, pain, and suffering. In Taoism, the Way is a state of complete contentment, tranquility, and harmony with nature (Smith 1991). Compound Motives. Much like all chemical compounds reduce to combinations from the chart of elements, sensitivity theory holds that many complex human motives are combinations of two or more of the sixteen basic desires. Some religious images, concepts, and experiences, therefore, may be related to the regulation of more than one of the basic desires. The religious concept of sin, for example, is multifaceted. Sin reduces our sense of honor and our experience of loyalty to parents, because it is a violation of our moral heritage; sin also reduces our sense of acceptance, because it represents an estrangement from God; and sin reduces our experience of order, because it is a violation of rules, giving impressions of impurity. The concept of sin, thus, is relevant to the regulation of at least three of the basic desires-honor, acceptance, and order. SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT Sensitivity theory is best viewed as a theory of behavior. Only years of research can establish the validity of these ideas, and I urge behavioral scientists, philosophers, and theologians to conduct future work in the sensitivity theory of religion. I conducted an early empirical test of this theory by evaluating which basic desires play large roles in motivating religiosity- defined as how religious a person says he or she is. I asked 558 mostly Christian adults to complete the Reiss Profile questionnaire and then describe themselves as very religious, somewhat religious, or not religious. The results showed that how religious people said they were was strongly associated with the extent to which they said they were motivated by honor (see Reiss 2000b). I interpreted this result to mean that many people embrace religion to honor and show loyalty to parents and ancestors. The results also showed that religious people place below-average value on independence (self-reliance). The more religious a person said he or she was, the less the individual sought to be self-reliant. This result is consistent with the religious literature that emphasizes the significance of being absolutely reliant on God. Although religious people desired to be in need of God or others, they showed average desire for personal power or influence. Indeed, some religious people saw opening their hearts to God as a means of gaining power. Self-reported religiosity also was associated with above-average motivation to raise a family, avoid conflict (low vengeance motivation), and experience order. These findings are consistent with Christian teachings on the importance of family and the concept of "turning the other cheek." Since self-reported religiosity was associated with order motivation, the psychological satisfactions of rituals may play a significant role in attracting people to religion. Havercamp has studied preliminarily the basic desires that drive young adults to join the clergy. She administered the Reiss Profile to 49 students (26 men and 23 women) enrolled in one of three Midwestern Protestant seminaries and showed profiles of low independence, high idealism, and low status (Havercamp 1998). The significance of low scores for the basic desire of independence already has been discussed; it implies a desire for psychological support (as in submission to God). High scores for idealism suggested that the seminary students sought to improve society. The seminarians also scored more than a half standard deviation below the general population norm for status, suggesting that they should feel comfortable taking vows of poverty. Although these initial studies have provided empirical support for sensitivity theory, they need to be replicated and extended with participants from more diverse religious backgrounds. Future research could determine which desire profiles are associated with various god-images and specific religious practices. I suspect that the world's major religions address the same basic desires but in different ways. Administering the Reiss Profile to large groups of people practicing different religions and comparing the results based on religious affiliation might produce interesting results. Sensitivity theory expresses a number of ideas that would benefit from further analysis by philosophers and theologians. One idea is that basic desires are great equalizers (see Reiss 2000a). I believe that the child who overcomes a physical handicap to dribble a basketball experiences the same sense of accomplishment Michael Jordan experienced when he won his fifth National Basketball Association championship. The adult with mental retardation who prays to God experiences the same psychological support experienced by anyone who prays to God. Under the theory of sixteen basic desires, all people-rich and poor, smart and dull, handsome and plain, healthy and sick-have approximately equal potential to embrace their basic desires and experience life as psychologically meaningful. I distinguish two kinds of happiness that I call "value-based happiness" and "feel-good happiness" (Reiss 2000a). Value-based happiness refers to a sense that life is meaningful, and feel-good happiness refers to the experience of sensual pleasures. Value-based happiness occurs as a by-product of experiencing basic goals (satisfying our strivings), whereas feel-good happiness occurs when certain senses are excited. Arguably, the study of value-based happiness, which is what the sixteen basic desires are all about, could be seen as a scientific study of the human spirit. NOTES 1. Sensitivity theory addresses the psychology of religious experiences and has no implications for the validity or invalidity of religious beliefs. 2. See Daniel L. Robinson's account (1989) of Aristotle's psychology, especially the discussions of self, for an overview of this subject matter. Sensitivity theory is an original theory that reflects the influence of Aristotle's work. 3. Under sensitivity theory, genetically influenced behavior is not necessarily unchangeable. Sometimes significant life events alter our fundamental desires and change who we are, but usually these are unplanned. Generally, psychologists do not know how to deliberately change their patients' basic desires and core values. For the most part, therapy is about changing means, not ends. Usually its goals are to teach patients effective means for satisfying their basic needs (such as teaching social skills to a person having interpersonal problems) or reducing conflict with regard to the means an individual has chosen to satisfy different ends. 4. For more than twenty centuries the scholarly study of human motivation was classified under the heading of "ethical philosophy" because we value what we want and want what we value. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics ([330 B.C.E.] 1976) includes lengthy discussions of motivation and temperament. 5. Details of this research are reported elsewhere. See Reiss 2000a; Reiss and Havercamp 1996; 1998; Reiss, Wiltz, and Sherman 2001; Wiltz and Reiss 2003; Dykens and Rosner 1999; Engel, Olson, and Patrick 2002; Lecavlier and Tasse 2002; Reiss forthcoming a, b; Reiss and Havercamp forthcoming; Havercamp and Reiss 2003. REFERENCES Allport, Gordon W. 1961. The Individual and His Religion. New York: Macmillan. Argyle, Michael, and Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi. 1975. The Social Psychology of Religion. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Aristotle. [330 B.C.E.] 1976. The Nicomachean Ethics. New York: Penguin. Armstrong, Karen. 1993. A History of God. New York: Ballantine. Bandura, Albert. 1977. Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Bandura, Albert, and Robert H. Walters. 1965. Social Learning and Personality Development. New York: Holt. Davis, Kenneth. 1948. Human Society. New York: Macmillan. Dykens, Elisabeth M., and Beth A. Rosner. 1999. "Refining Behavioral Phenotypes: Personality- motivation in Williams and Prader-Willi Syndromes." American Journal on Mental Retardation 104 (2): 158-69. Engel, Gina, Kenneth Olson, and Carol Patrick. 2002. "The Personality of Love: Fundamental Motives and Traits Related to Components of Love." Personality and Individual Differences 32:839-53. Flugel, John C. [1945] 1961. Man, Morals, and Society. New York: Viking. Frankl, Victor E. 1984. Man's Search for Meaning. New York: Simon and Schuster. Freedman, Jonathan L. 1984. "Effect of Television Violence on Aggressiveness." Psychological Bulletin 96 (2): 227-46. Freud, Sigmund. 1907. "Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices." Collected Papers 2:25-35. Greenberg, B. S., and M. G. Woods. 1999. "The Soaps: Their Sex, Gratifications, and Outcomes." The Journal of Sex Research 36:250-57. Havercamp, Susan M. 1998. The Reiss profile of motivation sensitivity: reliability, validity, and social desirability. Ph.D. diss., Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University. Havercamp, Susan M., and Steven Reiss. 2003. "A Comprehensive Assessment of Human Strivings: Reliability and Validity of the Reiss Profile." Journal of Personality Assessment 81:123-32. Huesmann, L. Rowell, and Leonard D. Eron. 1989. "Individual Differences and the Trait of Aggression." European Journal of Personality 3:95-106. Kendler, Kenneth S., Charles O. Gardner, and C. A. Prescott. 1997. "Religion, Psychopathology, and Substance Use and Abuse: A Multi-measure, Genetic-epidemiological Study." The American Journal of Psychiatry 154:322-29. Lecavlier, Luc, and Mark J. Tasse. 2002. "Sensitivity Theory of Motivation and Psychopathology: An Exploratory Study." American Journal of Mental Retardation 107:105-15. Malraux, Andre. 1961. Man's Fate. New York: Random House. Marx, Karl. 1964. Early Writings. New York: McGraw-Hill. McNally, Richard J. 2002. "Anxiety Sensitivity and Panic Disorder." Biological Psychiatry 52:938-46. Niebuhr, Reinhold. 1949. The Nature and Destiny of Man. New York: Scribner's. Perse, Elizabeth M. 1992. "Predicting Attention to Local Television News: Need for Cognition and Motives for Viewing." Communication Reports 5:40-49. Piedmont, Ralph L. 1999. "Does Spirituality Represent the Sixth Factor of Personality? Spiritual Transcendence and Five-Factor Model." Journal of Personality 67:985-1013. Reiss, Steven. 2000a. Who Am I: The 16 Basic Desires that Motivate Our Actions and Define Our Personality. New York: Tarcher Putnam. ---. 2000b. "Why People Turn to Religion." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 39:47-52. ---. Forthcoming a. "Multifaceted Nature of Intrinsic Motivation: The Theory of 16 Basic Desires." Review of General Psychology. ---. Forthcoming b. "Human Individuality and the Divide between Science and Religion." Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. Reiss, Steven, and Susan M. Havercamp. 1996. "The Sensitivity Theory of Motivation: Implications for Psychopathology." Behaviour Research and Therapy 34:621-32. ---. 1998. "Toward a Comprehensive Assessment of Fundamental Motivation: Factor Structure of the Reiss Profile." Psychological Assessment 10:97-106. ---. Forthcoming. "Motivation in Developmental Context: A New Method for Studying Maslow's Self-actualization." Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Reiss, Steven, James Wiltz, and Michael Sherman. 2001. "Trait Motivational Correlates of Athleticism." Personality and Individual Differences 30:1139-45. Robinson, Daniel N. 1989. Aristotle's Psychology. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. Smith, Huston. 1991. The World's Religions. New York: HarperCollins. Wiltz, James, and Steven Reiss. 2003. "Compatibility of Housemates with Mental Retardation." American Journal of Mental Retardation 103 (3): 173-80. From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 28 16:24:05 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 11:24:05 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Chemistry Mid-Term: Is Hell Exothermic or Endothermic Message-ID: Chemistry Mid-Term: Is Hell Exothermic or Endothermic The following is supposedly an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well. Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)? Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant. One student, however, wrote the following: First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added. This gives two possibilities: 1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose. 2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over. So which is it? If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, "it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you," and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct...leaving only Heaven thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting "Oh my God." THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A" From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 28 16:25:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 11:25:25 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: Woman, 55, Gives Birth to Grandchildren Message-ID: Woman, 55, Gives Birth to Grandchildren http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32411-2004Dec28?language=printer [This is almost a month late, but I don't think I've seen it elsewhere.] Surrogate Pregnancy In Va. Produces Triplets By Michael D. Shear and Rob Stein Washington Post Staff Writers Wednesday, December 29, 2004; Page B01 RICHMOND, Dec. 28 -- Tina Cade gave birth to her daughter 29 years ago. On Tuesday, at 55, she gave birth to her daughter's three children. Just hours after the births of two boys and a girl by Caesarean section at 12:22, 12:23 and 12:24 p.m., the proud parents declared grandma and babies to be doing well and said they hoped their extraordinary medical story would inspire other couples who have trouble conceiving. "Mommy's doing fine," the new father, Jason Hammond, 29, told reporters at a news conference at Bon Secours St. Mary's Hospital. Then, motioning to his wife, Camille Hammond, he added: "Not this mommy. Grandma mommy. She's upstairs, doing well." The Hammonds, who live outside Baltimore and are medical residents at Johns Hopkins Hospital, said they had tried for several years to have a child but failed in six attempts at in-vitro fertilization. Camille Hammond has endometriosis, a condition that affects the lining of the uterus. It was then that Cade, who works at the University of Richmond, offered to become pregnant for the couple, a proposal that Hammond said her mother had been contemplating since Hammond's condition was diagnosed in 1993. "My mother approached us and asked if she could carry our babies," said Camille Hammond, who teared up during the news conference. The couple resisted at first, Hammond said, fearful for Cade's health, but eventually relented. In May, doctors implanted three embryos formed by Camille Hammond's eggs and Jason Hammond's sperm into Cade, who was past menopause. Her primary doctor, James E. Jones Jr., said the process required coaxing Cade's uterus "out of retirement" for what turned out to be a 33-week pregnancy. Fertility experts said there have been similar cases, though the exact number is unknown. Such cases can enable infertile couples to have children while avoiding the expense and legal difficulties that can happen when an unrelated woman serves as a surrogate. "When families are emotionally sound, I think this is an ethically good thing," said Arthur Caplan, a medical ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania. But such cases also can raise a host of troubling issues, legally, socially and medically, other experts said Tuesday. For example, many states recognize the woman who gives birth to a baby as the legal mother, even if she is a surrogate, which can spur ugly custody battles. Virginia law, however, considers the mother to be the person who provided the embryo. Some experts expressed concern about the health of the woman carrying the child, especially if she is older and has to take hormones. In-vitro fertilization frequently produces twins and triplets, which can be risky. "The challenge with in-vitro fertilization in a 55-year-old lady is that her cardiovascular system might not handle the load," Jones said. He said doctors will continue to monitor Cade for potential heart problems in the immediate aftermath of the delivery. Such cases can also create unusual, sometimes difficult dynamics in family relationships. "All those people will be at family gatherings for years to come. Someone who has had an involvement of a nine-month pregnancy may want to have a role that goes beyond the role of a traditional grandmother," said Lori B. Andrews, who studies reproductive issues at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. Said R. Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin at Madison: "The 55-year-old woman giving birth will be the genetic grandmother but gestational mother to the baby. The woman who will be doing the rearing will be the genetic mother but gestational sister. I find these arrangements personally troubling." Jason Hammond said the experience of watching his mother-in-law grow with his children was "surreal." He praised Cade's husband, saying, "You can imagine he thought he was done dealing with a pregnant wife." And he praised Cade, who he said "is a wonderful lady who would do anything for her children -- as you can tell." For all the novelty of the circumstances, both Hammonds seemed more shellshocked by the reality of suddenly becoming parents of triplets. Jason Hammond said the couple has named the three children but has decided to keep the names secret for now. They are simply being called Baby A, Baby B and Baby C. The babies -- whose weights range from 3 pounds, 12 ounces to 4 pounds, 10 ounces -- should be able to go home within a few weeks, doctors said. Camille Hammond said she was still grappling with the prospect that having three children could mean a new car and a bigger house. Jason Hammond said they had bought a stroller that fits three babies and joked that it provides "stadium seating" for the kids. Camille Hammond said she hopes the birth of the children will help other couples. "We just wanted to let people know if they're struggling with a problem . . . there may in fact be options they haven't considered that may be a little nontraditional," she said. From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 28 16:27:32 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 11:27:32 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Customer Service: The Hunt for a Human Message-ID: Customer Service: The Hunt for a Human NYT December 30, 2004 By KATIE HAFNER TRY to reach customer service at Amazon.com to fix a problem with an order and you will encounter one of the most prominent and frustrating aspects of the Internet era: a world devoid of humans. Not only is there no telephone number on Amazon's Web site, but the company makes a point of not including one. Instead, customers are asked to fill out an online form and wait for a response. "It's incredibly annoying," said Ellen Hobbs of Austin, Tex., whose frustration has led her to publish Amazon.com's customer support number at her own Web site (clicheideas.com/amazon.htm). "They haven't invested the kind of money in helping you solve problems as they have in selling you things." In December alone, some 1,100 people visited Ms. Hobbs's site. Indeed, in the pursuit of customer service, the Sisyphean challenge of making contact with a human defines the automated age, and can sometimes feel like a full-time job. "It's almost as if we're dealing with this ghostly machine," said Lauren Weinstein, a telecommunications consultant in Los Angeles who has made an avocation of studying customer service. "You assume there are people back there somewhere, but it's as if the whole purpose of these systems isn't to provide customer service but to keep the customer at arm's length." Now, by punching or typing in a sequence of numbers, or by speaking to a machine that has been programmed to understand human speech, you can have access to information previously impossible to obtain without a human - the whereabouts of a package, for instance, or the balance of a bank account. What is increasingly difficult to obtain, though, is the actual human. "Unless you want to call a neighbor," said Dorothy Meyer of Escondido, Calif. "You get them right away." Then she thought better of it. "But then, you don't. You get their answering machine." Many consumers have developed any number of tricks for reaching a sentient being. Mr. Weinstein and others have discovered a number of techniques for outwitting the automation to reach a human, especially when confronted with the labyrinthine menus that accompany most phone-based systems. Most people, for instance, know to punch zero even when the option isn't offered. And many a frustrated consumer has learned to pretend to be one of the few remaining telephone customers in possession of a rotary-dial phone. "But a lot of people don't take it far enough," Mr. Weinstein said. Sometimes, for instance, he said, automated phone systems are programmed to ignore the first one, two or three pushes of zero. "But if you push it again, and then you do it again, then it goes through. That's fairly common." Mr. Weinstein said he knew of one system where you had to do it four times in a row. "Then it's like a jackpot in Vegas - you say, 'Bingo.' " Increasingly, it is the Internet that engenders the frustration. Lou Garcia, president of the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals in Business, a group based in Alexandria, Va., said that in a recent survey of 1,000 people about their experiences with customer service, the society found that "at the top of the dislike list is that they can't find a human." And while calling a toll-free number is still the preferred way to reach customer service, he said, his studies show more and more people using the Web because they have no other choice. "Each time we do one of these things we see a big uptick in customers contacting the Internet," Mr. Garcia said. When they do, as at Amazon.com, there is little, if any, indication of how to get live assistance. Rachael Flynn thought she was getting an early start on the holidays when, a good two weeks before Christmas, she clicked on a British Web site called Everything iPod (everythingipod.co.uk) and ordered a radio transmitter for her boyfriend's iPod. But when her credit card was declined and Ms. Flynn tried to get through to a customer-service representative, one wall after another presented itself. She scoured the site in vain for a telephone number or even an e-mail address. "I was getting a bit panicky," said Ms. Flynn, who lives in Cork, Ireland. "And when you're in a panic state you really want to talk to a human being." Finally she found an online customer-service form and filled it out, twice, just to be safe. It took four days to get a personal response by e-mail. All ended well. The purchase went through, and the gift arrived with a few days to spare. "But I never did get to a human being," Ms. Flynn said. As it turned out, the company had removed its telephone number from the site last year because although the site sells only accessories, people desperate for technical support for their iPod had been calling for help. "We had to withdraw all telephone support," a page on the site says. "We were being used as a free technical support line for the Apple iPod." People had been driven to call because Apple's free telephone support is generally limited to the first three months of ownership. Also, if the volume of calls to the Apple support line is too heavy, callers are redirected to the Apple Web site. Another alternative, assuming the geography works in your favor, is to visit an Apple store and consult a technician. Amazon sees no reason to apologize for its decision to leave the customer-service phone number off its Web site. "We've found that customers really do appreciate the self-service features we've got," said Craig Berman, an Amazon spokesman. Not everyone agrees. An underground movement to publicize Amazon's customer-service number, 800-201-7575, along with other numbers for Amazon noted on Ms. Hobbs's site, has spread across the Web. (A reporter's call to the number this week produced a human within a few minutes, but only after a recording suggested a visit to the Web site instead.) EBay, another Internet giant, likewise has no customer-service number listed on its site. Instead, like Amazon, eBay asks its customers to fill out an online form, and they receive a response in 24 to 48 hours, said Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman. "We've worked to make sure customer support is dealing with community issues as quickly and effectively as possible, and this is the best system we've come up with," Mr. Durzy said. (EBay does provide a phone number to a subset of its power sellers who qualify for phone-based service.) True desperation leads some enterprising consumers to look up the name, address and phone number - often complete with a contact name - under which a company's domain name is registered on the Web, through the Whois lookup service. Yet some companies, aware of this ploy, no longer provide more than a minimum of information when registering a site. "I noticed Amazon has taken off most of its references in the Whois database," said Peter Flynn, Ms. Flynn's father and a computer consultant in Cork. Mr. Flynn occasionally goes a step farther, drilling into a Web site's inner workings to look through the HTML code in case contact information is revealed. But when he used these various schemes to find a phone number for everythingipod.co.uk, Mr. Flynn was stumped. "It appears they don't want to be traced," he said. "A lot of people want to do business on the Web only, and they don't want people calling them." Sometimes the pursuit of a human can require travel. When planning a recent trip to Brazil, Randy Cook, an elementary school teacher in Sonoma, Calif., went to the Web site of the Consulate General of Brazil in San Francisco and downloaded a visa application. When he wasn't sure how to answer a question, he looked for a customer-service number for the consulate in San Francisco. "I listened to a message that gave a number to call to talk to an actual person," he said. "So I tried this number and received a scratchy-sounding message in Portuguese only, which ended with an alternate number to call. But it went by so fast and my Portuguese was so poor that I couldn't get it." So Mr. Cook took a day off work and made the hour drive to San Francisco to go to the consulate in search of a person. Mrs. Meyer, 82, remembers well the days, long before touch-tone phones, when a customer-service phone number was promptly answered by a person. A friendly person. "The way it used to be, you'd ring the number up and a person would pick it up and ask you, 'What can we do for you?' " Mrs. Meyer said, as if describing life on Mars. Yet she, too, is now victim to automation. Several months ago, Mrs. Meyer's Amana refrigerator began to lose its capacity to chill, a problem complicated by the fact that the service contract was with someone besides Amana. Mrs. Meyer spent hours at a time punching numbers into the phone. "I dialed this number, then pushed that number, then pushed this number again," she said. Finally, once Mrs. Meyer got through, "a very, very nice gentleman came out and fixed it," and all was well. The same is true of Mrs. Meyer's medical prescriptions and her banking service. "You never, never speak to a person," she said. "I have a lot of patience, but not that much." Sometimes Mrs. Meyer's frustration reaches the point where she simply starts speaking into the phone, human or no human at the other end. "I'll just talk to the phone, anyway," she said. "I say, 'I've already pushed this number.' Of course, you're just talking to yourself. It's sad." Mr. Garcia, from the consumer affairs group, said that he planned to stick to his guns; that it was in a company's best interests to make sure a customer could get through to a person. "Because if they can solve your problem, the chances are really high that you'll be a satisfied customer," he said. Mr. Garcia said his organization helped put out a consumer resource handbook published by the General Services Administration. The handbook, which includes a directory of corporations, with many phone numbers for customer service, along with e-mail and Web addresses, is available online at pueblo.gsa.gov/crh/corpormain.shtml. Sometimes happy accidents occur. Phil Bernstein, of Portland, Ore., a radio station advertising representative, deals with many business owners who have set up elaborate screening systems designed to limit a caller's access. In the course of one memorable attempt, Mr. Bernstein managed to get through to the president of a mattress outlet. Usually when calling this number, Mr. Bernstein got only as far as an assistant, who decided whether to put the call through. But one day he inadvertently hit the star key, which took him to an automated company directory. It invited him to spell his target's last name, and he was put straight through. Mr. Bernstein could hardly believe his good fortune. " 'Hi,' I said, 'It's Phil Bernstein with KEX Radio.' There was a long pause and the president of the company asked, 'How did you get to me?' "I explained about hitting the star key by mistake and spelling his name in the company directory," Mr. Bernstein said. "There was another pause, and then he said quietly, 'Don't ever do that again.' " http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/30/technology/circuits/30serv.html From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 28 16:29:03 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 11:29:03 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Internet Use Said to Cut Into TV Viewing and Socializing Message-ID: Internet Use Said to Cut Into TV Viewing and Socializing NYT December 30, 2004 By JOHN MARKOFF SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 29 - The average Internet user in the United States spends three hours a day online, with much of that time devoted to work and more than half of it to communications, according to a survey conducted by a group of political scientists. The survey found that use of the Internet has displaced television watching and a range of other activities. Internet users watch television for one hour and 42 minutes a day, compared with the national average of two hours, said Norman H. Nie, director of the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, a research group that has been exploring the social consequences of the Internet. "People don't understand that time is hydraulic," he said, meaning that time spent on the Internet is time taken away from other activities. A 2000 study by the researchers that reported increasing physical isolation among Internet users created a controversy and drew angry complaints from some users who insisted that time they spent online did not detract from their social relationships. However, the researchers said they had now gathered further evidence showing that in addition to its impact on television viewing, Internet use has lowered the amount of time people spend socializing with friends and even sleeping. According to the study, an hour of time spent using the Internet reduces face-to-face contact with friends, co-workers and family by 23.5 minutes, lowers the amount of time spent watching television by 10 minutes and shortens sleep by 8.5 minutes. The researchers acknowledged that the study data did not answer questions about whether Internet use itself strengthened or weakened social relations with one's friends and family. "It's a bit of a two-edged sword," Mr. Nie said. "You can't get a hug or a kiss or a smile over the Internet." Many people are still more inclined to use the telephone for contact with family, he said. The latest study also found that online game playing has become a major part of Internet use. Over all, 57 percent of Internet use was devoted to communications like e-mail, instant messaging and chat rooms, and 43 percent for other activities including Web browsing, shopping and game playing. Users reported that they spent 8.7 percent of their Internet time playing online games. The study also found that although the Internet is widely employed for communications, users spend little of their online time in contact with family members. Of the time devoted to communication, just a sixth was spent staying in touch with family members, significantly less than the time spent on work-related communications and contact with friends. The study found that as much as 75 percent of the population in the United States now has access to the Internet either at home or work. "It is remarkable that this expansion of use has happened in just a decade since the invention of the Web browser," Mr. Nie said. That rate of growth is almost as fast as the spread of the telephone, and is impressive because the computer is more complicated to use, he said. The study, titled "What Do Americans Do on the Internet?" also found that junk e-mail and computer maintenance take up a significant amount of the time spent online each day. Respondents reported spending 14 minutes daily dealing with computer problems. That would suggest that Internet users spend a total of 10 workdays each year dealing with such problems. The study, the latest in an annual series, was based on a survey of 4,839 people between the ages of 18 and 64 who were randomly selected. Respondents were asked to create detailed diaries of how they spent their time during six randomly selected hours of the previous day. Data collection was performed by Knowledge Networks, a survey research firm based in Menlo Park, Calif. The researchers plan to release the study on Monday on their Web site, www.stanford.edu/group/siqss. Thirty-one percent of the survey sample reported using the Internet on the day before they were surveyed. Researchers classified this group as Internet users. The researchers found that the amount of Internet use does not differ by gender. But women on average use e-mail, instant messaging and social networking more than men, while men spend more time browsing, reading discussion groups and participating in chat rooms. Younger people in the sample tended to favor immediate forms of online communication, while older people used e-mail more frequently. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/30/technology/30internet.html From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 28 16:30:55 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 11:30:55 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: Men Avoid Marrying Strong Women Message-ID: Betterhumans > Study: Men Avoid Marrying Strong Women http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2004-12-10-2 Finding supports anecdotal evidence and reinforces evolutionary theory of human mate selection Betterhumans Staff 12/10/2004 3:20 PM Men don't want to marry powerful women, shows a new study that supports anecdotal evidence and reinforces evolutionary theories of human mate selection. The study highlights the importance of relational dominance in mate selection and discusses the evolutionary utility of male concerns about mating with dominant females. "These findings provide empirical support for the widespread belief that powerful women are at a disadvantage in the marriage market because men may prefer to marry less accomplished women," says social psychologist and study lead author Stephanie Brown of the [3]University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Subordinate attraction With the help of a grant from the US [4]National Institute of Mental Health, Brown and coauthor Brian Lewis from the [5]University of California, Los Angeles tested 120 male and 208 female undergraduates by asking them to rate their attraction and desire to affiliate with a man and a woman they were said to know from work. "Imagine that you have just taken a job and that Jennifer (or John) is your immediate supervisor (or your peer, or your assistant)," study participants were told as they were shown a photo of a male or a female. After seeing the photo and hearing the description of the person's role at work in relation to their own, participants were asked to use a nine-point scale (in which one is not at all, and nine is very much) to rate the extent to which they would enjoy going to a party with Jennifer or John, exercising with the person, dating the person and marrying the person. Brown and Lewis found that males, but not females, were most strongly attracted to subordinate partners for high-investment activities such as marriage and dating. Cautious investors "Our results demonstrate that male preference for subordinate women increases as the investment in the relationship increases," says Brown. "This pattern is consistent with the possibility that there were reproductive advantages for males who preferred to form long-term relationships with relatively subordinate partners. "Given that female infidelity is a severe reproductive threat to males only when investment is high, a preference for subordinate partners may provide adaptive benefits to males in the context of only long-term, investing relationships--not one-night stands." According to Brown, the findings are consistent with earlier research showing that expressions of vulnerability enhance female attractiveness. "Our results also provide further explanation for why males might attend to dominance-linked characteristics of women such as relative age or income, and why adult males typically prefer partners who are younger and make less money." The research is reported in the journal [6]Evolution and Human Behavior ([7]read abstract). References 3. http://www.umich.edu/ 4. http://www.nimh.nih.gov/ 5. http://www.ucla.edu/ 6. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/10905138 7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2004.08.003 From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Fri Jan 28 23:07:44 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 15:07:44 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] finding a human voice In-Reply-To: <200501282039.j0SKcpC29791@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050128230745.10051.qmail@web30810.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>TRY to reach customer service at Amazon.com to fix a problem with an order and you will encounter one of the most prominent and frustrating aspects of the Internet era: a world devoid of humans.<< --My wife, who is from Australia, said "Don't you have real people on the phones in your country?" Michael ===== My blog: http://shallowreflections.blogspot.com/ Link to my website, including art, flash poetry and fledgling CafePress store (t-shirts, bumperstickers etc): http://www.soulaquarium.net We are stardust, we are golden, We are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden. - Joni Mitchell "We don't fear the unknown. We fear how the unknown might cause us to re-evaluate the known." - Unknown __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Jan 29 00:02:09 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 16:02:09 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] finding a human voice Message-ID: <01C50552.B9401910.shovland@mindspring.com> It has gotten a lot worse in recent years. Businesses don't seem to care that they are sending "go away" signals. An opportunity for those who call customers in person :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Friday, January 28, 2005 3:08 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] finding a human voice >>TRY to reach customer service at Amazon.com to fix a problem with an order and you will encounter one of the most prominent and frustrating aspects of the Internet era: a world devoid of humans.<< --My wife, who is from Australia, said "Don't you have real people on the phones in your country?" Michael ===== My blog: http://shallowreflections.blogspot.com/ Link to my website, including art, flash poetry and fledgling CafePress store (t-shirts, bumperstickers etc): http://www.soulaquarium.net We are stardust, we are golden, We are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden. - Joni Mitchell "We don't fear the unknown. We fear how the unknown might cause us to re-evaluate the known." - Unknown __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 29 16:23:01 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:23:01 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: 'Collapse': How the World Ends Message-ID: 'Collapse': How the World Ends New York Times Book Review, 5.1.30 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/30EASTERB.html By GREGG EASTERBROOK [First chapter appended.] COLLAPSE: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. By Jared Diamond. Illustrated. 575 pp. Viking. $29.95. EIGHT years ago Jared Diamond realized what is, for authors, increasingly a fantasy -- he published a serious, challenging and complex book that became a huge commercial success. ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' won a Pulitzer Prize, then sold a million copies, astonishing for a 480-page volume of archeological speculation on how the world reached its present ordering of nations. Now he has written a sequel, ''Collapse,'' which asks whether present nations can last. Taken together, ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' and ''Collapse'' represent one of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual of our generation. They are magnificent books: extraordinary in erudition and originality, compelling in their ability to relate the digitized pandemonium of the present to the hushed agrarian sunrises of the far past. I read both thinking what literature might be like if every author knew so much, wrote so clearly and formed arguments with such care. All of which makes the two books exasperating, because both come to conclusions that are probably wrong. ''Guns'' asked why the West is atop the food chain of nations. Its conclusion, that Western success was a coincidence driven by good luck, has proven extremely influential in academia, as the view is quintessentially postmodern. Now ''Collapse'' posits that the Western way of life is flirting with the sudden ruin that caused past societies like the Anasazi and the Mayans to vanish. Because this view, too, is exactly what postmodernism longs to hear, ''Collapse'' may prove influential as well. Born in Boston in 1937, Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Initially he specialized in conservation biology, studying bird diversity in New Guinea; in 1985 he won one of the early MacArthur ''genius grants.'' Gradually he began to wonder why societies of the western Pacific islands never developed the metallurgy, farming techniques or industrial production of Eurasia. Diamond also studied the application of natural-selection theory to physiology, and in 1999 received a National Medal of Science for that work, which is partly reflected in his book ''Why Is Sex Fun?'' (Sex is fun; the book is serious.) Today Diamond often returns to the Pacific rim, especially Australia, where in the outback one may still hear the rustle of distant animal cries just as our forebears heard them in the far past. ''Collapse'' may be read alone, but begins where ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' ended: essentially the two form a single 1,000-page book. The thesis of the first part is that environmental coincidences are the principal factor in human history. Diamond contends it was chance, not culture or brainpower, that brought industrial power first to Europe; Western civilization has nothing to boast about. Many arguments in ''Guns'' were dazzling. Diamond showed, for example, that as the last ice age ended, by chance Eurasia held many plants that could be bred for controlled farming. The Americas had few edible plants suitable for cross-breeding, while Africa had poor soil owing to the millions of years since it had been glaciated. Thus large-scale food production began first in the Fertile Crescent, China and Europe. Population in those places rose, and that meant lots of people living close together, which accelerated invention; in other locations the low-population hunter-gatherer lifestyle of antiquity remained in place. ''Guns'' contends the fundamental reason Europe of the middle period could send sailing ships to explore the Americas and Africa, rather than these areas sending sailing ships to explore Europe, is that ancient happenstance involving plants gave Europe a food edge that translated into a head start on technology. Then, the moment European societies forged steel and fashioned guns, they acquired a runaway advantage no hunter-gatherer society could possibly counter. Also, as the ice age ended, Eurasia was home to large mammals that could be domesticated, while most parts of the globe were not. In early history, animals were power: huge advantages were granted by having cattle for meat and milk, horses and elephants for war. Horses -- snarling devil-monsters to the Inca -- were a reason 169 Spaniards could kill thousands of Incas at the battle of Cajamarca in 1532, for example. ''Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire,'' Diamond speculates, but the rhino and other large mammals of Africa defied domestication, leaving that continent at a competitive disadvantage. Large populations and the fact that Eurasians lived among domesticated animals meant Europe was rife with sicknesses to which the survivors acquired immunity. When Europeans began to explore other lands, their microbes wiped out indigenous populations, easing conquest. Almost all variations in societies, Diamond concludes, are caused not by societies themselves but by ''differences in their environments''; the last 500 years of rising power for the West ''has its ultimate roots in developments between about 11,000 B.C. and A.D. 1,'' the deck always stacked in Europe's favor. In this respect, ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' is pure political correctness, and its P.C. quotient was a reason the book won praise. But the book must not be dismissed because it is P.C.: sometimes politically correct is, after all, correct. The flaws of the work are more subtle, and they set the stage for ''Collapse.'' One flaw was that Diamond argued mainly from the archaeological record -- a record that is a haphazard artifact of items that just happened to survive. We know precious little about what was going on in 11,000 B.C., and much of what we think we know is inferential. It may be decades or centuries until we understand human prehistory, if we ever do. Diamond's analysis discounts culture and human thought as forces in history; culture, especially, is seen as a side effect of environment. The big problem with this view is explaining why China -- which around the year 1000 was significantly ahead of Europe in development, and possessed similar advantages in animals and plants -- fell behind. This happened, Diamond says, because China adopted a single-ruler society that banned change. True, but how did environment or animal husbandry dictate this? China's embrace of a change-resistant society was a cultural phenomenon. During the same period China was adopting centrally regimented life, Europe was roiled by the idea of individualism. Individualism proved a potent force, a source of power, invention and motivation. Yet Diamond considers ideas to be nearly irrelevant, compared with microbes and prevailing winds. Supply the right environmental conditions, and inevitably there will be a factory manufacturing jet engines. Many thinkers have attempted single-explanation theories for history. Such attempts hold innate appeal -- wouldn't it be great if there were a single explanation! -- but have a poor track record. My guess is that despite its conspicuous brilliance, ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' will eventually be viewed as a drastic oversimplification. Its arguments come perilously close to determinism, and it is hard to believe that the world is as it is because it had to be that way. Diamond ended his 1997 book by supposing, ''The challenge now is to develop human history as a science.'' That is what ''Collapse'' attempts -- to use history as a science to forecast whether the current world order will fail. To research his new book, Diamond traveled to the scenes of vanished societies like Easter Island, Norse Greenland, the Anasazi, the Mayans. He must have put enormous effort into ''Collapse,'' and his willingness to do so after achieving wealth and literary celebrity -- surely publishers would have taken anything he dashed off -- speaks well of his dedication. ''Collapse'' spends considerable pages contemplating past life on Easter Island, as well as on Pitcairn and Henderson islands, and on Greenland, an island. Deforestation, the book shows, was a greater factor in the breakdown of societies in these places than commonly understood. Because trees take so long to regrow, deforestation has more severe consequences than crop failure, and can trigger disastrous erosion. Centuries ago, the deforestation of Easter Island allowed wind to blow off the island's thin topsoil: ''starvation, a population crash and a descent into cannibalism'' followed, leaving those haunting statues for Europeans to find. Climate change and deforestation that set off soil loss, Diamond shows, were leading causes of the Anasazi and Mayan declines. ''Collapse'' reminds us that like fossil fuels, soil is a resource that took millions of years to accumulate and that humanity now races through: Diamond estimates current global soil loss at 10 to 40 times the rate of soil formation. Deforestation ''was a or the major factor'' in all the collapsed societies he describes, while climate change was a recurring menace. How much do Diamond's case studies bear on current events? He writes mainly about isolated islands and pretechnology populations. Imagine the conditions when Erik the Red founded his colony on frigid Greenland in 984 -- if something went wrong, the jig was up. As isolated systems, islands are more vulnerable than continents. Most dire warnings about species extinction, for example, are estimates drawn from studies of island ecologies, where a stressed species may have no place to retreat to. ''Collapse'' declares that ''a large fraction'' of the world's species may fall extinct in the next 50 years, which is the kind of conclusion favored by biologists who base their research on islands. But most species don't live on islands. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the leading authority on biodiversity, estimates that about 9 percent of the world's vertebrate species are imperiled. That's plenty bad enough, but does not support the idea that a ''large fraction'' of species are poised to vanish. Like most species, most people do not live on islands, yet ''Collapse'' tries to generalize from environmental failures on isolated islands to environmental threats to society as a whole. Diamond rightly warns of alarming trends in biodiversity, soil loss, freshwater limits (China is depleting its aquifers at a breakneck rate), overfishing (much of the developing world relies on the oceans for protein) and climate change (there is a strong scientific consensus that future warming could be dangerous). These and other trends may lead to a global crash: ''Our world society is presently on a nonsustainable course.'' The West, especially, is in peril: ''The prosperity that the First World enjoys at present is based on spending down its environmental capital.'' Calamity could come quickly: ''A society's steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth and power.'' Because population pressure played a prominent role in the collapses of some past societies, Diamond especially fears population growth. Owing to sheer numbers it is an ''impossibility'' that the developing world will ever reach Western living standards. Some projections suggest the globe's population, now about 6 billion, may peak at about 8.5 billion. To Diamond, this is a nightmare scenario: defenders of population growth ''nonchalantly'' mention ''adding 'only' 2.5 billion more people . . . as if that were acceptable.'' Population growth has made Los Angeles ''less appealing,'' especially owing to traffic: ''I have never met an Angeleno (and very few people anywhere in the world) who personally expressed a desire for increased population.'' About the only nonaboriginal society Diamond has kind words for is pre-Meiji Japan, where population control was strictly enforced. But wait -- pre-Meiji Japan collapsed! If 2.5 billion more people are not ''acceptable,'' how, exactly, would Diamond prevent their births? He does not say. Nuclear war, plague, a comet strike or coerced mass sterilizations seem the only forces that might stop the human population from rising to its predicted peak. Everyone dislikes traffic jams and other aspects of population density, but people are here and cannot be wished away; the challenge is to manage social pressure and create enough jobs until the population peak arrives. And is it really an ''impossibility'' for developing-world living standards to reach the Western level? A century ago, rationalists would have called global consumption of 78 million barrels per day of petroleum an impossibility, and that's the latest figure. If trends remain unchanged, the global economy is unsustainable. But the Fallacy of Uninterrupted Trends tells us patterns won't remain unchanged. For instance, deforestation of the United States, rampant in the 19th century, has stopped: forested acreage of the country began rising during the 20th century, and is still rising. Why? Wood is no longer a primary fuel, while high-yield agriculture allowed millions of acres to be retired from farming and returned to trees. Today wood is a primary fuel in the developing world, so deforestation is acute; but if developing nations move on to other energy sources, forest cover will regrow. If the West changes from fossil fuel to green power, its worst resource trend will not continue uninterrupted. Though Diamond endorses ''cautious optimism,'' ''Collapse'' comes to a wary view of the human prospect. Diamond fears our fate was set in motion in antiquity -- we're living off the soil and petroleum bequeathed by the far past, and unless there are profound changes in behavior, all may crash when legacy commodities run out. Oddly, for someone with a background in evolutionary theory, he seems not to consider society's evolutionary arc. He thinks backward 13,000 years, forward only a decade or two. What might human society be like 13,000 years from now? Above us in the Milky Way are essentially infinite resources and living space. If the phase of fossil-driven technology leads to discoveries that allow Homo sapiens to move into the galaxy, then resources, population pressure and other issues that worry Diamond will be forgotten. Most of the earth may even be returned to primordial stillness, and the whole thing would have happened in the blink of an eye by nature's standards. Gregg Easterbrook is an editor of The New Republic, a fellow of the Brookings Institution and the author, most recently, of ''The Progress Paradox.'' First Chapter: 'Collapse' http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/chapters/0130-1st-diamo.html By JARED DIAMOND A few summers ago I visited two dairy farms, Huls Farm and Gardar Farm, which despite being located thousands of miles apart were still remarkably similar in their strengths and vulnerabilities. Both were by far the largest, most prosperous, most technologically advanced farms in their respective districts. In particular, each was centered around a magnificent state-of-the-art barn for sheltering and milking cows. Those structures, both neatly divided into opposite-facing rows of cow stalls, dwarfed all other barns in the district. Both farms let their cows graze outdoors in lush pastures during the summer, produced their own hay to harvest in the late summer for feeding the cows through the winter, and increased their production of summer fodder and winter hay by irrigating their fields. The two farms were similar in area (a few square miles) and in barn size, Huls barn holding somewhat more cows than Gardar barn (200 vs. 165 cows, respectively). The owners of both farms were viewed as leaders of their respective societies. Both owners were deeply religious. Both farms were located in gorgeous natural settings that attract tourists from afar, with backdrops of high snow-capped mountains drained by streams teaming with fish, and sloping down to a famous river (below Huls Farm) or 3ord (below Gardar Farm). Those were the shared strengths of the two farms. As for their shared vulnerabilities, both lay in districts economically marginal for dairying, because their high northern latitudes meant a short summer growing season in which to produce pasture grass and hay. Because the climate was thus suboptimal even in good years, compared to dairy farms at lower latitudes, both farms were susceptible to being harmed by climate change, with drought or cold being the main concerns in the districts of Huls Farm or Gardar Farm respectively. Both districts lay far from population centers to which they could market their products, so that transportation costs and hazards placed them at a competitive disadvantage compared to more centrally located districts. The economies of both farms were hostage to forces beyond their owners' control, such as the changing affluence and tastes of their customers and neighbors. On a larger scale, the economies of the countries in which both farms lay rose and fell with the waxing and waning of threats from distant enemy societies. The biggest difference between Huls Farm and Gardar Farm is in their current status. Huls Farm, a family enterprise owned by five siblings and their spouses in the Bitterroot Valley of the western U.S. state of Montana, is currently prospering, while Ravalli County in which Huls Farm lies boasts one of the highest population growth rates of any American county. Tim, Trudy, and Dan Huls, who are among Huls Farm's owners, personally took me on a tour of their high-tech new barn, and patiently explained to me the attractions and vicissitudes of dairy farming in Montana. It is inconceivable that the United States in general, and Huls Farm in particular, will collapse in the foreseeable future. But Gardar Farm, the former manor farm of the Norse bishop of southwestern Greenland, was abandoned over 500 years ago. Greenland Norse society collapsed completely: its thousands of inhabitants starved to death, were killed in civil unrest or in war against an enemy, or emigrated, until nobody remained alive. While the strongly built stone walls of Gardar barn and nearby Gardar Cathedral are still standing, so that I was able to count the individual cow stalls, there is no owner to tell me today of Gardar's former attractions and vicissitudes. Yet when Gardar Farm and Norse Greenland were at their peak, their decline seemed as inconceivable as does the decline of Huls Farm and the U.S. today. Let me make clear: in drawing these parallels between Huls and Gardar Farms, I am not claiming that Huls Farm and American society are doomed to decline. At present, the truth is quite the opposite: Huls Farm is in the process of expanding, its advanced new technology is being studied for adoption by neighboring farms, and the United States is now the most powerful country in the world. Nor am I claiming that farms or societies in general are prone to collapse: while some have indeed collapsed like Gardar, others have survived uninterruptedly for thousands of years. Instead, my trips to Huls and Gardar Farms, thousands of miles apart but visited during the same summer, vividly brought home to me the conclusion that even the richest, technologically most advanced societies today face growing environmental and economic problems that should not be underestimated. Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined Gardar Farm and Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse), and others succeeded (like the Japanese and Tikopians). The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn, in order that we may keep on succeeding. Norse Greenland is just one of many past societies that collapsed or vanished, leaving behind monumental ruins such as those that Shelley imagined in his poem "Ozymandias." By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time. The phenomenon of collapses is thus an extreme form of several milder types of decline, and it becomes arbitrary to decide how drastic the decline of a society must be before it qualifies to be labeled as a collapse. Some of those milder types of decline include the normal minor rises and falls of fortune, and minor political/economic/social restructurings, of any individual society; one society's conquest by a close neighbor, or its decline linked to the neighbor's rise, without change in the total population size or complexity of the whole region; and the replacement or overthrow of one governing elite by another. By those standards, most people would consider the following past societies to have been famous victims of full-fledged collapses rather than of just minor declines: the Anasazi and Cahokia within the boundaries of the modern U.S., the Maya cities in Central America, Moche and Tiwanaku societies in South America, Mycenean Greece and Minoan Crete in Europe, Great Zimbabwe in Africa, Angkor Wat and the Harappan Indus Valley cities in Asia, and Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean (map, pp. 4-5). The monumental ruins left behind by those past societies hold a romantic fascination for all of us. We marvel at them when as children we first learn of them through pictures. When we grow up, many of us plan vacations in order to experience them at firsthand as tourists. We feel drawn to their often spectacular and haunting beauty, and also to the mysteries that they pose. The scales of the ruins testify to the former wealth and power of their builders-they boast "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" in Shelley's words. Yet the builders vanished, abandoning the great structures that they had created at such effort. How could a society that was once so mighty end up collapsing? What were the fates of its individual citizens?-did they move away, and (if so) why, or did they die there in some unpleasant way? Lurking behind this romantic mystery is the nagging thought: might such a fate eventually befall our own wealthy society? Will tourists someday stare mystified at the rusting hulks of New York's skyscrapers, much as we stare today at the jungle-overgrown ruins of Maya cities? It has long been suspected that many of those mysterious abandonments were at least partly triggered by ecological problems: people inadvertently destroying the environmental resources on which their societies depended. This suspicion of unintended ecological suicide-ecocide-has been confirmed by discoveries made in recent decades by archaeologists, climatologists, historians, paleontologists, and palynologists (pollen scientists). The processes through which past societies have undermined themselves by damaging their environments fall into eight categories, whose relative importance differs from case to case: deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased per-capita impact of people. Those past collapses tended to follow somewhat similar courses constituting variations on a theme. Population growth forced people to adopt intensified means of agricultural production (such as irrigation, double-cropping, or terracing), and to expand farming from the prime lands first chosen onto more marginal land, in order to feed the growing number of hungry mouths. Unsustainable practices led to environmental damage of one or more of the eight types just listed, resulting in agriculturally marginal lands having to be abandoned again. Consequences for society included food shortages, starvation, wars among too many people fighting for too few resources, and overthrows of governing elites by disillusioned masses. Eventually, population decreased through starvation, war, or disease, and society lost some of the political, economic, and cultural complexity that it had developed at its peak. Writers find it tempting to draw analogies between those trajectories of human societies and the trajectories of individual human lives-to talk of a society's birth, growth, peak, senescence, and death-and to assume that the long period of senescence that most of us traverse between our peak years and our deaths also applies to societies. But that metaphor proves erroneous for many past societies (and for the modern Soviet Union): they declined rapidly after reaching peak numbers and power, and those rapid declines must have come as a surprise and shock to their citizens. In the worst cases of complete collapse, everybody in the society emigrated or died. Obviously, though, this grim trajectory is not one that all past societies followed unvaryingly to completion: different societies collapsed to different degrees and in somewhat different ways, while many societies didn't collapse at all. The risk of such collapses today is now a matter of increasing concern; indeed, collapses have already materialized for Somalia, Rwanda, and some other Third World countries. Many people fear that ecocide has now come to overshadow nuclear war and emerging diseases as a threat to global civilization. The environmental problems facing us today include the same eight that undermined past societies, plus four new ones: human-caused climate change, buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages, and full human utilization of the Earth's photosynthetic capacity. Most of these 12 threats, it is claimed, will become globally critical within the next few decades: either we solve the problems by then, or the problems will undermine not just Somalia but also First World societies. Much more likely than a doomsday scenario involving human extinction or an apocalyptic collapse of industrial civilization would be "just" a future of significantly lower living standards, chronically higher risks, and the undermining of what we now consider some of our key values. Such a collapse could assume various forms, such as the worldwide spread of diseases or else of wars, triggered ultimately by scarcity of environmental resources. If this reasoning is correct, then our efforts today will determine the state of the world in which the current generation of children and young adults lives out their middle and late years. But the seriousness of these current environmental problems is vigorously debated. Are the risks greatly exaggerated, or conversely are they underestimated? Does it stand to reason that today's human population of almost seven billion, with our potent modern technology, is causing our environment to crumble globally at a much more rapid rate than a mere few million people with stone and wooden tools already made it crumble locally in the past? Will modern technology solve our problems, or is it creating new problems faster than it solves old ones? When we deplete one resource (e.g., wood, oil, or ocean fish), can we count on being able to substitute some new resource (e.g., plastics, wind and solar energy, or farmed fish)? Isn't the rate of human population growth declining, such that we're already on course for the world's population to level off at some manageable number of people? All of these questions illustrate why those famous collapses of past civilizations have taken on more meaning than just that of a romantic mystery. Perhaps there are some practical lessons that we could learn from all those past collapses. We know that some past societies collapsed while others didn't: what made certain societies especially vulnerable? What, exactly, were the processes by which past societies committed ecocide? Why did some past societies fail to see the messes that they were getting into, and that (one would think in retrospect) must have been obvious? Which were the solutions that succeeded in the past? If we could answer these questions, we might be able to identify which societies are now most at risk, and what measures could best help them, without waiting for more Somalia-like collapses. But there are also differences between the modern world and its problems, and those past societies and their problems. We shouldn't be so na?ve as to think that study of the past will yield simple solutions, directly transferable to our societies today. We differ from past societies in some respects that put us at lower risk than them; some of those respects often mentioned include our powerful technology (i.e., its beneficial effects), globalization, modern medicine, and greater knowledge of past societies and of distant modern societies. We also differ from past societies in some respects that put us at greater risk than them: mentioned in that connection are, again, our potent technology (i.e., its unintended destructive effects), globalization (such that now a collapse even in remote Somalia affects the U.S. and Europe), the dependence of millions (and, soon, billions) of us on modern medicine for our survival, and our much larger human population. Perhaps we can still learn from the past, but only if we think carefully about its lessons. Efforts to understand past collapses have had to confront one major controversy and four complications. The controversy involves resistance to the idea that past peoples (some of them known to be ancestral to peoples currently alive and vocal) did things that contributed to their own decline. Continues... From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 29 16:24:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:24:51 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Technology News: Transforming Humans Message-ID: Transforming Humans http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Transforming-Humans-40103.html COMMENTARY: By Sonia Arrison TechNewsWorld 01/28/05 5:00 AM PT Late last year, South Korean scientists used stems cells to treat a woman who had been paralyzed for 20 years as a result of a back injury. To the amazement of many, she is now able to move about using a walker. Christopher Reeve would have delighted. William Safire bid farewell to his column at the New York Times this week, but not because he's retiring. Instead, this Pulitzer Prize-winning, former presidential speech writer is moving on to lead an organization concerned with what some call transhumanism. Transhumanism is the advocacy of using life-enhancing technology to improve the human condition. It is a forward-looking philosophy, and savvy proponents spend a good deal of time thinking about the ethics involved in areas such as stem-cell research, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and neuropharmaceuticals, to name a few. Fringe Issues No More The organization Safire will lead is called Dana, after Charles Dana, a New York State legislator, industrialist and philanthropist. Dana's core areas seem to be brain studies and immunology, but Safire recently wrote that he will also tackle such issues as, "Should we level human height with growth hormones?" and "Is cloning ever morally sound?" These used to be the issues of fringe sci-fi nerds, but things have changed. Biotechnology and related fields have advanced at an astounding pace. We now live in a world where what was once thought to be impossible is becoming reality. Late last year, for instance, South Korean scientists used stems cells to treat a woman who had been paralyzed for 20 years as a result of a back injury. To the amazement of many, she is now able to move about using a walker. Christopher Reeve would have delighted in such progress. Other high-profile people are embracing the idea that if we work hard and smart enough at these impossible-seeming problems, we can find the solution. Safire is one. Another is Michael Milken. After successfully fighting a bout of prostrate cancer, Milken applied his efforts to accelerating scientific discovery. Speed Up, Slow Down First, he worked on streamlining grant application processes so that scientists could focus on science. Paperwork and politics are both big problems facing researchers, especially if government is involved, so it was a stroke of genius to suggest that agencies such as the Prostate Cancer Foundation cut the wait time for grant money and hold researchers accountable. Faster Cures, a think tank Milken started, is literally trying to speed up the research process by focusing on weaknesses in public policy and other areas that might be slowing down progress. Its board includes Nobel laureates Gary Becker (economics) and David Baltimore (virology). But not everyone is interested in speeding up science. On both the left and right, there are factions that argue against scientific breakthroughs, especially if they augment or enhance humans. For instance, some on the left argue that it wouldn't be natural to use drugs to enhance someone's intelligence or happiness. And if it's not natural, it's bad. Others on the right argue that cloning and technologies that take us beyond the traditional human composition will compromise the moral importance of human life. Leon Kass, who was chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, is a powerful spokesman for the conservative point of view. Better Lives America, and indeed the world, is entering a new age where significant advances in bio and nanotechnology might allow humans to live better and longer lives. But they might also change who humans are. Imagine if it becomes possible, as in the film Johnny Mnemonic, to integrate silicon into the brain so that memory is greatly enhanced. The question of whether that person is still human, and whether that matters, will be of utmost import from both a legal and cultural point of view. The time to discuss these questions is now, so it is good to see the issues moving from fringe to mainstream. As Mr. Safire rightly points out, life expectancy for Americans has risen from 47 to 77 over the last century. Moore's law, that computer power doubles every two years, can be now combined with biotech. In the near future, we are all likely to be living much longer lives. [end-enn.gif] _________________________________________________________________ Sonia Arrison, a TechNewsWorld columnist, is director of Technology Studies at the California-based [29]Pacific Research Institute. References 29. http://www.pacificresearch.org/ From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 29 16:28:36 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:28:36 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: 'Wrong About Japan': The Road to Anime Message-ID: 'Wrong About Japan': The Road to Anime New York Times Book Review, 5.1.30 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/30THEROUX.html By MARCEL THEROUX WRONG ABOUT JAPAN: A Father's Journey With His Son. By Peter Carey. Illustrated. 158 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $17.95. THE novelist Peter Carey, twice the recipient of the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction, heads to Tokyo and returns with this, his second travel book. The inspiration for the trip comes from his son, Charley, who's 12. Charley is fascinated by anime and manga -- Japanese animated movies and graphic novels. His interest rubs off on his father, who sees in them links to Japan's older traditions of storytelling. And so Carey Senior conceives a quest ''to enter the mansion of Japanese culture through its garish, brightly lit back door.'' Manga and anime will become not only a key for unlocking Japanese culture, but a bridge over the generational divide between the author and his son. You have to salute Charley for his great good nature and for providing not only the impetus for the journey but all its high points. It never seems to occur to his dad that it might be oppressive to have your father not only covet your hobby, but turn it into a homework assignment. The book threatens to recreate in miniature one of those scenes being played out every day in the Piazza San Marco or the Louvre, where an overenthusiastic dad, clutching a voluminous guidebook, shepherds his reluctant offspring around the artifacts of high culture. But Charley seems unfazed by almost everything -- threatening mutiny only when his father drags him to a theater to watch four hours of kabuki. One of the running jokes here is the contrast between Carey's egghead interest in the subtexts of manga -- met with polite bafflement by everyone they speak to -- and his son's desire simply to meet his heroes, the artists and directors behind the images. By the end of the book, you feel you've witnessed a series of rather moving encounters between the author and one of the more baffling cultures of our time: one that combines technological sophistication and inscrutable inwardness; a culture largely impenetrable to outsiders, yet which remains unignorable -- not least because of its economic power. So much for Peter Carey's engagement with the world of the teenager. What's less clear is what you've learned about Japan. Carey has written the opposite of one of those authoritative and scholarly works of travel literature -- Jan Morris's ''Venice'' and Geoffrey Moorhouse's ''Calcutta'' spring to mind -- where erudition, deep experience and powerfully evocative writing render a place in exquisite detail. Instead, like a latter-day Phileas Fogg and Passepartout, Peter and Charley spend what doesn't feel like more than a week in Japan, failing ''to even break the skin of the culture.'' The good news is that on every page you're reminded that Carey is a novelist: he has a novelist's appetite for information, a novelist's elusiveness. He neatly captures the mood of disorientation and the tiny slights and dramas that characterize travel outside your own culture. But his tendency toward authorial invisibility seems like a flaw in a travel book of this kind. Since he has no expertise to communicate, you feel he should at least be a stimulating traveling companion. But he isn't really. He does talk about manga with a fan's excitement, but he never quite persuades you that it's worthy of his enthusiasm. Long chunks of interviews with the form's creators are presented in direct quotation, and feel unbalanced and indigestible in a book this short. Carey admits that he's a terrible reporter, and he makes this part of the comedy of the book: his notes are poor, his interviews interminable, he loses business cards and forgets names. Still, he expounds his ideas at length, trying out a prefabricated set of theories about manga on his hosts with incredible persistence and a resounding lack of success. He wants us to think of him as a tourist, but expects us to listen to him as though he's an expert. Meanwhile, the reader, along with Charley, is getting fidgety and yearning for fun and video games. ''Dad,'' Charley says, ''you don't really know. Stop pretending that you do.'' In the end, this book, which is never less than charming, feels slight. Anyone who wants to find out about Japan or manga will be better served elsewhere. A lot of it feels like the research notes for a novel; which may well be the case -- Peter Carey's next novel is said to be set in Japan. The author's principal vocation as a novelist makes itself felt in another way. As Carey's intellectual quest founders, a subplot unwinds through the book to a tender and satisfying climax, as if Carey has designed the book as a novel from force of habit. Early on, Charley reveals that he is planning to meet up with a Japanese friend whom he met on the Internet. Initially, the author worries about his son's mysterious friend, Takashi, but it turns out that the boy is a cool teenager who also loves manga. Stylish, switched on, unfathomable, Takashi appears providentially -- he even looks like a character in manga -- and seems like an unmediated taste of the ''real Japan.'' The episodes with Takashi underline Carey's inability to penetrate the culture. Carey unintentionally offends him. Then, in a wonderful reversal at the end of the book, Charley bonds with Takashi and his family in a moment as small and tender in its way as the end of ''Lost in Translation.'' The ending suggests that while Carey and those of his generation are doomed to be politely wrong about Japan forever, his son, burdened with less history and blessed with a visceral interest in the artifacts of modern Japanese culture, can connect with Japan in a way that eludes his father. Takashi provides a series of lovely moments and a great ending. He is also -- as the author admitted in a newspaper interview -- entirely made up. When I found this out, it increased my respect for Carey as a novelist and reduced my respect for him as a writer of nonfiction -- an opinion that ''Wrong About Japan'' had, in any case, tended to reinforce. Marcel Theroux's most recent novel is ''The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes: A Paper Chase.'' From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 29 16:31:15 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:31:15 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Experts Dispute Bush on Gay-Adoption Issue Message-ID: Experts Dispute Bush on Gay-Adoption Issue http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/29/politics/29marry.html January 29, 2005 By BENEDICT CAREY Are children worse off being raised by gay or lesbian couples than by heterosexual parents? Responding on Thursday to a question about gay adoption, President Bush suggested that they were. "Studies have shown," Mr. Bush said in an interview with The New York Times, "that the ideal is where a child is raised in a married family with a man and a woman." But experts say there is no scientific evidence that children raised by gay couples do any worse - socially, academically or emotionally - than their peers raised in more traditional households. The experts, who cross the political spectrum, say studies have shown that on average, children raised by two married heterosexual parents fare better on a number of measures, including school performance, than those raised by single parents or by parents who are living together but are unmarried. But, said Dr. Judith Stacey, a professor of sociology at New York University, "there is not a single legitimate scholar out there who argues that growing up with gay parents is somehow bad for children." Dr. Stacey, who published a critical review of studies on the subject in 2001 and has argued in favor of allowing adoption by gays, added, "The debate among scientists is all about how good the studies we have really are." Since 1980, researchers have published about 25 studies comparing children from same-sex households with peers in traditional families, using measures of social adjustment, school performance, mental health and emotional resilience. Some of the studies have focused on elementary-school children, others on those not quite teenagers, a few on adolescents; a handful have followed children for years. Uniformly, the authors have reported that there are no significant developmental differences between the two groups of children. Yet the field is still highly controversial, in part because the research on gay households with children has so far tended to be small; usually no more than a couple of dozen families have been involved. "You can't force families to participate, and there aren't that many of them out there to start with," said Dr. J. Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University who has studied gay men raising boys. "There is also a strong volunteer bias: the families who want to participate might be much more open about sexual orientation" and eager to report positive outcomes, Dr. Bailey said. Critics of the studies have more often charged that it is the researchers who are biased, failing to probe aggressively enough to find differences. "In many of these studies, they simply aren't asking hard questions," said Lynn Wardle, a law professor at Brigham Young University who has agued against adoption by gay couples. The researchers, Professor Wardle said, ask the families about the children's self-esteem, "about whether they have friends - soft and fuzzy questions - but not about sexual behavior, sexually transmitted disease and drug use." Dr. Stacey said one small survey of people raised in lesbian households, published in the late 1990's, did pointedly address sexual development and identity. In it, she said, two English researchers reported that of 30 young adults raised by lesbian parents, 6 had had a gay sexual relationship by the time they reached their 20's. She added that other small studies had also suggested that children raised in same-sex families might be more open in their attitudes toward gay relationships, if not gay themselves. "To me, it is plausible that their attitudes toward homosexuality would be more open, but here again the studies are not large enough to say anything for certain," she said, adding that a vast majority of these children grow up to be heterosexual. A more reliable finding, Dr. Stacey said, is that children in same-sex families tend to be more communicative with their parents. One undisputed reality for children raised by gay parents is that they tend to face teasing, discrimination and bullying in the schoolyard because of who their parents are. That many of these children can navigate such nastiness, on top of the usual social and emotional squalls of growing up, and still be found as well adjusted as their peers on standard psychological tests is remarkable in itself, some researchers say. As the political debate over same-sex parents becomes more contentious, the quality of the research appears to be getting better, some social scientists say. Last month psychologists at the University of Virginia and the University of Arizona published a study of 44 adolescents from all over the country being raised in female same-sex households. The families, with a variety of income levels, were drawn from a huge, continuing national family survey. The survey was random, and therefore unaffected by the sort of volunteer bias created when, say, families with good stories to tell respond to advertisements placed by investigators. In addition, the interviews were conducted by a team of government researchers who were interested in a wide array of social and demographic factors, all but eliminating the researcher bias that some critics point to. The survey's results, published in the journal Child Development, confirmed some previous findings: the 44 girls and boys were typical American teenagers, the researchers found, no more confused or moody than a comparison group of 44 peers from similar but traditional families. "They even reported being more involved at school, in clubs, after-school activities, things like that," said the report's senior author, Dr. Charlotte Patterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. "I have no idea what that means, but we sure didn't expect it." From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 29 16:32:10 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:32:10 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Graduate Cryptographers Unlock Code of 'Thiefproof' Car Key Message-ID: Graduate Cryptographers Unlock Code of 'Thiefproof' Car Key http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/29/national/29key.html January 29, 2005 By JOHN SCHWARTZ BALTIMORE - Matthew Green starts his 2005 Ford Escape with a duplicate key he had made at Lowe's. Nothing unusual about that, except that the automobile industry has spent millions of dollars to keep him from being able to do it. Mr. Green, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, is part of a team that plans to announce on Jan. 29 that it has cracked the security behind "immobilizer" systems from Texas Instruments Inc. The systems reduce car theft, because vehicles will not start unless the system recognizes a tiny chip in the authorized key. They are used in millions of Fords, Toyotas and Nissans. All that would be required to steal a car, the researchers said, is a moment next to the car owner to extract data from the key, less than an hour of computing, and a few minutes to break in, feed the key code to the car and hot-wire it. An executive with the Texas Instruments division that makes the systems did not dispute that the Hopkins team had cracked its code, but said there was much more to stealing a car than that. The devices, said the executive, Tony Sabetti, "have been fraud-free and are likely to remain fraud-free." The implications of the Hopkins finding go beyond stealing cars. Variations on the technology used in the chips, known as RFID for radio frequency identification, are widely used. Similar systems deduct highway tolls from drivers' accounts and restrict access to workplaces. Wal-Mart is using the technology to track inventory, the Food and Drug Administration is considering it to foil drug counterfeiting, and the medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles, plans to implant chips in cadavers to curtail unauthorized sale of body parts. The Johns Hopkins researchers say that if other radio frequency ID systems are vulnerable, the new field could offer far less security than its proponents promise. The computer scientists are not doing R.&D. for the Mafia. Aviel D. Rubin, a professor of computer science who led the team, said his three graduate students did what security experts often do: showed the lack of robust security in important devices that people use every day. "What we find time and time again is the security is overlooked and not done right," said Dr. Rubin, who has exposed flaws in electronic voting systems and wireless computer networks. David Wagner, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, who reviewed a draft of a paper by the Hopkins team, called it "great research," adding, "I see it as an early warning" for all radio frequency ID systems. The "immobilizer" technology used in the keys has been an enormous success. Texas Instruments alone has its chips in an estimated 150 million keys. Replacing the key on newer cars can cost hundreds of dollars, but the technology is credited with greatly reducing auto theft. - Early versions of in-key chips were relatively easy to clone, but the Texas Instruments chips are considered to be among the best. Still, the amount of computing the chip can do is restricted by the fact that it has no power of its own; it builds a slight charge from an electromagnetic field from the car's transmitter. Cracking the system took the graduate students three months, Dr. Rubin said. "There was a lot of trial and error work with, every once in a while, a little 'Aha!' " The Hopkins researchers got unexpected help from Texas Instruments itself. They were able to buy a tag reader directly from the company, which sells kits for $280 on its Web site. They also found a general diagram on the Internet, from a technical presentation by the company's German division. The researchers wrote in the paper describing their work that the diagram provided "a useful foothold" into the system. (The Hopkins paper, which is online at [1]www.rfidanalysis.org, does not provide information that might allow its work to be duplicated. The researchers discovered a critically important fact: the encryption algorithm used by the chip to scramble the challenge uses a relatively short code, known as a key. The longer the code key, which is measured in bits, the harder it is to crack any encryption system. "If you were to tell a cryptographer that this system uses 40-bit keys, you'd immediately conclude that the system is weak and that you'd be able to break it," said Ari Juels, a scientist with the research arm of RSA Security, which financed the team and collaborated with it. The team wrote software that mimics the system, which works through a pattern of challenge and response. The researchers took each chip they were trying to clone and fed it challenges, and then tried to duplicate the response by testing all 1,099,511,627,776 possible encryption keys. Once they had the right key, they could answer future challenges correctly. Mr. Sabetti of Texas Instruments argues that grabbing the code from a key would be very difficult, because the chips have a very short broadcast range. The greatest distance that his company's engineers have managed in the laboratory is 12 inches, and then only with large antennas that require a power source. Dr. Rubin acknowledged that his team had been able to read the keys just a few inches from a reader, but said many situations could put an attacker and a target in close proximity, including crowded elevators. The researchers used several thousand dollars of off-the-shelf computer equipment to crack the code, and had to fill a back seat of Mr. Green's S.U.V. with computers and other equipment to successfully imitate a key. But the cost of equipment could be brought down to several hundred dollars, Dr. Rubin said, and Adam Stubblefield, one of the Hopkins graduate students, said, "We think the entire attack could be done with a device the size of an iPod." The Texas Instruments chips are also used in millions of the Speedpass tags that drivers use to buy gasoline at ExxonMobil stations without pulling out a credit card, and the researchers have shown that they can buy gas with a cracked code. A spokeswoman for ExxonMobil, Prem Nair, said the company used additional antifraud measures, including restrictions that only allow two gas purchases per day. "We strongly believe that the Speedpass devices and the checks that we have in place are much more secure than those using credit cards with magnetic stripes," she said. The team discussed its research with Texas Instruments before making the paper public. Matthew Buckley, a spokesman for RSA Security, said his company, which offers security consulting services and is developing radio frequency ID tags that resist unauthorized eavesdropping, had offered to work with Texas Instruments free of charge to address the security issues. Dr. Wagner said that what graduate students could do, organized crime could also do. "The white hats don't have a monopoly on cryptographic expertise," he said. Dr. Rubin said that if criminals did eventually duplicate his students' work, people could block eavesdroppers by keeping the key or Speedpass token in a tinfoil sheath when not in use. But Mr. Sabetti, the Texas Instruments executive, said such precautions were unnecessary. "It's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist," he said. Dan Bedore, a spokesman for Ford, said the company had confidence in the technology. "No security device is foolproof," he said, but "it's a very, very effective deterrent" to drive-away theft. "Flatbed trucks are a bigger threat," he said, "and a lot lower tech." From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 29 16:35:35 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:35:35 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Racial groupings match genetic profiles, Stanford study finds Message-ID: Racial groupings match genetic profiles, Stanford study finds http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-01/sumc-rgm012705.php 5.1.27 [Thanks to Ted for finding this article.] Contact: Amy Adams [3]amyadams at stanford.edu 650-723-3900 [4]Stanford University Medical Center Racial groupings match genetic profiles, Stanford study finds STANFORD, Calif. - Checking a box next to a racial/ethnic category gives several pieces of information about people - the continent where their ancestors were born, the possible color of their skin and perhaps something about their risk of different diseases. But a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine finds that the checked box also says something about a person's genetic background. This work comes on the heels of several contradictory studies about the genetic basis of race. Some found that race is a social construct with no genetic basis while others suggested that clear genetic differences exist between people of different races. What makes the current study, published in the February issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, more conclusive is its size. The study is by far the largest, consisting of 3,636 people who all identified themselves as either white, African-American, East Asian or Hispanic. Of these, only five individuals had DNA that matched an ethnic group different than the box they checked at the beginning of the study. That's an error rate of 0.14 percent. According to Neil Risch, PhD, a UCSF professor who led the study while he was professor of genetics at Stanford, the findings are particularly surprising given that people in both African-American and Hispanic ethnic groups often have a mixed background. "We might expect these individuals to cross several different genetic clusters," Risch said. This is especially true for Hispanics who are often a mix of Native American, white and African-American ancestry. But that's not what the study found. Instead, each self-identified racial/ethnic group clumped into the same genetic cluster. The people in this research were all part of a study on the genetics of hypertension, recruited at 15 locations within the United States and in Taiwan. This broad distribution is important because it means that the results are representative of racial/ethnic groups throughout the United States rather than a small region that might not reflect the population nationwide. For each person in the study, the researchers examined 326 DNA regions that tend to vary between people. These regions are not necessarily within genes, but are simply genetic signposts on chromosomes that come in a variety of different forms at the same location. Without knowing how the participants had identified themselves, Risch and his team ran the results through a computer program that grouped individuals according to patterns of the 326 signposts. This analysis could have resulted in any number of different clusters, but only four clear groups turned up. And in each case the individuals within those clusters all fell within the same self-identified racial group. "This shows that people's self-identified race/ethnicity is a nearly perfect indicator of their genetic background," Risch said. When the team further analyzed each of the four clusters, they found two distinct sub-groups within the East Asian genetic cluster. These two groups correlated with people who identified themselves as Chinese and Japanese. None of the other genetic groups could be broken down into smaller sub-sections. This suggests that there isn't enough genetic difference to distinguish between people who have ancestry from northern Europe versus southern Europe, for example. Risch admitted that few people in this study were of recent mixed ancestry, who might not fall into such neat genetic categories. This work could influence how medical research is carried out. Often researchers ask study participants to identify their race and ethnicity at the beginning of a clinical trial. The researchers can then follow people of different racial/ethnic groups to see which group is more likely to get a particular disease or respond well to a new treatment. This information can help future doctors know which patients may need additional disease screening or should receive one treatment over another. But recently some researchers have moved to examining genetic differences between participants rather than relying on race and ethnicity. Their reasoning is that genetic differences may be a more precise tool for tracking groups of patients. Risch points out that this genetic analysis is costly. If people fall into the same groups using self-identified race as using genetics, then that could bring down the expanding cost of medical research. ### Other Stanford researchers who participated in this work include Hua Tang, a graduate student now at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and Tom Quertermous, MD, the William G. Irwin Professor in Cardiovascular Medicine. Stanford University Medical Center integrates research, medical education and patient care at its three institutions - Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford. For more information, please visit the Web site of the medical center's Office of Communication & Public Affairs at [5]http://mednews.stanford.edu. PRINT MEDIA CONTACT: Amy Adams at (650) 723-3900 ([6]amyadams at stanford.edu) BROADCAST MEDIA CONTACT: M.A. Malone at (650) 723-6912 ([7]mamalone at stanford.edu) References 3. mailto:amyadams at stanford.edu 4. http://med-www.stanford.edu/MedCenter/MedSchool/ 5. http://mednews.stanford.edu/ 6. mailto:amyadams at stanford.edu 7. mailto:mamalone at stanford.edu 8. http://www.eurekalert.org/pubnews.php 9. http://www.eurekalert.org/emailrelease.php?file=sumc-rgm012705.php From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 29 16:37:50 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:37:50 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYRB: Inside the Leviathan Message-ID: Inside the Leviathan http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17647 Volume 51, Number 20 ? December 16, 2004 By [13]Simon Head BOOKS AND DOCUMENTS MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE Wal-Mart: Template for 21st Century Capitalism? edited by Nelson Lichtenstein Papers presented at a conference on Wal-Mart held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, April 12, 2004. New Press, forthcoming in 2005 US Productivity Growth, 1995-2000, Section VI: Retail Trade a report by the McKinsey Global Institute October 2001, at www.mckinsey.com/knowledge/mgi/productivity [14]Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart by Liza Featherstone Basic Books, 282 pp., $25.00 [15]Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich Owl, 221 pp., $13.00 (paper) Betty Dukes, Patricia Surgeson, Cleo Page et al., Plaintiff, vs. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Defendant: Declarations in Support of Plaintiffs United States District Court, Northern District of California, at www.walmartclass.com Everyday Low Wages: The Hidden Price We All Pay for Wal-Mart a report by the Democratic Staff of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce February 16, 2004, at edworkforce.house.gov/democrats/walmartreport.pdf 1. Throughout the recent history of American capitalism there has always been one giant corporation whose size dwarfs that of all others, and whose power conveys to the world the strength and confidence of American capitalism itself. At mid-century General Motors was the undisputed occupant of this corporate throne. But from the late 1970s onward GM shrank in the face of superior Japanese competition and from having outsourced the manufacture of many car components to independent suppliers. By the millennium GM was struggling to maintain its lead over Ford, its longstanding rival. With the technology boom of the 1990s, the business press began writing about Microsoft as if it were GM's rightful heir as the dominant American corporation. But despite its worldwide monopoly as the provider of software for personal computers, Microsoft has lacked the essential qualification of size. In Fortune's 2004 listings of the largest US corporations, Microsoft ranks a mere forty-sixth, behind such falling stars as AT&T and J.C. Penney. However, Fortune's 2004 rankings also reveal the clear successor to GM, Wal-Mart. In 2003 Wal-Mart was also Fortune's "most admired company."^[16][1] Wal-Mart is an improbable candidate for corporate gorilla because it belongs to a sector, retail, that has never before produced America's most powerful companies. But Wal-Mart has grown into a business whose dominance of the corporate world rivals GM's in its heyday. With 1.4 million employees worldwide, Wal-Mart's workforce is now larger than that of GM, Ford, GE, and IBM combined. At $258 billion in 2003, Wal-Mart's annual revenues are 2 percent of US GDP, and eight times the size of Microsoft's. In fact, when ranked by its revenues, Wal-Mart is the world's largest corporation. One sign of its rising status is an academic conference devoted entirely to the subject of Wal-Mart that was held last April at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The range of subjects covered in the conference papers to be published early next year testifies to Wal-Mart's impact both on the transfer of goods from third-world sweatshops to suburban shopping malls in the US and on local communities where its stores are located. At the conference the many class-action lawsuits against Wal-Mart's employment practices were discussed, particularly its unfair treatment of women, whether by paying them extremely low wages or denying them promotions. The conference organizer, the labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, asked Wal-Mart to send a representative, but Wal-Mart declined. _________________________________________________________________ Within the corporate world Wal-Mart's preeminence is not simply a matter of size. In its analysis of the growth of US productivity, or output per worker, between 1995 and 2000-- the years of the "new economy" and the high-tech bubble on Wall Street--the McKinsey Global Institute has found that just over half that growth took place in two sectors, retail and wholesale, where, directly or indirectly, Wal-Mart "caused the bulk of the productivity acceleration through ongoing managerial innovation that increased competition intensity and drove the diffusion of best practice."^ This is management-speak for Wal-Mart's aggressive use of information technology and its skill in meeting the needs of its customers. In its own category of "general merchandise," Wal-Mart has taken a huge lead in productivity over its competitors, a lead of 44 percent in 1987, 48 percent in 1995, and still 41 percent in 1999, even as competitors began to copy Wal-Mart's strategy. Thanks to the company's superior productivity, Wal-Mart's share of total sales among all the sellers of "general merchandise" rose from 9 percent in 1987 to 27 percent in 1995, and 30 percent in 1999, an astonishing rate of growth which recalls the rise of the Ford Motor Company nearly a century ago. McKinsey lists some of the leading causes of Wal-Mart's success. For example, its huge, ugly box-shaped buildings enable Wal-Mart "to carry a wider range of goods than competitors" and to "enjoy labor economies of scale." McKinsey mentions Wal-Mart's "efficiency in logistics," which make it possible for the company to buy in bulk directly from producers of everything from toilet paper to refrigerators, allowing it to dispense with wholesalers. McKinsey also makes much of the company's innovative use of information technology, for example its early use of computers and scanners to track inventory, and its use of satellite communications to link corporate headquarters in Arkansas with the nationwide network of Wal-Mart stores. Setting up and fine-tuning these tracking and distribution systems has been the special achievement of founder Sam Walton's (the "Wal" of Wal-Mart) two successors as CEO, David Glass and the incumbent Lee Scott. Throughout its forty-year existence Wal-Mart has also shown considerable skill in defining its core customers and catering to their needs. One of Sam Walton's wisest decisions was to locate many of his earliest stores in towns with populations of fewer than five thousand people, communities largely ignored by his competitors. This strategy gave Wal-Mart a near monopoly in its local markets and enabled the company to ride out the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s more successfully than its then larger competitors such as K-Mart and Sears.^[17][2] Wal-Mart has also been skillful in providing products that appeal to women with low incomes. _________________________________________________________________ Although her book Selling Women Short is a powerful indictment of how Wal-Mart has treated its female employees, Liza Featherstone nonetheless acknowledges the lure of the Wal-Mart store for female shoppers, who delight "in spending as little as possible, all in one place." At a Wal-Mart "supercenter" you can change a tire, buy groceries for dinner, and get a new pair of shoes and some yard furniture--a set of errands that once would have required a long afternoon of visits to far-flung merchants. All these innovations contribute to Wal-Mart's remarkable productivity record, and this in turn has opened up another major source of competitive advantage for the company, its policy of "Every Day Low Prices" ("EDLP"), which makes it possible for it to undersell its competitors by an average of as much as 14 percent.^[18][3] Here the picture darkens because Wal-Mart's ability to keep prices low depends not just on its productivity but also on its ability to contain, or even reduce, costs, above all labor costs. As Sam Walton wrote in his memoirs: You see: no matter how you slice it in the retail business, payroll is one of the most important parts of overhead, and overhead is one of the most crucial things you have to fight to maintain your profit margin. One of the ways to win this particular fight is to make sure that the growth of labor's productivity well exceeds the growth of its wages and benefits, which has in fact been the dominant pattern for US corporations during the past decade. From a corporate perspective, this is a rosy outcome. When the productivity of labor rises and its compensation stagnates, then, other things being equal, the cost of labor per unit of output will fall and profit margins will rise. Wal-Mart has carried this strategy to extremes. While its workforce has one of the best productivity records of any US corporation, it has kept the compensation of its rank-and-file workers at or barely above the poverty line. As of last spring, the average pay of a sales clerk at Wal-Mart was $8.50 an hour, or about $14,000 a year, $1,000 below the government's definition of the poverty level for a family of three.^[19][4] Despite the implied claims of Wal-Mart's current TV advertising campaign, fewer than half-- between 41 and 46 percent--of Wal-Mart employees can afford even the least-expensive health care benefits offered by the company. To keep the growth of productivity and real wages far apart, Wal-Mart has reached back beyond the New Deal to the harsh, abrasive capitalism of the 1920s. _________________________________________________________________ At a retail business such as Wal-Mart the methods used to increase employee productivity differ from those used "on the line" at a manufacturing plant producing automobiles or computers, where work can be rigorously defined, and higher productivity can be achieved by simplifying tasks so that they are performed more quickly. At Wal-Mart most employees are not engaged in single, repetitive tasks. The location and timing of work at a Wal-Mart store is determined by the flow of goods entering the store through the back entrance, and the flow of customers entering the store through the front. Neither of these flows is constant or entirely predictable, and workers may have to be moved from one task to another as the flows change. An employee may begin the day by unloading and unpacking goods at the receiving dock; she may then transfer to shifting goods from the dock into the store; then to stacking goods on shelves or in special displays; and then finally to registering the sale of goods at one of the many checkout counters and making change. (At a Wal-Mart "supercenter" I recently visited in suburban Columbus, Ohio, there were two rows of checkout counters, each row with eighteen cash registers.) Since there is no assembly line at Wal-Mart its senior management uses blunter methods to achieve higher levels of productivity from the workforce. These methods are governed by a simple principle: when deciding how many workers to employ, Wal-Mart management relies on a formula guaranteeing that the growth of the labor budget will lag behind the growth in store sales, so that every year there will be more work for each employee to do. In her paper "The Quality of Work at Wal-Mart," presented at the conference in Santa Barbara, Ellen Rosen of the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis described in detail how this squeeze on labor works. Each year Wal-Mart provides its store managers with a "preferred budget" for employment, which would allow managers to staff their stores at adequate levels. But the actual budget imposed on the store managers always falls short of the preferred budget, so that most Wal-Mart stores are permanently understaffed. The gap between the preferred and actual budgets gives store managers an idea of how much extra work they must try to extract from their workforce. Jed Stone, a store manager at Wal-Mart between 1983 and 1991, explained to Rosen the practical consequences of this understaffing: With the meager staff he was allowed, it had always been a struggle to keep the shelves stacked and the floors shiny, or to get hourly workers to help customers. To get the work done Stone had to break the company rules by having employees work more than fifty hours a week--an "offense" for which a manager can be fired at Wal-Mart. Rosen also interviewed Katie Mitchell, a shop floor employee who worked night shifts at the unloading dock. Her task was to move goods from the dock to the store aisles where they could be stacked. She also had to count the goods with her handheld computer: "There was always too much work to be done and no one to help her," and at the end of the shift the supervisor was always at hand to issue a reprimand if the work had not been done. Sandra Stevenson was an overnight supervisor at a Wal-Mart store in Gurnee, Illinois, whose job was to get the store ready for the next day's business. Stevenson was supposed to be assigned between fourteen and sixteen employees to do the job properly; but she was usually understaffed and her requests for additional workers were always turned down. Nevertheless, Stevenson was severely reprimanded for "the condition of the store in the mornings."^[20][5] After a string of such incidents, Stevenson found that her "spirit was broken" and she left the company. Many others have had similar experiences. The pervasive understaffing at Wal-Mart gives rise to one of the most common employee infractions at the company, "time theft." With each em-ployee having more work to do, managers assume that whenever they see an employee not working, she must be shirking her duties, or "stealing time" from the corporation, a punishable offense. When Barbara Ehrenreich worked at a Minneapolis Wal-Mart as part of her research for her book on low-wage work, Nickel and Dimed, she was told by her boss that "time theft" in the form of "associates standing around talking to one another" was his "pet peeve." Later a fellow worker warned Ehrenreich that they could only talk about their work, and that anything else counted as "time theft" and was forbidden. Ehrenreich soon found that her boss and his fellow management spies were a constant presence on the shop floor, looking out for time thieves. 2. The harshness of the working conditions at Wal-Mart helps to account for the exceptionally high employee turnover at the company. Some 50 percent of Wal-Mart workers employed at the beginning of 2003 had left the company by the end of the year. At the retailer Costco, where employees are better treated, turnover in 2003 was just 24 percent.^[21][6] But Wal-Mart's harshness is not simply a consequence of management's efforts to extract maximum productivity from its workforce at minimum cost. There are also employees and groups of employees that management particularly mistrusts, and these have often been subjected to relentless harassment. Hundreds of employees have testified against Wal-Mart in the many class-action lawsuits brought against the corporation, and their sworn depositions provide a detailed account of what it is like to work at Wal-Mart day by day, even hour by hour. Perhaps the best evidence we have of this selective harassment is to be found in the depositions of 115 women who have testified against Wal-Mart in the Dukes case, a class-action lawsuit brought in 2001 by six female employees and named for one of the six, Betty Dukes, a Wal-Mart employee in Pittsburg, California. Most of the witnesses in the case have since either left Wal-Mart or been fired, but Betty Dukes herself continues to work as a greeter at the Pittsburg Wal-Mart. The suit, which alleges systematic discrimination by Wal-Mart both in the pay and promotion of women, is brought on behalf of 1.6 million female employees of Wal-Mart past and present, the largest civil rights case of its kind in US history. On June 22, 2004, US District Judge Martin Jenkins of San Francisco held that the Dukes lawsuit could proceed to trial, although a date has not been set. Sex discrimination at Wal-Mart has a long history. Bethany Moreton, a doctoral candidate in history at Yale, has stressed the importance of Wal-Mart's origins in the rural, small-town culture of the Ozarks, where Wal-Mart's corporate headquarters at Bentonville, Arkansas, is still located.^[22][7] In the early years many of the women who worked at Wal-Mart were the wives of local Ozark farmers, and the women's earnings were a meager supplement to their husbands'. The women in the Dukes case say that some of their store managers still often think of them as resembling those farmers' wives. Ramona Scott, a Dukes case petitioner who worked for Wal-Mart in the 1990s, was told by her store manager that "men are here to make a career and women aren't. Retail is for housewives who just need to earn extra money." In her book on the Dukes case, Selling Women Short, Liza Featherstone describes the women who have testified against Wal-Mart and shows why they have been willing to take on the corporation, often at the cost of their jobs. What the Dukes case women share in common is competence (as revealed in their work records), an ambition to move on to more responsible and better-paying jobs, and a sense of indignation when they discover that their male counterparts are paid significantly more than they are and are promoted ahead of them. The group includes college graduates who have worked at Wal-Mart's Bentonville headquarters, as well as high school graduates and dropouts assigned to Wal-Mart's checkout counters. For example, Stephanie Odle, an assistant store manager at a Riverside, California, Wal-Mart, decided that she would testify in the Dukes case when she found that a male assistant manager was earning $10,000 a year more than she was. _________________________________________________________________ The business economist and historian James Hoopes has described Wal-Mart as "one of the most highly disciplined firms in the history of busi-ness."^[23][8] The independence of spirit shown by the women in the Dukes case has therefore challenged the strict obedience that Wal-Mart requires of its rank-and-file employees. Indeed, the corporation insists on an elaborate aptitude test for new employees that is intended to weed out troublemakers. When Barbara Ehrenreich took the test at the Minneapolis Wal-Mart, she was told that she had given a wrong answer when she agreed "strongly" with the proposition that "rules have to be followed to the letter at all times." The only acceptable answer for Wal-Mart was "very strongly." Similarly, the only correct answer to the proposition "there is room in every corporation for a non-conformist" was: "totally disagree." For Wal-Mart the Dukes case women were therefore troublemakers who had somehow managed to get past Wal-Mart's digital gatekeeper and had ended up where they didn't belong. Wal-Mart management has been prepared to go to considerable lengths to discourage the women from making complaints, and to stop them from pursuing the Dukes case. The purpose of this management offensive was not simply to maintain discipline at Wal-Mart, but also to protect the corporation's pattern of sex discrimination. Since lower wages and salaries paid to female employees have added significantly to profits, the company's profit margin was threatened by the Dukes women's demands for fair promotion and for equal pay. The Dukes case depositions show how ruthless and inventive Wal-Mart managers can be in keeping troublesome women in their place. To discipline the workforce, Wal-Mart managers can use a variety of formidable penalties and punishments. There are written reprimands in the form of "pink slips"; spoken reprimands in the form of "coachings"; "decision making days" when an employee must explain why he or she should not be fired; and, finally, summary dismissal. Women who inquire about promotion are often told they must conform to rules or qualifications that are invented on the spur of the moment and have never been required of male employees. Claudia Renati, a marketing specialist at a Roseville, California, Wal-Mart, was told by her boss that she could not join a management training course unless she could first prove to him that she could lift fifty-pound bags of dog food. "When I told him I could not repeatedly lift 50 pounds, he told me that there was nothing he could do for me." Renati was also told that she was not eligible for management training unless she was prepared to sell her house in Roseville and move immediately to Alaska. The women in the Dukes case were frequently punished or fired for trivial or trumped-up offences. Melissa Howard, a manager at several Indiana Wal-Marts, resigned from the company when a senior manager well known for his belittling of women humiliated Howard in front of her subordinates. He berated her for designating a certain type of plastic spoon as a nonreplenishable item, even though a junior manager had told him that Howard had done the right thing. Trudy Crom, an assistant manager at a Loveland, Colorado, Wal-Mart, was told by her immediate boss, the store manager, to reprimand all the shop floor employees who were working forty hours a week or more and were therefore likely to earn higher overtime pay. This was a way of making it easier for Wal-Mart to fire such potentially expensive employees if the corporation needed to reduce its wage bill. Crom twice queried the order with her store manager, and was told both times that it was company policy and she should go ahead. But when some of the employees complained to senior management about this treatment, the store manager denied ever have given the order to Crom, and it was Crom who was reprimanded. _________________________________________________________________ The productivity figures at Wal-Mart wouldn't be as good as they are unless most employees were doing their jobs efficiently most of the time. But it is hard for Wal-Mart employees to take pride in their work or to have confidence in themselves. Perhaps the most powerful insight that Barbara Ehrenreich took away from her time at Wal-Mart was that the daily routines of the low-wage world damage the self-esteem of employees: If you are treated as an untrustworthy person--a potential slacker, drug addict or thief--you may begin to feel less trustworthy yourself. If you are constantly reminded of your lowly position in the social hierarchy, whether by individual managers or by a plethora of impersonal rules--you begin to accept that unfortunate status. With its deliberate understaffing, its obsession about time theft, its management spies, and its arbitrary punishments, Wal-Mart is a workplace where management's suspicion can affect the morale of even the best employees, creating a discrepancy between their objective record of high productivity and how they come to regard their performance on the job as a result of their day-to-day dealings with management. This discrepancy helps keep wages and benefits low at Wal-Mart. One of the most telling of all the criticisms of Wal-Mart is to be found in a February 2004 report by the Democratic Staff of the House Education and Workforce Committee. In analyzing Wal-Mart's success in holding employee compensation at low levels, the report assesses the costs to US taxpayers of employees who are so badly paid that they qualify for government assistance even under the less than generous rules of the federal welfare system. For a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store, the government is spending $108,000 a year for children's health care; $125,000 a year in tax credits and deductions for low-income families; and $42,000 a year in housing assistance. The report estimates that a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store costs federal taxpayers $420,000 a year, or about $2,103 per Wal-Mart employee. That translates into a total annual welfare bill of $2.5 billion for Wal-Mart's 1.2 million US employees. Wal-Mart is also a burden on state governments. According to a study by the Institute for Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2003 California taxpayers subsidized $20.5 million worth of medical care for Wal-Mart employees. In Georgia ten thousand children of Wal-Mart employees were enrolled in the state's program for needy children in 2003, with one in four Wal-Mart employees having a child in the program.^[24][9] 3. In the introduction to her book Liza Featherstone argues convincingly that Wal-Mart is a "scandal, not a praiseworthy business model." Yet Wal-Mart is Fortune's most admired corporation, the star of McKinsey's productivity study, and the subject, as recently as last April, of a hagiographic cover story in The Economist, "Wal-Mart: Learning to Love It."^[25][10] Wal-Mart has also set off a particularly destructive form of competition among corporations, which seek competitive advantage by pushing down the wages and benefits of employees. A clear example of this has been the conflict provoked by Wal-Mart's decision in 2002 to enter the southern California grocery market with forty of its "supercenters"--where the shopper can buy everything from tomatoes to deck furniture and spare tires. Although Wal-Mart has not yet opened any of these new stores, the response of California supermarkets, led by Safeway, has been to demand cuts in their employees' wages and benefits, with the cuts falling heavily on newly hired workers. This posed a serious threat to the supermarket employees, 70,000 of whom are members of the Union of Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and have benefited from its bargaining with employers. While a sales clerk at Wal-Mart earns only $8.50 an hour, a worker holding a similar job at Safeway or Albertson could earn $13 an hour along with full health care benefits.^[26][11] For employees that could make the difference between minimal financial security and a life spent scraping by on the poverty line. After the UFCW called a large-scale strike against the Safeway stores last winter, two other retailers, Kroger and Albertsons, locked out their workforce --and replaced it with temporary employees--as a demonstration of support for Safeway even though their workers were not on strike themselves. Taking full advantage of their right to hire replacements for striking and nonstriking workers, the supermarket owners beat the Safeway strike and forced the UFCW to accept cuts in wages and benefits. The failure of the California grocery strike, not to mention the history of labor relations at Wal-Mart, points to the urgent need for reform of labor law in the United States. Wal-Mart is a ferociously anti-union company, and the UFCW has yet to organize a Wal-Mart store. Every store manager at Wal-Mart is issued a "Manager's Toolbox to Remaining Union Free," which warns managers to be on the lookout for signs of union activity, such as "frequent meetings at associates' homes" or "associates who are never seen together...talking or associating with each other." The "Toolbox" provides managers with a special hotline so that they can get in touch with Wal-Mart's Bentonville headquarters the moment they think employees may be planning to organize a union. A high-powered union-busting team will then be dispatched by corporate jet to the offending store, to be followed by days of compulsory anti-union meetings for all employees. In the only known case of union success at Wal-Mart, in 2000 workers at the meat-cutting department of a Texas Wal-Mart somehow managed to circumvent this corporate FBI, and voted to join the UFCW in an election certified by the National Labor Relations Board. A week later Wal-Mart closed down the meat-cutting department and fired the offending employees, both illegal acts under the National Labor Relations Act. The NLRB ordered Wal-Mart to reopen the department, reemploy the fired workers, and bargain with the union, but Wal-Mart has appealed the NLRB decision and the litigation continues. _________________________________________________________________ Unions are needed at Wal-Mart for much the same reasons that they were needed at Ford and GM in the 1930s--to prevent the mistreatment of employees, and to obtain for them fair, living wages. Unions are also needed to curb the unedifying "race to the bottom" among corporations. If Wal-Mart had been a union company and its employees had the same wages and benefits as other California store employees, Safeway and Albertsons could not have used Wal-Mart's planned entry into the California market as an excuse to beat down employee wages and benefits. As things stand now, the National Labor Relations Act, the toothless federal law governing the right to organize, allows union-busting corporations like Wal-Mart to break the law with virtual impunity. Since 1995 the US government has issued sixty complaints against Wal-Mart at the National Labor Relations Board, citing the illegal firing of pro-union employees, as well as the unlawful surveillance and intimidation of employees. But under the present law persistent violators of government rules such as Wal-Mart are responsible only for restoring the lost pay of fired workers --in most cases, not more than a few thousand dollars--and these penalties do not increase with successive violations. So long as US law makes it possible for Wal-Mart to crush efforts to organize unions it will continue to treat its more than a million workers shabbily, while the company no doubt continues to be celebrated in the business press as a a model of efficient modern management. The exploitation of the working poor is now central to the business strategy favored by America's most powerful and, by some criteria, most successful corporation. With the re-election of a president as enamored of corporate power as George W. Bush, there is every prospect that this strategy and its harsh practices will continue to spread throughout the economy. Notes ^[27][1] "The Fortune 500 Largest US Corporations," Fortune, April 5, 2004, p. B-1; see also Jerry Useem, "America's Most Admired Companies: One Nation Under Wal-Mart," Fortune, March 3, 2003. ^[28][2] Sam Walton with John Huey, Made in America: My Story (Bantam, 1993), pp. 139-141. ^[29][3] Steven Greenhouse, "Wal-Mart, Driving Workers and Supermarkets Crazy," The New York Times, October 19, 2003. ^[30][4] See Greenhouse, "Wal-Mart, Driving Workers and Supermarkets Crazy." ^[31][5] United States District Court, Northern District of California: Betty Dukes, Patricia Surgeson, Cleo Page, et al Plaintiff, v. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Defendant. Declaration of Sandra Stevenson in support of plaintiffs, pp. 2-3. Hereafter referred to as "Dukes Case Declarations." ^[32][6] Ann Zimmerman, "Costco's Dilemma: Be Kind to Its Workers, or Wall Street?" The Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2004. ^[33][7] Bethany Moreton, "It Came From Bentonville: The New South Origins of Wal-Mart's Managerial Culture," UCSB conference paper, forthcoming in Wal-Mart: Template for 21st Century Capitalism?, edited by Nelson Lichtenstein. ^[34][8] James Hoopes, "Growth Through Knowledge: Wal-Mart, High Technology, and the Ever Less Visible Hand of the Manager," forthcoming in Wal-Mart: Template for 21st Century Capitalism? and available at www.americaincorporatedweblog.com/index.php, p. 2. ^[35][9] See the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Everyday Low Wages, p. 9. See also Featherstone, Selling Women Short, p. 148. ^[36][10] April 17-23, 2004. ^[37][11] See Greenhouse, "Wal-Mart, Driving Workers and Supermarkets Crazy." References 13. http://www.nybooks.com/authors/847 14. http://barnesandnoble.bfast.com/booklink/click?sourceid=119949&ISBN=0465023150 15. http://barnesandnoble.bfast.com/booklink/click?sourceid=119949&ISBN=0805063897 From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 29 16:39:03 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:39:03 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Bouchard et al: Human Psychological Differences Message-ID: Sources of human psychological differences: the Minnesota study of twins reared apart. Thomas J. Bouchard Jr.; David T. Lykken; Matthew McGue; Nancy L. Segal; and Auke Tellegen. Science, Oct 12, 1990 v250 n4978 p223(6) [What have been the followups on this famous article? Too bad I can't display the tables!] Since 1979, a continuing study of monozygotic and dizygotic twins, separated in infancy and reared apart, has subjected more than 100 sets of reared-apart twins or triplets to a week of intensive psychological and physiological assessment. Like the prior, smaller studies of monozygotic twins reared apart, about 70% of the variance in IQ was found to be associated with genetic variation. On multiple measures of personality and temperament, occupational and leisure-time interests, and social attitudes, monozygotic twins reared apart are about as similar as are monozygotic twins reared together. These findings extend and support those from numerous other twin, family, and adoption studies. It is a plausible hypothesis that genetic differences affect psychological differences largely indirectly, by influencing the effective environment of the developing child. This evidence for the strong heritability of most psychological traits, sensibly construed, does not detract from the value or importance of parenting, education, and other propaedeutic interventions. Monozygotic and dizygotic twins who were separated early in life and reared apart (MZA and DZA twin pairs) are a fascinating experiment of nature. They also provide the simplest and most powerful method for disentangling the influence of environmental and genetic factors on human characteristics. The rarity of twins reared apart explains why only three previous studies of modest scope are available in the literature [1-4]. More than 100 sets of reared-apart twins or triplets from across the United States and the United Kingdom have participated in the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart since it began in 1979. Participants have also come from Australia, Canada, China, New Zealand, Sweden, and West Germany. The study of these reared-apart twins has led to two general and seemingly remarkable conclusions concerning the sources of the psychological differences - behavioral variation - between people: (i) generic factors exert a pronounced and pervasive influence on behavioral variability, and (ii) the effect of being reared in the same home is negligible for many psychological traits. These conclusions will not come as revelations to the many behavioral geneticists who have observed similar results and drawn similar conclusions [5]. This study and the broader behavioral genetic literature, nevertheless, challenge prevailing psychological theories on the origins of individual differences in ability, personality, interests, and social attitudes [6]. Here we summarize our procedures and review our results and interpretations of them. Participants complete approximately 50 hours of medical and psychological assessment. Two or more test instruments are used in each major domain of psychological assessment to ensure adequate coverage (for example, four personality trait inventories, three occupational interest inventories, and two mental ability batteries). A systematic assessment of aspects of the twin's rearing environments that might have had causal roles in their psychological development is also carried out. Separate examiners administer the IQ test, life history interview, psychiatric interview, and sexual life history interview. A comprehensive mental ability battery is administered as a group test. The twins also complete questionnaires independently, under the constant supervision of a staff member. Reared-apart twins have been ascertained in several ways, such as: (i) friends, relatives, or the reunited twins themselves, having learned of the project, contact the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research (MICTAR); (ii) members of the adoption movement, social workers, and other professionals who encounter reared-apart twins serve as intermediaries; (iii) twins who are, or become aware of, a separated co-twin solicit assistance from the MICTAR staff in locating this individual. Selection on the basis of similarity is minimized by vigorously recruiting all reared-apart twins, regardless of known or presumed zygosity and similarity. We have been unable to recruit to the study six pairs of twins reared apart whom we believe to be monozygotic. Zygosity diagnosis is based on extensive serological comparisons, fingerprint ridge count, and anthropometric measurements. The probability of misclassification is less than 0.001 [7]. Where appropriate, our data are corrected for age and sex effects [8]. Due to space limitations and the smaller size of the DZA sample (30 sets), in this article we focus on the MZA data (56 sets). The results reported here are, for the most part, based on previously reported findings, so that the sample sizes do not include the most recently assessed pairs and vary depending on when in the course of this ongoing study the analyses were conducted. As shown in Table 1, the sample consists of adult twins, separated very early in life, reared apart during their formative years, and reunited as adults. Circumstances of adoption were sometimes informal, and the adoptive parents, in comparison to parents who volunteer to participate in most adoption studies, have a lower level of education (mean equals 2 years of high school), and are quite heterogeneous in educational attainment and socioeconomic status (SES). Because our sample includes no subjects with IQs in the retardate range ([is less than or equal to] 70), the mean IQ is higher and the standard deviation lower than for the general population. [Tabular Data Omitted] Components of Phenotypic Variance If genetic and environmental factors are uncorrelated and combine additively (points we return to later), the total observed variance, [V.sub.t], of a trait within a population can be expressed as [V.sub.t] = [[V.sub.g] + [V.sub.e] + [V.sub.m] where [V.sub.g] is variance due to genetic differences among people, [V.sub.e] is variance due to environmental or experiential factors, and [V.sub.m] is variance due to measurement error and unsystematic temporal fluctuations. For measures of psychological traits, [V.sub.m] ranges from approximately 10% (of [V.sub.t]) for the most reliably measured and stable of traits (for example, IQ) to as high as 50 to 60% for traits that are less reliable or that show considerable secular instability (for example, some social attitudes). The environmental component, [V.sub.e], can be divided into variance due to experiences that are shared, [V.sub.es], and experiences that are unshared, [V.sub.eu]. Shared events may be experienced differently by two siblings (for example, a roller coaster ride or a family vacation), in which case they contribute to the [V.sub.eu] component. If the total variance, [V.sub.t], is set at unity, the correlation between MZ twins, [R.sub.mz], equals [V.sub.g] + [V.sub.es]. The heritability of a trait equals [V.sub.g]; the heritability of the stable component of a trait (for example, the mean value around which one's aggressiveness varies) equals [V.sub.g]/([V.sub.t] - [V.sub.m]). [V.sub.t] and [V.sub.m] can be estimated from studies singletons, but [V.sub.g] is more elusive: for monozygotic twins reared together (MZT), some of the within-pair correlation might be due to effects of shared experience, [V.sub.es]. The power of the MZA design is that for twins reared apart from early infancy and randomly placed for adoption, [V.sub.es] is negligible, so that [V.sub.g] can be directly estimated from the MZA correlation. Similarity in the IQ of MZA Twins The study of IQ is paradigmatic of human behavior genetic research. There are more than 100 relevant twin, adoptee, and family studies of IQ, and IQ has been at the center of the nature-nurture debate [9]. The analysis of IQ is also paradigmatic of the approach taken by this study. It illustrates our use of replicated measures, evaluation of rearing environmental effects, and analysis of environmental similarity. We obtain three independent measures of IQ: (i) the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS); (ii) a Raven, Mill-Hill composite; and (iii) the first principal component (PC) of two multiple abilities batteries. The WAIS consists of a set of six verbal and five performance subtests that are individually administered, requiring about 1.5 hours, and that yield an age-corrected estimate of IQ [10]. To avoid examiner bias, we administer the WAIS simultaneously to the twins in different rooms by professional psychometrists. The Raven Progressive Matrices (Standard Set) is a widely used nonverbal measure of problem-solving ability often paired with the Mill-Hill Vocabulary Test, a multiple-choice word knowledge test [11]. In this study, the Raven and Mill-Hill are both administered and scored by computer. The two age- and sex-corrected scores are transformed to have a mean equal to 50 and a standard deviation of 10. The sum of these transformed scores (which intercorrelate about 0.57) provides a separate estimate of IQ. The first major ability battery included in our assessment is an expanded version of the battery used in the Hawaii Family Study of Cognition [12]. The second major ability battery is the Comprehensive Ability Battery [13]. Detailed results from analysis of both tests are reported elsewhere [14]. In each of the three prior studies of MZA twins, two independent estimates of intelligence were obtained. The sample sizes and intraclass correlations for all four studies are compared in Table 2. The table illustrates the remarkable consistency of the MZA correlations on IQ across measurement instrument, country of origin, and time period. These correlations vary within a narrow range (0.64 to 0.74) and suggest, under the assumption of no environmental similarity, that genetic factors account for approximately 70% of the variance in IQ. This estimate of the broad heritability of IQ is higher than the recent estimates (0.47 to 0.58) based on a review of the literature that includes all kinship pairings [9, 15]. Virtually the entire literature on IQ similarity in twins and siblings is limited, however, to studies of children and adolescents. It has been demonstrated [16] that heritability of cognitive ability increases with age. A heritability estimate of approximately 70% from these four studies of mainly middle-aged adults is not inconsistent with the previous literature. Do Environmental Similarities in Rearing Environments Explain MZA IQ Similarity? Such marked behavioral similarities between reared-apart MZ twins raise the question of correlated placement: were the twins' adoptive homes selected to be similar in trait-relevant features which, in turn, induced psychological similarity? If so, given that the total variance equals 1.0, then [V.sub.es] will equal at least [R.sub.ff] X [r.sub.ft.sup.2], where [R.sub.ff] is the within-pair correlation for a given feature, f, of the adoptive homes (the placement coefficient), and [r.sub.ft] is the product-moment correlation between the feature and the trait in question, t. A checklist of available household facilities (for example, power tools, sailboat, telescope, unabridged dictionary, and original artwork) provides an index of the cultural and intellectual resources in the adoptive home [17]. Each twin completes the Moos Family Environment Scale (FES), a widely used instrument with scales describing the individual's retrospective impression of treatment and rearing provided by the adoptive parents during childhood and adolescence [18]. The age- and sex-corrected placement coefficients for these and other measures are shown in Table 3, together with the correlations between twins' IQ and the environmental measure ([r.sub.ft]) and the total estimated contribution to MZA twin similarity. The maximum contribution to MZA trait correlations that could be explained by measured similarity of the adoptive rearing environments on a single variable is about 0.03(19). The absence of any significant effect due to SES or other environmental measures on the IQ scores of these adult adopted twins is consistent with the findings of other investigators [20]. Rearing SES effects on IQ in adoption studies have been found for young children but not in adult samples [21], suggesting that although parents may be able to affect their children's rate of cognitive skill acquisition, they may have relatively little influence on the ultimate level attained. [Tabular Data Omitted] Has Pre- and Post-Reunion Contact Contributed to MZA Twin Similarity in IQ? MZA twins share prenatal and perinatal environments, but except for effects of actual trauma, such as fetal alcohol syndrome, there is little evidence that early shared environment significantly contributes to the variance of psychological traits. Twins are especially vulnerable to prenatal and perinatal trauma, but these effects are most likely to decrease, rather than increase, within-pair similarity [22]. There is evidence that twins who maintain closer contact with each other later in life tend to be more similar in some respects than twins who engage in infrequent contact [23]. It appears, however, that it is the similarity that leads to increased contact, rather than the other way around [24]. MZA twins in this study vary widely in the amount of contact they have had prior to assessment. All twin pairs spend their formative years apart. Some had their first adult reunion at the time of assessment, whereas others met as much as 20 years earlier and had experienced varying degrees of contact. A small number of the pair actually met at intervals during childhood. As shown in Table 1, total contact time for the MZA twins ranges from 1 to 1233 weeks. In the one case of 1223 weeks of contact, the twins met as teenagers and lived near each other until assessment when they were adults. Since they met on a regular basis, most of this time was coded as contact time. Degree of social contact between two members of a reared-apart twin pair accounts for virtually none of their similarity. The correlations with the within-pair absolute WAIS IQ difference are 0.06 [+ or -] 0.15 for time together prior to separation, 0.08 [+ or -] 0.15 for time apart to first reunion, -0.14 [+ or -] 0.15 for total contact time, and 0.17 [+ or -] 0.15 for percentage of lifetime spent apart(25). The absolute within-pair difference in WAIS IQ of co-twins as a function of degree of contact are plotted in Fig. 1. Also shown are the expected absolute IQ differences between randomly paired individuals and between two testings of the same individual(26). Although the MZA average difference approximates the absolute difference expected between two testings of a single individual, we do observe a wide range of differences. It is not that we have found no evidence of environmental influence; in individual cases environmental factors have been highly significant (for example, the 29 IQ point difference in Fig. 1). Rather, we find little support for the types of environmental influences on which psychologists have traditionally focused [27]. Similarity of MZA Twins on a Variety of Dimensions Table 4 [28] gives the MZA correlations, most previously published, on variables ranging from anthropometry and psychophysiology, to aptitudes, personality and temperament, leisure-time and vocational interests, to social attitudes. Correlations for MZT twins and retest stability coefficients are also provided for comparison Stable, reliably measured variables like fingerprint ridge count and stature show the highest correlations. Brain wave spectra are highly reproducible [29] and are strongly correlated in both MZA and MZT twins. Most other psychophysiological variables (for example, blood pressure and electrodermal response) vary considerably across time so that the retest correlations between repeated measurements on the same persons range from 0.5 to 0.8(30). These retest correlations set the upper limit of similarity that might be found between MZ co-twins. The retest stability of aptitude measures, such as IQ, is rather better, ranging from 0.8 to 0.9 [10], whereas stability of personality and interest measures ranges from 0.6 to 0.7. [Tabular Data Omitted] With these upper limits in mind, the findings in Table 4 demonstrate remarkable similarity between MZA twins. In terms of standardized tests and measures, the MZA twin similarities are often nearly equal to those for MZT twins (last column) and constitute a substantial portion of the reliable variance (column 5) of each trait. The Minimal Effect of Being Reared Together Some of the MZA twins have had considerable contact as adults, but all of them were reared apart throughout the formative periods of childhood and adolescence. If being reared together enhances similarity in twins, within-pair correlations for MZA twins are expected to be smaller than those for MZT twins. For example, the mean MZT correlation for IQ, based on 34 studies of primarily children or adolescents, is 0.86 [9] as compared to 0.72 for all, primarily adult, MZA twins. If the mean MZT correlation were maintained into adulthood, its difference from the MZA correlation would suggest that common rearing increases the similarity of IQ in twins (and siblings). However, the MZT correlation apparently declines with age (for example, as a result of the accumulation of nonshared environmental effects) [16], in which even the small MZT-MZA correlation difference would suggest little influence of common rearing on adult IQ. In any case, a significant contribution of shared environment is found for the personality trait of social closeness(31), and possibly religious interests and values (32). As illustrated in Table 4, however, adult MZ twins are about equally similar on most physiological and psychological traits, regardless of rearing status. This finding and the failure to find significant [r.sub.ft] effects for cognitive abilities [17] or personality (31), together with findings from numerous studies of MZT and DZT twins, sibs, and foster sibs, implies that common rearing enhances familial resemblance during adulthood only slightly and on relatively few behavioral dimensions. This conclusion is given detail discussion by Plomin and Daniels [5]. [Tabular Data Omitted] Why Are MZA Twins So Similar? It is well known to naturalists and to animal breeders that there are wide and heritable differences in behavior within other species, but there is a curious reluctance among some scientists [33] to acknowledge the contribution of genetic variation to psychological differences within the human species. Our findings support and extend those from many family, twin, and adoption studies [15], a broad consilience of findings leading to the following generalization: For almost every behavioral trait so far investigated, from reaction time to religiosity, an important fraction of the variation among people turns out to be associated with genetic variation. This fact need no longer be subject to debate [34]; rather, it is time instead to consider its implications. We suggest the following: 1) General intelligence or IQ is strongly affected by genetic factors. The IQs of the adult MZA twins assessed with various instruments in four independent studies correlate about 0.70, indicating that about 70% of the observed variation in IQ in this population can be attributed to genetic variation. Since only a few of these MZA twins were reared in real poverty or by illiterate parents and none were retarded, this heritability estimate should not be extrapolated to the extremes of environmental disadvantage still encountered in society. Moreover, these findings do not imply that traits like IQ cannot be enhanced. Flynn [35], in a survey covering 14 countries, has shown that the average IQ test score has significantly increased in recent years. This increase may be limited to that part of the population with low IQs [36]. The present findings, therefore, do not define or limit what might be conceivably achieved in an optimal environment. They do indicate that, in the current environments of the broad middle-class, in industrialized societies, two-thirds of the observed variance of IQ can be traced to genetic variation. 2) The institutions and practices of modern Western society do not greatly constrain the development of individual differences in psychological traits. The heritability of a psychological trait reveals as much about the culture as it does about human nature. Heritability must increase as [V.sub.e], the variance affected by the environment, decreases. Where the culture's influence is relatively homogeneous and efficacious, [V.sub.e] will decrease and heritability will increase; most American boys, for example, have similar opportunities to play baseball, so that one expects heritability of baseball skill in American young men to be high. Where culture is efficacious, but heterogeneous, [V.sub.e] (and total phenotypic variance) will increase; thus, one would expect the heritability of specific linguistic o religious behaviors in the United States or in the Soviet Union to be low. Individuals in Western societies are heterogeneous with respect to personality traits, interests, and attitudes, yet the heritabilities of these traits are relatively high. We infer that the diverse cultural agents of our society, in particular most parents, are less effective in imprinting their distinctive stamp on the children developing within their spheres of influence - or are less inclined to do so - than has been supposed. Psychologists have been surprised by the evidence that being reared by the same parents in the same physical environment does not, on average, make siblings more alike as adults than they would have been if reared separately in adoptive homes. It is obvious that parents can produce shared effects if they grossly deprive or mistreat all their children. It seems reasonable that charismatic, dedicated parents, determined to make all their children share certain personal qualities, interests, or values, may sometimes succeed. Our findings, and those of others [37], do not imply that parenting is without lasting effects. The remarkable similarity in MZA twins in social attitudes (for example, traditionalism and religiosity) does not show that parents cannot influence those traits, but simply that this does not tend to happen in most families. 3) MZA twins are so similar in psychological traits because their identical genomes make it probable that their effective environments are similar. Specific mechanisms by which genetic differences in human behavior are expressed in phenotypic differences are largely unknown. It is a plausible conjecture that a key mechanism by which the genes affect the mind is indirect, and that genetic differences have an important role in determining the effective psychological environment of the developing child [38]. Infants with different temperaments elicit different parenting responses. Toddlers who are active and adventurous undergo different experiences than their more sedentary or timid siblings. In addition, children and adolescents seek out environments that they find congenial. These are forms of gene-environment covariance, [C.sub.ge]. Moreover, different individuals pay different attention to or respond differently to the same objective experience, or both. These are forms of gene-environment interaction, [V.sub.ge]. From infancy onwards, genetic individually helps to steer the developing organism through the multitude of possible experiences and choices. That is, Eq. 1 must be elaborated to include these indirect and modifiable ways in which the genome exerts its influence [V.sub.t] = [V.sub.g] + [V.sub.e] + [C.sub.ge] + [V.sub.ge] + [V.sub.m] The proximal cause of most psychological variance probably involves learning through experience, just as radical environmentalists have always believed. The effective experience, however, to an important extent are self-selected, and that selection is guided by the steady pressure of the genome (a more distal cause). We agree with Martin et al. [39] who see "humans as exploring organisms whose innate abilities and predispositions help them select what is relevant and adaptive from the range of opportunities and stimuli presented in the environment. The effects of mobility and learning, therefore, augment rather than eradicate the effects of the genotype on behavior" (p. 4368). In this view is correct, the development experiences MZ twins are more similar than those of DZ twins, again and environmentalist critics of twin research have contended. However, even MZA twins tend to elicit, select, seek out or create very similar effective environments and, to that extent, the impact of these experiences is counted as a genetic influence. Finally, if the genome impresses itself on the psyche largely by influencing the character, selection, and impact of experiences during development - if the correct formula is nature via nurture - then intervention is not precluded even for highly heritable traits, but should be the more effective when tailored to each specific child's talents and inclinations. Relevance to Evolutionary Psychology and Sociobiology This research focuses on individual differences, but like other animals we share certain species-specific tendencies by virtue of our being human. Whereas behavioral geneticists study variatins within a species, evolutionary psychologists or sociobiologists attempt to delineate species-typical proclivities or instincts and to understand the relevant evolutionary developments that took place in the Pleistocene epoch and were adaptive in the lives of tribal hunter-gatherers. The genes sing a prehistoric song that today should sometimes be resisted but which it would be foolish to ignore.' At the interface of behavioral genetics and sociobiology is the question of the origin and function, if any, of the within-species variability we have been discussing. One view is that it represents evolutionary debris [40], unimportant to fitness and perhaps not expressed in prehistoric environments. Another view is that variability has an adaptive function and has been selected for. Whether sociobiologists can make evolutionary sense of the varieties of human genetic variation we have discussed here remains to be seen [41]. Whatever the ancient origins and functions of genetic variability, its repercussions in contemporary society are pervasive and important. A human species whose members did not vary genetically with respect to significant cognitive and motivational attributes, and who were uniformly average by current standards, would have created a very different society than the one we know. Modern society not only augments the influence of genotype on behavioral variability as we have suggested, but permits this variability to reciprocally contribute to the rapid pace of cultural change. If genetic variation was evolutionary debris at the end of the Pleistocene, it is now a salient and essential feature of the human condition. REFERENCES AND NOTES [1.] H.H. Newman F. N. Freeman, K. J. Holzinger, Twins: A Study of Heredity and Environment (Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1937); N. Juel-Nielson, Acta Psychiatr. Neurol. Scand. Suppl. 183 (1965); J. Shields, Monozygotic Twins: Brought up Apart and Brought up Together (Oxford Univ. Press, London, 1962). There are two other ongoing studies of twins reared apart, one in Sweden (2) and one in Finland (3). The questionable study by Burt (4) has been omitted. [2.] N. Pedersen, G. E. McClearn, R. Plomin, L. Friberg, Behav. Genet. 15, 407 (1985); R. Plomin, P. Lichtenstein, N. L. Pederson, G. E. McClean, J. R. Nesselroade, Psychol. Aging 5, 25 (1990). [3.] H. Langainvainio, J. Kaprio, M. Koskenvuo, J. Lonnqvist, Acta Gene t. Med. Gemellol. 33, 259 (1984). [4.] L. Hearnsahw, Cyrill Burt: Psychologist (Hodder & Stoughten, Londo n, 1979); but see R. B. Joynson, The Burt Affair (Routledge, London, 1990). [5.] R. Plomin and D. Daniels, Behav. Brain Sci. 10, 1 (1987); L. J. Ea ves, H. J. Eysenck, N. G. Martin, Genes Culture and Personality: An Empirical Approach (Academic Press, New York, 1989). [6.] T. J. Bouchard, Jr., in The Chemical and Biological Bases of Indiv iduality, S. Fox, Ed. (Plenum, New York, 1984), p. 147; N. L. Segal, W. M. Grove, T. J. Bouchard, Jr., in Genetic Issues in Psychosocial Epidemiology, M. Tsuang, K. Kendler, M. Lyons, Eds. (Rutgers Univ. Press, New Brunswick, NJ, in press). [7.] D. T. Lykken, Behav. Genet. 8, 437 (1978). [8.] M. McGue and T. J. Bouchard, Jr., ibid. 14, 325 (1984). [9.] T. J. Bouchard, Jr., and M. McGue, Science 212, 1055 (1981). [10.] J. D. Matarazzo, Wechsler's Measurement and Appraisal of Adult Intelligence (Williams and Wilkins, Baltimore, ed. 5, 1972). [11.] J. Raven, Manual for Raven's Progressive Matrices and Vocabulary Scales (Lewis, London, 1986). [12.] J. C. DeFries et al., Behav. Genet. 9, 23 (1979). [13.] A. R. Hakstian and R. B. Cattell, J. Educ. Psychol. 70, 657 (1978). [14.] T. J. Bouchard, Jr., N. L. Segal, D.T. Lykken, Ada Genet. Med. Gemellol. 39, 193 (1990). [15.] J. C. Loehlin, Am. Psychol. 44, 1285 (1989); R. Plomin and J. C. Loehlin, Behav. Genet. 19, 331 (1989). [16.] K. McCartney, M. J. Harris, F. Bernieri, Psychol. Bull. 107, 26 (1990). [17.] M. McGue and T. J. Bouchard, Jr., in Advances in the Psychology of Human Intelligence, R. J. Sternberg, Ed. (Erlbaum, New York, 1989), vol. 5, p. 7. This checklist yields four relatively independent scales: scientific or technical, cultural, mechanical, and material possessions. [18.] R. H. Moos and B. S. Moos, Manual: Family Environment Scale (Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto, CA, 1986). (19.) Formally, this is the maximum linear contribution; nonlinear effects are, of course, possible. For these data, however, investigation of higher-ordered relationships (quadratic and cubic) showed no associations that did not exist at the linear level, and there was no discernible nonlinearity detected in visual inspection of the scatterplots. [20.] T. J. Bouchard, Jr., Intelligence 7, 175 (1983). [21.] C. Capron and M. Duyme [Nature 340, 552 (1989)] have shown an SES effect in an adoption study of young children; S. Scarr and R. Weinberg [Amer. Sociol. Rev. 43, 674 (1978)] did not find an SES effect in a study of young adult adoptees. [22.] B. Price, Am. J. Hum. Genet, 2, 293 (1950). [23.] R. J. Rose and J. Kaprio, Behav. Genet. 18, 309 (1988). [24.] D. T. Lykken, T. J. Bouchard, Jr., M. McGue, A. Tellegen, Behav. Genet., in press. (25.) As in our earlier analysis, nonlinear relationships were tested for and found not to exist. Additionally, deletion of a single outlier (IQ difference of 29 points) did not appreciably change the correlation estimates. (26.) Expected difference (D) can be expressed as a function of the correlation (r) and standard deviation as [Mathematical Expression Omitted] [R. Plomin and J. C. DeFries, Intelligence 4, 15 (1980)]. [27.] K. R. White, Psychol. Bull. 86, 461 (1982). [28.] D. T. Lykken, T. J. Bouchard, Jr., M. McGue, A Tellegen, Acta Genet. Med. Gemellol. 39, 35 (1990); and (6). [29.] H. H. Stassen, D. T. Lykken, G. Bomben, Eur. Arch. Psychiatry Neurol. Sci. 237, 244 (1988). (30.) Systolic blood pressure from Minnesota twin studies. Heart rate from B. Hanson et al., Am. J. Cardiol. 63, 606 (1989). Electrodermal and habituation data from D. T. Lykken, W. G. Iacono, K. Haroian, M. McGue, T. J. Bouchard, Jr., Psychophysicology 25, 4 (1988). Reliability data from K. Matthews, C. Rakczky, C. Stoney, S. Manuck, ibid. 24, 464 (1978); M. Llabre et al., ibid, 25, 97 (1988). (31.) MPQ data from A. Tellegen et al., J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 54, 1031 (1988); CPI data from T. J. Bouchard, Jr., and M. McGue, J. Pers. 58, 263 (1990). Reliability data from test manuals. (32.) MZA and MZT Religiosity data from N. G. Waller, B. A. Kojetin, T. J. Bouchard, Jr., D. T. Lykken, A. Tellegen, Psychol. Sci. 1, 138 (1990). Reliability of religious leisure time interests and religious occupational interests and mean of 14 nonreligious social attitude items from Minnesota twin study data base (28). Reliability of other scales from test manuals. For a general discussion of the reliability of traits such as those measured in this study, see K. C. H. Parker, R. K. Hanson, J. Hunsley [Psychol. Bull. 103, 367 (1988)] and J. J. Conley [Pers. Individ. Differ. 5, 11 (1984)]. [33.] R. C. Lewontin, S. Rose, L. J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes; Biology, Ideology and Human Nature (Pantheon, New York, 1984). [34.] S. Scarr, Behav. Genet. 17, 219 (1987). [35.] J. R. Flynn, Psychol. Bull. 101, 171 (1987). [36.] R. Lynn, Pers. Individ. Differ. 11,273 (1990); T. W. Teasedale and D. R. Owen, Intelligence 13, 255 (1989). [37.] R. Wilson, Child Dev. 54, 298 (1983). [38.] K. J. Hayes, Psychol. Rep. 10, 299 (1962); C. J. Lumsden and E. O. Wilson, Genes, Mind and Culture (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1981); S. Scarr and K. McCartney, Child Dev. 54, 424 (1983). [39.] N. G. Martin et al., Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 83, 4364 (1986). [40.] M. W. Feldman and R. C. Lewontin, Science 190, 1163 (1975); D. Symonds, The Evolution of Human Sexuality (Oxford Univ. Press, New York, 1979). [41.] D. M. Buss, J. Pers. 58, 1 (1990). [42.] T. J. Bouchard, Jr., D. T. Lykken, M. McGue, N. L. Segal, A. Tellegen, this article. (43.) The MZA correlation of 0.771 reported by the late Sir Cyrill Burt and questioned for its authenticity after his death (4) falls within the range of findings reviewed here. (44.) WAIS data for MZTs from K. Tambs, J. M. Sundet, P. Magnus, Intelligence 8,283 (1984). Reliabilities from (10). Raven, Mill-Hill, and composite data from Minnesota twin studies (6, 42). (45.) MZA data on SCII and JVIS from D. Moloney, unpublished thesis (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1990). Minnesota Occupational Interest Scale data from N. Waller, D. T. Lykken, A. Tellegen, in Wise Counsel: Essays in Honor of Lloyd Lofquist, R. Dawis and D. Lubinski, Eds. (Univ. of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, in press). SCII MZT data from Nichols [Homo 29, 158 (1978)]. Reliability data from test manuals. (46.) We thank our colleagues E. D. Eckert, L. L. Heston, and I. I. Gottesman for their help on the medical and psychiatric portions of the study and H. Polesky, director, for the blood testing. This research has been supported by grants from The Pioneer Fund, The Seaver Institute, The University of Minnesota Graduate School, The Koch Charitable Foundation, The Spencer Foundation, The National Science Foundation (BNS-7926654), The National Institute of Mental Health (MH37860), The National Institute on Aging (AG06886), and the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishing Company. From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 29 16:39:49 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:39:49 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Terminating Spyware With Extreme Prejudice Message-ID: Terminating Spyware With Extreme Prejudice NYT December 30, 2004 By RACHEL DODES THE end of the year is a time when people sit down, rethink their priorities and sometimes change their ways. Some quit smoking. Others join a gym. I chose to erase my hard drive and reinstall my operating system. Sure, it was a drastic move, but my two-year-old I.B.M. ThinkPad - equipped with a 1,000-megahertz Pentium III processor, a high-speed Internet connection and 256 megabytes of memory - was running about as fast as the Apple IIE I used in the mid-80's. After six months engaged in mortal combat with spyware - parasitic software that tracks your browsing habits, sends out pop-up ads and can even send your private information to an organized crime ring in Guam - I had two options: shell out $1,200 for a new ThinkPad, or wipe my hard drive and start from scratch - a huge production with potentially cataclysmic results. Since I enjoy new challenges (and more important, since I lack the funds to buy a new laptop), I decided to shoot for the moon and delete, delete, delete. It did not have to be this way. I can trace the decline of my computer's performance to an ill-advised download over the summer. In a pop-music-induced frenzy, I am embarrassed to admit, I went to www.kazaa.com, downloaded and installed the free file-sharing service, then proceeded to download (a k a steal) Britney Spears's and Madonna's collaborative effort, "Me Against the Music." I was about to get my karmic retribution. In downloading Kazaa, I had inadvertently opened the floodgates to all manner of spyware. By the end of the summer, even after I had deleted Kazaa and installed Norton AntiVirus 2004 - which took care of the virus-related part of the problem - I was unable to open Internet Explorer without being deluged with pop-ups enticing me to buy everything from herbal weight-loss pills to obscure business publications. My home page would mysteriously try to redirect itself to a site called badgurl.grandstreetinteractive.com. Little gray dialog boxes would pop up in the center of my screen to inform me, shockingly, that my computer might be infected with spyware. Then it would crash. Spyware is "definitely the most annoying problem," said Tim Lordan, staff director of the nonprofit Internet Education Foundation, which joined with Dell Computer this year to mount a spyware awareness campaign (www.getnetwise.com). Spyware is also ubiquitous: in October, a study by America Online and the nonprofit National Cyber Security Alliance found that 80 percent of computers were infected with it. As my frustration mounted, I sought the advice of fellow spyware sufferers. My friend Jesse, a lawyer at a large New York firm, told me he was forced to wipe his hard drive when his Dell Latitude laptop transmogrified into a purveyor of pornography advertisements. He sheepishly confessed that against his better judgment, he had downloaded a virus- and spyware-addled copy of the Paris Hilton sex video. "I contracted a sexually transmitted computer virus from Paris Hilton," said Jesse, who requested that his last name not be printed. (He feared his law firm - and his wife - would not be too happy about the download.) "It was chronic." Downloading dubious files is a surefire way to get spyware, but it can also be transmitted through seemingly innocuous e-mail, by clicking on a banner ad, or from wholesome Web surfing. The programs install themselves in several places on your computer, making it difficult to find and delete them. What's worse, even if you do delete them, many are programmed to reinstall themselves automatically when the computer is rebooted. What really distinguishes spyware from other computer security threats (viruses, worms and Trojans) is that it often seems to defy the products meant to exorcise it. McAfee introduced an anti-spyware program - aptly called McAfee AntiSpyware - in February, but it has met with mixed reviews. Symantec, the maker of Norton security software, will release its first anti-spyware product early in the new year. (Norton AntiVirus can detect some forms of spyware, but cannot get rid of it.) Microsoft also announced that it would release new anti-spyware software by the end of January. For now, though, computing experts recommend what they call a "multilayered approach" - translation: ad hoc, complicated and largely ineffective. I tried everything the experts suggested. I switched my default browser from Internet Explorer - the target of most spyware programmers - to Mozilla Firefox (available free at www.mozilla.org) and downloaded and ran free expert-sanctioned software with all sorts of renegade names (CWShredder, Spyware Search & Destroy, AdAware and HijackThis). I submitted my "HijackThis log" - a three-page list of potentially dubious files - to a reputable online help forum and, following the experts' advice, manually performed a perilous bit of surgery on my computer's vital organs, deleting several keys from its Windows registry. The pop-ups continued unabated. A Norton AntiVirus scan informed me that despite my efforts, 77 spyware programs were still lurking on my hard drive. (Before this daylong production, I had more than 100 pieces of spyware on my computer, so indeed, it was an improvement.) Erasing my hard drive, long considered a last-ditch measure, was becoming more and more appealing with each passing virus scan. My friend the bankruptcy lawyer finally convinced me: "The catharsis cannot be understated." He recommended I talk to his friend Larry Wagner, an independent technology consultant who has become a self-styled sherpa in hard-drive erasure. At last count, he had helped six other people (including his in-laws, his parents, a colleague from work and my friend) deal with spyware problems. Mr. Wagner is particularly enthusiastic about deleting - and upon hearing my sordid tale, requested that I wipe my hard drive under his auspices. "It's like a baptism for your computer," Mr. Wagner said. "You cannot truly live a good life until you've taken that first step." I arrived at Mr. Wagner's Upper West Side apartment on a December evening with my laptop, a list of my computer's components, my original Windows XP Pro installation discs, a 20-gigabyte iPod and a bottle of Cabernet. It is important to note that some computers, including my own, contain a hidden, manufacturer-installed hard drive "partition," which houses operating system software that can be deployed in an emergency. But since not all computers have this feature, I chose to use the XP installation disks instead. (Some people will want to upgrade their operating system in the process - from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, for example - which requires installation disks anyway.) The first thing Mr. Wagner and I did, since my computer lacked a CD or DVD burner, was to save everything to an external hard drive. (You can buy a plug-and-play keychain drive for $20 to $250, depending on how much storage you want, but an MP3 player also doubles as a nice portable hard drive.) I decided to use my iPod, which was only half full. I simply plugged it into my laptop (it shows up as an "E" drive under My Computer), and copied onto it all of the files contained in My Documents, My Pictures and My Music. I then transferred the contents of my iPod to Mr. Wagner's desktop, on which we created a folder called Backup. The process took about 90 minutes. Then, using Mr. Wagner's DVD burner, I saved the entire Backup folder onto a five-gigabyte DVD. (If you are not so lucky as to know someone with a DVD burner, you can do the same thing using a regular CD burner and several CD's, which typically hold about 700 megabytes each, or many, many Zip disks, which hold 250 megabytes each.) I could have simply kept my files on the iPod or another external hard drive and transferred them back to my pristine hard drive after the procedure was over, but it would have been riskier, and I would have ended up with no backup discs. Now I had a backup of everything. Make that two: Mr. Wagner believes in what he refers to as "Noah's archiving," saving two copies of everything, just in case. Then I took a deep breath, toasted the New Year, and inserted the XP Pro CD-ROM installation disks into my own computer. My computer asked me if I wanted to reformat my hard drive (yes), and warned me that if I continued all files would be deleted (good). It took about an hour for XP to reformat my hard drive and install itself, and I just sat back and watched while the screens became progressively more colorful. When my computer rebooted, it had total amnesia. It was like the Kate Winslet character in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," who has brain surgery to erase the memories of a painful relationship. My computer asked me to enter my time zone, country and type of Internet connection I would be using (LAN, dialup, etc.). It thanked me for buying an I.B.M. and asked if I wanted to register my product. (I said I would do it later.) Now that I had a clean slate, I went online and downloaded all of the XP patches and updates from Microsoft's Web site (windowsupdate.microsoft.com). I made sure I connected to the Internet using an external router with a built-in firewall - after all this, I did not want spyware to sully my pristine hard drive. I plugged my computer into Mr. Wagner's network, and downloaded all of the necessary Microsoft updates, including Service Pack 2, and restarted my computer. This step took about 40 minutes. Now it was 12:30 a.m., so I thanked Mr. Wagner for his help and went home. The following morning, I was ready to reinstall all of my software. In keeping with the hypervigilant theme, I started with Norton AntiVirus. After installing it, restarting, and scanning my computer, I was elated to discover I had a clean bill of health. Not a rogue program in sight! Emboldened by this development, I reinstalled all of my programs - Microsoft Office, iTunes, FinalDraft - and all of my external components, like my printer, camera, CD burner and iPod. Fortunately, I had all of my software discs and their necessary registration codes in a file cabinet next to my desk. The drivers for the external components were not even needed because XP can recognize just about anything and procure the necessary driver online. The software installations took about eight hours over the course of two days, and involved downloading certain things, like Adobe Reader and Mozilla Firefox, from the Web. Between each installation, I restarted my computer, which made this process annoying and time-consuming. (For those who have tons of software, the prospect of reinstalling everything might be worse than the idea of peacefully coexisting with spyware.) Finally, it was time to upload all of my saved files. I plugged in my iPod, and just for good measure, deleted "Me Against the Music" from my music library before putting my songs back on iTunes. After all, it's almost 2005, and I did not want any ill-gotten gains to taint my perfect computer. Two weeks later, still no spyware. Yes, it was a huge production, but after struggling with spyware for the last six months, I have to say it was well worth it. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/30/technology/circuits/30hard.html From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 29 16:41:10 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:41:10 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Cozy Nights on the Orient Express Message-ID: Cozy Nights on the Orient Express NYT December 30, 2004 By JANE MARGOLIES [Another idea on driving down the cost of supplying housing for those made unemployable by robots.] FOUR years ago, while living in Short Hills, N.J., Geoffrey and Susan Harris bought an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan from a friend. The place was run-down and far too small to be a full-time home for the couple and their four children. Instead they bought it, somewhat impulsively, as a pied-?-terre, a place to stay when they visited the city for museum outings and shows. But even as occasional quarters the place was cramped, with just two bedrooms. The adults claimed one for themselves, leaving the other, a modest room 12 by 14 feet, to accommodate all four children. How could they all be shoehorned in? The room had too little space for four single beds, and trundle beds seemed too much trouble. "The last thing we want when we come here is to have to pull out and make up beds," Mr. Harris said. But it was plenty tall for bunk beds, at 9 feet 6 inches. Eve Robinson, an interior designer the Harrises had hired to help renovate the apartment, suggested built-in bunks to free floor space for play. To create a sense of romance about traveling to the a pied-?-terre, Ms. Robinson, a mother herself, designed stacked beds modeled on the sleeping compartments of trains. "Trains always appeal to children," she said. "I was inspired by the idea of the Orient Express because it was a bit exotic and would speak to the imagination of the children." The contractors used birch plywood for the bed structure, built on one of the room's longer walls, and made the railings and ladders of maple. Six bottom drawers provide storage space for toys and linens. Each alcove has its own $1,400 sconce by Stephen McKay, a lighting designer; (212) 255-2110. Each also has a gingham curtain that can be drawn to provide a modicum of privacy and a way for the two older children, Catharine, 11, and Stephen, 9, to stay up reading without disturbing the 6-year-old twins, George and Elyse. A faint silhouette of the New York skyline was painted on the pale blue walls of each cubby by the contractor, SilverLining Interiors Inc., which specializes in decorative painting; (212) 496-7800 or www .silverlininginteriors.com. "I liked the train moving through the New York skyline," Ms. Robinson said. On the other walls, subway graphics reinforce and update the train motif. A horizontal line painted around the room has circles representing the stops on the Lexington Avenue line, which passes within a block of the apartment. The bed unit, which cost around $17,000 (not including $6,000 for the decorative paintings and stri? wall finish throughout the room), was completed two years ago. That was just in time, as it turned out: shortly after the renovation, Mr. Harris, who works in finance, took a new job and the family moved to Boston. Suddenly an apartment bought on a lark became the lifeline to New York. "It's our connection to friends, to museums, to everything," Mr. Harris said. He and his wife attend the opera regularly, and the whole family makes the trip down at least one weekend a month. As Ms. Robinson predicted, the beds make the children's Manhattan weekends something of an adventure. "It's fun," said Catharine, padding around the children's room on a recent Saturday morning while Stephen made rubber-band chains in his lower bunk. George cannonballed from his bed just above, and Elyse nestled in an armchair with her Game Boy, oblivious of the activity all around. Such harmonious play is possible, Mrs. Harris is quick to point out, only because the children occupy their tight quarters for short stays. It should be noted that they all have their own rooms back in the family's Boston house. "This is perfect," their mother said, "for two or three days at a time." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/30/garden/30BUNK.html From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 29 16:43:34 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:43:34 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Gale Group: Google Beta review Message-ID: Google Beta review http://www.galegroup.com/free_resources/reference/peter/dec.htm#googlescholar [I got this on December 15 last year.] Title: Google Scholar Beta Publisher: Google URL: http://scholar.google.com Cost: Free Tested: November 18-27, 2004 Google Scholar has enormous gaps in its coverage of publishers' archives, and implicitly in the direct links to the full-text documents therein. The citedness scores of documents displayed in the results lists have great potential for choosing the most promising articles and books on a subject, but they often are inflated. The prominent display of the citedness scores could help the scholars and practitioners whose libraries don't have access to the best citation-based systems, such as Web of Science and Scopus, or to the smartest implementations of citation-enhanced abstracting indexing databases, like some on CSA and EBSCO. Google should take a page from the best open-access services and repositories, such as CiteBase, Research Index and RePEc/LogEc, which handle citing and cited references and citedness scores much better than Google Scholar. Google's crawlers, which many scholarly publishers and preprint servers let in to their archives for this project, picked up information for many redundant and irrelevant pages and ignored a few million full-text scholarly papers and/or their citation/abstract records. With the exception of the authors' name field, Google treated the items in the huge archives as any of the zillions of unstructured pages on the Web. Google Scholar needs much refinement in collecting, filtering, processing and presenting this valuable data. The Context In the universal, ritualistic adulation, it was no surprise that Google's latest service received publicity that was as wide as it was shallow. The blogorrhea and avalanche of e-mail was as if a free, magical cure for cancer had been announced by the National Institutes of Health. I like and use Google a lot, but not with the "nothing-but-Google" zealotry of its fans. Google Scholar is a follow-up to the CrossRef Search Pilot project that was launched in April with the help of CrossRef and the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registration agency that handles scholarly and professional publishers. CrossRef was the matchmaker between Google and the nine original participating publishers. My review of the first version of that project praised the agency for its work, and criticized Google for the careless implementation. At the annual conference of the Society for Scholarly Publishing in mid-2004, I moderated a session about "Searching Proprietary Content" that was graced by learned panelists, including systems developers from Google and Elsevier. I presented some of my disheartening findings about the massive omissions of documents from the nine publishers' archive in Google CrossRef Search. My testing of Google Scholar eerily reminded me of the same symptoms. Amid the many myths, one is that Google could penetrate the invisible Web. It couldn't and it didn't. The publishers who cooperated in the Google Scholar project opened the doors of their document stores (normally invisible to Web-wide search engines) to allow Google's special crawlers to collect data and to show some of it free to anyone. This would then steer users to their libraries' subscription-based digital journal archives. Undoubtedly, Google significantly enlarged the scope of Google Scholar by crawling and gathering data from the sites of many additional publishers and/or their digital facilitators, as well as from open access abstracting/indexing databases and from the largest archives of preprint and reprint servers. Google Scholar offers free access for anyone to the bibliographic records and often to the abstracts of millions of articles. It may also lead users to full-text documents that can be displayed (if they qualify for free access) or (if they don't) to a document-delivery company. Elsevier has been doing this with the Scirus service for years (although on a smaller scale), offering far better search and results display options. Yes, I did criticize Scirus at its launch for including in its database zillions of not merely worthless, but sometimes inane and vulgar Web pages (mostly created by undergraduate students with an .edu account). However, some time ago this subset was significantly reduced. By the way, Google Scholar also includes a large number of pages that are not scholarly by any stretch of the imagination. The Content Content is the most obscure part of Google Scholar. Apart from the generic statement on the About page that states that "Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web" there is no specific information about the publisher archives or the (p)reprint servers covered, nor about the type of documents processed (such as major articles versus all the content, including reviews, letter to the editors) or the time span covered. Exploring the dimensions of the content base of this service is as difficult as deciphering the real meaning and implications of the credit card agreements penned by the lawyers in the banking industry, so consider this a beta review. Just because a service is free doesn't mean that the producer is not expected to disclose substantial information about the content. Scirus, HighWire Press, Research Index and RePEc show the best examples of the professional attitude of enlightening users about their free information services. One implementation of the open access RePEc archive goes the farthest by providing substantial and very informative content details. The content disclosure of Google Scholar is not at all informative. Furthermore, the Google Scholar's FAQ page does not address the most substantial content issues. The questions included seem unlikely to be the really frequent type. They sound more like the scripted questions in infomercials that let the inventor impress the carefully selected audience with the invention's capability to meet all the needs that the average customer will never have. Scope and Size of the Database Sample searches may shed light on the size of the content . sometimes. You will find hits from the archives of ACM, Blackwell, the Institute of Physics, the Nature Publishing Group, Wiley Interscience, Springer, IEEE and many others. But there is no list of publishers; preprint and reprint servers; or open access abstracting/indexing databases, like the largest e-print collection of the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), the outstanding digital preprint and reprint collection of the RePEc repository or PubMed, among others. Breadth of Archives' Coverage More importantly, users would not have the faintest idea that only a small subset of the articles in many of these digital archives are known to Google Scholar. This is particularly painful in such cases where open-access, full-text scholarly articles are ignored by Google Scholar. The RePEc archive, for example, has 292,416 items, of which 196,025 are full-text. Google Scholar has information about and links to merely 43,800 items. To get some sense of the breadth of coverage, the journal and the source base of Google Scholar, a somewhat experienced searcher may make test searches to find out if a given publisher's archive is covered and to what extent, but the process is not exactly intuitive. Scholars may be good in their subject territories, but not necessarily in the syntax of Google's advanced search. Even if they know that the search can be restricted to a domain with the "site:" parameter (though it is not documented), would they know that the correct site name for, say, Blackwell is blackwell-synergy and that it must be followed by .com, as in "site:blackwell-synergy.com"? Would they really know that there must be no space before and after the colon? There is not even an advanced mode in Google Scholar, which could make the syntax somewhat more transparent. After making some simple searches, users would see various domain names in the results list and could figure out that if they want articles from, say, one of the 753 Blackwell journals to which the library has full access in digital format, the subject query must be limited like this: "site:blackwell-synergy.com dengue fever hawaii". Not the most user-friendly solution, but the software gets more unintuitive at other tasks. More unnervingly, my test searches by domain name clearly indicated that Google Scholar has gathered information for only a small fraction of the articles available on several publisher sites. For example, Blackwell claims that it has "437,451 records for articles published in 755 leading journals." Google Scholar finds 53,400 records when doing a domain search. In other words, nearly 90% of the records are not retrieved from Blackwell's archive through Google Scholar. This is not an extreme example, and may have serious consequences even if the record for some of those articles missed by Google Scholar may show up in its results list from other databases such as PubMed. These records, however, offer only the descriptor-enhanced citation and/or abstract. They don't offer links to the subscription-based journal archives to which the user's library may subscribe. That's why the holes in the coverage of many scholarly journal archives by Google Scholar is not merely an academic exercise and issue for this reviewer, but something that is important to most of the scholars and their libraries. That's why I elaborate on the coverage issue, reporting about some additional test results here. Probing Tests Highwire Press' superb search engine, which hosts many publishers' journals, returns 29,044 hits for a test search of the top-ranked Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Google Scholar retrieves only 12,900 records for the domain restricted search. One has to be careful with domain searches, as Google Scholar may show different domain names in the results list of topical searches, or domain names that yield no results as a search parameter. This is the case, for example, with the Wiley archive. Its link appears as doi.wiley.com in all the results, but in a domain restricted search, the string "site:doi.wiley.com" returns no results. It must be searched as "site:interscience.wiley.com" or "site:wiley.com". These two domain name searches, by the way, bring up slightly different results. Indeed, it is possible that not all of the documents are stored under the same domain name. I tested several variants that I saw on results lists, as well as ones that I guessed as possible variants. The native search software in the archive of the Institute of Physics (for an admittedly quick and dirty test search) found 187,678 records for journal articles. Through Google Scholar's domain searching, the total number of records is 25,600 for "site:iop.org" and 24,400 for "site:www.iop.org". Sometimes the domain name with or without the www or other prefix makes no difference, as in the case of BioMed Central . It is a no-brainer to sense that something is wrong when the query "site:ncbi.nlm.nih.gov" (the mouthful domain name for PubMed) brings up only 879,000 records and the same number of records when using "site:www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov" domain. For a reality check, PubMed acknowledges that it has more than 15 million records. And there are even larger gaps. Ingenta's native search engine reports having records for 17,343,034 articles, chapter, reports and other documents. Through Google Scholar, the total number of records was merely 128,000 for the query "site:ingenta.com" (the domain name that keeps coming up in the results lists). With due diligence I tried other domain name parameters, like ingentaconnect.com or catchword.com (acquired earlier by Ingenta), but Google Scholar did not find any records for these domains. Topical Searches Casual users may not care too much about these problems, as long as they can find a few good records for scholarly articles from any journal of any academic publisher for their research papers. Real scholars, however, are concerned with finding as much relevant, and as little irrelevant or redundant, items as possible on a specific topic, and to not pay for something that their college, research institute or corporation already paid the journal publisher for. The combination of the total lack of information about source coverage and the shallowness of coverage can hit the serious users and/or their employees hard. I have run several topical test queries limited to the appropriate domain across a number of archives using Google Scholar and the native search engines, searching separately in the full-text and title fields. As a follow-up on one of my earlier tests for Google CrossRef, I searched for the exact phrase "maximum fractional energy loss" in the full text. The native search engine of the archive of the Institute of Physics (IoP) found 24 articles (one more than in my April 2004 test). Google Scholar returned only 15 hits. The item-by-item comparison did not indicate any pattern for the omission of records by Google Scholar. Current items from 2004 were missing, as well as items from 1985. The format of the full text . PDF versus PostScript . was not a reason for the omission either. Other topical tests have shown similarly large differences across several archives for three test queries. These are not surprising in light of the disappointing result of the broad, domain-only searches. The full-text search for the eponym Karman retrieved 430 records by the native engine and 271 through Google Scholar from the IoP archive. The ratio from Nature was 37-to-5. For the keyword "vortex," the ratio was similarly disheartening: for Annual Reviews it was 521-to-371; Blackwell was 372-to-215; IoP 1,333-to-839; and Nature Publishing Group 195-to-15. The search for the phrase "energy loss" showed similarly bad ratios for Google Scholar: in the archives of Annual Reviews, it was 700-to-521; Blackwell was 677-to-400; IoP was 7,899-to-3,730; and Nature Group 383-to-23. The native search with Wiley's search engine consistently underperformed Google Scholar in the full-text searches, suggesting possible problems with the implementation of their native search engine, which offers a combined abstract/full-text index. These full-text searches yielded sets that were too large for item-by-item comparison. However, the same searches limited to title field made it easy to quickly spot the glaring omissions in Google Scholar. I posted a new polysearch engine on the Web so anyone could run test searches in the full-text and the title fields using the native search engines and Google Scholar (with predefined domain restriction) for five major publishers' archives. After typing in the query and selecting the archives, the search is run and the results are displayed side-by-side in separate window panes. In this example, three articles are retrieved by the native search engine, and only one by Google Scholar. A 32-year-old article is the common hit, but the two more current ones were not found by Google Scholar, which has the author name oddly misspelled as DW INMAN. Oddly, because it appears correctly as D WEINMAN in the archive. Scrolling down the 12 matching hits for the search about "vorticity" illustrates that the native search engine retrieved six times as many hits as Google Scholar because it is smarter and lemmatizes the query word "vorticity" so as to also retrieve "vortex," "vortices" and "vortical." This still does not explain why Google Scholar did not retrieve the record for the paper on vorticity dynamics. Lemmatization, stemming and automatic pluralization could explain some differences between the number of hits in some other results lists, but this does not much change the disheartening ratios mentioned above. Most of them are inexplicable (and unacceptable) omissions, such as the fourth item for the Karman query where Google Scholar also shows a weird change in the order of the title words, suggesting an article describing "how von K?rm?n flows swirling," when it is about the swirling flows in the noted scholar's vorticity theory. Once again, in the archive the title is correct. The second and third matches may have been omitted because of the correct accents in K?rm?n's name, which Google apparently could not handle. The retrieval of some articles with the plural format of the search phrase "energy loss" explain can not alone explain why the ratio between the results by the native search engine and Google Scholar is 25-to-11 in the title-only test. Large in a Bad Way Searching by topical words alone would yield an impressively large number of hits from Google Scholar, as it seems to be a very large database . but it is large in a bad way. Here is a typical example of how inflated the hit counts of Google Scholar can be when it presents three entries (counting them as three hits) with 14 links for the article in Computer, a journal of IEEE. In this case, the inflated hit count is partly due to crawling a variety of sites whose scholarly nature is not immediately apparent from the funky names of their mirror sites, such as crazyboy.com and nigilist.ru (the transliteration of the Russian word for nihilist). My learned colleagues may not exactly feel lucky being steered to some of these sites whose entries may be graced by prominent journal names in the results list of Google Scholar. Then again, discovering such sites with possibly unauthorized copies of articles may have been an argument in persuading scholarly publishers to let Google's special crawlers into their archives. I am the greatest fan(atic) of self-archiving by authors, but for these and hundreds of thousands of other hits, those may not be cases of such self-archiving. The third "hit" for the above query shows one of the many examples of Google's problem extracting the correct names of the authors. It misses authors and mistakes first names and initials for last names, even though on the page of the linked second site (which was the one working and sporting the PDF file in all its glory) they appear correctly. The content of the results lists is rather enigmatic and badly needs an illustrated help file and some cleaning up. The Software The mass adulation for Google is search engine is largely due to its simple user interface and smart relevance ranking, which usually brings to the top some of the most relevant hits in a no-brainer format. Understandably, users often think, say and click "I'm feeling lucky." Google smartly indoctrinated, sloganized and "buttonized" this apothegm, just as AOL made grandparents happily hum the "You've Got Mail" ditty. Like its popular counterpart, searching Google Scholar is easy, finding the gems is difficult. Content and Ranking of Hits The display of the citedness score would definitely make me feel lucky, but those scores are often much inflated (more about that later). I doubt if most users feel lucky looking at Google Scholar's results list. I bet many feel discombobulated by the enhanced entries, specifically the labels preceding them. Google has added new labels like CITATION, which identifies items extracted from the reference footnotes of other documents, bibliographies, curricula vitae, etc., but have no further information and therefore are not clickable. There is a link to launch a Web search using the standard Google search engine with a well-formulated query, which in turn retrieves pages that include the query term, but the user still may not get a link to the primary document. The items with the PS label, identifying PostScript documents that are particularly popular for physics and computer science articles, may be unfamiliar to scholars in other fields. Therefore, they may be discouraged from clicking on such items as they would be required to download and install the PostScript plug-in. Users may also not understand why certain PDFs are offered for viewing in HTML format while others are not. Few would understand why the no. 1 article appears with the same title 10 times in various formats scattered throughout the results list . showing up among other places as item no. 34, 48, 52, 54, 59, 64, 73, 89, 113, 117 and 119. It helps if they realize that this paper appeared in full and abbreviated versions in different sources. Scholars (who are not necessarily intimately familiar with information technology) may feel more confused than lucky and wonder how these records relate to the six others, four of which have cryptic hyperlinks as part of the no. 1 entry. Clicking on the link to show a list of all six links in a separate window may not alleviate their confusion as it has a duplicate pair, which reduces the number to five. This is just a prelude to the really daunting task of understanding what the links mean, when and why they are selected, and where they take the user. If they figured these out, then they may believe that they understand the ranking of the results as they see the decreasing citedness scores until they get to item no. 5, which was cited more than four times as often as item no. 4. They may guess that records that matched the query term in the title field are ranked ahead of the ones with higher citedness score, but this does not seem to hold true when looking at items no. 8 and no. 9. If that's not enough, they may question why some items have a cached version while others don't. Then comes possibly the most discombobulating issue: the links listed in the records. Links, Links, Links The first time an eyebrow may really rise is when two links appear with the same name in the same entry . one hotlinked, the other not . such as in this entry from Blackwell. The first occurrence is not clickable because it is linked through the title field of the record. The second is hotlinked, but it takes you to the very same location as the title link within the archive. Although the names of the links suggest that you will be taken to the homepage of the publisher, they are just a shorthand. Right clicking the links, then selecting the Properties option will reveal the full URL. Many scholarly users would be even more puzzled as to why ingenta.com is hotlinked (because it hosts Blackwell journals) next to blackwell-synergy.com which is not hotlinked (because clicking on the hotlinked title takes one to the publisher's site in this case). Furthermore, why is there a link to ncbi.nlm.nih.gov for the same record? Because MEDLINE also has a record for the article. It is only an abstracting/indexing record, but with MeSH terms as a bonus. But why does ingenta.com appears twice with both being hotlinked? Why does the second ingenta link take the user to the record of an unrelated article? Because the seemingly unrelated article does have a relationship to the main article about dengue fever. Alas, this relationship is a very indirect one: the article to which the second link takes the user was published in the same issue of the journal Heredity. "So what?" you may ask. Well, the table of contents page on Ingenta includes both of them. That's it. And this is only the tip of the iceberg as the results screen shows more cryptic notations. The CITATION Hits The biggest confusion overall may be caused by listing the primary documents or their indexing/abstracting records intertwined with records for other documents that list the primary document in their references. Results retrieved for my search on the problems of intractability and computers illustrates the possible extent of this problem and the inflated nature of the hit counts and citedness scores. The search yielded 8,130 hits. I looked at the first 100 "hits" and 92% of them were about the book "Computers and Intractability" by Garey and Johnson, with as many errors and inconsistencies in the title, subtitle, author names, publishers names, locations and years as one can imagine. Only eight of the first 100 hits were for items other than this book, scattered around the results list as items 14, 27, 36, 37, 55, 89, 99 and 100. Ninety-one of the "hits" were labeled as CITATIONS, meaning that the "hit" was extracted from references in other records in one of the other archives crawled by Google Scholar. It is not that so many references were given incorrectly in the source documents. Most of them came from the cited reference list of the ACM Guide. It is a lovely archive, but it has a prominent note in red type in every record that "OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article." Well, OCR errors are found in most reference lists as the technology is not yet perfect. The problem is that the crawlers of Google Scholar take and deliver the references as they are, then Google Scholar seems to create a record for each of them. Consequently, it counted and listed each that matched my two-word query. I don't know how many hits on the entire results list were for variants of this book, but I do know that no scholar would scroll down the 8,130-item results list of a topical search in the hope of finding the full documents, or at least an abstract of other items relevant to this topic. Google's approach is like mixing in a gigantic bowl the appetizer, soup, entree, salad, dessert and coffee. It is not exactly a mouth-watering potpourri, even though there are many delicious ingredients in the bowl. All the other citation-enhanced systems (including the best free ones like CiteBase and Reference Index) handle these two hit categories separately; try to consolidate the format differences; filter the "citing" sources to avoid course listings and other materials of tertiary importance for a topical search, let alone for citation counting; and offer clearly explained options to look up cited and citing references. >From the results returned as CITATIONS, you may launch a Web search in the generic Google service, or get to the cluster of the citing records for each in Google Scholar. The first hit on the original results list had 8,397 "cited by" sources, the second had 1,736. If you add up the citedness scores for each variant for this book it would be well over 10,000. I don't know how many of these are double and triple listed and counted in calculating the citedness scores due to postings on mirror sites, and I wonder if anyone would want to find out. I do know that books are more cited than other items in many disciplines. I do know that this is one of the most-cited books in computer science. I do know that a score above 5,000 unique citing references would make a computer science book, article or conference paper an all-time citation classic superstar (to borrow Eugene Garfield's terminology). I do know that both the hit counts for searches without domain restriction and the citedness scores are often inflated. Paradoxically, I also know that millions of citations from scholarly journals and books are not counted, let alone listed, such as the ones from most of the 1,700 Elsevier publications that are not covered at all by Google Scholar, let alone analyzed for citations. Google, Inc. has the intellectual and financial resources (and the largest group of cheerleaders) to create a superb resource discovery tool of scholarly publications. It needs to: 1. exploit the highly structured and tagged Web pages with rich metadata readily available in the digital archives of most of the scholarly publishers 2. create field-specific indexes for many distinct data elements 3. offer an advanced menu with pull-down menus for limiting the search by publisher, journal, document type, publication year, etc. 4. consolidate cited references through the ever increasing DOI registry 5. collect information of all the relevant materials from the publishers' archive 6. develop utilities that enable libraries to launch a known-item federated search in the full-text aggregators' databases licensed by the library in order to check if any have the document from a journal that is not licensed digitally from the publisher I promise that I will write a hagiographic review about Google Scholar when it is done, and done well. From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 29 16:46:06 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:46:06 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Pathways to Philosophy/ International Society for Philosophers Message-ID: Pathways to Philosophy/ International Society for Philosophers [No URL supplied, but perhaps it was an e-mail. I got this on December 18 last year. I'm still clearing off the deck of messages I stored between abanonding reality on October 28, when I turned 60 and January 1, where I started resuming my postings anyhow.] Dear Colleague, PATHWAYS TO PHILOSOPHY/ INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR PHILOSOPHERS Launched in 1995, Pathways is the world leading distance learning philosophy program with students in over 40 countries. The Pathways web sites cover 9 domains and run to 3000+ pages and over 2 million words - the work of philosophy teachers, students and enthusiasts around the globe. Although based at Sheffield University, Pathways is run independently and receives no grant funding from any other institution. Despite this, we have been able to offer an increasing number of scholarships to deserving students. We are also the leading provider of tuition for the long established University of London External Programme leading to the BA (Hons) in Philosophy. In 2002, the International Society of Philosophers was formed to promote the benefits of philosophy world wide, as well as overseeing the Pathways programs and awards. There are now over 800 ISFP members in 65 countries. We publish two highly respected electronic journals aimed at a general readership, 'Philosophy Pathways' (current issue 96) and 'Philosophy for Business' (current issue 14). Launched in 1999, the Pathways 'Ask a Philosopher' service has accumulated over a million words of answers from our expert panel of philosophy teachers and graduates. Below you will find a list of all the main Pathways pages. This letter is a general call to philosophers world wide to join in this exciting enterprise. Membership of the ISFP is free and open to all. We are also looking for: * New members to join the Board of the ISFP * Mentors for the Pathways programs * Contributors for Ask a Philosopher * Articles for Philosophy Pathways * Articles for Philosophy for Business * Reciprocal links to the Pathways web sites If you know of anybody who would be interested in the work of Pathways and the ISFP please forward this email to them. I apologize for the length of this email! I hope that you have a happy and productive New Year! All the best, Geoffrey Klempner Director of Studies === PATHWAYS WEB SITES Pathways to Philosophy http://www.philosophypathways.com (http://www.shef.ac.uk/~ptpdlp/) Main page for the Pathways to Philosophy distance learning program, with study guide, downloadable e-texts and student essay archive. --- PhiloSophos Knowledge Base http://www.philosophos.com Resources and advice for philosophy students including feature articles, searchable archive of over a million words of questions and answers and specialist search engines. --- International Society for Philosophers http://www.isfp.co.uk Launched in April 2002, the aim of the ISFP is to bring together students and teachers of philosophy and amateur philosophers from all over the world. --- Ask a Philosopher http://go.to/ask-a-philosopher (http://www.shef.ac.uk/~ptpdlp/questions/feedback/feedback.html) Submit your philosophy question to a panel of graduate philosophers and teachers. A new page of questions and answers is posted every two weeks. --- Philosophy Pathways e-journal http://www.shef.ac.uk/~ptpdlp/newsletter/ E-journal with articles on a wide range of topics from metaphysics to political philosophy together with reports on the activities of philosophical societies around the world. --- Philosophy for Business e-journal http://www.isfp.co.uk/businesspathways/ E-journal aimed at amateur and professional philosophers as well as business people, with articles looking at philosophical and ethical aspects of business practice. --- The Ten Big Questions http://www.123infinity.com Questions and answers on the interface of science, ethics and philosophy, including time travel, artificial intelligence, creation vs evolution and big bang theory. --- The Possible World Machine http://philosophy.members.beeb.net Illustrated science fiction stories introducing the central questions of philosophy taken from the Pathways Introduction to Philosophy program. --- The Glass House Philosopher http://www.pathways.plus.com/glasshouse/ Home page and web log of philosopher Geoffrey Klempner, including Klempner's online philosophical note books August 1999 - May 2002 and February 2004 - present. --- Wood Paths http://klempner.freeshell.org Articles on self, time, ethics and teaching philosophy by Geoffrey Klempner, Director of Studies of the International Society for Philosophers. === PATHWAYS LINKS PAGES Pathways Philosophy and Distance Learning Links http://www.shef.ac.uk/~ptpdlp/pathways/links.html Democratic arrangement of philosophy and distance learning sites linked to Pathways, with mega-sites listed alongside personal home pages. --- Pathways Top Ten Philosophy Sites http://www.shef.ac.uk/~ptpdlp/topten.html Nominate your favourite philosophy web site or the philosophy site you enjoyed visiting most this week. If your nomination is accepted it will will be added to the head of this list. --- Philosophy of A-Z http://www.aletheia.fsnet.co.uk A selection of links to interesting and unusual philosophy pages on the web, dedicated to the proposition that everything under the sun is a subject matter for philosophy. From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 29 16:47:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:47:47 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] LAT: Sharper minds Message-ID: Sharper minds http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-smartdrugs20dec20,0,7101336,print.story By Melissa Healy Times Staff Writer December 20, 2004 It would be hard to imagine improving on the intelligence of computer engineer Bjoern Stenger, a doctoral candidate at Cambridge University. Yet for several hours, a pill seemed to make him even brainier. Participating in a research project, Stenger downed a green gelatin cap containing a drug called modafinil. Within an hour, his attention sharpened. So did his memory. He aced a series of mental-agility tests. If his brainpower would normally rate a 10, the drug raised it to 15, he said. _________________________________________________________________ FOR THE RECORD: Brain-boosting drugs --An article on drugs that enhance mental performance in Monday's Health section said James L. McGaugh was director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at UC Irvine. He is the former director. Dr. Michael Rugg is the director. _________________________________________________________________ "I was quite focused," said Stenger. "It was also kind of fun." The age of smart drugs is dawning. Modafinil is just one in an array of brain-boosting medications -- some already on pharmacy shelves and others in development -- that promise an era of sharper thinking through chemistry. These drugs may change the way we think. And by doing so, they may change who we are. Long-haul truckers and Air Force pilots have long popped amphetamines to ward off drowsiness. Generations of college students have swallowed over-the-counter caffeine tablets to get through all-nighters. But such stimulants provide only a temporary edge, and their effect is broad and blunt -- they boost the brain by juicing the entire nervous system. The new mind-enhancing drugs, in contrast, hold the potential for more powerful, more targeted and more lasting improvements in mental acuity. Some of the most promising have reached the stage of testing in human subjects and could become available in the next decade, brain scientists say. "It's not a question of 'if' anymore. It's just a matter of time," said geneticist Tim Tully, a researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., and developer of a compound called HT-0712, which has shown promise as a memory enhancer. The drug soon will be tested in human subjects. The new brain boosters stem in part from research to develop treatments for Alzheimer's disease, spinal cord injuries, schizophrenia and other conditions. But they also reflect rapid advances in understanding the processes of learning and memory in healthy people. * Developing research In the last two decades, scientists have made important discoveries about which regions of the brain perform specific functions and how those regions work together to absorb, store and retrieve information. Researchers also have begun to grasp how and where neurotransmitters are manufactured and which ones help perform which mental tasks. "There are things cooking here that couldn't have been done one to two decades ago," said James L. McGaugh, director of UC Irvine's Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. Research has gotten further stimulus from a deep-pocketed investor -- the U.S. military, which is looking for ways to help pilots and soldiers stay sharp under the stress and exhaustion of combat. The potential market for cognitive enhancers has never been bigger, or more receptive. An estimated 77 million members of the baby boom generation will turn 50 in the next 10 years, joining 11 million who have already passed the half-century mark -- a stage at which memory and speed of response show noticeable decline. Modafinil, the drug that whetted Stenger's powers of concentration, is used to treat narcolepsy and other sleep disorders. It is one of three prescription medications on the market that have been shown to enhance certain mental powers. The other two are methylphenidate, marketed under the name Ritalin as a remedy for attention deficit disorder, and donepezil, prescribed for patients with Alzheimer's. Studies have shown that these drugs can produce significant mental gains in normal, healthy subjects. None of the three has been approved for that purpose. Nevertheless, a growing number of healthy Americans are taking them to get a mental edge. Some obtain the medications from doctors who write prescriptions for "off-label" uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration -- a practice both legal and common. Others buy the drugs through unregulated Internet pharmacies. Cambridge University psychologist Barbara Sahakian considers modafinil (marketed commercially under the name Provigil) especially intriguing. Its developers aren't sure exactly how it keeps drowsiness at bay. But even in healthy people, the medication appears to deliver measurable improvements with few side effects. In a series of experiments in 2001, Sahakian and colleagues found that in games that test mental skill, subjects who took a 200-milligram dose of modafinil paid closer attention and used information more effectively than subjects given a sugar pill. Confronted with conflicting demands, the people on modafinil moved more smoothly from one task to the next and adjusted their strategies of play with greater agility. In short, they worked smarter and were better at multi-tasking. "In my mind, it may be the first real smart drug," Sahakian said. "A lot of people will probably take modafinil. I suspect they do already." Donepezil, sold under the name Aricept, also has been found to boost the brain function of healthy people. The drug increases the concentration of a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine, boosting the power of certain electrical transmissions between brain cells. In a 2002 study, 18 pilots with an average age of 52 were put through seven training flights in a simulator and taught a complex set of piloting skills over 30 days. Half took a low dose of donepezil; the other half took a placebo. At month's end, all were tested on the skills they had learned. The pilots on donepezil retained more of the skills than those who took the placebo. On the most challenging parts of the test, an emergency drill and a landing sequence, their performance was notably superior, according to results of the study published in the journal Neurology. * Botox for the mind? Some scientists predict that the development of even more-effective brain-enhancing drugs will usher in an age of "cosmetic neurology." "If people can gain a millimeter, they're going to want to take it," said Jerome Yesavage, director of Stanford University's Aging Clinical Research Center and an author of the donepezil study. Judy Illes, a psychologist at Stanford's Center for Biomedical Ethics, said mind-enhancing medicine could become "as ordinary as a cup of coffee." This could be good for society, helping people learn faster and retain more, she said. But it also raises questions: Will the rich get smarter while the poor fall further behind? (Drugs such as modafinil can cost as much as $6 per dose.) Will people feel compelled to use the medications to keep up in school or in the workplace? In a world where mental function can be tweaked with a pill, will our notion of "normal intelligence" be changed forever? Mirk Mirkin of Sherman Oaks, 77, a retired marketing manager, would like to regain a bit of his old intellectual nimbleness. A member of Mensa, a society for people with IQs in the top two percentile of the nation, Mirkin is bothered by what he laughingly calls "senior moments," such as when a name stubbornly eludes him. If a pill could halt the march of forgetfulness without uncomfortable side effects, he would probably take it, Mirkin said. Mirkin, who proctors tests for admission into Mensa, said he would not object if younger people took such pills to pump up their mental muscle for the test. "If they physically can handle it and want it bad enough, why not?" Many college and graduate students want an edge bad enough to take Ritalin, even if they do not suffer from attention deficit disorder. At campuses, test sites and, increasingly, workplaces across the country, people are popping "vitamin R." Some users persuade a doctor to prescribe it; others get it from friends who have been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. The growing demand for Ritalin, which can be addictive, has prompted the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to classify it as a "drug of concern." On the Internet chat board of the Student Doctor Network, college students preparing for medical school admission tests frequently discuss the benefits of taking Ritalin or similar drugs on exam day. Some students think they have no choice. "You figure you're being compared to people who are on Ritalin," said one Los Angeles student who frequents the site and recently asked a relative to supply the drug. "I just figured it would be more fair if you're on the same level." Eventually, ambitious parents will start giving mind-enhancing pills to their children, said McGaugh, the UC Irvine neurobiologist. "If there is a drug which is safe and effective and not too expensive for enhancing memory in normal adults, why not normal children?" he said. "After all, they're going to school, and what's more important than education of the young? And what would be more important than giving them a little chemical edge?" Defense Department scientists are pursuing just such an advantage for U.S. combat forces. The Pentagon spends $20 million per year exploring ways to "expand available memory" and build "sleep-resistant circuitry" in the brain. Among its aims: to develop stimulants capable of keeping soldiers awake, alert and effective for as long as seven days straight. The armed forces have taken leading roles in testing modafinil and donepezil as performance enhancers for pilots and soldiers. On the horizon are other potential smart drugs, each operating on different systems in the brain. If they progress through tests of safety and effectiveness, the first of them could be available as early as 2008. ([3]See "What's on the horizon?" below). Three companies are among the leading contenders in the race to develop drugs for memory and cognitive performance: Memory Pharmaceuticals Corp. of Montvale, N.J.; Cortex Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Irvine; and Helicon Therapeutics Inc., founded by Tully, the geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. All the new smart drugs are being developed as treatments for recognized illnesses such as Alzheimer's -- a requirement for FDA approval. But the drug that will make a company and its stockholders rich will be the one that treats a disorder that until recently was not seen as an illness at all -- "age-associated memory impairment," the mild but progressive forgetfulness that afflicts us all as we get older. * The risks involved Neuroscientists say two factors could prevent Americans from succumbing completely to the seductions of smart pills. First, their performance may not live up to expectations. Second, they could have side effects, some of them difficult to predict. "There's no free lunch," said Tully. Consumers will have to consider what level of discomfort or risk they're willing to accept in exchange for sharper recall or enhanced powers of concentration. The side effect that most neuroscientists fear is not physical discomfort, but subtle mental change. Over time, a memory-enhancing drug might cause people to remember too much detail, cluttering the brain. Similarly, a drug that sharpens attention might cause users to focus too intently on a particular task, failing to shift their attention in response to new developments. In short, someone who notices or remembers everything may end up understanding nothing. "The brain was designed by evolution over the millennia to be well-adapted because of the lives we lead," said Martha Farah, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. "Our lives are better served by being able to focus on the essential information than being able to remember every little detail.... We meddle with these designs at our peril." Despite such qualms, Farah is drawn to the idea that a mind enriched by a life of experience might not have to lose the speed of recall it enjoyed in its youth. "To have the wisdom of age and the memory of a young person? That'd be a very good combination." ______________ What's on the horizon? Smart drugs will probably emerge from among medications developed for impairments of the brain and nervous system, including depression and schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis, stroke and spinal cord injury. Here are a few under development: Ampakines o Are designed to amplify the strength of electrical signals between brain cells. o Could be the first of the new generation of cognitive enhancers to come to market; developed by Cortex Pharmaceuticals Inc., which has launched human trials. o One is being tested by the Pentagon as an antidote for sleep deprivation. o Boosted cognitive function of healthy Swedish medical students in a 1997 study. Mem compounds o Are designed to strengthen consolidation of long-term memory -- key to learning new skills. o Are under development by Memory Pharmaceuticals Corp., which has begun human testing on three separate Mem compounds as treatment for Alzheimer's disease, mild cognitive impairment and depression. o In early animal studies, one Mem compound appeared to restore the maze recall of middle-aged rats to youthful levels. o Could come to market by 2008. HT-0712 o Is designed to speed and strengthen the process by which short-term memories are committed to long-term storage. o Is under development by Helicon Therapeutics Inc., which plans to move from animal testing to trials on humans soon. o Shows particular promise as a drug to aid in the rehabilitation of stroke victims and to counter the effects of age-associated memory impairment. Gene therapy o Genetically engineered cells are implanted deep inside the cortex, acting as a miniature biological pump that secretes nerve growth factor (NGF), a naturally occurring protein in all vertebrates. o Nerve growth factor revitalizes brain cells that atrophy and shrink as their host's age advances. o Biotechnology company Ceregene Inc. has launched early tests of the gene therapy on human subjects suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, in hopes of slowing its progress. o UC San Diego neuroscientist Mark Tuszynski, who designed the NGF-secreting pump, reported in 2000 that aged monkeys who got the implanted cells showed an almost complete restoration of normal cell function and size. References 3. http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-smartdrugs20dec20,0,7101336,print.story#horizon From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 29 16:50:15 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:50:15 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] SF Chronicle: ASIAN POP: The Gadget Gap/Why does all the cool stuff come out in Asia first? Message-ID: ASIAN POP: The Gadget Gap/Why does all the cool stuff come out in Asia first? Thursday, December 9, 2004 (SF Gate) by Jeff Yang, special to SF Gate Sidebar: Our Top Japan-Only Gizmo Picks Let's call him Johnny Sokko. A deputy assistant office manager and aspiring rock guitarist, Johnny lives in Tokyo in a cramped three-bedroom apartment shared with his parents and his teenage sister. Upon waking up in the morning, Johnny stumbles to the bathroom to answer the call of nature using the household's amazing Matsushita-brand Smart Toilet, which automatically measures his weight, body fat, blood pressure and urine sugar and sends the results to the Sokko family physician via the Internet. Over breakfast, he checks his daily schedule on his Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 -- the first PDA to feature a 4-gigabyte internal hard drive -- and confirms he's free until noon. Great; he can spend the morning trying to beat the Puzzle Bobble Pocket high score his sister rang up on his brand-new Sony PlayStation Portable. Meanwhile, back in the U.S. of A., John Smith rises from his bed before dawn, roused by the crowing of the family rooster. He splashes some creek water on his face, then hikes out to milk the goats. Before he returns from the barn, he checks the suspension on the family buggy and makes sure the horses are properly shod -- it's market day, and if the weather's fine, he might get the chance to ride into town with Pa ... Not the fairest of contrasts, given that the Amish actually make up a very small percentage of the U.S. population, but the fact remains: there's a tremendous divide between the average Japanese consumer and his Stateside counterpart. Call it the gadget gap or the device deficit -- call it what you will, as long as you recognize that, where cool high-tech stuff is concerned, America is light-years behind its counterparts in the Far East. "I've been going to Akihabara [Tokyo's renowned electronics district] for 20 years, and I'm still amazed at the vitality of the scene -- the number of incredible toys you can find there," says David J. Farber, distinguished career professor of computer science and public policy at Carnegie-Mellon University and former chief technologist of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. "You have stores that specialize in selling nothing but little robots. You have your tiny electronic devices -- cameras, music players. You have incredibly convenient kitchen gizmos. Every time I come back, I bring home something new." Japan's trade surplus with the United States remains astronomically high, at over $6 billion; yet any regular reader of technophile Web sites such as I4U, Engadget or Gizmodo knows that the world's biggest exporter of consumer electronics regularly keeps its most innovative and exciting widgetry to itself, selling it only to the domestic market. Cell phones that do everything but make toast (although appropriate attachments are probably available from third-party accessory vendors). Gigapixel digital cameras. Laptops so tiny that "My dog ate my homework" is once again a valid excuse. And, of course, the most incredible toilets in the history of humankind. Some of these devices eventually plod over to U.S. shores months or even years after they've become obsolete in Japan. But many never arrive here at all. Why is it that Japanese manufacturers (and, increasingly, those in Korea and China as well) have such a death grip on consumer-electronics cool? And why are Americans deprived of the choicest fruits of this technological bounty? The answers to these questions offer an intriguing look at how culture shapes technology -- and vice versa. May the (Market) Forces Be with You Japan's gizmo utopia exists in part because of a happy harmonic convergence between its domestic market and its industrial sector: Japanese consumers are intensely style and status conscious, willing to pay more for better and cooler features and motivated to upgrade their core electronic devices at least annually, and sometimes even every six months. "Japanese consumers tend to fall into one of two categories: they're either luxury seekers who are looking for symbols of conspicuous consumption or bleeding-edge-tech seekers who are looking for the most powerful and convenient tools they can find to make their lives easier," says Douglas Krone, CEO and founder of J-tech retailer Dynamism. "And, of course, many consumers are both. Here in the U.S., corporate buying tends to drive innovation -- technology goes where business wants it to go. In Japan, technology is largely driven by individual consumers. They save a lot, but when they spend, they buy the best. I mean, Louis Vuitton racks up over a third of its total global sales in Japan, and that's true for a lot of the luxury brands." America has its share of early adopters, but they tend to be the exception rather than the rule; the average U.S. electronics consumer is driven more by cost and value than by features and technological sophistication. "We're much more Wal-Mart," says Carnegie-Mellon's David J. Farber ruefully. "We buy our electronics from big-box stores where the salespeople know nothing about what they're selling -- they know how to swipe a credit card, and that's it." Geek Chic Consumer behavior is learned young (as any parent of a child devoted to SpongeBob can attest), and America's relatively low-tech outlook is in part due to a fundamental difference in youth culture in the United States and Japan. "Consumer behavior in Japan is totally driven by the teenagers," says Manfred "Luigi" Lugmeyer, editor in chief of the global gadget e-zine I4U. "They're not just buying toys -- they're buying electronics. They're competing in school to have the coolest stuff. American kids are into sneakers. Japanese kids are into technology." Dynamism's Douglas Krone agrees: "Being cool in high school in Japan is all about having the right cell phone. And we're not just talking about brands or styles here. You need to have the functions, the features -- megapixel cameras, and so forth." The cell-phone craze was born soon after the launch of NTT DoCoMo's wildly successful i-Mode wireless Internet service in 1999 gave rise to a phenomenon known as "keitai [mobile-phone] culture," fed by a generation of kids known as oyayubisoku, or "thumb tribes," whose handset addiction has shaped public health (as more and more "thumb princes and princesses" succumb to repetitive stress injuries); sexual mores (as enterprising schoolgirls subscribe to cell-phone "dating services," where they are introduced to lonely and generous older men); media consumption (as magazine vendors and bookstores find that browsers now snap high-quality cell-cam pictures of articles they want to read rather than purchasing their products); and impulse commerce (as Japanese cell phones increasingly become equipped with "e-money" devices that allow them to be used to purchase small items). Unlike in the United States, where consumer electronics is an overwhelmingly male-driven industry, the critical vector in the propagation of keitai culture was its embrace by adolescent girls. That this demographic drives the market is no coincidence. Like many Japanese marketers, NTT DoCoMo had determined that i-Mode would live and die based on whether teen fashion queens adopted the handsets as the season's must-own accessories. A year and a half of aggressive marketing later, with 30 million active users, DoCoMo became the world's largest Internet access provider, surpassing longtime leader America On-Line. More than 10 million of these users are young women. "A couple of months ago, Newsweek Japan did a special issue that listed the 100 most influential Japanese people in history," says Douglas Krone with a chuckle. "Along with ancient emperors, best-selling authors, inventors and scientists, they listed 'Japanese Schoolgirls,' because they've been so influential, inside of Japan and out." House of Tiny Gadgets Taste isn't the only thing driving Japanese gizmo-vation. As the old saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention; in Japan, the corollary might be that skyrocketing real estate prices are the godparents of cool consumer tech. Because the price of shelter is so expensive -- even after the collapse of the housing market, average real estate prices in Tokyo are the most costly in the world, at about $1,271 per square foot (New York, by comparison, averages out at a paltry $890 per square foot) -- Japanese apartments tend to be remarkably cramped. "My wife and I lived in Tokyo for three months," says David J. Farber. "Our apartment there was around 360 square feet, and we quickly got to appreciate small, integrated devices." Japanese manufacturers became experts at miniaturizing and creating multiple-function devices (like, say, refrigerators that let you browse the Web) simply because the average consumer really needs the room. "Space is everything," says Farber. "Many years ago, I sat down with a person -- an American -- who was trying to sell telephone extensions into the Japanese market. His sales pitch was that every family needs five phones -- one for every room in your house. Japanese people looked at him and said, 'Well, my apartment is so small that when my phone rings, I just reach across the room and pick it up.' He wasn't doing so well." There's a subtle secondary manner in which real estate prices have shaped consumer behavior in Japan: housing is so expensive that young people have virtually no means of renting or owning their own homes; even after they've joined the workforce, they continue to live with their parents for years or even decades after graduation. Given that the average American spends up to one-third of his or her take-home wages on shelter, by sponging off Mom and Dad, young Japanese men and women have significantly more disposable income to spend on themselves; a $600 Louis Vuitton purse -- or a $3,000 ultrathin 1.2-pound laptop -- becomes instantly affordable when you're living rent free. It's the Infrastructure, Stupid There's another basic reason Japanese gizmos are cooler than ours, and a reason many of the best tech pickings are restricted to the domestic market. Simply put, Japanese companies (aided by government subsidies and cheap financial-sector loans) have spent billions of dollars in building out key infrastructure -- for example, widespread ultra-high-speed cell-phone networks and readily available broadband Internet access. (Japan is, after South Korea, second in the world in fast-Internet access penetration; the United States is 10th, behind such global tech giants as Belgium.) America's mediocre digital foundation means that devices like DoCoMo's bleeding-edge FOMA phones -- capable of such feats as mobile videoconferencing -- wouldn't work here even if they were available. We're Just Not That into It The hard truth is that even though a relative handful of gadget mavens, like this reporter, rail against the injustice of a world where the latest and sexiest gear is barred from entry into the United States, the vast majority of American consumers prefers to window shop -- experiencing new technology by proxy rather than shelling out the cash necessary to really own it. Web sites such as I4U provide a daily updated peephole into an exotic world of fanciful contraptions; but although I4U editor in chief Luigi Lugmeyer says the site is self-sustaining and profitable, it's still more of a labor of love and a technological test bed than a burgeoning commercial enterprise. Even Douglas Krone, who started Dynamism right after graduating from Northwestern University when he realized his imported superslim laptop was drawing the equivalent of wolf whistles from everyone he knew, says his company is designed to fill a very defined, high-end niche. "We like to think of ourselves as a kind of technology concierge," he says. "We import top Japanese products that aren't available here and language localize them so that they're 100 percent in English, and then we offer unlimited lifetime toll-free tech support. We do well at our niche, but it's not about huge volume -- it's about offering really intense service for people who want best-of-class products." As Krone points out, if he started moving thousands of units of something, it would rapidly be available in your local Best Buy. But he hasn't yet had to face that kind of competition. Nor is he likely to soon. "The way business works here is simple," says David J. Farber. "In America, if you have a potential product, you do research, you try to figure out the size of the potential market. And if it's a totally new, totally innovative thing, where no one has any idea of the size of the market, and there's no guaranteed return on a large investment, well, forget it. No American company will touch it. In Japan, it's usually quite the opposite: manufacturers know that the home market loves new stuff; they'll take risks there, hoping that something will catch fire and take off. The only U.S. company that's doing that is Apple, and, honestly, I don't think that even Steve Jobs, in all of his infinite wisdom, thought that the iPod was going to take off the way it has." Which means that for the foreseeable future, American technophiles will continue to experience a chronic case of gadget envy. Hey, is that a brand-new buggy whip I see under the Christmas tree? * * * Seven from Gadget Heaven: Jeff Yang's Top Japan-Only Gizmo Picks 1. Sony PSP (Playstation Portable): It's only the most anticipated handheld gaming device ever -- a portable wonder that packs all the power of the original PlayStation in one palm-size package. And it doesn't just play games: according to Sony, it'll also deliver music and MPEG-4 video, display photos and offer 802.11 Wi-Fi connectivity for wireless gaming and messaging. It's going on sale in Japan this weekend. The United States, however, doesn't get it until March 2005 at the earliest. Envy factor: 4.5 out of 5. 2. Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000: For the hardcore gadget geek, the SL-C3000 is the latest in Sharp's heavy-duty Linux-based handhelds; more of a palmtop computer than a PDA, the SL-C3000 has an internal hard drive, a razor-sharp full VGA screen with zoom-in capabilities and a full QWERTY keyboard to go along with its swiveling touch screen. Plus, it looks damn good. Get it in a full-English version at Dynamism now. Envy factor: 4 out of 5. 3. DoCoMo "Mobile FeliCa" Payment System: A product, not a service, this e-payment system lets you buy stuff from convenience stores, software publishers, concert-ticket kiosks and train stations by transmitting virtual cash from your i-Mode-equipped phone. The system works in Japan because it's riding on the back of FeliCa, an existing, wildly popular smart-card payment system; here in the United States, we don't even have smart cards, much less i-Mode. Envy factor: 3.5 out of 5. 4. The NEC V601N: Sure, it'll display live broadcasts for only about an hour before its batteries give up the ghost, but this first-ever combination TV/cell phone also lets you grab screen shots and video off programs being played on its bright but tiny screen and browse TV guides to schedule programming, and it can even be used as a remote control for external devices. Japan gets it later this month; we get it, uh, never. Envy factor: 3 out of 5. 5. SONY Clie VZ-90: Sony gave up on making PDAs for the U.S. market but has continued to build new versions of its best-of-breed Clie in Japan. This edition is the first PDA to offer an OLED screen, producing brilliant, neon-sharp colors that can't be duplicated by LCDs. Sony has positioned the VZ-90 not just as an organizer but also as a portable media storage and playback device, with stereo speakers, multiple types of memory slots and integrated Wi-Fi; Dynamism has it, but, unfortunately, not yet in an English-language localized version. Envy factor: 3 out of 5. 6. Takara's Dream Factory: The geniuses behind the Bowlingual and the Meowlingual (universal translators for dogs and cats that turn woofs and purrs into human-intelligible speech) have created a product that allegedly helps you turn your nightmares into delightful dreams using musical tunes, sweet perfumes and prerecorded, whispered phrases. We'll be dreaming of the Sony PSP. Envy factor: 2.5 out of 5. 7. Sony HMP-A1 Portable Media Player: Wish your iPod could play back movies? Sony hopes you do. Its new HMP-A1 PMP offers 20 gigabytes of MP3 and MPEG-4 playback goodness; it even has a video-out jack so you can watch your flicks on a big-screen TV instead of its embedded sharp but tiny 3.5-inch screen. Envy factor: 2.5 out of 5. Jeff Yang is author of "Once Upon a Time in China: A Guide to the Cinemas of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China" (Atria Books) and co-author of "I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action" (Ballantine) and "Eastern Standard Time" (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin). He lives in New York City. From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 29 16:51:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:51:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Slate: Feed the Worms Who Write Worms to the Worms Message-ID: Feed the Worms Who Write Worms to the Worms [E-mailed to me by Slate, which did not supply the URL] everyday economics Feed the Worms Who Write Worms to the Worms The economic logic of executing computer hackers. By Steven E. Landsburg Posted Wednesday, May 26, 2004, at 2:14 PM PT If we execute murderers, why don't we execute the people who write computer worms? It would probably be a better investment. Let's do the math. What do we get out of executing a murderer? Deterrence. A high-end estimate is that each execution deters about 10 murders. (The highest estimate I've ever seen is 24 murders deterred per execution, but the closest thing to a consensus estimate in the econometric literature is about eight.) That's 10 lives saved, with a value??again a high-end estimate??of about $10 million apiece. (The closet thing to a consensus estimate in the economics literature is about $7 million per life. I am rounding up.) So let's say the benefit of executing a murderer is roughly 10 times $10 million, or $100 million??and that's probably at the high end. Compare that to the benefit of executing the author of a computer worm, virus, or Trojan. There seems to be no good name for such people, so I'll make one up??at least until some reader sends in a better suggestion, I'll call them "vermiscripters." It's estimated that vermiscripting and related activities cost the world about $50 billion a year. So if a single execution could deter just one-fifth of 1 percent of all vermiscripting for just one year, we'd gain the same $100-million benefit we earn by executing a killer. Anything over one-fifth of 1 percent, and any effects that last beyond the first year, are gravy. So much for benefits. What about costs? The cost of an execution is one life??usually (one hopes) the life of the guilty, but occasionally the life of a wrongly convicted innocent. The question is: Which is worth more: the life of the average convicted murderer or the life of the average convicted vermiscripter? Plausibly, the latter. Compared to murderers, vermiscripters might be easier to rehabilitate (the author of the Sasser worm is, by all reports, still a teenager) and probably have more skills that can be put to good use. (Offsetting this, though, is the prospect that those same skills can be put to further bad use.) Let's bias things very strongly against the conclusion I'm driving at by valuing the average murderer's life at zero and the average vermiscripter's life at $100 million??the same value we earlier attributed to 10 lives. Then to rate the vermiscripter's execution as a better investment than the murderer's, you'd have to expect it to deter at least $200 million worth of computerized vandalism??enough to cover the $100 million value of executing the murderer plus the $100 million value of the vermiscripter's life. That's twice our earlier estimate, but still just two-fifths of 1 percent of one year's worth of worm and virus damage??and still a plausibly easy hurdle to clear. Conclusion: On a pure cost-benefit basis, we should be quicker to execute a vermiscripter than a murderer. But of course we're not. Which raises the question: Why not? Here's one answer: "These things can't possibly be reduced to numbers. Who cares if some economist said a human life was worth $7 million or $8 million or $10 million? A chemist will tell you that the elements in your body have a collective market value of about $10. You might find these numbers interesting in some abstract academic sort of way, but they have nothing at all to do with making wise policy decisions." The problem with that answer is that it's wrong. To understand why it's wrong, you have to understand how economists come up with these numbers in the first place. When we say that a human life is worth $10 million, we mean nothing more or less than this: A typical person, faced with a 1??in-10-million chance of death, seems to be willing to pay about a dollar to eliminate that risk. We know this not from theory but from observation??by looking, for example, at the size of the pay cuts people are willing to take to move into safer jobs. On this basis, Harvard professor Kip Viscusi estimates the value of a life at $4.5 million overall, $7 million for a blue-collar male and $8.5 million for a blue collar female. (Viscusi acknowledges that it's puzzling for a blue-collar life to be worth more than a white-collar life, but that's what the data show.) If we can deter one random murder in America, we make you a little bit safer: Your chance of being a murder victim shrinks by about 1 in 300 million (because that's how many Americans there are). If we can execute one killer and deter 10 random murders, the enhancement to your safety is multiplied by 10: Your chance of being a victim shrinks by 1 in 30 million. When we say that your life is worth $10 million, we mean precisely that you'd be willing to pay about one-thirty-millionth of $10 million??about 33 cents??for that much extra safety. (Actually, you'd probably be willing to pay slightly less, because each execution, while making you safer on the street, also enhances the risk that you yourself will be falsely convicted and executed someday.) On the other hand, suppose we can execute one vermiscripter and thereby eliminate, oh, say, 1 percent of all computer viruses for one year. Assuming that half the $50 billion cost of malicious hacking is concentrated in the United States and that you bear your proportionate share of that cost, we're putting about 83 cents in your pocket. Which would you rather have, the safety or the cash? Almost every American would take the cash; that's exactly what we learn from studies like Viscusi's. Executing the murderer means giving you the safety. Executing the vermiscripter means giving you the cash. You'd rather have the cash than the safety. Ergo, executing the vermiscripter is better policy. There's one exception to this reasoning: Maybe there's an alternative and less drastic punishment that is highly effective against vermiscripters and not against murderers. If we can effectively deter malicious hackers by cutting off their supply of Twinkies or crippling their EverQuest avatars, then there's no need to fry them. Whether that would work is an empirical question. Some might argue that capital punishment has moral costs and benefits beyond its practical consequences in terms of lives lost and lives saved. Those who make such arguments will want to modify a lot of the calculations in this column. As for myself, I hold that the government's job is to improve our lives, not to impose its morality. In this, I take my stand with the president of the United States, who, in a 2000 debate against Al Gore, said quite explicitly that nothing other than deterrence can justify the death penalty. There's also the fact that all the arithmetic in this column is very much back-of-the-envelope. I implicitly assumed that we're all equally likely to be random murder victims when in fact some of us (i.e., the poor) are more susceptible than others. I used numbers that are rough approximations to the truth. And I probably omitted a consideration or two that I'm sure I'll hear about from astute readers. But this essential point remains: Governments exist largely to supply protections that, for one reason or another, we can't purchase in the marketplace. Those governments perform best when they supply the protections we value most. We can measure their performance only if we are willing to calculate costs and benefits and to respect what our calculations tell us, even when it's counterintuitive. Any policymaker who won't do this kind of arithmetic is fundamentally unserious about policy. Steven E. Landsburg is the author, most recently, of Fair Play: What Your Child Can Teach You About Economics, Values, and the Meaning of Life. You can e-mail him at armchair at troi.cc.rochester.edu. From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 29 16:52:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:52:51 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: Hard Exercise Keeps the Mind Sharp Message-ID: Hard Exercise Keeps the Mind Sharp http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2004-12-28-3 Ten-year study shows that longer and more intense physical activity could help people maintain cognitive skills Betterhumans Staff 12/28/2004 3:46 PM Longer and more intense physical activity could help prevent cognitive decline, according to research based on a 10-year study of elderly men. "Our study suggests that being physically active in old age could keep the brain fit," says research author Boukje van Gelder of the [8]National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in Bilthoven, the Netherlands. The findings are based on a review of the data of 295 men, born between 1900 and 1920, from the Finland, Italy and Netherlands Elderly (FINE) Study. The review included data on the duration and intensity of physical activities such as walking, bicycling, gardening, farming, sports, odd jobs and hobbies. It also included data on cognitive functioning, assessed using the Mini Mental State Examination. Mental fitness Over 10 years, cognitive decline in men who had reduced their daily physical activity by an hour or more was 2.6 times greater than the decline in men who maintained their activity. Men who performed their daily physical activity with a lower intensity 10 years later had a 3.6 times stronger decline than men who maintained the intensity level. Men who engaged in activities of the lowest intensity had up to 3.5 times greater decline than men who participated in activities with a higher intensity. There was no decline among those who increased the duration or intensity of their activities. Activities of medium-to-low intensity, such as walking three miles per day, were associated with less cognitive decline than the lowest-intensity activities, such as walking less than three miles per day. Memory reserves Researchers think that physical activity could exert its benefits by improving blood flow to the brain and thereby reducing the risk of stroke and dementia. Physical activity might also stimulate the growth of nerve cells in the hippocampus, part of the brain involved in memory functions, helping build up a reserve to prevent further mental deterioration. "The small number of healthy participants in the FINE study is a disadvantage but the study's length is an advantage, and the results were consistent and significant," says van Gelder. "Future research should include more extensive cognitive testing than the Mini Mental State Exam, which is reliable but is only a screening test." The research is reported in the journal [9]Neurology ([10]read abstract). References 8. http://www.rivm.nl/ 9. http://www.neurology.org/ 10. http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/63/12/2316 From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 29 16:54:46 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:54:46 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: (Nanotechnology) Small wonders Message-ID: Small wonders http://www.economist.com/printedition/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3494722 4.12.29 Nanotechnology will give humans greater control of matter at tiny scales. That is a good thing, says Natasha Loder (interviewed [3]here) ATOMS are the fundamental building blocks of matter, which means they are very small indeed. The world at the scale of atoms and molecules is difficult to describe and hard to imagine. It is so odd that it even has its own special branch of physics, called quantum mechanics, to explain the strange things that happen there. If you were to throw a tennis ball against a brick wall, you might be surprised if the ball passed cleanly through the wall and sailed out on the other side. Yet this is the kind of thing that happens at the quantum scale. At very small scales, the properties of a material, such as colour, magnetism and the ability to conduct electricity, also change in unexpected ways. It is not possible to "see" the atomic world in the normal sense of the word, because its features are smaller than the wavelength of visible light (see table 1). But back in 1981, researchers at IBM designed a probe called the scanning tunnelling microscope (STM), named after a quantum-mechanical effect it employs. Rather like the stylus on an old-fashioned record player, it could trace the bumps and grooves of the nanoscale world. This allowed scientists to "see" atoms and molecules for the first time. It revealed landscapes as beautiful and complex as the ridges, troughs and valleys of a Peruvian mountainside, but at the almost unimaginably small nanometre (nm) scale. A nanometre is a billionth of a metre, or roughly the length of ten hydrogen atoms. Although scientists had thought about tinkering with things this small as long ago as the late 1950s, they had to wait until the invention of the STM to make it possible. Nanotechnology is generally agreed to cover objects measuring from 1 to 100nm, though the definition is somewhat arbitrary. Some people include things as small as a tenth of a nanometre, which is about the size of the bond between two carbon atoms. At the other end of the range, in objects larger than 50nm the laws of classical physics become increasingly dominant. There are plenty of materials that simply happen to have features at the nanoscale--such as stained glass, mayonnaise or cat litter--but do not qualify for the nanotechnology label. The point about nanotechnology is that it sets out deliberately to exploit the strange properties found in these very small worlds. At the nanoscale, explains George Smith, the amiable head of materials science at Oxford University, "new, exciting and different" properties can be found. If you were to start with a grain of sugar, he says, and chopped it up into ever smaller pieces and simply ended up with a tiny grain of sugar, that would be no big deal. But as an object gets smaller, the ratio between its surface area and its volume rises. This matters because the atoms on the surface of a material are generally more reactive than those at its centre. So icing sugar, for instance, dissolves more quickly in water than does the granulated form. And if silver is turned into very small particles, it has antimicrobial properties that are not present in the bulk material. One company exploits this phenomenon by making nanoparticles of the compound cerium oxide, which in that form are chemically reactive enough to serve as a catalyst. In this invisible world, tiny particles of gold melt at temperatures several hundred degrees lower than a large nugget, and copper, which is normally a good conductor of electricity, can become resistant in thin layers in the presence of a magnetic field. Electrons, like that imaginary tennis ball, can simply jump (or tunnel) from one place to another, and molecules can attract each other at moderate distances. This effect allows geckos to walk on the ceiling, using tiny hairs on the soles of their feet. But finding novel properties at the nanoscale is only the first step. The next is to make use of this knowledge. Most usefully, the ability to make stuff with atomic precision will allow scientists to produce materials with improved, or new, optical, magnetic, thermal or electrical properties. And even just understanding the atomic-scale defects in a material can suggest better ways of making it. Indeed, entirely new kinds of material are now being developed. For example, NanoSonic in Blacksburg, Virginia, has created metallic rubber, which flexes and stretches like rubber but conducts electricity like a solid metal. General Electric's research centre in Schenectady in New York state is trying to make flexible ceramics. If it succeeds, the material could be used for jet-engine parts, allowing them to run at higher, more efficient temperatures. And several companies are working on materials that could one day be made into solar cells in the form of paint. Because nanotechnology has such broad applications, many people think that it may turn out to be as important as electricity or plastic. As this survey will show, nanotechnology will indeed affect every industry through improvements to existing materials and products, as well as allowing the creation of entirely new materials. Moreover, work at the smallest of scales will produce important advances in areas such as electronics, energy and biomedicine. From small beginnings Nanotechnology does not derive from a single scientific discipline. Although it probably has most in common with materials science, the properties of atoms and molecules underpin many areas of science, so the field attracts scientists of different disciplines. Worldwide, around 20,000 people are estimated to be working in nanotechnology, but the sector is hard to define. Small-scale work in electronics, optics and biotechnology may have been relabelled "nanobiotechnology", "nano-optics" and "nanoelectronics" because nano-anything has become fashionable. The "nano" prefix is thought to derive from the Greek noun for dwarf. Oxford's Mr Smith jokingly offers an alternative explanation: that it "comes from the verb which means to seek research funding". And research funding is certainly available by the bucketload. Lux Research, a nanotechnology consultancy based in New York, estimates that total spending on nanotechnology research and development by governments, companies and venture capitalists worldwide was more than $8.6 billion in 2004, with over half coming from governments. But Lux predicts that in future years companies are likely to spend more than governments. For America, nanotechnology is the largest federally funded science initiative since the country decided to put a man on the moon. In 2004, the American government spent $1.6 billion on it, well over twice as much as it did on the Human Genome Project at its peak. In 2005, it is planning to shell out a further $982m. Japan is the next biggest spender, and other parts of Asia as well as Europe have also joined the funding race (see chart 2). Perhaps surprisingly, the contenders include many developing countries, such as India, China, South Africa and Brazil. In the six years up to 2003, nanotechnology investment reported by government organisations increased roughly sevenfold, according to figures from Mihail Roco, senior adviser for nanotechnology at America's National Science Foundation. This large amount of funding has raised expectations that may not be met. Some people worry that all the nanotechnology start-ups will help to inflate a bubble reminiscent of the internet one. But there are good reasons to think that the risk has been exaggerated. Private investors are being much more cautious than they were during the dotcom boom, and much of the money that is being spent by governments is going on basic science and on developing technologies that will not become available for years. However, a number of existing products have already been improved through nanotechnology, with more to come in the next few years. Bandages for burns have been made antimicrobial by the addition of nanoparticles of silver. Fabrics have been stain- and odour-proofed by attaching molecules to cotton fibres that create a protective barrier. Tennis rackets have been strengthened by adding tiny particles that improve torsion and flex resistance. Other applications include coatings for the hulls of boats, sunscreen, car parts and refrigerators. In the longer term nanotechnology may produce much bigger innovations, such as new kinds of computer memory, improved medical technology and better energy-production methods such as solar cells. The technology's most ardent proponents claim that it will lead to clean energy, zero-waste manufacturing and cheap space travel, if not immortality. Its opponents fear that it will bring universal surveillance and harm the poor, the environment and human health--and may even destroy the whole planet through self-replicating "grey goo". This survey will argue that both sides overstate their case, but that on balance nanotechnology should be welcomed. From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 29 16:56:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:56:21 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Scientist Interview: (Nash) Return of a 'beautiful mind' Message-ID: Return of a 'beautiful mind' http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18424781.800 John Nash was recognised by his colleagues as a genius in 1948 when he was accepted into Princeton University's graduate programme at the age of 20. A year later he found a mathematical way for hostile parties to settle arguments to mutual advantage. Known as the Nash equilibrium, his major contribution to mathematics remains as useful today - as shown by recent auctions of bandwidth to mobile phone companies - as it was in cold war politics. It gained him a Nobel prize for economics in 1994. He now researches problems in cosmology and quantum theory An obvious question to kick off with: is there a connection between madness and genius? There's certainly a connection between mental illness and "thinking out of the box". If you're going to be anything like a genius you have to think out of the box. In that sense genius is something other than perfect normality, but I wouldn't say there is a strong connection. Mathematicians are comparatively sane as a group; it's the people who study logic that are not so sane. Logical scholars like Kurt G?del are certainly not a good example of sanity. You're doing mathematics again, looking at aspects of relativity and presenting your research at conferences. Are you doing good work? Well, these subjects are things I've been thinking about for a long time. In some ways I've been very amateurish in approaching them. Yes, I think I am doing good work. Maybe not great work, but good work. Some mathematicians, notably John von Neumann, have said that a mathematician will have done all his best work by the time he's reached 30. You're not too old to produce decent maths? I have never said that. There are some statistics about when people do good mathematical work. It is more rare for people to do notable things at a later age, but it does occur. Part of the thing might be that a mathematician does not need a laboratory. Maybe scientists need more time to get a good laboratory running. If that delays them, they're not completing their work until a later age, whereas a mathematician gets it done earlier. What's it like to have become famous as a mathematician through Hollywood's influence? Do you find it awkward that people now know about your personal life without knowing much about your work? It is a bit of a burden. You become quite well known, without it being the best type of reputation to have. To be considered a distinguished mathematician by mathematicians is one thing, but to be considered by the public to be a distinguished mathematician, well, that's something else. It does help that there is a lot of fiction in the movie. It's based on my life but there are some variations - and the other characters are more or less all fictional. Do you even recognise yourself in A Beautiful Mind? It's not me, but Russell Crowe plays the role well. I didn't meet him before the movie. Just his speech coach came to see me a few times. The idea was that Crowe would be modelling my accent and the flavour of my speech. In the end he simply used a southern accent, which is not the same as mine. I only met him when they were actually doing the movie, and at the Oscar event. Didn't the director want you to be more involved? Ron Howard did not want the real person to interfere with the movie person. When he made Apollo 13, some of the people that were cooperating with him were astronauts, and he felt there was conflict when you get the real astronauts too involved with the people in the movie. He wanted the story in A Beautiful Mind to move forward well, without getting into too much detail. Were you involved in the screenplay? No, that wasn't the deal. The writers had complete artistic freedom. It worked out well, of course. They won Oscars. At the end of the film, we see a happily-ever-after scenario when you have recovered from mental illness. Was that really like a second birth? It was more of a return than a second birth. I have a son who is disturbed through mental illness. He is a mathematician. He got as far as a PhD and then he got disturbed. If he could come back it wouldn't be a rebirth, it would be like a return. Mental illness is a major factor in your life. Have you ever been involved in campaigning about the issues it raises? I've gotten involved in some issues, and gone to scientific meetings as a guest, but I don't take all the opportunities: some are not of the right type. Some people try to campaign against the stigma of mental illness, but you can't remove the stigma without removing the illness. It is rational to understand people as sick or not sick: to remove stigma you have to make everyone blind to the existence of the illness. So the taint is unavoidable? What I'm saying is, the natural attitude is not necessarily entirely wrong: insanity is something that is undesirable. Of course, psychiatrists would like people in the care of psychiatrists not to be stigmatised. Both psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies say people who are taking drugs for mental illness should not be stigmatised. But there are some interests involved here. There are people who think the [mentally ill] people are lazy, taking advantage of society through insanity - well, in a sense that is the truth. To say people should not think like that is to say they should favour the culture of how mental illness is dealt with now. You don't think the current treatments merit favour? You have said that the drugs used to treat the mentally ill can be overrated, and that they haven't increased the proportion of people who recover to the point where they don't need drugs. Is that true? Well, I wouldn't say it in those words. There is evolution in this area: there is progress in types of drugs available. The thing I do notice is acceptance of something that is not a cure. For mental illness, a person who is dependent on drugs and gets continued attention from psychiatrists is considered OK. I think the ideal could be higher. These people do not usually function on a level corresponding to the level on which they would have functioned before their mental illness. So a quite low level of function is accepted as being good treatment. But you're not really sane if you need drugs to be sane; you haven't reached the level of rationality. What about you? Do you still hear voices? I was a long way into mental illness before I heard any voices. Ultimately I realised I am generating these voices in my own mind: this is dreaming, this is not communication. This is coming from an internal source, not from the cosmos. And simply to understand that is to escape from the thing in principle. After understanding that, the voices died out. My son hears voices, but I haven't heard any for a long time. So was there an element of rational decision-making involved in dealing with your symptoms? There's a lot of choice in this, I think. I know this is not the standard point of view. The standard doctrine is that we are supposed to be non-stigmatic in terms of these people: they are constitutionally, necessarily, schizophrenic. But I think there is an element of choice. A person doesn't pass into insanity when their situations are good. If their personal life is successful, people don't become insane. When they're not so happy, when things aren't so good, then they may become clinically depressed, and then maybe schizophrenic. Wealthy people are less likely to become schizophrenic than people who are not wealthy. Are you saying that some people simply choose to opt out of a difficult reality? It provides an escape. In another way, a person might choose a monastic life; become a monk or a nun. There are various forms of escape in human societies, leading to another life where you do not face the same challenges, the same burdens. So is it a rational choice to come back? Being sane is like being a computer that is properly programmed to do useful things. Being insane is like being a computer that is not programmed to do anything useful. You have to come back to where you are expected to work. I can see that in my son. He does not appreciate work. We can't get him to do anything around the house. If he could be given small chores and do them, he would be more ready to come out of it. I don't know whether he'll come out of schizophrenia or not now. He has reached an advanced stage now because it's gone on so long. "Mathematicians are comparatively sane as a group; it's the people who study logic that are not so sane" Your work on bargaining solutions - the Nash equilibrium - still has broad impact. It was used to design the recent auctions of microwave spectrum bandwidths for mobile phones, for instance. Are you surprised by the importance of your work? It is remarkable the way it has been applied in auctions. It is now a big-money, billion-dollar industry. I did see the application possibilities right from the start: some of my earliest publications were in econometrics. When you came up with the Nash equilibrium, the United Nations had just formed, and a few people were pushing for a world government. Your colleagues were thinking only about optimistic bargaining situations involving mutual cooperation. You solved the problem of finding bargaining solutions for situations where people won't cooperate. Is that why your work seemed so radical - because it ran contrary to the zeitgeist and exposed the fact that there's always a way to get by without cooperation? At the time my idea was offbeat or radical, but in a sense it was classical. After all, economics works this way. I know that von Neumann and Einstein thought that there could be some sort of coordinating world leadership. It's easy to say there should not be any war. When the Pope talks about war and peace, you know without listening what he will say. But war is not in the ideal world, it's in the real world. It will happen. Do you see world politics as an experimental lab for the mathematics of game theory? It could be seen that way. But if you consider game theory from a more general point of view, it doesn't need to be mathematical. My personal view is that Machiavelli was really a great game theorist, and he's not mathematical at all. Did the Nobel prize change anything for you? It changed everything for me. Before the Nobel I wasn't recognised at all. I was quoted and cited in economics and game theory, but beyond that I didn't have any recognition. And without the Nobel prize, of course, there wouldn't have been any movie. What about the success of the movie - has that changed anything? Well, there is a certain amount of money for authorising a movie. I'm still living in the same house in Princeton. I still don't have enough money to buy a mansion. From issue 2478 of New Scientist magazine, 18 December 2004, page 46 From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 29 16:58:32 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:58:32 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Scientist: Software agent targets chatroom paedophiles Message-ID: Software agent targets chatroom paedophiles http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18124393.000 20 March 2004 PAEDOPHILES attempting to "groom" children in internet chatrooms can now be detected by a computer program. The program works by putting on a convincing impression of a young person taking part in a chatroom conversation. At the same time it analyses the behaviour of the person it is chatting with, looking for classic signs of grooming: paedophiles pose as children as they attempt to arrange meetings with the children they befriend. Called ChatNannies, the software was developed in the UK by Jim Wightman, an IT consultant from Wolverhampton in the West Midlands. It creates thousands of sub-programs, called nanniebots, which log on to different chatrooms and strike up conversations with users and groups of users. If a nanniebot detects suspicious activity it sends an alert to Wightman and emails a transcript of the conversation. If he considers the transcript suspicious, he contacts the relevant police force, giving them the internet address of the suspect user. He claims that tip-offs from his software have already led to police investigations, but New Scientist was unable to verify this before going to press. The nanniebots do such a good job of passing themselves off as young people that they have proved indistinguishable from them. In conversations with 2000 chatroom users no one has rumbled the bots, Wightman says. Chatbots scarcely distinguishable from people were predicted by computer pioneer Alan Turing as long ago as 1950, says Aaron Sloman, an artificial intelligence expert at the University of Birmingham in the UK. So he is not surprised the bots are so convincing, especially as their conversation is restricted to a limited topic - like youth culture, say - and is kept relatively short. "It's not going to be too difficult for a chatbot to look like an ordinary chatroom participant to other users who are not even on the lookout for them," he says. To converse realistically, ChatNannies analyses the sentences other users type, breaks them down into verb and noun phrases, and compares them with those in sentences it has previously encountered. ChatNannies includes a neural network program that continually builds up knowledge about how people use language, and employs this information to generate more realistic and plausible patterns of responses. One of its tricks is to use the internet itself as a resource for its information on pop culture. Wightman will not reveal how it judges what is reliable information and what not. He does say, however, that each bot has dozens of parameters that are assigned at random, to give each one a different "personality". "If this software works, then it would be marvellous because there is nothing like this out there," says Chris Atkinson, the internet safety officer with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in the UK. But she warns that paedophiles may outsmart it. "The grooming activity that I have seen doesn't have to be sexual," she says. Wightman says, however, that ChatNannies is sophisticated enough to look for less obvious signs that something is amiss. It also looks for slip-ups and inconsistencies that give away an adult posing as a child. Wightman currently has 100,000 bots chatting away undetected in chatrooms - the most he can generate on the four internet servers at his IT practice. He would like to build more but funding is the sticking point, as he doesn't want anyone to profit financially from his technology. "Some companies have offered fantastic sums of money, but all want technology ownership. And that's something that isn't going to happen," he says. Instead, he hopes eventually to get financial support from government-run organisations that focus on child protection. From issue 2439 of New Scientist magazine, 20 March 2004, page 23 From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sat Jan 29 17:29:37 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 10:29:37 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Technology News: Transforming Humans In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <41FBC801.3070705@solution-consulting.com> "prostrate cancer"? Milliken fought prostrate cancer? Is the author joking? That was an old Li'l Abner joke - when the upright gland shifted, it became the prostrate gland and the man became dishonest. Li'l Abner was unclear about how women could become dishonest. Let's biopsy Barbara Boxer. Lynn 'better humans means better fact checking" Premise Checker wrote: > Transforming Humans > http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Transforming-Humans-40103.html > COMMENTARY: > > By Sonia Arrison > TechNewsWorld > 01/28/05 5:00 AM PT > > -snip- > Other high-profile people are embracing the idea that if we work hard > and smart enough at these impossible-seeming problems, we can find the > solution. Safire is one. Another is Michael Milken. After successfully > fighting a bout of prostrate cancer, Milken applied his efforts to > accelerating scientific discovery. > > -snip- From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sat Jan 29 23:37:44 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 15:37:44 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] "go away" signals In-Reply-To: <200501291913.j0TJDOC03806@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050129233744.77029.qmail@web30807.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>Businesses don't seem to care that they are sending "go away" signals. An opportunity for those who call customers in person :-)<< --Yes, good point. The market will right itself by sinking those companies and promoting ones that value the human element. Part of a larger trend, I believe. Michael ===== My blog: http://shallowreflections.blogspot.com/ Link to my website, including art, flash poetry and fledgling CafePress store (t-shirts, bumperstickers etc): http://www.soulaquarium.net We are stardust, we are golden, We are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden. - Joni Mitchell "We don't fear the unknown. We fear how the unknown might cause us to re-evaluate the known." - Unknown __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - What will yours do? http://my.yahoo.com From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sat Jan 29 23:39:36 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 15:39:36 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] worms In-Reply-To: <200501291913.j0TJDOC03806@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050129233936.63079.qmail@web30809.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>If we execute murderers, why don't we execute the people who write computer worms? It would probably be a better investment.<< --Erm... how about using them to write better virus protection programs? They may not mean well, but they perform a valuable service, probing for security holes before someone seriously malicious like a terrorist learns to exploit them. Michael ===== My blog: http://shallowreflections.blogspot.com/ Link to my website, including art, flash poetry and fledgling CafePress store (t-shirts, bumperstickers etc): http://www.soulaquarium.net We are stardust, we are golden, We are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden. - Joni Mitchell "We don't fear the unknown. We fear how the unknown might cause us to re-evaluate the known." - Unknown __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Sun Jan 30 00:12:21 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 19:12:21 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] On Sunday, Only the Propaganda Will Change In-Reply-To: <01C5049F.D1F9D710.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C5049F.D1F9D710.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <41FC2665.2030706@uconn.edu> The US will withdraw its troops. Iraq will become a Colombia in the middle east. The failing of democracy will be blamed on Iraqs, after all, they are running the country now, aren't they? Oil will continue to be pumped by the colonizer's corporations and any attempt to obtain some profit for the Iraq people will be labeled "comunist nationalization" and strongly oposed by "the market". By the way, Iraq's market is now open for exploitation. The US will be "safer" without Saddam. Oh! And, of course, when democracy do emerges decades in the future. The US will claim to have planted the seed of it when it only delayed the process through the support of a dictator, sanctions and now a war that lead to greater instability. Am I a pessimist? Or is it just the eve of the election that put me in a bad mood? Christian Steve Hovland wrote: > Our man Allawi will "win," just like Karzai did > in Afghanistan. > > We will be told that turnout was strong in spite > of the terrorist threats. One wonders how many > people will actually be dumb enough to risk > their lives for a PR stunt. > > Any stories about violence at the polls or voting > problems will quickly disappear from the corporate > media. > > President Bush will make a flowery speech about > how wonderful democracy is. > > He will say that we are in Iraq at the invitation of > a legitimate government, and that we are only > there to protect a fledgling democracy against > those who hate freedom. Yada yada yada... > > The killing will continue. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych -- ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt...... If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake. - Thomas Jefferson, from a letter he sent in 1798 after the passage of the Sedition Act _____________________________________________________________________ ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Jan 30 00:13:41 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 16:13:41 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] "go away" signals Message-ID: <01C5061D.80491AA0.shovland@mindspring.com> I'm reading a marketing book called "Let Them Eat Cake" by Pam Danziger and she talks about affluent consumers desiring "memorable experiences" rather than more stuff. Certainly good service would count as a memorable experience these days :-) The sense of good service is in part the result of a good business process faithfully executed. Most companies have a long way to go in business process improvement. I spent a few weeks before Christmas at Genentech helping their training group improve about 50 processes, and that is just a small part of the whole. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2005 3:38 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] "go away" signals >>Businesses don't seem to care that they are sending "go away" signals. An opportunity for those who call customers in person :-)<< --Yes, good point. The market will right itself by sinking those companies and promoting ones that value the human element. Part of a larger trend, I believe. Michael ===== My blog: http://shallowreflections.blogspot.com/ Link to my website, including art, flash poetry and fledgling CafePress store (t-shirts, bumperstickers etc): http://www.soulaquarium.net We are stardust, we are golden, We are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden. - Joni Mitchell "We don't fear the unknown. We fear how the unknown might cause us to re-evaluate the known." - Unknown __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - What will yours do? http://my.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Jan 30 00:36:30 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 16:36:30 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] On Sunday, Only the Propaganda Will Change Message-ID: <01C50620.B028A120.shovland@mindspring.com> You are a realist. This afternoon I have been thinking that perhaps no one wants an exit strategy more than the Bushies, because they can see their entire agenda going down in flames. Unfortunately, a retreat under fire is the only option, since most of the strategic mistakes can only be fixed by turning back the clock. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Christian Rauh [SMTP:christian.rauh at uconn.edu] Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2005 4:12 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] On Sunday, Only the Propaganda Will Change The US will withdraw its troops. Iraq will become a Colombia in the middle east. The failing of democracy will be blamed on Iraqs, after all, they are running the country now, aren't they? Oil will continue to be pumped by the colonizer's corporations and any attempt to obtain some profit for the Iraq people will be labeled "comunist nationalization" and strongly oposed by "the market". By the way, Iraq's market is now open for exploitation. The US will be "safer" without Saddam. Oh! And, of course, when democracy do emerges decades in the future. The US will claim to have planted the seed of it when it only delayed the process through the support of a dictator, sanctions and now a war that lead to greater instability. Am I a pessimist? Or is it just the eve of the election that put me in a bad mood? Christian Steve Hovland wrote: > Our man Allawi will "win," just like Karzai did > in Afghanistan. > > We will be told that turnout was strong in spite > of the terrorist threats. One wonders how many > people will actually be dumb enough to risk > their lives for a PR stunt. > > Any stories about violence at the polls or voting > problems will quickly disappear from the corporate > media. > > President Bush will make a flowery speech about > how wonderful democracy is. > > He will say that we are in Iraq at the invitation of > a legitimate government, and that we are only > there to protect a fledgling democracy against > those who hate freedom. Yada yada yada... > > The killing will continue. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych -- ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt...... If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake. - Thomas Jefferson, from a letter he sent in 1798 after the passage of the Sedition Act _____________________________________________________________________ ???????????????????????????????$o$??????????????????????????????????? _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 30 16:37:15 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 11:37:15 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: Serious play's feat of clay Message-ID: Serious play's feat of clay http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2108252&window_type=print Tanya Harrod 23 July 2004 A SECRET HISTORY OF CLAY. From Gauguin to Gormley. Tate Liverpool, until August 30 A SECRET HISTORY OF CLAY. By Simon Groom. 107pp. Tate Publishing. ?16.99. - 1 854 37557 1 A Secret History of Clay: From Gauguin to Gormley is intended to be a groundbreaking exhibition that changes the way we look at art. It challenges the neglect of clay (fired, glazed clay in particular) by art critics and art historians. It is a hopeful show, which argues that artists are now turning to ceramics' messy materiality in reaction against the increasing virtuality of digital culture. In this brave new world Grayson Perry's 2003 Turner Prize, bestowed on a room full of pots, signifies a change of heart, an abandonment of the fustian hierarchies which have marginalized ceramics. But for all its polemical intent, A Secret History of Clay in practice tells a rather familiar story, in which artists' claywork is seen as inherently more interesting than anything made by ceramicists. Studio pottery, an artistic discipline born in the early part of the twentieth century, is almost excluded. A Secret History includes eighty male artists and a handful of women - no Ruth Duckworth, Viola Frey, Anne Krause, Maria Martinez, Beatrice Wood or Betty Woodman; no Ladi Kwali, Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, Dionyse Carmen, Lucie Rie, Alison Britton or Carol McNicoll. These names may be unfamiliar - because the real secret history is that of studio pottery where women rank as equals. Nonetheless, despite its essential conservatism, this is a pleasurable exhibition. Artists' forays into clay, and indeed into any kind of applied art, are invariably excluded from exhibitions and monographs, and are rarely displayed in public collections. The exhibition opens with "Fountain", Marcel Duchamp's famous ready-made of 1917. To be quite accurate, what we see is a 1964 version, one of several authorized by Duchamp after the "original" of 1917 was lost. For Simon Groom, the exhibition's organizer, "Fountain" encapsulates a central problem. It is one of the most recognizable icons of twentieth-century art. It is also made of ceramic, a fact that Groom believes has been "conceptualized out of existence". While it is true that, for most people, Duchamp's urinal is not primarily seen as a specifically ceramic work, there are more important reasons for making "Fountain" a curtain-raiser. The exhibition is dominated by vessels of various kinds, revealing that artists find the medium's family of shapes engaging at a deep level. In effect, jugs, platters and vases are shown here as ready-mades, offering a repertoire of familiar forms - as Kenneth Silver once pointed out in an illuminating essay on Picasso. Ceramics therefore have the capacity to act as inspirational objets trouves, ripe for re-representation. Making pots also once stood for a radical anti-academicism, an alternative to the stranglehold of easel painting and sculptures perched on pedestals. In A Secret History of Clay, this daring rejection of mainstream art is made manifest by Paul Gauguin's haunting hand-built vases, by a monumental gesturally decorated pot and platter by the Danish artist Thorvald Bindesboll, and by the Fauves' engagement with tin glaze decoration in the form of some glowing colouristic experiments by Georges Rouault and Maurice de Vlaminck. Gauguin did not do well out of his foray into ceramics and was bitter about the way in which the public appeared to prefer safer kinds of experimentation in the pure forms of Auguste Delaherche's handsome neo-Oriental pots. Matisse, weakly represented in A Secret History, learnt new colouristic freedoms and new ways of organizing space from decorating pots, but his ceramics were and remain little discussed. Like Matisse, Picasso used ceramics to investigate painterly and sculptural space, returning with playful magnificence to ideas first addressed in his 1914 domestic-scale sculpture "The Glass of Absinthe". But, notoriously, the post-war ceramics of Picasso and of Miro were summarily dismissed by an institutionalized avant garde led by North American critics and curators. Gravitas is evidently an issue. Serious play is hard to capture: see, for example, the ceramic activities of the CoBrA group in the 1950s. Ironically, the energy comes over best in photographs - of impromptu outdoor shows, of Asger Jorn driving his scooter over a bed of clay to create a mural. The outcomes look a bit stranded at Tate Liverpool, even if the intense chaotic quality of CoBrA ceramics stood for everything that was lacking in the encroaching technocracy and warrior politics of the Cold War. The exhibition includes expressively modelled ceramic sculptures by Lucio Fontana. When Fontana showed Brancusi one of his polychrome ceramics in 1937 he was told that it was not sculpture. And indeed at that date it must have seemed the antithesis of direct carving or of truth to materials. Fontana's extraordinary ceramic output is only becoming as well known as his famous cut-and-slashed canvases because of the diminution of surprisingly persistent formalist standards, such as those of Brancusi. A Secret History brilliantly registers the messy fluidity of clay and the way in which it demands our engagement. Halfway through the show we encounter three great piles of oil clay ("Phase of Nothingness", by the Japanese artist Nobuo Sekine): seductive masses which invite us to touch and handle them. The show does not include the more conventional modern Japanese masters of ceramics -Hamada Shoji or even Rosanjin - but it demonstrates that, even at their most iconoclastic, Japanese artists possess a heightened sensitivity to the medium. But the unforgettable image of Kazuo Shiraga naked and wrestling with a pile of clay in 1955 is matched by the American Jim Melchert's haunting video of his 1972 "Changes" performance piece, in which he and his companions dipped their heads in liquid clay and sat about while it dried into a series of melancholy masks. This part of the show suggests that ceramics demand visceral commitment; another video of 2002 records a day that the young artists Roger Hiorns, Mark Titchner and Gary Webb spent together in a studio, fighting it out with a ton of clay. The show ends in a final underlit space in which the curator, Groom, confronts the spectre that haunts our appreciation of ceramics - that of a Victorian twilight zone of figurines and garnitures, cake stands and dusty souvenirs, half-glimpsed behind glass fronted cabinets. A job lot of Victorian furniture supports ironically framed ceramic works by Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Andrew Lord, Francis Uprichard and James Turrell. As an environment it works well for Uprichard's array of car-boot sale stoneware to which have been added sinister animalier lids. Edmund De Waal's Modernist variant on the eighteenth-century porcelain room looks less happy in this setting, and it fails to do justice to the other artists, even to Sherman's and Koons's historicizing exuberance. It is an odd finale, a return of the repressed; a reminder, too, that Freud's 1917 essay "On the Uncanny" is currently required reading for curators. The exhibition's subtitle - From Gauguin to Gormley - suggests a visit to Antony Gormley's "Field" on the floor below. It is one of several versions, this "addition" made in North America. Gormley's mannikins are always moving to contemplate, but what about the people who made them? An exhibition that begins with playful rebelliousness ends with something more authoritarian. "Field", in all its guises, is made by, typically, co-opted OAPs, house-wives and children. They are not there to express themselves, rather they are given the chance to experience the pleasures of mass production by hand. "Field" is almost an anomaly in the context of A Secret History as a whole - not as creatively humane as it looks, and ultimately remote from the anarchic, spontaneous engagements to be found in the rest of this thought-provoking display. From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 30 16:54:26 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 11:54:26 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Christine Ruolto: Individual and Social Psychologies of the Gothic Message-ID: Christine Ruolto: Individual and Social Psychologies of the Gothic English 981 at the University of Virginia [Sarah found this when inspired by the previous TLS review, "Serious play's feat of clay." The several parts of the course desciption are concatenated. For more, go to http://www.virginia.edu and do a Google search on the site for Ruotolo and for "psychologies of the gothic."] Individual and Social Psychologies: Introduction http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.intro.html The Gothic novel springs forth rather suddenly as the increasing preoccupation with individual consciousness that begins in the early 18th century collides with the unique cultural anxieties of the late 18th century. The effect of the former has already been well-established in literature, as Richardson and other "novelists of sensibility" invest their characters with unprecedented psychological depth. The Gothic novelists are less skillful and subtle in their depictions, and are often accused of populating their novels with stock or "flat" characters. Yet the emotions of these characters are externalized in a radical new way; their deepest passions and fears are literalized as other characters, supernatural phenomena, and even inanimate objects. At the same time, the nature of the fear represented in these novels--fear of imprisonment or entrapment, of rape and personal violation, of the triumph of evil over good and chaos over order--seems to reflect a specific historical moment characterized by increasing disillusionment with Enlightenment rationality and by bloody revolutions in America and France. The excerpts arranged below, therefore, are united by a focus on the psychological aspects of the Gothic in the broadest possible sense. They address such complex and overlapping themes as the mental and emotional portrait of the characters within the novels, the deep cultural anxieties that the novels reflect (and often attempt to work through), and the intense psychological responses that these works seek to elicit from their readers. The critical excerpts are therefore not necessarily psychoanalytic in their approach; they draw from a wide variety of structuralist, historicist, and reader-response traditions as well. Further introduction is provided at the beginning of each of the four sub-sections. _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ [1] 1. Terror and horror Primary excerpts: [2]Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho [3]Matthew Lewis, The Monk [4]William Beckford, Vathek [5]Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Secondary excerpts: [6]Ann Radcliffe, "On the Supernatural in Poetry" [7]Devendra Varma, The Gothic Flame [8]Robert Hume, "Gothic versus Romantic" [9]Robert Platzner, "'Gothic versus Romantic': A Rejoinder" _________________________________________________________________ [10] 2. Dreams of the Uncanny Primary excerpts: [11]Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho [12]Matthew Lewis, The Monk [13]Ann Radcliffe, The Italian [14]Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Secondary excerpts: [15]Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" [16]Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic [17]Terry Castle, "The Spectralization of the Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho" [18]Peter Brooks, "Virtue and Terror: The Monk [19]Margaret Anne Doody, "Deserts, Ruins, and Troubled Waters: Female Dreams in Fiction and the Development of the Gothic Novel" [20]Aija Ozolins, "Dreams and Doctrines: Dual Strands in Frankenstein" _________________________________________________________________ [21] 3. Architecture of the Mind Primary excerpts: [22]Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho [23]Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer [24]Matthew Lewis, The Monk [25]Ann Radcliffe, The Italian Secondary excerpts: [26]Norman Holland and Leona Sherman, "Gothic Possibilities" [27]Philip Hallie, The Paradox of Cruelty [28]Peter Brooks, "Virtue and Terror: The Monk" [29]Max Byrd, "The Madhouse, the Whorehouse, and the Convent" [30]Jacques Blondel, "On Metaphorical Prisons" _________________________________________________________________ [31] 4. Pscyho-social issues Primary excerpts: [32]Matthew Lewis, The Monk [33]Mary Shelley, Frankenstein [34]William Godwin, Caleb Williams [35]Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto [36]Ann Radcliffe, The Italian Secondary excerpts: [37]Marquis de Sade, Idee sur les Romans [38]Ronald Paulson, "Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution" [39]Frederick Karl, The Adversary Literature [40]David Punter, The Literature of Terror [41]Stephen Bernstein, "Form and Ideology in the Gothic Novel" References 1. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html 2. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html#udolpho 3. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html#monk 4. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html#vathek 5. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html#frank 6. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html#radcliffe 7. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html#varma 8. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html#hume 9. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html#platzner 10. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html 11. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html#udolpho 12. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html#monk 13. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html#italian 14. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html#frank 15. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html#freud 16. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html#todorov 17. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html#castle 18. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html#brooks 19. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html#doody 20. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html#ozolins 21. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html 22. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html#udolpho 23. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html#melmoth 24. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html#monk 25. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html#italian 26. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html#holland 27. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html#hallie 28. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html#brooks 29. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html#byrd 30. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html#blondel 31. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html 32. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html 33. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html#frank 34. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html#caleb 35. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html#otranto 36. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html#italian 37. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html#sade 38. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html#paulson 39. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html#karl 40. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html#punter 41. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html#bernstein ------------- Terror and Horror http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html Although the novels commonly referred to as "Gothic" are united by certain thematic and stylistic conventions, they seem to vary a great deal in the emotional responses they seek to elicit from readers. Ann Radcliffe herself was among the first to draw an affective dividing line down the middle of the newly emergent genre. Conservative and rational in her own approach to the Gothic, Radcliffe clearly objected to the shocking scenes depicted in The Monk, and it is widely believed that she wrote The Italian as a protesting response to Lewis' novel. She elucidated her stance in an 1826 essay entitled "On the Supernatural in Poetry," in which draws upon Edmund Burke in order to distinguish between terror and horror in literature. She argues that terror is characterized by "obscurity" or indeterminacy in its treatment of potentially horrible events; it is this indeterminacy that leads the reader toward the sublime. Horror, in contrast, "nearly annihilates" the reader's responsive capacity with its unambiguous displays of atrocity. Although Radcliffe uses examples from Shakespeare, rather than Gothic novels, to articulate her position, later critics have consistently adopted the terms "terror" and "horror" to distinguish between the two major strains of the Gothic represented by Radcliffe and Lewis respectively. Devendra Varma was one of the first critics to seize upon this distinction, characterizing the difference between terror and horror as the difference between "awful apprehension and sickening realization," with Radcliffe the sole representative of the former and Beckford, Maturin, Shelley and Godwin allied with Lewis in representing the latter. Robert Hume has also embraced this distinction, although in slightly different terms: he argues that the horror novel replaces the ambiguous physical details of the terror novel with a more disturbing moral and psychological ambiguity. In a sharp rebuttal to Hume, Robert Platzner has questioned the rigid categories of terror and horror, quoting from Udolpho to demonstrate that Radcliffe herself often crosses the line between the two. He calls for a more methodical and text- oriented approach to characterizing the Gothic novel. For related discussions, see the section on Burke's notion of [1]the sublime and the section on [2]the Female Gothic. _________________________________________________________________ >From The Mysteries of Udolpho A return of the noise again disturbed her; it seemed to come from that part of the room which communicated with the private staircase, and she instantly remembered the odd circumstance of the door having been fastened, during the preceding night, by some unknown hand. Her late alarming suspicion concerning its communication also occurred to her. Her heart became faint with terror. Half raising herself from the bed, and gently drawing aside the curtain, she looked towards the door of the staircase, but the lamp that burned on the hearth spread so feeble a light through the apartment, that the remote parts of it were lost in shadow. The noise, however, shich she was convinced came from the door, continued. It seemed like that made by the undrawing of rusty bolts, and often ceased, and was then renewed more gently, as if the hand that occasioned it was restrained by a fear of discovery. While Emily kept her eyes fixed on the spot, she saw the door move, and then slowly open, and perceived something enter the room, but the extreme duskiness prevented her distinguishing what it was. Almost fainting with terror, she had yet sufficient command over herself to check the shriek that was escaping from her lips, and letting the curtain drop from her hand, continued to observe in silence the motions of the mysterious form she saw. It seemed to glide along the remote obscurity of the apartment, then paused, and, as it approached the hearth, she perceived, in the stronger light, what appeared to be a human figure. Certain remembrance now struck upon her heart, and almost subdued the feeble remains of her spirits; she continued, however, to watch the figure, which remained for some time motionless, but then, advancing slowly towards the bed, [it] stood silently at the feet where the curtains, being a little open, allowed her still to see it; terror, however, had now deprived her of the power of discrimination, as well as that of utterance. _________________________________________________________________ >From The Monk [A light] proceeded from a small Lamp which was placed upon a heap of stones, and whose faint and melancholy rays served rather to point out, than dispell the horrors of a narrow gloomy dungeon formed in one side of the Cavern; It also showed several other recesses of similar construction, but whose depth was buried in obscurity. Coldly played the light upon the damp walls, whose dew-stained surface gave back a feeble reflection. A thick and pestilential fog clouded the height of the vaulted dungeon. As Lorenzo advanced, He felt a piercing chillness spread itself through his veins. The frequent groans still engaged him to move forwards. He turned towards them, and by the Lamp's glimmering beams beheld in a corner of the loathsome abode, a Creature stretched upon a bed of straw, so wretched, so emaciated, so pale, that He doubted to think her Woman. She was half-naked: Her long dishevelled hair fell in disorder over her face, and almost entirely concealed it. One wasted Arm hung listlessly upon a tattered rug, which covered her convulsed and shivering limbs: The Other was wrapped round a small bundle, and held it closely to her bosom. A large Rosary lay near her: Opposite to her was a Crucifix, on which She bent her sunk eyes fixedly, and by her side stood a Basket and a small Earthen Pitcher. Lorenzo stopped: He was petrified with horror. He gazed upon the miserable Object with disgust and pity. He trembled at the spectacle; He grew sick at heart: His strength failed him, and his limbs were unable to support his weight. _________________________________________________________________ Ann Radcliffe, "On the Supernatural in Poetry," The New Monthly Magazine (1826): 145-52. [Ed. note: Radcliffe's essay is in the form of a dialogue between Willoughton, "the apostle of Shakespeare," and Mr. Simpson, "the representative of Philistine common sense."] [W____:]"Who ever suffered for the ghost of Banquo, the gloomy and sublime kind of terror, which that of Hamlet calls forth? though the appearance of Banquo, at the high festival of Macbeth, not only tells us that he is murdered, but recalls to our minds the fate of the gracious Duncan, laid in silence and death by those who, in this very scene, are reveling in his spoils. There, though deep pity mingles with our surprise and horror, we experience a far less degree of interest, and that interest too of an inferior kind. The union of grandeur and obscurity, which Mr. Burke describes as a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror, and which causes the sublime, is to be found only in Hamlet; or in scenes where circumstances of the same kind prevail." "That may be," said Mr. S____, "and I perceive you are not one of those who contend that obscurity does not make any part of the sublime." "They must be men of very cold imaginations," said W____, "with whom certainty is more terrible than surmise. Terror and Horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend, that neither Shakespeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one; and where lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil? _________________________________________________________________ Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966). Mrs. Radcliffe, a mistress of hints, associations, silence, and emptiness, only half-revealing her picture leaves the rest to the imagination. She knows, as Burke has asserted, that obscurity is a strong ingredient in the sublime; but she knew the sharp distinction between Terror and Horror, which was unknown to Burke. "Terror and horror...are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them...; and where lies the great difference between terror and horror, but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil?" Sounds unexplained, sights indistinctly caught, dim shadows endowed with motion by the flicker of the firelight or the shimmer of the moonbeam invoke superstitious fear. "To the warm imagination," she writes in The Mysteries of Udolpho, "the forms which float half-veiled in darkness afford a higher delight than the most distinct scenery the Sun can show." _________________ The chords of terror which had tremulously shuddered beneath Mrs. Radcliffe's gentle fingers were now smitten with a new vehemence. The intense school of the Schauer- Romantiks improvised furious and violent themes in the orchestra of horror.... The contrast between the work and personalities of Mrs. Radcliffe and ' Monk' Lewis serves to illustrate the two distinct streams of the Gothic novel: the former representing the Craft of Terror, the latter and his followers comprising the chambers of Horror.... The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse. Professor McKillop, quoting from Mrs. Radcliffe, said that " obscurity [in Terror] . . . leaves the imagination to act on a few hints that truth reveals to it, . . . obscurity leaves something for the imagination to exaggerate". Burke held that "To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary", and added that, ". . . darkness, being originally an idea of terror, was chosen as a fit scene for such terrible representations ". Burke did not distinguish between the subtle gradations of Terror and Horror; he related only Terror to Beauty, and probably did not conceive of the beauty of the Horrid, the grotesque power of something ghastly, too vividly imprinted on the mind and sense. Terror thus creates an intangible atmosphere of spiritual psychic dread, a certain superstitious shudder at the other world. Horror resorts to a cruder presentation of the macabre: by an exact portrayal of the physically horrible and revolting, against a far more terrible background of spiritual gloom and despair. Horror appeals to sheer dread and repulsion, by brooding upon the gloomy and the sinister, and lacerates the nerves by establishing actual cutaneous contact with the supernatural... Each writer of the intense school contributed a grotesque and gruesome theme of horror to the Schauer-Romantik phase of the Gothic novel. They wrote stories of black-magic and lust, of persons in pursuit of the elixir virtue, of insatiable curiosity and unpardonable sins, of contracts with the Devil, of those who manufacture monsters in their laboratories, tales of skull-headed ladies, of the dead arising from their graves to feed upon the blood of the innocent and beautiful, or who walk about in the Hall of Eblis, carrying their burning hearts in their hands.... The baleful hall of Eblis, "the abode of ve ngeance and despair", is pictured in the full effulgence of infernal majesty. It conveys to us the horror of the most ghastly convulsions and screams that may not be smothered. Here everyone carries within him a heart tormented in flames, to wander in an eternity of unabating anguish... _________________________________________________________________ >From Vathek In the midst of this immense [Hall of Eblis], a vast multitude was incessantly passing, who severally kept their right hands on their hearts, without once regarding anything around them: they had all the livid paleness of death. Their eyes, deep sunk in their sockets, resembled those phosphoric meteors that glimmer by night in places of interment. Some stalked slowly on, absorbed in profound reverie; some, shrieking with agony, ran furiously about like tigers wounded with poisoned arrows; whilst others, grinding their teeth in rage, foamed along more frantic than the wildest maniac. They all avoided each other; and, though surrounded by a multitude that no one could number, each wandered at random unheedful of the rest, as if alone on a desert where no foot had trodden. _________________ Almost at the same instant, the same voice announced to the caliph, Nouronihar, the four princes, and the princess, the awful and irrevocable decree. Their hearts immediately took fire, and they at once lost the most precious gift of heaven-- HOPE. These unhappy beings recoiled, with looks of the most furious distraction. Vathek beheld in the eyes of Nouronihar nothing but rage and vengeance; nor could she discern aught in his, but aversion and despair. The two princes who were friends, and, till that moment, had preserved their attachment, shrunk back, gnashing their teeth with mutual and unchangeable hatred. Kalilah and his sister made reciprocal gestures of imprecation; all testified their horror for each other by the most ghastly convulsions, and screams that could not be smothered. All severally plunged themselves into the accursed multitude, there to wander in an eternity of unabating anguish. _________________________________________________________________ >From Frankenstein How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips. The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. _________________________________________________________________ Robert Hume, "Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel," PMLA 84 (1969): pp. 282-290. Terror dependent on suspense or dread is the modus operandi of the novels of Walpole and Radcliffe. The Castle of Otranto holds the reader's attention through dread of a series of terrible possibilities-Theodore's execution, the (essentially) incestuous marriage of Manfred and Isabella, the casting-off of Hippolita, and so on. Mrs. Radcliffe's use of dramatic suspension is similar but more sophisticated. She raises vague but unsettling possibilities and leaves them dangling for hundreds of pages. Sometimes the effect is artificial, as in the case of the black-veiled "picture" at Udolpho, but in raising and sustaining the disquieting possibility of an affair between St. Aubert and the Marchioness de Villeroi, for in stance, she succeeds splendidly. Mrs. Radcliffe's easy manipulation of drawn-out suspense holds the reader's attention through long books with slight plots. The method of Lewis, Beckford, Mary Shelley, and Maturin is considerably different. Instead of holding the reader's attention through suspense or dread they attack him frontally with events that shock or disturb him. Rather than elaborating possibilities which never materialize, they heap a succession of horrors upon the reader. Lewis set out, quite deliberately, to overgo Mrs. Radcliffe. The Monk (1796), like Vathek (1786), Frankenstein, and Melmoth the Wanderer, gains much of its effect from murder, torture, and rape. The difference from terror-Gothic is considerable; Mrs. Radcliffe merely threatens these things, and Walpole uses violent death only at the beginning and end of his book. The reader is prepared for neither of these deaths, which serve only to catch the attention and to produce a climax, respectively. Obviously a considerable shift has occurred. Is its purpose merely ever greater shock? Or has the Gothic novelists' aesthetic theory changed? Terror-Gothic works on the supposition that a reader who is repelled will close his mind (if not the book) to the sublime feelings which may be realized by the mixture of pleasure and pain induced by fear. Horror-Gothic assumes that if events have psychological consistency, even within repulsive situations, the reader will find himself involved beyond recall. This change is probably related to a general shift in conceptions of good and evil.... Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe maintain the proprieties of a strict distinction between good and evil, though in Manfred and Montoni they created villain- heroes whose force of character gives them a certain fearsome attractiveness, even within this moral context. But with the villain-heroes of horror-Gothic we enter the realm of the morally ambiguous. Ambrosio, Victor Frankenstein, and Melmoth are men of extraordinary capacity whom circumstance turns increasingly to evil purposes. They are not merely monsters, and only a bigoted reading makes them out as such. To put the change from terror-Gothic to horror-Gothic in its simplest terms, the suspense of external circumstance is de- emphasized in favor of increasing psychological concern with moral ambiguity. The horror-Gothic writers postulated the relevance of such psychology to every reader; they wrote for a reader who could say with Goethe that he had never heard of a crime which he could not imagine himself committing. The terror novel prepared the way for a fiction which though more overtly horrible is at the same time more serious and more profound. It is with Frankenstein and Melmoth the Wanderer that the Gothic novel comes fully into its own. _________________________________________________________________ Robert L. Platzner, "'Gothic versus Romantic': A Rejoinder," PMLA 86 (1971): 266-74. [W]hen Mr. Hume, in search of a theoretical model of the mechanism of Gothic sensibility, turns to the Burkean concept of the sublime and its attendant emotions, he finds in the distinction between terror and horror not only a satisfactory modus operandi for Radcliffean Romance but an adequate principle of differentiation for all Gothic Romance after Radcliffe. What I would object to in all this is not the very existence of an esthetic of terror or even the fact of its importance to Mrs. Radcliffe and her contemporaries....[n]o, what I propose to students of the Gothic is that any reinterpretation of this genre must proceed beyond or outside of the constricting framework of late-eighteenth-century esthetic theory, for if we are to establish the groundwork for a new appraisal of the Gothic imagination we will have to provide for the theoretical differentiation of mythopoetic tendencies that cannot be accounted for in terms of either "terror" or "horror". I would suggest, further, that there are reasons for doubting the final adequacy of neo-Burkean sensationalism, or any of the distinctions it makes possible between gradations of terror and their source, even if we restrict ourselves to the Radcliffe- Lewis-Maturin era. I, at least, remain unconvinced that Mrs. Radcliffe's rationale for terror is in fact the governing principle behind all of her work. It appears, rather, that far from never crossing the boundary between terror and horror, Mrs. Radcliffe compulsively places her heroine in situations of overwhelming anxiety in which a gradual shift from terror to horror is inescapable. Let us agree, for example, to dismiss the notorious "veil" scene as too crudely melodramatic to be properly representative, and focus on a more modestly terrifying episode that occurs sometime later in the same chapter: "A return of the noise again disturbed her; it seemed to come from that part of the room which communicated with the private staircase, and she instantly remembered the odd circumstance of the door having been fastened, during the preceding night, by some unknown hand. Her late alarming suspicion concerning its communication also occurred to her. Her heart became faint with terror....she saw the door move, and then slowly open, and perceived something enter the room, but the extreme duskiness prevented her distinguishing what it was. Almost fainting with terror, she had yet sufficient command over herself to check the shriek that was escaping from her lips....but then, advancing slowly towards the bed, [it] stood silently at the feet where the curtains, being a little open, allowed her still to see it; terror, however, had now deprived her of the power of discrimination, as well as that of utterance." How far is Emily from that annihilation of sensibilities that is characteristic only of pure "horror"--a hairbreadth? What is the practical utility of insisting upon a critical distinction that belies rather than discloses the dramatic character of events or sensations? No doubt some such dichotomy between titillation and revulsion is necessary to express the shift in tone and subject one encounters as one moves from the school of Radcliffe to the Schauerroman of Lewis or Maturin and its singular preoccupation with the perverse and the occult. Once again, however, I find (as in the relation between Gothicism and Romanticism) the continuity between Udolpho and The Monk at least as instructive as the discontinuity. Regarded in this light, Lewis' marginally pornographic Romance is but an actualizing of the incipient or imagined horrors of an Emily or an Adeline. Put another way, the paranoiac apprehensions of the Radcliffean heroine become the real crimes of an Ambrosio, no slight distinction to be sure. But transcending even such a distinction is the undeniable presence of evil, whether manifest as free-floating dread or demonic temptation. References 1. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/zach.sublime1.html#burke2 2. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/ami.intro.html --------------- The Uncanny and the Fantastic http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html The German word "unheimlich" is considered untranslatable; our rough English equivalent, "uncanny", is itself difficult to define. This indescribable quality is actually an integral part of our understanding of the uncanny experience, which is terrifying precisely because it can not be adequately explained. Rather than attempting a definition, most critics resort to describing the uncanny experience, usually by way of the dream-like visions of doubling and death that invariably seem to accompany it. These recurrent themes, which trigger our most primitive desires and fears, are the very hallmarks of Gothic fiction. According to Freud's description, the uncanny "derives its terror not from something externally alien or unknown but--on the contrary--from something strangely familiar which defeats our efforts to separate ourselves from it" (Morris). Freud discusses how an author can evoke an uncanny response on the part of the reader by straddling the line between reality and unreality within the fiction itself. In The Fantastic, Todorov goes to some length to distinguish his structuralist approach to this genre from a Freudian psychoanalytic approach; nonetheless, he shares many of Freud's conclusions, especially in attributing literary terror to the collapsing of the psychic boundaries of self and other, life and death, reality and unreality. Although Freud never mentions Gothic fiction in his essay, and Todorov partially excludes it from his, critics of the Gothic have drawn heavily upon both of them, often in conjunction with one another. Terry Castle's article on the "other" in Radcliffe's novels and Peter Brook's essay on The Monk are two examples of this combined theoretical approach. Although Margaret Anne Doody does not mention Freud or Todorov specifically, her essay--which describes how Radcliffe blurs the distinction between dreams and reality within her novels--seems indebted to both of them. This emphasis on dreams is also essential to any analysis of Frankenstein, a text which is itself the product of a dream-vision and which seems to capture the very essence of the uncanny. See also the excerpt on the Freudian uncanny by [1]David Morris. _________________________________________________________________ Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. & trs. James Strachey, vol. XVII (London: Hogarth, 1953), pp. 219-252. When we proceed to review the things, persons, impressions, events and situations which are able to arouse in us a feeling of the uncanny in a particularly forcible and definite form, the first requirement is obviously to select a suitable example to start. Jentsch has taken as a very good instance 'doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate'; and he refers in this connection to the impression made by waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata....Jentsch writes: 'In telling a story, one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton, and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately." That, as we have said, would quickly dissipate the peculiar emotional effect of the thing. _________________ The theme of the 'double' has been very thoroughly treated by Otto Rank (1914). He has gone into the connections which the 'double' has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, with guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and with the fear of death; but he also lets in a flood of light on the surprising evolution of the idea. For the 'double' was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an 'energetic denial of the power of death', as Rank says; and probably the 'immortal' soul was the first 'double' of the body.... Such ideas...have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man. But when this stage has been surmounted, the 'double' reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death...The 'double' has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion the gods turned into demons. _________________ Many people experience the feeling [of the uncanny] in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts....There is scarcely any other matter, however, upon which our thoughts and feelings have changed so little since the very earliest times, and in which discarded forms have been so completely preserved under a thin disguise, as our relation to death. Two things account for our conservatism: the strength of our original emotional reaction to death and the insufficiency of our scientific knowledge about it. Biology has not yet been able to decide whether death is the inevitable fate of every living being or whether it is only a regular but yet perhaps avoidable event in life. It is true that the statement 'All men are mortal' is paraded in text-books of logic as an example of a general proposition; but no human being really grasps it, and our unconscious has as little use now as it ever had for the idea of its own mortality....Since almost all of us still think as savages do on this topic, it is no matter for surprise that the primitive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface on any provocation.... _________________ The uncanny as it is depicted in literature, in stories and imaginative productions, merits in truth a separate discussion. Above all, it is a much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life, for it contains the whole of the latter and something more besides, something that cannot be found in real life. The contrast between what has been repressed and what has been surmounted cannot be transposed on to the uncanny in fiction without profound modification; for the realm of phantasy depends for its effect on the fact that its content is not submitted to reality-testing. The somewhat paradoxical result is that in the first place a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life; and in the second place that there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life. The imaginative writer has this license among many others, that he can select his world of representation so that it either coincides with the realities we are familiar with or departs from them in what particulars he pleases. We accept his ruling in every case. In fairy tales, for instance, the world of reality is left behind from the very start, and the animistic system of beliefs is frankly adopted. Wish-fulfillments, secret powers, omnipotence of thoughts, animation of inanimate objects, all the elements so common in fairy stories, can exert no uncanny influence here; for, as we have learnt, that feeling cannot arise unless there is a conflict of judgment as to whether things which have been 'surmounted' and are regarded as incredible may not, after all, be possible; and this problem is eliminated from the outset by the postulates of the world of fairy tales.... The situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality. In this case he accepts as well all the conditions operating to produce uncanny feelings in real life; and everything that would have an uncanny effect in reality has it in his story. But in this case he can even increase his effect and multiply it far beyond what could happen in reality, by bringing about events which never or very rarely happen in fact. In doing this he is in a sense betraying us to the superstitiousness which we have ostensibly surmounted; he deceives us by promising to give us the sober truth, and then after all overstepping it. We react to his inventions as we would have reacted to real experiences; by the time we have seen through his trick it is already too late and the author has achieved his object. But it must be added that his success is not unalloyed. We retain a feeling of dissatisfaction, a kind of grudge against the attempted deceit. _________________________________________________________________ Tsvetan Todorov, The Fantastic (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975). The fantastic requires the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader's role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work--in the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as "poetic" interpretations.... The fantastic, we have seen, lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and character, who must decide whether or not what they perceive derives from "reality" as it exists in the common opinion. At the story's end, the reader makes a decision even if the character does not; he opts for one solution or the other, and thereby emerges from the fantastic. If he decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we say that the work belongs to another genre: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous. The fantastic therefore leads a life full of dangers, and may evaporate at any moment. It seems to be located on the frontier of two genres, the marvelous and the uncanny, rather than to be an autonomous genre. One of the great periods of supernatural literature, that of the Gothic novel, seems to confirm this observation. Indeed, we generally distinguish, within the literary Gothic, two tendencies: that of the supernatural explained (the "uncanny"), as it appears in the novels of Clara Reeves and Ann Radcliffe; and that of the supernatural accepted (the "marvelous"), which is characteristic of the works of Horace Walpole, M. G. Lewis, and Maturin. Here we find not the fantastic in the strict sense, only genres adjacent to it. More precisely, the effect of the fantastic is certainly produced, but during only a portion of our reading: in Ann Radcliffe, up to the moment when we are sure that the supernatural events will receive no explanation. Once we have finished reading, we understand--in both cases--that what we call the fantastic has not existed. _________________ One might say that the common denominator of the two themes, metamorphosis and pan-determinism, is the collapse of the limit between matter and mind Thus we may advance a hypothesis as to a generating principle of all the themes collected [in this study]: the transformation from mind to matter has become possible. ...[In fantastic literature] a character will be readily multiplied....The multiplication of personality, taken literally, is an immediate consequence of the possible transition between matter and mind: we are several persons mentally, we become so physically. Another consequence of the same principle has still greater extension: this is the effacement of the limits between subject and object. The rational schema represents the human being as a subject entering into relations with other persons or with things that remain external to him, and which have the status of objects. The literature of the fantastic disturbs this abrupt separation. We hear music, but there is no longer an instrument external to the hearer and producing sounds... _________________________________________________________________ >From The Mysteries of Udolpho Retired to her lonely cabin, her melancholy thoughts still hovered round the body of her deceased parent; and, when she sunk into a kind of slumber, the images of her waking mind still haunted her fancy. She thought she saw her father approaching her with a benign countenance; then smiling mournfully, and pointing upwards, his lips moved; but, instead of words, she heard sweet music borne on the distant air, and presently saw his features glow with the mild rapture of a superior being. The strain seemed to swell louder, and she awoke. The vision was gone; but music yet came to her ear in strains such as angels might breathe. She doubted, listened, raised herself in the bed, and again listened. It was music, and not an illusion of her imagination. After a solemn, steady harmony, it paused--then rose again, in mournful sweetness--and then died, in a cadence that seemed to bear away the listening soul to heaven. She instantly remembered the music of the preceding night, with the strange circumstances related by La Voisin, and the affecting conversation it had led to concerning the state of departed spirits. All that St. Aubert had said on that subject now pressed on her heart, and overwhelmed it. What a change in a few hours! He who then could only conjecture, was now made acquainted with the truth--was himself become one of the departed! As she listened, she was chilled with superstitious awe; her tears stopped; and she arose and went to the window. All without was obscured in shade; but Emily, turning her eyes from the massy darkness of the woods, whose waving outline appeared on the horizon, saw, on the left, that effulgent planet which the old man had pointed out, setting over the woods. She remembered what he had said concerning it; and the music now coming at intervals on the air, she unclosed the casement to listen to the strains, that soon gradually sunk to a greater distance, and tried to discover whence they came. The obscurity prevented her from distinguishing any object on the green platform below; and the sounds became fainter and fainter, till they softened into silence. She listened, but they returned no more. _________________________________________________________________ Terry Castle, "The Spectralization of the Other in the Mysteries of Udolpho," in The New 18th Century, ed. Nussbaum and Brown (Routledge: New York, 1987). To be a Radcliffean hero or heroine in one sense means just this: to be "haunted," to find oneself obsessed by spectral images of those one loves. One sees in the mind's eye those who are absent; one is befriended and consoled by phantoms of the beloved. Radcliffe makes it clear how such phantasmata arise....The "ghost" may be of someone living or dead. Mourners, not surprisingly, are particularly prone to such mental visions. Early in the novel, for instance, Emily's father, St. Aubert, is reluctant to leave his estate, even for his health, because the continuing "presence" of his dead wife has "sanctified every surrounding scene" (22)....After St. Aubert dies and Emily has held a vigil over his corpse, her fancy is "haunted" by his living image: "She thought she saw her father approaching her with a benign countenance; then, smiling mournfully and pointing upwards, his lips moved, but instead of words, she heard sweet music borne on the distant air, and presently saw his features glow with the mild rapture of a superior being" (83). Entering his room when she returns to La Vallee, "the idea of him rose so distinctly to her mind, that she almost fancied she saw him before her" (95). But lovers--those who mourn, as it were, for the living--are subject to similar experiences. The orphaned Emily, about to be carried off by her aunt to Tholouse, having bid a sad farewell to Valancourt in the garden at La Vallee, senses a mysterious presence at large in the shades around her: "As her eyes wandered over the landscape she thought she perceived a person emerge from the groves, and pass slowly along a moon-light alley that led between them; but the distance and the imperfect light would not suffer her to judge with any degree of certainty whether this was fancy or reality." (115) ...When Emily's gallant suitor Du Pont, the Valancourt-surrogate who appears in the midsection of the novel, traverses the battlements at Udolpho in the hope of seeing her, he is immediately mistaken by the castle guards (who seem to have read Hamlet) for an authentic apparition. He obliges by making eerie sounds, and creates enough apprehension to continue his lovesick "hauntings" indefinitely (459). Similarly, at the end of the fiction, when Emily is brooding once again over the absent Valancourt, her servant Annette suddenly bursts in crying, "I have seen his ghost, madam, I have seen his ghost!" Hearing her garbled story about the arrival of a stranger, Emily, in an acute access of yearning, assumes the "ghost" must be Valancourt (629). _________________ Characters in Udolpho mirror, or blur into one another. Following the death of her father, Emily is comforted by a friar "whose mild benevolence of manners bore some resemblance to those of St. Aubert" (82). The Count de Villefort's benign presence recalls "most powerfully to her mind the idea of her late father" (492). Emily and Annette repeatedly confuse Du Pont with Valancourt (439-40); Valancourt and Montoni also get mixed up. In Italy Emily gazes at someone she believes to be Montoni who turns out, on second glance, to be her lover (145). But even Emily herself looks like Valancourt. His countenance is the "mirror" in which she sees "her own emotions reflected" (127)....This persistent deindividuation of other people produces numerous dreamlike effects throughout the novel. Characters seem uncannily to resemble or to replace previous characters....Du Pont, of course, is virtually indistinguishable from Valancourt for several chapters. Blanche de Villefort is a kind of replacement-Emily, and her relations with her father replicate those of the heroine and St. Aubert...and so on. The principle of deja vu dominates both the structure of human relations in Udolpho and the phenomenology of reading. One is always free, of course, to describe such peculiarly overdetermined effects in purely formal terms. Tzvetan Todorov, for example, would undoubtedly treat this mass of anecdotal material as a series of generic cues--evidence of the fantastic nature of Radcliffe's text. The defining principle of the fantastic work, he posits in The Fantastic, is that "the transition from mind to matter has become possible." Ordinary distinctions between fantasy and reality, mind and matter, subject and object, break down. The boundary between psychic experience and the physical world collapses, and "the idea becomes a matter of perception".... Radcliffe's fictional world might be described as fantastic in this sense. The mysterious power of loved ones to arrive at the very moment one thinks of them, or else to "appear" when one contemplates the objects with which they are associated--such events blur the line between objective and subjective experience....But the fantastic nature of Radcliffe's ontology is also manifest, one might argue, in the peculiar resemblances that obtain between characters in her novel. When everyone looks like everyone else, the limit between mind and world is again profoundly undermined, for such obsessive replication can only occur, we assume, in a universe dominated by phantasmatic imperatives. Mirroring occurs in a world already stylized, so to speak, by the unconscious. Freud makes this point in his famous essay "The Uncanny" in which he takes the proliferation of doubles in E. T. A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman" as proof that the reader is in fact experiencing events from the perspective of the deranged and hallucinating hero.... [Later in his study, Todorov] uncovers one of the central themes of the fantastic: "To think that someone is not dead--to desire it on one hand, and to perceive this same fact in reality on the other--are two phases of one and the same movement, and the transition between them is achieved without difficulty.'' Only the thinnest line separates the experience of wishing for (or fearing) the return of the dead and actually seeing them return. Fantastic works, he argues, repeatedly cross it. Here indeed is the ultimate fantasy of mind over matter. Just such a fantasy--of a breakdown of the limit between life and death--lies at the heart of Radcliffe's novel and underwrites her vision of experience. To put it quite simply, there is an impinging confusion in Udolpho over who is dead and who is alive. The ambiguity is conveyed by the very language of the novel: in the moment of Radcliffean reverie, as we have seen, the dead seem to "live" again, while conversely, the living "haunt" the mind's eye in the manner of ghosts. Life and death--at least in the realm of the psyche--have become peculiarly indistinguishable.... _________________________________________________________________ >From The Monk ...Alarmed at the [sexual fantasies of Matilda] which He was indulging, He betook himself to prayer; He started from his Couch, knelt before the beautiful Madona, and entreated her assistance in stifling such culpable emotions. He then returned to his Bed, and resigned himself to slumber. He awoke, heated and unrefreshed. During his sleep his inflamed imagination had presented him with none but the most voluptuous objects. Matilda stood before him in his dreams, and his eyes again dwelt upon her naked breast. She repeated her protestations of eternal love, threw her arms round his neck, and loaded him with kisses: He returned them; He clasped her passionately to his bosom, and...the vision was dissolved. Sometimes his dreams presented the image of his favourite Madona, and He fancied that He was kneeling before her: As He offered up his vows to her, the eyes of the Figure seemed to beam on him with inexpressible sweetness. He pressed his lips to hers, and found them warm: The animated form started from the Canvas, embraced him affectionately, and his senses were unable to support delight so exquisite. Such were the scenes, on which his thoughts were employed while sleeping: His unsatisfied Desires placed before him the most lustful and provoking Images, and he rioted in joys till then unknown to him. _________________________________________________________________ Peter Brooks, "Virtue and Terror: The Monk," ELH 40 (1973): 249-63. [In The Monk,] the experience of the eerie and the uncanny coincides so closely with Freud's description of the Unheimliche (the uncanny) that we are impelled to consider the Freudian derivation. For Freud, the Un--this sign of negation which makes the heimlich into something strange--represents an act of censorship which turns into the weird and uncanny what is in fact too familiar, too close to home: a repressed primal experience. So in The Monk: the novel makes it clear that the world of the supernatural which it has evoked, from the Bleeding Nun to Matilda's satanic traps, is interpretable as a world within the characters themselves, and that Ambrosio's drama is in fact the story of his relationship to the imperatives of desire. His tale is one of Eros denied, only to reassert itself with the force of vengeance, to smite him--in the manner of folktale and Greek tragedy-through and in his very claims to superiority, which are in fact denials, repressions, psychic disequilibrium. Matilda, disguised as the innocent and adoring young novice Rosario, makes her first approach to Ambrosio precisely through his piety and loathing for the impurity of the secular world, and works his downfall through his confidence in his own purity, his failure to recognize the repressions that it represents. The narcissism of his proud chastity will lead to--lead back to--the erotic narcissism which is incest. Matilda's masterstroke is to have her own portrait painted in the disguise of the Madonna: underneath Ambrosio's passionate adoration of the sacred icon there will be, unbeknownst to him, a latent erotic component, which Matilda will need only to make explicit. The painting of the Madonna/Matilda is in fact a kind of witty conceit demonstrating why God can no longer be for Ambrosio the representative of the Sacred: spirituality has a latent daemonic content; the daemonic underlies the seemingly Holy. And the daemons represent, not a wholly other, but a complex of interdicted erotic desires within us. The tremendum is generated from within. Lewis's consistent understanding and demonstration of this generation constitutes his major claim to our attention. _________________________________________________________________ Ann Radcliffe, The Italian (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1968). Satisfied with this conclusion, [Vivaldi] again laid his head on his pillow of straw, and soon sunk into a slumber. The subject of his waking thoughts still haunted his imagination, and the stranger, whose voice he had this night recognized as that of the monk of Paluzzi, appeared before him. Vivaldi, on perceiving the figure of this unknown, felt, perhaps, nearly the same degrees of awe, curiosity, and impatience that he would have suffered, had he beheld the substance of this shadow. The monk, whose face was still shrowded, he thought advanced, till, having come within a few paces of Vivaldi, he paused, and, lifting the awful cowl that had hitherto concealed him, disclosed--not the countenance of Schedoni, but one which Vivaldi did not recollect ever having seen before! It was not less interesting to curiosity, than striking to the feelings. Vivaldi at the first glance shrunk back; --something of that strange and indescribable air, which we attach to the idea of a supernatural being, prevailed over the features; and the intense and fiery eyes resembled those of an evil spirit, rather than of a human character. He drew a poniard from beneath a fold of his garment, and, as he displayed it, pointed with a stern frown to the spots which discoloured the blade; Vivaldi perceived they were of blood! He turned away his eyes in horror, and, when he again looked round in his dream, the figure was gone. A groan awakened him, but what were his feelings, when, on looking up, he perceived the same figure standing before him! It was not, however, immediately that he could convince himself the appearance was more than the phantom of his dream, strongly impressed upon an alarmed fancy. _________________________________________________________________ Margaret Anne Doody, "Deserts, Ruins, and Troubled Waters: Female Dreams in Fiction and the Development of the Gothic Novel," Genre 10 (1977): 529-73. ...In eighteenth-century English fiction, until the appearance of the Gothic novel, it is women, not men, who have dreams. Masculine characters rarely dream; those who do are usually simpletons whose dreams can be jocosely interpreted. Heroes are not dreamers....Women, weaker than men, not in control of their environment, are permitted to have dreams...Women are often seen as living an inward life rather different from that of men, whose consciousness is more definitely related to the objective world and to action within it. Women, less able to plan and execute actions, are seen as living a life closer to the dream-like, and closer to the dream-life....It was left to later (I certainly do not say superior) novelists to deal extensively with fear, desire and repression in terms of the nightmare images used by earlier novelists only occasionally to provide momentary glimpses into the perturbed depths of the feminine psyche. That is, the occasionally-glimpsed landscape of feminine dream was to become the entire setting in another, non- realistic, type of novel. The writers of the Gothic novel could give their full attention to the world of dream and nightmare--indeed, the "real world" for characters in a Gothic novel is one of nightmare. There is no longer a common sense order against which the dream briefly flickers; rather, the world of rational order briefly flickers in and out of the dreamlike. There is no ordinary world to wake up in....All the imagery we have met in these fictional dreams of women is to be found in the Gothic novel: mountain, forest, ghost, desert, cavern lake, troubled waters, ruined building with tottering roof, subterraneous cavern, sea, "howling and conflicting winds," snowy wastes, the bleeding lover, orange groves, corpse, iron instruments, invisible voices and dread tribunals--and, with these, sudden changes of place, preternatural speed, irresistible forces. In the Gothic novel these things are not the illusions which result from momentary feminine weakness--they constitute objects and facts in the "real" outer world. whose nature it is to create dread.... In what is probably [Radcliffe's] best work, The Italian (1797) the reader shares the separate experience of both Ellena and Vivaldi, and the hero's experience is even more frightening than the heroine's. Everyone remembers Vivaldi's being brought into the fortress of the Inquisition, and the scenes of his interrogation before mysterious tribunals, in the depths of the labyrinth behind iron doors. These scenes touch on our terror of being tried, of facing accusation without defence, of being tainted with unspecified guilt while innocent of crime....[They are] capable of shocking the mind with the dread of what is fearfully unreasonable and painful in consciousness, from which one cannot be dismissed by awakening, while at the same time conveying the fact that the public world is inescapably harsh, crushing the individual in the name of order and reason, attempting to make both masculine and feminine sexual identity and inner existence into guilt. The hero is really afraid, and, when he "at length found a respite from thought and from suffering in sleep," he has a frightening dream in which the unholy monk appears, holding a bloodstained poniard. When he awakens he finds "the same figure standing before him" although in this reality into which the dream has melted, the monk does not at first seem to be holding a dagger. It is only after the strange conversation with Vivaldi that the intruder shows him a poniard and asks him to look at the blood upon it: "Mark those spots. . . Here is some print of truth! To-morrow night you will meet me in the chambers of death!" (p. 323). Clementina had looked for marks of blood that were not there: reality and dreaming melancholy were separate. Now within the environment of nightmare man as well as woman is the victim, and dream and reality are indistinguishable. The Gothic novel as Mrs. Radcliffe developed it takes the images of nightmare and gives them a strong embodiment; they are the framework of life, they are reality. The images and their concomitant emotions are no longer the figments of a particular feminine consciousness within the novel, nor do they, as in The Recess, provide an environment for feminine consciousness alone. They cannot be dismissed as symptoms of a peculiar psychological state....The Gothic novel has a value in this alone in making accessible what was strange and elusive, and so paying full attention to what had been underdeveloped in the work of earlier novelists...Adolescent heroines had previously been shown as troubled by dubious fears and mysterious dreads upon their coming to maturity. Mrs. Radcliffe also associates fear with maturing, and assumes, quite calmly, that men can be afraid. _________________________________________________________________ >From Frankenstein [From Mary Shelley's 1931 Introduction]: "We will each write a ghost story," said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us....I busied myself to think of a story -- a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror -- one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name. I thought and pondered -- vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative. ...Night waned...and even the witching hour had gone by, before we retired to rest. When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw -- with shut eyes, but acute mental vision -- I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect if any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes. I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around....I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me. I must try to think of something else. I recurred to my ghost story -- my tiresome unlucky ghost story! O! if I could only contrive one which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened that night! Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. "I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow." On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began that day with the words, It was on a dreary night of November, making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking thoughts. ____________________________________________________ [From the text]: The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room, and continued a long time traversing my bed-chamber, unable to compose myself to sleep. At length lassitude succeeded to the tumult I had before endured; and I threw myself on the bed in my clothes, endeavouring to seek a few moments of forgetfulness. But it was in vain: I slept indeed, but was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I though I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the graveworms crawling in the folds of the flannel. _________________________________________________________________ Aija Ozolins, "Dreams and Doctrines: Dual Strands in Frankenstein," Science-Fiction Studies 2 (1975): 103-10. There is ample evidence in the novel that the creature functions as the scientist's baser self. Frankenstein's epithets for him consistently connote evil: devil, fiend, demon, horror, wretch, monster, monstrous image, vile insect, abhorred entity, detested form, hideous phantasm, odious companion and demoniacal corpse. Neutral terms like creature and being are comparatively rare. Most important, there is Frankenstein's thinking of him as "my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me". And after each murder Frankenstein acknowledges his complicity: "I not in deed, but in effect, was the true murderer". One sure sign of the double is his haunting presence. Maria Mahoney characterizes the feeling as "someone or something behind you, an ominous adversary dogging your footsteps...[a1 sinister and truly evil figure lurking in the dark." Even though Frankenstein initially flees from his creature and even though their direct confrontations are few, the monster is nevertheless a ubiquitous presence in his life. When he agrees to fashion a mate for his creature he is told to expect constant surveillance: "I shall watch your progress with unutterable anxiety; and fear not but that when you are ready I shall appear" . After breaking his promise he is even more oppressed by a sense of the monster's presence; even his days take on a nightmarish quality: "although the sun shone," he felt only "a dense and frightful darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes that glared" at him. The psychological motif of the double is reinforced by several visual tableaux that hint at a secret sympathy between the monster and his maker. At the beginning of her dream Mary saw "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together," but at its conclusion the positions are reversed, with the "horrid thing" standing at the student's bedside and "looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes". This picture is repeated at the end of the novel when the monster stands sorrowfully over the corpse of Frankenstein. Similarly, there are three moonlight encounters between the two. Although meetings by lightning and moonlight are a conventional part of the Gothic landscape, Mary's conjunction of man, moon, and monster is traceable to her dream and serves to emphasize the close relationship between them. Also, because most of these moonlight encounters are preceded by a crime, they spotlight the creature's jeering, malevolent form. The last and most important point regarding the double is the necessity to confront and recognize the dark aspect of one's personality in order to transform it by an act of conscious choice. Ideally, the Shadow diminishes as one's awareness increases. "Freedom comes," according to Mahoney, "not in eliminating the Shadow...but in recognizing him in yourself." Prospero acknowledges Caliban--"This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine"--but Frankenstein's typical reactions are first to flee, then to kill. His rejection of his creature is crucial, both in the present psychological context and in the sociological context we shall consider later. Frankenstein, as Philmus says, is always "fleeing from self-knowledge," always seeking "to lose himself in the external world," and thus denying, in Nelson's words, the "nether forces for which he should have accepted a fully aware responsibility." References 1. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/zach.sublime1.html#morris ---------------- Architecture of the Mind http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html It is important to remember that "Gothic" connoted architecture long before it connoted literature. Horace Walpole was the first to establish a link between the two; his obsession with his beloved miniature castle at Strawberry Hill was the inspiration for The Castle of Otranto, and the book's subtitle, "A Gothic Story," marks the first time that the term was used in a literary context. Ever since, representation of the labyrinthine and claustrophobic space associated with Gothic architecture has been the defining convention of Gothic fiction. This space is usually represented by a castle, but monasteries, convents, and prisons (often in ruins) also appear frequently. This architectural space is integral to the psychological machinations of Gothic fiction, and is used to invoke feelings of fear, awe, entrapment and helplessness in characters and readers alike. Furthermore, the architecture itself can be said to be psychically alive; it is often depicted as having "a vile intelligence of its own" and as "hyper-organic in all its aspects" (Frank 436). The following excerpts all discuss the relationship between physical structure and emotional affect within Gothic fiction, exploring how the individual or social psyche is externalized in its various architectural forms. [See also the closely related section on the [1]"inner space" in the Female Gothic.] _________________________________________________________________ >From The Mysteries of Udolpho The sun had just sunk below the top of the mountains she was descending, whose long shadow stretched athwart the valley, but his sloping rays, shooting through an opening of the cliffs, touched with a yellow gleam the summits of the forest that hung upon the opposite steeps, and streamed in full splendor upon the towers and battlements of a castle that spread its extensive ramparts along the brow of a precipice above. The splendor of these illuminated objects was heightened by the contrasted shade which involved the valley below. There, said Montoni, speaking for the first time in several hours, is Udolpho. Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, which she understood to be Montoni's; for, though it was now lighted up by the setting sun, the Gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark-gray stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object. As she gazed, the light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper as the thin vapor crept up the mountain, while the battlements above were still tipt with splendor. From those, too, the rays soon faded, and the whole edifice was invested with the solemn duskiness of evening. Silent, lonely, and sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all who dared to invade its solitary reign. As the twilight deepened, its features became more awful in obscurity; and Emily continued to gaze, till its clustering towers were alone seen rising over the tops of the woods, beneath whose thick shade the carriages soon after began to ascend. _________________________________________________________________ Norman N. Holland and Leona F. Sherman, "Gothic Possibilities," New Literary History 8 (1977): 278-94. We can begin with the formula, maiden-plus-habitation, and the prototypical habitation in it, the castle. An older psychoanalytic criticism would have assumed a one-to-one equation: the castle symbolizes the body. Unfortunately, this kind of easy isomorphism does not stand up under experimental testing or even close introspection. Rather, each of us resymbolizes reality in our own terms. A gothic novel combines the heroine's fantasies about the castle with her fears that her body will be violated. The novel thus makes it possible for literents to interpret body by means of castle and castle by means of body, but does not force us to do so nor does it fix the terms in which the two of us will do it. Instead, the castle admits a variety of our projections. In particular, because it presents villains and dangers in an archaic language and mise-en-scene, it fits all we can imagine into it of the dark, frightening, and unknown. If, like Udolpho, it also has midnight revelry, violence, battles, confusing noises and disturbances, it can express our childhood fears at the strange sounds of "struggle" between our parents in the night and the sexual violence children often imagine as a result. At the same time, the gothic novel usually says that the castle contains some family secret, so that the castle can also become the core for fantasies based on a childish desire that adulthood be an exactly defined secret one can discover and possess.... The castle delineates a physical space which will accept many different projections of unconscious material. de Sade makes this receptive function of the castle quite terrifyingly explicit: its chief attribute is an isolation in which the heroine is completely controlled by someone else while separated from those she loves. The castle threatens shame, agony, annihilation--and desire. From the torture chambers of, say, the monastery in Justine, we can create a magic realm, beyond all normative associations and experience, where the best anodyne one can hope for is catatonia. Given such an arena for sexual and sadistic games, we are free to use de Sade's satanic imaginings to structure our own wildest wishes and fears about loss and helplessness. _________________________________________________________________ >From Melmoth the Wanderer The magnificent remains of two dynasties that had passed away, the ruins of Roman palaces, and of Moorish fortresses, were around and above him;--the dark and heavy thunder-clouds that advanced slowly seemed like the shrouds of these spectres of departed greatness; they approached, but did not yet overwhelm or conceal them, as if nature herself was for once awed by the power of man....Stanton gazed around. The difference between the architecture of the Roman and Moorish ruins struck him. Among the former are the remains of a theatre, and something like a public place; the latter present only the remains of fortresses, embattled, castellated, and fortified from top to bottom--not a loop-hole for pleasure to get in by--the loop-holes were only for arrows; all denoted military power and despotic subjugation a l'outrance.... So thought Stanton, as he still saw strongly defined, though darkened by the darkening clouds...the solid and heavy mass of a Moorish fortress, no light playing between its impermeable walls--the image of power, dark, isolated, impenetrable. _________________________________________________________________ Philip P. Hallie, The Paradox of Cruelty (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1969) ...[T]o look into the eyes of the villains is not to see the full force of the tremendum of the Gothic Tale. That force is embodied in the ambiente, the time and place in which those villains prey on their victims. The place is often a castle whose lord is the villain. And the castle, as Maturin puts it towards the beginning of Melmoth, is "...fortified from top to bottom--not a loophole for pleasure to get in by--the loopholes were only for arrows; all denoted military power and despotic subjugation a l'outrance...." A medieval castle was a fortress with one purpose: to maintain and intensify the power of its lord. Medieval castles came into being when nobles were comparatively independent of their kings, and could with impunity exert absolute power upon anyone living in or near them. It is just such impregnable power that the castle expresses in the Gothic tale. And one reason it expresses this power has to do with the victims or prisoners of its lord. When they are in the dungeon of a lord's castle, their weakness is as total as his power. The castle heightens the power of the villain and the weakness of his victim by making it impossible for the victim to escape the "danger" or dominion of the lord, and equally impossible for him to get help from the outside, since even if his cries could be heard through all that distance and stone, his allies would have to "storm" an impregnable fortress. ...Cruelty occurs most readily in sequestered areas in which the dominion of the powerful one is inescapable and impregnable, at least for the moment. Whether it be a dungeon in a medieval castle or a group of boys gathered round to see a bird have its eyes burned out in a London street, sequestration from escape and resistance is important to cruelty. By heightening the strength of the strong one and by rendering the victim more passive, the castle helps generate and maintain the difference of power that helps make cruelty, like a spark of electricity, possible. The castle is the dynamo of cruelty. _________________________________________________________________ >From The Monk The Monks quitted the Abbey at midnight. Matilda was among the Choristers, and led the chaunt. Ambrosio was left by himself, and at liberty to pursue his own inclinations. Convinced that no one remained behind to watch his motions, or disturb his pleasure, He now hastened to the Western Aisles. His heart beating with hope not unmingled with anxiety, he crossed the Garden, unlocked the door which admitted him into the Cemetery, and in a few minutes He stood before the Vaults. Here He paused. He looked round him with suspicion, conscious that his business was unfit for any other eye. As He stood in hesitation, He heard the melancholy shriek of the screech-Owl: The wind rattled loudly against the windows of the adjacent Convent, and as the current swept by him, bore with it the faint notes of the chaunt of Choristers. he opened the door cautiously, as if fearing to be over-heard: He entered; and closed it again after him. Guided by his Lamp, He threaded the long passages, in whose windings Matilda had instructed him, and reached the private Vault which contained his sleeping Mistress. Its entrance was by no means easy to discover: But this was no obstacle to Ambrosio, who at the time of Antonia's Funeral had observed it too carefully to be deceived. He found the door, which was unfastened, pushed it open, and descended into the dungeon. he approached the humble Tomb, in which Antonia reposed. He had provided himself with an iron crow and a pick- axe; But this precaution was unnecessary. The Grate was slightly fastened on the outside: He raised it, and placing the Lamp upon its ridge, bent silently over the Tomb. By the side of three putrid half-corrupted Bodies lay the sleeping Beauty. _________________________________________________________________ Peter Brooks, "Virtue and Terror: The Monk," in ELH 40 (1973): 249-63. It is notable that toward the end of [The Monk], all the major characters are compelled to descend into the catacombs of the Convent of St. Clare, and that it is deep in this multi- layered sepulchre that the climaxes of all the different plots in the novel will be played out: here Agnes has been imprisoned by the Domina, here Ambrosio has sequestered Antonia in order to rape her, and here the nuns of St. Clare retreat as the incensed mob sacks and fires their convent. The sepulchre, into which the Domina descends for her sadistic punishments, and Matilda for her diabolical conjurations, has come in the course of the novel to represent the interdicted regions of the soul, the area of the mind where our deepest and least avowable impulses lie, and at the novel's climax the characters are driven unconsciously, but all the more powerfully, to go to confront their destinies in the sepulchre. The force of this drive is imaged in the description of Lorenzo's decision to descend: this arch-rationalist of the novel is impelled by a movement "secret and unaccountable "into the labyrinth" of the sepulchre (p. 347). He then discovers the trap-door into the lowest depth, a "yawning gulph "which he must go on to explore "alone . . . and in darkness " (p. 354) . That the young lovers of the novel will eventually find a measure of peace and tempered happiness is no doubt a product of this experience in and of the central darkness of the soul: their exploration of the content of the unconscious will be curative. The erotic implications of the sepulchre and its labyrinth are patent, for it is here, down below the daylight world, that Lewis can indulge the richest, and most sadistic, urgings of his decidedly perverse imagination. The descriptions of Agnes's attachment to the putrefied corpse of her baby become almost unbearable. But Lewis's exploitation of sepulchre and labyrinth also confirm our sense of his intuitive understanding of his psycho-historical moment. It is easy to document that there was a veritable explosion of "claustral" literature at this period, especially in France from the onset of the Revolution. We know in fact that shortly before starting to write The Monk, Lewis had seen one of the most celebrated and melodramatic plays on the theme, Boutet de Monvel's Les Victimes Cloitrees-- which he later translated--and he probably also knew Olympe de Gouges' Le Couvent, ou les Voeux forces. Part of the epistemological moment to which The Monk belongs, and which it best represents, is this opening up of sepulchral depths, the fascination with what may lie hidden in the lower dungeons of institutions and mental constraints ostensibly devoted to discipline and chastity. What does lie hidden there is always the product of erotic drives gone beserk, perverted and deviated through denial, a figuration of the price of repression. Lewis's psychic architecture, then, offers what we have suggested about the nature of the supernatural in the novel, and the transformation of the Sacred into taboo. Ambrosio's story is most centrally a drama of conquest by a desire made terrific by its freight of repression. Its liberation will be led to commit both matricide and incest. That is, through the play of repression, erotic pleasure has been necessarily tied to the idea of transgression, violation of taboo; and Ambrosio, once he has given himself over wholly to his erotic drive, will manage to transgress the most basic of them. Particularly, Ambrosio with growing urgency discovers the need to violate, defile, to soil and profane the being who has come to represent for him the sum of erotic pleasure precisely because she is most clothed in the aura of the Sacred, and most protected by taboo. _________________________________________________________________ Max Byrd, "The Madhouse, the Whorehouse, and the Convent," Partisan Review In the first half of the eighteenth century the primary meaning of the incarceration that occurs over and over in fiction is restraint. Unbalancing, socially destructive passions like greed or lust are simply pressed into submission by moral and social institutions, by the madhouse and the prison. In the later eighteenth century the primary meaning of incarceration becomes, not restraint, but burial, a meaning already implied in the Persephone myth. The dungeons in these houses are Tartarus, the deepest recesses of the human mind in which unreason still clings to life. Toward the conclusion of M.G. Lewis's The Monk the hero Lorenzo, searching through subterranean passages, stumbles upon the following: "in a corner of this loathsome abode, a creature stretched upon a bed of straw, so wretched, so emaciated, so pale, that he doubted to think her woman. She was half naked: her long disheveled hair fell in disorder over her face, and almost entirely concealed it. One wasted arm hung listless upon a tattered rug, which covered her convulsed and shivering limbs: the other was wrapped round a small bundle, and held it closely to her bosom." Thus far we might feel we were reading another description of justly punished whores in Mrs. Sinclair's brothel; but the next sentence places us elsewhere: "A large rosary lay near her: opposite to her was a crucifix , on which she bent her sunken eyes fixedly, and by her side stood a basket and a small earthen pitcher." The convent in Gothic novels, outwardly a symbol of self-control and reason, in reality exists as a den of incarceration, just as the madhouse and the whorehouse do in earlier literature; inwardly it harbors row after row of dungeons like this one in The Monk where unreason is shut away. Within the farthest reaches of this building, learns the heroine of The Italian, "is a stone chamber, secured by doors of iron, to which such of the sisterhood as have been guilty of any heinous offence have, from time to time, been consigned. This condemnation admits of no reprieve: the unfortunate captive is left to languish in chains and darkness, receiving only an allowance of bread and water just sufficient to prolong her sufferings, till nature, at length, sinking under their intolerable pressure, obtains refuge in death." The scene Lorenzo discovers in The Monk reminds us of numerous other eighteenth-century descriptions of Bedlam cells as well as of brothels....The bundle an inmate clutches is the corpse of her baby, an emblem of her original female sin....like mid-century European fiction, The Monk extends the meaning of its symbols of incarceration, adding isolation, fantasy, and incest to the themes of restraint, passion, and death that mark the Augustan madhouses and whorehouses. In its convents and dungeons, for example, The Monk shows us what the Age of Reason seems never to have doubted, the disastrous consequences of incarceration when it is understood as isolation from society. The wretched mother whom Lorenzo discovers in The Monk has been "plunged into a private dungeon, expressly constituted to hide from the world for ever the victim of cruelty and tyrannic superstition. In this dreadful abode she was to lead a perpetual solitude, deprived of all society, and believed to be dead, by those, whom affection might have prompted to attempt her rescue." ...But two further points should be noticed here. The first is how often the incarcerating house is destroyed by these incestuous children...Ambrosio is responsible for a mob's destruction of a convent and the slaughter of its nuns; and Moncada, in the most terrifying episode of all, brings down the palace of the Inquisition in fire....All the shattered and smoking convents of the Gothic novel prove to us the power of unreason to destroy its prisons, if it can break free or if the keeper lingers in their dark passages. The recurring theme of incest in these novels also conveys to us the destructive power of unreason, its ability to tear apart the central institution of order and stability in a public society, the family. _________________________________________________________________ >From The Italian The carriage having reached the walls, followed their bendings to a considerable extent. These walls, of immense height, and strengthened by innumerable massy bulwarks, exhibited neither window or grate, but a vast and dreary blank; a small round tower only, perched here and there upon the summit, breaking their monotony. The prisoners passed what seemed to be the principal entrance, from the grandeur of its portal, and the gigantic loftiness of the towers that rose over it; and soon after the carriage stopped at an arch-way in the walls, strongly barricadoed. one of the escort alighted, and, having struck upon the bars, a folding door within was immediately opened, and a man bearing a torch appeared behind the barricado, whose countenance, as he looked through it, might have been copied for the 'Grim-visaged comfortless Despair of the poet. No words were exchanged between him and the guard; but on perceiving who were without, he opened the iron gate, and the prisoners, having alighted, passed with the two officials beneath the arch, the guard following with a torch. They descended a flight of broad steps, at the foot of which another iron gate admitted them to a kind of hall; such, however, it at first appeared to Vivaldi, as his eyes glanced through its gloomy extent, imperfectly ascertaining it by the lamp, which hung from the centre of the roof. No person appeared, and a death-like silence prevailed; for neither the officials nor the guard yet spoke; nor did any distant sound contradict the notion, that they were traversing the chambers of the dead. To Vivaldi it occurred, that this was one of the burial vaults of the victims, who suffered in the Inquisition, and his whole frame thrilled with horror. Several avenues, opening from the apartment, seemed to lead to distant quarters of this immense fabric, but still no footstep whispering along the pavement, or voice murmuring through the arched roofs, indicated it to be the residence of the living. _________________________________________________________________ Jacques Blondel, "On 'Metaphysical Prisons,'" Durham University Journal 32 (1971): 133-38. The theme of metaphysical prisons in art and literature...expands on three levels....The first is that of reasonable sublimity implying some ambiguity in the nature of the supernatural; the next is deliberately that of moral ambiguity and negation of traditional norms; while the third is that of 'paradis artificiels' and self-created prisons. The absence of escape in a fictitious universe devoid of the redemptive scheme and the absence of forgiveness command this diversified approach to fantastic worlds of their own. On every level the implications of 'generic guilt' are there to account for the density, so to say, of walls and the depth of romantic chasms, to create or challenge the metaphysics of heated brains and to preside over the fate of both victims and executioners. A diachronic study of our theme would less forcibly throw into relief the relationship, between the ethical implications of 'metaphysical prisons' and their artistic or literary representation....Granted that Mrs. Radcliffe follows in the wake of Walpole's canons in the genre-- namely romance--and that romance breaking with 'strict adherence to common life' should include the marvelous, both writers claim to be enfranchised from superstition, though allowing room for 'stupendous phenomena' (The Castle of Otranto, 2nd Preface) confronting the 'moral agents of the drama'. The description of the well-known castle, an adumbration of Strawberry Hill, anticipates the architectural designs of Mrs. Radcliffe's structures, that of Montoni and the prisons of the Inquisition: "The lower part of the castle was hollowed out into several intricate cloisters; and it was not easy for one under so much anxiety to find the door that opened into the cavern" ...However, the structure of the plot in all cases implies a return to the world of light, a liberation from the devilish machinery which, as in the case of The Italian, eventually recoils on its devisor (p. 243); the innocent pair, as in the sentimental novel, are duly permitted to marry, after the trials undergone in the labyrinthine vaults of Rome. The caves here, more emphatically than in The Mysteries of Udolpho, have been the proper setting where Vivaldi realized the danger of inclining too much to the marvelous (p. 347): " . . . he dismissed, as absurd, a supposition, which had begun to thrill his every nerve with horror." Stress is thus laid on his weakness from the point of view of the rational-minded novelist who remains content with offering the 'delightful horror' (John Dennis) of plunging one's eyes into depths, mountain gloom, and mountain glory in turn. Prisons here are contrasted by visions of the sublime; thus Ellena loses the consciousness of her prison (San Stefano), "while her eyes ranged over the wide and freely-sublime scene without . . . She perceived that this chamber was within a small turret . . . and suspended, as in air, above the vast precipices of granite, that formed part of the mountain" (p. 90). Such contrasts evince Mrs. Radcliffe's avoidance of any whole-hearted commitment to the powers of darkness; Vivaldi is made to descend further and further, but the final vision is daylight and open air, even as in Girtin's sublime landscape. The captivity motif remains external to the mind, except for the guilty villain, when we are invited to approve of the judgment of the awful tribunal sentencing him to suffer. Illusions of any kind have had to be dispelled and prisons have never been properly metaphysical. The Gothic nocturnal world of The Monk (1796), though influencing The Italian, develops the prison theme on medieval metaphysical lines.... In The Monk, the conditions of both physical and moral claustrophobia are fully achieved. Lewis's story, originating from German 'horror' tales, concentrates on the powerlessness of the victims (Agnes, Elvira, Raymond) in the face of adverse forces hailing from the darksome world. Thus Raymond, once captured by the 'Bleeding Nun' whom he negates as a phantom, has to be released from his trance by a magician. Matilda, another Fuseli-like figure, traps lustful Ambrosio, whose perverse and morbid passion leads him willingly to persevere in sin and face damnation. The ambiguity here lies not with the fiction itself, as in the case of Mrs. Radcliffe's visions of imprisonment, but consists in the divided commitment of Lewis, strumming on the strings of sensuality in order seemingly to rouse indignation while pandering to the desires of the flesh. Thus it is a willing prison the setting of which tallies with the requirements of the fantastic....Ambrosio's is the "metaphysical" prison of a belated medieval age, the creation of an unmetaphysical imagination. Thus all possibility of redemption is and has to be made absurd (hence the blasphemous pronouncements here and there in the book) in a world where the constants of reality are nullified, an illusionary yet strikingly real one. References 1. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/ami.inner.html ------------------- Psycho-Social Concerns http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html A generation of Freudians have busied themselves reading the Gothic novel as an externalization of the author's psyche, or as a device to elicit a proscribed pyschological response from the reader. However, because the true Gothic novels comprise a well-defined canon, produced within a narrow space of time, it is possible to read them as reflections a distinct social psyche--that is, as illustrating deep-seated concerns and anxieties associated with a specific political and historical moment. The sudden flourishing of the Gothic novel at the end of the eighteenth century has been linked by critics to such cultural preoccupations as the French Revolution (and persistent Jacobin uprisings in England) and concerns about the place of the individual--in relation to both the family and society at large--in a rapidly changing social order. Sade, characteristically ahead of his time, was perhaps the first critic to identify the fictitious horrors of the Gothic novel with the all-too-real horrors of the 1790s. He wrote that the revolutionary age had numbed the senses of the general populace to such an extent that authors were obliged to "call upon the aid of hell itself" in order to strike a chord of recognition with readers. (Sade later went on to try his own hand at Gothic short stories.) In a fascinating article, Ronald Paulson builds upon Sade's association of the Gothic and the French Revolution. Paulson reads The Monk and Caleb Williams as bearing witness to the inevitably bloody excesses of the revolutionary mob, which in throwing off tyranny becomes itself tyrannical. He sees Frankenstein as mapping this theme of rebellion onto the family, with the oppressive "father" locked in struggle with the wronged "son". Frederick Karl also cites Caleb Williams, along with Frankenstein, in discussing the recurrent theme of the "outsider". David Punter uses both Freud and Marx to read the original Gothic novels as literary manifestations of the deep social anxieties of the late eighteenth century; he sees Otranto reflecting the ambivalence of the English toward their feudal past in light of the dawning of liberal humanism, and the later Gothics revealing deep concerns about the fate of the individual in industrial, post- Enlightenment society. Finally, Stephen Bernstein takes a very different approach, arguing that the Gothic novels reproduce a "psychological" ideology in which the will of the individual is always eventually subordinated to the family and to society. He cites examples, not just from the "conservative" Radcliffe novels, but from The Monk, Otranto, and Melmoth as well. _________________________________________________________________ >From The Monk Here St. Ursula ended her narrative. It created horror and surprise throughout: But when She related the inhuman murder of Agnes, the indignation of the Mob was so audibly testified, that it was scarcely possible to hear the conclusion. This confusion increased with every moment: at length a multitude of voices exclaimed, that the Prioress should be given up to their fury....They forced a passage through the Guards who protected their destined Victim, dragged her from her shelter, and proceeded to take upon her a most summary and cruel vengeance. Wild with terror, and scarcely knowing what she said, the wretched Woman shrieked for a moment's mercy: She protested that She was innocent of the death of Agnes, and could clear herself from the suspicion beyond the power of doubt. The Rioters heeded nothing but the gratification of their barbarous vengeance. They refused to listen to her: They showed her every sort of insult, loaded her with mud and filth and called her by the most opprobrious appellations. They tore her one from another, and each new Tormentor was more savage than the former. They stifled with howls and execrations her shrill cries for mercy; and dragged her through the Streets, spurning her, trampling her, and treating her with every species of cruelty which hate or vindictive fury could invent. At length a Flint, aimed by some well-directing hand, struck her full upon the temple. She sank upon the ground bathed in blood, and in a few minutes terminated her miserable existence,. yet though She no longer felt their insults, the Rioters till exercised their impotent rage upon her lifeless body. They beat it, trod upon it, and ill-used it, till it became no more than a mass of flesh, unsightly, shapeless, and disgusting. _________________________________________________________________ Marquis de Sade, Idee sur les Romans (Geneva: Slatkine, 1967). Perhaps at this point we ought to analyze these new novels in which sorcery and phantasmagoria constitute practically the entire merit: foremost among them I would place The Monk, which is superior in all respects to the strange flights of Mrs. Radcliffe's brilliant imagination....Let us concur that this kind of fiction, whatever one may think of it, is assuredly not without merit: twas the inevitable result of the revolutionary shocks which all of Europe has suffered. For anyone familiar with the full range of misfortunes wherewith evildoers can beset mankind, the novel became as difficult to write as monotonous to read. There was not a man alive who had not experienced in the short span of four or five years more misfortunes than the most celebrated novelist could portray in a century. Thus, to compose works of interest, one had to call upon the aid of hell itself, and to find in the world of make- believe things wherewith one was fully familiar merely by delving into man's daily life in this age of iron. _________________________________________________________________ Ronald Paulson, "Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution," ELH 48 (1981): 532-53. The Gothic did in fact serve as a metaphor with which some contemporaries in England tried to come to terms with what was happening across the Channel in the 1790s. The first Revolutionary emblem was the castle-prison, the Bastille and its destruction by an angry mob, which was fitted by Englishmen into the model of the Gordon Riots of nine years before. But if one way of dealing with the Revolution (in its earliest stages) was to see the castle-prison through the eyes of a sensitive young girl who responds to terror in the form of forced marriage and stolen property, another was to see it through the case history of her threatening oppressor, Horace Walpole's Manfred or M.G. Lewis' Ambrosio--the less comforting reality Austen was heralding in the historical phenomena of London riots. In Lewis' The Monk (1795) the two striking phenomena dramatized are first the explosion--the bursting out of the bonds--of a repressed monk imprisoned from earliest childhood in a monastery, with the havoc wreaked by his self- liberation (assisted by demonic forces) on his own family who were responsible his being immured; and second, the blood-thirsty mob that lynches-- literally grinds into a bloody pulp--the wicked prioress who has murdered those of her nuns who succumbed to sexual temptation. Both are cases of justification followed by horrible excess: Ambrosio deserves to break out and the mob is justified in punishing the evil prioress, but Ambrosio's liberty leads him to the shattering of his vow of celibacy, to repression, murder, and rape not unlike the compulsion against which he was reacting; and the mob not only destroys the prioress but (recalling the massacres of September 1792) the whole community and the convent itself: "The incensed Populace, confounding the innocent with the guilty, had resolved to sacrifice all the Nuns of that order to their rage, and not to leave one stone of the building upon another. They battered the walls, threw lighted torches in at the windows and swore that by break of day not a Nun of St. Clare's order should be left alive.... The Rioters poured into the interior part of the Building, where they exercised their vengeance upon every thing which found itself in their passage. They broke the furniture into pieces, tore down the pictures, destroyed the reliques, and in their hatred of her Servant forgot all respect to the Saint. Some employed themselves in searching out the Nuns, Others in pulling down parts of the Convent, and Others again in setting fire to the pictures and furniture, which it contained. These Latter produced the most decisive desolation: In-deed the consequences of their action were more sudden, than themselves had expected or wished. The Flames rising from the burning piles caught part of the Building, which being old and dry, the conflagration spread with rapidity from room to room. The Walls were soon shaken by the devouring element. The Columns gave way; The Roofs came tumbling down upon the Rioters, and crushed many of them beneath their weight. Nothing was to be heard but shrieks and groans, the Convent was wrapped in flames, and the whole presented a scene of devastation and horror." The end, of course, as it appeared to Englishmen in 1794-- remembering Thomas Paine's words ("From a small spark, kindled in America, a flame has arisen, not to be extinguished) and the imagery of light and fire associated with the Revolution--was the destruction of the revolutionaries themselves in the general collapse. _________________ The relationship between Falkland and Caleb is the same explored by Inchbald and Holcroft between society the cruel hunter and the suffering individual, its victim. But by the time Godwin was writing, the French Terror had cast its shadow on libertarian dreams, and his work reflects that constant potential for simple inversion of the persecutor-persecuted relationship which events in Paris had so terribly exemplified....For Caleb Williams, in his way, becomes as much a persecutor (and ultimately a murderer) as his master--and is eventually brought to commit similar crimes through an obsessive concern to protect the "honour" he no longer possesses. _________________ The construction of the monster, as of the makeshift, non- organic family, is the final aspect of the Frankenstein plot. Burke's conception of the state as organic and of the Revolution as a family convulsed was joined by Mary Shelley with the fact of her own "family," the haphazard one in which she grew up with other children of different mothers and with a stepmother. This creation of a family of children by some method other than natural, organic procreation within a single love relationship is projected onto the Frankenstein family, a family assembled by the additive process of adoptions and the like, and so to Victor's own creation of a child without parents or sexual love.....Frankenstein predictably sees himself as the father who ''deserves the gratitude of his children more "completely" than any other, and in saying so becomes the tyrant himself. As an allegory of the French Revolution, his experiment corresponds to the possibility of ignoring the paternal (and maternal) power by constructing one's own offspring out of sheer reason, but it shows that the creator is still only a "father" and his creation another "son" locked into the same love-tyranny relationship Mary's own father had described so strikingly in Caleb Williams (another book Mary had reread as she undertook her novel). _________________________________________________________________ >From Frankenstein The monster saw my determination in my face and gnashed his teeth in the impotence of anger. "Shall each man," cried he, "find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone? I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn. Man! You may hate, but beware! Your hours will pass in dread and misery, and soon the bolt will fall which must ravish from you your happiness forever. Are you to be happy while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness? You can blast my other passions, but revenge remains--revenge, hence forth dearer than light or food! I may die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery. Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. Man, you shall repent of the injuries you inflict. _________________________________________________________________ >From Caleb Williams What--dark, mysterious, unfeeling, unrelenting tyrant!--is it come to this? When Nero and Caligula swayed the Roman sceptre, it was a fearful thing to offend these bloody rulers. The empire had already spread itself from climate to climate, and from sea to sea. If their unhappy victim fled to the rising of the sun, where the luminary of day seems to us first to ascend from the waves of the ocean, the power of the tyrant was still behind him. If he withdrew to the west, to Hesperian darkness, and the shores of barbarian Thule, still he was not safe from his gore-drenched foe.--Falkland! art thou the offspring in whom the lineaments of these tyrants are faithfully preserved? Was the world, with all its climates, made in vain for thy helpless unoffending victim? Tremble! Tyrants have trembled, surrounded with whole armies of their Janissaries! What should make thee inaccessible to my fury? No, I will use no daggers! I will unfold a tale!--I will show thee to the world for what thou art; and all the men that live, shall confess my truth!--Didst thou imagine that I was altogether passive, a mere worm, organised to feel sensations of pain, but no emotion of resentment? Didst thou imagine that there was no danger in inflicting on me pains however great, miseries however dreadful? Didst thou believe me impotent, imbecile, and idiot-like, with no understanding to contrive thy ruin, and no energy to perpetrate it? I will tell a tale--! The justice of the country shall hear me! The elements of nature in universal uproar shall not interrupt me! I will speak with a voice more fearful than thunder!--Why should I be supposed to speak from any dishonourable motive? I am under no prosecution now! I shall not now appear to be endeavouring to remove a criminal indictment from myself by throwing it back on its author! --Shall I regret the ruin that will overwhelm thee? Too long have I been tender-hearted and forbearing! What benefit has ever resulted from my mistaken clemency? There is no evil thou hast scrupled to accumulate upon me! Neither will I be more scrupulous! Thou hast shown no mercy; and thou shalt receive none!--I must be calm! bold as a lion, yet collected! _________________________________________________________________ Frederick R. Karl, "Gothic, Gothicism, Gothicists" in The Adversary Literature: The English Novel in the Eighteenth Century -- A Study in Genre (New York: Farrar, 1974), pp. 235-274. The one theme that cuts through virtually all Gothic is that of the "outsider," embodied in wanderers like Frankenstein's monster and Maturin's Melmoth, monks such as Lewis's Ambrosio and Mrs. Radcliffe's Schedoni, and so on. The outsider, like Cain, moves along the edges of society, in caves, on lonely seacoasts, or in monasteries and convents. While the society at large always appears bourgeois in its culture and morality, the Gothic outsider-like the earlier picaro is a counterforce driven by strange longings and destructive needs. While everyone else appears sane, he is insane; while everyone else appears bound by legalities, he is, like Laocoon, trying to snap the pitiless constrictions of the law; while everyone else seems to lack any peculiarities of taste or behavior, he feels only estrangement, sick longings, terrible surges of power and devastation. He is truly countercultural, an alternate force, almost mythical in his embodiment of the burdens and sins of society. _________________ Caleb Williams is a catchall of eighteenth-century themes and techniques.... Caleb Williams, ultimately, is concerned with the nature of tyranny and with a definition of individual human rights. Written shortly after the French Revolution, the novel is, in a sense, an extension of the ideas of the rights of man. Godwin argues that man has the right to fulfill himself without interference from tyranny; that the individual must always seek the maximum amount of choice in an oppressive society; that a person must never let himself be governed by circumstance (the latter an eighteenth-century assumption); that human dignity demands each responsible individual break the master-slave relationship wherever he finds it; that responsible people can together create an enlightened world conducive to freedom; that man is, indeed, Faustian in his positive ability to throw off the old and assume the mantle of the new. ...Falkland is himself a false representative of the world of art. He is duplicitous, manipulative, and ruthless in pursuit of his own values....Falkland, then, is a false prophet. His cultivated mind is only one part of him; the other part is the tyrannical aspect of England and Europe, which, before the French Revolution, terrorized all those who failed to accept traditional hierarchies and customary chains of being. The truly new man is Caleb Williams--his name alone would appear to indicate his newness as a post-revolutionary hero. Although gifted with a bookish mind, a good memory, and an easy manner, he is ordinary. The hunting down of Caleb, both mythical and symbolic, is indicative of the play of forces: the new man chased by the old, hounded by the footsteps of authoritarianism, dogged by traditional values. _________________ Gothic fiction, as we have observed, is concerned with the outsider, whether the stationary figure who represses his difference, or the wandering figure who seeks for some kind of salvation, or else the individual who for whatever reason- moves entirely outside the norm. In any event, he is beyond the moderating impulses in society, and he must be punished for his transgression. Frankenstein's monster obviously straddles these categories. He wanders through mountain areas of the far North, lurks in caves and caverns, in places no one else dare go. He seeks a mate, a complement to his own loneliness. He is gloomy and melancholy, full of self-pity and self-hatred. Like Cain, he is the perpetual outsider, marked by his appearance, doomed to wander the four corners of the earth, alone and reviled. As an outsider, he argues with Frankenstein that he needs a female monster with the same defects, so that he will not have to go through life alone. He desires completion in monstrosity--still well within the Gothic orbit. This argument, however, becomes intermixed with several eighteenth-century strains existing outside of Gothic. In a curious turn, the monster sees himself as capable of all kinds of beautiful behavior, but because of his ghastly appearance, no one will allow him to develop his propensities for good. A product of ill treatment and society's horror, he can only indulge in revenge and cruel acts against the innocent. The monster's plaint comes directly from the eighteenth-century belief in the tabula rasa and Godwin's sense of the individual's innate right to develop at his own rate. At the same time, this point is well within the idealism and political beliefs of Shelley's circle. _________________________________________________________________ >From The Castle of Otranto The prisoner soon drew her attention: the steady and composed manner in which he answered, and the gallantry of his last reply, which were the first words she heard distinctly, interested her in his favour. His person was noble, handsome and commanding, even in that situation: but his countenance soon engrossed her whole care. Heavens! Bianca, said the princess softly, do I dream? or is not that youth the exact resemblance of Alfonso's picture in the gallery? She could say no more, for her father's voice grew louder at every word. This bravado, said he, surpasses all thy former insolence. Thou shalt experience the wrath with which thou darest to trifle. Seize him, continued Manfred, and bind him--the first news the princess hears of her champion shall be, that he has lost his head for her sake. The injustice of which thou art guilty towards me, said Theodore, convinces me that I have done a good deed in delivering the princess from thy tyranny. May she be happy, whatever becomes of me!--This is a lover! cried Manfred in a rage: a peasant within sight of death is not animated by such sentiments. Tell me, tell me, rash boy, who thou art, or the rack shall force thy secret from thee. Thou hast threatened me with death already, said the youth, for the truth I have told thee: if that is all the encouragement I am to expect for sincerity, I am not tempted to indulge thy vain curiosity farther. Then thou wilt not speak? said Manfred. I will not, replied he. Bear him away into the court-yard, said Manfred; I will see his head this instant severed from his body. _________________________________________________________________ David Punter, The Literature of Terror (London: Longman, 1980). ...Otranto is serious about history. For whatever its shortcomings and infelicities, it does give evidence of an eighteenth century view of feudalism and the aristocracy, and in doing so originates what was to become perhaps the most prevalent theme in Gothic fiction: the revisiting of the sins of the fathers upon their children. When this is placed in a contemporaneous setting, it is a simple theme; but it becomes altogether more complex when the very location of crime and disorder is thrust back into the past. The figure of Manfred, laden with primal crime, is considerably larger than Otranto itself: his violence, his bullying, his impatience with convention and sensibility mark him out not only as the caricature of a feudal baron, but also as the irrepressible villain who merely mocks at society, who remains unassimilable. What is interesting is the conjunction in Manfred, and after him in so many other Gothic villains, of the feudal baron and the figure of antisocial power. If, as seems likely, the widespread appearance of these figures signifies a social anxiety, then that anxiety clearly had a historical dimension: threat to convention was seen as coming partly from the past, out of the memory of previous social and psychological orders. In other words, it came from the atrophying aristocracy; and if one thing can be said of all the different kinds of fiction which were popular in the later eighteenth century, it is that they consistently played upon the remarkably clear urge of the middle classes to read about aristocrats. Otranto's strength and resonance derive largely from the fact that in it Walpole evolved a primitive symbolic structure in which to represent uncertainties about the past: its attitude to feudalism is a remarkable blend of admiration, fear and curiosity. _________________ A great deal of Gothic is about injustice, whether it be divinely inspired, or meted out by man to his fellow men and women. The Wanderer and Frankenstein's monster are powerful symbols of that injustice....The question of why these symbols of injustice and malevolent fate should be conjured up at a particular historical period is a delicate one....It is conventional, and reasonable, to say that the society which generated and read Gothic fiction was one which was becoming aware of injustice in a variety of different areas, and which doubted--principally in the persons of the great romantics--the ability of eighteenth-century social explanations to cope with the facts of experience. We can see it in the dawning consciousness of inequality in the relations between the sexes; in the romantic emphasis on the partiality and non-neutrality of reason as a guiding light for social behaviour; in the increasing awareness that there are parts of the psyche which do not appear to act according to rational criteria; in the constantly reiterated thought that, after all and despite so-called natural law, it is still often the sins of the fathers which are visited on their descendants. This last may well be the strongest argument in connexion with Frankenstein.... ...Gothic writing emerges at a particular and definable stage in the development of class relations: we may define this as the stage when the bourgeoisie, having to all intents and purposes gained social power, began to try to understand the conditions and history of their own ascent. This, surely, is the reason for the emphasis in the literature on recapturing history, on forming history into patterns which are capable of explaining present situations....The coming of industry, the move towards the city, the regularisation of patterns of labour in the late eighteenth century, set up a world in which older, 'natural' ways of governing the individual life--the seasons, the weather, simple laws of exchange--become increasingly irrelevant. Instead, individuals are propelled along paths of activity which make sense only as parts of a greater, less easily comprehended whole. The individual comes to see himself at the mercy of forces which in fundamental ways elude his understanding. Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising to find the emergence of a literature whose key motifs are paranoia, manipulation and injustice, and whose central project is understanding the inexplicable, the taboo, the irrational. _________________________________________________________________ >From The Italian [Marchese:] "[W]hat reparation can you make [Ellena] for the infatuated folly, which has thus stained her character? What"-- "By proclaiming to the world, my Lord, that she is worthy of becoming my wife," replied Vivaldi, with a glow of countenance which announced the courage and the exultation of a virtuous mind. "Your wife!" said the Marchese, with a look of ineffable disdain, which was instantly succeeded by one of angry alarm.--"If I believed you could so far forget what is due to the honour of your house, I would for ever disclaim you as my son." "O! why," exclaimed Vivaldi, in an agony of conflicting passions, "why should I be in danger of forgetting what is due to a father, when I am only asserting what is due to innocence; when I am only defending her, who has no other to defend her! Why may not I be permitted to reconcile duties so congenial! But, be the event what it may, I will defend the oppressed, and glory in the virtue, which teaches me, that it is the first duty of humanity to do so. Yes, my Lord, if it must be so, I am ready to sacrifice inferior duties to the grandeur of a principle, which ought to expand all hearts and impel all actions. I shall best support the honour of my house by adhering to its dictates." "Where is the principle," said the Marchese, impatiently, "which shall teach you to disobey a father; where is the virtue which shall instruct you to degrade your family?" "There can be no degradation, my Lord, where there is no vice," replied Vivaldi; "and there are instances, pardon me, my Lord, there are some few instances in which it is virtuous to disobey." "This paradoxical morality," said the Marchese, with passionate displeasure, "and this romantic language, sufficiently explain to me the character of your associates, and the innocence of her, whom you defend with so chivalric an air. Are you to learn, Signor, that you belong to your family, not your family to you; that you are only a guardian of its honour, and not at liberty to dispose of yourself? My patience will endure no more!" _________________________________________________________________ Stephen Bernstein, "Form and Ideology in the Gothic Novel," Essays in Literature 18 (1991): 151-65. [The] overriding concern of the gothic with the solution in the present of past family crimes, with the assertion expressed in Walpole's "Translator's Preface" to the first edition of Otranto (and borrowed from Exodus), that "the sins of the fathers are visited on their children to the third and forth [sic] generation," is obviously a variation on the plot of Oedipus Rex, and for this reason may seem worthy of little discussion. The explosion of so many such plots in the English novel during the period of the gothic novel, however, suggests that the novels performed an historically specific ideological task, one which it is important (if only to better position the gothic novel historically) to understand. What this form of resolution implies, guaranteeing as it does that justice will be done despite the degree to which the original crime has been obscured and forgotten, is that the power of social stability is stronger than any individual's attempt to transgress it. This in itself was no new topic for fictional works, even in the mid- eighteenth century, but in the gothic it is expressed in such an obsessive manner that the representation signifies a depth of concern with the issue not always apparent in other works where it is treated.... When the gothic narrative structure is seen in conjunction with the Freudian model of neurosis, the leap is not too great to see the genre taking part in the transmission, through popular narrative, of a socially acceptable constitution of the properly integrated subject. This subject formation demands a rectified personal history, guaranteeing social integration only at the point when the skeletons are, indeed, out of the closet. The further assurance is made, of course, that whether the subject exhibits such candor or not, the offensive stain on the past will be made public. Better, it seems, to live in such a way as to give one less to fear from the scrutiny of the anonymous gaze. In this way the gothic promotes what Antonio Gramsci terms an "historically organic" ideology, that is, an ideology such as those which "have a validity which is 'psychological'; they 'organize' human masses, and create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc.... The importance of marriage in this schema cannot be overstated. Not only does movement toward matrimony in the gothic's present trigger the appearance of the buried past, but that buried past itself always contains information tied to the institutions of matrimony or family interest, as noted above. It is in this emphasis that the gothic also articulates concerns regarding class and property, creating a nexus important for further ideological interpretation. ...the operation of the gothic text is to secure in the subject a certain raining in, and acceptance of, the approved path toward ideological interpellation via matrimony. Since marriage was inexorably tied to the movement of property in society, the gothic strives to make palatable the economic truth of the match through its melodramatic emphases on the fitness and rightness of the spouse, the difficulty of courtship, and the purification of the family name....Thus the conjunction of love, sexuality, property, and economic power in the eighteenth-century marriage creates a program ruling out all types of perversion, the offensive behavior constituted equally damningly by either lower class lack of property or the perceived forms of sexual debauchery. _________________ In Otranto Ricardo's false claim on Alfonso's castle is the cause of the later action; it is echoed in Manfred's consuming desire for an heir so that the property can continue in its wrongful transmission, a desire that leads him to seek an all-but-incestuous union with Isabella and to murder his own daughter....[In The Italian,] [a]ll of the plotting against--and imprisonment of--Ellena is founded on the desire of Vivaldi's mother (suggested and inflamed by Schedoni) to keep her son from marrying in a way unbefitting of his class. Property is at the heart of the conflict and motivates Schedoni's turnaround and attempt to renegotiate the marriage when he mistakenly believes that Ellena is his daughter. _________________ The seeming contradiction between the gothic's prohibition of class-violating marriages and the rise in them between middle and upper classes at this time is not as troubling as it first appears. The marriages problematized in the gothic are most often those involving a lower-class participant, someone who can bring no property to the match. The frequent gothic peripeteia of showing that someone with no ostensible status actually possessed it all along (as with the marriages in Radcliffe's works} is actually well suited to middle-class aspirations toward greater status and stability. In this way the field of power deployed through gothic narrative expands. Where earlier we saw that these novels provided a way of shaping in the subject an acceptance of the futility of criminality due to the precariousness of privacy and the certainty of detection and furthermore posited this realization as "health," we can now observe the way in which the novels extend this surveillance into the micro-social sphere of the family.... The subjectification of the family works in a more publicly oriented way in that it creates two levels of responsibility, the micro-social level of governance within the family, and the macro-social level of the family's relations with the broader society of other families. Through constant reminders of the imbricated status of family, marriage, property, and surveillance, the gothic projects a subject role for the family which then continues to define itself through constant vigilance and an importation into the domestic sphere of the hegemonic tactics of external class reality. _________________ All these aspects of narrative structure have been demonstrated above as interpellating aspects of a dominant ideology of social formation. The ideology of the gothic novel is the legitimation of burgeoning capitalist power, a dark fairy-tale assurance that the propertied, after surviving their troubles, could maintain their ascendancy in terms of political and economic power should correct subject positions, both for individual and family, be assumed. The period experienced, as is well known, the increasing ascendancy of the middle class, so it is here that the utility of a dominant ideology should be sought. From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 30 16:59:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 11:59:21 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Carsten Strathausen: "Resistance is Futile"?: The Advance of the Cyborg in Modern Society Message-ID: Carsten Strathausen: "Resistance is Futile"?: The Advance of the Cyborg in Modern Society (course description) http://www.missouri.edu/~grscs/courses/201.html [Thanks to Sarah also for this.] Prof. Carsten Strathausen email: [7]StrathausenC at missouri.edu 451 GCB German and Russian Studies office hours: Tu/Th 2-3pm and by appointment web: [8]www.missouri.edu/~grscs German 201/General Honors 130 "Resistance is Futile"?: The Advance of the Cyborg in Modern Society From Robocop, Blade Runner, and Terminator to video games and computer generated cyberspace, contemporary culture is haunted by the dreadful image of the artificial killing machine as a metaphor for modern technology run rampant. These fears may be prompted not only by feelings of alienation in an automated society, but also by the underlying suspicion that humans may in fact be nothing more than highly sophisticated machines. This course tries to map the history of this "l'homme machine," focusing on the representation of cyborgs, creatures which, in contrast to robots, consist of both human and technolgical "parts." We will discuss theoretical texts by Descartes, Freud, Haraway, Baudrillard, and members of the Frankfurt School, literary masterpieces such as E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Sandman and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as well as cinematic masterpieces by Fritz Lang, Ridley Scott, the brothers Wachowski and others. Our overall goal is to discern both the source of fascination and the ambivalent social mechanisms at work in the constant evocation of the "human machine." We shall close by examining what Mark Taylor calls "emerging network cultures" in recent literary and cinematic representations. Requirements Active class participation (20%) and three five-page papers (60%). Films Over the course of the semester, we shall watch and discuss several films. These films are mandatory, not optional. They are an integral part of this class. Students are responsible for watching these films, either during the scheduled group-showing or on their own. * Fritz Lang, Metropolis * Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will * Ridley Scott, Blade Runner * Brothers Wachowski, The Matrix Books * The Cyborg Handbook (optional) * Mary Shelley, Frankenstein * Aldous Huxeley, Brave New World * Phillip Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? * William Gibson, Neuromancer * Bruce Sterling, Snowcrash * Andrew Crumey, Pfitz Texts on electronic reserve - Electronic Reserves (ERes): [10]http://eres.missouri.edu/ * Donna Haraway, "Cyborg and Symbionts" * "Introduction" of Cyborg Handbook * Descartes, "Discourse on Method" (excerpts) * E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Sandman * Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny * Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto"" * Mark Taylor, The Moment of Complexity (excerpts) * Jean Baudrillard, Simulacar and Simulations (excerpts) * Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (excerpts) Introduction Tu, Jan 21 Course overview, video clips. Homework: Donna Haraway, "Cyborg and Symbionts" "Introduction" of Cyborg Handbook Th, Jan. 23 Discussion: Homework: Donna Haraway, "Cyborg and Symbionts" "Introduction" of Cyborg Handbook Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Tu, Jan 28 NO CLASS Part I: Fantasies of Procreation Th, Jan 30 Discussion: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Tu, Feb 04 Discussion: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Th, Feb 06 Discussion: Films for discussion: Homework: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein various film versions of Frankenstein (excerpts) E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Sandman Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" Tu, Feb 11 Discussion: E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Sandman Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" Th, Feb 13 Discussion: Film showing: E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Sandman Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" Fritz Lang, Metropolis Part II: The Fall of the Individual Tu, Feb 18 Discussion: Fritz Lang, Metropolis Th, Feb 20 Discussion: Homework: Dziga Vertov, "Man with the Movie Camera" (excerpts) Slide show: the Avantgarde Write first 5-page paper Tu, Feb 25 Film-Showing: Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will First Paper Due Th, Feb 27 Discussion: Homework: Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will Read Aldous Huxeley, Brave New World Part III: The Rise of the Cyborg Tu, Mar 04 Discussion: Aldous Huxeley, Brave New World. Th, Mar 06 Discussion: Homework: Aldous Huxeley, Brave New World. Read Phillip Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? Tu, Mar 11 Discussion: Phillip Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? Th, Mar 13 Discussion: Film-Showing: Phillip Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? Ridley Scott, Blade Runner (director's cut) Tu, Mar 18 Discussion: Homework: Ridley Scott, Blade Runner (director's cut). Read Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto" Th, Mar 20 Discussion: Homework: Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto" Read William Gibson, Neuromancer Tu, Apr 01 Discussion: William Gibson, Neuromancer Th, Apr 03 Discussion: Homework: William Gibson, Neuromancer Read Kathleen Hayes, How We Became Posthuman Deleuze/Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Part IV: Global Network Culture Tu, Apr 08 Discussion: Homework: Kathleen Hayes, How We Became Posthuman Deleuze/Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Read Bruce Sterling, Snowcrash Write second 5-page paper Th, Apr 10 Discussion: Bruce Sterling, Snowcrash Second Paper Due Tu, Apr 15 Discussion: Homework: Bruce Sterling, Snowcrash Read Taylor, The Moment of Complexity Th, Apr 17 Discussion: Film-Showing: Read Taylor, The Moment of Complexity Brothers Wachowski, The Matrix Tu, Apr 22 Discussion: Homework: Brothers Wachowski, The Matrix tba Th, Apr 24 Discussion: Homework: Brothers Wachowski, The Matrix Read Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacar and Simulations" Tu, Apr 29 Discussion: Homework: Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacar and Simulations" Read Andrew Crumey, Pfitz Th, May 01 Discussion: Andrew Crumey, Pfitz Tu, May 06 Discussion: Andrew Crumey, Pfitz Tu, May 08 Discussion: Final Remarks Final Paper due Statements Academic honesty is fundamental to the activities and principals of a university. All members of an academic community must be confident that each person's work has been responsibly and honorably acquired, developed, and presented. Any effort to gain advantage not given to all students is dishonest whether or not the effort is successful. The academic community regards academic dishonesty as an extremely serious matter, with serious consequences that range from probation to expulsion. When in doubt about plagiarism, paraphrasing, quoting, or collaboration, consult the course instructor. If you have a disability and need classroom accommodation, it is your responsibility to notify me as soon as possible. Please see me privately after class. You should also register with the Access Office, A048 Brady Commons, 882-4696, especially if you are requesting academic accommodations such as extended testing time. [11]Research :: [12]Teaching :: [13]Publications :: [14]Links :: [15]Home [16]German and Russian Studies :: [17]College of Arts & Science :: [18]University of Missouri-Columbia revised: winter 2003 References 7. mailto:StrathausenC at missouri.edu 8. http://www.missouri.edu/~grscs 10. http://eres.missouri.edu/ 11. http://www.missouri.edu/~grscs/research.html 12. http://www.missouri.edu/~grscs/teaching.html 13. http://www.missouri.edu/~grscs/pubs.html 14. http://www.missouri.edu/~grscs/links.html 15. http://www.missouri.edu/~grscs/index.html 16. http://web.missouri.edu/~graswww/ 17. http://coas.missouri.edu/ 18. http://www.missouri.edu/ From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 30 17:06:23 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 12:06:23 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Washington Post.com: Surf City, Here She Comes Message-ID: washingtonpost.com: Surf City, Here She Comes http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46443-2005Jan29?language=printer [Mom, 85 and cheerful, had a letter published by Ann Landers a good many years ago, saying the elderly need not be lonely, for they can communicate with everyone with the Internet. She signed it "Cybergrandma." [A boxed article, "Making the Computer Easier to Use," is appended.] Surf City, Here She Comes As Seniors Log On, New Tech Opens Some Quality-of-Life Doors By Annys Shin Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, January 30, 2005; Page F01 Sometimes the residents of the Kensington Park Retirement Community in Kensington don't know quite what to make of Carolyn Layton. At lunch one recent afternoon, Layton, 74, pulled up in her motorized chair to her usual table in the dining room. Josette, her regular lunch companion, was already there, picking the toppings off her pizza. "You should sell the rest of it on eBay," Layton joked. "What's that?" Josette asked. "It's an auction," Layton explained. "Oh." Layton went back to her grilled cheese and tomato. By now, she's used to the people around her not always understanding her. But she would rather be a bit of a misfit than give up her Internet connection -- even if it is dial-up. Layton uses the motorized chair because of a degenerative spine ailment. But her mind is agile. Without e-mail and the Internet, her world would not stretch far beyond the confines of her retirement home, where the highlight of the day for many is a session of "Sittercise" or a van ride to Target. While her peers spend their days sitting in the sunroom downstairs, Layton reads six daily newspapers online, instant-messages her grandson in Maine and downloads bits of animation to attach to e-mails. Layton thinks her neighbors, some of whom suffer from early Alzheimer's, would benefit from time spent online. "Half the people here are bored," she said. Surfing the Internet "would keep their synapses firing." Of course, when given the chance, many people use the Internet to gamble and look at porn, not to better themselves as Layton does. But this notion that technology is the key to maintaining not only the health of mature adults -- from the active 65-year-old retiree to the homebound 80-year-old -- but also their social lives and their minds is taking hold in boardrooms, research labs and government agencies. By technology, we're talking about more than defibrillators and hearing aids. We're talking retirement homes built with high-speed Internet connections; about souped-up caller ID that not only identifies who is calling but reminds you of the people you know in common and the subject of your last conversation. We mean "smart houses" that tell your daughter how many times you opened the refrigerator or got up off the sofa during the day, so she can call or stop by if she thinks something is wrong. That high-tech companies are even focused on mature adults marks an industry sea change, said Ken Dychtwald, a gerontologist and president of Age Wave, a San Francisco marketing firm. When the Internet came along, "it was a party, and older people were not invited," he said. "All the language, the media, the marketing, Wired magazine, was about the new, the young, the hip, the cool, the next -- not about Grandma. To their amazing credit, even though they weren't invited, seniors began climbing the castle walls and crashing the party." At first, the folks who made it over the wall didn't bring too many friends along. In 2000, just 15 percent of people over age 65 used the Internet, according to Susannah Fox, director of research for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. "They were a very elite group. They were white, male, wealthy, very well educated and more likely to have a computer at home," Fox said. The demographics of this older group "looked like the Internet in 1993." Today, men and women over 65 surf the Web in equal numbers, a Pew survey last May and June found. About 22 percent of non-Hispanic white Americans over age 65 are online, compared with 21 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of African Americans. But despite television commercials showing Grandma happily e-mailing snapshots of the grandkids to her friends, or guiltily sending off pictures from her adventure cruise vacation -- taken with her cell-phone camera, of course -- older Web surfers are still a minority. By comparison, 60 percent of Americans age 50 to 64 go online. If you've been out of the job force and out of school for the past dozen years or so, you're not going to have had much exposure at all to the cyberworld, which went mainstream in that period, says Tom Tullis, senior vice president of human interface design at Fidelity Investments. That's not to say that older Americans are suffering because they don't have a Gmail account. "We have not had a need or an interest in technology and the Internet" from residents, said Jamison Gosselin, a spokesman for Sunrise Senior Living, the McLean company that operates more than 340 assisted living and independent living centers across the country. The residents are "fine with using the telephone or visiting, doing a lot of things they enjoyed doing 30 years ago." At Kensington Park, for instance, Layton's neighbors may not know what eBay is. But not every Web junkie can create elaborate three-dimensional tableaux by layering paper cutouts the way Layton's neighbor Bernice can. Yet, the prevailing wisdom is that seniors need to keep up with their younger counterparts or be left behind. That won't be a problem for long, said Dychtwald, the gerontologist. And the reason is the coming retirement of the baby boomers. With each passing day, more people who have indeed been exposed, even tethered, to the new world and its Web are crossing the threshold from what Dychtwald calls the land of "no time" to the land of "nothing but time," once known as retirement, but that in the future will increasingly include some form of work. And as the oldest boomers approach 60, the distinction between youngsters and oldsters and information technology will diminish to the vanishing point. Companies such as Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp. are beginning to wake up to this reality. "The migration of the boomers and their enormous demographic heft and their willingness to spend money on technology is really sending a wake-up call," Dychtwald said. "The image of older adults listening to their AM station and not being able to program their VCR, that notion is fading in the sunset." "This is a population that has had a longer interaction with technology -- and an expectation that technology makes life better," said Beth Mynatt, lead researcher for the Aware Home initiative at Georgia Tech. "Technology remade the workplace -- especially computing technology. If technology does these things for me at work, it should be doing things for me at home." But those about to embark on old age who think they're ahead of the game because they're wired may not yet appreciate what technology companies have in store for them. In countries with large aging populations, the future is already here. In Japan, you can buy a toilet that checks your temperature and tests your urine and stool, then sends the results to your doctor. Even in the United States, assisted living facilities are increasingly installing "granny cams," so relatives can check in on their loved ones, said Rick Grimes, a spokesman for the Assisted Living Federation of American, a trade association for operators of assisted living centers. "Some people put a parent in a home and, for whatever reason, can't visit for a year. Then they come to visit and are upset that [their loved one] has deteriorated, Grimes said. The Web cams "allow them to be part of the aging process." Sunrise Senior Living already makes use of "wander bracelets" that allow staff or a family member to keep track of a resident in case he strays from the premises, Gosselin said. While computing technology gave people a new way to communicate and access information, in the future it may help them stay out of an assisted living or nursing home setting for as long as possible. Delaying such a move "can make a big economic difference, as well as a personal one, for older adults," Mynatt said. In all this giddy excitement about what technology can do to make our old age more, well, livable, the only voices of criticism so far have been those of privacy advocates, who want to know where all the information in our smart houses and wander bracelets will go. Which brings us to a question: Just whom is this technology for? Do you really want a computer to register whether you've eaten your bran flakes today? Or does your adult child who wants to keep an eye on you without having to leave work? Aging experts contend that technology can fulfill the needs of both generations, if not emotionally, then at least in practical ways. "If the person can continue to live in their home and be in a familiar environment, it might be worth the trade-off to have someone check in on you. Is that any different than having your daughter coming over and opening the fridge? Maybe," said Harvey L. Sterns, a gerontologist and director of the Institute for Life-Span Development and Gerontology at the University of Akron. "I think these are really Faustian bargains. It's about how these are used. We're just beginning to explore using technology to help older people." "Sometimes we get carried away. We have a World's Fair technology-can-solve-all-types-of-things attitude," Mynatt said. "But if you look at the demographic data, even if you wanted the majority of support for older adults to come from humans, you don't have the people. . . . The demographics are working against us for the next few decades. Technology shouldn't replace people, but there's a grudging acceptance that we have to look at technology to fill in the gaps." Layton would certainly prefer to still be on her own. And, not having a Luddite bone in her body, she would likely be thrilled if technology could help her maintain her independence. In fact, if she had her druthers, she said, "I'd have one of everything -- a cell phone, an iPod." After all, she was the first person on her block in Wilmington, Del., to have an electric screwdriver, her daughter Nancy Caffey recalled. And in the early 1980s, Layton not only bought an early Atari video game system complete with the first home edition of Pac-Man, but she played it so she could teach her grandsons. Her joystick addiction ended there. In the late 1980s, she booted up for the first time after her son-in-law, Bethesda attorney Andrew Caffey, gave her an old computer with the personal finance program Quicken on it. She was an early Internet surfer. And she bought one of the first digital cameras. Layton can spend hours parked in front of the flat-screen monitor of her Hewlett-Packard desktop computer, which sits on a small desk next to a twin bed in her small, sunny room filled with plants and artwork. She types using the few fingers that aren't immobilized by arthritis. And she uses a virtual magnifying glass that she downloaded from a Web site to read small type on the screen. She uses the Internet not only to keep in touch with her grandchildren but also to keep tabs on them. On a recent morning, she noticed that her youngest grandson, who lives in Maine, was on AOL Instant Messenger. It was too early for school to be out, so she typed, "Why R U home dear one?" Through the Internet, Layton has befriended people she would not likely come across in person, such as A. Raffaele Ciriello, an Italian freelance photojournalist. She sent Ciriello an admiring e-mail and the two began to correspond about Afghanistan, photography and Ciriello's newborn daughter, Layton said. In March 2000, Ciriello returned to Afghanistan and stopped writing. Layton found out later from the Committee to Protect Journalists that he had been killed while on assignment covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Ramallah. "To think that he took the time to respond, I didn't expect it," she said. Not everyone Layton has met on the Internet has been as friendly as Ciriello. She's tried chat rooms and avoids them. "I got all kinds of IM messages saying things that were quite shocking," she said. A couple of years ago, an old high school flame named Gus tracked Layton down through [3]www.classmates.com. He courted her relentlessly with e-mails, phone calls and letters. Layton was not interested. "I told him, 'I'm not the cute little thing I was. I'm a little old lady with wrinkles and a motorized chair,' " she recalled. "And I wear a bib!" she added, referring to the swatch of blue terry cloth that she wears at mealtime to cut down on her dry-cleaning bill. Gus replied that he didn't care. Eventually, she said, he got the picture and left her alone. The experience didn't put her off surfing. Often she is reachable only through e-mail or instant messaging. Her dial-up Internet connection ties up her only telephone line. (She'd upgrade to DSL, but a brother pays for the connection and she doesn't want to be greedy.) When one of Layton's doctors recently complained that he had a hard time reaching her by phone, she listened patiently for a few minutes, then asked, "When are you going to get e-mail?" -------------- Making the Computer Easier to Use http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46425-2005Jan29?language=printer Making the Computer Easier to Use Sunday, January 30, 2005; Page F06 Seniors interested in getting comfortable with the Internet can be hampered by physical characteristics of computers. A sophisticated world of "assistive devices" exists, primarily for people with physical disabilities, and some of these software programs and systems and devices can cost into the thousands of dollars. For garden-variety declines in eyesight and dexterity, however, there are far less expensive enhancements that can mean the difference between happily engaging with the wired world and not. Listed below are a few -- some of which are tucked inside the computer's operating system. Microsoft has lots of how-to information at [3]www.microsoft.com/enable. And for those who are comfortable searching the Internet for downloadable software, there are utilities similar to those below that are free ("freeware") or inexpensive ("shareware"). Visual Aids Larger type: Users of the Outlook Explorer browser can, right within the Explorer program, enlarge (or decrease) words that appear on Web sites. On the menu bar at the top of the home page, click on View, then scroll down and click on Text Size. Choose from five sizes, Smallest to Largest. But note that only unformatted text will shift in size. For general Windows use, a quick search under "Help" on the Start menu will provide more information about other accessibility options. Whole screen magnification: BigShot Screen Magnifier 2.1 software by Ai Squared can enlarge on-screen images up to 200 percent. Works with Windows XP, ME, 2000, NT4, 95 and 98; it's $99 at [4]www.activeandable.com. ZoomText 8.1 Magnifier software, also by Ai Squared, can enlarge on-screen images up to 16 times; also features color, cursor and pointer enhancers. Works with Windows XP, ME, 2000, NT4 and 98; it's $395 at [5]www.activeandable.com. Better light: Dimmed room lights enhance computer-screen brightness but can obscure the keyboard. The Feather-Touch Keyboard Light sits on the work surface, its long wand-like fluorescent bulb illuminating the keys. It's $28 from [6]www.goldviolin.com. Larger letters and numbers on the keys: Large-print peel-and-stick vinyl keyboard labels to fit IBM-compatible keyboards, from 20/20 Type, are $9.95 from [7]www.goldviolin.com. A sheet of large labels from the Key Connection (black on ivory, black on yellow or white on black) is $24.95 at [8]www.customkeys.com. Oversize cursors: Biggy software, by RJ Cooper & Associates, provides a choice of double-size, playful, ultra-visible cursors and pointers (including the Windows hourglass and the Mac watch face) for all programs. Works with all Windows editions, also Macintosh OS X, OS 9 and earlier; it's $109 at [9]rjcooper.com/biggy. Large-print keyboard: VisiKey keyboards, some designed specifically for Net surfing, are $59 to $99 at [10]www.atestore.enablemart.com. Dexterity Aids Larger trackballs: BIGtrack says that, at three inches across, it's the largest trackball available, requiring less fine motor control than the standard. Works with Windows; it's $75 from [11]www.atestore.enablemart.com. (Can be bought at this site in combination with BigKeys Plus keyboard, below.) Oversize keyboard/keyboard keys: BigKeys Plus is a standard-size, simplified keyboard with one-inch-square, colorful keys. Available as a traditional QWERTY or ABC layout. For Windows, it's compatible with 286, 386, 486 and Pentium processors; Mac-compatible with a USB adapter. All versions are $159, or $180 in combination with BIGtrack trackball (above) at [12]www.atestore.enablemart.com. Similar BigKeys LX keyboard is $149 at [13]www.activeandable.com. Key modifications: In the Windows Control Panel, click on Accessibility Options, where there are ways to modify the contrast, sound and even use of keys. Enabling StickyKeys allows the user to perform functions requiring Shift, Ctrl or Alt in tandem with another key by pressing one key at a time. Enabling ToggleKeys produces a tone when hitting Caps Lock, Num Lock and Scroll Lock. -- Nancy McKeon References 3. http://www.microsoft.com/enable 4. http://www.activeandable.com/ 5. http://www.activeandable.com/ 6. http://www.goldviolin.com/ 7. http://www.goldviolin.com/ 8. http://www.customkeys.com/ 9. http://rjcooper.com/biggy 10. http://www.atestore.enablemart.com/ 11. http://www.atestore.enablemart.com/ 12. http://www.atestore.enablemart.com/ 13. http://www.activeandable.com/ From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 30 18:35:32 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 13:35:32 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: 'Aliens of the Deep': Extending a Hand, Hoping a Tentacle Might Shake It Message-ID: The New York Times > Movies > Movie Review | 'Aliens of the Deep': Extending a Hand, Hoping a Tentacle Might Shake It http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/28/movies/28alie.html January 28, 2005 MOVIE REVIEW | 'ALIENS OF THE DEEP' Extending a Hand, Hoping a Tentacle Might Shake It By STEPHEN HOLDEN When the director [1]James Cameron proclaimed himself "king of the world" on winning the Oscar for [2]"Titanic," who knew that he also had designs on the rest of the solar system? His newest film, [3]"Aliens of the Deep," is a grandiose hybrid of undersea documentary and outer-space fantasy that begins on our planet's ocean floor and ends many miles under the ice crust that covers Europa, the second moon of Jupiter. The movie's sneaky transition from undersea documentary to speculative fantasy of a journey yet to be undertaken is so seamless that you could easily mistake the last part for the record of an actual space voyage. Filmed in IMAX-3D, this 48-minute film is a visual adventure worthy of that much degraded adjective, awesome. And when the movie is observing the ocean floor where lava from the Earth's inner core is leaking into the water, the strangeness and beauty of an autonomous, teeming ecosystem that has probably existed for two billion years matches any science fiction you could conjure. Mr. Cameron's theory, supported by astrobiologists, is that the life forms found at the deepest levels of the ocean, where no light from the sun penetrates, may hold clues to the nature of possible life in outer space. Even on the Earth, it turns out, the sun isn't the essential be-all and end-all for the existence of life, as was once supposed. Working with scientists at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mr. Cameron, who sporadically narrates the film, accompanied by a team of researchers, journeys several miles under the ocean's surface in submersible vehicles. There they observed and photographed the tumultuous undersea world clustered around cracks where emerging lava creates giant chimneys of superheated water. The submersibles resemble spacecraft, complete with smaller modules that venture out from the mother ship. One of the dangers faced by the explorers is venturing too close to a chimney whose heat could melt the windows. For all the caution expressed, the researchers voice no real fear, only wonder at the sights they behold. They include six-foot-long sea worms with crimson plumes; blind white crabs; and thousands, perhaps millions, of tiny white shrimp swarming in and out of the chimneys. Because the imagination of "Aliens of the Deep" is pure Hollywood, the movie can't resist giving us a "Close Encounters" moment when a human hand pressed against the window of a submersible is met by a welcoming, nonhuman tentacle. Could similar environments exist in outer space? Some astrobiologists speculate that a hidden ocean, twice the size of those on Earth, exists many miles under Europa's ice-covered shell. The movie imagines a robotic vehicle that drills through the ice and surveys that ocean, which teems with similar but even more exotic life forms. And so the primal human impulse to explore goes on. 'Aliens of the Deep' Opens today at Imax theaters nationwide. Directed by [4]James Cameron and Steven Quale; director of photography, Vince Pace; edited by Ed W. Marsh, Fiona Wight and Matt Kregor; music by Jeehun Hwang; produced by Andrew Wight and Mr. Cameron; released by Walt Disney Pictures and Walden Media. Running time: 48 minutes. This film is rated G. From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 30 18:36:42 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 13:36:42 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Word for Word: Give a Blood Chit to the Confusion Agent Message-ID: The New York Times > Week in Review > Word for Word: Give a Blood Chit to the Confusion Agent http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/weekinreview/30word.html January 30, 2005 WORD FOR WORD Give a Blood Chit to the Confusion Agent By PETER EDIDIN TO civilians, the language of war is poetry, or at least poetic: "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers," or "Half a league, half a league/ Half a league onward." Even "War is hell," Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's terse repudiation of the whole thing, has its own hard-bitten grace. But to the military professional, war is associated less with the martial cadences of Tennyson than with bland bureaucratese. This makes intuitive sense. A nation's military establishment requires an emotionally neutral, descriptively precise vocabulary to track and control its endlessly branching organizational tree, and to occasionally fight a war - an extraordinarily complex undertaking. The United States may have the greatest need for a military operating language, because it has by far the largest military to operate. Such a language exists, and much of it, the unclassified part, is collected in the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, a 742-page and growing work, most recently amended in November. Since 1989, its use has been mandatory for the armed forces and the Defense Department. The dictionary (online at: [1]http://jdeis.cornerstoneindustry.com/jdeis/dictionary/qsDictionaryP ortlet.jsp?group=dod is striking for the resourcefulness of the compilers - who must describe a wide array of arcane objects, activities and institutions - for their lack of affect and for the surreal humor that is the occasional product of unswerving literalism. In a book whose ultimate subject is weapons and war, there is hardly a whiff of smoke or powder. Excerpts follow. A absolute dud A nuclear weapon which, when launched at or emplaced on a target, fails to explode. antemortem identification media Records, samples and photographs taken prior to death. These include (but are not limited to) fingerprints, dental X-rays, body tissue samples, photographs of tattoos or other identifying marks. These "predeath" records would be compared against records completed after death to help establish a positive identification of remains. B back tell The transfer of information from a higher to a lower echelon of command. See also track telling. (See also: cross tell; forward tell; lateral tell; overlap tell; and relateral tell.) blood chit A small sheet of material depicting an American flag and a statement in several languages to the effect that anyone assisting the bearer to safety will be rewarded. C catalytic attack An attack designed to bring about a war between major powers through the disguised machinations of a third power. cloud amount The proportion of sky obscured by cloud, expressed as a fraction of sky covered. confusion agent An individual who is dispatched by the sponsor for the primary purpose of confounding the intelligence or counterintelligence apparatus of another country rather than for the purpose of collecting and transmitting information. consequence management Those measures taken to protect public health and safety, restore essential government services and provide emergency relief to governments, businesses and individuals affected by the consequences of a chemical, biological, nuclear and/or high-yield explosive situation. culture A feature of the terrain that has been constructed by man. Included are such items as roads, buildings and canals; boundary lines.... D D & D Denial and deception. destroyed A condition of a target so damaged that it can neither function as intended nor be restored to a usable condition. disaffected person A person who is alienated or estranged from those in authority or lacks loyalty to the government; a state of mind. E E total probable error expellee A civilian outside the boundaries of the country of his or her nationality or ethnic origin who is being forcibly repatriated to that country or to a third country for political or other purposes. See also displaced person; evacuee; refugee. F fires The effects of lethal or nonlethal weapons. first light The beginning of morning nautical twilight; i.e., when the center of the morning sun is 12 degrees below the horizon. free rocket A rocket not subject to guidance or control in flight. G garnishing In surveillance, natural or artificial material applied to an object to achieve or assist camouflage. grazing fire Fire approximately parallel to the ground where the center of the cone of fire does not rise above one meter from the ground. H harmonization The process and/or results of adjusting differences or inconsistencies to bring significant features into agreement. hasty breaching The rapid creation of a route through a minefield, barrier or fortification by any expedient method. I I Immediate; individual. in extremis A situation of such exceptional urgency that immediate action must be taken to minimize imminent loss of life or catastrophic degradation of the political or military situation. Injill Injured or ill. K kill box A three-dimensional area reference that enables timely, effective coordination and control and facilitates rapid attacks. M median incapacitating dose The amount or quantity of chemical agent which when introduced into the body will incapacitate 50 percent of exposed, unprotected personnel. message Any thought or idea expressed briefly in a plain or secret language and prepared in a form suitable for transmission by any means of communication. mixed bag In naval mine warfare, a collection of mines of various types, firing systems, sensitivities, arming delays and ship counter settings. N NAK negative acknowledgement nickname A combination of two separate unclassified words that is assigned an unclassified meaning and is employed only for unclassified administrative, morale or public information purposes. nuclear bonus effects Desirable damage or casualties produced by the effects from friendly nuclear weapons that cannot be accurately calculated in targeting as the uncertainties involved preclude depending on them for a militarily significant result. O open unimproved wet space That water area specifically allotted to and usable for storage of floating equipment. P partisan warfare Not to be used. See guerrilla warfare. perception management Actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives and objective reasoning ... ultimately resulting in foreign behaviors and official actions favorable to the originator's objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations. R rainout Radioactive material in the atmosphere brought down by precipitation. S salted weapon A nuclear weapon which has certain elements or isotopes which ... produce radioactive products over and above the usual radioactive weapon debris. squirt In air-to-air refueling, a means of providing visual detection of a nearby aircraft. In practice this is achieved by the donor aircraft dumping fuel .... T two-person rule A system designed to prohibit access by an individual to nuclear weapons and certain designated components by requiring the presence at all times of at least two authorized persons, each capable of detecting incorrect or unauthorized procedures with respect to the task to be performed. unpremeditated expansion of a war Not to be used. See escalation. unwarned exposed The vulnerability of friendly forces to nuclear weapon effects. In this condition, personnel are assumed to be standing in the open at burst time, but have dropped to a prone position by the time the blast wave arrives. V vulnerability The susceptibility of a nation or military force to any action by any means through which its war potential or combat effectiveness may be reduced or its will to fight diminished. W warble In naval mine warfare, the process of varying the frequency of sound produced by a narrow band noisemaker to ensure that the frequency to which the mine will respond is covered. WORM Write once, read many. Z z Effort. From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 30 18:39:20 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 13:39:20 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Under One Roof, Aging Together Yet Alone Message-ID: The New York Times > National > Under One Roof, Aging Together Yet Alone http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/national/30assisted.html January 30, 2005 By JANE GROSS STRATFORD, Conn., Jan. 28 - Everyone complains about the food. Nobody wants to sit with the misfits. There are leaders and followers, social butterflies and loners, goody-goodies and troublemakers. Friendships are intense and so are rivalries. Everybody knows everybody else's business. Except for the traffic jam of wheelchairs and walkers, the dining room at the Atria assisted living community here might as well be a high school cafeteria. Mary Mercandante, 88, has an explanation for the restive, gossipy environment when old people are forced to live under one roof, even in a top-notch place like this. "Nobody wants to be here," said Mrs. Mercandante, who has lived in the residence for all of its five years and has a gold key to prove it. Phil Granger, a chipper 84-year-old newcomer, agrees that no one welcomes assisted living's stark reminder of mortality. "There's everything anybody could want here," said Mr. Granger, who spreads good cheer by dispensing hard candy, except to diabetics and those with dementia, who might choke. "The only thing wrong with this place is that we're all old. We remember what we used to do and can't do anymore." When introduced in the mid-1980's in the United States, assisted living was hailed as a dignified alternative to nursing homes. Its chief attraction was a well-appointed private apartment rather than a fluorescent-lighted double room along a linoleum corridor. The monthly costs, which average $2,524 nationwide and thousands of dollars more here in Connecticut's wealthiest county, include a common dining room, transportation, housekeeping, activities meant to relieve isolation, and ? la carte services for changing personal care and medical needs. In the last decade the number of elderly Americans in assisted living has tripled, to nearly one million, and industry experts say the residents, overwhelmingly widowed women with an average age of 85, have steadily grown older and frailer. A study by the National Center for Assisted Living, an industry group, shows that half the residents have some degree of cognitive impairment, three-quarters need help bathing, 8 in 10 cannot administer their own medication and more than 90 percent can no longer cook or do housework. Residents who leave assisted living usually do so not because they die but because they run out of money, and go to nursing homes. There the impoverished, including middle-class men and women who have outlived their savings, are covered by Medicaid as they are not (except for a small percentage) in assisted living. The federal government has already made recommendations to improve quality control and correct misleading advertising in assisted living facilities. But only a few sociologists and public health researchers have studied the social organization and daily preoccupations of these communities. Dr. Catherine Hawes, a professor of health policy at Texas A&M University, is one. She describes them as "high school all over again, without the expectations." Keren Brown Wilson, who ran some of the nation's first assisted living homes, in Oregon, said that "na?ve notions about the socialization of older adults" leave many residents wondering why they are not having as much fun as the happy people pictured in retirement brochures. The Atria brochure, by example, features photographs of people who look to be 60 to 70. "We pretend everything is wonderful," Dr. Brown Wilson said, "which is an unrealistic expectation at this stage in life." This stage in life, experts agree, is bleaker than most Americans admit. Humbled by the loss of control and fearful of the future, many older people complain incessantly, most often about the food. Also, in a cruel sorting process, they ostracize others more impaired than themselves. The hierarchy by disability "is really fear," said David Vail, executive director of Atria Stratford and president of the Connecticut Assisted Living Association, an industry group. "They don't want to look at what they might become." Both the crankiness and the cliques are on view in the dining room of the Atria Stratford, home to 120 residents, many of whom good-humoredly call themselves "inmates." But also on view are acts of exceptional kindness, budding friendships and sparks of romance between flirtatious women who dress for dinner and chivalrous men who hold their chairs. King of Crankiness The king of crankiness, by his own account, is Bill Haug, 87, who finds fault with just about everything. The chicken is dry and the soup lukewarm. The fitted sheet does not quite cover his bed. What the menu bills as cranberry juice is actually cranberry cocktail. His hotheaded letters to management are legendary. So are his tirades at meetings of the residents' council. Mr. Haug writes the letters on the same electric typewriter he uses for love poems, sent back to him unread by a woman he dated after his wife died. Bluster turns to tears in the privacy of his apartment, where only the typewriter and crossword puzzle books are his own. The shabby furnishings were borrowed from Atria's storeroom. Within months, Mr. Haug says, his nest egg will be gone, despite selling his house, car and possessions. Then he will have to go into a nursing home. To Mr. Haug's right at the dinner table is Mary Thompson, 85, statuesque, dressed to the nines and reluctantly resettled here by an adult daughter. Mrs. Thompson sometimes gets confused, insisting she is in a hotel while her home is remodeled. At meals, she bangs a spoon on her glass or hollers to get the waitress's attention. Mr. Haug pays her no mind. But it took lots of shuffled seating assignments to achieve this peculiar if peaceable arrangement. Most residents have no patience for either of them. Behind his back Mr. Haug is often called a windbag. Mrs. Thompson's behavior provokes cries of "Shut up!" from nearby tables, where fear of the future trumps empathy. Everywhere but the dining room, Mrs. Thompson is never more than inches away from Christine Schwinbold, 88, who is a full foot shorter and cheerfully forgetful. The pair, who even accompany each other to the ladies' room, are known as the Bobbsey Twins and are generally given a wide berth. Plans to Call a Cab Mrs. Schwinbold declares that her former home in Wisconsin is just down the block. Other residents were so tired of hearing about Beaver Lake that they showed her a map. It made no difference. Gwendolyn Lord, director of food services, separated the two women at meals because "they feed off each other's impairment," with one or the other hatching plans to call a cab and go home. This way, Ms. Lord said, Mrs. Thompson, a great beauty in her time, holds court with Mr. Haug and two other grumpy old men. And Mrs. Schwinbold is the perfect dinner companion for others who are similarly impaired but less perky about it. Ms. Lord's latest seating dilemma is which woman to put in the "ghost seat" occupied by Ann Cerino until her sudden death on Dec. 26. Leaving a chair empty after a funeral is a mistake, Ms. Lord said. So is an all-male table, a waste of scarce resources. "Men have a duty to flirt with the ladies because the desire to be admired doesn't go away with age," Ms. Lord said. "Plus, assuming responsibility for their female tablemates enhances their masculinity." Mrs. Cerino's wake and funeral drew a big crowd of residents, including Mr. Granger, in a new topcoat, who drove there in his souped-up 2001 Impala, mostly used to visit his own wife's grave. Mrs. Cerino was the queen bee here, holding court all day in the snack bar, known as the country kitchen. She also ran the all-important food committee - assisted living's equivalent to being president of the student government - which debates the merits of chunky versus smooth spaghetti sauce and whether the fish should be fried or broiled. Meanwhile her 90-year-old husband, Tony, a shy man, watched television in their apartment upstairs. Mr. Cerino was dazed in the weeks following the death of his wife of 67 years, so Pete Piretti, 83, kept an eye on him. Mr. Piretti lives alone in a studio, while his wife, Millie, who has had Alzheimer's disease for 18 years, is upstairs in the dementia unit. Mr. Piretti had some homemade tomato sauce, Mrs. Cerino's recipe for polenta with beans and a jug of Chianti. The two men had a jolly evening in Apartment 306, neither directly mentioning the other's heartache. "He can cook better than I can because I didn't have to," Mr. Cerino said, obliquely referring to the many years Mr. Piretti cared for his wife and assumed all the housekeeping duties. The Pirettis, high school sweethearts, arrived at Atria Stratford on March 17, 2002, when Mr. Piretti said he was close to "the breaking point" and afraid he would strike out at his wife. He is not alone in knowing the precise month, date and year, a grim milestone that stays fixed in memory. For Mr. Granger it was Oct. 4, 2004, shortly after his wife died and he realized he "couldn't hack it" at home alone. Arline Brady, 87 and nearly blind, came a month earlier. She had taken a bad fall in her Florida condominium and, she said, her five children "told me I couldn't live alone anymore." Similarly, Helen Simics, 78, moved here at the insistence of her brother and sister-in-law, on June 21, 2000, after she broke a hip. Leaving an assisted living community, on average after two and a half years, is rarely voluntary. Three residents died at Atria Stratford in December. Others, when their assets are gone, will go to nursing homes, which charge 40 percent more on average but accept government reimbursement. The best known in these parts is Lord Chamberlain. The euphemism for winding up there is "being sent across the street." Most states in the last few years have begun small, experimental programs that permit Medicaid to pay a portion of the cost of assisted living: the personal care and medical services that are tacked on to the monthly charge, but not the rent itself. Nationwide, according to a 2002 study by the National Academy for State Health Policy, 102,000 assisted living residents, or 11 percent of the total, received this benefit, double the number in 2000. But rarely is it enough to allow people to stay in an apartment for more than a few extra months. That is because of the traditional fee structure in assisted living. At Atria Stratford, for example, a studio costs $3,400 with no special services. Medication management adds $400 a month. Help bathing, dressing or eating can cost an additional $1,400 a month, for a total of $5,200. Of that amount $1,800 would be covered by Medicaid if Atria participated in Connecticut's tiny waiver program. It does not. Statewide, Mr. Vail said, there are 9,800 assisted living units and only 75 Medicaid waiver slots. So he advises families to calculate when their money will run out and move before that point, since nursing homes, if they have a high enough percentage of Medicaid patients, can push those with assets to the top of the waiting list. Mr. Piretti, a former gas station owner, currently pays $3,400 a month for his apartment and an additional $5,500 a month for his wife's care and accommodations, a stunning sum to him. "When we run out," he said, "she'll go on Title 19," as Medicaid is known in Connecticut, "and I'll go live with my daughter." It is a workable plan. Especially if Mr. Piretti remains as fit and independent as he is now, able to drive to stores that sell supplies for the log houses he builds from kits and the decoupage watering cans he decorates with magazine photos. He is among just 20 residents, mostly men, who need no assistance but meals and housekeeping, Mr. Vail said. The discrepancy seems to be a result of men moving here earlier than women, who want to stay home as long as possible, often until their adult children intervene. Men, by contrast, seem to willingly relocate when their wives have died or deteriorated to the point they cannot run a household anymore. Here they will be taken care of by a largely female staff and have the companionship of the female residents, who outnumber them 4 to 1. "I couldn't stay home alone," Mr. Granger said. "My wife was my life. I just didn't know that until she died." Big Men on Campus Now Mr. Granger is one of the big men on campus. He favors a tweed cap, has all his faculties and still drives, even after dark. But grief for his wife is fresh and his outings take him no farther than Riverside Cemetery, 4.1 miles away by his reckoning. The other candidate for romance is Pat Jordan, 94, whose wife died here last year. Mr. Jordan is a charmer. His arrival in the country kitchen or the arts and crafts room brings a blush to the faces of at least two women. One is Mrs. Brady, a well-to-do widow whom Mr. Jordan describes as "one classy gal." The other is Doris Mauri, 85, who never married and worked with computers. Mr. Jordan says Miss Mauri is "a quiet girl, a decent girl and my very best friend here." "I'm very fond of her," he added. "But I have no love interest in anyone. I don't think my Florence would like it." But Colleen Douglas, the activity director, has not given up hope. She is not the typical aerobics-instructor-type who is often hired to lure the old folks to the 9:30 a.m. seated exercise class. Residents love her faux leopard skin coat, red furry boots and year-round tan, as well as her sharp wit. Activity directors, more typically, are cloying or patronizing. The daily activities schedule here nevertheless has a cookie cutter-feel. On Dec. 28, for instance, the lobby signboard, headlined "Today's Opportunities to Engage Life," lists exercise, penny poker, word games, afternoon snacks and socializing, bingo, and a Gene Hackman movie, "The Heist." But outside the formal schedule, Ms. Douglas injects a bit of pizzazz. One recent day she baked apple pies, using a resident's recipe. She never pushes organized gaiety on loners, like Miss Simics, who prefers reading The Connecticut Post in the lounge each morning and then spending the rest of the day puttering in her apartment. Ms. Douglas gets a kick out of seeing Mr. Jordan return from the store with a six-pack of beer. And she does not tattle on a resident with no serious disabilities who has a forbidden hot plate. Mr. Jordan is her best shot at every activity director's dream: a wedding. "Nobody wants a romance in this building more than I do," Ms. Douglas said. "So if I'm moving in a woman who still has her mind and walks, I go to Mr. Jordan. So far he's still mourning his wife. But I'll keep trying." From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 30 18:40:42 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 13:40:42 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Op-Ed: Tom Wolfe: The Doctrine That Never Died Message-ID: The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: The Doctrine That Never Died http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/opinion/30wolfe.html January 30, 2005 By TOM WOLFE SURELY some bright bulb from the Council on Foreign Relations in New York or the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton has already remarked that President Bush's inaugural address 10 days ago is the fourth corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. No? So many savants and not one peep out of the lot of them? Really? The president had barely warmed up: "There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants ... and that is the force of human freedom.... The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. ... America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one..." when - bango! - I flashed back 100 years and 47 days on the dot to another president. George W. Bush was speaking, but the voice echoing inside my skull - a high-pitched voice, an odd voice, coming from such a great big hairy bear of a man - was that of the president who dusted off Monroe's idea and dragged it into the 20th century. "The steady aim of this nation, as of all enlightened nations," said the Echo, "should be to strive to bring ever nearer the day when there shall prevail throughout the world the peace of justice. ...Tyrants and oppressors have many times made a wilderness and called it peace. ...The peace of tyrannous terror, the peace of craven weakness, the peace of injustice, all these should be shunned as we shun unrighteous war. ... The right of freedom and the responsibility for the exercise of that right cannot be divorced." Theodore Roosevelt! - Dec. 4, 1904, announcing to Congress the first corollary to the Monroe Doctrine - an item I had deposited in the memory bank and hadn't touched since I said goodbye to graduate school in the mid-1950's! In each case what I was hearing was the usual rustle and flourish of the curtains opening upon a grandiloquent backdrop. But if there was one thing I learned before departing academe and heading off wayward into journalism, it was that these pretty preambles to major political messages, all this solemn rhetorical throat-clearing - the parts always omitted from the textbooks as superfluous - are inevitably what in fact gives the game away. Theodore Roosevelt's corollary to President James Monroe's famous doctrine of 1823 proclaimed that not only did America have the right, ? la Monroe, to block European attempts to re-colonize any of the Western Hemisphere, it also had the right to take over and shape up any nation in the hemisphere guilty of "chronic wrongdoing" or uncivilized behavior that left it "impotent," powerless to defend itself against aggressors from the Other Hemisphere, meaning mainly England, France, Spain, Germany and Italy. The immediate problem was that the Dominican Republic had just reneged on millions in European loans so flagrantly that an Italian warship had turned up just off the harbor of Santo Domingo. Roosevelt sent the Navy down to frighten off the Italians and all other snarling Europeans. Then the United States took over the Dominican customs operations and debt management and by and by the whole country, eventually sending in the military to run the place. We didn't hesitate to occupy Haiti and Nicaragua, either. Back in 1823, Europeans had ridiculed Monroe and his doctrine. Baron de Tuyll, the Russian minister to Washington, said Americans were too busy hard-grabbing and making money to ever stop long enough to fight, even if they had the power, which they didn't. But by the early 1900's it was a different story. First there was T.R. And then came Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. In 1912 Japanese businessmen appeared to be on the verge of buying vast areas of Mexico's Baja California bordering our Southern California. Lodge drew up, and the Senate ratified, what became known as the Lodge Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The United States would allow no foreign interests, no Other Hemispheroids of any description, to give any foreign government "practical power of control" over territory in This Hemisphere. The Japanese government immediately denied having any connection with the tycoons, and the Baja deals, if any, evaporated. Then, in 1950, George Kennan, the diplomat who had developed the containment theory of dealing with the Soviet Union after the Second World War, toured Latin America and came away alarmed by Communist influence in the region. So he devised the third corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The Kennan Corollary said that Communism was simply a tool of Soviet national power. The United States had no choice, under the mandates of the Monroe Doctrine, but to eradicate Communist activity wherever it turned up in Latin America ... by any means necessary, even if it meant averting one's eyes from dictatorial regimes whose police force did everything but wear badges saying Chronic Wrongdoing. The historian Gaddis Smith summarizes the Lodge and Kennan Corollaries elegantly and economically in "The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1945-1993." Now, Gaddis Smith was a graduate-schoolmate of mine and very much a star even then and has remained a star historian ever since. So do I dare suggest that in this one instance, in a brilliant career going on 50 years now, that Gaddis Smith might have been ...wrong? ... that 1945 to 1993 were not the last years of the Monroe Doctrine? ... that the doctrine was more buff and boisterous than it has ever been 10 days ago, Jan. 20, 2005? But before we go forward, let's take one more step back in time and recall the curious case of Antarctica. In 1939 Franklin Roosevelt authorized the first official United States exploration of the South Pole, led by Admiral Richard E. Byrd. The expedition was scientific - but also military. The Japanese and the Germans were known to be rooting about in the ice down there, as were the Russians, the British, the Chileans, the Argentines, all of them yapping and stepping on one another's heels. Gradually it dawned on the whole bunch of them: at the South Pole the hemispheres got ... awfully narrow. In fact, there was one point, smaller than a dime, if you could ever find it, where there were no more Hemispheres at all. Finally, everybody in essence just gave up and forgot about it. It was so cold down there, you couldn't shove a shell into the gullet of a piece of artillery ... or a missile into a silo. Ah, yes, a missile. On the day in November 1961, when the Air Force achieved the first successful silo launching of an intercontinental ballistic missile, the SM-80, the Western Hemisphere part of the Monroe Doctrine ceased to mean anything at all - while the ideas behind it began to mean everything in the world. At bottom, the notion of a sanctified Western Hemisphere depended upon its separation from the rest of the world by two vast oceans, making intrusions of any sort obvious. The ICBM's - soon the Soviet Union and other countries had theirs - shrank the world in a military sense. Then long-range jet aircraft, satellite telephones, television and the Internet all, in turn, did the job socially and commercially. By Mr. Bush's Inauguration Day, the Hemi in Hemisphere had long since vanished, leaving the Monroe Doctrine with - what? - nothing but a single sphere ... which is to say, the entire world. For the mission - the messianic mission! - has never shrunk in the slightest ... which brings us back to the pretty preambles and the solemn rhetorical throat-clearing ... the parts always omitted from the textbooks as superfluous. "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," President Bush said. He added, "From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth." David Gelernter, the scientist and writer, argues that "Americanism" is a fundamentally religious notion shared by an incredibly varied population from every part of the globe and every conceivable background, all of whom feel that they have arrived, as Ronald Reagan put it, at a "shining city upon a hill." God knows how many of them just might agree with President Bush - and Theodore Roosevelt - that it is America's destiny and duty to bring that salvation to all mankind. [1]Tom Wolfe is the author, most recently, of [2]"I Am Charlotte Simmons." References 1. http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2004/11/23/books/authors/index.html 2. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/books/28WEISBER.html From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 30 18:42:01 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 13:42:01 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: Tool for Thought Message-ID: The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > Essay: Tool for Thought http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/30JOHNSON.html January 30, 2005 By STEVEN JOHNSON One often hears from younger writers that they can't imagine how anyone managed to compose an article, much less an entire book, with a typewriter. Kerouac banging away at his Underwood portable? Hemingway perched over his Remington? They might as well be monastic scribes or cave painters. But if the modern word processor has become a near-universal tool for today's writers, its impact has been less revolutionary than you might think. Word processors let us create sentences without the unwieldy cross-outs and erasures of paper, and despite the occasional catastrophic failure, our hard drives are better suited for storing and retrieving documents than file cabinets. But writers don't normally rely on the computer for the more subtle arts of inspiration and association. We use the computer to process words, but the ideas that animate those words originate somewhere else, away from the screen. The word processor has changed the way we write, but it hasn't yet changed the way we think. Changing the way we think, of course, was the cardinal objective of many early computer visionaries: Vannevar Bush's seminal 1945 essay that envisioned the modern, hypertext-driven information machine was called ''As We May Think''; Howard Rheingold's wonderful account of computing's pioneers was called ''Tools for Thought.'' Most of these gurus would be disappointed to find that, decades later, the most sophisticated form of artificial intelligence in our writing tools lies in our grammar checkers. But 2005 may be the year when tools for thought become a reality for people who manipulate words for a living, thanks to the release of nearly a dozen new programs all aiming to do for your personal information what Google has done for the Internet. These programs all work in slightly different ways, but they share two remarkable properties: the ability to interpret the meaning of text documents; and the ability to filter through thousands of documents in the time it takes to have a sip of coffee. Put those two elements together and you have a tool that will have as significant an impact on the way writers work as the original word processors did. For the past three years, I've been using tools comparable to the new ones hitting the market, so I have extensive firsthand experience with the way the software changes the creative process. (I have used a custom-designed application, created by the programmer Maciej Ceglowski at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, and now use an off-the-shelf program called DEVONthink.) The raw material the software relies on is an archive of my writings and notes, plus a few thousand choice quotes from books I have read over the past decade: an archive, in other words, of all my old ideas, and the ideas that have influenced me. Having all this information available at my fingerprints does more than help me find my notes faster. Yes, when I'm trying to track down an article I wrote many years ago, it's now much easier to retrieve. But the qualitative change lies elsewhere: in finding documents I've forgotten about altogether, documents that I didn't know I was looking for. What does this mean in practice? Consider how I used the tool in writing my last book, which revolved around the latest developments in brain science. I would write a paragraph that addressed the human brain's remarkable facility for interpreting facial expressions. I'd then plug that paragraph into the software, and ask it to find other, similar passages in my archive. Instantly, a list of quotes would be returned: some on the neural architecture that triggers facial expressions, others on the evolutionary history of the smile, still others that dealt with the expressiveness of our near relatives, the chimpanzees. Invariably, one or two of these would trigger a new association in my head -- I'd forgotten about the chimpanzee connection -- and I'd select that quote, and ask the software to find a new batch of documents similar to it. Before long a larger idea had taken shape in my head, built out of the trail of associations the machine had assembled for me. Compare that to the traditional way of exploring your files, where the computer is like a dutiful, but dumb, butler: ''Find me that document about the chimpanzees!'' That's searching. The other feels different, so different that we don't quite have a verb for it: it's riffing, or brainstorming, or exploring. There are false starts and red herrings, to be sure, but there are just as many happy accidents and unexpected discoveries. Indeed, the fuzziness of the results is part of what makes the software so powerful. These tools are smart enough to get around the classic search engine failing of excessive specificity: searching for ''dog'' and missing all the articles that have only ''canine'' in them. Modern indexing software learns associations between individual words, by tracking the frequency with which words appear near each other. This can create almost lyrical connections between ideas. I'm now working on a project that involves the history of the London sewers. The other day I ran a search that included the word ''sewage'' several times. Because the software knows the word ''waste'' is often used alongside ''sewage'' it directed me to a quote that explained the way bones evolved in vertebrate bodies: by repurposing the calcium waste products created by the metabolism of cells. That might seem like an errant result, but it sent me off on a long and fruitful tangent into the way complex systems -- whether cities or bodies -- find productive uses for the waste they create. It's still early, but I may well get an entire chapter out of that little spark of an idea. Now, strictly speaking, who is responsible for that initial idea? Was it me or the software? It sounds like a facetious question, but I mean it seriously. Obviously, the computer wasn't conscious of the idea taking shape, and I supplied the conceptual glue that linked the London sewers to cell metabolism. But I'm not at all confident I would have made the initial connection without the help of the software. The idea was a true collaboration, two very different kinds of intelligence playing off each other, one carbon-based, the other silicon. IF these tools do get adopted, will they affect the kinds of books and essays people write? I suspect they might, because they are not as helpful to narratives or linear arguments; they're associative tools ultimately. They don't do cause-and-effect as well as they do ''x reminds me of y.'' So they're ideally suited for books organized around ideas rather than single narrative threads: more ''Lives of a Cell'' and ''The Tipping Point'' than ''Seabiscuit.'' No doubt some will say that these tools remind them of the way they use Google already, and the comparison is apt. (One of the new applications that came out last year was Google Desktop -- using the search engine's tools to filter through your personal files.) But there's a fundamental difference between searching a universe of documents created by strangers and searching your own personal library. When you're freewheeling through ideas that you yourself have collated -- particularly when you'd long ago forgotten about them -- there's something about the experience that seems uncannily like freewheeling through the corridors of your own memory. It feels like thinking. Steven Johnson is the author, most recently, of ''Mind Wide Open.'' His new book, ''Everything Bad Is Good for You,'' will be published in May. From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 30 18:43:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 13:43:58 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: The Observant Reader Message-ID: The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > Essay: The Observant Reader http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/30SHALITL.html January 30, 2005 By WENDY SHALIT JONATHAN ROSEN'S novel ''Joy Comes in the Morning'' features a beatific Upper East Side Reform rabbi named Deborah whose days are spent reassuring insecure converts, studying the Talmud and cuddling deformed newborns whose parents have rejected them. This paragon is, we are told, like a ''plant . . . nourishing herself directly from the source.'' But if Deborah is a plant, she's certainly not a clinging vine. When she propositions a man named Lev, it's with a sexy whisper: ''I'm a rabbi, not a nun.'' In contrast, Deborah's Orthodox ex, Reuben, is a Venus' flytrap. Although he wasn't supposed to touch her, he had no qualms about sleeping with Deborah, a slip she's sure was ''only one of the 613 commandments he had violated, but perhaps the one he most easily discounted.'' Curiously, Reuben showed ''more anxiety about the state of her kitchen'' than he did about spending the night -- next morning, he went through the dishes to make sure she had separate sets for milk and meat. You might think Reuben is just a guy with a problem, but the problem may also be the author's. In the course of the novel, Rosen dismisses modern Orthodox men as ''macho sissies'' and depicts ''pencil-necked'' Orthodox boys ''poring over giant books instead of looking out the window at the natural world.'' Rosen's yeshiva students ''give in to the simplicity of rules rather than the negotiated truce that Deborah seemed to have achieved.'' Even an elderly lady attracts his withering eye: ''Like many Orthodox women of a certain age, she had the look of an aging drag queen.'' Authors who have renounced Orthodox Judaism -- or those who were never really exposed to it to begin with -- have often portrayed deeply observant Jews in an unflattering or ridiculous light. Admittedly, some of this has produced first-rate literature or, at the least, great entertainment, but it has left many people thinking traditional Jews actually live like Tevye in the musical ''Fiddler on the Roof'' or, at the opposite extreme, like the violent, vicious rabbi in Henry Roth's novel ''Call It Sleep.'' Not long ago, I did too. At 21, I was on the outside looking in, on my first trip to Israel with a friend who was, like me, a Reform Jew. One day, we wandered into a religious neighborhood in Jerusalem, and suddenly there were black hats and side curls everywhere. My friend pointed out a group of men wearing odd fur hats. ''Those,'' he explained, ''are the really mean ones.'' I never questioned our snap judgment of these people until, a few years later, I returned to study at an all-girls seminary and was surprised to discover that my teachers, whom I adored, were men and women from this same community. The women were a particular revelation. Instead of the oppressed drudges I'd expected, they turned out to be strong and energetic, raising large families and passing on beloved Jewish traditions, quite often in addition to holding down outside jobs. Not all of them had been born into this world: some were newly religious women, former Broadway dancers or scholars with advanced degrees who had now dedicated themselves to performing good deeds. After spending more time in homes like theirs, in Israel and later in America, I came to have a very different view of the haredi, known to outsiders as the ultra-Orthodox. Some of my Jewish friends have intermarried with people of other faiths; others have gone back to their traditional roots. Because I did the latter, I'm fascinated by the ways different Jewish communities understand and misunderstand one another. As a writer, I'm especially fascinated by how this happens in print. And it seems I'm not the only one. Although some Jewish outsiders, like Allegra Goodman, have written sympathetically of the haredi, other writers have purported to explain the ultra-Orthodox from an insider's perspective. But are these authors really insiders? As I changed from outsider to insider, my perspective changed too. Consider, for example, Nathan Englander, a talented writer whose collection of stories, ''For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,'' brimmed with revelations of hypocrisy and self-inflicted misery: a fistfight that breaks out in synagogue over who will read from the Torah; a sect whose members fast three days instead of one and drink a dozen glasses of wine at the Passover seders instead of four; a man whose rabbi sends him to a prostitute when his wife won't sleep with him. Of course, the Orthodox don't actually brawl over who reads the Torah, no rabbi is allowed to write a dispensation for a man to see a prostitute, and even extremely pious Jews can't invent their own traditions for fast days or seders. Englander's sketches were fictional, but did most people realize this? Apparently not. The world at large took him to be a ''former yeshiva boy'' who had renounced his old life. Englander didn't help matters by referring to the ''anti-intellectual'' and ''fire-and-brimstone'' aspects of his ''shtetl mentality substandard education'' -- a strange way of describing the Long Island community where he grew up, which prides itself on its tolerance and dedication to learning, both secular and religious. Englander is about as much a product of the shtetl as John Kerry. He actually attended the coeducational Hebrew Academy of Nassau County and then the State University of New York, Binghamton. It was one of his supposedly substandard teachers who encouraged him to write in the first place. Englander is one of a number of outsider insiders. In 1978, Tova Reich's novel ''Mara'' depicted an Orthodox rabbi who doubles as a shady nursing-home owner, married to an overweight dietitian so obsessed with food that she gorges herself with five-course meals, even on the fast day of Yom Kippur. The Hasidic hero of her 1988 novel, ''Master of the Return'' (praised by Publishers Weekly for its ''devastating accuracy'') abandons his semi-paralyzed pregnant wife in her wheelchair in order to spit on immodestly clad female strangers; at home, he helps his 2-year-old son get ''high on the One Above'' by giving him marijuana. Reich's 1995 novel, ''The Jewish War,'' told of a band of zealots whose leader takes three wives and encourages his followers to kill themselves. Reich herself prefers not to comment on the level of observance she keeps today, while Englander for his part publicly boasts about eating pork. Ostensibly about ultra-Orthodox Jews, this kind of ''insider'' fiction actually reveals the authors' estrangement from the traditional Orthodox community, and sometimes from Judaism itself. Unlike Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, assimilated Jews who have written profoundly about the alienation that accompanies that way of life, the outsider insiders write about a community they may never have been part of. One of the most popular of these is Tova Mirvis. In her first novel, ''The Ladies Auxiliary,'' the Orthodox women of Memphis appear in an unsettlingly harsh light. One of Mirvis's favorite themes is the oddball ba'al teshuvah (literally, ''master of repentance''), a deeply observant Jew who did not grow up as one. Such a type can be seen in ''The Ladies Auxiliary'': Jocelyn, who after years of keeping kosher still regularly indulges in the shrimp salad she hides in her freezer. In Mirvis's more recent novel, ''The Outside World,'' we meet Shayna, a mother of five girls living in an ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn community. Shayna supposedly chose a more spiritual life as a young adult, yet now she spends most of her time reading bridal magazines. Another character, Bryan, is a 19-year-old who returns home from Israel as a deeply religious radical, renamed Baruch. Yet at his engagement party, he's suddenly starring in a Harlequin romance: out on the porch, Baruch embraces his fiancee and she leans ''in close, their bodies gently pressing against each other.'' It's bad enough that a yeshiva student would embrace a woman not related or married to him, but to do so in public is even worse. Yet Baruch's younger sister isn't surprised: ''They who pretended to be so holy in public were just like everyone else in private. It confirmed what she had suspected: that it was all pretense.'' It certainly seems that way. Shayna's supposedly observant husband, Herschel, ignores his job as a kosher supervisor for the Orthodox Coalition while collecting a salary, without experiencing a moment's guilt. Meanwhile, Shayna has a television in her bedroom, ''its presence an unacceptable connection to the outside world. It had long ago been smuggled into the house in an air-conditioner box to hide it from the neighbors, all of whom had done the same thing.'' All of whom? There will always be people who fail to live up to their ideals, and it would be pointless to pretend the strictly observant don't have failings. But before there can be hypocrisy, there must be real idealism; in fiction that lacks idealistic characters, even the hypocrite's place can't be properly understood. Like other outsider insiders, Mirvis homes in on hypocrisy, but in the process she undermines the logic of her plot. The novel's jacket copy announces that ''The Outside World'' is meant to explain ''the retreat into traditionalism that has become a worldwide phenomenon among young people,'' but the uninformed reader might wonder why any young person would want to be part of such a contemptible community. On her Web site, Mirvis says she ''did very little research'' for her books because ''I grew up with all these rules and customs and rituals.'' People who grow up with some traditional customs may imagine themselves experts, but until they've logged real time among the haredi they may know as little as most secular writers. Come to think of it, they may know less, because a secular writer might do more on-the-spot research. What is the market for this fiction? Does it simply satisfy our desire, as one of Mirvis's reviewers put it, to indulge in ''eavesdropping on a closed world''? Or is there a deeper urge: do some readers want to believe the ultra-Orthodox are crooked and hypocritical, and thus lacking any competing claim to the truth? Perhaps, on the other hand, readers are genuinely interested in traditional Judaism but don't know where to look for more nuanced portraits of this world. Thankfully for this last group, another sort of fiction has recently appeared, written by some of the newly religious Jews that Mirvis, Englander and others describe but don't quite understand. In real life, thousands of people each year enter the religious fold, and the ones who are writers are bringing with them the literary training of the more secular life they left behind. This makes them ideally suited to act as interpreters between the two worlds. Consider, for example, Risa Miller, whose ''Welcome to Heavenly Heights'' is a sharply focused fictional portrait of a group of religious American Jews in a settlement on Israel's West Bank. Miller doesn't idealize her characters: they have the same worries and petty jealousies as the rest of us. But she also presents them as people who aspire to transcend their flaws. A ba'al teshuvah since her college days at Goucher, Miller may well have been the first woman to accept the PEN Discovery Award in a sheitel, the wig traditionally worn by observant married women. Ruchama King is another talented insiders' insider. King is also haredi, though she grew up less observant, and her novel, ''Seven Blessings,'' while ostensibly about matchmaking, is really about the revolution in women's learning among ultra-Orthodox Jews. Like Miller, King doesn't shy away from the problems that affect her world, but she also captures the subtlety and magic of its traditions. In particular, she convincingly describes the sublimated excitement that characterizes ultra-Orthodox dating as tiny gestures take on heightened meaning. The promising young poet Eve Grubin, who was raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and went to Smith College, has recently committed herself to Orthodox Judaism. Her first collection, ''What Happened,'' which explores her faith, will appear this fall. For now, harshly satirical views of the haredi may still be too common, and novels and stories by sympathetic outsiders like Allegra Goodman too rare. But the emergence of these newly religious novelists is a refreshing development. In their work, age-old customs are being presented in a way that reminds us of the deep satisfactions they can provide, even, or especially, in the face of the uncertainties of modern life. Who knows, they may even succeed in converting some of those outsider insiders. Wendy Shalit is the author of ''A Return to Modesty.'' She is at work on a second book, ''The Rebellion of the Good Girl.'' From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 30 18:46:24 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 13:46:24 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: (Crighton) 'State of Fear': Not So Hot Message-ID: The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > 'State of Fear': Not So Hot http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/30BARCOTT.html January 30, 2005 [First chapter appended.] By BRUCE BARCOTT STATE OF FEAR By Michael Crichton. 603 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $27.95. There's a problem with Michael Crichton's new thriller, and it shows up before the narrative even begins. In a disclaimer that follows the copyright page, Crichton writes: ''This is a work of fiction. Characters, corporations, institutions and organizations in this novel are the product of the author's imagination, or, if real, are used fictitiously without any intent to describe their actual conduct. However, references to real people, institutions and organizations that are documented in footnotes are accurate. Footnotes are real.'' Footnotes? Yes, there will be footnotes. Although ''State of Fear'' comes dressed as an airport-bookstore thriller, Crichton's readers will discover halfway through their flight that the novel more closely resembles one of those Ann Coulter ''Liberals Are Stupid'' jobs. Liberals, environmentalists and many other straw men endure a stern thrashing in ''State of Fear,'' but Crichton's primary target is the theory of global warming, which he believes is a scientific delusion. In his zeal to expose the emperor's nudity the author cites, ad nauseam, actual studies that seem to contradict the conventional wisdom on global warming. Hence, footnotes. Scholarly trappings aside, ''State of Fear'' does follow the basic conventions of the mass-market thriller. There are villains, there are heroes and there is an evil plot to be foiled. Chief among the baddies is Nicholas Drake, head of an environmental group called the National Environmental Resource Fund (NERF), who has conspired with radical eco-terrorists to trigger a series of climate-related catastrophes. Drake believes the disasters will convince the public that global warming is an imminent crisis that can be averted only by writing big fat checks to NERF. As Drake explains to a P.R. man, John Henley, global warming simply isn't scary enough. ''You can't raise a dime with it, especially in winter,'' he says. ''Every time it snows people forget all about global warming. Or else they decide some warming might be a good thing after all. They're trudging through the snow, hoping for a little global warming. It's not like pollution, John. Pollution worked. It still works. . . . You tell 'em they'll get cancer, and the money rolls in. But nobody is scared of a little warming.'' Opposing Drake is John Kenner, an M.I.T. professor who moonlights as a 007-style agent for the National Security Intelligence Agency. When he's not dispatching thugs, Kenner spends most of his time disabusing new acquaintances of the wrongheaded scientific notions they've absorbed from the news media. Global warming, he says, was ''a setup from the beginning,'' a wrongheaded theory foisted upon the public by unscrupulous scientists and fear-mongering environmental leaders. Between Kenner and Drake stands Peter Evans, a mild-mannered attorney for NERF whose loyalty to the do-gooding tree huggers melts away in the heat of Kenner's relentless climatology lectures. In the cartoonish political world Crichton creates in ''State of Fear,'' Kenner and Drake exist as extreme symbols of a good red conservative and an evil blue liberal struggling to win a swing state. Peter Evans is Ohio. Crichton clearly enjoys drawing the line between fact and fiction exceedingly fine. Nicholas Drake's fellow travelers include George Morton, a billionaire philanthropist who's pledged $10 million to NERF; Ted Bradley, an actor and environmental activist who plays the United States president on a popular TV drama; and a shadowy band of eco-terrorists known as the Environmental Liberation Front (ELF). The author's disclaimer notwithstanding, it's impossible not to identify these folks as stand-ins for the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, the ''West Wing'' star Martin Sheen and the real-life Earth Liberation Front. The nonfictional N.R.D.C. finds itself burdened with an acronym, NERF, symbolizing all that is soft, squishy and childish. Sheen's doppelg?nger comes in for portraiture so villainous -- a drunken lecherous crybaby blowhard, he suffers the novel's most gruesome demise -- that one wonders what the poor actor did to earn such emnity. ''State of Fear'' is so over-the-top, in fact, that it wouldn't take much to turn it into a satiric parable of a liberal coming to his conservative senses. Take the scene where Kenner, Evans and Sarah Jones, George Morton's plucky assistant, arm themselves to confront the eco-terrorists: ''When was the last time you were on a range?'' Kenner asks Evans. ''Uh, it's been a while,'' answers Evans, whose lack of military training and anti-gun politics instantly put his manhood in doubt. ''In the passenger seat, Sarah looked at Peter. He was good-looking, and he had the strong physique of an athlete. But sometimes he behaved like such a wimp.'' Her suspicions aroused by Evans's metrosexual gunslinging, she presses him further. ''You ever do any sports?'' she asks. Sure, he says. ''Squash. A little soccer.'' Wrong answer, blue boy. ''She was disappointed with him and not even sure why. Probably, she thought, because she was nervous and wanted somebody competent to be with her. She liked being around Kenner. He was so knowledgeable, so skilled. He knew what was going on. He was quick to respond to any situation. Whereas Peter was a nice guy, but. . . .'' But she'll be voting red this year. Sarah -- for some reason the author refers to Peter Evans as Evans and John Kenner as Kenner, but Sarah Jones, well, she's just Sarah -- functions as Crichton's own Dame Commonsense. She sees through Ted Bradley's self-righteous bluster: ''Sarah thought: Ted really is a fool. He has a severely limited understanding of what he is talking about.'' She appreciates the road clearance of a good gas-guzzler: ''The vehicle was bouncing over the dirt road, but it was an S.U.V. and it rode high so Sarah knew they would be all right.'' Thank God they didn't take Evans's hybrid wimpmobile. Really -- the guy drives a Prius. This might all be good if not screamingly clever fun -- but for the footnotes. The annoying citations make it apparent that the author desperately wants to be taken seriously on the global warming stuff. That would be perfectly fine in a Weekly Standard cover story. In a thriller, it's a little like having the author interrupt the story to insist that Dr. Evil actually has a death ray. Crichton's proof is itself laughably rigged. Kenner cites study after study but Drake, the scheming NERF leader, is allowed no evidence. ''Just trust me, it's happening,'' Drake says of global warming. ''Count on it.'' There are, of course, thousands of scientific studies that raise disturbing questions about climate change and the human role in its cause. To claim that it's a hoax is every novelist's right. To criticize the assumptions and research gaps in global warming theory is any scientist's prerogative. Citing real studies to support the idea of a hoax is ludicrous. In case anybody misses his point, Crichton tacks a bibliography and two ''author's message'' essays to the end of the book. In these the author compares global warming to the early 20th-century belief in the ridiculous theory of eugenics, and treats us to a bullet-point presentation of his thoughts about science and the environment. One of those thoughts bemoans the lack of ''rational'' and ''systematic'' research on wilderness preservation. For this sorry state of affairs, he writes, ''I blame environmental organizations every bit as much as developers and strip miners.'' Crichton thus leads his readers to one of two possible conclusions: one, there exists a world yet unrevealed in which strip miners wrestle with the issue of proper wilderness management; or two, this fellow has completely lost all sense of perspective. The evidence in ''State of Fear'' forces this reader to embrace the latter. Bruce Barcott is a contributing editor for Outside magazine. First Chapter: 'State of Fear' http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/chapters/0130-1st-crichton.html By MICHAEL CRICHTON PARIS NORD SUNDAY, MAY 2, 2004 12:00 P.M. In the darkness, he touched her arm and said, "Stay here." She did not move, just waited. The smell of salt water was strong. She heard the faint gurgle of water. Then the lights came on, reflecting off the surface of a large open tank, perhaps fifty meters long and twenty meters wide. It might have been an indoor swimming pool, except for all the electronic equipment that surrounded it. And the very strange device at the far end of the pool. Jonathan Marshall came back to her, grinning like an idiot. "Qu'estce que tu penses?" he said, though he knew his pronunciation was terrible. "What do you think?" "It is magnificent," the girl said. When she spoke English, her accent sounded exotic. In fact, everything about her was exotic, Jonathan thought. With her dark skin, high cheekbones, and black hair, she might have been a model. And she strutted like a model in her short skirt and spike heels. She was half Vietnamese, and her name was Marisa. "But no one else is here?" she said, looking around. "No, no," he said. "It's Sunday. No one is coming." Jonathan Marshall was twenty-four, a graduate student in physics from London, working for the summer at the ultra-modern Laboratoire Ondulatoire-the wave mechanics laboratory-of the French Marine Institute in Vissy, just north of Paris. But the suburb was mostly the residence of young families, and it had been a lonely summer for Marshall. Which was why he could not believe his good fortune at meeting this girl. This extraordinarily beautiful and sexy girl. "Show me what it does, this machine," Marisa said. Her eyes were shining. "Show me what it is you do." "My pleasure," Marshall said. He moved to the large control panel and began to switch on the pumps and sensors. The thirty panels of the wave machine at the far end of the tank clicked, one after another. He glanced back at her, and she smiled at him. "It is so complicated," she said. She came and stood beside him at the control panel. "Your research is recorded on cameras?" "Yes, we have cameras in the ceiling, and on the sides of the tank. They make a visual record of the waves that are generated. We also have pressure sensors in the tanks that record pressure parameters of the passing wave." "These cameras are on now?" "No, no," he said. "We don't need them; we're not doing an experiment." "Perhaps we are," she said, resting her hand on his shoulder. Her fingers were long and delicate. She had beautiful fingers. She watched for a minute, then said, "This room, everything is so expensive. You must have great security, no?" "Not really," he said. "Just cards to get in. And only one security camera." He gestured over his shoulder. "That one back in the corner." She turned to look. "And that is turned on?" she said. "Oh yes," he said. "That's always on." She slid her hand to caress his neck lightly. "So is someone watching us now?" "Afraid so." "Then we should behave." "Probably. Anyway, what about your boyfriend?" "Him." She gave a derisive snort. "I have had enough of him." Earlier that day, Marshall had gone from his small apartment to the caf? on rue Montaigne, the caf? he went to every morning, taking a journal article with him to read as usual. Then this girl had sat down at the next table, with her boyfriend. The couple had promptly fallen into an argument. In truth, Marshall felt that Marisa and the boyfriend didn't seem to belong together. He was American, a beefy, red-faced fellow built like a footballer, with longish hair and wire-frame glasses that did not suit his thick features. He looked like a pig trying to appear scholarly. His name was Jim, and he was angry with Marisa, apparently because she had spent the previous night away from him. "I don't know why you won't tell me where you were," he kept repeating. "It is none of your business, that's why." "But I thought we were going to have dinner together." "Jimmy, I told you we were not." "No, you told me you were. And I was waiting at the hotel for you. All night." "So? No one made you. You could go out. Enjoy yourself." "But I was waiting for you." "Jimmy, you do not own me." She was exasperated by him, sighing, throwing up her hands, or slapping her bare knees. Her legs were crossed, and the short skirt rode up high. "I do as I please." "That's clear." "Yes," she said, and at that moment she turned to Marshall and said, "What is that you are reading? It looks very complicated." At first Marshall was alarmed. She was clearly talking to him to taunt the boyfriend. He did not want to be drawn into the couple's dispute. "It's physics," he said briefly, and turned slightly away. He tried to ignore her beauty. "What kind of physics?" she persisted. "Wave mechanics. Ocean waves." "So, you are a student?" "Graduate student." "Ah. And clearly intelligent. You are English? Why are you in France?" And before he knew it, he was talking to her, and she introduced the boyfriend, who gave Marshall a smirk and a limp handshake. It was still very uncomfortable, but the girl behaved as if it were not. "So you work around here? What sort of work? A tank with a machine? Really, I can't imagine what you say. Will you show me?" And now they were here, in the wave mechanics laboratory. And Jimmy, the boyfriend, was sulking in the parking lot outside, smoking a cigarette. "What shall we do about Jimmy?" she said, standing beside Marshall while he worked at the control panel. "He can't smoke in here." "I will see that he does not. But I don't want to make him more angry. (Continues...) From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 30 18:47:46 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 13:47:46 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Safire: Vegan Message-ID: Vegan On Language by William Safire, New York Times Magazine, 5.1.30 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/magazine/30ONLANGUAGE.html January 30, 2005 [I do not know how much longer his language columns will continue. He ended his political column last week. "By all that is sacred in our hopes for the human race,'' wrote the passionate poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1813, ''I conjure those who love happiness and truth, to give a fair trial to the vegetable system.'' The cardinal rule of that blithe spirit: ''Never take any substance into the stomach that once had life.'' That philosophy of diet was first recorded by Pythagoras of Samos who munched on his veggies around the fifth century B.C., with Greek philosophers like Plato, Epicurus and Plutarch embracing fleshless eating with enthusiasm. A few decades after Bish's endorsement (the teenager he seduced and later married, Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, called him Bish), the diet was being called vegetarian, a word popularized by the formation of the vegetarian Society at Ramsgate, England, in 1847. After its planting, that word grew (from the Latin vegetare, ''to grow'') for a century. Then along came the Yorkshireman Donald Watson, a woodworker in Britain and a devotee of greens, who was looking for a name for his newsletter. ''We should all consider carefully,'' he wrote his early subscribers in 1944, ''what our Group, and our magazine, and ourselves, shall be called.'' He was tired of typing the long word vegetarian thousands of times and believed nondairy was too negative: ''Moreover it does not imply that we are opposed to the use of eggs as food. We need a name that suggests what we do eat.'' He rejected vegetarian and fruitarian as ''associated with societies that allow the 'fruits'(!) of cows and fowls.'' (That's milk and eggs; the poet Robert Lowell wrote in 1959 of a ''fly-weight pacifist,/so vegetarian, /he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.'') Watson suggested to his readers that the newsletter be called The Vegan News. ''Our diet will soon become known as a vegan diet, and we should aspire to the rank of vegans.'' As his subscribers swallowed his coinage, Watson promptly made it an -ism : ''Veganism is the practice of living on fruits, nuts, vegetables, grains and other wholesome nonanimal products.'' He thus dissociated his strict -ism from that of vegetarianism, a less rigorous regime that usually permits the eating of eggs, dairy products and honey, as well as the wearing of animal products like leather, wool and silk. (To get the vitamin B12 in animal products, many vegans drink fortified soy milk or take a vitamin pill. Mother's milk is permitted for babies.) Vegetarian has another offshoot besides the aforesaid fruitarian: ''Pescetarian is a frequently used term for those alleged veggies who eat seafood (but not meat or fowl),'' noted a writer in The Guardian in 2002, ''and irritate meat eaters and genuine vegetarians the world over.'' One who exclusively noshes on crudit?s (a Yiddish-English-French phrase) is called a rawist. Also coined in the early 90's is flexitarian, one who eats vegetarian dishes at home but will go along with meat, fish or fowl in a restaurant or as a guest. (A food pollster would call these loosey-goosey gourmands swing eaters.) In the recent presidential campaign, Ralph Nader revealed his food flexitarianism -- no meat, but fish is O.K. -- while Representative Dennis Kucinich firmly asserted his status as a vegan. The strict term can be politically parodied: the humorist Dave Barry, in a healing postelection column, urged readers not to stereotype red-state voters as ''knuckle-dragging Nascar-obsessed cousin-marrying roadkill-eating'' rednecks, nor blue-state voters as ''tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts.'' Vegan, too, has its offshoot: a freegan is an anticonsumerist who eats only what others throw away. Unlike a dumpster diver, a freegan (hard g) limits his scrounging to edibles. I believe this term is too close to euphemisms for copulation to be more than a nonce word. Do not confuse the noun vegan with the intransitive verb to veg out. The latter is based on vegetate, ''to exist passively,'' coined in that sense by the playwright Colley Cibber in 1740. It means ''to droop into such a state of insensibility as to appear to become a vegetable.'' My problem with vegan, now affirmatively used as self-description by roughly two million Americans, is its pronunciation. Does the first syllable sound like the vedge in vegetable, with the soft g? Or is it pronounced like the name sci-fi writers have given the blue-skinned aliens from far-off Vega: VEE-gans or VAY-gans? For this we turn to the word's coiner: ''The pronunciation is VEE-gan,'' Watson told Vegetarians in Paradise, a Los Angeles-based Web site, last year, ''not vay-gan, veggan or veejan.'' He chooses the ee sound followed by a hard g. That's decisive but not definitive; some lexicographers differ, and pronunciation will ultimately be determined by the majority of users. I'll go along with the coiner's pronunciation of VEE-gan. He's a charmingly crotchety geezer who began as a vegetarian. ''When my older brother and younger sister joined me as vegetarians, nonsmokers, teetotalers and conscientious objectors,'' Watson says, ''my mother said she felt like a hen that had hatched a clutch of duck eggs.'' He obviously inherited her feel for language. I'm a carnivore myself -- an animal that delights in eating other animals -- but won't treat this guy like a fad-diet freak: Watson has a major coinage under his belt, and he's a spry 94. Send comments and suggestions to: [1]safireonlanguage at nytimes.com. From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 30 18:51:06 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 13:51:06 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: News from Elsewhere Message-ID: News from Elsewhere Vincent Deary TLS, 4.7.16 [Can you explain this to someone with a mathematics and economics background? It seems that Zizek is saying that the web of causation is not tight. But I can't think of any logical reason why causal chains cannot begin at any time. Pan-causal determinists seem to think that, just because every effect has a cause, every event must also have a cause. But just what Zizek is driving at, I can't figure out. Help!] CONVERSATIONS WITH ZIZEK. Slavoj Zizek and Glyn Daly. 171pp. Polity. Paperback, ?16.99. - 0 7456 2897 4. Is it possible to be a materialist and not be a determinist? Books like Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained (1992), and Daniel Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will (2002) have worked hard to dispel the popular belief in "the magic of our own causal agency" (Wegner). Our idea of freedom is, to paraphrase Spinoza, based on our ignorance of the workings of the machinery that is us. This machinery works largely automatically. Consciousness, if involved at all is - pace the work of the neuroscientist Benjamin Libet half a second behind the game, but, like a senile monarch in a democracy, mistakes its nods of assent for real agency. This is not the only camp besieging consciousness. Dennett has noted that he and the deconstructionists have arrived at similar conclusions - those of the self as a fiction spun from a web of discourse, a centre of narrative gravity. The increasingly numerous followers of Gilles Deleuze are there too, dismembering the self into a shifting confluence of impersonal affects, concepts and percepts. What unites the Deleuzians and the scientists in particular is that they will admit to no rupture in the great chain of being through which freedom can enter. The world is a closed system and subjectivity must be constructed from the materials to hand. It is precisely here that Slavoj Zizek disagrees. While insisting throughout his work on the materialism of his position, his assertion is that "the material" is fissured, inconsistent, and that this gap in substance is subjectivity itself. Arguing that the materialist notion of a mind observing an external reality contains the covert idealism of the world existing outside our minds, he insists, against this, "that our mind does not exist outside the world". Implicit here is that any ontology must account for the place of its enunciation, that "contingent humanity is at the same time the only site of disclosure of the Absolute itself". Zizek, then, attempts a kind of transcendental materialism, where subjectivity is factored in rather than explained away. His work is informed by, and often evokes, a basic wonder at subjectivity, that "an accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and actual only in its context with others should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom - this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure 'I'". The quote, a favourite of the early Zizek, is from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and it lies at the heart of Zizek's project: "Absolute self relating negativity . . . this is at the very center of what I am doing generally". Under the intelligent guidance of Glyn Daly, in Conversations with Zizek we follow this heart of darkness through its three incarnations in Zizek's thought, first as Subject, then as Real and finally as Act. Kant argued, and the cognitive scientists would agree, that reality is posited, achieves its phenomenal coherence through the world-building activity of the observational machinery. However, using Zizek's "The Abyss of Freedom", to paraphrase his argument here, "it is not possible to pass directly from the purely 'animal soul' immersed in its natural life-world to 'normal subjectivity' dwelling in its symbolic universe - the vanishing mediator between the two is the 'mad' gesture of radical withdrawal from reality that opens up the space for its symbolic (re)constitution". This "mad gesture" appears in numerous guises in his work - the Hegelian Night of the World, Schelling's Night of the Self, the Abyss of Freedom, and, here, as Freud's Death Drive. What all these homonyms attest to is a fundamental negativity, a moment between the noumenal and the phenomenal where the former must be utterly destroyed to be reformed as the latter. This moment can never appear in the phenomenal. As Kant noted, "the thing which thinks . . . is known only through its predicates". Indeed, it is absolutely essential that the means of production of meaning remain, in Zizek's terms, foreclosed for reality to have its coherence. It is only when it begins to "peep through", in moments of madness, that we even notice it at work at all. This, for want of a better word, trope of a foreclosure as the founding gesture of a closed system of meaning is in many ways the central Zizekian notion. It provides the key to understanding his reworking of the Lacanian notion of the Real. The Real, at first glance, is to reality as the noumenal is to the phenomenal: the "raw stuff" prior to perception. As Kant acknowledged, any representation is always partial, the totality of reality can never be given to a finite being. This partiality led Kant to formulate the notion of the Ding an sich, the idea that there must be an excess of this partial process. Zizek, going via Hegel and then Lacan, reverses the contingency of this relationship. The Real is nothing but this lack/excess of the process of symbolization given positive form, ontologized; the Thing is "retroactively produced by the very process of symbolization . . . it emerges in the very gesture of its loss" (from Zizek's Tarrying with the Negative). This is not to say that there is nothing beyond the phenomenal, only that any notion of it can never be anything other than, in Hegel's terms, Notion becoming aware of its own inconsistency. This is the second key Zizek trope: that the foreclosed of any system is nothing but the inherent inconsistency of the system (mis)perceived as external obstacle/limit. Implicit here, then, is the paradox that the Real is both the cause and the effect of the process of subjectivity/meaning formation. Zizek is in no hurry to dispel this apparent contradiction, but he does here further specify his position by deploying the three Lacanian categories - the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real - with regard to the Real itself. The Symbolic Real is the territory of science, the meaningless algorithms of matter. The Real Real is the "impossible", "unsymbolisable", "traumatic", etc, which nevertheless instigates the process of symbolization (cf trope one). The Imaginary Real is the most complex formation. Partly it is whatever we imagine to lie behind the veil of appearance, the glimmers of the Eternal we believe we occasionally intuit. It is also what any ideology or meaning system has to foreclose or posit as an obstacle to function (cf trope two) - the founding violence of the rule of Law; the figure of the Jew in Nazi ideology. Consequently, he argues, by changing the coordinates of our symbolic universe(s) we can change the Real. This brings us to his ethics, and specifically to his notion of the Act. As with Kant's, Zizek's ethics are founded on the notion of the subject's absolute freedom. And here we return to our starting point. In a closed, deterministic universe, freedom is an illusion or a miracle - news from elsewhere. However, Zizek's wager is that through the loophole in substance that is subjectivity, an Act can emerge that is literally unconditioned, not determined by the prevailing symbolic order or by its antecedents. By not being of it, the Act thus changes the symbolic order within which it occurs, without, however, appearing to break the chain of causality. This latter point is crucial and is for Zizek what separates his notion of the Act from Alain Badiou's similar notion of the Event. The Act "papers over" the gap of its occurrence by virtue of key Zizek trope number three - by positing its own presuppositions. The Act and the Event, as Zizek acknowledges, are more or less synonymous with trauma, and trauma works retroactively. This point was brutally illustrated in Gaspar Noe's recent film, Irreversible, which reverses narrative chronology and presents the events leading up to the trauma after it has happened. Innocent and contingent remarks which, without the Act, would have been forgotten, now stand transfigured in the light of hindsight as ghastly precursors of an inevitable fate. Lacan describes a similar structure under the category of Truth: "the effect of a full Word is to re-order the past contingent events by conferring on them the sense of necessities yet to come". This, then, is the logic of positing presuppositions, how freedom balances the causal books. "We philosophers are madmen: we have a certain insight that we affirm again and again", notes Zizek here. Quite so. The Subject, the Real, and the Act are essentially identical - an "unbearable" excess which instigates/disrupts a reasonable order, all performing the three-trope dance, all versions of trauma. His vision is a compelling and, as befits this heir to German idealism, a romantic one. Human freedom and dignity are snatched from the teeth of materialist reductions, the virtues of courage and fidelity are asserted in the face of awful contingency. However, at the heart of this "materialist" system lies something profoundly odd: an indescribable nothing that is simultaneously the subject's "real core" and the ineffable beyond of the phenomenal world; a nothing that can never be described, only evoked by its predicates; the immaterial font of freedom. Readers of recent philosophy may be puzzled by this, readers of Judaeo-Christian mystical theology will not. Slavoj Zizek has put the Soul back into philosophy. http://www.the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2108196 From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 30 18:53:07 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 13:53:07 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Scientist: Google's search for meaning Message-ID: Google's search for meaning http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6924 New Scientist, 5.1.28 Computers can learn the meaning of words simply by plugging into Google. The finding could bring forward the day that true artificial intelligence is developed. Paul Vitanyi and Rudi Cilibrasi of the National Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, realised that a Google search can be used to measure how closely two words relate to each other. For instance, imagine a computer needs to understand what a hat is. To do this, it needs to build a word tree - a database of how words relate to each other. It might start with any two words to see how they relate to each other. For example, if it googles "hat" and "head" together it gets nearly 9 million hits, compared to, say, fewer than half a million hits for "hat" and "banana". Clearly "hat" and "head" are more closely related than "hat" and "banana". The technique has managed to distinguish between colours, numbers, different religions and Dutch painters based on the number of hits they return, the researchers report in an online preprint. The pair's results do not surprise Michael Witbrock of the Cyc project in Austin, Texas, a 20-year effort to create an encyclopaedic knowledge base for use by a future artificial intelligence. Cyc represents a vast quantity of fundamental human knowledge, including word meanings, facts and rules of thumb. Witbrock believes the web will ultimately make it possible for computers to acquire a very detailed knowledge base. Indeed, Cyc has already started to draw upon the web for its knowledge. "The web might make all the difference in whether we make an artificial intelligence or not," he says. From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 30 18:56:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 13:56:02 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Slate: David Dobbs: Brain Scans for Sale Message-ID: Brain Scans for Sale - As brain imaging spreads to nonmedical uses, will commerce overtake ethics? By David Dobbs http://slate.msn.com/id/2112653/#ContinueArticle Posted Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2005, at 2:45 PM PT The brain-imaging technology developed over the past three decades--first [22]positron emission tomography, or PET, and more recently the faster, simpler [23]functional magnetic resonance imaging known as fMRI--has given neuroscience a tool of unprecedented power. By tracing blood flow associated with neuronal activity, scanning methods enable researchers to see how different regions of the brain activate as a person thinks or acts. A subject, lying in a scanner, completes mental tasks or responds to various stimuli--solving a simple word puzzle, say, or a more complex task like characterizing facial expressions. As the subject works, the scanner tracks changes in blood flow to create images showing distinctive patterns of neuronal activation. The result is a visual representation of the "neural correlates" of various mental states. At first this technology served primarily to refine a basic map of the brain's main functional areas--showing, for instance, that certain regions in either hemisphere process and generate language or that the amygdala, an almond-sized area near the brain's center, acts as a sort of hub connecting sensory perception, emotion, and memory. Researchers also discovered patterns characteristic of difficult-to-diagnose afflictions ranging from autism to schizophrenia. But perhaps the most intriguing progress, most of which has come in the past five years, has been researchers' increasing ability to identify patterns distinctive to many of our more complex mental processes. Scan studies have tracked the maturation of decision-making regions during adolescence; clarified how we store, retrieve, and lose memories; and identified the neural correlates of fear, distraction, and affection, as well as of various character traits, including [24]extraversion, empathy, and [25]persistence. They've even seen patterns of alarm when volunteers viewed faces of people of another race--a sort of [26]neural correlate of racism. Researchers find new correlations every month. Neurologists stress that cognitive neuroscience is still young, its tools too rough and knowledge too patchy to predict behavior and diagnose personality. Even fMRI, the finest-grained tool, cannot capture events at the minute scale and lightning speed of the neuron. And while a certain activation pattern may be common to most murderers, for example, too many diseases and characteristics remain unexplored to know that the same pattern couldn't also show up in a Grand Theft Auto fanatic. Despite these caveats, some entrepreneurs and researchers are carrying brain imaging into new, nonmedical territory that could be ethically treacherous. Some of these uses, such as lie detection, are already upon us; others, such as the use of brain scans to screen job applicants, seem almost certain to be explored or developed. Close behind the neuroentrepreneurs are neuroethicists at places like the University of Pennsylvania's [29]Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and the [30]Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, who are trying to identify and resolve the ethical concerns raised by these applications: Are scanning technologies really appropriate for nonmedical uses? If personal information is collected by a nonmedical commercial interest, how can we ensure its confidentiality? Perhaps the best-known and possibly least threatening nonmedical use of scanning is the emerging "neuromarketing" industry. At least one well-funded firm, [31]Brighthouse Neurostrategies Group, is trying to learn how to better market everything from licorice to liquor by scanning volunteers as they view ads or other media to see how different advertising approaches activate different brain areas. This strikes many as offensive; do we need yet more insidious ways to stir consumer lust? Yet neuromarketing, while perhaps in poor taste, seems harmless next to other possibilities. More problematic is the use of brain-testing for high-tech lie detection. Neurologist Larry Farwell's [32]Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories is the most prominent such outfit. Farwell contracts with public and private investigators to conduct a brain-wave analysis called multifaceted electroencephalographic response analysis, or MERA, that he claims can tell whether a suspect is familiar with evidence--a crime scene, a face, a piece of furniture or clothing--that would be known only to the perpetrator of a particular crime. The suspect views a series of images on a computer screen while wearing a little cap full of EEG-like sensors; the sensors pick up a distinctive burst of neuronal activity when the suspect sees something familiar. Most neurologists consider this method sound. It's the application of it that gets messy--who uses it, whether proper controls are established, whether the images shown could truly be known only by whoever committed the crime. In high-profile cases like those Farwell has worked on, such as the successful effort to free wrongly convicted murderer [33]Terry Harrington, such issues get close scrutiny. But if brain fingerprinting becomes common, [34]shoddy or dishonest technique could produce false convictions. The most complex, fraught, and uncertain aspect of brain imaging being discussed by neuroethicists is the potential these technologies hold for screening job and school applicants. This so far remains more a hypothetical notion than a budding industry, and no company or school has announced plans to scan applicants. Yet many ethicists feel the temptation will be overwhelming. How to resist a screen that can gauge precisely the sorts of traits--persistence, extroversion, the ability to focus or multitask--that make good employees or students? The legality of such use is unclear. The relevant federal laws, the American With Disabilities Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (which governs privacy of medical information), allow pre-employment medical tests only if they assess abilities relevant to a particular job. An employer couldn't legally scan for depression or incipient Alzheimer's. Yet it's possible an employer could legally use a brain scan to test for traits relevant to a particular job--risk tolerance for a stock-trading job, for instance, or extroversion for a sales position. An additional attraction of brain scanning is that a tester can evaluate these and other traits while an applicant performs nonthreatening, apparently unrelated tasks--like matching labels to pictures. An unscrupulous employer could fashion such tests to covertly explore subjects that would be off-limits in an interview, such as susceptibility to depression, or cultural, sexual, and political preferences. Finally, widespread brain testing poses the risk that the results could be filed away in databases marketed to prospective employers, lenders, health and life insurance companies, or security officials, similar to the way credit rating information is now. Present law would forbid this if the scans were considered medical information. But if they were ruled nonmedical--or if consent were obtained, as consent for releasing certain medical information to insurers or employers often is now--some sharing might be allowed. How likely are these things, really? Your opinion on this will likely depend largely on your faith in how well the legal system will protect privacy and how well any emerging neuroinformation industry will heed ethical guidelines. Nonmedical brain imaging currently falls under no regulatory agency's purview. And the response of both industry and government will likely depend partly on public awareness and pressure. To the extent it pays attention, the public today seems to view neuroscience as a curiosity. But should a new brain-testing industry start to seem heedless or brash--lacking that adultlike prefrontal control, as it were--we may want to start setting limits. [35]David Dobbs writes on science, medicine, and culture. His latest book is Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral. Photograph on the Slate home page of MRI of brain and head from Royalty-Free Corbis. What did you think of this article? Join the Fray, our reader discussion forum [43]POST A MESSAGE [44]READ MESSAGES Remarks from the Fray: Dobbs suggests that there is a distinction between medical and non-medical brain imagining, based entirely on the application of the data rather than on the procedure itself. Do we draw a similar distinction between medical and non-medical x-rays, ultrasounds or urinalyses? No: they are all considered medical procedures regardless of how one uses the data collected. Why should data retrieved from the brain be any less "medical" than data retrieved from the blood or tissue samples? I suspect that it is because of superstitious mind/body dualism: that somehow the brain is not as "material" as the rest of the body, and that any data retrieved is less concrete...less grounded in science. While it is true that much of the inner workings of the brain have yet to be fully understood, the brain is still an ORGAN, albeit a highly complex organ. When one performs a MEDICAL procedure upon an ORGAN, then that data is clearly medical data, and should be considered confidential under current law. --Ang_Cho (To reply, click [45]here) Dobbs frets over the possibility of "...a screen that can gauge precisely the sorts of traits--persistence, extroversion, the ability to focus or multitask--that make good employees or students?" Don't let BRAIN IMAGING take on a magical quality that good ol' paper-and-pencil neuroscience lacks. We HAVE tests to measure persistence, extroversion, and ability to focus along with "intelligence" and a teeming host of other traits. They just happen to display their effects on a test page instead of a picture of someone's head. And, for the time being at least, they are much more likely to be accurate measures of the traits in question. So, if the ethical questions surrounding giving someone an IQ test or an MMPI at a job interview are settled...well then, a brain image doesn't really add any new problems. --Mangar (To reply, click [46]here) Mr. Dobbs makes a creditable effort to describe the frontier of functional imaging of the brain. The trouble is that now it is more like phrenology, or "animal magnetism", or the Orgone Box at this point -- a myriad of hucksters surrounded by hype with little in the way of careful study. That is because those who do the careful study are puzzling away at the complexities trying to figure them out while the hucksters hawk their snake oil, which in this case appears to be an oxygen isotope or some electrolytic cream... ... everything that we have learned from neuroscience at this point indicates that neural activity adapts to tasks over at least 3 time courses and progresses from a "recognition of novelty" or initiation pattern to a "habituation to routine" or familiarity pattern. It is a biological universality that even extend to Paramecium when they get bumped on the front or bacteria when exposed to a drop of sugar. This means that the only way that a brain scan can yield an accurate pattern that is unique to a particular stimulus/activity/task is to track the temporal changes of activity in all regions of cortex (and not simply the particular "brain centers" associated with the activity through neurological lesion studies). In fact, much of the supposedly demonstrated functional imaging is validated ostensibly by reference to the field potentials, an older technique. Statistical validity is rarely examined, and the reason the reputable scientists so rarely speak up is because they are busy trying to figure this out. --NarcoRepublican (To reply, click [47]here) (1/26) References 22. http://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-medicine2.htm 23. http://www.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/fmri_intro/brief.html 24. http://www.apa.org/journals/bne/bne115133.html#tbl1 25. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/100/6/3479?maxtoshow=&HITS=&hits=&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=fmri+persistence&andorexactfulltext=and&searchid=1105161998295_20992&stored_search=&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=1 26. http://www.psychtesting.org.uk/hotissues.asp?id=80 27. http://slate.msn.com/id/2112653/#ContinueArticle 28. http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/slate.technology/slate;kw=slate;sz=300x250;ord=1234? 29. http://ccn.upenn.edu/ 30. http://scbe.stanford.edu/research/programs/neuroethics.html 31. http://www.thoughtsciences.com/ 32. http://www.brainwavescience.com/HomePage.php 33. http://www.brainwavescience.com/IowaSupCourtPR.php 34. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/specials/chi-0410210285oct21,1,2210813.story?coll=chi-newsspecials-hed 35. http://daviddobbs.net/ 36. http://slate.msn.com/ 37. http://slate.msn.com/id/2112653/ 38. http://slate.msn.com/id/2112151/ 39. http://slate.msn.com/id/2111499/ 40. http://slate.msn.com/id/2111023/ 41. http://slate.msn.com/id/2109808/ 42. http://slate.msn.com/?id=3944&cp=2657 43. http://slate.msn.com/?id=3936&post=1&tp=medicalexaminer From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 30 19:21:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 14:21:27 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Scientist: The world turned inside out Message-ID: The world turned inside out http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18124395.200 4.3.20 IN EVERY time and in every culture, there have been stories of creation - how the universe began. In our time the story is that of the big bang, the incredibly hot, dense state from which the universe expanded. But this is not the whole story. "To believe that the big bang is the first moment of time is more religious mysticism than science," says Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Smolin is not suggesting that the big bang never happened: astronomical observations and Einstein's general theory of relativity leave little doubt that it did. But they don't explain why it happened or what may have come before. Martin Bojowald of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Golm, Germany, has come up with a possible solution to this problem. He has taken a theory called loop quantum gravity, first proposed by Smolin, which ascribes a complex quantum architecture to space, and used it to peer into the core of creation. What he found there was not a beginning at all, but rather a portal to a universe that came before, a universe that, as it turned out, was completely inside out. The notion of the big bang arises from Edwin Hubble's discovery in the 1920s that the universe is expanding right before our eyes. Cosmologists naturally followed the story backwards, and they now conclude that some 14 billion years ago, all the matter in the universe must have been crammed into a single, dimensionless point. But Einstein's equations of general relativity can't describe what happens at this point, called a singularity - let alone what could have come before it. They can only predict that at the singularity, space warps beyond repair. So, while relativity can give us a comprehensive account of our cosmic beginnings, it cannot tell us what caused the big bang to happen. Fortunately, general relativity is not the only theory in the cosmos. When it comes to the very small - the realm of atoms and electrons and quarks - quantum mechanics reigns. Both theories allow physicists to understand the world before them with incredible precision, and in that sense both theories are "right". But there's a catch: they completely contradict one another in their descriptions of the basic structure of space itself. Unlike the active, malleable fabric of general relativity, the space of quantum theory is a fixed and passive backdrop against which elementary particles dance. It can't be both. This problem becomes particularly pronounced when dealing with space in its most extreme condition - at the singularity that lies in the belly of the big bang. There, the intense gravity requires a description from general relativity, while the incredibly small volume brings quantum mechanics to bear. Physicists need a new theory of quantum gravity that can reconcile both these worlds. For years string theory, which says that elementary particles have a structure that resembles tiny loops of string, was the only contender. But in the 1990s Smolin and colleagues developed an alternative - the theory of loop quantum gravity. And LQG can cope with the singularity, says Bojowald. Smolin, working with a small group of physicists including Ted Jacobson, Abhay Ashtekar and Carlo Rovelli, developed LQG by rewriting the equations of general relativity in a quantum framework. The new framework described space as if it were made up of tiny loops a mere 10-35 metres in diameter. These loops, the team suggested, are the very building blocks of space. Understanding the structure of the universe became a matter of understanding how the loops link together. The web-like networks of the theory, called spin networks, encode on a two-dimensional map all the information needed to construct a three-dimensional quantum space. So, for example, each vertex on the web is taken to represent a volume in space, while each line represents an area. According to the theory, both the volumes and areas can only increase in discrete steps. But how can this web-like pattern tell us anything about the origin of the universe? The key is that the passage of time can be represented as a function of the volume of the loop universe, something that is possible in other theories that attempt to construct space-time from individual quanta (New Scientist, 4 October 2003, p 36). Since volume is made up of individual loops, time also hops along in discrete jumps. As Bojowald followed cosmic evolution backwards, the volume grew smaller and smaller until it reached the big bang itself. And that was where things got really interesting. In the quantum network, areas and volumes are finite and indivisible. There cannot be a singularity, because space just cannot get that small. And since the theory no longer broke down, Bojowald could continue following time back beyond what had previously been viewed as the beginning. There he found an entire universe on the other side of time zero, a looking-glass world where expansion is replaced by contraction - and a big crunch reflects our big bang. "When we follow the universe beyond the classical singularity, we can do so forever, until we reach negative infinity," Bojowald explains. "Therefore, the universe does not have a beginning. It has always existed." The looking-glass universe would have looked very similar to the one we know, with all the same laws of physics. Except, that is, for one bizarre thing: it was inside out. Because Bojowald measured time in volume, he found that as he ventured into negative time, the orientation of space flipped so that its volume and other spatial quantities became negative. Cosmic event Bojowald likens the spatial flip to a balloon. If we idealise a balloon as a perfect sphere, and then deflate it, it will collapse to a single point. If we then imagine it continuing to collapse even further, all the points will pass through one another until the balloon reinflates, with the inside of the sphere now on the outside. Any object in the balloon would be reversed left to right, and that is just what happens in the universe before the big bang. So would this make a difference? "This would be mostly imperceptible," says Smolin, "as most properties of the universe and most of the fundamental laws are symmetric under the exchange of left for right." But there are a few exceptions. Some reactions involving neutrinos and kaons are asymmetrical, because the reactions' products are preferentially spinning in one direction rather than the other. In the universe on the other side of the big bang looking glass, those directions are reversed. So although in Bojowald's model the big bang no longer marks a beginning of time, it remains a vitally significant event in cosmic history: the time when space flipped over, and left and right reversed. The universe has an eternal past, but all the details of the big bang evolution that have been worked out by cosmologists on this side of the big bang still apply. The theory also provides a way to explain why the early universe apparently underwent the brief but extraordinarily fast period of expansion known as inflation. As soon as the universe flips from inside out to the right way round, it starts expanding. But because volume is made up of individual loops, it cannot grow smoothly. Instead, it tends to jump stepwise, and this creates a kind of outward pressure on the universe. This, it turns out, is just what is needed to get the universe inflating, and removes the need to introduce any arbitrary fields like the inflaton, without which inflation cannot be explained in standard models of the big bang. The same scenario could solve another problem in general relativity: revealing what happens in the dark depths of black holes. Here, too, singularities resist any description in terms of classical general relativity. Relativity says at most that time stops at the centre of a black hole, and light rays halt in their tracks. In Bojowald's picture, the space of the black hole may invert itself and open up into an entirely new inside-out universe. Smolin, for one, has long believed that black holes in our universe hide umbilical cords to a host of baby universes. Smolin and Bojowald's ideas remain controversial among the majority of physicists. Most, like Sean Carroll of the University of Chicago, believe that string theory is closer to the right track than LQG. "The best evidence is the incredible fruitfulness of the string theory idea," Carroll says. From the idea of strings, physicists have been able to derive all the symmetries of space-time and the forces we see. String theorists even have their own ideas on what caused the big bang: a collision between membranes or "branes" existing in higher dimensions (see "Can String theory solve the singularity puzzle?"). In their picture, too, the universe has always existed. But Smolin points out that string theory cannot explain one important feature of nature: space. In LQG, general relativity - and with it, the notion of space - is built in from the start. String theory, by contrast, takes quantum mechanics as its starting point, and so the strings wiggle against a fixed spatial background that is unaccounted for by the theory. Supporters of Bojowald's approach say this means that applications of string theory to the singularity just don't work as well. Too many assumptions are involved both in what strings are and in how they behave. Smolin finds Bojowald's approach far more elegant. "Martin's work is clean," he says. "The only assumptions are the principles of general relativity and of quantum mechanics." Elegant calculations are one thing, but what about experimental evidence for LQG and the looking-glass universe? At the moment there is none, but that may change within a few years when NASA's Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), scheduled for launch in 2006, starts getting results. Giovanni Amelino-Camelia of Harvard University suggests using its data to track gamma-ray photons from billions of light years away. In our everyday lives the effects of loopy space are negligible, but if space is grainy on the smallest scale, as LQG says it is, then the gamma-ray photons will have accumulated a noticeable spread during their billions of years travelling through space. An instrument like GLAST should be able to observe such an effect, and when its measurements are analysed it may turn out that the big bang is just one small piece of a much bigger story Can string theory solve the singularity puzzle? String theorists have their own ideas about what came before the big bang - and they do not include a looking-glass universe. String theorist Gabriele Veneziano, for one, has attempted to use the finite size of strings to avoid a singularity, leading him to a universe that has existed forever (New Scientist, 3 June 2000, p 24). And physicists Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University and Neil Turok of the University of Cambridge, UK, proposed a model in which the extra dimensions of string theory are put to cosmological use (New Scientist, 16 March 2002, p 26). According to their "cyclic model", the three dimensions of space we experience actually live on the surface of a brane (short for "membrane") that is floating in an additional dimension. Another brane hovers a microscopic distance from ours, and every few trillion years the two branes collide. What we perceive as the big bang, the model says, is just one of these collisions. "The idea that underlies the cyclic model," explains Steinhardt, "is that what appears to be a classical singularity in the usual 3-space plus one time dimension corresponds to a collision between branes in an extra dimension. There is a singularity in the sense that an extra dimension is disappearing, but it's not our three dimensions that are disappearing." This cycle, in which the branes move toward one another, collide, and then move apart again, can repeat over and over again eternally, which means the universe may never have had a beginning. The model also makes testable predictions. In the standard model of cosmology, inflation would have stirred up gravitational waves whose imprints should still be discernible in the cosmic microwave background. The cyclic model, however, doesn't need inflation, so it predicts no such primordial gravity waves. Experiments that look for gravitational waves may be able to distinguish between the two. From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 30 19:23:14 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 14:23:14 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Scientist: Breaking Elgar's enigmatic code Message-ID: Breaking Elgar's enigmatic code http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18424792.600 25 December 2004 IT IS a story with all the makings of a blockbuster novel: a brilliant composer, an attractive woman, a secret letter and a mystery that has lasted 100 years. This story, though, is real. The composer was Edward Elgar, the renowned English musician who died 70 years ago. The young women was Dora Penny, a family friend. And the mystery? A short coded letter that, his music apart, remains one of Elgar's most enduring legacies. A study of the composer's papers reveals that for most of his life he was fascinated by cryptography. His letters and music scores, for example, are dotted with codes and anagrams. And the title of his Enigma Variations, first performed in 1899, hints at his delight in cryptic puzzles. He teasingly suggested that the melody on which his variations are based forms a counterpoint or matching voice to a well-known tune that is present in the piece only by implication. None of the many suggestions as to what this tune might be, including Auld Lang Syne and Rule Britannia, ring true, so the enigma remains. Yet Elgar left another, more intriguing, mystery. In 1896, while struggling to achieve recognition as a composer, he met Dora Penny, a young woman 20 years his junior. The daughter of a clergyman recently returned from Melanesia, she shared Elgar's interests in kites, cycling and football (they both supported Wolverhampton Wanderers). They exchanged letters and in July 1897, the halcyon summer of Queen Victoria's golden jubilee, Elgar sent her a letter in code. Its curious symbols, possibly inspired by Arabic script, seem to be based on the double-arched, cursive E in Elgar's signature (see page 58). Now known as the Dorabella cipher, after his nickname for Dora Penny, it remains unbroken. It has proved one of cryptography's most enduring puzzles. It is not surprising that Elgar was fascinated by ciphers. Code-breaking techniques have notable similarities to the process of composing formal harmony and counterpoint. Both activities involve sifting, shuffling and transposing parallel sequences of code or notes to find the best fit. For musicians, the challenge is to devise lines of music that sound pleasing on their own and also sound harmonious when played together. Take the round Fr?re Jacques, for instance. This is a simple example of repeated patterns of notes that overlap with each other. In a more complex manifestation it becomes a fugue. Experienced composers, like code-breakers, build up a repertoire of templates and patterns that can be tested and modified to suit. Links between music and ciphers go back centuries. One of the earliest known treatises on cryptography was written by Al-Kindi, an accomplished musician who was one of a group of Baghdad scholars working in the 9th century during the golden age of Islamic scholarship. Al-Kindi devised a revolutionary system for breaking substitution ciphers - messages encrypted by replacing, say, A with P, B with Q, and so on - based on an analysis of letter frequencies. Scholars had noticed that in the Koran, certain letters appeared with greater frequency than others, and they compiled a chart that ranked letters from most to least frequent. Al-Kindi realised he could use this chart to help crack substitution ciphers by replacing the most commonly used character in the ciphered text with the most common letter in Arabic, and then working through the chart to the least frequent. "Known as the Dorabella cipher, Elgar's code is one of cryptography's most enduring puzzles" Aware of this weakness, the Italian composer and architect Leon Alberti revolutionised cryptography in the 15th century with the invention of the cipher wheel. This is a rotating disc set within another disc, each with an alphabet inscribed around its rim. Match, say, A on one disc with C on the other and it becomes easy to create coded messages. Better still, it is simple to reset the position of the wheels at intervals to eliminate frequency patterns. This, Alberti thought, would make messages coded with his wheel impossible to break unless the settings were known. An electronic version of this device with multiple discs lay at the heart of the Enigma machine, a German cipher device used in the second world war and named after Elgar's variations by its German inventor, Arthur Scherbius. Cryptographers have also co-opted musical notation into their service. Everyone from 16th-century spies to illegal gamblers in 1950s New York have sent messages disguised as music. A typical cipher from the 18th century matches the first 12 letters of the alphabet to an ascending scale of 12 crotchets or quarter notes, and the next 12 letters to a descending scale of 12 quavers or eighth notes. Musicians, too, seem to enjoy adopting simple codes when composing melodies. Many pieces of music contain motifs based on initials, words or short phrases written using the seven musical notes A to G. German musical notation also allows the addition of S and H - equivalent to E-flat and B. The musical cipher B-A-C-H is common, and both the BBC and the composer Dmitri Shostakovich have used their initials as coded musical signatures. However, note-based codes can be used for more than just adding labels: Robert Schumann and Alban Berg both used short coded motifs in their compositions as references to illicit love affairs, and in the early 19th century John Field, the celebrated Irish composer of nocturnes, thanked some particularly generous dinner hosts with melodies based on B-E-E-F and C-A-B-B-A-G-E. Elgar made use of this technique too. In 1885 he composed a duet for two sisters based on their family name G-E-D-G-E, and 15 years later he mischievously ciphered the names of some of his critics into the demon's chorus in his oratorio The Dream of Gerontius. It is also possible to create a cipher using musical rhythm. Morse code has obvious potential. The Australian-born composer Barrington Pheloung used conspicuous Morse code rhythm patterns in his music for the UK television series Inspector Morse, and even encoded the murderer's identity into the incidental music for some episodes. It is known that Elgar attempted to learn Morse code and it is possible that he used it in his music. For example, it could explain his Enigma theme, which has a distinctive rhythmic structure that suggests calculated design: the first motif is followed by itself reversed, forming a rhythmic palindrome: two short notes, two long notes; two long notes, two short notes. This pattern is repeated three times in total. Its symmetry is striking, a feature that would do credit to a 20th-century modernist but it is odd for its time. So what might this pattern represent? In Morse code two dots represents I and two dashes M. So the motif could be read as a repetition of "I am, am I?" This accords with Elgar's admission that the theme represented the sense of loneliness and inadequacy he felt at the time he wrote it, and the observations by others that Elgar had been deeply hurt by cruel put-downs from critics. It suggests a heartfelt but defiant response. Morse code may also crop up in a cryptic letter that Elgar sent to Dora in 1901. Within the message he inserts short, distinctive motifs from his Enigma Variations, in particular a fragment from the Dorabella variation and the opening of the initial theme. The segment reads: "Whether you are as nice as", three short notes, three short notes, "or only as unideal as", two short notes, two long notes. Interpreted as Morse code, these mysterious notes become SS and IM, inviting the interpretation: "Whether you are as nice as sugar and spice or only as unideal as I am". What clues do we have to the meaning of the Dorabella cipher itself? Analysis of the frequency distribution of the characters in the message reveals a pattern typical of a substitution cipher, but all attempts to break it based on this assumption have failed. Writing in the journal The Musical Times in February 1970, cryptographer and musicologist Eric Sams analysed the cipher for telltale patterns of letter groups, such as sequences of the form xyyx that have a limited number of possible vowel-consonant equivalents (S-E-E-S, for instance) and which could offer clues to the cipher. Sams did not get very far, however, and his results are unconvincing. "Elger mischievously ciphered the names of some of his critics into the demon's chorus" Elgar appears to have offered the key in an exercise book containing the address "Tiddington House", where he lived from 1927. He listed the symbols used in the Dorabella cipher matched against the letters of the alphabet. The cipher follows a simple pattern, with single, double and triple E-like characters, each in eight possible orientations - upright, rotated 45 degrees clockwise, 90 degrees clockwise and so on. This gives a total of 24 potential characters, and as with many ciphers, I and J share a single character, as do U and V. Samples on the page written using this code reveal the messages M-A-R-C-O E-L-G-A-R (Marco was his pet spaniel) and A V-E-R-Y O-L-D C-Y-P-H-E-R. But when applied to the Dorabella cipher this key does not generate anything that makes obvious sense. Since simple substitution fails, it seems likely that Elgar used a form of double-encipherment, such as letter substitution followed by letter shuffling, perhaps coding the message in alternate letters (for example, the 1st, 3rd, 5th and so on). But the appearance of a repeated four-letter group makes letter shuffling unlikely. This does not rule out the use of multiple substitution alphabets using a keyword, however, a sort of manual version of the Alberti cipher wheel. If the keyword is D-O-G, for example, you might carry out letter substitution by first coding A as D, B as E and so on, then coding A as O, B as P and so on, finally coding A as G, B as H and so on. The detective work is complicated by Elgar's eccentric spelling. For instance, he once wrote of Dora Penny "warbling wigorously in Worcester wunce a week". And what appears to be a potential cipher message in the Tiddington House exercise book reads: "DO YOU GO TO LONDON TOMORROW?" A message lacking E, the most frequently used letter in English, seems deliberately designed to confuse. Elgar even put a small mark below each letter O, perhaps hinting that they might be dropped from the message altogether. Did he use these kinds of tricks in the Dorabella cipher? It seems likely. Seventy years after his death, Elgar's most intriguing composition is yet to be cracked. From issue 2479 of New Scientist magazine, 25 December 2004, page 56 From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 30 19:24:45 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 14:24:45 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Scientist: The first evidence for string theory? Message-ID: The first evidence for string theory? http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18424781.400 18 December 2004 IF YOU consider them separately, these two observations are hardly going to set the scientific world on fire. But together they add up to a spectacular possibility. In a tiny region of sky, astronomers have seen a dozen galaxies that appear as a curious sequence of double images. They have also observed a quasar whose brightness oscillates in an unexpected way. What could cause these odd phenomena? The only explanation that covers both is pretty mind-bending: "superstrings" of pure energy that can stretch millions of light years across the universe. Is this the first experimental evidence for string theory? The theory is our best hope of understanding how the universe works at its most fundamental level. It suggests that the basic constituents of matter are impossibly narrow threads of concentrated energy. The various different ways these superstrings can vibrate correspond to different fundamental particles, such as the up-quark and the muon-neutrino. The idea is well on the way to becoming a "theory of everything", uniting the laws of physics to explain how all matter and energy behave. Visible strings One of the strangest features of string theory is that it requires many more dimensions than we can see: the only way the vibration modes of the superstrings can be sufficiently diverse to create all particles is if the superstrings vibrate in a space-time of 10 dimensions. Of course, we appear to live in a universe with only four dimensions - three of space and one of time - so string theorists have postulated that the extra dimensions are "rolled up" much smaller than the dimensions of an atom. However, until now no one had seen evidence to support string theory, and many scientists dismiss its ideas as untestable conjectures. But are they about to be proved wrong? The answer lies with the big bang that kicked our universe into existence. String theory suggests that our universe may be a three-dimensional island or "brane" moving through 10-dimensional space, and that the big bang might have been caused by a collision between two such branes (New Scientist, 16 March 2002, p 26). This kind of collision would release a tremendous amount of energy, which would create a plethora of different kinds of stringy object. One type is the fundamental superstrings. Another is strange objects called Dirichlet or "D" branes that exist within each brane and as connections between branes, but intersect with only one dimension of our universe. As a result, they look to us like one-dimensional superstrings. But these are not necessarily the tiny strings we associate with fundamental particles: they can be of all sizes right up to astronomical dimensions. "Contrary to what we used to think, fundamental strings need not be ultra-tiny," says Tom Kibble of Imperial College London. And the bigger strings can be big enough to leave a visible mark on our universe. That's because a string distorts the space around it in a unique way. We are used to objects with mass or energy distorting the space around them, rather like a person's weight distorting the flat surface of a trampoline. This distortion of space is the origin of every object's gravitational attraction. However, a string is somewhat different from a normal object. All its energy is held on a one-dimensional line, not spread through space, and this concentrated energy distorts the space around it into a conical shape, with the string as its axis. "Superstrings are well on the way to becoming a 'theory of everything', uniting the laws of physics to explain how all matter and energy behave" If there were a string between us and a distant galaxy, it would distort the light of the galaxy so that it could take two possible routes to the Earth. The result would be two identical images of the galaxy only a few arc-seconds apart in the sky (an arc-second is roughly the angle a small coin would make when seen from 2 kilometres away). And this is exactly what an Italian-Russian group claims to have found last year. The team, led by Mikhail Sazhin of Capodimonte Astronomical Observatory in Naples and the Sternberg Astronomical Institute in Moscow, christened the image pair Capodimonte-Sternberg Lens Candidate 1, or CSL-1. It consists of two apparently identical elliptical galaxies roughly 10 billion light years from Earth and a mere 2 arc-seconds apart (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol 343, p 353). Seeing two identical galaxies is nothing new: it also arises from a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing (New Scientist, 13 November, p 42). This occurs when light from a distant galaxy passes close to another galaxy on its way to Earth. The mass of the intervening galaxy distorts the path of the light, producing multiple images of the distant galaxy. But gravitational lensing tends to manifest itself as an odd number of images that differ in brightness, often greatly. In the case of CSL-1, no intervening galaxy or cluster of galaxies is visible, there are just two images, and they are of equal brightness. So gravitational lensing doesn't seem to offer an explanation. "It looks like the signature of a string to me," says Kibble. Tanmay Vachaspati of Case Western Reserve University in Ohio is similarly optimistic. When he first noticed Sazhin's paper, he and his student Dragan Huterer tried to come up with reasons why a string could not be responsible. One of the first things that occurred to them was gravitational lensing, and they soon realised this hypothesis could easily be tested. The way galaxies are randomly distributed throughout the universe means that if you look at a patch of sky, gravitational lensing should be a rare phenomenon. If there's a string around, however, double images will be a lot more common. "A string should create other double images of galaxies in the neighbourhood - far more than would be expected by random chance," he says. "A simple follow-up observation should be enough to resolve the issue." Sazhin and his colleagues have now made just such an observation. In a "field" 16 arc-minutes square centred on CSL-1, they found 11 other double images. Between nine and 200 would be expected for a string, they say, but just two would be expected by chance from the gravitational lensing of intervening galaxies. "This already sounds very exciting," Vachaspati says. Good vibrations It's particularly exciting because CSL-1 is not the only observational evidence for a string: there is also the curious case of the double quasar known as Q0957+561A,B, the first confirmed case of a gravitationally lensed object, observed by the Jodrell Bank telescope in the UK, in 1979. The two images are formed by the gravity of a galaxy that bends the light of the quasar so that it follows two distinct paths to Earth. The paths are different lengths and so the light takes a different time to travel along each one. As a result, outbursts in one image are mimicked by identical outbursts in the other image 417 days later. This year, a team from the US and Ukraine, led by Rudolph Schild of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, noticed some peculiar anomalies. Four times between September 1994 and July 1995, the two images of Q0957+561A,B brightened and faded by about 4 per cent, but without any time delay. Each oscillation in brightness lasted about 100 days, and they were not repeated. The only way such a synchronous change in brightness could occur would be if the cause was not the quasar itself but rather an object between the quasar and the Earth. Schild and his colleagues claim that the idea that best fits the bill is an oscillating loop of string. These oscillations would occasionally cause the string to encroach on the two light paths from the quasar, altering the images we see. The string also appears to be moving across our line of sight at about 70 per cent of the speed of light - which is why it affected the quasar for only a limited time. To oscillate once every 100 days or so, the loop has to be very small in astronomical terms - roughly 1011 kilometres. It also has to subtend an angle at the Earth substantially smaller than the separation of the images or it would create a spiky variation in the quasar's brightness rather than the smooth, periodic variation observed. The combination of these two conditions implies that the string is shockingly close to us - in our own galaxy, within about 10,000 light years of the sun. "We are left with the conclusion that we are very lucky to have a string on our doorstep" So is it pure coincidence that a stringy relic of the big bang has ended up in our neighbourhood, or are these things scattered liberally throughout the universe? Strings would also emit gravitational waves and these should distort the space between them and us, introducing fluctuations in the time light takes to reach us and therefore in the observed timings of pulses. Though Kibble points out that there are a number of uncertainties in this calculation, the fact we do not see such an effect suggests a limit on how many strings there are between us and known pulsars. So we are left with the conclusion that we are very lucky to have a string on our doorstep. Scientifically speaking, that's not a very satisfying conclusion. Indeed, the whole question of string observation is still riddled with uncertainty, and many researchers are wary of rushing to conclusions about Sazhin's observations. "I think it is too early to get excited," says Edmund Copeland of the University of Sussex in the UK. "There may be other possible explanations. Until the unique string aspects are confirmed, I think we should remain a little cautious." It is always possible, for example, that the fluctuations in the brightness of Q0957+561A,B looked the same entirely by chance. Abraham Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics still favours the possibility that we have just seen a set of identical twin galaxies. "CSL-1 is most likely just a pair of galaxies that happened to be close together on the sky," he says. "We know of many close pairs of galaxies in the local universe, including our own Milky Way and Andromeda." Such a coincidence would be disappointing, Vachaspati says. "I am hoping nature won't have played such a trick on us." What everyone needs now is more evidence. To prove that each galaxy pair is a lensed, double image of a single galaxy, it will be necessary to measure the spectra of both objects and show them to be the same. Another angle of attack would be to find more candidates like CSL-1 and Q0957+561A,B. But the best approach might be to look for gravitational waves. Strings would produce gravitational waves because they get kinked as they meet each other in space. As two straight strings cross, for example, they can emerge from the meeting as two V-shaped strings. Every time strings cross, they can become more kinked, and to shake off a kink they emit a shockwave, cracking like a whip. This shockwave travels at almost the speed of light, and should produce an intense burst of gravitational waves. As first pointed out by Thibault Damour of the Institut des Hautes ?tudes Scientifiques in Paris and Alex Vilenkin of Tufts University in Massachusetts, "cusp" signals could be spotted by the VIRGO or LIGO gravitational wave detectors. "The signals are very distinctive," says Joe Polchinski of the University of California at Santa Barbara. "If they exist, they could be picked up in the next few years." According to Polchinski, if strings are discovered it will take at least a decade to measure the signals precisely enough to deduce their properties. This, he says, may enable us to pin down their origins. It could be another source of disappointment: the observed strings could have nothing to do with string theory, but be low-energy versions of the cosmic strings that were once thought to have seeded the universe's structure (see "Return of the cosmic string"). Nevertheless, it's an exciting prospect. String theory is big on imagination-stirring concepts, such as vibrating threads of energy that inhabit a multidimensional reality, and awesome collisions that create new universes. It may be that these elusive and fantastical strings have finally shown themselves. From issue 2478 of New Scientist magazine, 18 December 2004, page 30 Return of the cosmic string WE ALREADY know there cannot be an enormous number of giant superstrings out there. That's because they share many characteristics with "cosmic strings", concentrated threads of energy that physicists once believed to be scattered throughout space. In the 1980s, cosmologists were greatly interested in such structures: they were thought to be defects in space and time, formed by abrupt misalignments in the fundamental fields of nature when the universe cooled in the aftermath of the big bang, and locked forever in the weave of the fundamental fields threading the universe. Cosmic strings would be massive, and according to theory their gravity was of exactly the right strength to drag in the cooling debris of the big bang and seed the great superclusters of galaxies we see in today's universe. The observations, unfortunately, did not play ball. The gravity of cosmic strings should distort the cosmic background radiation - the "afterglow" of the big bang fireball - in a particular way, creating distinctive features. These were not seen. More seriously, experiments such as Boomerang and NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which each made detailed measurements of the radiation's temperature differences across different angular scales, saw sharp fluctuations in the temperature of the background radiation. The existence of such sharp peaks was seen as a natural consequence of the fact that the universe had a very particular size, or scale, at the end of an early epoch of super-fast "inflation". If cosmic strings - or the superstrings created by brane collisions in string theory - had indeed seeded structures in today's universe, no such sharply peaked features would be created. That's because, according to the theoretical ideas behind them, both types of strings are created with all possible sizes. From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 30 19:26:49 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 14:26:49 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: A Crack in the Broken-Windows Theory Message-ID: A Crack in the Broken-Windows Theory http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46381-2005Jan29?language=printer By Richard Morin Unconventional Wisdom Sunday, January 30, 2005; Page B05 What causes some neighborhoods to thrive, while others decay? It's a question that has fascinated social scientists for decades and led directly to the Broken Windows theory, which holds that ignoring the little problems -- graffiti, litter, shattered glass -- creates a sense of irreversible decline that leads people to abandon the community or to stay away. That theory, in turn, spawned a revolution in law enforcement and neighborhood activism. Broken windows? Get building owners to replace them. Graffiti on the walls? Scrub them clean, then get tough with graffiti artists. Abandoned cars? Haul them away. Drunks on the sidewalks? Get them off the streets, too. But wait a minute, say social psychologists Robert J. Sampson of Harvard University and Stephen W. Raudenbush of the University of Michigan. Taking such steps may clean up a neighborhood, but don't expect those measures alone to keep people from moving or bring people back, they assert in the current issue of Social Psychology Quarterly. They found that race and class may be more important than the actual levels of disorder in shaping how whites, blacks and Latinos perceive the health of a neighborhood. The researchers reached their conclusions after an elaborate study of 196 census tracts in Chicago. From the census data, they compiled a detailed statistical profile of every neighborhood in the tracts, including the residents' average income, the racial makeup and other demographic factors. Then they surveyed 3,585 randomly selected residents in the study area, asking them how they felt about their neighborhood. Did they see graffiti or litter as a problem? What about abandoned buildings? Did neighborhood teens cause much trouble? From these and other questions, they developed a scale measuring perceptions of disorder in each neighborhood. They also collected demographic data from survey respondents. Next they made home movies. Or more precisely, they made videos of the homes and businesses along the streets in the neighborhoods where they had conducted the surveys. Trained raters then watched these videos and used a set of criteria to describe the physical condition of each neighborhood. The survey results showed that race was a factor in how residents perceived their neighborhood. White residents were far more likely to report disorder than black or Latino residents living in the same neighborhood -- sensitivities that might explain, they theorized, why whites are relatively scarce in many city neighborhoods. But then the number-crunching got really interesting. As the proportion of black residents in a neighborhood increased, white residents' perception of disorder also soared -- even in neighborhoods that the raters had judged to be no more ramshackle than others with a smaller proportion of black residents. The researchers found the same thing when they looked at the percentage of families living in poverty: In neighborhoods with more poor people, residents perceived more disorder, regardless of the objective condition of the neighborhood. Much to the researchers' surprise, they saw the same patterns when they looked at the perceptions of black residents. As the percentage of African Americans in the neighborhood increased, the percentage of black residents who judged their neighborhood to be in disarray also rose -- out of proportion to the neighborhood's rating. In fact, the perceptions of blacks were no less likely than those of whites to be negatively affected by an increasing number of black residents. Among Latinos, the pattern was even starker. They were far more likely than either blacks or whites to be negatively affected by the increased presence of black residents, the researchers found. What explains these reactions? For Latinos and whites, the answer might seem obvious: racism. Researchers have known for years that new immigrants quickly learn on their arrival to the United States that blacks are a stigmatized group and are to be avoided at all costs. "Latino immigrants therefore may draw too heavily on the presence of blacks as a proxy for disorder," Sampson and Raudenbush wrote. But racial bias is not the whole answer, claim Sampson and Raudenbush. If it were, why were blacks as likely as whites to see more disorder than was really there? The answer, they argue, seems to be that blacks had bought into the same negative stereotypes as whites, and have come to associate black neighborhoods -- any black neighborhood -- with decay and dysfunction, regardless of the objective condition of the area. These findings splash a bit of cold water on the Broken Windows theory, the researchers assert in their article. "It may well be that reducing actual levels of disorder will not remedy psychological discomfort, as that discomfort stems from more insidious sources. . . . Simply removing (or adding) graffiti may lead to nothing" in terms of stabilizing the neighborhood, they conclude. The People Speak, The Wiz Listens Ah, your Unconventional Wiz could listen to the Vox Pop forever. That's because adults say the darnedest things, particularly when they're asked questions in public opinion polls. The latest Washington Post-ABC News telephone survey, conducted earlier this month, asked 1,007 randomly selected adults what they thought was the world's No. 1 environmental problem. Nearly one in five respondents cited air pollution as their top concern, while nearly as many said climate change. Seven percent named dirty water. Thoughtful answers, all. Then there were some that were, uh, unique. One respondent said the "United Nations." Someone else fretted most over "warts." Another said cryptically that "thought processes" were the biggest environmental problem. A GOP respondent listed "The Democrats" while a Democrat named "The Bush Family." But my favorite was the one who worried most about the environmental threat posed by "Mount Saint Everest." When that baby blows, watch out! WOMPed Scandinavians are the most trusting people in the world while WOMPS -- short for white, older, male, Protestants -- are among the least trusting, according to Harvard University economist Iris Bohnet. Bohnet has spent four years studying personal trust in countries around the world and in the United States. She offered a quick overview of her findings as well as other research into interpersonal trust during an interview with Update, published by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "Scandinavians are most likely to trust," Bohnet said. "People in developing countries typically are least likely to trust. Americans are in-between." Demography is destiny, at least as far as trust is concerned, she found. WOMPS "behave significantly differently than their counterparts," she said. "WOMPS traditionally are associated with having higher status in the United States" and thus have more to lose if someone betrays their trust, so they instinctively are more suspicious about the altruism of others. "They really hate being betrayed," she said. "This pattern applies," according to Bohnet, "even when we control for income." From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Mon Jan 31 14:54:16 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 07:54:16 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Counterintuitive oil availability Message-ID: <41FE4698.3020002@solution-consulting.com> Thought the list would be interested: http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006228 Oil, Oil Everywhere . . . Why is it expensive? Because it's so cheap. BY PETER HUBER AND MARK MILLS Sunday, January 30, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST The price of oil remains high only because the cost of oil remains so low. We remain dependent on oil from the Mideast not because the planet is running out of buried hydrocarbons, but because extracting oil from the deserts of the Persian Gulf is so easy and cheap that it's risky to invest capital to extract somewhat more stubborn oil from far larger deposits in Alberta. The market price of oil is indeed hovering up around $50 a barrel on the spot market. But getting oil to the surface currently costs under $5 a barrel in Saudi Arabia, with the global average cost certainly under $15. And with technology already well in hand, the cost of sucking oil out of the planet we occupy simply will not rise above roughly $30 a barrel for the next 100 years at least. The cost of oil comes down to the cost of finding, and then lifting or extracting. First, you have to decide where to dig. Exploration costs currently run under $3 per barrel in much of the Mideast, and below $7 for oil hidden deep under the ocean. But these costs have been falling, not rising, because imaging technology that lets geologists peer through miles of water and rock improves faster than supplies recede. Many lower-grade deposits require no new looking at all. To pick just one example among many, finding costs are essentially zero for the 3.5 trillion barrels of oil that soak the clay in the Orinoco basin in Venezuela, and the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Yes, that's trillion--over a century's worth of global supply, at the current 30-billion-barrel-a-year rate of consumption. Then you have to get the oil out of the sand--or the sand out of the oil. In the Mideast, current lifting costs run $1 to $2.50 per barrel at the very most; lifting costs in Iraq probably run closer to 50 cents, though OPEC strains not to publicize any such embarrassingly low numbers. For the most expensive offshore platforms in the North Sea, lifting costs (capital investment plus operating costs) currently run comfortably south of $15 per barrel. Tar sands, by contrast, are simply strip mined, like Western coal, and that's very cheap--but then you spend another $10, or maybe $15, separating the oil from the dirt. To do that, oil or gas extracted from the site itself is burned to heat water, which is then used to "crack" the bitumen from the clay; the bitumen is then chemically split to produce lighter petroleum. In sum, it costs under $5 a barrel to pump oil out from under the sand in Iraq, and about $15 to melt it out of the sand in Alberta. So why don't we just learn to love hockey and shop Canadian? Conventional Canadian wells already supply us with more oil than Saudi Arabia, and the Canadian tar is now delivering, too. The $5 billion (U.S.) Athabasca Oil Sands Project that Shell and ChevronTexaco opened in Alberta last year is now pumping 155,000 barrels per day. And to our south, Venezuela's Orinoco Belt yields 500,000 barrels daily. But here's the catch: By simply opening up its spigots for a few years, Saudi Arabia could, in short order, force a complete write-off of the huge capital investments in Athabasca and Orinoco. Investing billions in tar-sand refineries is risky not because getting oil out of Alberta is especially difficult or expensive, but because getting oil out of Arabia is so easy and cheap. Oil prices gyrate and occasionally spike--both up and down--not because oil is scarce, but because it's so abundant in places where good government is scarce. Investing $5 billion over five years to build a new tar-sand refinery in Alberta is indeed risky when a second cousin of Osama bin Laden can knock $20 off the price of oil with an idle wave of his hand on any given day in Riyadh. The one consolation is that Arabia faces a quandary of its own. Once the offshore platform has been deployed in the North Sea, once the humongous crock pot is up and cooking in Alberta, its cost is sunk. The original investors may never recover their capital, but after it has been written off, somebody can go ahead and produce oil very profitably going forward. And capital costs are going to keep falling, because the cost of a tar-sand refinery depends on technology, and technology costs always fall. Bacteria, for example, have already been successfully bioengineered to crack heavy oil molecules to help clean up oil spills, and to mine low-grade copper; bugs could likewise end up trampling out the vintage where the Albertan oil is stored. In the short term anything remains possible. Demand for oil grows daily in China and India, where good government is finally taking root, while much of the earth's most accessible oil lies under land controlled by feudal theocracies, kleptocrats, and fanatics. Day by day, just as it should, the market attempts to incorporate these two antithetical realities into the spot price of crude. But to suppose that those prices foreshadow the exhaustion of the planet itself is silly. The cost of extracting oil from the earth has not gone up over the past century, it has held remarkably steady. Going forward, over the longer term, it may rise very gradually, but certainly not fast. The earth is far bigger than people think, the untapped deposits are huge, and the technologies for separating oil from planet keep getting better. U.S. oil policy should be to promote new capital investment in the United States, Canada, and other oil-producing countries that are politically stable, and promote stable government in those that aren't. Messrs. Huber and Mills are co-authors of "The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy," just out from Basic Books. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: storyend_dingbat.gif Type: image/gif Size: 155 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 013005well.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 7851 bytes Desc: not available URL: From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 31 15:33:17 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:33:17 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Chronicle Colloquy: Religious freedom vs. civil rights Message-ID: Religious freedom vs. civil rights The Chronicle: Colloquy Live Transcript http://chronicle.com/colloquy/2005/01/studentgroups/ Thursday, January 27, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time The topic At dozens of colleges the filing -- or the mere threat -- of a lawsuit has persuaded officials to exempt Christian student groups from campus nondiscrimination rules. But observers say a judicial showdown may finally be coming. Lawsuits pending against four public institutions claim that their nondiscrimination policies violate the First Amendment rights of Christian student groups. The four are: Arizona State University at Tempe, Pennsylvania State University at University Park, the University of California's Hastings College of Law, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Unlike other institutions, which gave in and exempted religious student groups from nondiscrimination rules, most of the four institutions say they will fight the challenges. That means that federal courts may finally rule on the dispute. And if they are split in their decisions, the Supreme Court could take up the issue. Observers say the controversy presents a thorny problem because it pits two constitutionally protected rights against one another: freedom of religion, guaranteed by the First Amendment, and equal protection under the law, as established by the 14th Amendment. The American Civil Liberties Union has not taken a position on the cases. The group's Ohio chapter is set to discuss the issue shortly. It must decide whether it wants to get involved in a dispute at Ohio State University and, if so, on which side. Should student groups be required to respect campus nondiscrimination rules? Conservative Christian groups say they should be allowed to restrict membership to heterosexual students who share their faith. But others say that if groups discriminate, they should not receive funds and other support from their colleges. Which should take precedence -- religious freedom or protection from discrimination? Is there any way to reconcile the two concepts? How will the courts rule in these difficult cases? [43]Choosing Their Flock (1/28/2005) The guest David A. French is president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a Philadelphia-based watchdog group for free speech on college campuses. Mr. French, a lawyer, taught for two years at Cornell University's Law School. He and FIRE have provided legal advice to Christian student groups at several dozen institutions. _________________________________________________________________ A transcript of the chat follows. _________________________________________________________________ Burton Bollag (Moderator): Hello, I am The Chronicle's religion reporter, Burton Bollag, and I'll be moderating today's online discussion. Let's begin. _________________________________________________________________ David French: I would like to thank the Chronicle for hosting this Colloquy. The issues we will discuss today involve not so much a clash of constitutional doctrines as a clash between constitutional doctrine and an ideology of nondiscrimination that says that certain kinds of "exclusion" should never be permitted. Given the momentum that this ideology has in higher education, I like to characterize the problem as: "the irresistable ideological force (nondiscrimination) meets the immovable constitutional object (the First Amendment)." _________________________________________________________________ Question from : Would these groups operate according to the standards set by Christian groups? If no, then they should not be allowed. If yes, then there is no question. Let us promote what is good for the survival of mankind. Religious freedom is the heart and soul of the American way of life. Christians have founded and sustained America,let us not stop them from keep moving their country in the right direction. David French: Sadly, many colleges and universities have little or no regard for religious freedom. The standard campus orthodoxy often dictates that conservative religious individuals, groups, and institutions are backward and bigoted. If a school official disagrees with the Christian (or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu) message, that school official is free to use the "bully pulpit" of their position to decry perceived "intolerance," but they may not use the power of the state to actually stifle religious expression or to exclude religious groups from campus. _________________________________________________________________ Question from James, liberal arts college: Should a black organization in a college be forced to accept a sheet-wearing member of Tri Kapppa? Should a Jewish organization on campus be forced to accept an ardent Nazi? Should a Druid club be forced to accept Christians or Jews? Come on, folks. David French: James, your analogies go to the heart of the issue. It is critical for expressive organizations to maintain control over the integrity of their message. This is a matter of basic common sense. It is also important to note that your analogies deal with BELIEF, not STATUS. In other words, there is nothing about being white that prevents someone from sharing a common cause with the NAACP, but -- by definition -- a white supremacist would be at odds with the NAACP's mission and purpose. I know of no college that would require a campus chapter of the NAACP to welcome skinheads with open arms. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Lynn Johnson, University of Utah: Can a strained interpretation of the 14th amendment trump the clear meaning of the 1st? Is my freedom of religion abrogated when the government forces me to denounce my beliefs or enjoins whom I associate with? David French: The so-called "conflict" between the First and Fourteenth Amendments puzzles me. The Fourteenth Amendment requires the GOVERNMENT to provide citizens with equal protection; it does not mandate that PRIVATE ORGANIZATIONS treat all their members equally. The equal protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment have no bearing on the composition of my church congregation or the membership of my political party. I have found that universities raise the Fourteenth Amendment defense typically for two reasons: (1) to confuse the public into thinking that these amendments actually conflict, thereby providing a degree of public relations "covering" for an unconstitutional act; (2) they somehow believe that the act of "recognizing" a student organization makes it -- in essence -- a part of the university instead of a private entity. There is another factor as well: genuine good faith ignorance. University lawyers have a lot on their plate, and they can hardly be expected to be experts in every relevant area of constitutional, statutory, regulatory and common law. They're helping manage endowments, manage human resources, manage liability risks, maintain regulatory compliance, etc. It's just too much for any one person to know. _________________________________________________________________ Question from John K. Wilson, Illinois State University: I think this is not a 1st Amendment vs. 14th Amendment issue, but a 1st Amendment vs. 1st Amendment one. Students at a public university have a 1st Amendment right to participate in a registered student organization, regardless of their religion. Rulings such as the Boy Scout case deal with private organizations, not one sponsored by a government entity. It seems odd that FIRE, given its acronym, is favoring a group's right to exclude over an individual's right to participate, particularly when the organization in question is getting the student's funding. David French: Mr. Wilson, you misunderstand the status of "registered" student organizations. A registered student organization is no more a public entity than a church is, or a political party, or an insurance agency, or FIRE itself. Each of these entities is "registered" to do business in a certain state, but the registration process does not make us public. FIRE is not "state-sponsored" because we are a Massachusetts corporation registered to do business in Pennsylvania. In fact, at almost every university, the registration guidelines make it clear that registered student organizations are NOT agents of the university and their actions cannot be imputed to the university itself. Regarding student fee funding, the Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that student fee funds are not "government" funds. The only way mandatory student funds can be constitutional is if they are dispensed on a viewpoint neutral basis. The imposition of nondiscrimination regulations in this manner is not viewpoint neutral. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Larry J. Ringgenberg, Ph.D. UW-La Crosse: So if public funds should not be used to sponsor discrimination, if no financial support is provided to the group is the discrimination legal? David French: I'm not sure that I understand your question. Public funds are used to sponsor discrimination all the time. For example, the military discriminates on the basis of disability when selecting soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines. Public universities discriminate on the basis of numerous factors when engaging in selective admissions practices . . . including discrimination on the basis of race when following certain kinds of affirmative action or diversity regimes. Thus, there is no constitutional impediment to the use of public funds for "discrimination" as broadly defined. There are some limited impediments to the use of public funds to "sponsor" certain kinds of discrimination in certain kinds of circumstances. There are broader statutory limits of the use of funds by entities that "discriminate," but, again, the statutory prohibitions on discrimination are very specific. It is simply meaningless spin when students, faculty and administrators say, "I don't want to fund discrimination." In fact, they do fund discrimination, and they do so happily in many instances. What they are really saying is, "I don't want to fund THIS KIND of discrimination." If an African-American organization was tossed off campus for excluding a white supremacist who sought to change the message of the group from inclusion and racial equality to exclusion and racial supremacy, many of the same people who decry "discrimination" by Christians would lead the candlelight vigils to protest the right of the African-American group to "discriminate" to maintain the integrity of its message. The reality is that the objection is often not to "discrimination" but to the underlying world view of the Christian or Muslim or Jewish organization. _________________________________________________________________ Question from JDM, small liberal arts college: Federal law has a long history of exempting religiously controlled institutions from discrimination on the basis of religion (e.g., Title VII and Title IX), why should not student religious organizations within institutions be entitled to similar exemptions? David French: Federal law has a history of granting these exemptions in part because -- if the exemptions are not granted -- the law may very well be unconstitutional. In other words, the exemptions are a matter not just of legislative choice but of constitutional necessity. FIRE believes that this constitutional necessity will soon become painfully clear to public universities that insist on excluding religious groups on the grounds that such groups engage in "religious discrimination." _________________________________________________________________ Question from Lara Schwartz, Human Rights Campaign: Why does there need to be a choice between religious freedom and protection from discrimination? The campus groups are not being denied religious freedom when they are asked to accept LGBT students as a condition of receiving funds. First of all, the presence of GLBT students in a university club does not deny the Christian students the right to practice their religion freely. Second, the students do not have to accept university funds. The real question is, if students are free to decide that a non-discrimination policy cannot apply to them, why wouldn't they be able to choose other university rules to violate? David French: Before I get to the heart of your question, there is one factual matter that must be cleared up. Student groups at most major universities cannot exist at all unless they agree to abide by all university regulations -- including expansive nondiscrimination rules. Thus, there is typically no lower level of regulation for groups who want facilities access but not student fee funding. (Several Christian groups have proposed arrangements like that and have been rebuffed). The funding issue is often simply irrelevant to the larger question of the group's ability to exist at all. Campus groups are being denied religious freedom if they are being asked to accept students that disagree with their mission or message as a precondition for recognition (which is just another word for "existence.") Freedom of association is an inherent part of the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment . . . without freedom of association, you are by definition deprived of a critical aspect of your religious liberty (and free speech rights). A concrete example illustrates the importance of the "right to exclude." If several fundamentalist students sought to join a chapter of the HRC and then used that membership to either (1) report HRC internal strategy and deliberations back to political opponents to grant them an edge in public debate; or (2) use the strength of numbers to elevate to leadership people who believed homosexual sexual activity was an "abomination," you would see quite clearly and painfully how important it is to be able to dictate the membership of expressive organizations. Finally, if a rule is unconstitutional, it is not disrespecting campus policies to challenge that rule. If there was a rule in a particularly conservative public school that restricted the HRC's ability to, say, advocate for gay marriage, you would rightfully be outraged if I accused you of "picking and choosing" regulations. I have never encountered a religious student organization -- Christian, Muslim or Jewish -- that had a problem complying with constitutionally appropriate regulations. _________________________________________________________________ Burton Bollag (Moderator): We're just past the halfway mark in our discussion. Keep those questions coming! _________________________________________________________________ Question from Larry J. Ringgenberg, Ph.D. UW-La Crosse: Another constitutional right, freedom of the press, can also be in conflict with the equal protection regulations of the 14th amendment when a satirical publication writes about specific groups of students. What do you say to these groups that want the publication stopped and their organization status on campus taken away? David French: The freedom of the press does not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment. If a private publication prints an allegation that offends specific groups of students, those student rights to equal protection or due process are not being threatened. The government has not harmed them (and remember, the Fourteenth Amendment protects a person from government action, not private action). At FIRE, we have seen several examples of publications "offending" students so much that the publication is threatened with punishment or expulsion. My message to those offended students is simple: If you think the publication's message is offensive, refute it in a publication of your own -- or in one of the other publications on campus. The cure for bad speech is more speech -- not censorship. Overall, students, faculty, and administrators are far too easy to offend and far too eager to believe that someone must be punished if they are offended. It takes a bit of courage to participate in the marketplace of ideas. Students need fewer paternalistic protection and stronger backbones. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Emma, public two year college: Then why stop there? Should that Nazi student be allowed to enroll in Judaic Studies courses? Should white students be allowed to enroll in Black Studies courses? How do you see that as being different? David French: Of course both kinds of students should be allowed to enroll in the courses. But we're not talking today about class enrollment, which presents issues (at public universities) as to whether a government entity can exclude students on the basis of viewpoint or race. We're talking about the ability of purely private organizations to dicate their own membership and message. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Burton Bollag: David, aren't you confusing the issues of STATUS and BELIEF? While it may be justified for a religious group to restrict membership to students who share their belief, is it right for them to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation -- i.e. a person's status? Sexual orientation is not an opinion, it is indeed a status. Christian groups typically are ready to accept only gays who denounce their own nature. If the issue were one of no-sex-before-marriage, than surely many gay students could accept that, as do many straight students. But let's be clear about the reasons for barring gays. David French: A good question, Burton. I have never encountered a Christian or Muslim group (and those are the two groups that FIRE has most often worked with) that has ever said that a person's sexual orientation by itself is reason enough to exclude them from membership and/or leadership. The question is one of religious belief -- and conduct in conformance with that belief. For example, at Tufts University, the Tufts Christian Fellowship allowed a woman with a lesbian sexual orientation to lead a women's bible study... so long as she subscribed to the group's beliefs regarding scriptural authority and sexual behavior. When her beliefs changed, she was not permitted to lead. Her orientation remained the same throughout. Her beliefs were the only variable. Many people may read the above statement and be aghast that certain theological traditions ask gays not to engage in same-sex sexual contact, but no one requires any gay individual to attend such a church or belong to such a group. Why is it not enough to be able to form a competing group and to protest and denounce the Christian group? Why is it not enough to work to persuade the Christian group to change its stance (as has happened with the Episcopal Church and the United Churches of Christ, for example)? Why must administrators go one step further and say that your viewpoint must be EXCLUDED from campus? It is that lest step that is problematic... and unconstitutional. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Dave, small private college: Do you imagine that FIRE may one day be in the position of defending the right of a group to be funded that you would rather not be funded? Extremist (fill in your least favorite belief here). David French: It is safe to say, given the ideological diversity of our staff, that we defend the right of groups that any number of us dislike (or even despise) to receive student fee funding and recognition virtually every day. Freedom of speech is worth defending for its own sake. There are more than enough people out there willing to defend the free speech (and other constitutional rights) of groups they like. It is much less common to see a group defend freedom not as a means to a particular political end, but as a way of life. At FIRE, we aspire to that level of consistency. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Lara Schwartz, Human Rights Campaign: If students do not wish to associate with their lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender peers, they can simply form a club that does not accept university funds. What is to prevent a student group from deciding that it does not want Jews as members? Or African American students? Surely the university could withold funds from a group that violated its racial or religious non-discrimination policies, even with a purported religious justification. Would you represent a Christian student group that wanted to exclude Jews from its meetings while taking university funds? The question is not whether these students should have religious freedom. It is whether they may be exempt from a reasonable university rule designed to protect the entire community simply because they SAY that their religion requires that they break this rule. The question is whether they have a right to use university funds to violate the university's non-discrimination policy. David French: Again, the issue is so much more than funding. We are talking about existence. There is typically no such thing as a student group that can exist with a lower level of recognition (including, crucially, facilities access) and no funding. Also, student fee funding must be dispensed on a viewpoint neutral basis. Period. That is an absolute constitutional requirement. The university cannot privilege or prefer one point of view or ideology when dispensing those funds. This question has been decided for years. Regarding your various scenarios, you are blurring issues of status and belief. At FIRE, we do not believe that a university would be required to recognize a group that had a "no whites" or "no women" (except in certain, extremely limited circumstances) or "no Jews" (using the term in its racial sense) policy. There is nothing about race or gender, for example, that prohibits participation in the mission or message of an expressive organization. Belief is a different matter. If a Christian organization wanted to exclude people from membership who were not Christian, it would have the right to do so. As would a Muslim group; as would a Jewish group. As would an atheist organization, for that matter. These rights also extend to political and cultural organizations like the HRC. This is absolutely fundamental to the ability to form an expressive organization and advance the group's expressive purpose. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Kathy, 4 yr university: Are your views on LGBT exclusion from religious groups founded on the belief that sexual orientation is a choice? This debate is far from resolution but if sexual orientation was found to be an immutable characteristic such as race, would you still believe groups could discriminate against these individuals? [To refer to your previous example, a student NAACP chapter could not exclude white (immutable) students but could exclude white supremacists (belief/choice)] David French: Our view on this issue has nothing to do with sexual orientation's classification as a choice or genetic destiny. At FIRE, we assume that sexual orientation is not a choice. The issue is one of belief and behavior in conformance with belief. No one would say that heterosexuals can choose not to be tempted by extramarital sexual activity, but it is fair to say that they have a choice to believe such activity is wrong and a choice to engage in that activity . . . or not. You are free to disagree with such a view and even to find it shocking, disgusting, immoral, pathetic (or some combination thereof). That is not the question. The question is whether the state can exclude from campus those organizations who hold such beliefs. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Rick Haught, University of South Dakota: On more than one answer you have characterized student organizations as "purely private." Will you explain that in the light that these organizations are using the university's tax exempt status, various financial and physical resources, etc? David French: An organization's designation as "public" or "private" depends on multiple factors, but even the most cursory review of the relevant case law indicates that use of public facilities does not alter a group's private status. Nor does the receipt of student fee funds . . . remember, under Supreme Court precedent, student fee funds are not "public funds." The use of a university's tax exempt status is an interesting issue, but it does not convert a group to public status any more than the federal government's decision to grant such status to private groups "federalizes" them. The primary question is one of responsibility and control. Universities do not govern these groups and in fact disclaim any responsibility for their actions in university policies. They are private, and there is no legal precedent to suggest otherwise. _________________________________________________________________ David French: I believe we are now out of time. Thank you very much for your questions. It is critically important that we all understand that a truly free community is one that recongizes the independence of expressive organizations and respects their right to advance their own mission and message -- even if we disagree with that message. You never know . . . the right you seek to undermine today you may need tomorrow. In any case, FIRE will be there to help. Thank you to the Chronicle for making this discussion possible and extending the "marketplace of ideas" to your own corner of the academic world. _________________________________________________________________ Burton Bollag (Moderator): I'm afraid our time is up, but the debate will clearly continue, especially with law suits by Christian campus groups pending against at least four major colleges. Our thanks to our guest, David French, for his thoughtful responses, and to all those who sent in questions. References 43. http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i21/21a03301.htm From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 31 15:35:40 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:35:40 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Academe: The Academic Elite Goes to Washington, and to War Message-ID: The Academic Elite Goes to Washington, and to War http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2005/05jf/05jflewi.htm Academe, 5.1-2 Critics of the academy have lambasted faculty doves. History shows that academia has roosted a flock of hawks. By Lionel Lewis ______________________________________________________________ It has become part of the conventional wisdom that a decidedly left-wing slant influences what students are taught at elite colleges and universities in America, chiefly at Ivy League institutions. This perception has been common at least since the congressional investigations in the late 1940s into Communist Party activities in the United States, and surely since the publication of William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale in 1951. Liberal faculty, abetted by permissive or weak academic administrators, are said to indoctrinate impressionable students with an un-American ideology passed off as objective inquiry. The more prestigious the school, the more clear this bias is thought to be. In the 1950 speech that fixed his place as a national political force, Senator Joseph McCarthy laid the blame for the threats to America's democracy on "the traitorous actions" of those "who have all the benefits" of "the finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in government." Buckley's book is a catalogue of "teachers and texts" at Yale that "assiduously disparage the individual, glorify the government, enshrine security, and discourage self-reliance." Opinion surveys throughout the 1950s showing that professors were less rabidly anticommunist than members of the public fed this perception of the radical right. Some extremists still argue that students or faculty with conservative or traditional views find the climate on many campuses inhospitable. Shortly after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the conservative American Council of Trustees and Alumni prepared a report detailing over a hundred examples of "how our universities are failing America." The alleged failures ranged "from moral equivocation to explicit condemnations of America" on campuses across the country. "Indeed," the group asserted, "the message of many in academe was clear: blame America first." Unscathed by the Ivory Tower The facts have never supported such fanciful claims. Many, for example, who have taught and been taught at elite universities have helped develop America's aggressive and confrontational foreign policy (a policy resting on the premise that the nation's strength should be felt around the world) while serving as secretary of defense or as national security adviser. The secretary of defense is the president's principal assistant on defense matters and heads the Department of Defense, a cabinet position established in 1949 to provide the military forces necessary to deter war and protect the national security. The national security adviser is the chief counsel to the president on national security issues. This position was established by the National Security Act of 1947, legislation passed to give the president and the country mechanisms to coordinate foreign policy and reconcile diplomatic and military commitments and requirements to fight the Cold War effectively. By 1950, the military was unified and placed under the command of the Defense Department. The creation of the National Security Council, headed by the national security adviser, kept the White House's initiatives at the center of foreign policy. All of this centralized authority existed outside of what had been understood to be normal constitutional structures of democratic accountability. It also further lodged American foreign policy in an establishment. Many of those with ties to this establishment have passed through or have other connections with a handful of elite institutions among the more than three thousand U.S. colleges and universities. Here are some facts. First, among the fifteen individuals serving as secretary of defense under ten presidents--from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush--eleven had at least one degree from an elite university. The current secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, for example, received a BA from Princeton University. [28]^1 At one point in their careers, former secretaries Robert McNamara, James Schlesinger, Harold Brown, and William Perry even spent some time on the faculty of a prestigious university. Second, two of the six leading members of President George W. Bush's foreign policy team who most vigorously promoted the invasion of Iraq in 2003 have undergraduate degrees from Ivy League institutions, beginning with Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, who has a degree from Cornell University. Bush himself has a bachelor's degree from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard University. Moreover, two members of the team have taught and have been academic administrators at elite universities: Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, at Stanford University and Wolfowitz at Yale and Johns Hopkins universities. In contrast, the two members of the team most reluctant to rush into war--before international arms inspectors had completed their task and without support from the United Nations--have military backgrounds with no ties to elite academic institutions: secretary of state Colin Powell and Richard Armitage, his deputy. Some believe that the inner circle of the Vulcans--the label often applied to passionate backers of the Iraq war in the Bush administration--is somewhat larger than this handful, making it possible to extend this line of analysis a bit further. In his book, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet, James Mann notes that "[Lewis] Scooter Libby [assistant to the president and chief-of-staff to the vice president], deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley, undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith, and undersecretary of state Paula Dobriansky . . . all . . . qualify as Vulcans." All four have at least one degree from an elite academic institution. Libby has a BA from Yale and a JD from Columbia University; Hadley has a BA from Cornell and a JD from Yale; and Feith has an AB and Dobriansky a PhD from Harvard. Third, an examination of the educational backgrounds of U.S. national security advisers since World War II shows that most earned academic degrees or taught at elite universities. These are the architects of the muscular American foreign policy that resulted in the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Desert Storm, and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Of the seventeen national security advisers serving ten American presidents (half of whom themselves earned degrees from Harvard or Yale), four had military backgrounds, four spent most of their careers in government service, four came from the private sector, and five--McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Condoleezza Rice--came from academia (Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia, and Stanford). Eleven of the seventeen earned fourteen degrees from six elite institutions: Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the California Institute of Technology.[29]^2 The five national security advisers from academia proved no less unapologetic than the other twelve in championing the vigorous pursuit of America's economic, ideological, and political interests. Bundy was one of the "wise men" surrounding President John Kennedy during the misguided American-led invasion of Cuba; early in his tenure, he was a strong proponent of American participation in Vietnam. In other government positions before his appointment as national security adviser, Rostow consistently recommended the use of force in American foreign policy. He was one of the first to advocate aerial bombing as a way to quickly end the conflict in Vietnam and avoid a major Asian war. Not only did Kissinger press for escalating the Vietnam War even further, but he also urged controversial bombing campaigns in Laos and Cambodia. (Many have also accused Kissinger of illegally undermining domestic policy in other countries, most notably Chile.) Immediately after his appointment and before he took office, Brzezinski, described as a "hard-nosed cold warrior," wrote in his diary of "the need to have somewhat more tough-minded a group in security and arms-control-oriented areas." To thwart his b?te noire, the Soviet Union, Brzezinski successfully urged support for the mujaheddin in Afghanistan and helped develop a policy that promoted Islamist radicalism. The history of Rice's role in Operation Iraqi Freedom has yet to be written, although she has publicly defended the policy of waging unilateral preventive war: "America's power and purpose must be used to defend freedom," and "we are fighting the war in Iraq for our security,as well as for the benefit of the Iraqi people." In other words, little distinguishes the national security advisers with academic backgrounds from those without them, not even the possession of an advanced degree, which almost all of the advisers earned. Not surprisingly, the ideas of those with academic credentials in world affairs, history, and international relations were more often published by university or prestigious commercial presses than those of advisers without such expertise. Brzezinski and Kissinger established solid academic reputations before beginning their work in the White House. Both men's work, however, was more ideologically driven than is typical of much social science. Rostow wrote many of his major publications after his work in government. Bundy was an academic administrator with few publications, most of them co-authored. Also a career academic administrator, Rice did little serious research after publishing her dissertation. In short, all had successful academic careers, but none could be counted as a towering academic figure. Little Discernible Difference The putative nonworldliness of academics has long been a subject of derision and scorn. When asked who could best serve as chancellor of Germany, longtime chancellor Otto von Bismarck reportedly replied: "It makes no difference what sort of person becomes chancellor, provided it isn't a professor." Yet the vigor with which academic and nonacademic U.S. national security advisers have advanced America's growing global power suggests that the academics are no less attuned than their nonacademic colleagues to realpolitik. At the core of liberalism is the belief that government intervention can help solve problems. In this sense, the academic elite involved in formulating an activist foreign policy might be called liberal. They, however, would likely reject the appellation as a sophistic joke. In any case, it is doubtful that they acquired their ideas about how to further U.S. interests from liberal "teachers and texts" at America's leading universities. In fact, almost all of those closely identified with crafting the post-World War II U.S. policy of containing and confronting communism around the globe have Ivy League degrees. Many were called "wise men" by their contemporaries, and all were seen as part of the "establishment." Graduating from Yale were Dean Acheson (secretary of state), Harvey Bundy (assistant secretary of state), William Bundy (assistant secretary of state and assistant secretary of defense), W. Averell Harriman (ambassador to Russia and secretary of commerce), Robert Lovett (undersecretary of state and secretary of defense), and Cyrus Vance (secretary of state). Studying at Princeton were David Bruce (ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany and to Great Britain), Allen Dulles (director of the Central Intelligence Agency), John Foster Dulles (secretary of state), James Forrestal (secretary of the navy and secretary of defense), and George Kennan (a Kremlinologist). The Harvard graduates were Charles Bohlen (ambassador to the Soviet Union), C. Douglas Dillon (ambassador to France and secretary of the treasury), and Paul Nitze (secretary of the navy and deputy secretary of defense). The only other foreign policy elites in the decades after World War II as important as these fourteen men (aside from several individuals who served as secretary of defense or as national security adviser) were graduates of institutions only slightly less prestigious: John McCloy, who earned an Amherst degree (president of the World Bank and high commissioner for Germany), and Dean Rusk, a graduate of Davidson College (secretary of state). Of these sixteen, none attended a public institution of higher learning as an undergraduate. And of the nine with a law degree, four were graduates of Harvard Law School. The advice they dispensed proved to be unwise--for example, that the United States should work in 1953 to overthrow the government of Iran; that the following year, it should do the same in Guatemala; that the Bay of Pigs operation was a good idea; and that the development of nuclear weapons for massive retaliation would help stabilize international relations. Still, they gave their advice in good faith, to enable the United States to pursue what they saw as its national security interests or to fulfill its national destiny, not because of a left-wing slant imposed by a Bolshevistic professoriate. Indeed, it has long been known that it hardly matters what professors teach students. What matters is what they come away with--and that is pretty much what they bring with them when they first set foot on campus. The broadest range of ideas can be found on all but the most doctrinal campuses, and students can readily find a niche without having to change their beliefs. Research spanning six decades has shown that the effect of college on the attitudes, values, religiosity, and political views of students, on elite campuses and elsewhere, is almost nil. In light of this research, it hardly makes a difference if the professoriate is mostly liberal or conservative, teaching Leo Tolstoy or Leon Trotsky. It is doubtful that there is a causal relationship in the fact that so many in the highest reaches of government have had ties with so few private institutions of higher learning. What it reflects is simply that these individuals have long been members of an interlocking and interacting social circle. Through their families and cliques, they have had lifelong access to each other, ranging from informal activities to common institutional experiences. From this interaction, sundry opportunities, including career opportunities, can be created. A cursory examination of the biographies of the sixteen foreign policy elite exemplifies the extent of these social ties, all of which existed before their involvement in government service. There are family relations by birth (the Bundys, father and sons, and the Dulles brothers) and by marriage (William Bundy married Acheson's daughter). Harriman taught Acheson to excel at crew at prep school. In college, many of the sixteen had similar social affiliations. Bohlen and Nitze were in the Porcellian Club at Harvard; Vance and Acheson were in Scroll and Key at Yale; Harriman, Lovett, and the three Bundys were in Skull and Bones at Yale. Harriman's and Lovett's fathers were close business associates, and they themselves became business partners. Nitze and Forrestal also had close business ties. Forrestal became president of the investment bank Dillon's father put together. The son later became its chair. Bruce not only helped manage the interests of his father-in-law, Andrew Mellon, but was engaged in business dealings with Harriman, serving for a time, along with Lovett, as one of the nine outside directors of the Harriman-controlled Union Pacific Railroad and as a member of the oversight board of the Harriman-controlled Aviation Corp. These are not the only instances in which Harriman, Lovett, Bruce, and McCloy served on the same corporate boards. Some among the sixteen were also neighbors, including Forrestal and Lovett, whose wives were friends and whose children were playmates. And some spent considerable leisure time together, as did Forrestal and McCloy, longtime tennis partners. The conclusion seems obvious: although students who attend elite institutions need not fear indoctrination by liberal faculty, they can look forward to opportunities to maintain or to form equal-status relationships with those with wealth and power in America. Notes 1. Other defense secretaries who received degrees from elite institutions are Neil McElroy (1957-59), BA, Harvard University; Thomas Gates (1959-61), BA, University of Pennsylvania; Robert McNamara (1961-68), MA, Harvard; Eliot Richardson (1973), BA and LLB, Harvard; James Schlesinger (1973-75), BA and PhD, Harvard; Harold Brown (1977-81), BA and PhD, Columbia University; Casper Weinberger (1981-87), AB and LLB, Harvard; Frank Carlucci (1987-89), BA, Princeton University; Leslie Aspin (1993-94), BA, Yale University, PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and William Perry (1994-97), BS, Stanford University. [30]Back to text. 2. Robert Cutler (1953-55) earned an AB and an LLB from Harvard; Dillon Anderson (1955-56) and Gordon Gray (1958-61) received LLBs from Yale; McGeorge Bundy (1961-66) earned a BA from Yale; Walt Rostow (1966-69) had a PhD from Yale; Henry Kissinger (1969-75) earned a BA and a PhD from Harvard; Zbigniew Brzezinski (1977-81) received a PhD from Harvard; John Poindexter (1985-86) earned a PhD from the California Institute of Technology; Frank Carlucci (1986-87) received a BA from Princeton; Brent Scrowcroft (1989-93) earned a PhD from Columbia; and Samuel Berger (1997-2001) received a BA from Cornell and an LLB from Harvard. [31]Back to text. Lionel Lewis is emeritus professor of sociology and adjunct professor of higher education at the State University of New York at Buffalo. References 28. http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2005/05jf/05jflewi.htm#1 29. http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2005/05jf/05jflewi.htm#2 30. http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2005/05jf/05jflewi.htm#b1 31. http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2005/05jf/05jflewi.htm#b2 From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 31 15:35:53 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:35:53 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Mongolia's Reverse Gender Gap Message-ID: Mongolia's Reverse Gender Gap The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.2.4 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i22/22a03901.htm By JEN LIN-LIU [Another article about higher education in Mongolia is appended.] Ulan Bator, Mongolia Dondog Natsag, a father of three daughters and three sons, is a typical countryside parent. When each of his sons graduated from high school, he put little pressure on them to continue their education. But when it came to his daughters, he was adamant that they should go on to college. "Of course it's better for girls to go on to university," he says. "Boys can always find work to do. If girls do not study, the only thing they can do is find a job in a sewing factory." Mr. Dondog expresses the sentiments of many Mongolian parents. The preference to send daughters to college has led to what the United Nations calls a "reverse gender gap" -- women now make up 60 percent of all students at Mongolian universities. The trend is particularly distinctive because Asia is typically considered a place where women are less valued than men. "It's just the opposite of much of Asia. Arab and Asian students in other countries often don't believe" that this could happen, says Solongo Algaa, a demographer at the National University of Mongolia, who studies the phenomenon. Women also perform better than men at places like National University of Mongolia, says Davaa Suren, the university's vice president. Looking over the scores on a recent entrance exam in the Mongolia-language department, he notes that 8 of the top 10 students are women. In economics, women are 7 of the top 10 students; in science departments, women account for about half of the top 10. He shrugs when asked why the gap exists: "Perhaps women are more hard-working." "Boys are lazy" seems to be the typical explanation among parents and other observers. But Ms. Solongo says the problem starts before students enter college. Young men now make up 70 percent of the dropouts from compulsory education. In this predominantly agricultural country, parents often pull their sons out of school so that they can help with herding duty, long considered a male responsibility. Boys also lack role models in schools, where 75 percent of the teachers are women, Ms. Solongo says. She believes that the government should create policies to encourage boys to stay in primary and secondary school. Reversal of Fortune Until the early 1990s, under the Soviet-style economic system, 60 percent of the students in higher education were male. But with the collapse of Communism, they could resume their traditional role as herders of the family livestock. What's more, changing times resulted in the closure of the government's vocational and technical training schools. So rather than learn a trade in the capital or a smaller town, young men remained in the countryside, raising horses, sheep, and yak to feed their families and to sell the milk and meat. The idea that parents should pass on material possessions like herds and land to sons is strong in Mongolia, says the national university's Ms. Solongo. But parents also believe that daughters should have some resources of their own, rather than be left to their own devices or married off to another family, which happens in many other Asian cultures. Education often serves as that resource, she says. In her own family, for example, her sole brother inherited her parents' apartment and now works in a factory, while she and her three sisters were sent to college and have become professionals. In a culture long dependent on herding and manual labor, Mongolians have the idea that "boys can do rougher things while girls should work in the office," Ms. Solongo says. But advanced education for women has yet to translate into real economic or political power. "At the top decision levels, there are very few women," says Sanjaasurengin Oyun, a leading feminist in Mongolia and head of the Zorig Foundation, which mobilizes the rural population to vote. Of the 76 parliamentary seats in Mongolia, only 5 are occupied by women. "Employers would rather hire males than females," says Altantsetseg Sodnomtseren, an expert on higher education at the National University of Mongolia. Upon graduation from college, men have a much easier time finding jobs than women, says Ms. Altantsetseg. Nevertheless, many women entering Mongolia's higher-education system display confidence that it's a woman's world. Tsedendamba Amartavshin, who lives in a felt tent called a ger in the countryside near Ulan Bator, enrolled in the Agriculture University last fall. Of her four siblings, all boys, only one has also chosen to go on to higher education. "The girls are just dominating the university," she says. "And by having a good education, we'll have a good living." ----------------- Discipline and Devotion at Ghengis Khan U. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.2.4 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i22/22a04001.htm By JEN LIN-LIU Ulan Bator, Mongolia The office of Namsrain Nyam-Osor, president of Ikh Zasag University Named After Chinggis Khaan, looks like a shrine to the Mongolian warrior, who is known as Ghengis Khan to the rest of the world. Several oil paintings of the 13th-century leader, with his pointy beard, decorate the gold-papered walls. A small bust of Chinggis sits on Mr. Namsrain's desk. And the university president will lecture anyone about the great leader, unprompted. "He unified China, doing in 60 years what China couldn't do in 1,000 years," Mr. Namsrain says. "If the United States adopted the strategies of Khaan, it would be 10 times more powerful than it is today." The Ikh Zasag University Named After Chinggis Khaan may have an unusual name -- "Ikh Zasag" refers to the code that the conqueror used to govern his empire -- and an eccentric president. And, yes, its campus resembles that of an American high school. But in a country of 2.8 million, where the average salary is $1,700 per year, it is regarded by Mongolia's National Council for Higher Education Accreditation as one of the best private universities. Established in 1994, after Mongolia began encouraging private individuals to open universities, Ikh Zasag enrolls 5,000 students each year, who major in such disciplines as law, finance, and tourism. What sets it apart from other Mongolian universities, says Mr. Namsrain, is that part of its mission is to teach students to take pride in being Mongolian. "State-run universities give students a professional education, but not a personal education," he says. Students here, by contrast, take compulsory classes in Mongolian history and culture. If the young people of this country "think they're Mongolian, they should master the history of Chinggis Khaan," says Nomingerel Davaavorj, who graduated from Ikh Zasag last summer with a bachelor's degree in international relations. While Chinggis's name is associated with pillaging and warfare in the Western world, to modern-day Mongolians he stands for unity, courage, and respect. In Ulan Bator, Mongolia's capital, his name shows up on vodka bottles, hotels, and storefronts. A Leader Redeemed It hasn't always been that way. During the Soviet era, when Mongolia was a satellite country largely dependent on funds from the Soviet Union, Chinggis's name was virtually banned, not only from history books but from daily life as well. Growing up in the rural grasslands of eastern Mongolia, Mr. Namsrain did not learn of the legendary warrior until the age of 12. He had been walking along a river, he recalls, and by chance came upon a statue of Chinggis that had not been destroyed by Soviet troops. "The image of Khaan was engraved in a flame-shaped rock," the president recalls, raising his hands above his head. "He was standing, holding a bow and arrow." That was when his fascination with Chinggis began. Mr. Namsrain's own experience with higher education began when he was 27. A former herdsman and Communist Party official, he won admission to a college in Moscow and spent six years in the Soviet Union studying history. When Chinggis's name was mentioned in history books, it was always in a negative light, Mr. Namsrain says: "The Russians didn't want Mongolians to think he was a hero, because Russia was conquered by him." When Mr. Namsrain returned to Mongolia he worked for the mayor of his hometown, Aimak, 250 miles east of the capital. After Communism fell, in the early 1990s, he moved to Ulan Bator to try his luck as an entrepreneur. "Before the 1990s," he says, "you couldn't even own a car." Having benefited from higher education himself, and seeing a need for it in Mongolia, he decided to open a university, starting with 40 students and 3 lecturers. He instituted strict policies -- administering Ikh Zasag the way Chinggis might have, he says. Students are expelled if they miss more than 36 hours of class. And full-time professors are not allowed to teach at other universities, a common practice in Mongolia. Mr. Namsrain, who has a tanned, broad face and a strong build, has a quirky streak. Twins and triplets get a 20-percent tuition discount at Ikh Zasag, and he has hired several sets of twins to work in his administration. "It's God's will," he says. "They're special." The university also places special emphasis on extracurricular activities like martial arts. "We are the first university in Mongolia to graduate bodyguards with a higher education," Mr. Namsrain jokes. But his main focus, he says, is to make sure that Chinggis Khaan's name is never suppressed again. He has published two books about the ancient ruler, in Russian and Mongolian, and avidly collects scholarly materials on him. "I want Mongolia to be as powerful as it was during Chinggis Khaan's rule," he says. From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 31 15:41:26 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:41:26 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Op-Ed: (Philip Johnson) Form Follows Fascism Message-ID: The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Form Follows Fascism http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/31/opinion/31stevens.html January 31, 2005 OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR By MARK STEVENS THE death last week of Philip Johnson, the nonagenarian enfant terrible, brought 20th-century architecture to a symbolic close. Even Mr. Johnson's friends sometimes doubted that he was an architect of the first rank, but friend and foe alike agreed that he was an emblematic figure of his time. But emblematic of what? In death, his role in American culture will come into sharper focus, and it's a darker picture than many have thought. Traditionally, Mr. Johnson is presented as the great champion of modern architecture - organizer of the landmark 1932 Museum of Modern Art show on the International Style, and architect of the Glass House on his Connecticut estate, which quickly came to symbolize American modernism. He is equally celebrated for abandoning classical modernism in the late 50's and adopting in the decades that followed a succession of styles that mirrored the changing taste of the time. It hardly mattered that many of his skyscrapers were corporate schmaltz; he was an enlivening, generous figure, a man who charmingly described himself as a "whore" as he picked the corporate pocket. Always ready to challenge the earnest, Mr. Johnson, who understood Warhol as well as Mies, became both an icon and an iconoclast. Only one aspect marred this picture: His embrace of fascism during the 1930's, which was mentioned only in passing in most obituaries. He later called his ideological infatuation "stupidity" and apologized whenever pressed on the matter; as a form of atonement, he designed a synagogue for no fee. With a few exceptions, critics typically had little interest in the details, granting Mr. Johnson a pass for a youthful indiscretion. Then, in 1994, Franz Schulze's biography presented this period of Mr. Johnson's life in some depth. Mr. Schulze's account was as sympathetic as possible - and many reviews of the book still played down the importance of Mr. Johnson's politics - but it was clear that views of Mr. Johnson's import for American culture would change significantly. Philip Johnson did not just flirt with fascism. He spent several years in his late 20's and early 30's - years when an artist's imagination usually begins to jell - consumed by fascist ideology. He tried to start a fascist party in the United States. He worked for Huey Long and Father Coughlin, writing essays on their behalf. He tried to buy the magazine American Mercury, then complained in a letter, "The Jews bought the magazine and are ruining it, naturally." He traveled several times to Germany. He thrilled to the Nuremberg rally of 1938 and, after the invasion of Poland, he visited the front at the invitation of the Nazis. He approved of what he saw. "The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy," he wrote in a letter. "There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle." As late as 1940, Mr. Johnson was defending Hitler to the American public. It seems that only an inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation - and, presumably, the prospect of being labeled a traitor if America entered the war - led him to withdraw completely from politics. Today, any debate over an important figure with a fascist or Communist background easily becomes an occasion for blame games between right and left. Mr. Johnson is no exception. Morally serious people can have different views of his personal culpability. But what's essential is to let the shadow fall - to acknowledge that fascism touched something important in his sensibility. Throughout his life, he was an ardent admirer of Nietzsche. His understanding of the great philosopher was surely deeper than that of the Nazis, but he was overly enchanted by the idea of "a superior being," "the will to power" and Nietzsche's view of art. And he loved the monumental. In an interview published in 1973, long after he renounced fascism, Mr. Johnson said: "The only thing I really regret about dictatorships isn't the dictatorship, because I recognize that in Julius's time and in Justinian's time and Caesar's time they had to have dictators. I mean I'm not interested in politics at all. I don't see any sense to it. About Hitler - if he'd only been a good architect!" In discussing Rome, he contrasted the poor artistic achievements of the democratically elected Republic with those of earlier regimes. "So let's not be so fancy-pants about who runs the country," he concluded. "Let's talk about whether it's good or not." Mr. Johnson's observation was refreshingly hard-nosed about art's relation to politics: good politics is not now and never will be a prerequisite for good art. But his emphasis on the aesthetic as the only important value in art was remarkably cold-blooded. His main regret seems to be that contemporary republics have failed to create monuments that ravish the senses. He never became a fascist architect. But he was probably one of those artists - among them many Communists - whose philosophical sensibilities were gutted by the experience of the 30's and World War II. Afterward, he lived more than ever for the stylish surface, appearing uncomfortable with large-minded ideas even when his buildings reached for the sky. Perhaps as a consequence, his imagination developed no particular center. Nothing was intractable or non-negotiable. He was remarkably free. He could toy, sometimes beautifully, with history. He liked a splash. He was a playful cynic, cultivating success even as he winked at its vulgarity. If someone should complain, well, the problem lay not in the artist but in the fallen world. Philip Johnson now seems like an emblematic figure partly because he appears to have been happily, marvelously, provocatively, disturbingly hollow. It is an underlying fear of Western culture, one that has lasted since World War II, that there is no larger or ennobling content to mine. Mr. Johnson's main flaws as an artist - his tastes for razzle-dazzle and overweening scale - are equally the weaknesses of American secular culture. His main strengths - his openness to change, playfulness and urbane rejection of the Miss Grundys of the world - are equally it strengths. The beautiful Glass House will remain Mr. Johnson's signature work. It is the transparent heart of a collection of eclectic buildings in New Canaan, Conn. It's a dream house, a stylish stage set. It floats upon the land, eliding boundaries between inside and outside. It seems full of emptiness. It's not really a place to live, but was still Mr. Johnson's essential home. That uneasy stylishness deserves emphasis. Philip Johnson lived in a glass house. He threw stones, too. Mark Stevens is the art critic of New York magazine and the co-author of "De Kooning: An American Master." From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 31 15:43:40 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:43:40 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: German High Court Overturns National Ban on Tuition Message-ID: German High Court Overturns National Ban on Tuition The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.2.4 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i22/22a04002.htm [Important article for followers of states' rights issues.] By AISHA LABI Germany's highest court ruled last week that a ban on tuition, imposed by the federal government in 2002, was unconstitutional. The eight-judge panel of the Federal Constitutional Court, in Karlsruhe, decided in favor of the six states that had sued to overturn the ban, saying it violated Germany's postwar Constitution, which makes education the preserve of the 16 states, or L?nder, rather than the federal government. Germany's universities, once world renowned, have suffered under the current system, as cash-strapped state governments have cut back on financing for higher education. University classrooms are notoriously overcrowded, and facilities are often ill equipped and poorly maintained. Many universities have eliminated entire departments to save money, and those that remain are often understaffed. A recent ranking by The Times Higher Education Supplement of the world's leading universities placed only one German institution -- the University of Heidelberg -- in the top 50. German university students pay no tuition and tend to take far longer to graduate than their counterparts in other European countries. The southern state of Baden-W?rttemberg, where the University of Heidelberg is located, became the first to impose tuition on long-term students in 1998, when it began charging undergraduates who had been pursuing their degrees for more than six years about $550 per semester. That practice was stopped by the federal government's 2002 ban. "We were also the first to promote and to plan general tuition fees, although Bavaria will be the first to actually have them, since they now hope to install them as soon as later this year," said Gunter Schanz, the spokesman for Baden-W?rttemberg's education ministry. Such fees will apply to all university students, not just to those who take more than a set number of years to complete their degrees. No Fees Until 2007 Baden-W?rttemberg does not expect to begin imposing fees, which will probably be around 500 euros a semester, or about $660, until 2007, said Mr. Schanz. The state's 9 research universities, 22 universities of applied science, and 6 universities of education cost about $2.9-billion a year to run. The additional revenue generated by tuition, about $182-million, will go entirely to those institutions and will be spent primarily on teaching, said Mr. Schanz. Christoph Parchmann, deputy spokesman of Bavaria's education ministry, confirmed that fees of no more than 500 euros a semester are likely to be collected there by the end of the year. "We want to change the system as quickly as possible," he said. Specifics have yet to be decided, and Mr. Parchmann said that everybody, including students, the universities, parliament, the unions, and other state officials, will be consulted. "What we will not do," he vowed, "is to tell the people how the system is hoping to be and to ask them afterward what they think." Like the other states that challenged the federal government's tuition ban, Baden-W?rttemberg and Bavaria are governed by parties on the right, while the federal government is run by a coalition of Chancellor Gerhard Schr?der's left-leaning Social Democrats and the Green Party. Now that the court ruling leaves the matter of whether to impose tuition up to the states, their decisions are likely to be based on political alliances. "The Social Democrat states are not willing to introduce fees because they think it is not good socially and that it will be prohibitive for students," said Florian Frank, a spokesman for the federal education ministry. Last week's ruling was welcomed by university administrators. "We are pleased that there is now room for the introduction of tuition fees, and we're hoping that the L?nder will put new legislation into place to allow universities to raise fees," said Christiane Ebel-Gabriel, secretary general of the German Rectors' Conference, which represents the heads of most of Germany's institutions of higher education. Legislation Needed States that choose to allow fees will first have to pass enabling legislation, and Ms. Ebel-Gabriel said that the universities' main concern now is to monitor that process. She and her colleagues believe that universities should be permitted to decide how to exercise their new right. "Universities should be able to decide to what extent they want to raise fees, and they should be able to decide not to raise fees for certain programs," said Ms. Ebel-Gabriel. "There are some programs that are very attractive to students, such as M.B.A. programs and other programs that attract large numbers, that the universities should be able to charge more for." Under Ms. Ebel-Gabriel's preferred system, a university should be allowed to charge more to students in a popular business program, up to a maximum cap, and less to students in an undersubscribed research program. The university should also be allowed to decide how to spend the money it collects, she said. "The other possibility is that the L?nder will define the level of fees universally within each state, for all universities and all programs identically," said Ms. Ebel-Gabriel. "We feel that this takes freedom and initiative and autonomy away from the universities." Mr. Schanz, of the education ministry in Baden-W?rttemberg, said that "different fees for different studies and different disciplines" was a long-term possibility in that state. None of the states are considering charges of more than 500 euros a semester, but even that amount strikes many students as exorbitant. German student groups reacted angrily to the ruling. "Tuition fees will affect living conditions for people throughout the country, not just in states that have the fee," predicted Christine Scholz, who is studying for a master's degree in art history at the Free University of Berlin and is on the executive board of Germany's main student union, which represents 1.1 million of the country's 2 million university students. Students in states that impose fees will be forced to relocate to states with lower fees or no fees in order to complete their studies, Ms. Scholz said, citing a recent online poll by Der Spiegel. The magazine's poll found that most Germans oppose tuition. She and her colleagues hope to tap into that sentiment in demonstrations planned for February 3 in five cities -- Essen, Hamburg, Hannover, Leipzig, and Mannheim -- to protest the ruling. From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 31 15:47:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:47:11 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Information Literacy Makes All the Wrong Assumptions Message-ID: Information Literacy Makes All the Wrong Assumptions The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.7 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i18/18b01301.htm [Letters from the 5.2.4 issue are appended.] By STANLEY WILDER Academic librarians were quick to react to the threat posed by Internet competition. In 1989, half a dozen years before the first official release of Netscape, they recognized the explosion in networked information and proposed "information literacy," a reinvention of the educational function of the academic library. The premise of information literacy is that the supply of information has become overwhelming, and that students need a rigorous program of instruction in research or library-use skills, provided wholly or in part by librarians. A survey conducted by the Association of College and Research Libraries six years later found that 22 percent of U.S. academic libraries reported running some kind of information-literacy program, and in the years since, the idea has become the profession's accepted approach to its educational function. But information literacy remains the wrong solution to the wrong problem facing librarianship. It mistakes the nature of the Internet threat, and it offers a response at odds with higher education's traditional mission. Information literacy does nothing to help libraries compete with the Internet, and it should be discarded. Librarians should not assume that college students welcome their help in doing research online. The typical freshman assumes that she is already an expert user of the Internet, and her daily experience leads her to believe that she can get what she wants online without having to undergo a training program. Indeed, if she were to use her library's Web site, with its dozens of user interfaces, search protocols, and limitations, she might with some justification conclude that it is the library, not her, that needs help understanding the nature of electronic information retrieval. The idea behind information literacy is that our typical freshman is drowning in information, when in fact Google provides her with material she finds good enough, and does so instantaneously. Information literacy assumes that she accepts unquestioningly the information she finds on the Internet, when we know from research that she is a skeptic who filters her results to the best of her ability. Information literacy tells us that she cannot recognize when she needs information, nor can she find, analyze, or use it, when she demonstrably does all of those things perfectly well, albeit at a relatively unsophisticated level. Simply put, information literacy perceives a problem that does not exist. Furthermore, it misses the real threat of the Internet altogether -- which is that it is now sufficiently simple and powerful that students can graduate without ever using the library. That is unfortunate because, for all its strengths, the Internet cannot give students the high-quality scholarly information that is available only through subscription, license, or purchase. But if you have already decided that students are drowning in information, then your mission becomes obvious: Teach them the information-seeking skills they need to stay afloat. To put it another way, information literacy would have librarians teach students to be more like them. The problem with that approach is that librarians are alone in harboring such aspirations for students. As Roy Tennant noted in the January 1, 2001, Library Journal, "only librarians like to search; everyone else likes to find." Any educational philosophy is doomed to failure if it views students as information seekers in need of information-seeking training. Information-seeking skills are undeniably necessary. However, librarians should view them in the same way that students and faculty members do: as an important, but ultimately mechanical, means to a much more compelling end. Information literacy instead segregates those skills from disciplinary knowledge by creating separate classes and curricula for them. There is no better way to marginalize academic librarianship. Information literacy is also harmful because it encourages librarians to teach ways to deal with the complexity of information retrieval, rather than to try to reduce that complexity. That effect is probably not intentional or even conscious, but it is insidious. It is not uncommon for librarians to speak, for example, of the complexity of searching for journal articles as if that were a fact of nature. The only solution, from the information-literacy point of view, is to teach students the names of databases, the subjects and titles they include, and their unique search protocols -- although all of those facts change constantly, ensuring that the information soon becomes obsolete, if it is not forgotten first. Almost any student could suggest a better alternative: that the library create systems that eliminate the need for instruction. My final objection lies in the assumption that it is possible to teach information literacy to all students. Most college libraries can reach some students; some libraries can manage to reach all students. But no instructional program can reach enough students often enough to match their steady growth in sophistication throughout their undergraduate careers. To do so would require enormous and coordinated shifts in curricular emphases and resource allocation, none of which is either practical or politically realistic. One alternative to information literacy is suggested in a comment by my colleague Ronald Dow: "The library is a place where readers come to write, and writers come to read." Dow casts students not as information seekers, but as apprentices engaged in a continuous cycle of reading and writing. The model of reading and writing suggests that the librarian's educational role is analogous to that of the professor in the classroom: Librarians should use their expertise to deepen students' understanding of the disciplines they study. More specifically, librarians should use their intimate knowledge of the collections they manage and the writing process as practiced in the disciplines to teach apprentice readers and writers. Much of what academic libraries already do would fit neatly within that approach. For example, libraries place a high premium on disciplinary expertise on the part of their reference staffs and subject liaisons, which means that many of their staff members understand the norms of discourse in the disciplines they work with. Libraries have also shown enormous creativity in integrating their subject liaisons into the life of their disciplines on the campus, so that those librarians have a good understanding of curricula, class assignments, and faculty interests. How might the model of reading and writing work in practice at the reference desk? A librarian would first try to find out what kind of writing assignment a student needs help with and where he is in the writing process. For example, a librarian helping an undergraduate on a term paper in art history might help him pick or narrow his topic, point him to standard reference works like the 34-volume Dictionary of Art for background reading, and offer suggestions on how to follow the citations in those works to other material. The librarian might show him relevant databases or print collections for supporting evidence, and provide help in preparing a bibliography. Each interview at the reference desk does not need to include a complete review of the writing process, but the writing process should provide the framework for the librarian's response to the student's request for help. The library's educational function would be to make students better writers, according to the standards of the discipline. Librarians would not be teaching students to become librarians, but to absorb and add to their disciplines in ways that make them more like their professors. Replacing instruction in information literacy with instruction in reading and writing scholarly material, however, is not enough. The library must also do a better job of reaching more students, more often. Librarians need to use their expertise to make the library's online presence approach the simplicity and power of the Internet. Every obstacle we can remove makes it more likely that reference and bibliographic instruction will get to the heart of the matter: connecting students with information. Libraries have high-quality collections; we have to make sure that students know about them. By pairing instruction with smart information-technology systems, we can create educational programs that reach everyone on our campuses, every time they turn to us. No educational model that focuses exclusively on instruction can say as much. Yet the most important thing libraries can do to educate students is not technological in nature. We must change the way we think of students and of librarians. Students are apprentices in the reading and writing of their chosen disciplines, and librarians are experts who can help them master those tasks. Here is an educational function that creates real value within our institutions. Stanley Wilder is the associate dean of the River Campus libraries at the University of Rochester and author, most recently, of Demographic Change in Academic Librarianship (Association of Research Libraries, 2003). --------------- Letters: Librarians' Role in Helping Students Sift Through Information The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.2.4 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i22/22b01701.htm LETTERS TO THE EDITOR To the Editor: Stanley Wilder's assumptions are wrong and harmful to the education of students ([3]"Information Literacy Makes All the Wrong Assumptions," The Chronicle Review, January 7). Students do have difficulty finding, evaluating, and using information appropriately and ethically, and we have the data to prove it from multiyear, quantitative, and qualitative studies undertaken in the California State University System. ... That is why members of the CSU library faculty work with professors to integrate information literacy into the learning outcomes of academic disciplines, and work hard to teach students information-literacy skills through one-on-one instruction at reference desks, team-taught classes, Web-based tutorials, chat-based sessions, and credit-bearing, classroom-based instruction. Contrary to Mr. Wilder's assertions, we do not segregate information-literacy skills from disciplinary knowledge, or fail to reduce the complexity of information. The California State University is a teaching institution, and our librarians teach every day. They use their expertise to help students understand how information is produced within the disciplines, when to use print and electronic resources, how to evaluate the merits of information found on the Internet, and how to cite and give credit to the authors who produced the information. Mr. Wilder comes from a research institution. He could learn much from the experiences of the California State University libraries. Ilene F. Rockman Manager Information Competence Initiative California State University Long Beach, Calif. *** To the Editor: I am afraid that Stanley Wilder is barking up the wrong tree in his essay about the wrong assumptions of information literacy. I certainly agree that librarians should not spend all of their teaching time on information technology and database searching. However, that claim would have been more accurate 10 or 20 years ago, when online library catalogs and bibliographic databases first became prevalent. Contemporary views of information literacy are much broader than that narrow emphasis, including all of the various stages of research and reporting, and the ethical, legal, political, economic, and social study of information. ... Let me respond to a few of Mr. Wilder's characterizations of information literacy. Mr. Wilder is correct that librarians alone should not be pushing students to learn to search the databases. Librarians should be working closely with faculty members on what and how to teach students about research methodologies and library resources. Siena College has a successful program that gives curriculum-development grants to faculty members, so they -- in collaboration with librarians -- can embed teaching modules and exercises in their courses to integrate information literacy into the course of study. ... As far as teaching students to read critically and write papers, there is no question that this fits under the broad umbrella of information literacy. Information literacy can and should encourage students to explore, discover, and investigate. Information literacy can and should encourage students to read for comprehension, read with a critical mind, and read and gather information with the goal of the creation of new knowledge through oral and written communication. ... Gary B. Thompson Library Director Siena College Loudonville, N.Y. *** To the Editor: Stanley Wilder's essay was certainly thought provoking, but I find many of his arguments problematic. I am particularly disappointed with Mr. Wilder's remedy for the students drowning in information: "Teach them the information-seeking skills they need to stay afloat." Is that all Mr. Wilder believes students need to be able to do? Rest assured, students will need to do more than simply "stay afloat" in the real world. ... Also, Wilder seems to ignore the fact that students' information literacy varies. Some graduated from high school with the ability to recognize the need for information, find it, and use it effectively. However, many do not fit Wilder's description of the student who "does all of those things perfectly well," and these students need to be taught. Mr. Wilder's dismal proclamation that "any educational philosophy is doomed to failure if it views students as information seekers in need of information-seeking training" is very disheartening. I believe that students come to a college or university to learn. A large part of that learning process involves seeking information. Since information seeking is not an innate quality, it must therefore be taught to students. If a library develops an information-literacy rubric that clearly outlines and defines goals and objectives for each stage, or semester, of the undergraduate career, that library can successfully reach all students. Finally, Mr. Wilder seems to be misplacing the blame for the complexity of information seeking and retrieval. I certainly concur with his assessment that the search protocols and interfaces for many databases are insanely complicated; as a professional librarian, I myself can barely keep up. However, much of this complexity is beyond the control of librarians. Developing library systems that eliminate the need for instruction (and hence give librarians the ability to reduce the complexity of information retrieval) remains a long way off. ... Asking library professionals to change the complexity of information seeking and retrieval is like asking banking professionals to change the complexity of the stock market. Yes, your professional banker has a responsibility to help you wisely manage your money and investments, but he or she cannot control the stock market. ... Sarah Hood User Services Librarian/Webmaster Columbia College Columbia, S.C. *** To the Editor: Granted, I have only two years under my belt in the library field, and I don't have the Association of College and Research Libraries' information-literacy guidelines memorized. However, I am compelled to contribute a word or two based on my experiences as a reference and instruction librarian who is a fan of information literacy. First, I think that we librarians have already lost the battle if we refer to the Internet as a "threat" or "competition." It might have been like that at first, but now our library catalogs, research guides, online tutorials, and reference chat services are all on the Internet. Second, why can't the skills that the students logically develop while searching Google, Yahoo, or Amazon be used as steppingstones for library instruction? I often introduce the ideas of Boolean searches, truncation, and search limits this way. ... Pointing out the similarities between Web sources and online library sources can help students analyze what they are searching for, find similar patterns in search options so that new databases or interfaces are less daunting, become more efficient when conducting a search, understand that each new source brings on a new set of hits, and be better prepared to find the differences among databases. I am not looking to have information-literacy instruction make students become librarians, but to bring out a little bit of the librarian in them. ... Another part of information literacy was addressed in Wilder's reading-and-writing model. He mentions that under the model, librarians should help students narrow topics, use ready-reference works, and build citations. This advice to librarians seems akin to advising doctors to get their patients' temperature. Topic development, reference sources, and citation building are standard components of both online library tutorials and information-literacy classes. I agree that we cannot reach every student. That would be ideal, but it is unrealistic considering that most libraries are understaffed and most librarians are overworked. On our campus, students are required to finish a series of writing classes that work in collaboration with the library. In addition, we offer credit-bearing classes at the introductory and advanced levels. ... I also agree that there are students who think they are experts and get everything online. ... However, most faculty members ask students to use scholarly works that are primarily found on restricted databases or high-quality Web sites. These assignments are what usually bring the students to the reference desk or information-literacy class. I don't see information literacy as a way to battle anything or even teach a specific thing. ... I think information literacy is a bigger concept, designed to help students develop a way of thinking and evaluating information that will be highly useful to them in college and in life. Liza Posas Assistant Librarian University of California Santa Barbara, Calif. *** To the Editor: The Internet has spawned, among a great many other novel phenomena, a new genre of literature written by and for librarians: the self-flagellation proclamation. It seems that on a quarterly basis, if not more often, we librarians take yet another scolding from a member of our own profession. Our transgressions are legion: We try to turn students into miniatures of ourselves; we take for granted that students have an intrinsic interest in the research skills we're teaching them; library databases are nonintuitive; etc. I was dismayed to read all of these chronic complaints, as well as a few new ones, in Stanley Wilder's essay. ... What I'm waiting for is an article that acknowledges, even to some small degree, the immense efforts librarians consistently put into learning the latest, nonintuitive software application, the latest veritable wonder guaranteed to place resources of the highest quality at the fingertips of our students. Having dutifully mastered all these new wonders, we turn our attention to packing the greatest amount of succinct yet clear instruction on their use into the 50- or 75-minute session grudgingly allotted to us. ... How could I not agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Wilder that sessions covering nothing but the rudiments of information seeking are a disservice to our students? The day cannot come soon enough when I no longer have to spend valuable time demonstrating the "limit" function. In the meantime, however, students' bewilderment in the wonderland of database and Internet searching is so palpable that we librarians are compelled to address it. ... The real heart of the information-literacy controversy is this: If we as instruction librarians were entrusted with the full spectrum of what is by right our curriculum too, we would be partners with our course-instructor colleagues in teaching the higher-order cognitive skills. This is what many of us argue for, even fight for, academic year after academic year. The innovative writing program developed by Mr. Wilder and his colleagues is an example in point. Unlike them, however, I do not see the synthesis of research material as a process apart from, even antithetical to, information literacy. Evaluation and synthesis have been identified as two of the higher, more-sophisticated information-literacy skills in various studies. ... It is unfortunate that Mr. Wilder did not include a few words of support for those of us who are still battling to claim our full vocation as teachers. Would that he had included in his essay a call to course instructors to work with us in creating more team-taught endeavors. ... Sadly, even a presence in the electronic classroom, other than the perfunctory links to library resources, remains beyond the purview of many of us. Mentoring students as they synthesize their research findings into original writing is still a distant dream indeed; a dream that I, for one, will never give up struggling to realize. But I don't do self-flagellation. Barbara Quintiliano Instructional Design Librarian Villanova University Villanova, Pa. From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 31 15:51:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:51:02 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Toronto Star: The end of innocence Message-ID: The end of innocence http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1107039015893&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968793972154&DPL=IvsNDS/7ChAX&tacodalogin=yes [84]ASHANTE INFANTRY Michael Jackson is headed to court. His trial, which is scheduled to begin with jury selection tomorrow in Santa Maria, Calif., will not be simply an evaluation of the charges against him. It will also be an indictment of his Peter Pan-like existence from his Disney-style Neverland Ranch and toy fetish to his preference for the companionship of young boys. But being stuck in adolescence is not grounds for conviction, warns Tom Lyon, a University of Southern California law professor and expert in child molestation cases. "He could be a serial pedophile for all we know. But the fact that he's kind to children or that he likes to play children's games doesn't suggest that he's going to molest kids," said Lyon. "That's more a reflection that stereotypically, men are uninterested in kids." Free on $3 million (U.S.) bail, the 46-year-old singer has pleaded not guilty to 10 charges, including child molestation, giving a minor alcohol in order to seduce him and conspiracy to kidnap, detain and extort the family of his alleged victim, a 13-year-old cancer patient who met Jackson through a Make-A-Wish-type appeal. According to reports of leaked documents, the prosecution claims Jackson is a predator who plied children with liquor, gave them nicknames such as "Doo Doo Head" and "Blowhole" and encouraged them to masturbate. Expect his defence lawyers to portray their client as a benefactor of children fallen prey to extortionists. They will have a tough time if the judge allows evidence of similar allegations involving another 13-year-old boy who settled out of court with Jackson in 1993. It remains to be seen if any of Jackson's celebrity friends, like Elizabeth Taylor and Chris Tucker, show up to lend their support; or whether family members, including father Joe, whom he's accused of abusing him, and sister LaToya, from whom he was once estranged, will be by his side as they were during last year's arraignment. One thing is certain: even without cameras in the courtroom, the trial, which is expected to last six months, is going to be scrutinized and reported in its every detail. It's a celebrity scandal of unseen proportions, and to help you wade through the case ahead, we introduce you to Santa Maria the picturesque city being overrun by the media, the lawyers and their arguments, the judge and the potential witnesses. But we begin with the man at the centre of it all. Not guilty, your honour The fifth son of a Gary, Ind., steelworker and his devout Jehovah's Witness wife, Michael Joe Jackson is the most successful of his singing siblings, largely due to 1982's Thriller, the biggest-selling album of all time with global sales of more than 51 million copies. In the last decade, however, the King of Pop's cat-and-mouse games with the public, lukewarm recordings, childlike obsessions, implausible plastic surgeries and controversial relationships with young boys have transformed him from music icon to punch line. But he's still relevant, says Vibe magazine writer Cheo Hodari Coker. "Justin Timberlake and Usher cannot do what they do without Michael Jackson," said Coker. "When you hear the pureness of Justin Timberlake's falsetto, his delivery ... everything that he's doing is completely influenced by Michael Jackson. When you see Usher's latest video `Caught Up' the hat, the clothing, moves that are very modular, but smooth that's `Smooth Criminal.' There may be less crotch grabs, that's pure Michael." And the twice-divorced father of two sons and a daughter still sells a recent hits compilation Number Ones entered Billboard's Top Internet Albums Sales chart at No. 1 last January and Thriller sold 228,710 copies in 2004. However, the allegations have given even his most diehard fans pause. "As many people love Michael Jackson, you say `Would you allow your kids to spend the night at Mike's house?' I think those that say yes are probably lying," said Coker. Wine country "Mike's house" is a 1,100-hectare ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley, just east of the city of Santa Maria, population 80,528. If you've seen the movie Sideways, then you're already familiar with the area, located in California's central coast and known for its magnificent wineries and strawberry fields. Vandenberg Air Force Base is the largest employer, providing jobs to more than 5,000 people. The advent of the trial means all of the city's 1,100 hotel rooms have been booked. "I've heard comments about us benefiting from the misfortune of others," said Chamber of Commerce president Robert Hatch, who has fielded calls and emails from reporters in Germany and Japan. "But we didn't cause this to happen, and we just want to make sure everyone who comes here is comfortable, and perhaps they'll remember us when the trial ends." High alert When Jackson and his lawyers turn up in Santa Maria tomorrow, along with hundreds of reporters, about 1,000 fans and the first batch of prospective jurors, there will be 30 police officers a third of the Santa Maria Police Department on hand to keep order. "The city is working with some of the media to rent some of its parking and office space near the courthouse," said city spokesperson Mark van de Kamp, who estimates police overtime costs at $40,000 per month. "We are expecting to recoup about 90 per cent of those costs from contracts we're negotiating right now." Inside the courthouse, sheriff deputies will be on patrol. The ground-floor courtroom has 120 available seats: 60 for the public, allocated through a lottery system, and 60 for the media. The county is charging a group of 100 media outlets $7,500 (U.S.) per day to offset the costs of extra staffing, barricades and a portable toilet. 12 peers "I think a lot of them are going to lie through their teeth to try to get on this jury panel," said L.A. jury consultant Marshall Hennington of the 4,000 people who have been summoned to Santa Barbara County Superior Court. And since only 1.9 per cent of people in the county are African-American, the final dozen will be more reflective of Jackson's current hue than his racial heritage. "I think the defence made a crucial mistake by not asking for a change of venue," said Hennington. "He would be better off if he had a jury panel in which there were more minorities because they would raise the burden of proof on the state." Vibe's Coker concurs. "I think that black people, regardless of whether or not he's innocent, feel the need to defend him because of the fact that he's a high profile African-American entertainer that's being attacked with such vehemence," said the writer, drawing parallels with O.J. Simpson who was perceived as having distanced himself from the African-American community until he found himself on trial for murder. "That's what was going on with the O.J. Simpson trial; the way (authorities) were going after him, it was like black America was being attacked. So there was a need to protect him," said Coker, adding jokingly, "even though by his own admission, O.J hadn't been black since 1975." Southwestern Law School professor Robert Pugsley doesn't believe the race card is in play. "I think it's really a question of whether or not the public's perception of Mr. Jackson's weird lifestyle has any relevance to the charges against him. He seems to be well-liked by his neighbours, he's done a lot of charity work for kids ... I think he has as much opportunity as anybody of his international fame and celebrity would to get a fair trial in that area." He says/He says _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ `Michael Jackson has to take the stand.' L.A. jury consultant Marshall Hennington _________________________________________________________________ According to The Smoking Gun website and ABC News, the accuser, now 15, told investigators that the entertainer gave him wine in a soda can, showed him porn and fondled him over a four-week period in 2003. But the boy, seen holding hands with the singer and talking about sharing a bed with him in Briton Martin Bashir's 2003 documentary, Living with Michael Jackson, also told child welfare authorities that Jackson was a father figure who did nothing wrong. "It's pretty clear that they can't get a conviction unless they get some convincing testimony from the child," said law professor Lyon. "Jurors will look for things like whether the child tears up on the stand ... and those are not very reliable indicators (of veracity). The best thing is to listen to the amount of detail that he can provide and the extent to which what he says is corroborated." While the defence may treat the boy and his siblings gingerly on the witness stand, expect them to tear into their mother, who has been characterized as an opportunist with a history of making false accusations. "If these jurors can separate the mother from the children and say, `Yes, the mother may have been a poor caretaker and been out for her own personal gains, but still he should be held accountable for what he did,' then Michael Jackson is going to be in for the fight of his life," said jury consultant Hennington. Gotcha! Santa Barbara District Attorney Tom Sneddon, 63, is the face of the prosecution. The father of nine, known early in his career as "Mad Dog," was disappointed when his 1993 molestation case against Jackson fell apart after the alleged victim stopped co-operating and inked a $20-million (U.S.) civil settlement with the pop star. Two years later, Jackson released the song "D.S." about "a cold man" Dom Sheldon who tried to take him down; it was thought to be a reference to his nemesis. So, it was an exuberant Sneddon, in his sixth and final four-year term as D.A., who announced new allegations against Jackson in November 2003. "I think that initial press conference was inappropriate," said Loyola Law School professor and former prosecutor Laurie Levenson. "He got the law wrong; he made light of charges that there's nothing funny about; he certainly made it sound personal. During the investigation he went out to the search locations, he spoke directly to witnesses ... that's the sort of extra zealousness that makes people think he's not completely objective." Johnny who? After quitting actor Robert Blake's murder case over "irreconcilable differences," Harvard grad Thomas Mesereau Jr., 54, replaced Mark Geragos (of Scott Peterson fame) as Jackson's lead attorney. "He's a terrific lawyer, with a pretty amazing track record," said Levenson, who estimates Jackson's minimum legal bill at $1 million (U.S.). "He's a real detail man, always very prepared, passionate about the law and knows how to conduct himself in the courtroom. I think his strengths are that he probably knows this prosecution's case better than they do. "And he's done a lot of work with underprivileged people and in the black community. He's not as flashy as a Mark Geragos or Johnny Cochrane (who successfully represented Simpson), and he doesn't have as much prior publicity, but I do think he's enjoying this limelight a bit." He's da boss Judge Rodney Melville, 63, "likes to run a tight ship," said Levenson of the jurist who has banned cameras at the trial and slapped a gag order on participants. "He's not a big fan of the media," she noted. "And he can be really short and caustic to some of the lawyers. I think he wants this case to go away desperately; he has said pretty much he wants his life back." But he's fully aware of the responsibility he has been given. "The world is watching justice in the United States here the world. Not Santa Maria, not Santa Barbara County, not California the world," he said during pre-trial rulings Friday. Melville has yet to decide whether he'll allow the prosecution to present their evidence of "at least seven" other alleged sexual abuse victims from Jackson's past. That could include testimony from the 1993 complainant, now in his 20s. "If the prosecution is not able to get him on the stand to bolster their case, that's where it becomes a weaker case than it originally appeared to be and may explain why after the (April 2004 grand jury) indictment, Sneddon conducted more raids on Neverland and requested a DNA swab from Jackson," said law professor Pugsley. "It certainly appears no expense is being spared and the D.A. is casting an extremely wide net to try to get Jackson this time around." I swear to tell the truth ... Martin Bashir, now employed by ABC's 20/20, may be called to testify about his observations during the making of his two-hour documentary. There has also been talk about former child star Macaulay Culkin, who often slept over at Neverland, taking the stand for either the prosecution or the defence. But, none of the 100-plus witnesses slated to appear are likely to be more riveting than the pop star himself. "Michael Jackson has to take the stand," said trial consultant Hennington, "but he's going to have to have significant witness preparation work to make sure he comes across as credible, likeable and believable. "That's what did him in (at a 2003 civil trial he lost to a German concert promoter over cancelled shows). He always showed up to court late, he made the jurors wait, he'd take long lunch breaks. "One time he didn't even show up again after lunch; another time he called in after the jurors were seated and said he couldn't make it because he had a doctor's appointment. Those things really angered the jurors." But Judge Melville has already figured in the Jackson factor: the trial is scheduled to sit from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. each day without a lunch break. "That's a great move," said the Chamber of Commerce's Hatch. "He knows if Mr. Jackson goes for lunch and stops out there with the fans ... he might not be back on time, or at all. He's just not used to people telling him what to do." This could get ugly If he's convicted of what he's been charged with, probation "will not be an option," said Levenson. "He's not going to get a bracelet and stay at home; he's facing three to 20 years." And Jackson could dodge the prurient allegations and still do time. "The big problem is that Sneddon added that conspiracy charge," said Pugsley. The prosecution claims that Jackson colluded with aides to hide and intimidate the boy and his family after the fallout from the Bashir documentary. "You can prove conspiracy with relative ease," said Pugsley. "And that still carries heavy prison time." Even if Jackson goes free, the legal troubles are still not over. His former wife, Debbie Rowe, is reportedly set to auction her 2.13-carat wedding ring on eBay to raise money for a custody battle over their two children Prince Michael, 7, and Paris, 6. This is his future. Dismal. Disgraced. Diminished. [85]Additional articles by Ashante Infantry References 84. http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Render&c=Page&cid=968332188492&ce=Columnist&colid=1060683025687 85. http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Render&c=Page&cid=968332188492&ce=Columnist&colid=1060683025687 From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 31 15:53:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:53:25 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Prospect (UK): David Held: Global Left Turn Message-ID: David Held: Global Left Turn http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=6584&AuthKey=1f160fba4227a1115ea020940d5f509f&issue=496 Prospect Magazine, 5.1 Martin Wolf and I come from similar backgrounds and agree about much in the globalisation debate. But while he regards liberal markets as sufficient, I think the globe needs a turn to social democracy _________________________________________________________________ David Held is a professor of political science at the LSE and author of "Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus" (Polity Press) Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, has written a remarkable but flawed defence of the global market economy: Why Globalisation Works: The Case for the Global Market Economy (Yale University Press). Wolf conceives globalisation in essentially economic terms. The book says little about the political, social, cultural and environmental aspects of globalisation, although he does argue that nation states remain the locus of political debate and legitimacy and that the best way to combine economic globalisation with political stability is via liberal democracy. But it is economic globalisation - meaning greater openness of trade, free movement of capital, expansion of foreign direct investment - which is the focus because it is, in Wolf's view, the key to boosting prosperity and the life opportunities of all. Wolf's mission is to dispel the illusions about globalisation promulgated by the forces of what he calls anti-globalisation.com, or the "new millennium collectivists." The book is about the intellectual clash between liberal capitalism and its opponents. Wolf is on the streets fighting a new wave of dark forces. The stakes are high: disorder and the fragmentation of the global economy threaten unless they are defeated. And defeating them requires both showing them they are wrong and offering hope for a better future. Wolf's voice is clear, serious and didactic, and his book offers a carefully crafted account of the global market economy and the strengths and limits of his opponents' views. Yet there is also something anachronistic about the book and the territory it covers: its agenda seems to have been set a few years ago when the anti-globalisation movement was at its peak and hundreds of thousands were marching against the forces of economic globalisation. These days, after 9/11 and the war in Iraq, it is seldom asked whether we are for or against globalisation. The ground has shifted to a debate about the type of globalisation we want. On these grounds, Wolf's contribution is less impressive. I have been thinking and writing about globalisation and global governance arrangements for over a decade, and have considered much of the material that informs Wolf's book. It is therefore interesting to reflect on the points of similarity and difference in our background and approach. Wolf begins his book with a brief autobiographical essay, describing his recent family history and its influence upon him. His father was an Austrian Jewish refugee who came to Britain before the second world war, and his mother was from a Dutch Jewish family. My parents were both Jewish and born in Germany, one in Leipzig and the other in Berlin. Both came to Britain in the early 1930s fleeing the Nazis. Wolf, like myself, was brought up with a strong sense of the menace of authoritarian dictatorships, and we both learned early about the importance of the values of an open society and of the forces, from the left and right, which might threaten it. Both Wolf and I grew up in communities strongly committed to the Enlightenment ideals of freedom, democracy and the pursuit of reason - the impartial pursuit of truth - and with a strong sense of the fragility of the world's commitment to them. But while he believes that the liberal market economy is the best means of embedding these ideals, and that markets and liberal states create a framework for humans to be free and equal, I consider that the Enlightenment ideals remain unfulfilled in important respects and that the neoliberal form of globalisation to which Wolf subscribes is a challenge to them. We have both been influenced by Friedrich Hayek. Wolf takes him as one of the great champions of personal liberty, of the market economy as a necessary condition of democracy, and of the dangers of intrusive government. I, like Wolf, take Hayek as one of the great theorists of the market, and of its advantages over other systems. But I also think that Hayek failed to grasp the nature of markets as systems of power which can also threaten liberty and democracy. Wolf conceives of markets as powerless mechanisms of co-ordination, while I understand them as highly fluid and risk-laden - often generating damaging externalities with regard to health, welfare, income distribution and the environment. This is not an argument for abandoning the market, but it is an argument - explored in my new book Global Covenant - for reframing it. If we want to guarantee personal liberty and the efficient and just operation of the market, we must build bridges between economic and human rights, between the commercial and the environmental, and between national and international jurisdictions. Hayek does not help here at all. For both Hayek and Wolf, at the feast of the global market, power is largely absent. Nevertheless, both Wolf and I believe that globalisation has been much misrepresented. We agree, for example, that globalisation is more than Americanisation; that there has been no straightforward collapse in welfare, labour or environmental standards (although there are big challenges); globalisation does not mean the end of the state; it has not just compounded the globe's inequities; the gap between the world's richest and poorest states is greater than it has ever been and is growing, yet there is some evidence that the proportion of those living in extreme poverty is falling; global economic processes have not always reinforced corporate power; developing countries do not always lose out in world trade; and economic globalisation and the current structure of economic governance do not exclude the voice and influence of developing countries. Most of Wolf's book is devoted to examining propositions such as these, and while he does not paint a wholly rosy picture of economic globalisation, the force of the book is to show that anti-globalisation.com has precious little to offer. We agree on the need to dispel these myths, but Wolf's portrait of economic globalisation does not get to the heart of the problems of globalisation in its current neoliberal form. I will stress three of them here: global market integration is not the indispensable condition of development; a "market first" political philosophy cannot provide adequate terms of reference for thinking about a range of transborder problems and the capacities of multilateral organisations to cope with them; and liberal market philosophy is the wrong philosophy for the age in which we live. We require, instead, a cosmopolitan social democratic philosophy to guide a world of overlapping communities. Wolf's main argument is that "a successful move to the market, including increasing integration in the world economy, explains the success stories of the past two decades." Developing countries which have prospered, notably in Asia, have all followed this path. But his argument needs questioning in a number of respects. First, the experience of China and India - along with Japan, South Korea and Taiwan earlier - shows that countries do not have to adopt liberal trade or capital market policies in order to benefit from enhanced trade and faster growth. All these countries have grown relatively fast behind protective barriers. It is true that as these countries have become richer, they have tended to liberalise their trade policy, but there is not a simple causal relationship at work. As Dani Rodrik, the Harvard economist, has shown, the only thing that can be said with certainty is that countries become more open as they become richer. Furthermore, recent research has found that one of the main factors limiting the capacity of the poorest countries to develop is the liberalisation of capital. Geoffrey Garrett, a professor of political science at UCLA, has shown that what hurts developing countries faced with a broad liberalisation programme is not the pursuit of free trade per se, but the free movement of capital. While tariff liberalisation can be broadly beneficial for low-income countries, rapid capital liberalisation in the absence of sound domestic capital markets can be a recipe for "volatility, unpredictability and booms and busts in capital flows." Countries that have rapidly opened their capital accounts have performed significantly less well in terms of economic growth and income inequality than countries that have maintained tight control on capital movements but cut tariffs. An IMF study published in March 2003 found that there is no consistent support for the theory that financial globalisation per se delivers a higher rate of economic growth. Economic protectionism does not work as a general strategy, but there is evidence to suggest that a country's internal economic integration - the development of its human capital and national market institutions, and the replacement of imports with national production where feasible - can be stimulated by state-led industrial policy. The evidence indicates that the development of state regulatory capacity, a sound public domain, the ability to focus investment on job creating sectors in competitive and productive areas and the protection of infant industries are more important priorities than integration into world markets. This finding should not come as a surprise, since nearly all today's rich countries began their growth behind tariff barriers and only lowered them once their economies were relatively robust. The argument here should not be taken, as Wolf might suspect, as a simple endorsement of old leftist, state-centred development. Public objectives can be delivered by a diversity of actors, public and private. And the development of civil society is an indispensable part of national development. Although there can, of course, be conflicts between economic development and the strengthening of civil society, all countries need sufficient autonomy to work out their own ways of managing this conflict. Developing nations need the latitude to create individual polices and institutions which may depart from the orthodoxy of global market integration. Similarly, organisations such as the WTO need a broader range of policies to encourage the different national economic systems to flourish within an equitable, rules-based global market order. Wolf acknowledges elements of these arguments throughout his book, especially in his discussions of the work of Dani Rodrik and Ha-Joon Chang (see Michael Lind's [37]essay in Prospect, January 2003). He accepts that there is much more involved in successful development than trade liberalisation, and that financial liberalisation carries risks. He does concede some ground to the critics of market liberalisation and global economic integration. But he never allows that these concessions have implications for the very basis of his liberal market approach - for its explanatory power and prescriptive value. There are many ways of conceiving and categorising the global challenges that we face. Jean-Fran?ois Rischard, vice-president for Europe of the World Bank, usefully thinks of them as forming a triumvirate of problems, concerned with sharing our planet (global warming, water deficits, biodiversity and ecosystem losses), our humanity (poverty, global infectious diseases, conflict prevention), and our rulebook (intellectual property rights, unsustainable debt, trade, finance and tax rules). Wolf seems to think that global challenges such as these can be addressed by the current interstate order, even if it does require reform (notably in relation to the IMF and the WTO). But how urgent global problems might be resolved is far from clear, for the problem-solving capacity of the international system is not effective, accountable or fast enough. There are three main difficulties. To begin with, there is no clear division of labour among the many international governmental agencies: functions overlap, mandates conflict, and aims and objectives get blurred. This is true, for example, in the area of health and social policy, where the World Bank, the IMF and the World Health Organisation often have competing priorities. A second, related set of problems surrounds those issues which have both domestic and international dimensions. These are often insufficiently understood or acted upon. There is an ultimate lack of responsibility for problems such as global warming and the loss of global biodiversity. Institutional fragmentation means that these issues fall between agencies. This latter problem is also manifest between the global level and national governments. A third set of difficulties relates to an accountability deficit in the international agencies which stems from power imbalances among states. Multilateral bodies need to be more representative of the states involved with them. Developing countries are under-represented in many international organisations. There must also be arrangements in place to ensure consultation and co-ordination between state and non-state actors, and these conditions are seldom met in multilateral decision-making bodies. Underlying these institutional difficulties is a lack of symmetry or congruence between decision-makers and decision-takers. The point has been well articulated recently by Inge Kaul and her associates at the UNDP in their work on global public goods and what they term the "forgotten principle of equivalence." At its simplest, the principle suggests that those who are significantly affected by a global development, good or bad, should have a say in its provision or regulation. Yet all too often there is a breakdown of "equivalence" between decision-makers and decision-takers. For example, a decision to permit the "harvesting" of rainforests may contribute to ecological damage far beyond the borders which formally limit the responsibility of a given set of decision-makers. A decision to build a nuclear plant near the frontiers of a neighbouring country is likely to be taken without consulting that country, despite the risks for it. Systematising the provision of global public goods requires extending and reshaping multilateral institutions. Pressing issues include the need to develop criteria for fair international negotiations; strengthen the negotiating capacity of developing countries; create advisory scientific panels for major global issues (following the example of the intergovernmental panel on climate change); create negotiating arenas for new priority issues (such as access to water), together with appropriate grievance panels (such as a world water court); and expand the remit of the UN security council to examine and, where necessary, intervene in the full gambit of human crises - physical, social, biological, environmental. Liberal market philosophy offers too narrow a view, but clues to an alternative strategy can be found in an old rival - social democracy - which Wolf explicitly rejects. Traditionally, social democrats have sought to deploy the democratic institutions of individual countries on behalf of a particular national project - a compromise between the powers of capital, labour and the state. They have accepted that markets are central to generating economic wellbeing, but recognised that in the absence of appropriate regulation they suffer serious flaws - especially the generation of unwanted risks for their citizens, and an unequal distribution of those risks. Social democracy at the global level means pursuing an economic agenda which calibrates the freeing of markets with poverty reduction and the protection of basic labour and environmental standards. What is required is not only the enactment of existing human rights and environmental agreements and the clear articulation of these with the ethical codes of particular industries (where they exist or can be developed), but also the introduction of new terms of reference into the ground rules or basic laws of the free market and trade system. Precedents exist: in the social chapter of the EU's Maastricht treaty, for example, or in the attempt to attach labour and environmental conditions to the Nafta regime. Social democratic globalisation requires three interrelated transformations. The first would involve engaging companies in the promotion of core UN principles (as the UN's global compact does at present). To the extent that this led to the entrenchment of human rights and environmental standards in corporate practices, it would be a significant step forward. And to avoid these principles being sidestepped, they need to be elaborated in due course as a set of mandatory rules. The second set of transformations would thus involve the entrenchment of revised codes, rules and procedures - concerning health, child labour, trade union activity, environmental protection, stakeholder consultation and corporate governance, among other matters - in the terms of reference of economic organisations and trading agencies. But this cannot be implemented without a third set of transformations, focused on alleviating the harshest cases of economic suffering. This means that development policies must challenge unequal access to the global market, and ensure that global market integration, particularly of capital markets, happens in sequence with the growth of sustainable public sectors, which guide long-term investment in healthcare, human capital and physical infrastructure, and the development of transparent, accountable political institutions. Moreover, it means eliminating unsustainable debt, seeking ways to reverse the outflow of net capital assets from the south to the north, and creating new finance facilities for development purposes. In addition, if such measures were combined with a (Tobin) tax on the turnover of financial markets, and/or a consumption tax on fossil fuels, and/or a shift of priorities from military expenditure (running at over $950bn a year globally) to the alleviation of severe need (direct aid amounts to $50bn a year globally), then the developed world might really begin to accommodate those nations struggling for survival and minimum welfare. This is a big agenda, which cannot, of course, be realised all at once. Yet, as I argue in Global Covenant, it is feasible, and can be pursued on a step by step basis. And unless we move in this direction, and make social justice a priority alongside liberty, then tens of millions of people will continue to die unnecessarily every year of poverty, disease and environmental degradation. The shift in the agenda of globalisation I am arguing for - a move from liberal to social democratic globalisation - would also have payoffs for today's most pressing security concerns. If developed countries want rapid progress towards global legal codes that will enhance security and ensure action against the threat of terrorism, then they should also participate in a wider process of reform that addresses the insecurity of life experienced in developing societies. Across the developing world, human rights and democracy are seldom perceived as legitimate concerns in the abstract. They must be connected with humanitarian issues of social and economic well-being, such as education and clean water. To be concerned today with the Enlightenment ideals of freedom, democracy and reason, one needs to think about their entrenchment in an era in which political communities and states matter, but not solely and exclusively. States are hugely important vehicles for aiding the delivery of effective public regulation, equality and social justice, but they should not be thought of as occupying a privileged level of politics. They can be judged by how far they deliver these public goods and how far they fail. The question is not why globalisation works, but rather how it can be made to work better to bridge the gaps between liberty and social justice, economic and human rights concerns, the accelerating affluence of some and the continuing poverty of many. Liberal economic philosophy does not equip us adequately for this task. End of the article References 37. http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=5460 From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 31 15:54:34 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:54:34 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: Economics focus: Mind games Message-ID: Economics focus: Mind games http://www.economist.com/finance/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3556121 5.1.13 Can studying the human brain revolutionise economics? ALTHOUGH Plato compared the human soul to a chariot pulled by the two horses of reason and emotion, modern economics has mostly been a one-horse show. It has been obsessed with reason. In decisions from how much to produce to whether to save and invest, humans have been assumed to be coolly rational calculators of their own self-interest. Over the past few years, however, evidence from psychology has persuaded many economists that reason does not always have its way. Now, judging from a series of presentations at the American Economic Association meetings in Philadelphia last weekend, a burgeoning new field dubbed "neuroeconomics" seems poised to provide fresh insights on how the two horses together produce economic behaviour. The current bout of research is made possible by the arrival of new technologies such as functional magnetic-resonance imaging, which allows second-by-second observation of brain activity. At several American universities, economists and their collaborators in the neurosciences have been placing human subjects in such brain scanners and asking them to perform a variety of economic tasks and games. For example, the idea that humans compute the "expected value" of future events is central to many economic models. Whether people will invest in shares or buy insurance depends on how they estimate the odds of future events weighted by the gains and losses in each case. Your pension, for example, might have a very low expected value if there is a large probability that bonds and shares will plunge just before you retire. Brian Knutson, of Stanford University, carried out one recent brain-scan experiment to understand how humans compute such things. Subjects were asked to perform a task, in this case pressing a button during a short interval in which a certain shape was flashed on to a screen. In some trials, the subjects could win up to $5 if successful, while in others they would have to defend against a $5 loss. Before presenting the target, the researchers signalled to subjects which kind of trial they were in. Brain activity in certain neural systems seemed to reveal a strong correlation with the amount of money at stake. Moreover, the prospects of gains and losses activated different parts of the brain. Traditional economists had long thought--or assumed--that the prospect of a $1,000 gain could compensate you for an equally likely loss of the same size. In subsequent trials, subjects were given another signal: one that provided an estimate of the odds of success. That allowed the researchers to identify the regions of the brain used for recognising an amount of money and for estimating the probability of winning (or losing) it. Having identified these regions, the hope is that future work can measure how the brain performs in situations such as share selection, gambling or deciding to participate in a pension scheme. David Laibson, an economist at Harvard University, thinks that such experiments underscore the big role that expectations play in a person's well-being. Economists have usually assumed that people's well-being, or "utility", depends on their level of consumption, but it might be that changes in consumption, especially unexpected downward ones, as in these experiments, can be especially unpleasant. Mr Laibson's own work tries to solve a different riddle: why people seem to apply vastly different discount rates to immediate and short-term rewards compared with rewards occurring well into the future. People tend much to prefer, say, $100 now to $115 next week, but they are indifferent between $100 a year from now and $115 in a year and a week. In one recent experiment, noted in our science section on October 30th, Mr Laibson and others found that the brain's response to short-term riches (in this case, gift certificates of $15 or $20) occurs largely in the limbic system, a region that governs emotion. By contrast, the prospect of rewards farther into the future triggers the prefrontal cortex, which is often associated with reason and calculation. Thus, choosing immediate economic gratification, by spending excessively on credit cards or not saving enough even though you "know better", could be a sign that the limbic system is in charge. Government policies, such as forced savings or "cooling off" periods for buying property or cars, may be one remedy. And then there is trust and deception. Colin Camerer, of the California Institute of Technology, has conducted experiments in which brain-scanned participants play strategic games with anonymous partners. In these, a subject chooses his own actions and also tries to anticipate the choices of the other player. When players are doing the best that they can to "win" the game by anticipating their opponents' moves, their brains tend to show a high degree of co-ordination between the "thinking" and the "feeling" regions. Economic equilibrium, by this measure, is an identifiable "state of mind". Don't let it go to your head Some neuroeconomists claim that such brain-scanning experiments are the start of a revolution in economics. No longer will economists rely on crude statistical models of how people behave in response to a policy change, such as an interest-rate rise or a tax increase. Instead, they will be able to peer directly into the brain to predict behaviour. One day, perhaps; but much work remains. Identifying the parts of the brain that control economic actions is one thing. Harder tasks include determining how neural systems work together to create behaviour, and how wide is the variation in brain patterns between different people. Then there are age-old questions of free will: is your failure to save for old age simply a lifestyle choice, or is it down to faulty brain circuits? Neuroeconomics is already providing fascinating conclusions. But Plato's chariot will remain an alluring explanation for a while yet. From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 31 16:02:36 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 11:02:36 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Legal Affairs: Common Denominator By Nicholas Thompson Message-ID: Common Denominator By Nicholas Thompson http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/January-February-2005/feature_thompson_janfeb05.html Using sophisticated mathematical models, a group of four economists has proven that a country's legal history greatly affects its economy. At least they think they've proven it. How their sweeping theory has roiled the legal academy. By Nicholas Thompson MALAYSIA AND INDONESIA COULDN'T BE CALLED TWINS, but they might be called siblings. The adjacent Southeast Asian nations possess similar natural resources and their citizens speak similar languages and follow similar strains of Islam. But Malaysia's economy is prospering while Indonesia's is floundering. Malaysia's stock market is far more vibrant than its neighbor's, and its average resident is three times richer. Economists might explain these divergent paths by pointing to the countries' different responses to the Asian financial crisis of the mid-1990s. Sociologists might find a cultural explanation in the close-knit community of Chinese immigrants who are the most powerful force in Malaysia's business community. Historians might point out that Malaysia's struggle for independence was much less bloody than Indonesia's. Another explanation lies in the countries' legal systems, however. Malaysia was a British colony and its legal system is based on the common law: the set of rules, norms, and procedures that has guided the legal system of England and the British Empire for about nine centuries. Indonesia was a Dutch colony and its legal system derives from French civil law, a set of statutes and principles written under Napoleon in the early 19th century and imposed upon the lands he conquered, including the Netherlands. According to research published by a group of scholars beginning in 1998, countries that come from a French civil law tradition struggle to create effective financial markets, while countries with a British common law tradition succeed far more frequently. While the scholars conducting the research are economists rather than lawyers, their theory has jolted the legal academy, leading to the creation of a new academic specialty called "law and finance" and turning the authors of the theory into the most cited economists in the world over the past decade. The evidence supporting their theory is hardly absolute. For starters, some civil law countries handily outperform common law ones. Although it may not stack up well against Malaysia, Indonesia looks positively affluent when compared with common law countries like Ghana or Sierra Leone. The logic underlying the theory isn't universally accepted either. Legal and economic scholars alike have attacked nearly every premise and conclusion, though the frequency and fury of the attacks seem to be evidence as much of its importance as of its flaws. If true, the theory provides more than just a new way of looking at legal historyit also gives Indonesians gazing across the South China Sea at their far richer neighbor insight into how they might catch up. THE IDEA THAT LEGAL ORIGIN CAN EXPLAIN NATIONAL MARKET DIFFERENCES comes from four economists who are referred to in their field by the acronym LLSV: Rafael La Porta of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes of the Yale School of Management, Andrei Shleifer of Harvard's economics department, and Robert Vishny of the University of Chicago's business school. Though the law is at the heart of their theory, none of the scholars has a J.D. "We're all lawyer wannabes," Lopez-de-Silanes said recently. Shleifer organized the group, and he's the best known of the four. In 1975, at age 15, he immigrated to the United States from Russia and soon entered Harvard, claiming to have learned English by watching Charlie's Angels on television. He earned tenure at Harvard before turning 30. In 1999, Shleifer won the John Bates Clark medal as the most accomplished economist under 40, an award second in prestige only to the Nobel Prize in the profession. He's also recently gained notoriety for a scandal over whether it was illegal for him to personally invest money into the same Russian markets that he was helping to design in the mid-1990s, while funded by a government grant. Shleifer and Vishny were graduate students together at the University of Chicago, and in 1994 they founded an investment firm that now manages about $25 billion. Shleifer later met Lopez-de-Silanes and La Porta when they were his students at Harvard. Asked how much the group knew about common law and civil law when the project commenced, Shleifer said, "Nothing, literally." But the scholars did have an instinct that the nature of laws could explain important national differences. Three of the group's four members grew up in countries whose economies collapsed in their adult lives in large part due to corruption that legal systems failed to stop: La Porta is from Argentina, Lopez-de-Silanes is from Mexico, and Shleifer is from Russia. LLSV's initial work examined why some government regulations of markets succeed in creating and maintaining an environment where people want to invest, and others don't. Intrigued by what seemed like patterns related to legal history, LLSV built a database that included every country with a stock market in the world and then classified each country's legal origins. The group then ran mathematical tests to determine correlations between legal origin and other variables like measures of corruption and indices of shareholder rights. In 1998, their first major paper, "Law and Finance," set off a firestorm. THOUGH THERE ARE OTHER SYSTEMS WITH INTERNATIONAL SCOPEIslamic theocratic law, for examplemost countries' legal systems derive from either French civil law or English common law. Legal scholars had of course already cataloged the differences between the two, but until "Law and Finance," no one had tried to link these differences to the success or failure of financial markets. Nor had anyone ever mathematically examined the differences between the two systems. LLSV's main tool was regression analysis, a mathematical technique in which many variables are plugged into a program that sorts out which ones are correlated and which ones are not. Using regression analysis, for example, you could plug in the heights, weights, and eye colors of 100 people. The results would show that height and weight are correlated (the taller you are, the more you're likely to weigh) but that weight and eye color are not. Using this tool, "Law and Finance" showed that common law countries protect both shareholders and creditors better than civil law countries do, and they also tend to be less corrupt. LLSV took dozens of specific financial indicatorsranging from key gauges, like the odds that a company's assets will be confiscated by the state, to smaller measures, like whether shareholders can vote at company meetingsand regressed them all against legal origin. The regressions showed that the measures that indicate high investor and creditor protection or low corruption connect to common law origin, just as height connects to weight. The measures that represent low protection and high corruption connect to civil law origin. The regression didn't show that common law necessarily makes people richer, but it did represent a crucial link in a chain of logic that could connect legal origin to prosperity. When shareholders have more rights, people are more likely to invest in markets, because they have more protections against dishonest executives. When creditors have more rights, they are more likely to lend money, which spurs markets to grow. And when countries are free from corruption, investors put more money into them. The LLSV scholars weren't the first to recognize that shareholder and creditor rights spur economic growth, or that corruption stunts it, but they were the first to connect these conditions to a country's legal system and to do so using cold, hard numbers. THERE'S NOTHING IN THE COMMON LAW PER SE that significantly protects shareholderscommon law doesn't come with a shareholder's bill of rights. Nor is there a mandate for corruption embedded in civil law. "Law and Finance," then, raised as big a question as the one it claimed to answer: Why is a country's legal system so powerful a factor in determining its economic development? In subsequent papers, LLSV has set out to solve that mystery. The most compelling theory they've developed has to do with the power both systems afford their judiciaries. Common law judges are, on balance, far more powerful than their counterparts in civil law countries. Since judges tend to be a country's most reliable check on the other parts of its government, common law countries grant less power to their executives than civil law countries do. And in developing nations, corruption is generally perpetuated from the top. The difference in the power that the two systems grant their judges is rooted in their respective histories. French civil law derives from the Napoleonic code, published in 1804 by scholars eager to wrest power from the judiciary. Before the country's revolution, France's courts had earned reputations for elitism and corruption. Influenced by popular discontent with much of the judiciary, Napoleon attempted to write a statutory code that was essentially judge-proof. Judges draw their influence from their power to interpret laws. Napoleon's code stripped them of this prerogative; his code favored the writing of a new law over a judge's interpretation of an old one. Consequently, compared to common law countries, civil law countries have weak judiciariesand long statute books. Common law was similarly influenced by a violent revolution that pitted the people against the crown. But in the years leading up to England's Glorious Revolution in the late 17th century, the judiciary tended to side with the people and against the Stuarts, who had tried to eliminate an independent judiciary. When the revolution came, the new government gave the judiciary far more power than France did a century later. Courts could interpret laws and even overrule the executive branch. Legal historians didn't need LLSV to tell them all this. They knew that common and civil law countries differ fundamentally in the roles that judiciaries play. But LLSV was hardly content just to recite the old histories and anecdotes. They went back to their calculators and, in a 2003 paper titled "Judicial Checks and Balances," they demonstrated mathematically that common law countries give judges more independence, which in turn correlates with the sound economic policies they had examined in "Law and Finance." The paper compared factors like whether judges in a country's highest court system have life tenure against measures of what LLSV called economic freedom, such as whether people have secure property rights. The numbers showed that judicial independence closely correlates with common law legal origins. It also correlates strongly with economic freedom and investor protection. Again, the idea that judicial independence was related to economic freedom wasn't revolutionary. You can find arguments for judicial independence in The Federalist Papers. But James Madison didn't back up his theories with regression analysis. LLSV GAINED NOTORIETY AND PRESTIGE WITH "LAW AND FINANCE," and they've built on it, as co-authors publishing close to a dozen papers since. According to Essential Science Indicators, a research service that tracks publications, over the past 10 years, Shleifer's papers have been cited more frequently than any other academic writing about business or economics topics. Vishny is a close second, with Lopez-de-Silanes in seventh place, and La Porta in eighth. From their first publication, the quartet had clearly uncovered something deeply original and surprising, and the legal academy reacted with a combination of fascination and disdain. Lawyers are generally trained to answer narrow questions with detailed intellectual or historical analysis. LLSV had ventured to answer a far-reaching question with sweeping mathematical analysis, and they had done so in a decidedly pro-market framework. ("We use the term 'good' in this paper to stand for good-for-capitalist-development," they wrote in one paper.) Their approach pricked up the ears of the legal academyand raised its hackles. Soon after the first drafts of "Law and Finance" began circulating, LLSV was presenting the paper at conferences around the world and, according to La Porta, receiving "a lot of hate mail." "The first time that I saw LLSV's work I had two thoughts. The first was, Why didn't I think of this? It's such a simple, brilliant thing to do," said Mark West, a professor of law at the University of Michigan. "The second thought was: This is just way too simple. . . . I can't run regressions [analyzing] the houses in my subdivision. They are running regressions on countries." West has published a widely read paper mocking LLSV's work. "LLSV controlled for GDP growth and the logarithm of real GNP," he notes dryly. "In this model, I control for a potentially more relevant development-related factor in this context: the number of professional soccer players per capita." With bravado no doubt inspired by LLSV's work, West then takes the parody a step further, attempting to prove that civil law countries fare better than common law ones in international soccer tournaments. The paper is the most widely read comment on LLSV's work on the Social Science Research Network. But West has launched substantive attacks on LLSV's actual findings as well, believing that they have relied heavily on oversimplification in order to make their analyses work. He points to Japan, which LLSV codes simply as a German civil law country. But the foundation of Japan's legal code comes from China. Some of it did come from Germany during the late 19th century, but still other sections came from elsewhere. The laws covering corporate conduct, for example, were imported from Illinois state law by professors from the University of Chicago during Japan's postwar reconstruction. "You can't code an entire legal system with all of its societal baggage into one entry on a spreadsheet," said West. "That's just wrong." Other scholars don't question the data so much as the hypotheses LLSV draws from it. They point out the thinness of the quartet's explanation that common law correlates with judicial independence, which in turn correlates with economic liberalism. "The puzzle was less the econometric results than their explanation for the differences. I think it's fair to say that most lawyers, whether trained in common or civil law countries, thought the explanation was na?ve," said Ronald Gilson, a law professor at Stanford. The LLSV scholars admit that this latter point is a weakness that they have yet to fully resolve. Not all the links in their chain of logic are steel. Though they've shown that having a strong tradition of judicial review does correlate with sound economic regulations, for instance, it's a weak enough correlation that the authors know other factors are in play. Think again of height and weight: The two are related, but there are other variablesa fondness for exercise, a taste for chocolate crullersthat can determine how much you weigh. THE LLSV SCHOLARS ACKNOWLEDGE THESE WEAKNESSES in their research. They have little patience, however, for most of their critics in the legal academy, who they believe look through microscopes, not telescopes. According to Lopez-de-Silanes, you can't come up with a theory about the way the world works if you're fretting over whether Canada has been miscategorized as a common law country because Quebec uses civil law. Lawyers worry about such issues, Lopez-de-Silanes said, so they don't have to come up with grand theories. "Lawyers don't do empirical work," said Shleifer. "They just argue with each other." Yet strong criticisms of LLSV's work have also been leveled by members of their own discipline. One of the most compelling critiques of their theory comes from economists Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago and Raghuram G. Rajan of the International Monetary Fund. They argue that even if you accept that there are distinctions between countries with common law and civil law origins, that doesn't necessarily mean that legal origins are the cause of those distinctions. According to a paper Zingales and Rajan published in 2003, France had a much more developed stock market than Britain or the U.S. in the early 20th century. It lagged for much of the remainder of the century, but is now catching up. If civil law is fundamentally flawed, you would expect that France would have continued to lag at about the same rate. To Zingales, the differences that LLSV has shown may not come from something intrinsic to common law or civil law, but rather from some other correlated factor. Correlation is not the same thing as causation, especially when you are looking at complicated global trends. It is said that in the decades between the two world wars, German intelligence agencies divided the world into countries where people tucked in their shirts and countries where they didn't. That classification made some sense because people in industrialized countries feared that loose shirttails could get stuck in machinery. But it didn't mean that a country could mandate that its citizens tuck in their shirts and vault its way into the league of industrialized nations. Similarly, common law may be linked to strong markets without causing them. Common law countries tend to speak English (a big advantage in the latter half of the 20th century, given American economic dominance) and tend to be Protestant (scholars dating back to Max Weber have connected Protestantism with hard work). Many historians also believe that the British did a much better job than the French of finding economically viable locations to set up colonies. "What LLSV has done is a very clever relabeling of things," said Zingales. "We all know that Anglo-American countries are different. You can call it the English language, the English tradition, and you can code it in all sorts of ways." The LLSV scholars counter that they have built their regression models to try to take all of these variables into account. In one paper, they compared religious affiliation with legal origin and found that civil law origin has much more of an impact on markets than Catholicism does, just as height has more of an impact on weight than bone density does. It's not possible, however, to control a regression for every factor. Until they can come up with a clear and convincing explanation for what precisely it is about common law that causes the differences they've found, scholars will continue to assail their theory. THE POLICY IMPLICATIONS OF THE DEBATE over what factors spur economic success make it more than a shouting match echoing inside the ivory tower; they are what lured LLSV into the scrum. "I am from Mexico, and the first goal I have in my life is to make it look nice," said Lopez-de-Silanes. La Porta added that the quartet deliberately chose to look at variables that could lead to solutions. They wanted to avoid focusing on religion, for example, because converting a country from Catholicism to Protestantism isn't possible, at least not for a group of economists. Altering shareholder regulations, on the other hand, isn't out of the question. "[We] look at things that the policy maker can change," said La Porta. It's not clear, however, that LLSV's work can translate into practical policy changein part because their work is so sweeping. Their contention is that civil law leads to profoundly flawed outcomesthat's not something a policy maker can easily fix. LLSV hasn't discovered a disease in the soil that, once identified, can be eradicated. They've discovered a more fundamental problem: There's something wrong with the region's climate. Consequently, LLSV can't offer an easy prescription. Civil law countries can't just switch over to common law, asking all their judges to throw out their code books. "If you fly into the C?te d'Ivoire, where the new government is just holding on by its fingertips, is the first thing out of your mouth going to be, 'Junk your legal system and adopt the British's'? Not even close," said Roger Noll, an economics professor at Stanford. Though they may wish otherwise, LLSV has not produced a recipe for success that government ministers in developing countries can follow. What they have done is provide a giant statistical brief in support of the ideas of John Locke and James Madison, and they've updated those ideas for a world that's as interested in economic success as liberty. Creating a judicial branch that can check the executive and the legislature doesn't just protect individual rights and prevent the persecution of the government's political opponents. It improves your stock market. If 18th-century reasoning can't convince modern constitution writers and lawmakers of the utility of protecting private property and putting judicial checks on other government branches, maybe 21st-century statisticsand economic enticementscan. Indonesia's market won't improve if the new finance minister comes into office this winter with a list of regulations culled from LLSV papers. But Indonesia's stock market might improve over time if the minister has read LLSV's papers and thought about the larger principles of judicial independence and judicial review they espouse. This, at least, is the path being taken by the French government, for obvious reasons the most elegant and persistent defender of civil law. Initially, the French government ignored LLSV's findings. Then it dismissed them. Starting last summer, it began funding research through its Ministry of Rights and Justice into what the country can learn from LLSV. Nicholas Thompson is a senior editor at Legal Affairs. Respond to this article with a [26]letter to the editor References 26. mailto:letters at legalaffairs.org From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 31 16:04:01 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 11:04:01 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] spiked: Ten myths about assisted suicide Message-ID: spiked-liberties | Article | Ten myths about assisted suicide http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CA82B.htm 4.12.17 Ten myths about assisted suicide The flaws in the arguments that end lives. by Kevin Yuill The campaign for assisted suicide seems to be picking up a head of steam in the UK, with the Mental Capacity Bill's stormy passage through the House of Commons on Tuesday 14 December. It is certainly a step in the direction of the legalisation of assisted suicide, despite the protestations of its defenders. According to some readings of this bill, a patient may request that he or she is deprived of food and water in certain circumstances, and a doctor must obey this request or face a possible five years in prison. In addition to this, Lord Joel Joffe's Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill is currently under review in the House of Lords. It is worth picking apart some of the arguments for assisted suicide. 1. This is just about individual autonomy According to the Suicide Bill of 1961, individuals already have the right to commit suicide. Nobody today could be hanged for attempting suicide, as was the case in the nineteenth century - nor would they be imprisoned for their unsuccessful attempt. Lord Joffe's bill would remove the penalty, outlined in the Suicide Act, of up to 14 years imprisonment for aiding a suicide. As the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz has pointed out, '(s)trictly speaking, assisted suicide is an oxymoron' (1). The only people who would be 'empowered' by this bill would be doctors, who would decide whether or not the patient is 'competent', certify that the patient's illness is 'terminal' and '[conclude] that the patient is suffering unbearably as a result of that terminal illness'. 2. We all need the 'right to die' We all have the right to die, with or without its sanction in law. All the 'patients' of Dr Jack Kevorkian, currently in prison in America for having gone a little too far in assisting the suicide of Thomas Youk (which was videotaped and shown on CBS's 60 Minutes), were physically capable of bringing about their own deaths. Anyone, with a little forward planning and much determination, can kill themselves. The Assisted Dying bill will instead place an onus on doctors and carers to help individuals to commit suicide. One of the most ugly arguments to come from the Voluntary Euthanasia Society is that disabled people should have the right to die, too. We must be clear that we are being obligated to give the proverbial man on the bridge a push (or perhaps to make the bridge wheelchair accessible). 3. Those opposing assisted suicide are a 'small religious minority'. It is true that many religious groups vehemently oppose the Joffe Bill, but they are not the only ones. They unite with medical representatives and disabled groups, who fear that doctors' judgements about 'quality of life' may imply that their own lives are not worth living. This is no abstract fear voiced by philosophers such as Baroness Warnock, as Jane Campbell, writing recently in The Times (London), discovered. Campbell, who suffers from spinal muscular atrophy, a muscle-wasting illness that means she cannot lift her head from her pillow unaided, was hospitalised for a case of pneumonia. The consultant treating her said that he assumed she would not want to be resuscitated should she go into respiratory failure. When she protested that she would like to be resuscitated, she was visited by a more senior consultant who said that he assumed she would not want to be put on a ventilator. According to the Disability Rights Commission, this was not was not an isolated incident. As Campbell says, these incidents 'reflect society's view that people such as myself live flawed and unsustainable lives and that death is preferable to living with a severe impairment' (2). In fact, it is those calling for legalisation of assisted suicide who tend to espouse New Age religious values. 'Self-deliverance' is the term favoured by Derek Humphry, former Sunday Times journalist and author of the best-selling suicide bible, Final Exit. Delivery to where, Mr. Humphry? Dr Timothy Quill, who admitted in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that he had helped a patient die, has written a book called A Midwife through the Dying Process. To an atheist (like myself), death is not an 'experience' but the end of all experiences. Do assisted suicide advocates wish simply to replace rituals formerly carried out by priests? Finally, you need not be Christian to agree with the Archbishop of Canterbury that 'the respect for human life in all its stages is the foundation of a civilised society'. 4. Allowing the right to die is the hallmark of a civilised society To break the taboo against suicide would be a sure sign of societal breakdown. Though the disintegration of society and the disappearance of socially integrating institutions receive much attention, there is little recognition of the relationship with the right-to-die movement. The sociologist Emile Durkheim made the point that 'Man is the more vulnerable to self-destruction the more he is detached from any collectivity.' Is suicide not the most awful manifestation of the 'drop out' society? To encourage it is a celebration of alienation and anomie. The taboo on suicide marks the recognition of our interdependence. We should maintain it. Even Mary Warnock pointed out, what sort of society tells its members that it values their right to starve to death, especially if they are a burden on society? Surely a mark of civilisation would be to offer people in despair some sort of argument that their lives are valuable, that they do have some worth. Instead, right-to-die advocates project their own gloomy estimation of the worth of human life on to these poor souls. 5. The central issue is pain Not according to any available study. In 1995, an update to the authoritative Remmelink Report on euthanasia in Holland, where the practice has long been accepted and is now legal, showed that pain played a role in only 32 percent of requests for euthanasia. In no case did pain represent the sole reason for requests. In Oregon, USA, under right-to-die legislation that is seen as a blueprint for Lord Joffe's bill, only 28 out of 129 physician-assisted deaths in the first five years cited pain as the most important factor (the primary reasons was fear of what the future might bring) (3). The suffering occurring at the end of life is real enough, but it involves fears rather than simply physical pain. 6. This is all about 'dignity' What sort of dignity? Right-to-die campaigners condemn the lives of the disabled as bereft of dignity, apparently associating dignity solely with control over bodily functions. According to this definition, if someone loses their bodily 'autonomy', they no longer have human dignity. In my mind, dignity comes from bearing up under suffering we meet throughout our lives rather than letting it destroy us, and from facing fears rather than caving in to them. 7. Many are forced into 'lonely, back-street suicides' because of our restrictive laws The good news is that fewer people are actually committing suicide today. In spite of the case of Mrs Z (see [2]A ticket to die), very few Britons become 'suicide tourists'. In six years, only 180 people took up the option of assisted suicide under Oregon's right-to-die law, which is less than one percent of those requesting information about it. Even in Holland, where assisted suicide has been legal for some time, the numbers are low. Prominent campaigners for the right to die such as Timothy Leary have backed out of suicide at the last minute. In most polls, those who are keenest advocates for legalising assisted suicide are the young. The elderly, whom one might imagine have most cause, tend to shun it. The real power behind the right-to-die campaigns is fear. Imagine, campaigners say, if you were trapped, forced to live a life you no longer wanted, unable to end it yourself. But as Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, pioneering author of On Death and Dying, noted, the attraction of assisted suicide is really about the projection of present fears about life on to dying. We must ask what a person is saying when they ask for assisted suicide. If an individual was determined to die, they would hatch a plan and tell nobody about it. By asking for an assisted suicide, an individual is expressing their despair about their prospects, their fear for what the future holds. Why would they express despair unless they wanted some sort of connection with others? Why would someone with a true wish to alienate themselves from human contact forever tell someone about it? We ill serve those who express hopelessness by agreeing with them and, worse, cheering them on. 8. Amending the Suicide Act to allow assisted suicide would restore a right enjoyed by classical societies In fact, approving of suicide as a therapy would be unprecedented in human history. Assisted suicide advocates often justify their beliefs by invoking ancient societies, especially Athens, where apparently rationality reigned and suicide was tolerated. Yet in fact, at that time suicides were buried away from other graves; the suicide's self-murdering hand was cut off and buried apart. Ancient Greeks and Romans often took their own lives for reasons of grief, high patriotic principle, or to avoid dishonor, but these deaths gained meaning by emphasising societal values. Plato allowed that suicide might be permitted for reasons of painful disease or intolerable restraint, but he argued that the subject had first to plead their case before the Senate. The solipsism of today's suicide advocates stands out. Suicide for the reason that an individual's life is wretched puts aside relationships with others. It ignores the union between the dead, the living, and the as yet unborn. To throw away a life for such paltry reasons mocks those who, in the past, sacrificed themselves to extend and enrich life, and risks demoralising those who are just entering our world. However, one precedent for a tolerant view of suicide exists. Germany between the years of 1900-1945 presupposed many of the ideas of the assisted suicide movement (4). Depends on your view of 'classical', I guess. 9. The real problem is modern technology's ability to keep people alive indefinitely Did someone invent a cure for death that I didn't hear about? The blurb on one book notes: 'As medical technology advances to the point when any human life can be maintained almost indefinitely, questions related to the "quality" of that life inevitably arise.' (5) It is instructive that the authors chose not to celebrate the triumph of medical science but to look for potential problems. 10. It is best to die as you choose, surrounded by friends and relatives at home rather than by tubes and monitors in a hospital. We cannot control when and how we die; to give the 'right' to do so is as meaningful as giving people the right not to die of heart attacks or accidents. The holistic, back-to-nature view, apparent in many medical ethics books, imagines that we have become alienated from death and over-reliant on trying to extend life by technological means. It is understandable that many people would prefer to die away from a hospital, but the search for a 'good death' will forever prove elusive. Every death is ugly and undignified, as life is wrenched away, leaving an inanimate, waxen corpse. Those who seek the security of a good death seek to inure themselves to uncertainty, perhaps because they have witnessed the prolonged death of a close relative or friend. But this is a projection of our own technophobic fears on to the dying person. So shall we project our own cramped and gloomy worldview on to those who are most sensitive to counsels of despair? Or shall we continue to view all human life as valuable, doctors as curers of physical disease (rather than prescribers of death for therapeutic reasons), and life as worth living? (1) [3]Killing to be kind?, by Thomas Szasz (2) 'A right to die? I'm more concerned that everyone has the right to live', Jane Campbell, The Times, 2 December 2004 (3) Statistics available at the [4]Five years under Oregon's assisted suicide law section of the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide website (4) See Death and Deliverance: 'Euthanasia' in Germany 1900-1945, Michael Burleigh, Cambridge University Press, 1994 (5) Quality of Life: The New Medical Dilemma, ed James J Walter and Thomas A Shannon, Paulist Press, 1990 References 2. http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA7EE.htm 3. http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/00000002D3C8.htm 4. http://www.internationaltaskforce.org/orstats.htm 5. http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA82B.htm From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 31 16:07:30 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 11:07:30 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] LRB: (Tom Wolfe) Theo Tait : Rutrutrutrutrutrutrutrut Message-ID: Theo Tait : Rutrutrutrutrutrutrutrut http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n01/print/tait01_.html London Review of Books, 5.1.6 I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe [ [14]Buy from the London Review Bookshop ], Cape, 676 pp, ?20.00 Tom Wolfe is, in many ways, an outrageous figure - with his white suit and cane, his glib social analyses, and his delusions of grandeur. For three decades he has been saying that his minutely researched books herald `a revolution' in literature, which is bound to `sweep the arts in America, making many prestigious artists . . . appear effete and irrelevant'. Over the years, a lot of these effete and irrelevant artists - John Updike, Norman Mailer, Jonathan Franzen - have launched tirades against him. The most concise comes from John Irving, commenting red-faced and furious on live TV: `Wolfe's problem is, he can't bleeping write! He's not a writer! Just crack one of his bleeping books! Try reading one bleeping sentence! You'll gag before you can finish it! He doesn't even write literature - he writes . . . yak! He doesn't write novels - he writes journalistic hyperbole!' These comments, graciously reported by Wolfe himself, don't seem entirely fair to me. They do, however, perfectly describe his bloody awful new novel I am Charlotte Simmons. Wolfe can actually write. As far as he's concerned, prose is a just a sponge, a holding station for slang, buzzwords, sociological observations, lists and pungent dialogue. `Cramming' is the word he uses, and he is often exhilaratingly good at it - probably the best example is his hippie book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). Novels, for Wolfe, are `65 per cent material and 35 per cent the talent'; the really important thing is to incorporate as much as possible of `the lurid carnival of American life'. And his characters are deliberately stereotypical, since, by his lights, a typical character is more revealing than an individual. And his plots are just a way of making these ciphers collide, setting off some fireworks and a few spring-loaded ironies in the process. Perhaps the confusion arose because, since The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), Wolfe has cheekily tried to sell himself as a `realistic' novelist (or `intensely realistic', in his own phrase). I suppose it depends what you mean by `realism'. Wolfe uses a wealth of convincing circumstantial detail in the way thriller writers do, to disguise the hackneyed and often deeply implausible aspects of his books. He is irredeemably, programmatically superficial. Yet The Bonfire of the Vanities is powerfully mimetic, not of how the world goes round, but of how we idly and crudely imagine it does. That must be how it is, we think, as Sherman McCoy reclines in the bucket seat of his $48,000 Mercedes sports car, in his New & Lingwood loafers with the bevelled instep, his classy mistress by his side, congratulating himself all the while. Wolfe's superficiality is part of his charm, and it suits many of his subjects - lust, Las Vegas, customised cars. The dialogue, the information, the tags and coinages - `Radical Chic', `mau-mauing', `Masters of the Universe' - these are worth remembering. The characters and the sentences themselves are best forgotten. If it wasn't for his self-aggrandising tendencies (and his unpleasant, reductive stereotypes) he would probably just be accepted as a bracing broad-brush satirist, a set-piece artist with a terrific ear. Perhaps it's not literature, in the Tolstoy or Dickens sense, but it's not Tom Clancy or Dan Brown either. He's more like the Oliver Stone of American letters: crass, hectoring but passionately interested - and occasionally touched by genius. Charlotte Simmons resembles a very bad Oliver Stone film. Unfortunately, at 676 pages, it lasts considerably longer. In Sparta, North Carolina, high up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, lives a young lady called Charlotte Simmons, an academic prodigy and a paragon of God-fearing, hard-working, down-home virtue besides. Much to the admiration of her family and her `gruff', `dear' mentor Miss Pennington, she wins a scholarship to Dupont University, an elite institution in Pennsylvania. Sadly, Dupont is not the high-minded and austere centre of learning that Charlotte imagines. The reader already knows this, from the first scene of the book, in which two obnoxious frat boys, `drunk on youth and beer' (a steal from The Simpsons, by the way), witness the governor of California (not Mr Schwarzenegger, I hasten to add) receiving a blow-job from a female student. So the hillbilly ing?nue is lowered into this academic Sodom - and, following the general pattern of Wolfe's novels, is repeatedly and violently humiliated. This starts early, with the scene in which Charlotte first meets her wealthy, bitchy, prep-school-educated roommate Beverly. Beverly's family, just off their private jet and `sleek as beavers', want to go to upscale Le Chef: Charlotte's horny-handed father insists that they go to the Sizzlin' Skillet to eat mountains of greasy junk food. Large helpings of social embarrassment ensue; and so Wolfe demonstrates his great, his constant theme: that `social status' is important to Americans. Initially, Charlotte's humiliations are only social, but it gets worse. She is a virgin - this is terribly important to the scheme of the book - and three suitors are homing in on her virtue: Hoyt Thorpe, one of the obnoxious frat boys; Jojo Johanssen, the only white boy on the college basketball team; and Adam Gellin, a poor, resentful, Jewish scholarship student. Hoyt gets there first, when, after several hundred pages of will-she-won't-she, she forgets her nobler ambitions, gets drunk for the first time ever, and is brutally deflowered in a hotel room. As far as plot goes, that's about it: this torrid, horribly drawn-out sequence, for which Wolfe deservedly won the Bad Sex Award, is the centrepiece of the novel. It is hard to think of any other work of fiction that fixates and slavers so obsessively on a heroine's virginity - since Clarissa, anyway. There are, though, two half-hearted subplots which give some vague sense of propulsion. In one, Jojo gets into trouble because a ball-breaking, resentful Jewish academic notices that someone else has written one of his term papers. In the other, Adam tries to run a newspaper splash on the blow-job story, now a campus legend charmingly known as `The Night of the Skull Fuck'. One of Wolfe's many annoying tics is what he calls `the drive known as information compulsion': the need to hit the reader with a Fascinating Fact or a Big Theory every few pages. He always knows where things are happening; he is always the First Person to spot this trend or articulate this precept; the intrepid traveller at the edge of the new continent. This is just about tolerable when what he's describing is interesting - which it usually has been in his previous books. With the best will in the world, one couldn't say that about Charlotte Simmons. One astounding discovery is that students are interested in sex: `Sex! Sex! It was in the air along with the nitrogen and the oxygen!' he writes, replicating a sentence from Bonfire almost word for word. `The whole campus was humid with it! tumid with it! lubricated with it! gorged with it! tingling with it! in a state of around-the-clock arousal with it! Rutrutrutrutrutrutrutrut.' Another is that young people use the word `fuck' a lot. They also use it in different ways: sometimes as a verb, sometimes as a participle, sometimes as a noun - `Fuck Patois'. His Big Theory about campus life is articulated by Hoyt, who tells us that just as in the early Middle Ages `there were only three classes of men in the world - warriors, clergy and slaves,' so on the modern campus there are only frat boys, dorks and jocks, represented by Hoyt, Adam and Jojo respectively. But underpinning all these observations is another, even Bigger Theory. That man - wait for it - is an animal. A `human beast', as Charlotte calls him, largely or entirely driven by his `genetic code', his baser urges. These observations, an `unfaltering distillation of the obvious and the obviously false' - as Martin Amis said of Desmond `the Naked Ape' Morris - are rammed home with the trademark Wolfe intensifiers: caps, italics, exclamation marks. All the while, the reader has the bullied sense that This Is How It Is, because Wolfe has done the research - he's been there with pad and ballpoint pen, for God's sake. But information compulsion is not the only thing Wolfe suffers from. Another is repetition compulsion. When in doubt, repeat words for emphasis. Hoyt's smile, for instance, is described as `so warm, warm, warm, loving, loving, loving, so warm and loving and commanding, all commanding' that Charlotte `couldn't move'. But later, when he deserts her, she gives way to `sobs sobs sobs sobs sobs sobs racking racking racking racking racking racking convulsive sobs sobs sobs sobs sobs'. A description of a basketball match begins: `Static::::::::::: Static::::::::::: Static::::::::::: Static::::::::::: [repeat 12 further times] choked the Buster Bowl.' Large people are `giants', their muscles are `slabs', the exposed belly buttons of young women are forever `winking'. Over and over again. Then there is his long-running and mysterious insistence on naming muscles. All the old favourites are there: the pecs, the delts, the lats, the trapezius, the sternocleidomastoid. Perhaps because he has a female main character, for the first time, he's had to branch out into new anatomical areas: the pelvic saddle, the mons pubis, the groin joint, the `otorhinolaryngological caverns' and particularly the `ilial crest' - something to do with the pelvis which plays a surprisingly important role in the novel (a bit of biological sleuthing reveals that it ought to be `iliac crest' anyway - not, I suspect, the only bit of plain wrong information to have found its way through the famous research process). Behind all these things - status, virginity, animality, muscles - is the controlling Wolfe obsession: homomania. He is, as he says of one his characters, `crazed on the subject of manliness'. Wherever he looks, he sees the struggle for male dominance, the tournament, men butting like stags. It's not just that all human endeavour comes down to this: there is really nothing else, whether on the basketball field or in the classroom or at a family picnic. Women are either willing notches on the bedpost, or else aping the male thing in a confused way. We are all of us forever acting out our machismo, like rappers or wrestlers before the fight, narcissistically preoccupied with an almost abstract display of prowess. Even weedy Adam, in the gym, glances at his own muscles in the mirror (all Wolfe's male characters always do this): `He was enjoying that temporary high the male feels when his muscles, no matter what size they may be, are gorged with blood. He feels . . . more of a man.' This is it: the endless struggle for tumescence. Often, with Wolfe, the sheer butch outrageousness of the execution is a sort of pleasure in itself. In one of the few scenes from Charlotte Simmons that I enjoyed, Jojo, after being put through the paces by a nubile basketball groupie, asks her why she's so `nice and obliging' to a stranger like him. She replies, sweetly and sincerely: `Every girl wants to . . . fuck . . . a star.' More often you think a whole chapter could be boiled down to: `Sex! Sex! Muscles! Status::::::: Status::::::::: He feels . . . more of a man!' Given that Wolfe has cracked the meaning of life, it's not surprising that he has a pat term for every trend, a potted biography for every character. `The male sex was divided into two types,' we learn: Alpha and Beta, of course. We see `the eternal male, eternally mortified by the female Making a Scene'. We hear digressions about the typical `resentful petit bourgeois Jewish intellectual' and hear that another character `knew the type very well by now, being Jewish himself'. At one point, we discover that `Adam, essentially a literary intellectual, didn't realise he was listening to the typical depressed girl.' This is what happens in Wolfe novels: people come to terms with their typicality. Charlotte Simmons, 1950s-style high-school valedictorian, descends on the fleshpots of the modern university - where she learns, slightly reluctantly, that she too wants to . . . fuck . . . a star. [15]Theo Tait lives in London. References 15. http://www.lrb.co.uk/contribhome.php?get=tait01 From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 31 16:09:00 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 11:09:00 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Telegraph: The number that comes after 12 Message-ID: Telegraph: The number that comes after 12 http://www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/12/19/bolac19.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004/12/19/bomain.html (Filed: 19/12/2004) Tom Payne reviews 13: the World's Most Popular Superstition by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer It turns out that there are growing numbers of people who love the number 13. Nathaniel Lachenmeyer quotes a 23-year-old massage therapist from Dallas, whose birthday is on February 13. "I find it a liberating number, one that goes against the grain. I always feel special and unique when I tell someone my favourite number is 13." A young convert to paganism confesses, "I look forward to when the 13th falls upon a Friday. I look upon it as a great love spell day." Where does Lachenmeyer find them? He finds them on the internet. He encounters conspiracy theorists who believe that the Church and/or the government have done their best to promote the idea that the number 13 is unlucky: that Pope Clement V and Philip IV of France colluded to begin executing the Knights Templar on Friday 13, 1307; that when witches confessed to meeting in covens of 13, they were showing the vestiges of a religion that predated Christianity, and which priests were keen to destroy. As he points out, the reasoning that produced the latter theory was rigged and ropey. Although he produces some vintage examples of 13-fearing, the superstition about the number is relatively recent. It flourished at the end of the 19th century, and attached only to seating 13. If 13 sit at a table, the tradition has it, then, by the end of the year, one of them will buy the farm. Most folklorists agree that the superstition goes back to the Last Supper, where 13 people gathered and two fatalities followed within 24 hours. Worries that this might make a rule appeared in the late 17th century and, 200 years later, dining clubs emerged to show there was no hex. Diners would spill salt, crack mirrors and cross their knives and forks. There were casualties: a Thirteen Club in New Jersey was bombed. Matthew Arnold died within a year of eating with 12 others. Really, that's all the book has to go on. The number itself was never so unlucky, except that it comes after 12, and is the beginning of the unknown. The author does examine the history of Friday 13th as an unfortunate day - Christ died on a Friday (unlucky enough) and in 1907 Thomas W Lawson published a book, Friday, the Thirteenth, in which a broker picks that day on which to bring down Wall Street. Then there's some discussion of the film of the same name, a list of the sequels, a few more anecdotes, a list of songs with the number 13 in them, and some other stuff, such as that Estonians don't like to place their beds over underground streams. I believe all this, but there's enough misinformation in the book to make me wary. Even when Lachenmeyer is making a sound point, he muffs it. When he observes that Christ and his disciples must have sat 13 at a table often, he says: "The Last Supper was only one of any number of sabbaths that Christ and his 12 disciples spent together." They may have enjoyed many sabbath suppers together, but their final meal was on a Thursday. He dismisses an early psychoanalyst as being "not much of an authority on etymology", but has already repeatedly garbled a Latin title, while his own etymologies aren't convincing. And he swallows the idea that the Church devised the solar calendar. He also spends a while finding out what people do if they want a cure for triskaidekaphobia. True to form, he goes online. Admittedly, he finds some interesting types who say they can cure most phobias in three hours and then, after running a disclaimer saying they're not doctors and can't cure anything, add, "If you really need a disclaimer, this stuff is not for you." But he doesn't show us anyone who's asked anyone, "I fear 13, sort me out." I assume Lachenmeyer likes 13. His book costs ?13. But it's quite a lot to charge for cuttings from the New York Times, e-mails from mystics and any length of time spent on Google. That's the problem with the internet. Suddenly, everyone's a scholar. From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 31 16:13:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 11:13:51 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Revealer: The Secular Experiment Message-ID: The Secular Experiment http://www.therevealer.org/archives/main_story_001397.php 16 December 2004 What's freethought got to do with it? Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (Metropolitan Books, 2004) Reviewed by Brendan Boyle John Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending, teased the Bush-camp after the first presidential debate. Kerry cried foul, but he should have known better. He wasnt the first Catholic presidential candidate obliged to defend his independence from would-be interlopers. In 1960, not long before Election Day,[11] John F. Kennedy had to make it clear that he had no intention of outsourcing important decisions to the Boston Archdiocese, much less to the Vatican. Kennedy pledged his allegiance to an America where the separation of church and state is absolute where no Catholic prelate would tell the President, should he be Catholic, how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him and the people who might elect him. Catholics arent the only ones whose loyalty has been called into question. American Jews have been the most frequent targets of this slander. A Jewish president, presumably, wouldnt take orders from the Vatican (or Paris). But he just might make Israel the centerpiece of American foreign policy. This hysterical accusation has an ancient, but not noble, pedigree. Susan Jacoby, in [12]Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, quotes one eighteenth-century journalist who publicly worries that Should the president be a Jew, our posterity might be ordered to rebuild Jerusalem. In 1787, no Jew was just about to win the presidency. Protestants of varying stripes had a lock on that office. What occasioned this journalists consternation was the imminent adoption of a constitution that explicitly outlawed religious tests for office. [13]Article 6, section 3 guaranteed that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States. It was the mere possibility that a Jew, a Catholic, or worse, an atheist might take office that proved so troubling. [Jefferson.jpg] Article 6 and its author Thomas Jefferson are the heroes of Jacobys temperamental book. Jacobys Jefferson is an avowed Enlightenment Francophile, a steely humanist wary of organized religion. She devotes much space to Jeffersons pre-White House, freethinking days in the Virginia assembly. There he honed his secularist chops by defending the separation of church and state against Patrick Henrys proposal to use public money to fund teachers of the Christian religion. Jefferson defeated this plan and then went on to author a sweeping declaration of his states commitment to religious freedom, the 1786 [14]Act for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia, a rough draft of what would become Article 6. This article, Jacoby argues, became a kind of freethinkers manifesto. Freethinker isnt a very fashionable term. The adjective-noun coupling gives it a faintly archaic redolence. Susan Jacoby would like her book to inject new life into this once-venerable but now out-of-favor designation. The first two-thirds of the book is a loving treatment of an assortment of so-called secular humanists. Its a wildly mixed bag. Jefferson takes top billing, followed by Revolutionary insurrectionist [15]Thomas Paine, firebrand abolitionist [16]William Garrison, emancipator-cum-cipher Abraham Lincoln, Seneca Falls planners [17]Susan Anthony and [18]Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the Great Agnostic [19]Robert Ingersoll. Along the way, [20]Walt Whitman, [21]Clarence Darrow, and [22]Margaret Sanger make brief cameos. [Ingersoll.jpg] The Great Agnostic This roster is, with the notable exception of Lincoln, fairly by-the-numbers. Lincolns faith is a great source of pride for American evangelicals -- and not without reason. The [23]second inaugural promises that should the Civil War continue until all the wealth piled by the bond-mans two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk it must be said that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. Jacoby huffs that this hardly makes Lincoln a believer, but she never comes to terms with just what kind of freethinker could use such haunting, Biblical language. She is much stronger after leaving Lincoln behind. She solidly demonstrates the secularist impetus behind many enlightened causes -- emancipation, womens suffrage, evolution, and, somewhat less convincingly, civil rights. In the case of the Jim Crow South, the moral stewardship provided by religious African Americans was so momentous that the contributions of Jacobys Northern secularists feel slim. She probably should have conceded this round to the theists and moved on. That way, she might have saved some energy for the books exhausted final third. By then, freethought has all but disappeared, replaced by series of ornery screeds against Catholicism, evangelical Protestantism, and other redoubts of irrationalism. Jacobys special pleading for freethought never catches fire because it never becomes clear what this motley bunch has in common. They all owed a vague debt to French Enlightenment humanism and all had good, skeptical temperaments. They resented religious orthodoxy and, for the most part, practiced a sensible, sober, progressivist politics. But even the most incendiary of the lot -- Paine and Garrison -- knew the time and place for compromise. Few were committed atheists. Most subscribed to a restrained, laissez-faire sort of agnosticism. Freethought, it turns out, is a rather weak and rickety contraption, held together by a few silken threads. Hooking a three-hundred-page argument to this vehicle becomes, as the book lurches toward its close, an increasingly unwise choice. Without much to go on, these heroic secularists come off flat, sounding the same anti-orthodoxy note time and again. [SCOPE2.jpg] Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan To keep the book above water Jacoby resorts to some rather unseemly hectoring. Freethinkers have been vilified and demonized, harps Jacoby early on. And this is just the beginning. It is past time, shouts Jacoby, to restore secularism, and its noble and essential contributions at every stage of the American experiment, to its proper place in our nations historical memory and vision of the future. Her tone throughout is snide, hortatory, and aggrieved. The early writing of James Madison should be as familiar to students of American history as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; the diaries of Unitarian minister William Bentley, should have secured him a place in American cultural history; the religiously correct version of American history has never given proper credit to the central importance of the Enlightenment concept of natural rights. And so on. This kind of bullying sits ill with the ostensible subject of the book. So too does the remarkable lack of documentation. A book about freethought doesnt need a dozen footnotes per page, but it should have enough to allow readers to sift through the evidence and make up their own minds. That seems a reasonable -- perhaps even an Enlightened -- request. Jacoby is embarrassed by the faintest whiff of religion in one of her freethinkers. Susan Anthony somberly mused that, if it be true that we die like the flower, leaving behind only the fragrance what a delusion has the race ever been in what a dream is the life of man. For this weakness of will, Jacoby bumps her down one notch in the secularist standings and elevates instead [24]Ernestine Rose, Polish emigre and hardened atheist who unflinchingly and unfailingly rejected the idea that it was possible to communicate with spirits of the dead. This is the lowest point of the book. To read Jacoby, we might have thought Anthony was leading a s?ance, conjuring up spirits from the other side. But of course she is doing nothing of the sort. Her existential sounding -- echoed by other freethinkers like Garrison, Lincoln, and Ingersoll -- is not a failure of nerve but expressions of a deeply felt human need to see purpose in the world. Even the books hero, Thomas Jefferson knew this. He, after all, spent a good many nights of his presidency [25]editing the Gospels into two neat volumes, The Philosophy of Jesus and The Life and Morals of Jesus. Jeffersons Jesus is, to be sure, extremely hygienic. He works no miracles. He preaches benevolence more than redemption. But he does witness the fact that religion can inspire -- and need not necessarily impede -- social justice. Jacoby, who must have met some very mean-spirited believers in her life, never fesses up to this fact and the book suffers for it. Brendan Boyle is a writer living in Chicago. [space.gif] Published at the Department of Journalism and the Center for Religion and Media at NYU References 11. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/johnfkennedyhoustonministerialspeech.html 12. http://www.henryholt.com/holt/freethinkers.htm 13. http://www.house.gov/Constitution/Constitution.html 14. http://religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu/sacred/vaact.html 15. http://www.ushistory.org/paine/ 16. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1561.html 17. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAWanthony.htm 18. http://www.nps.gov/wori/ecs.htm 19. http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/index.shtml 20. http://www.whitmanarchive.org/ 21. http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/DARROW.HTM 22. http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/ 23. http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html 24. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/rose.html 25. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/jesus/jefferson.html From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Mon Jan 31 15:57:35 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 08:57:35 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] perceiving deception? Message-ID: <41FE556F.1000504@solution-consulting.com> Some time ago there was a report of a portion of the brain being specialized for perceiving deception. I cannot find that reference; can anyone help me? Lynn From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Jan 31 18:01:16 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:01:16 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] perceiving deception? Message-ID: <01C5077B.CE9F37C0.shovland@mindspring.com> I remember hearing that but can't recall the words. Try this- some interesting stuff came up: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=people+detect+lying&btnG=Google+Search Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Monday, January 31, 2005 7:58 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] perceiving deception? Some time ago there was a report of a portion of the brain being specialized for perceiving deception. I cannot find that reference; can anyone help me? Lynn _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From waluk at earthlink.net Mon Jan 31 19:13:56 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 11:13:56 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] perceiving deception? References: <41FE556F.1000504@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <009c01c507c9$03ddb6d0$2706f604@S0027397558> Could the report in question have been in National Geographic: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/07/0705_wirelies.html Gerry ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D." To: "The new improved paleopsych list" Sent: Monday, January 31, 2005 7:57 AM Subject: [Paleopsych] perceiving deception? > Some time ago there was a report of a portion of the > brain being specialized for perceiving deception. I > cannot find that reference; can anyone help me? > Lynn > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Mon Jan 31 19:59:38 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 11:59:38 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] icons and racial tension In-Reply-To: <200501311938.j0VJclC32758@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050131195938.40592.qmail@web30809.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>"I think that black people, regardless of whether or not he's innocent, feel the need to defend him because of the fact that he's a high profile African-American entertainer that's being attacked with such vehemence," said the writer, drawing parallels with O.J. Simpson who was perceived as having distanced himself from the African-American community until he found himself on trial for murder.<< --That's a tough one... if an icon is deeply planted in the imagination of a group, any attack on the icon, even a justified attack, is felt by the group as an assault on its identity. If MJ is convicted by a white jury, it could result in a lot of hurt feelings and racial tension. It would be the equivalent of convicting George W. Bush of treason, which would be felt as an assault by the right wing Christian community. Especially disturbing given the recent accusations against Bill Cosby. Regardless of the guilt or innocence of the icon, the communities most identified with the entertainer may feel such accusations as a deep and personal wound. A racially balanced jury for the MJ case would be a very, very good idea. Michael ===== My blog: http://shallowreflections.blogspot.com/ Link to my website, including art, flash poetry and fledgling CafePress store (t-shirts, bumperstickers etc): http://www.soulaquarium.net We are stardust, we are golden, We are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden. - Joni Mitchell "We don't fear the unknown. We fear how the unknown might cause us to re-evaluate the known." - Unknown __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Jan 31 21:36:20 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 13:36:20 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] icons and racial tension Message-ID: <01C50799.D9D12400.shovland@mindspring.com> Finding a racially balanced jury in Santa Barbara may be a little difficult :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Monday, January 31, 2005 12:00 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] icons and racial tension >>"I think that black people, regardless of whether or not he's innocent, feel the need to defend him because of the fact that he's a high profile African-American entertainer that's being attacked with such vehemence," said the writer, drawing parallels with O.J. Simpson who was perceived as having distanced himself from the African-American community until he found himself on trial for murder.<< --That's a tough one... if an icon is deeply planted in the imagination of a group, any attack on the icon, even a justified attack, is felt by the group as an assault on its identity. If MJ is convicted by a white jury, it could result in a lot of hurt feelings and racial tension. It would be the equivalent of convicting George W. Bush of treason, which would be felt as an assault by the right wing Christian community. Especially disturbing given the recent accusations against Bill Cosby. Regardless of the guilt or innocence of the icon, the communities most identified with the entertainer may feel such accusations as a deep and personal wound. A racially balanced jury for the MJ case would be a very, very good idea. Michael ===== My blog: http://shallowreflections.blogspot.com/ Link to my website, including art, flash poetry and fledgling CafePress store (t-shirts, bumperstickers etc): http://www.soulaquarium.net We are stardust, we are golden, We are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden. - Joni Mitchell "We don't fear the unknown. We fear how the unknown might cause us to re-evaluate the known." - Unknown __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych